#Oscar wilde plays ranked trial

He wrote his acclaimed play Salomé in a Parisian hotel. Clad in a top hat, Wilde was portrayed gazing at the fortune tellers and belly dancers on the stage – not to mention cabaret legend La Goulue. He was even immortalised in Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings, including La Danse Mauresque. When he’d first attended the Moulin Rouge back in 1891, fellow poet Stuart Merrill recalled, his ostentatious appearance had seen him mistaken for royalty: “The habitués took him for the prince of some fabulous realm of the North”. Wilde knew all too well about Paris’s progressive attitudes – in fact, prior to his prison sentence, he had enjoyed celebrity status there. In fact, gay sex was legalised in France around 150 years before women were allowed to vote. Yet clandestine courtships continued among high society, with King Henry III of France rumoured to have preferred his male aides to his wife.īy the late 1700s, homosexuality had been decriminalised in France altogether, whereas barely 60 years ago, it was still classified as a mental disorder in the UK. Repeat offenders would eventually be burnt alive and left to die an agonising death. Whereas King Philip I allegedly enjoyed an affair with the Bishop of Orléans in the 1100s, “common folk” with the same desires could expect to have their testicles chopped off. Of course, France had not always been so sympathetic – there was a time when only royalty had escaped sex scandals unscathed. As it turned out, this precaution might have been unnecessary because, as Wilde remarked to one journalist: “In Paris, one can go where one likes, and no one dreams of criticising one”. Yet, here in France, he had a new identity, enjoying blissful anonymity as the enigmatic ‘Sebastian’. At the time, frozen in fearful passivity, Wilde could have done little more than sarcastically praise their imagination.

Just hours earlier, a baying crowd in England had followed him through the streets, taunting him and sniping that he deserved to be torn apart by a pack of wolves and eaten alive. He was released in 1897, but – with the Marquess threatening to shoot him dead if he ever rekindled a romance with his son – it was perhaps little surprise that he immediately headed for France.Īs soon as he set foot on French soil, Wilde was overcome by his new-found liberation.

#Oscar wilde plays ranked trial

After a trial that left him bankrupt, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labour in prison at the command of the Marquess of Queensbury, the father of his lover, Lord Douglas. Just as it had once been socially acceptable to brand some women who lived on the margins of society “witches” and execute them, homosexuality too was a punishable offence, right up until the 1960s. His crime? An illicit relationship with another man. According to the British press, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde was not merely a “sane criminal”, but a vile, contemptible “sexual pervert of an utterly diseased mind”.