THEATRICAL CAREER (1892 -1895)

SALOME When Oscar Wilde came back to Paris in the late 1891, he was very well known in London, so he was considered a respected writer in the French city. His plays of the 80s didnt have much success in Paris, for instance Vera, or The Nihilist and The Duchess of Padua. Thats why he started to focus on the biblical stories, such as Salome. One evening, after discussing about the Salome story, he went back to his hotel and wrote down everything he had been talking before in his notebook. He composed a new theater play, in French and rapidly written, Salom. It was published in 1893 in London and Paris at the same time, but it was first performed in 1896. COMEDIES OF SOCIETY In the early 1892, Wilde was aware of he had already irritated the Victorian society with his dandy appearance and later with a novel full of vice under a mask of art, The Picture of Dorian Grey; and he found a way to really critique de society: he wrote Lady Windermere's Fan, first performed in 1892. It was a very popular play, it was touring the country for months. Two more Victorian plays followed this one because he had a pressure from his producers: firstly in 1893 A Woman of No Importance, critiquing the illegitimate births and mistaken identities; and lastly, first performed in 1895 but published in 1898, An Ideal Husband. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Final Oscar Wildes play came back to the topic of switched identities of the main characters to escape from the Victorian society manners. It changed a bit his typical writing; there wasnt any of his most common kind of character, such as an innocent idealized woman or a women with no past. He also lacked more things, but he remained the aim of the play, critiquing the Victorian age. This play was The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895, but published in 1998. Before the first performance, Wilde and his producer George Alexandre carefully prepared every single detail to create and mock the late-Victorian society. The plays premiere was a brilliant party, it was very successful, and it was immediately considered Oscar Wildes best work, and it remains it.

IMPRISONMENT
Wilde was jailed in the prison of Reading Gaol because of his trials with the Queensberry family who accused Oscar Wilde of homosexual practice with a Queensberry member, Alfred Douglas. During his imprisonment, even though Alfred had been the cause of his problems, he wrote a 50.000 words letter addressed to Alfred in which Wilde examines his own career until that moment, how he had been provocative for the Victorian society and others things of his life. It was written in the early 1897 in jail with the name of De Profundis, but it was published several times

until the last of this epistle version in 1962 in a book which contained the most important letters of Oscar Wildes life with the purpose of doing the biography that Oscar Wilde never wrote.

EXILE AND DEATH

After his release of jail, with a new name: Sebastian Melmoth, he tried to join the Society of Jesus, but he was dismissed, he exiled to France in the mid-1897. In 1898, during his exile in Bernaval-le-Grand he wrote his last work: The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his most famous poem and one of the most popular in the English literature. He wrote about what he had watched in the jail, the people he had met and the crimes they made to be jailed. Then he reunited his lover Alfred Douglas in the French city of Rouen, and later he went to Naples. During this time he didnt write anything more; he just corrected and published The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband. The when he got cerebral meningitis and he write no more until his dead in the late 1900. A passage of this famous poem was chosen as the epitaph on Oscar Wildes tomb in a cemetery of Paris:
And alien tears will fill for him Pity's long-broken urn, For his mourners will be outcast men, And outcasts always mourn.