SOURCE: Stokes, John. “Wilde Interpretation.” Modern Drama 37, no. 1 (spring 1994): 156-74.

In the following essay, Stokes surveys the critical reaction to three productions of Wilde's plays in the 1990s, finding insight into the theatrical scene of the 1890s.

We live in an age of interpretation, a fact that is constantly mentioned in the theatrical journals. Some think that it has always been this way, that there never has been representation without mediation; others, like the director Jonathan Miller, that the power of interpretation is a recent phenomenon with complex origins. “[H]istorical change has accelerated so much in the last fifty years that the differences between ‘now’ and even a quite recent ‘then’ are much more noticeable” says Miller, “the bequests of the past arouse our interpretative energies as never before.” “Besides,” he goes on, “the life of the mind has now taken a distinctively ‘interpretative turn’, and with...