The Comedy of the False Apperception: Wilde, Maugham, and Stoppard

Abstract

Oscar Wilde had to recreate the tradition of British drama; he did so by a process that I will name “false apperception.” In the nineteenth century, Britain lost its tradition of drama. If a person is asked to name a few British poets of the nineteenth century, the names of literary masters floods his or her mind: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats among the Romantics, and Tennyson, Arnold, the Brownings, the Rossettis, among the Victorians. The same happens with fiction writers: Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Hardy come immediately to mind. In both poetry and fiction, these are only a few of the greatest names; and countless others wrote well and still find readers today. Other authors who are no longer represented on the shelves even of a good literary bookstore continue to receive attention in university graduate programs. But what about drama? Who were the great British dramatists of the nineteenth century? Asked this question, we are speechless; even people with doctorates in nineteenth-century British literature have difficulty naming a single author who wrote plays between 1800 and 1890.¹