Factfile Born: Dublin, 1854. Died: Paris, 1900. Why in the news: The art, theatre and cinematic world is currently awash with Wilde. Most likely to say: Either that wallpaper goes or I do. Least likely to say: Pucker up, Queensberry.
As the world clamours to mark the impending 100th anniversary of the death of Oscar Wilde it is worth musing on what that great wit might have made of the current Irish drama as it approaches the end of its six-week run.
Observing the five presidential musketeers (all for one and one for all as long as it's not Mary McAleese) smiling, shaking hands and kissing babies on the hustings, he may have remarked: "One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing." He might have advised Adi Roche that her plans for a children's Aras were misguided: "The oldfashioned respect for the young is fast dying out." He may also have told Prof McAleese that: "One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged."
The fact that a handful of Wildean observations can be plucked from a play or a poem and given a contemporary context is the essence of why Wilde is set to remain forever fashionable.
As we approach the end of one century there is, it seems, a need to look back to the end of another when a velvet-clad dandy wowed and repelled late Victorian London within the space of a decade. A need to make reparation for what many see as the historical injustice of Wilde being underestimated as an artist because, as a Penguin minibiography once coyly asserted, he "fell on evil times".
This reparation has come in many forms. Here, the Gate Theatre recently revived Lady Windermere's Fan and the Abbey staged A Woman of No Importance and The Importance of Being Earnest. Abbey audiences are also currently enjoying, or not, Tom Kilroy's The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde. The bookshops are overflowing with Wilde reappraisals and a magnificent statue showing the two faces of Wilde is due to be unveiled near his childhood home in Merrion Square.
Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, recently released The Wilde Album, a pictorial biography of the man it has taken him a lifetime to understand.
On Thursday night it was the turn of Wilde the movie. Stephen Fry, as he addressed the audience at the premiere in Dublin, gushed about how no other role had given him such pleasure. The actor had been an admirer of Wilde since his school days.
Merlin Holland was conspicuous by his absence. He is said not to like the film because it concentrates too heavily on Wilde's sexual exploits with his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie). He feels Wilde's astonishing diversity is given less space than the scandal that saw him imprisoned for two years for "acts of gross indecency with other male persons".
"It might have been more appropriate to call the film Oscar and Bosie," commented David Rose, the man who is to Oscar Wilde what David Norris is to James Joyce.
Rose is currently running the fourth annual Oscar Wilde Autumn School in the Esplanade Hotel in Bray, Co Wicklow. It runs until Wednesday.
While putting up posters and seeking funding to organise the event, Rose was amazed at the "making it up to Oscar" feeling among the general public.
Rose says the fact that Wilde and other writers can now be assessed in terms of their sexuality has added to the debate. Almost a century after his tragic demise, Wilde is out of the closet.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16th, 1854, in Westland Row, Dublin.
He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he achieved a double first in classics. In 1879, he moved to London where his undoubted talent, flamboyant lifestyle and paradoxical humour won him the friendship of other budding literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. In 1881, his collected poems were published and a year later he went to America where he lectured on topics including interior design.
Wilde married Constance Lloyd, the daughter of an Irish barrister, in 1884, and had two children, Cyril and Vyvyan. He met Bosie in 1891 and was immediately entranced by him. His best-known plays were produced between 1892 and 1895, the period when Wilde was at the peak of his success. He and Bosie spent their days and nights together, along with a rapidly increasing circle of rent boys.
Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was not as enamoured of the playwright as his son was. A calling card "To Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite" [sic] was left by Queensberry and Wilde, urged on by Bosie, pressed suit for criminal libel. He lost and was himself charged with homosexual offences. He spent the next two years in Reading Gaol. He fled to France and was briefly reunited with Bosie but died penniless and without his young lord in a dingy Paris hotel.
And now, lovers of his sonnets, plays, books and essays are making it up to Oscar. The year 2000 marks the 100th anniversary of his death and will be marked by another crop of Oscar-related events. In the meantime, presidential hopefuls will forgive an updated version of one of Wilde's sayings: "In Ireland the President reigns for seven years and journalism governs for ever and ever."