Plays

Penguin Plays by Oscar Wilde collects five of the Irish playwright’s most celebrated and witty society comedies, showcasing his razor-sharp dialogue and satirical take on Victorian hypocrisy. The anthology features Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), where a young wife’s suspicions about her husband’s fidelity unravel into a web of scandal and moral ambiguity; A Woman of No Importance (1893), exposing class prejudices through a mysterious outsider’s disruptive arrival; An Ideal Husband (1894), in which political blackmail threatens a seemingly perfect marriage; The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), a farce of mistaken identities and double lives centered on two men inventing fictional personas to dodge social duties; and Salome (1891), Wilde’s decadent one-act tragedy of lust and biblical retribution. These plays, marked by epigrams like Many lack the originality to lack originality, blend farce, melodrama, and critique of upper-class mores, cementing Wilde’s legacy as a master of the drawing-room comedy.