Acting Wilde

''I love acting - it is so much more real than life'' Oscar Wilde famously wrote. Acting Wilde demonstrates that Wilde''s plays fiction and critical theory are organised by the idea that all so-called ''reality'' is a mode of performance and that the ''meanings'' of life are really the scripted elements of a dramatic spectacle. Wilde''s real issue was whether one could become the author of his own script the creator of the character and role he inhabits. It was a question he struggled to answer from the beginning of his career to the end whether in his position as the pre-eminent dramatist in English or as the beleaguered defendant on trial for ''gross indecency''. Introducing important evidence from Wilde''s career-launching tour of America the often tortured revisions of his plays and the recently discovered written record of his first courtroom trial this book reconstructs Wilde''s strategic dramatising of himself.