Alexis Sotiropoulos examines the relationship between two great Irish playwrights, GBS and Oscar Wilde.
The recent demise of the Home Secretary David Blunkett brought to mind Oscar Wilde’s downfall in 1895 when he launched an ill-advised prosecution against the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel for publishing a statement that Wilde was “posing as a sodomite”. They both formed an inappropriate intimate relationship which turned sour and caused them to pursue law suits through the courts which eventually caused events to turn against them. Whilst Wilde’s consequent suffering stands in the scale of an Oedipus compared to Blunkett’s Willy Loman we might concur with George Bernard Shaw’s observation of public sympathies, when he said in a letter to Frank Harris in 1918 that “it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly: indeed I have often said that if the Crucifixion could be proved a myth and Jesus convicted of dying of old age in comfortable circumstances, Christianity would lose ninety-nine percent of its devotees.”
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