His development as a... «An Improbable Life: review of The Letters of Oscar Wilde»

His development as a dramatist is interesting. Both in England and in France, even the most talented playwrights of the day were bewitched by a conception of drama that was sterile and self-frustrating - one that Shaw correctly diagnosed as an attempt to produce a genus of opera without music:
The drama can do little to delight the senses: all the apparent instances to the contrary are instances of the personal fascination of the performers. The drama of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been conquered by the musician.

The typical fashionable play of the period was a melodramatic libretto manque': indeed, a number of plays, including "Salome'", which have long since vanished from the theatre are flourishing to this day in the opera house. Shaw's conclusion, which was valid for himself, was that the future of drama without music lay in the drama of thought. Wilde could not have taken the Shavian path because he was not a thinker; he was, however, a verbal musician of the first order. While "Salome'" could become a successful libretto, "Lady Windermere's Fan", "A Woman of No Importance", and "An Ideal Husband" could not, because their best and most original elements - the epigrams and comic nonsense - are not settable; at the same time, their melodramatic operatic plots spoil them as spoken drama. But in "The Importance of Being Earnest", Wile succeeded - almost, it would seem, by accident, for he never realized its infinite superiority to all his other plays - in writing what is perhaps the only pure verbal opera in English. The solution that, deliberately or accidentally, he found was to subordinate every other dramatic element to dialogue for its own sake and create a verbal universe in which the characters are determined by the kinds of things they say, and the plot is nothing but a succession of opportunities to say them.