Quotation of the Week: Wilde About Oscar!

Oscar Wilde

Most of you know that I teach online Shakespeare classes (and other language arts courses, too, through Brave Writer). I mean, what cooler job is there in which I am paid to read and discuss Shakespeare's plays, all from the comfort of my sofa??? I have the BEST job on the face of the planet.

But one would think that my favorite play would be one by the Bard, right? Perhaps Hamlet, the tale of the melancholy Danish prince? Perhaps the sublime poetry of Romeo and Juliet? Perhaps the brewing evil and wicked Fates of Macbeth, or the jolly repartee of Much Ado About Nothing or Taming of the Shrew? 


Nope. My favorite play was written several centuries after the Bard left us his collected works to read, perform, and enjoy. My favorite play was written by an Irishman, not an Englishman. It's Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Truly, Earnest is the most clever play ever written, with Tom Stoppard's brilliant Hamlet-reversal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a close second.

Although they cut one of my favorite scenes, I am thoroughly in love with the 2002 Rupert Everett/Colin Firth film version of The Importance of Being Earnest as no one (and I mean NO ONE!) can play Lady Bracknell like Judi Dench. Yes, Reese Witherspoon gets on my nerves just a bit, but the remainder is simply marvelous. Every line sparkles. It's sheer brilliance.

Importance of Being Earnest (2002)

Did I happen to mention that I'll be teaching an online Literary Analysis class at Brave Writer next spring on The Importance of Being Earnest? As I said above: I have the BEST job on the face of the planet!!! :)

Over the weekend I began corresponding with a writer who happens to live in Italy and possesses her PhD in Italian Literature. She sent me several quotes in thanks for some feedback I offered her on a story she had published online, and two of the quotations were from Oscar Wilde. I immediately drew out my brass-nibbed pen and corked bottle of black ink and copied both quotations into my Quotation Journal which I have been keeping since August 2001.

So here are my Quotations of the Week, courtesy of my new Italian acquaintance:

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

~Oscar Wilde

"Yes, I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." 

~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist"

So I wish you all a wonderful week ahead, a week of truly living and of dreaming and enjoying the beautiful dawns before everyone else.

All About Oscar,