Biography Essay

Together with George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde transformed British drama in the late nineteenth century by expressing a new, "modern" sensibility. By the mid nineteenth century, the British theater, though rich in various theatrical forms, such as verse drama, melodrama, farce, and burlesque, had produced little of lasting value. In the 1860s, however, Thomas William Robertson's realistic, sentimental "cup and saucer" plays pointed to a new form of entertainment; in the 1870s the plays of William Gilbert (and especially his later librettos for Arthur Sullivan's operettas) revealed a new, ironic treatment of social mores and classes. In addition, the influence of the French "well-made play" elevated the quality of popular British melodrama and farce by introducing carefully designed plot structure dependent upon such theatrical devices as the secret that is ultimately revealed and the compromising letter that brings about the villain's downfall. By the 1880s Arthur...