Lady Windermere’s Fan / A Woman of No Importance / An Ideal Husband / The Importance of Being Earnest / Salomé

This Penguin collection contains Oscar Wilde’s five wittiest and best known plays. He himself described Lady Windermere’s Fan his first great stage success, as ‘one of those modern drawing-room plays with pink lampshades’. Its combination of polished social drama and corruscatingly with dialogue was repeated in A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband both of which were enthusiastically received by the public but savaged, much to Wilde’s delight, by affronted critics. His greatest play, The Importance of Being Earnest was first produced in 1895. Wilde wrote of it : ‘It is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubblue of fancy, and it has its philosophy… that we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’

This volume also includes Lord Alfred Douglas’s translation of Salomé a short drama which Wilde wrote in French.