Wilde was both a glittering wordsmith and a social outsider. His drama emerges out of these two perhaps contradictory identities, combining epigrammatic brilliance and shrewd social observation. Includes "Lady Windermere's Fan", "Salome", "A Woman of No Importance", "An Ideal Husband", "A Florentine Tragedy" and "The Importance of Being Earnest", which appears in full with the "Grigsby" scene which originally made up the fourth act.

Author Biography

Born in Ireland, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was educated in Dublin & Oxford and went on to become the leading and most prominent exponent of flamboyant aestheticism. As well as his many plays, he wrote one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and published several volumes of poetry and criticism. He was imprisoned in 1895 for homosexual offences and after his release he died in exile in Paris. Richard Cave has edited a selection of Yeats' plays for Penguin Classics.