Oscar Wilde in the context of "Lady Windermere's Fan"

A wide range of movements existed in the theatrical culture of Europe and the United States in the 19th century. In the West, they include Romanticism, melodrama, the well-made plays of Scribe and Sardou, the farces of Feydeau, the problem plays of Naturalism and Realism, Wagner's operatic Gesamtkunstwerk, Gilbert and Sullivan's plays and operas, Wilde's drawing-room comedies, Symbolism, and proto-Expressionism in the late works of August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.

Irish literature is literature written in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots (Ulster Scots) languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from back in the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin and Early Irish, including religious texts, poetry and mythological tales. There is a large surviving body of Irish mythological writing, including tales such as Táin Bó Cúailnge and Buile Shuibhne.

The English language was introduced to Ireland in the 13th century, following the Norman invasion of Ireland. The 16th and 17th centuries saw a major expansion of English power across Ireland, further expanding the presence of early Modern English speakers. One theory is that in the latter part of the nineteenth century saw a rapid replacement of Irish by English in the greater part of the country, largely due to the Great Famine and the subsequent decimation of the Irish population by starvation and emigration. Another theory among modern scholars is that far from being a sudden cataclysmic event the language shift was well underway much earlier. At the end of the century, however, cultural nationalism displayed a new energy, marked by the Gaelic Revival (which encouraged a modern literature in Irish) and more generally by the Irish Literary Revival.

The Importance of Being Earnest, a Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde, the last of his four drawing-room plays, following Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895). First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy depicting the tangled affairs of two young men about town who lead double lives to evade unwanted social obligations, both assuming the name Ernest while wooing the two young women of their affections.

The play, celebrated for its wit and repartee, parodies contemporary dramatic norms, gently satirises late Victorian manners, and introduces – in addition to the two pairs of young lovers – the formidable Lady Bracknell, the fussy governess Miss Prism and the benign and scholarly Canon Chasuble. Contemporary reviews in Britain and overseas praised the play's humour, although some critics had reservations about its lack of social messages.

The Cenci. A Tragedy, in Five Acts (/ˈtʃɛntʃi/ CHEN-chee; 1820) is a verse drama in five acts by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in the summer of 1819, and inspired by a real Roman family, the House of Cenci (in particular, Beatrice Cenci). Shelley composed the play in Rome and at Villa Valsovano near Livorno, from May to 5 August 1819. The work was published by Charles and James Ollier in London in 1819. The Livorno edition was printed in Livorno, Italy by Shelley himself in a run of 250 copies. Shelley told Thomas Love Peacock that he arranged for the printing himself because in Italy "it costs, with all duties and freightage, about half of what it would cost in London." Shelley sought to have the play staged, describing it as "totally different from anything you might conjecture that I should write; of a more popular kind... written for the multitude." Shelley wrote to his publisher Charles Ollier that he was confident that the play "will succeed as a publication." A second edition appeared in 1821, his only published work to go into a second edition during his lifetime.

The play was not considered stageable in its day due to its themes of incest and parricide, and was not performed in public in England until 1922, when it was staged in London. In 1886 the Shelley Society had sponsored a private production at the Grand Theatre, Islington, before an audience that included Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, and George Bernard Shaw. Though there has been much debate over the play's stageability, it has been produced in many countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and the United States. It was included in the Harvard Classics as one of the most important and representative works of the Western canon.

Richard Georg Strauss (/straʊs/; German: [ˈʁɪçaʁt ˈʃtʁaʊs] ; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer and conductor known for his tone poems and operas. A leading figure of the late Romantic and early Modern era, and a successor to Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, he combined, along with his friend Gustav Mahler, subtleties of orchestration with an advanced harmonic style.

His compositional output began in 1870 when he was just six years old and lasted until his death nearly eighty years later. His first tone poem to achieve wide acclaim was Don Juan, and this was followed by other lauded works of this kind, including Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, Symphonia Domestica, and An Alpine Symphony. His first opera to achieve international fame was Salome, which used a libretto by Hedwig Lachmann that was a German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. This was followed by several critically acclaimed operas with librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena, and Arabella. His last operas, Daphne, Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio used libretti written by Joseph Gregor, the Viennese theatre historian. Other well-known works by Strauss include two symphonies, lieder (especially the Four Last Songs), the Violin Concerto in D minor, the Horn Concerto No. 1, Horn Concerto No. 2, his Oboe Concerto and other instrumental works such as Metamorphosen.

Aestheticism (also known as the aesthetic movement) was an art movement in the late 19th century that valued the appearance of literature, music, fonts, and the arts over their functions. According to Aestheticism, art should be produced to be beautiful, rather than to teach a lesson, create a parallel, or perform another didactic purpose, a sentiment expressed in the slogan "art for art's sake." Aestheticism flourished, in the 1870s and 1880s, gaining prominence and the support of notable writers, such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.

Aestheticism challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture, as many Victorians believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. Writing in The Guardian, Fiona McCarthy states that "the aesthetic movement stood, in stark and sometimes shocking contrast, to the crass materialism of Britain, in the 19th century."

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (/ˈbɪərdzli/ BEERDZ-lee; 21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style figures.

The Dance of the Seven Veils is the dance performed by Salome before King Herod Antipas in modern stage, literature, and visual arts. It is an elaboration on the New Testament story of the Feast of Herod and the execution of John the Baptist, which refers to Salome dancing before the king, but does not give the dance a name.

The name "Dance of the Seven Veils" was chiefly popularized in modern culture with the 1894 English translation of Oscar Wilde's 1893 French play Salome in the stage direction "Salome dances the dance of the seven veils". The dance was also incorporated into Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salome.

The history of Irish theatre begins in the Middle Ages and was for a long time confined to the courts of the Gaelic and "Old English" – descendants of 12th-century Norman invaders – inhabitants of Ireland. The first theatre building in Ireland was the Werburgh Street Theatre, founded in 1637, followed by the Smock Alley Theatre in 1662 which held performances 1787.

From the 17th century, theatrical productions in Ireland tended to serve the political purposes of the English colonial administration, but as more theatres opened and the popular audience grew, a more diverse range of entertainments were staged. Many Dublin-based theatres developed links with their London equivalents and performers and productions from the British capital frequently found their way to the Irish stage. However, almost all Irish playwrights from William Congreve to George Bernard Shaw found it necessary to leave their native island to establish themselves.

In English literature, the term comedy of manners (also anti-sentimental comedy) describes a genre of realistic, satirical comedy that questions and comments upon the manners and social conventions of a greatly sophisticated, artificial society. The satire of fashion, manners, and outlook on life of the social classes, is realised with stock characters, such as the braggart soldier of Ancient Greek comedy, and the fop and the rake of English Restoration comedy. The clever plot of a comedy of manners (usually a scandal) is secondary to the social commentary thematically presented through the witty dialogue of the characters, e.g. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), by Oscar Wilde, which satirises the sexual hypocrisies of Victorian morality.

The comedy-of-manners genre originated in the New Comedy period (325–260 BC) of Classical Greece (510–323 BC), and is known from fragments of works by the playwright Menander, whose style of writing, elaborate plots, and stock characters were imitated by Roman playwrights, such as Plautus and Terence, whose comedies were known to and staged during the Renaissance. In the 17th century, the comedy of manners is best realised in the plays of Molière, such as The School for Wives (1662), The Imposter (1664), and The Misanthrope (1666), which satirise the hypocrisies and pretensions of the ancien régime that ruled France from the late 15th century to the 18th century. In the early 18th century, William Congreve's play The Way of the World (1700) became popular among the public for its strong depiction of the comedy of manners genre.

Uranian (from the Ancient Greek Aphrodite Urania (Ἀφροδίτη Οὐρανία, Aphrodítē Ouranía)) is a historical term for homosexual men. The word was also used as an adjective in association with male homosexuality or inter-male attraction regardless of sexual orientation.

An early use of the term appears in Friedrich Schiller's 'Sixth Letter' in the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795–96). Schiller claims that state institutions are so jealous they would rather share their servants with a Cytherean Venus than a Uranian Venus. The term was used by activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in a series of five booklets from 1864 to 1865 collected under the title Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (The Riddle of Man–Manly Love). The term uranian was adopted by English-language advocates of homosexual emancipation in the Victorian era, such as Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, who used it to describe a comradely love that would bring about true democracy. Oscar Wilde once wrote to his lover Robert Ross in an undated letter, "To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms."

Dame Edith Mary Evans (8 February 1888 – 14 October 1976) was an English actress. She was best known for her work on the West End stage, but also appeared in films at the beginning and towards the end of her career. Between 1964 and 1968, she was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Evans's stage career spanned sixty years, during which she played more than 100 roles, in classics by Shakespeare, Congreve, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Wilde, and plays by contemporary writers including Bernard Shaw, Enid Bagnold, Christopher Fry and Noël Coward. She created roles in two of Shaw's plays: Orinthia in The Apple Cart (1929), and Epifania in The Millionairess (1940) and was in the British premières of two others: Heartbreak House (1921) and Back to Methuselah (1923).

Sir Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an actor and broadcaster. He began his career on the sketch comedy series Alfresco (1983–1984) and the sitcom Blackadder (1986–1989) before gaining recognition as part of the comedy duo Fry and Laurie alongside Hugh Laurie and appearing together in A Bit of Fry & Laurie (1989–1995) and Jeeves and Wooster (1990–1993). His later television roles include Kingdom (2007–2009), Bones (2007–2017), and It's a Sin (2021). Fry was the original host of the comedy panel show QI (2003–2016), for which he was nominated for six British Academy Television Awards. In 2006, the British public ranked Fry number 9 in ITV's poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars.

Fry's film credits include Chariots of Fire (1981), A Fish Called Wanda (1988) Gosford Park (2001), The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004), V for Vendetta (2005), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), and Love & Friendship (2016). He portrays the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (2010) and its 2016 sequel, and the Master of Lake-town in the film trilogy adaptation of The Hobbit (2013–2014). For playing Oscar Wilde in the film Wilde (1997), Fry was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. Between 2001 and 2017, he hosted the British Academy Film Awards 12 times.

Franny Moyle (born 1964) is a British television producer and author. Her first book Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites (2009) was adapted into the BBC drama serial Desperate Romantics by screenwriter Peter Bowker. Her second book, Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde was published in 2011 to critical acclaim. In 2016 she released Turner: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J.M.W. Turner, published by Viking. In 2021, her book, The King's Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein, was published by Abrams Press in New York.

A drawing room play is a type of play, developed during the Victorian period in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. They set upper and middle-class characters confronting a social problem of the time with a comedic twist. The play is formed from a blend of three parts: part well-made play, part society drama, part comedy of manners. Exponents of this style include Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Wing Pinero, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Edward Martyn and George Moore.

The name drawing room play has its origins in the upper and middle classes of Victorian society, who with time on their hands, enacted amateur plays for the pleasure of their families in the drawing room.

A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde is "a new and original play of modern life", in four acts, first given on 19 April 1893 at the Haymarket Theatre, London. Like Wilde's other society plays, it satirises English upper-class society. It has been revived from time to time since his death in 1900, but has been widely regarded as the least successful of his four drawing room plays.

An Ideal Husband is a four-act play by Oscar Wilde that revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honour. It was first produced at the Haymarket Theatre, London in 1895 and ran for 124 performances. It has been revived in many theatre productions and adapted for the cinema, radio and television.