After his trial, disgrace and imprisonment in 1895 he wrote nothing substantial for the stage, and it seemed as though the stimulus of direct contact with society and the practical working atmosphere of the theatre had been essentially his ability to write drama. It was once customary to see the plays before The Importance of Being Earnest as so many unhappy shotgun marriages between wit and melodramatic convention, but recently critics have begun to take the works more seriously. In his successful West End plays of the early 1890s one can see an urgent interest in questioning, mocking and perhaps undermining the social assumptions that their very mechanisms were based on. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of it, you kill it.
Nothing survives being though of.
By allowing his villain the kind of taunting paradoxes he himself so enjoyed, Wilde seems to be at once asserting the need for skepticism and warning of its dangers. Mrs. Arbuthnot Insults Lord Illingworth, Act IV from the Graphic , April 1893. Nichola McAuliffe as Mrs. Allonby in Phillip Prowse's 1991 Royal Shakespeare Company Production. Back to A Woman of No Importance main page.