Цитаты из произведения An Improbable Life: review of The Letters of Oscar Wilde

Wilde's life was a drama, and in reading his letters chronologically there is an excitement similar to that of watching a Greek tragedy in which the audience knows what is going to happen while the hero does not.

The post-prison letters are more interesting than the pre-prison. To begin with, Wilde is now a lonely man, without an audience of his social and intellectual equals, so he puts into his letters what in happier times he would have expressed in talk, and the reader gets glimpses of what his conversation must have been like.

Yeats said of Wilde that he seemed to be a man of action rather than a writer. What Yeats should have said, I think, is that Wilde was, both by genius and by fate, primarily an "actor", a performer. Even those of his contemporaries who most admired his writings admitted that they were inferior to his conversation; what…

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…