Sheridan’s drama, and in particular The Rivals, involves a highly developed version of the plot complications characteristic of the “laughing comedy” fostered by his countryman Oliver Goldsmith on the English stage. It is a tradition which descends, on the English side, from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and indeed Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer is explicitly related to the plot of that novel.
Hidden identities and so-called discovery scenes - whether involving persons hidden behind screens or letters mistakenly delivered and disasterously opened - provide the main-spring of the action and the endings are invariably happy (signalled by the betrothal of the young couple at the centre of the action.)
  Sheridan’s The Rivals is a masterpiece in this tradition. In addition to those qualities, however, it contains two characters whose social and moral aspect makes them particularly interesting to the Irish reader. The first of these is Lady Malaprop. Though not represented as an Irishwoman, she epitomises the form of erroneous language known as the “blunder” and particularly associated with Irish speakers.
  The blunder occurs when a speaker misuses a word or mangles a phrase or expression - or, in the extreme case - produces an illogical expression such as the famous blunder of Sir Boyle Roche who once said in Parliament, “I smell a rat and I shall nip it in the bud”. (His best known blunder is, perhaps, the ingenious and probably intentional saying: “Why should we do anything for posterity? What has posterity done for us?”)
  In the original manuscript, Sheridan is known to have given blunders to several of his characters; in the final version that trait is confined to Mrs Malaprop - whose very name means blunder in French. Her continual misuse of English does not disguise a good heart yet it also imports a sense of hilarity which removes the effect of sentimentality that informs the play as a whole, and particularly its ending. She also, telling, refers to her own failing’, as when she says:

  In seeking an explanation for this defect in the character and the kind of comedy it involves, many English-stage figures suggest themselves as models including Dogberry and Mrs. Slipslop. Nonetheless, it is the comical inability of the Irish speaker to strike exactly the right note in English - itself a parallel case to the lower-class Englishman “learning” the polite version of his or her own language - which provides the immediate inspiration.
  The second character of interest from the specifically Irish standpoint is Sir Lucius O’Trigger. Indeed, the nationality of this character was so much at the centre of the audience’s reaction to the play at its first performance that it had to be taken off and revised before it met with entire approval (as Sheridan’s preface to the play reveals).
  Sir Lucius is a duelling Irishman - a type, well-known in other Irish writings, who (as he himself says) will not let any reason disturb a “pretty quarrel”. The conception that Irishmen are irrationally belligerent and inherently violent, and therefore unsocialised and unsocialisable, belongs to the system of stereotypes that derives from the Williamite War in Ireland when Irishness was effectively rendered illegal by means of the Penal Laws.
  Only in recent times (relative to the date of Sheridan’s drama) - precisely in 1766, when the Vatican withdrew its support from the Stuart lineage and thus permitted Catholics to espouse the Hanoverian succession as the legitimate English monarchy - had Irishmen begun to be represented in a complimentary light.
  In The Brave Irishman (1746), Sheridan’s father, Thomas Sheridan, had introduced as his main character one Captain O’Blunder who manages to protect a London widow from the assaults made on her fortune by an Englishman, a Welshman and a Scotsman. The play was unsuccessful in London but nevertheless reveals that the Anglo-Irish were receptive to the idea that the native Irish (signified by the prefix O’) were good-natured and trustworthy at heart.
  A more successful version of the new stage-Irishman was presented in Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771) in which Captain O’Flaherty bears the news of the real parentage of one of the star-crossed lovers resulting in the restitution of her fortune.
  In the prologue to the play, O’Flaherty is identified as one ‘[d]oom’d by Religion’s too severe command, / To fight for bread against his native land’. And if he is ‘[a] brave, unthinking, animated rogue, / With here and there a touch upon the brogue’ at whom’, the audience is nonetheless enjoined to ‘Laugh, but despise him not, for on his lip / His errors lie; his heart can never trip’.
  It is not recorded whether the audience who rejected the original version of Sir Lucius, who duels without any reason, was made up primarily of English or Anglo-Irish viewers but in any case their response revealed a new pro-Irish climate in London in the period of years approaching the august date when, on 16 April, 1782, Henry Grattan declared the Independence of the Irish parliament.
Sheridan himself was an M.P, though in London, and a friend of both the Prime Minister Charles Fox and the the Prince Regent (though later cast off by the latter on account of a misused loan of money). Thus moved easily between the the world of theatre and that of state and politics. In all of this he maintained a fixed loyalty to Ireland, and managed to promote a new and essentially generous version of Englishness on the London stage - a version which was arguably Irish in its essence.

In my lecture on Oscar Wilde I offered a straightforward reading of “The Happy Prince” [see story], in which a statue, moved to pity by the plight of the poorer citizens of the town in which it has been erected, divests himself of all his ornaments - jewels and gold-leaf - and, with the help of a migrant swallow, bestows this “wealth” upon those unhappy people whom he can see in their garrets from his lofty elevation. In the end, it is not only the Prince but also the swallow who perishes, the latter having missed his season and condemned himself through love of the Prince to die in the winter cold. When the burgers notice the delapidated condition of the statue they consign it to the urban rubbish dump; but miraculously the heart survives ...
 Taken at face value, this is indeed a story of remarkable philanthropy in which not only an apparently inanimate statue but also a mere creature (the swallow) sacrifice themselves out of Christian love for the “last” whom Christians are enjoined to succour and admire in the Sermon on the Mount. Wilde’s story is thus of a piece with the Gospel parable, and perhaps even a modernised version of the same, rendered palatable to a childhood audience fostered on fairy tales in which princes and swallows are more commonplace than Galilean fishermen and the communities from which them come. It is true, moreover, that Wilde devised this and the similar narrations published under the name of The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) as bed-time stories for his children.
 Looking more deeply, and especially peering into the biography of Oscar Wilde, one begins to feel that the story is in some sense disingenuous or, at least, unduly simplistic in its moral vision. The man who wrote this tale was similtaneously involved a homosexual alliances sometimes with young men who were hardly more than children (that is to say, newspaper boys doubling as rentboys). The element of philanthropy takes on a darker complexion in this context; and if the “Happy Prince” is an expression of Wilde’s psyche, it is surely an expression of his moral intentions rather than his moral actions.
 A more telling work, in many ways, is the “Ballad of Reading Gaol” in which he told the story of an English soldier condemned to execution by hanging for the murder of his wife who shared the prison with Wilde during the latter’s two-year incarceration for homosexuality, arising from his rash attempt to prosecute Lord Queensbury (the father of his lover Bosie) in a libel suit in 1895. Aside form being a disasterous course of action for Wilde himself, this trial was to spell the death-knell of the “decadent” tendency in English literature for at least a generation. In his brilliant, but pervasively self-pitying and maudlin, De Profundis (published in 1905), Wilde castigated his lover Bosie for leading him astray but also admitted his own risk-taking ( “ It was like feasting with panthers”).
 But it was not Wilde alone who suffered for his “crimes” - though the modern social conscience tends to regard homosexual acts between consenting adults as non-criminal and, indeed, an entirely legitimate expression of human love. The real, or at least proximate, victims of his rule-breaking activities - which he apparently embarked on first at Oxford where, as he said, his Dublin accent was only “one of the things he lost” - was his family: his wife Constance and his children Cyril and Vyvyan. (A grandson Merlin, still living today, is one of his chief memorialists.) For these, his social disgrace spelt a change of family name and a life spent without the support of a father, while Constance herself died tragically in the wake of a traumatic operation on her spine which was probably unnecessary and certainly unwise. Wilde survived her, and returned to his pursuit of boys after his release from prison.
 In the “Ballad of Reading Gaol”, Wilde tells us that “each man kills the thing he loves” - a line which might apply literally to the executed soldier (presuming that he strangled his wife in an irrational fit of drunken rage) but which, when applied to Wilde himself, seems a curiously self-reflexive notion harbouring the idea that the effect of his self-indulgence was the death of his own wife. This bears no literal interpretation, but it does suggest that there is a moral dimension of homosexual behaviour - at least in married men - which amounts, in fact, to homicidal violence against his loved ones (that is to say, his family).
 Wilde’s reputation was inevitably and appropriately revived on account of the extraordinary brilliance of his plays, and most especially the champagne sparkle of his paradoxical masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest in which every kind of social seriousness is turned on its head and the canons of conventional English society are accordingly exposes to ridicule. Wilde called it, in his subtitle, “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People”, implying that it contains a germ of earnestness as regards the deficiencies of English common sense.
 It also contains a good deal of gender-bending in the sense that the main characters all enact the very opposite of their stereotypical gender-roles. Indeed, we are told explicitly that the young men qualify for the attention of the young women on the basis that they stay at home and do essentially nothing - occupations traditionally associated with women - while the women busy themselves with learned studies and literary occupations conventionally reserved for men.
 In this way “St Oscar” (as Terry Eagleton has called him in a brilliant play about the writer) speaks up for the transgressive version of liberal culture which has been widely espoused at the metropolitan core of British and, more broadly speaking, modern Western culture.
 Not the least way in occasion on which he did so was the paradoxical version of Marxist philosophy outlined in the brilliant essay “Man Under Socialism” which argues that there is no such thing as the “deserving poor” and argues for a form of revolution that would bring about a world in which everyone enjoys the form of economic and artistic development currently reserved for aesthetes such as Wilde himself.
 This may not seem serious (though it is). At the same time there is an element of moral seriousness in Wilde’s literary high-jinks which is not so easily assimilated to the post-Christian amoralism of modern sexual orthodoxy: Wilde was himself drawing for dramatic energy on a profound sense of sin which he treats with this play with a sort of satanic levity that puts moralists on edge and causes immoralists to wonder about the rightness of their belief.
 Sexual politics since the 1970s has, indeed, tended to canonised Oscar Wilde both as a prophet of sexual liberation (though he wrote virtually nothing about it, and that in deep disguise) and as a victim of sexual puritanism under the aegis of the Victorian dispensation. His contemporaries were, inevitably, deeply divided about him, though generally English society and letters closed ranks against after his imprisonment in 1895.
 A notable exception was W. B. Yeats who always remembered the impact Wilde had made at their first meetings around Wilde’s dinner table. Yeats attributed to Wilde his own theory of masks - a sort of brilliant disingenuity in which the artist does best to choose an image which is most different from his quotidian self - and, in all his remarks, he spoke only of his genius without any taint of moral rebuke: His (Yeats’s) observations are immune from moral distain.
 Yeats considered Wilde the “greatest talker of his time” (which he undoubtedly was) and echoed his saying that the Irish were “the greatest talkers since the Greeks”. What he saw in him, besides, was the genius of “[a] man talking with perfect sentences,as if he had written them overnight with labour, and yet all spontaneous”.
 He saw something else also, which was his sheer foreignness of England to him and the corresponding delight with which he identified and manipulated its social conventions. Thus, on being asked if Wilde was a snob, Yeats said: “No, I would not say that. England is a strange country to the Irish. To Wilde the aristocrats of England were like the nobles of Baghdad.” (That is to say, the Baghdad of One Thousand and One Nights rather than the Baghdad of the War Against Terrorism today.)
 Yeats did not, however see - or did not wish to emphasise - a very different side of Wilde, and that was his real involvement in moral turpitude and his conscious awareness of the immoral as a source of imaginative energy and, ultimately, the fountain of his contradictory art. It was left to James Joyce, a Catholic Irishman who was by no means conventionally religious, to point out that the pulse of Wilde’s art was sin. [See Comments, infra.]
 It took, in fact, an Irish Catholic, to make this obvious remark; and it is a peculiar irony of the case of Oscar Wilde that at the end of his days he appears to have converted to Catholicism - something which his family implore him to resist when he was under the influence of fin de siecle aestheticism in the years of early manhood.
 Yet is not enough to argue that Wilde was contradictory because his writing was so sanctimoniously aesthetic, so pointedly amoral, so indifferent to convention while, at the same time, he was actively involved in sexual deviance of a kind which, however justifiable in terms of post-Christian morality, is turbid and intense in ways that set the normal nervous system aflutter.
 Aside from his sexual adventures, Wilde was involved in a deep and in many ways more obscure history, that is, the tale of Irish colonial subjugation and the extraordinary literary wealth that the writers of Ireland - including his own parents, Sir William and Lady Wilde - brought back from the brink of cultural extinction. It was thus that Oscar Wilde was able to tell Irish-American audiences of the “indomitable forces [that] nationality possesses” and, more particularly, to claim that there nothing “more wonderful, or more characteristic of the Celtic genius, than the quick artistic spirit in which we adapted ourselves to the English tongue.”
 According on Irish critic Wilde’s conception of the relation between Ireland and England has far-reaching socio-political consequences. Thus Declan Kiberd writes: “By becoming more English than the English themselves, Wilde was able to invert, and ultimately to challenge, all the time-honoured clichés about Ireland” ('Irish Literature and Irish History’, in Roy Foster, ed. Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, 1989, pp.310-13).
  If this is so, it must be admitted it is an effect achieved without any reference in his major works to Ireland. In reality, of course, it is more an effect of our way of reading Wilde; but it is a true way - and Wilde’s Irishness remains a matter of paradoxical triumph: he shed every sign of Irishness in order to conduct a subversive raid on English culture which had the ultimate result of bringing the rebellious spirit of Irishness to the centre of the London stage
 .. where, arguably, it resumed its place at various times due to the theatrical genius of George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett.