Abstract
For some time now, a veritable industry has grown up in commercial books featuring the “wit and wisdom of Oscar Wilde.” What does wit (we might ask) have to do with wisdom? And what does it say about Wilde’s own unique brand of wit?
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Notes
Michael J. O’Neill, “Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Unpublished Lecture Notes of Oscar Wilde,” University Review 1.4 (Spring 1955): 30.
W. W. Ward, “Oscar Wilde: An Oxford Reminiscence,” Appendix B in Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 250.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 422.
Robert E. Moore, “Images of Irish English in the Formation of Irish Publics, 1600-Present,” Irish Journal of Anthropology, 10.1 (2007): 23.
Oscar Wilde, “The Censure and Salomé,” interview, The Pall Mall Budget, xl (June 30, 1892), 947, quoted in Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail, vol. 1, 188.
Ironically, the word “tundish” is itself from an older English than that spoken by the dean. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. John Paul Riquelme (New York: W W Norton, 2007), 166.
The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 749; in future references abbreviated as L and cited in parentheses in the text.
Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 54, gives the first line inaccurately
its correct version is “Tá mé i mo chlodadh, is ná dúisigh mé,” as given by Richard Pine, Oscar Wilde (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1983), 121.
The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 266.
For the interrelation of political and speech acts, see Jerusha McCormack, “Oscar as Aesthete and Anarchist,” Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha McCormack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 85–86.
For a commentary on Wilde’s “borrowing,” see Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research, ed. Ian Smith, 1890–1920 British Authors Series, No. XIII (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1993), 99–100.
The following analysis is indebted to Sandra Siegal, “Wilde’s Use and Abuse of Aphorisms,” Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 12.1 (1986): 16–26.
Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 177.
‘“Wilde and Nietzsche,” from “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Recent History,” Last Essays; reprinted in Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard Ellmann (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 169.
The Trials of Oscar Wilde, ed. H. Montgomery Hyde (London: William Hodge, 1960), 123.
Brian Earls, “Bulls, Blunders, and Bloothers: An Examination of the Irish Bull,” An Cumann Le Béaloideas Éireann/The Folklore of Ireland Society (1988) 56: 3.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Donald L. Lawler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 36.
Earls, 26, quoting G. R Neilson and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, The Book of Bulls (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1898), 149–50, vi.
See Jerusha McCormack, “From Chinese Wisdom to Irish Wit: Zhuangzi and Oscar Wilde,” Irish University Review, 37.2 (autumn/winter 2007): 302–21.
Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 190.
Letter to Beatrice Allhusen, early 1890, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 425.
Quoted in Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Aldershot: Scolar, 1986), 76.
For an analysis of the strategies involved in this maneuver, see Jerusha McCormack, “Masks Without Faces: The Personalities of Oscar Wilde,” English Literature in Transition, 22 (1979): 253–69.
“Through the Looking Glass,” The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960), 269.
Henry James Letters, Vol. III: 1883–1895, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980), 373.
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© 2015 Michael Y. Bennett
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McCormack, J. (2015). Wit in Earnest: Wilde’s Irish Word-Play. In: Bennett, M.Y. (eds) Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410931_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410931_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56827-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-41093-1
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