The importance of being earnest, Oscar Wilde's trivial comedy for serious people,

opened on Valentine's Day, 1895, at the St James' Theatre in London.

And this farcical comedy, satirising, lampooning, and lightly mocking the social conventions of stuffy old Victorian England was a smash hit.

The playwright, poet essayist, novelist, short storywriter and cultivated dandy man about town had been enjoying wild success. the early 1890s across London theatres,

with a woman of no importance and Lady Windermere's fan running concurrently and continuing

to pack houses. A picture of Dorian Gray had already been published in Lippincott's monthly

and had helped to further

cement Wilde's reputation as a scandalous individual. And whilst incredibly talented in many

different literary modes, Wilde would see his own person as his ultimate artistic expression.

Life was the true canvas.

Wild was always playing the part of Wilde.

And like Lord Byron before him and Ernest Hemingway after him,

his celebrity is almost impossible to disentangle from his art,

which Wild always maintained came to him very easily. His works were dashed off without too much

thought, and they weren't to be taken seriously. In true

Wildean fashion this of course isn't true and Wilde labored endlessly over his work but part of the

effort involved making it all seem effortless, while truly embraced the Italian notion of

Spretzatura, studied carelessness. Denigrating and depedastalling, one's artistic expression,

was also a great way to defeat the critics, preemptively denying them the pleasure of tearing his work down.

And this was also a way of defending himself against the charges that could come about

where one to actually take the societal critiques that are delicately but deeply embedded in his work seriously. Unfortunately for Wilde,

this didn't work. And the year in which he was on the heights of his artistic and commercial

...