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    10/09/2024
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    Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane

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    Chapter: 3 | Listen: 3

    Two short fragments: an unfinished and a lost play. A Florentine Tragedy, left in a taxi (not a handbag), is Wilde’s most successful attempt at tragedy – intense and domestic, with surprising depth of characterisation. It was adapted into an opera by the Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky in 1917. La Sainte Courtisane, or The Woman Covered in Jewels explores one of Wilde’s great idées fixes: the paradox of religious hedonism, pagan piety. Both plays, Wildean to their core, revel in the profound sadness that is the fruit of the conflict between fidelity and forbidden love. Written towards the end of his tragic life, these fragments give us a glimpse of a genius at his best: visceral, passionate, personal, poetic. (Summary by Simon Larois) A Florentine Tragedy – cast: Narrator: TriciaG GUIDO BARDI, A Florentine prince: mb SIMONE, a merchant: Simon Larois BIANNA, his wife: Ruth Golding La Sainte Courtisane – cast: Narrator: Ruth Golding First man: mb Myrrhina: Philippa Second man: L.French Honorius: woggy298 Edited by Ruth Golding     [chương_files]  

    13/08/2024

    Lady Windermere’s Fan (Version 2)

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    Chapter: 4 | Listen:

    Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Play About a Good Woman is a four-act comedy by Oscar Wilde, first produced 22 February 1892 at the St James’s Theatre in London. The play was first published in 1893. Like many of Wilde’s comedies, it bitingly satirizes the morals of Victorian society, particularly marriage. The story concerns Lady Windermere, who discovers that her husband may be having an affair with another woman. She confronts her husband but he instead invites the other woman, Mrs Erlynne, to his wife’s birthday ball. Angered by her husband’s unfaithfulness, Lady Windermere leaves her husband for another lover. Or does she? Is it really possible to trust delicious gossip? Are all men really bad? These and many other questions are raised and if not answered, then held up for public scrutiny in this biting satire of morals and proper behavior. The best known line of the play sums up the central theme: We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. —Lord Darlington (from Wikipedia and the reader)     [chương_files]  

    10/08/2024
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    The Soul of Man

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    Chapter: 6 | Listen: 2

    “(T)he past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.” Published originally as “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” this is not so much a work of sober political analysis; rather it can be summed up as a rhapsodic manifesto on behalf of the Individual. Socialism having deployed technology to liberate the whole of humanity from soul-destroying labour, the State obligingly withers away to allow the free development of a joyful, anarchic hedonism… “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” Far from abandoning the epigram in favour of the slogan, Wilde wittily assails several of his favourite targets: the misguided purveyors of philanthropy; life-denying ascetics of various kinds; the army of the half-educated who constitute themselves the enemies of Art – and those venal popular journalists who cater to them… “Behind the barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle?” (Introduction by Martin Geeson)     [chương_files]  

    23/07/2024
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    Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde

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    Chapter: 26 | Listen: 3

    This is a selection of the early poetry of Oscar Wilde, selected by Robert Ross. As he puts it, “It is thought that a selection from Oscar Wilde’s early verses may be of interest to a large public at present familiar only with the always popular Ballad of Reading Gaol, also included in this volume. The poems were first collected by their author when he was twenty-six years old, and though never, until recently, well received by the critics, have survived the test of NINE editions. Readers will be able to make for themselves the obvious and striking contrasts between these first and last phases of Oscar Wilde’s literary activity. The intervening period was devoted almost entirely to dramas, prose, fiction, essays, and criticism.” – Summary by Carolin and Robert Ross     [chương_files]  

    22/07/2024
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    Charmides, and Other Poems

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    Chapter: 27 | Listen: 3

    This is a volume of poetry by Oscar Wilde, containing some of his rather famous longer poetry in the first part, and a section of sonnets in the second part of the book. – Summary by Carolin     [chương_files]  

    15/07/2024

    Ballad of Reading Gaol, (version 2)

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    Chapter: 1 | Listen:

    In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to 2 years of hard labor for acts of ‘gross indecency’. During his time at Reading Gaol, he witnessed a rare hanging, and in the three years between his release and his untimely death in 1900, was inspired to write the following poem, a meditation on the death penalty and the importance of forgiveness, even for (and especially for) something as heinous as murdering one’s spouse; for even the murderer, Wilde argues, is human and suffers more so for being the cause of his own pain, for ‘having killed the thing he loved’; for everyone is the cause of someone else’s suffering and suffers at the hands of another. It is this that Jesus Christ could see; he could continue to see the beauty of our humanity, despite all that we may do to each other, and encouraged us to love each other just the same “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was published in 1898 and would gain Wilde greater recognition as a poet (in addition to being a great playwright); although his only other volume of poetry, one of his earliest works that he’d published, was also well-received. Sadly, ‘The Ballad’ would be his last. (Summary by Linda Leu).     [chương_files]  

    15/07/2024
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    Reviews

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    Chapter: 100 | Listen: 3

    Wilde’s literary reputation has survived so much that I think it proof against any exhumation of articles which he or his admirers would have preferred to forget. As a matter of fact, I believe this volume will prove of unusual interest; some of the reviews are curiously prophetic; some are, of course, biassed by prejudice hostile or friendly; others are conceived in the author’s wittiest and happiest vein; only a few are colourless. And if, according to Lord Beaconsfield, the verdict of a continental nation may be regarded as that of posterity, Wilde is a much greater force in our literature than even friendly contemporaries ever supposed he would become. It should be remembered, however, that at the time when most of these reviews were written Wilde had published scarcely any of the works by which his name has become famous in Europe, though the protagonist of the æsthetic movement was a well-known figure in Paris and London.     [chương_files]  

    05/07/2024
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    Letters of Oscar Wilde, Volume 4 (1897-1898)

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    Chapter: 68 | Listen: 1

    This fourth collection of the correspondence of Oscar Wilde includes the letters Wilde wrote while living in Berneval, in the months after his release from prison, and in Naples, where he shared a villa with his former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. In a long letter to the editor of the Daily Chronicle, Wilde describes the cruelties of prison life. At this time Wilde was writing The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and the poem is a frequent topic in his letters to his friend, Robert Ross, and publisher, Leonard Smithers. The letters, some of which have been excerpted or redacted, are sourced from auction catalogues, biographies, collections of letters to Douglas and Ross, and other texts in the public domain. For a complete collection of Wilde’s letters, please see “The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde,” (2000) edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. – Summary by Rob Marland     [chương_files]  

    05/07/2024
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    Letters of Oscar Wilde, Volume 5 (1898-1900)

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    Chapter: 81 | Listen: 1

    This fifth and final collection of the correspondence of Oscar Wilde includes many letters to his friend, Robert Ross, and a long letter about prison reform to the editor of the Daily Chronicle. For most of the last three years of his life Wilde lived in Paris, but his letters also describe visits to Switzerland and Italy. The collection ends with one of Wilde’s last surviving letters, which he wrote from his deathbed to beg a friend for money to pay his medical bills. The letters, some of which have been excerpted or redacted, are sourced from auction catalogues, biographies, collections of letters to Ross, and other texts in the public domain. For a complete collection of Wilde’s letters, please see “The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde,” (2000) edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. (Rob Marland)     [chương_files]  

    04/07/2024
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    Letters of Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (1868-1890)

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    Chapter: 57 | Listen: 3

    This first collection of the correspondence of Oscar Wilde begins with the Irish playwright’s earliest extant letter, thanking his mother for the hamper she had sent to him at school. It includes letters about his travels in Italy, his American lecture tour, the staging of his first play (Vera, or the Nihilists), arrangements for the publication of a friend’s poetry collection, and exchanges in the press with artist James McNeill Whistler. The letters, some of which have been excerpted or redacted, are sourced from auction catalogues, newspapers, biographies, and other texts in the public domain. For a complete collection of Wilde’s letters, please see “The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde,” (2000) edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. – Summary by Rob Marland     [chương_files]