INTRODUCTION

Several years ago, a director named Moises Kaufman was given a book called The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde. It contained a categorical listing of WildeÕs celebrated epigrams and snippets from his plays and essays. When Kaufman worked his way to the end of the book, he discovered ten pages of transcripts from a trial: Regina v. Queensberry. The star witness, Oscar Wilde, was suing the 8th Marquess of Queensberry for libel. Kaufman was so astonished by what he read that he sought out the complete transcript, published in 1952 by H. Montgomery Hyde. Here he discovered the transcripts of two more trials and the story of a famous poetÕs fall from grace.

Some called it the trial of the century. Oscar Wilde was 40, a married man with two young children, and the author of such hit plays as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. He had also fallen in love with the young Lord Alfred Douglas, a burgeoning poet in his own right, and WildeÕs constant companion. The two met when Oscar Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891, Douglas was 21 and a student at Oxford. Wilde was 36. Wilde had embraced homosexual relationships five years earlier and enjoyed the company of several bright, beautiful young men. Douglas, however, eclipsed all the rest. For the next four years, Wilde and Douglas maintained a passionate, if tempestuous relationship, and made great efforts to be together as much as possible. When in London, they dined at the finest restaurants and stayed at the most luxurious hotels. They vacationed in Paris and Algiers and spent the summers in quiet estates by the ocean.

Their publicly affectionate relationship incited the ire of DouglasÕ father, the 8th Marquess of Queensberry. From the beginning, he was violently opposed to any sort of relationship between his son and Oscar Wilde, and harassed and pursued the pair for close to a year. Douglas and his father were not on good terms to begin with and an already unstable relationship soon turned venomous. Wilde became inextricably involved in February 1895, when the Marquess accused Wilde of Òposing as a somdomite (sic).Ó With BosieÕs encouragement, Wilde took legal action. The Marquess was charged with criminal libel and arrested. Regina vs. Queensberry went to trial in April 1895.

As the celebrated libel trial against the Marquess of Queensberry spiraled out of control, Wilde moved from prosecutor to defendant. By June 1895, Wilde had been convicted of acts of gross indecency and sentenced to two years hard labor in a London prison. His name was removed from the billboards in LondonÕs West End and An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were forced to close.

Gross Indecency explores the details of the trials that ended WildeÕs career as a dramatist and sent him to prison for two years with hard labor. It begins with WildeÕs prosecution of the Marquess of Queensberry and continues through the two trials in which Wilde defends himself against charges of gross indecency. Actual excerpts from the trial are interspersed with commentaries from friends and critics alike. Biographies, poetry, and contemporary newspapers are all quoted along with the respective memoirs of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. This mosaic of perspectives introduces Oscar Wilde: the man, the writer, the homosexual, the romantic. The audience bears witness to the legal actions that stripped him of his respect, his name, his promise Ð and ultimately, his life.

BIOGRAPHY OF OSCAR WILDE

March 1895. Oscar Wilde asks Sir Edward Clarke to act as his counsel in the prosecution of the Marquess of Queensberry. ÒI can only accept this brief, Mr. Wilde,Ó Clarke said, Òif you can assure me on your honor as an English gentleman that there is not and never has been any foundation for the charges that are made against you.Ó Technically Oscar did not lie when he gave Clarke his assurance; he was not an English gentleman at all. He was Irish.

Oscar Fingall OÕFlahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854, to William Robert Wilde and Jane ÒSperanzaÓ Francesca Wilde. His father was a well-known physician, his mother, a writer and fervent supporter of the Irish Nationalist and womenÕs liberation movements. The family had a French nurse and a German governess, and Oscar became fluent in both languages; his love for education and intellect was encouraged from early age. Though both parents were undoubtedly devoted to their children, they did not have the happiest of marriages. Dr. Wilde was notorious for having extramarital affairs and is said to have fathered three illegitimate children.

WildeÕs formal education began at Portora, one of the four Royal Schools of Ireland. At 17 he distinguished himself by winning a gold medal as the best classical scholar of the year. He accepted a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, where he again proved his intellectual prowess by earning another gold medal for classical studies and a scholarship for further study at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1874, despite his parentsÕ strong positions in Irish politics, Wilde left behind all Irish ties and set out for England.

At Oxford, Wilde began to study issues of religion and morality. He was greatly influenced by the lectures of the art critic and historian, John Ruskin, and even more so by the teachings of a new master, Walter Pater, leader of the Aesthetic Movement. Wilde was profoundly influenced by the ideals of the Aesthetic Movement, which promoted Art for ArtÕs sake, Beauty for BeautyÕs sake. It became the foundation of his literary works and gave him a career for several years to come. His schooling ended in triumphant success when he won the highest honors for his final examinations as well as the Newdigate prize for his poem, ÒRavenna.Ó

By the time he left Oxford in 1879, Wilde had distinguished himself as a scholar, a poet, and a ÒProfessor of Aesthetics.Ó He moved to London where he gave lectures and frequented literary salons, determined to use his wit and his talents to make his fortune. Indeed, WildeÕs personality and wit opened doors and introduced him to many important people. During his first years in London, he tried his hand as a writer, publishing his collection of poems in 1881 and writing his first play, Vera, in 1880. Vera was not produced until 1883, and ran for only one week in New York. In these years, it was WildeÕs personality that brought him success and attention. His writing would not garner him acclaim until several years later.

In 1881, Gilbert and Sullivan wrote Patience, a new comic opera mocking the Aesthetic Movement and parodying Wilde himself. Wilde accepted the parody with pleasure and soon came to benefit from it. In 1882 the producer of Patience invited Wilde to go to America on a lecture tour, thinking the presence of a real aesthetic poet might drum up business for his show. Wilde thought the tour might drum up business for Oscar and leapt at the chance. His comment to the customs agent in New York, ÒI have nothing to declare except my genius,Ó began a year of travel through much of the United States. Though amused by his breeches and long flowing hair, American audiences were quickly charmed by WildeÕs humorous good nature and stimulating theories on art history and aesthetics.

Upon his return to England in 1883, Wilde used the money from the American tour to retreat to Paris for a few months while he wrote his next play, The Duchess of Padua. Upon its completion, Wilde again began lecturing, this time around England on the subject of his experiences in America. In 1884, Wilde married the socially prominent Constance Lloyd, a pretty, loyal, and bright young woman who is said to have reminded Oscar of his younger sister who passed away when he was twelve. Constance had a little money of her own, and with these funds the couple bought their home on Tite Street in London. There is every indication that at the beginning of their marriage, Constance and Oscar were quite happy and very much in love. Their first son, Cyril, was born in 1885; their second boy, Vyvyan, in 1886.

To support his family, Wilde took a job as literary editor of Women's World, a position he held from 1887 to 1889; he continued to write reviews and critical pieces on art, literature, and drama. But Oscar had become increasingly unhappy. He was disillusioned with his wife and marriage, and was dissatisfied with his work. He was searching for something more profound in the world around him. It was during this time that Wilde had his first homosexual experience.

In 1886 during a visit to Oxford, Wilde met Robert Baldwin Ross, grandson on his mother's side of the first Prime Minister of Upper Canada. ÒRobbieÓ soon became a close friend of the older playwright and introduced Wilde to the sexual pleasures that would eventually lead to his imprisonment. It is generally agreed that Wilde's 17-year-old friend seduced him into his first homosexual affair.

The years when Wilde and Ross were intimate marked a new period of achievement in Wilde's writing. He published a variety of collected fiction, including A House of Pomegranates and The Portrait of Mr. W.H., the first piece to hint at Wilde's interest in homosexuality. If that piece raised some eyebrows, his next piece raised a storm. On a commission from an American publisher, he began writing The Picture of Dorian Gray. Originally published as a serial in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, its success prompted the author to extend it into a full novel that was published in 1891.

The novel tells the story of the painter, Basil Hallward, whose masterpiece captures the extraordinary beauty and purity of Dorian Gray, a young man with whom he has clearly fallen in love. Lord Henry Wotton is a cheerful cynic who, by means of dazzling conversation and epigrammatic aestheticism, attempts to influence and dominate the young Dorian. Dorian Gray's desparate wish that Hallward's portrait might show all the effects of age and corruption, while he remained forever young and beautiful, is horribly granted. Filled with betrayal, suicide, blackmail, and murder, The Picture of Dorian Gray explores the motivations and implications of Dorian's Òdouble life.Ó Wilde put good and evil, death and beauty, fatal attractions and secret lives all under public scrutiny, and challenged society's concept of morality under the province of art.

Wilde's only novel elicited a wide variety of comments. While some considered it Òthe most moral book of the century,Ó others thought the work was poisonous, tainted with corruption and abnormalities and hinting at ÒindecentÓ practices. Wilde's rebuttal was clear and clever. He first insisted that his novel was morally sound. He then went on to declare that art had no concern with morals. In response to a journalist's critique, Wilde wrote a letter to the editor stating:

Your reviewer suggests that I do not make it sufficiently clear whether I prefer virtue to wickedness or wickedness to virtue. An artist, sir, has no ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colors on his palette are to the painter... It was necessary, sir, for the dramatic development of this story to surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption. Otherwise the story would have had no meaning and the plot no issue... Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray's sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.

Though the press gave it mixed reviews, the public embraced the novel. They appreciated Wilde's ideas about Life and Art and were drawn to the novel's celebration of sensation and rejection of convention. The success of the The Picture of Dorian Gray established Wilde as a significant writer of prose. Of at least equal importance was the novel's impression on the young Lord Alfred Douglas, who is said to have read the story fourteen times before insisting that he meet the author. In 1891, Wilde and the 21-year old poet began an intimate companionship that was to become the talk of London society and eventually lead to Wilde's destruction.

Having made a name for himself as a poet, a critic, and a novelist, Wilde resumed his interrupted career as a playwright. His first dramatic success was Lady Windemere's Fan in 1892. The play received mixed reviews, but tremendous public acclaim. Wilde's next work, SalomŽ, was written in French for the leading French actress Sarah Bernhardt. The drama is a lushly sensual, erotic, mysterious piece that retells the story of John the Baptist by focusing on SalomŽ, the daughter of Herod's chief wife, who is caught up in lust, incest, and parental manipulations. SalomŽ stands by itself in the body of Wilde's work. In contrast to his highly intellectual comedies, this play was not thought but felt. The emotional charge of the story was too much for London. When it was banned in England, ostensibly for representing Biblical figures on stage, Wilde had it published in France and threatened to renounce his British citizenship.

Instead of leaving England, Wilde turned his attention to the lucrative genre of society comedies, where he earned his title as one of the greatest English writers of all time. When he produced A Woman of No Importance in 1893, the critics applauded the plot and admired the language. Two years later, he followed with An Ideal Husband, the premiere of which was attended and highly praised by the Prince of Wales. These social melodramas depicted conventional moral dilemmas with a unique combination of puns and paradoxes. Audiences swarmed to the receiving lines and gave Wilde the reputation and commercial success he needed to pursue his extravagant lifestyle.

At the height of his literary success and his public career, Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest, generally considered one of the most brilliant comedies in the English language. He demonstrated his mastery of the farcical conventions and his own witty wordplay, ably skewering London society and its pretensions. Both An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest opened in early 1895. Packed houses and rave reviews greeted the productions of London's favorite playwright.

As his career was climbing to new heights of unexpected fame, Wilde's personal life was both blossoming and heading down a dangerous path. Though it was months after their first meeting before Wilde and Douglas saw each other again, they were quickly on ÒOscarÓ and ÒBosieÓ terms. The two men maintained a passionate, if tempestuous relationship, and made great efforts to be together as much as possible. When in London, they dined at the finest restaurants and stayed at the most luxurious hotels. They vacationed in Paris and Algiers and spent the summers in quiet estates by the ocean. Early on, Douglas was impressed by the magical quality of Wilde's conversation. ÒI have never known anyone to come anywhere near him,Ó Douglas recalled more than thirty years after Wilde's death. ÒHe did succeed in weaving spells. One sat and listened to him enthralled. It all appeared to be wisdom and power and beauty and enchantment.Ó

In the summer of 1892, by which time it seems Wilde and Douglas were sexually intimate, Wilde wrote a letter to Robbie Ross describing how the two had stayed together in the Royal Palace Hotel, Kensington: Ò(Bosie) is quite like a narcissus Ð so white and goldÉ he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him.Ó Though most of Wilde's biographers believe it was Wilde who initially pursued the sexual relationship, it does not seem that this was Douglas' first homosexual encounter. From Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up:

After I had known Oscar for about nine months, I did with him and allowed him to do with me just what was done among boys at Winchester and Oxford. He treated me as an older boy treats a younger one at school.

Sometime after Wilde and Bosie had consummated their relationship, Bosie expressed a desire to explore other things. He introduced Wilde to a man named Alfred Taylor, the owner of a house frequented by beautiful young men, all willing escorts for older men of means. Through Taylor, Wilde met the valets, grooms, and clerks with whom he was to dine and go to bed. At the time, most people did not assume any homosexual relationship between Wilde and these boys, though there was a feeling around town that Òall was not right with Wilde.Ó The comings and goings of Douglas and Wilde were satirized in books like The Green Carnation, but most people were still unable to conceive of a homosexual relationship. During the gross indecency trials, many of Wilde's heterosexual friends firmly believed in his innocence. It was not until Wilde privately admitted his guilt that they truly understood the position of Bosie in Wilde's life.

In 1894, Wilde wrote a celebrated letter to Douglas, later translated into French by Pierre Louys and eventually called into evidence at Old Bailey courthouse.

This "love letter," which Wilde later called "a prose sonnet," became a letter of public interest years later. Douglas put the letter in his suit pocket, forgot about it, then gave the suit to one of his less fortunate friends. After the letter fell into the wrong hands, Wilde found himself the target of a blackmailer and the object of the Marquess of Queensberry's anger.

THE MARQUESS OF QUEENSBERRY

Laura Kieler was a writer Ibsen first met during his time in Dresden. Laura had written a sequel to one of Ibsen’s plays and sent it to him. The two kept in touch for several years and Ibsen served as a mentor of sorts to the young woman. Sometime after their meeting, Laura’s husband, a Danish schoolteacher, contracted tuberculosis. Laura was told that the only way to save her husband’s life was to arrange for them to move to a warmer climate. In order to avoid agitating her husband by asking him for money, Laura secretly arranged to take out a loan with the assistance of a friend. The couple visited Italy where Laura’s husband experienced a full recovery.

A few years later, Laura visited Ibsen in Munich and related the entire story of events to Suzannah, who passed the details on to her husband. Ibsen had previously heard nothing of Laura’s situation, as she had been careful to keep the whole affair quiet, though he did notice that she was less spirited and seemed to have something heavy weighing on her mind. In the early part of 1878, Ibsen received a manuscript and a letter from Laura begging him to pass on her newest novel to his publisher Frederik Hegel. Ibsen refused to recommend the inadequate book and wrote Laura to tell her so. In his letter, he wrote that he suspected something was bothering her and advised her to take the matter directly to her husband. "There must be something which you don’t tell me and which colours (sic) the whole situation... It is unthinkable that your husband knows everything; so you must tell him; he must take on his shoulders the sorrows and problems which now torment you... Confide all your troubles to your husband. He is the one who should bear them."

What Laura had not told either her husband or Ibsen was that she was being forced to pay back the money she had borrowed to send her husband to Italy. She did not have the money and was too terrified to tell her husband, hoping instead that the sale of a new novel would allow her to pay back the loan without getting her husband involved. When she received Ibsen's letter refusing to support her manuscript and advising her to speak to her husband, Laura forged a check. The forgery was discovered and Laura was forced to tell her husband everything. He was unable to appreciate that Laura had borrowed money to help save him when he was deathly ill or that she had dealt with the financial fall-out alone in an attempt to keep any unnecessary burdens from him. He told her she was a criminal and sought a legal separation to keep her from having any involvement in the rearing of their children. Laura suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental institution. When she was released a month later, she begged her husband to take her back for the children’s sake. He did, but not happily.

Later that year, Ibsen began writing A Doll's House. When it was published and produced in 1879, Laura Kieler was widely recognized as the inspiration for Nora. Unfortunately, this literary tribute only made married life more difficult for her, so she was unable to see the vindication Ibsen offered in his dramatization of her situation.

There are other connections between Nora and Laura, not the least of which is the similarity of their names. Ibsen playfully referred to Laura as his "skylark," a term of endearment Ibsen’s audiences now associate with Torvald Helmer. When Laura came to visit in the midst of financial crisis, Ibsen observed that his little skylark "could no longer sing her happy songs."

THE TRIALS AND THE AFTERMATH

On April 5, 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry's trial for criminal libel began. Under cross examination, Wilde was made to defend both his art and his friendships with young men of a lower class than himself. Three days later, Wilde was forced to drop the suit after a self-incriminating admission put him in danger of being prosecuted for gross indecency. The crown was forced to proceed with a prosecution of Wilde after Queensberry sent the Solicitor-General all the evidence his private detective had collected. Wilde was arrested and brought to trial for violating the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which prohibited acts of gross indecency between men. At this trial, 24 counts of gross indecency as well as one charge of conspiracy were brought against Alfred Taylor, the man who had introduced Wilde and Douglas to the young valets and grooms who kept their company.

During the trial, the public that had once adored Wilde turned violently against him. He was denied bail and kept imprisoned for several months. His name was removed from the billboards for his plays and eventually the productions themselves were withdrawn. In the salons and on the streets, Wilde's demeanor and his Irish birth were mocked, his writings criticized for degeneracy, and his books withdrawn from sale. He was even without Bosie who had been sent abroad by Wilde's counsel to avoid additional trouble.

When the trial resulted in a hung jury, the case moved to yet another trial where the conspiracy charges were dropped and Wilde and Taylor were tried separately. This was a triumph for the defense; however, their joy was short-lived as the prosecution insisted on trying Taylor first. Taylor was quickly found guilty of most of the charges against him, leaving Wilde to defend himself as the former co-conspirator of an easily convicted man. Wilde was found guilty as well and both men were sentenced to two years of hard labor. Wilde had endured the humiliation of three trials: Queensberrry's libel trial and the two trials he faced as a defendant. He faced a two year sentence many thought he would not survive. To make matters worse, he found himself bankrupt. His home was ransacked and all his possessions auctioned off to pay for Queensberry's trial costs. The man who was once on top of the world was now brought down to a point of no return.

Prison life at Reading Gaol completely destroyed Wilde's body and his creative spirit. After falling in prison, Wilde sustained an injury to his ear. The lack of medical care led to a worsening condition that is said to have been the cause of his death just a few years later. Oscar did not once hear from Douglas during the two years he was kept at Reading Gaol. The man for whom he had given up his entire life had abandoned him. Confined to a tiny cell, Wilde was at first kept from reading or writing. Eventually, a sympathetic warden allowed him some books and paper. Provided with only one sheet of paper at a time, and prevented from reviewing or revising anything, Wilde wrote his most hauntingly personal work, De Profundis. This long prose piece, in the form of a letter to Alfred Douglas, tells Wilde's own account of the relationship, denounces Douglas for his betrayal, and bitterly reviews Wilde's own fall from grace.

Do you really think that at any period in our friendship you were worthy of the love I showed you, or that for a single moment I thought you were? I knew you were not . . . Deliberately, and by me uninvited, you thrust yourself into my sphere, usurped there a place for which you had neither right nor qualifications...and by [having] succeeded in absorbing my entire life, could do no better with that life than break it in pieces . . . Unfortunately I spent on you my life, my name, my place in history . . . And [yet] the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don't write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine . . . You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.

After his release in 1897, disgraced and penniless, Wilde sought exile in France. His mother had died in 1896 during his prison term. His wife, who had fled to Europe with the children and taken a new name, died in 1898. Wilde never returned to England, nor did he see his family again. He immediately resumed his close friendship with Robbie Ross, who had remained in contact with Wilde throughout his time in prison and whom Wilde had come to regard as his truest friend. Not long afterward, Wilde was reconciled with Douglas and the two traveled together for a few months. With Douglas's help, Wilde composed his final work, the Ballad of Reading Gaol Ð a long poem thinly disguising his own experience as a prisoner. At the time of its publication, Wilde's name was so reviled that the author's name was listed as C.3.3., Wilde's prison number.

Wilde put some effort into writing for the reform of the prison system that had so utterly destroyed him. But most of his final days were spent in agony. Prevented from receiving any profit from his writings, Wilde remained in France under an assumed name in worsening health and crushed spirits. He and Douglas separated for good in 1900. Douglas married in 1902 and had two children. He became a fervant Catholic and eventually a Nazi sympathizer. He published some of his poems and satires and wrote four books, all tied in some way to his relationship with Oscar Wilde. As for Wilde himself, he had nothing left to live for. In a last grasp for hope, he converted to Catholicism shortly before his death on November 30, 1900. "Of course the sinner must repentÉ because otherwise he would be unable to realize what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation." Lord Alfred Douglas was one of the twelve people who attended his funeral. He is buried in France.

THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

After Wilde was convicted, The News of the World proclaimed, "the Aesthetic Cult is over!!"

Throughout his life, Wilde was identified with the Aesthetic movement. Not only did his lectures and writing sing the praises of beauty and flamboyance, his manners, mode of dress, and even his hairstyle reflected a "dandyism" associated with all things decadant. While he was parodied and sometimes ridiculed, Wilde was also praised and admired for his devotion to Art for Art's sake.

It was during his time at Magdalen College, Oxford, that Oscar Wilde was introduced to the teachings of Walter Pater, champion of the Aesthetic Movement. Born of the German romantics, especially Goethe, with a dash of Coleridge and Poe, the Aesthetic Movement was undergoing its own English renaissance, nurtured by French symbolist poets, English Pre-Raphaelite painters, and the shy, chaste Walter Pater. It was anti-bourgeois, escapist, dandaical, flamboyant, melancholy, exotic. It rejected the prevailing Victorian Utilitarianism, proclaiming the supremacy of art and beauty, the pursuit of pleasure and the brevity of life.

Regarded as an undistinguished and reclusive bachelor who made his mark on the young Oxford pupils, Walter Pater published The Renaissance, his first book of essays, in 1873. His writings inspired a new way of thinking, an "outbreak of the human spirit" that emphasized physical beauty, worship of the body, and destruction of the walls that traditional religion had imposed on the human heart and soul. He stressed the idea of escaping the oppressive and time-bound limits of reality, focusing instead on living intensely from moment to moment, and giving the highest quality of emotion to each moment as it passed. He proclaimed the passion which rules every artist's life: "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."

Wilde cultivated his own version of the Aesthetic movement. Taking the teachings of his mentor a step further, Wilde transformed the ideal into the physical. He believed that art was independent of morality, that beauty was the only thing of value in art or life, and it was in form alone rather than "content" that one finds beauty. In his essay "The Critic as Artist," Wilde insisted that his philosophy was the truly superior concept:

Aesthetics are higher than ethics . . . Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lively and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, variety, and change.

Wilde associated ethics with necessity and survival, with law, order, safety, and security. Aesthetics, on the other hand involved pleasure, fun, passion, and excitement, and were shaped by an individual's choice and desire. The "supreme individualist" was one who strove to express himself through his artistic life. For Wilde, self-expression represented the ultimate truth in art.

For most of his life, including the first part of the trials, Wilde was able to answer society's questions and criticisms under the philosophy and epigrams of his own aestheticism. In the end, it was Wilde's adherence to an aesthetic ideal that brought him down. The "aesthetic problem" concerning beauty emerged on the second day of Queensberry's trial as Mr. Edward Carson was cross-examining Wilde on the nature of his relationship with Walter Grainger, a sixteen-year-old servant at Bosie's house in Oxford. When asked by Carson whether or not he had kissed Grainger, Wilde responded, "Oh, no. He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, very ugly. I pitied him for it." Wilde's answer showed that he was more concerned with why he did not kiss the boy than the simple fact that he should not have. Carson's clarification of Wilde's slip was the beginning of the end for Wilde. It soon became clear that for Wilde, it was not Grainger's gender that was problematic, it was his beauty, or lack thereof. Wilde's rebuttal had the primary purpose of maintaining the integrity of his artistic pose and the purity of his own aesthetic; kissing an ugly boy was an unforgivable sin from an aesthetic point of view.

THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

The most revealing exchange in Wilde's first criminal trial was his defense of a poem written by Lord Alfred Douglas titled "Two Loves." The poem was published in The Chameleon, an Oxford undergraduate publication with artistic pretensions and homosexual leanings. Though the poem is several pages long, it is best remembered for its last few lines.

The "Love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect... It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name," and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man when the elder man has intellect and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

While the emotional effect of the speech was overwhelming (the court responded with a spontaneous outburst of applause), on second glance its content has come under more scrutiny. Wilde's speech contains a loose paraphrase of Socrates' adaptation of the homogenous ideal of love in Plato's Symposium. In that dramatic dialogue, Socrates, after a series of speeches extolling the virtues of physical love, advocated what has come to be known as "Platonic love." Platonic love has been described as "a common search for truth and beauty by two persons of the same sex inspired by mutual affection." The irony in Socrates' speech is that love for him contained a meaning which was spiritual, and therefore quite different from the meaning of love for the common man: that is, sexual love.

Wilde's interpretation of the Platonic ideal was explained in his essay The Portrait of Mr. W.H. which suggested that many of Western civilization's greatest artists and thinkers, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, and Michelangelo, preferred the company of boys to women, and not necessarily for spiritual reasons. The Platonic relationship described by Socrates was precisely the opposite of the kind of (sexual) love that Wilde had sought with Bosie.

THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LAWS AGAINST HOMOSEXUALITY

Oscar Wilde was sent to prison in 1895 after his arrest and conviction for "acts of gross indecency." He was prosecuted under Section 11 of The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, a statute specifically designed to punish homosexual activity. Though English laws against sodomy can be traced back to the 16th century, laws targeting homosexuals are fairly recent inventions.

Henry VIII was the first English monarch to make sodomy a crime under state law. Prior to Henry's reign, the power to investigate and prosecute sodomy cases lay with the Catholic Church. When Henry broke with the church, he made it his legislative agenda to gradually diminish its power. It was in the spirit of taking control of ecclesiastic matters that sodomy was made a felony. The law against sodomy was repealed and reinstated several times by Henry's Catholic and Protestant offspring in their attempts to give the church more or less power. It was finally recorded in its original form under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and remained untouched for the next 300 years.

Like most felonies at the time, a conviction of sodomy was punishable by death. Capital punishment was considered appropriate for a variety of crimes in 1533. The state recorded the executions of 72,000 felons during the reign of Henry VIII. In 1837, the death penalty was abolished for all crimes except murder, treason, rape, intercourse with girls under 13, and sodomy. Not until 1861 was the punishment for sodomy converted to life imprisonment. In the same year, a lesser charge of attempted sodomy was given a maximum sentence of ten years.

As the statutes against sodomy went through all of their various forms and mutations, a common thread remained. Until the 19th century, it was the act of sodomy, not the desire for sexual relationships with men that was being prosecuted. History gives us no reason to assume that the lawmakers were ignorant of other forms of homosexual contact. The classification of sodomy as a heretical act and Henry's struggle with the Catholic church cannot be overlooked when trying to understand the specificity of England's anti-sodomy laws.

Until 1869, there was no concept of homosexuality as a sexual sensibility. Consequently, the only laws prohibiting homosexual activity were those prohibiting sodomy. As the understanding of homosexuality evolved, those seeking to prosecute homosexuals found the laws against sodomy inadequate. Charges of attempted sodomy were the first to appear, followed by the charge of conspiring to commit sodomy. However, it was not until the 1880's that the most effective legislation was created. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 proved devastating to men in homosexual relationships.

The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 was originally proposed as protective legislation for girls in danger of becoming prostitutes. The amendment raised the age of consent, added special provisions against the abduction of girls for sexual purposes, made rape unlawful and protected girls against forced prostitution. Clause 11 was tacked on late in the process by Henry Labouchere.

Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labor.

Legal historians are unable to agree on Labouchere's motives for suggesting the clause. There is no evidence of a particular occurrence that might have alerted Labouchere to a need for this amendment, nor is there any clear link between his clause and the expressed purpose of the amendment. Some of his critics point to a personal rivalry with the amendment's primary author and speculate that he might have been attempting to sabotage the bill, by adding an unrelated, controversial charge. There was virtually no discussion of Section 11 when it was proposed, nor was its inclusion put to a vote. The amendment as a whole was passed and signed into law by Queen Victoria in 1886. It is interesting to remember that Wilde's first homosexual encounter is believed to have taken place this same year. Nine years later, he was imprisoned.

The English laws involving prosecution for homosexual offenses seem to have moved ahead with little relation to the rate of practice around it. It does not seem that homosexual activity was any less or more common at the time of Wilde's trials than in the years before him. There are records of homosexual activity among well-known personages dating back to the Norman conquest. Although male prostitution is said to have flourished from the 1860's onward, this was not the first time London was said to be full of male brothels. While a lengthy history of scandals and cover-ups exists in the time before Wilde's rise to prominence, the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 made it significantly more feasible to prosecute and convict men with homosexual tendencies. Wilde was one of the many victims of this amendment before it was finally overturned in 1967.

EFFECTS OF THE CRIMINAL LAW AMENDMENT ACT OF 1885

The first major scandal in England to occur under the shadow of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 is commonly known as the "Cleveland Street Scandal." Toward the middle of the 1880's, a male brothel was opened by a certain Charles Hammond in a house at 19 Cleveland Street. It quickly became a popular spot and its patrons were said to include various aristocratic and well-to-do homosexuals, including, so it was rumored, a member of the British royal family. The police got involved when money was found to be missing from London's General Post Office in the summer of 1889. Suspicion fell on one of the many Cleveland Street staff boys who delivered telegrams to cover their tracks. This boy was observed to have much more money than his salary should have permitted and was taken in for questioning. The boy soon revealed that the extra money came from his employer in exchange for "obliging Hammond's customers." He quickly added that he was not the only one with such an arrangement.

A few days later, the police detective watching the house reported "a great many gentlemen" entering and leaving the premises. He also noted furniture being removed, suggesting Hammond might be trying to flee the country. The police raided the house. Having missed Hammond himself, they arrested a forty-year-old clergyman and an eighteen-year-old clerk, both of whom pleaded guilty to having committed "acts of impropriety" and received mild prison sentences. The case did not initially receive journalistic attention and peaked no public interest.

The incident was later called to the public's attention by the weekly North London Press and the initiative of a young Radical journalist named Ernest Parke. Parke learned that the priest and the clerk were not the only men discovered during the police raid at the Cleveland Street premises. A young noble by the name of Lord Arthur Somerset had been detained and released. Realizing that he would be charged with a homosexual offense if he remained in the country, Lord Arthur quietly escaped court jurisdiction by crossing the channel to Boulogne, all with the unspoken blessing of the authorities.

Once Parke was able to confirm this bit of information, he pushed his story one step further. A few weeks later, there appeared an article in the North London Press accusing another aristocrat, the Earl of Euston, of patronizing the Cleveland Street brothel. The outraged earl immediately began proceedings against Parke for criminal libel. Apparently Lord Euston had been to Cleveland Street on one occasion, believing he was coming to see a female nude show. When he saw the true nature of what went on at the male brothel, he left at once, threatening to knock over anyone in his path. Though Parke's defense brought in witnesses testifying that Lord Euston was a regular customer of Cleveland Street, the earl swore in court that he had never been there before or after that one occasion, and the defense's witnesses were discredited one by one. It is now commonly believed that Euston was telling the truth. The 1890 jury believed him and sentenced Parke to twelve months' imprisonment. At the end of his sentencing the presiding judge expressed his hope that, besides being a punishment to the offending editor, it would be a warning to others not to publish atrocious libels upon others without justification."

The other great homosexual scandal of the late 19th century took place in Oscar Wilde's home country of Ireland. Known as the "Dublin Castle Scandals," these incidents occurred in the 1880's at Dublin Castle, the seat of the local English Government in Ireland. Although these scandals were based on national issues as well as issues of sexuality, their unfoldings bore an eerie foreshadowing to the upcoming Wilde trials. Two Irish Nationalist Members heard word from an informant that the head of the Criminal Investigation Department in Dublin Castle was engaging in homosexual activity. When William O'Brien published his suspicions about County Inspector James Ellis French, French responded by issuing a writ for libel against O'Brien, an action supposedly suggested by his superiors in the Castle.

Though the Irish police officers, fearing their jobs, would not support O'Brien's claims (though they may indeed have had information on French's activities), O'Brien enlisted the help of a private detective to find some concrete evidence. The next day, the detective had a list of men belonging to "a secret homosexual conspiracy." The list included men of all ranks, classes, and professions; the two top aristocrats were Mr. Gustavus Charles Cornwall and Captain Martin Kirwan. The detective was also able to round up four young men who agreed to testify that they had had relations with Cornwall and Kirwan. With this evidence, O'Brien was able to raise the matter in Parliament.

Through his continued journalism, O'Brien incurred additional libel charges from Cornwall as well as from the Crown Solicitor, George Bolton, who was accused by O'Brien of aiding in the conspiracy. Along with French's claim, this amounted to over £70,000 in damages against O'Brien. Due to financial difficulties, French was forced to drop his claim, thus leaving two libel charges. In Cornwall's case, the prosecution's attempts to discredit O'Brien were quickly silenced, as O'Brien's defense brought in a number of witnesses testifying to their "occasions of familiarity" with Cornwall. The jury was convinced; they found in favor of the defendant. Not long after, O'Brien won a similar action against Bolton.

In the meantime, with fate twisting on the original prosecutors much the same way it would for Oscar Wilde, arrests were made on Cornwall, French, Kirwan, and others on the basis of the witnesses' testimonies in the libel actions. The trials took place in the Court House in Green Street, the Irish equivalent of the Old Bailey; Cornwall and Kirwan were jointly tried on counts of conspiracy and French was tried separately. Although the evidence of O'Brien's witnesses was repeated, the juries were not satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt of the defendants' guilt and the trials ended in a disagreement. On a second trial, Cornwall and Kirwan were acquitted upon the argument that the Crown's evidence was "not considered sufficient." In French's second trial the jury again disagreed; upon being put up a third time, however, French was found guilty and sentenced to two years' imprisonment.

THE PRESS AND THE OSCAR WILDE TRIALS

For Oscar Wilde, the press represented the tyranny of public opinion over the self-realized artistic individual. As an artist of some stature in London society, he had his own history of run-ins with the press and was well-acquainted with the relationship between the press and public opinion in regards to his art. Wilde also understood that public scandals meant increased circulation for the papers, and that this in turn represented increased revenues and increased power to influence public opinion. It was a vicious cycle that played out too clearly when Wilde himself was brought under scrutiny.

The lashing from the press began with Wilde's own lawsuit against the Marquess of Queensberry. Across the board, the newspapers were almost unanimous with praise for the Marquess, supporting the idea that he was only trying to protect his son from Wilde's evil influences. Wilde, on the other hand, was severely criticized and the press condemned him almost from the beginning. For example, the Illustrated Police News characterized the trial as "the most gruesome tragedy of the nineteenth century" and went on to proclaim that Wilde's distinguished and brilliant career as a poet, novelist, and dramatist was finished. Other publications followed suit. The Echo considered Wilde damned and done for:

Other papers identified Wilde as a public nuisance, and the general response was that he had already proved himself guilty and that "the best thing would be to dismiss him and his deeds without another word to the penalty of universal condemnation" (Daily Telegraph). Some papers even went so far as to accuse Wilde of violating his public, a violation that threatened not only the "family values" of the domestic sphere, but the very fabric of society. "The superfine Art which admits no moral duty and laughs at the established phrases of right and wrong is the visible enemy of those ties and bonds of society Ð the natural affections, the domestic joys, the sanctity and sweetness of the home."

Not only did the papers condemn Wilde, they soon began to identify and interpret his social demise. Journalists were quick to analyze the trials and draw the "appropriate" moral lessons from it. The Daily Telegraph traced Wilde's life, his work, and his very purpose as being immoral and corruptive. The paper continued to cite Wilde as an example of "those hideous souls who, under the name of Art, or some other pretense, insidiously poison our stage, our literature, our drama, and the outskirts of our press." The National Observer, a weekly political journal, went so far as to suggest that Wilde should commit suicide if the courts did not take proper action against him.

All of these attacks from the press certainly made their mark on the public, and on the theatre business as well. Shortly after the multitude of commentaries appeared, Wilde's plays began to decline in audience attendance. Not long afterward his name was removed from the playbills, the plays were moved out of the big theatres, and eventually were stopped altogether. The public which had so recently adored their master playwright turned on him overnight.

Years later, the writer William Butler Yeats tried to explain the reaction in the terms of national dynamics. "The rage against Wilde was complicated by the Britisher's jealousy of art and the artistÉ This hatred [is] merely the expression of an individual hatred and envy become collective because circumstances have made it so." This theory was echoed in France, where a Parisian daily paper wrote a front-page story cartooning the fickleness of the English theatre owners and theatre-going public, and insisting that the French would have responded quite differently. "Box office receipts would have shot up overnight." Meanwhile, the press continued to support Queensberry's case. The Star published an interview held with the Marquess where he shared his surprise and pleasure at the number of letters he'd received from around the world, congratulating him and offering their support.

THE TRIALS AND PUBLIC OPINION

An interesting comment was made at this time by Henry Labouchere, editor of the journal Truth and author of the very same Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act under which Wilde was prosecuted. He maintained that the libel suit was not an imperative legal action on Wilde's part, but rather a pathological need for attention:

I have known Oscar Wilde off and on for years . . . There was nothing he would not do to attract attention ... So strange and wondrous is his mind when in an abnormal condition, that it would not surprise me if he were deriving a keen enjoyment from a position which most people, whether really innocent or guilty, would prefer to die rather than occupy.

Indeed, Wilde made this statement himself: "somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, notorious." The trial had certainly given Wilde all the notoriety he could have possibly desired. But if he enjoyed the spotlight at the beginning, his world must have grown dark when he realized just how serious his situation was, and how much pain, anguish, and humiliation lay in store for him.

The sad fact was that at this most crucial time of his life, Wilde was abandoned by most of his friends. The gravity of his case was so severe that anyone who associated with Wilde or appeared to defend his position was risking their own social status. One of the few who dared to speak out publicly on Wilde's behalf was Robert Buchanan, a well-known poet, playwright, novelist, progressive thinker, and contributor to the Daily Telegraph. From the end of the libel trial through the beginning of the first criminal trial, Buchanan became Wilde's chief supporter, not necessarily defending his chosen lifestyle but supporting his right to equality before the law.

Echoing this sentiment, Lord Alfred Douglas wrote a letter to the same paper accusing the press and the public of viciously condemning Wilde before he had been tried by a jury. Douglas spoke of the backlash he felt. "I am taking my life in my hands in daring to raise my voice against the chorus of the pack of those who are now hounding Mr. Oscar Wilde to his ruin." Yet the letter from Douglas revealed the emotional state the young poet must have been in, suffering from the deprivation of his lover and best friend. He may have been feeling incapable of helping Wilde at this time, or feeling guilty for putting him in the courtroom in the first place.

The debate between Buchanan and members of the public continued. Letters sent for publication were signed with pseudonyms rather than true identifications. The reactions varied from suggesting Douglas be put on trial with Wilde, to an interesting comparison between Wilde's exploitation of young men vs. the widespread and culturally accepted exploitation of young women by men. Buchanan made a further claim on Oscar's behalf, suggesting that the playwright was too delicate and high strung to survive prison. He continued to defend Wilde's writing saying that "two thirds of all Mr. Wilde has written is purely ironical, and it is only because they are now told that the writer is a wicked man that people begin to consider his writings wicked [also]."

The public debate over Wilde ended as the criminal trials began. Certainly, the press' handling of the trials served to raise public expectations that Wilde would be found guilty, and since Wilde's conviction was already a surety to most people, it came as a bit of a surprise when his first criminal trial ended in a hung jury. By the end of the second criminal trial, most people were tired of the case, and it brought little more than a sigh of relief when Justice Will pronounced the sentence on Wilde and thus put an end to one of the most difficult and fascinating cases in British legal history.

MOISES KAUFMAN

Moises Kaufman is the founder and artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project, a theater company based in New York City. With Tectonic he has directed works by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Benjamin Britten, and Sophie Treadwell, as well as new works by Peter Golub and Naomi Iizuka. His direction of Franz Xaver Kroetz's The Nest was named one of the ten best productions of the 1994-95 season by the Village Voice. In 1993, a retrospective of his work was presented at the Consulate General of Venezuela in New York.

Mr. Kaufman directs regularly with Working Classroom, a multi-ethnic arts program that produces original plays written and performed by residents of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has toured with this group throughout the U.S. and abroad.

In his native Venezuela, Mr. Kaufman performed as an actor with the Thespis Theater Ensemble, one of the country's foremost experimental theatre companies. He has lived in New York City since 1987.

HOW KAUFMAN CREATED GROSS INDECENCY

The majority of Kaufman's text is taken from the book The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, which was compiled by H. Montgomery Hyde from shorthand notes from the trials. The trial excerpts are interspersed with personal biographies, unpublished memoirs, journalistic accounts of the trials, and Wilde's own writing, giving us a glimpse into both the public and the private life of one of England's greatest playwrights.

Kaufman traces the beginning of this piece back a few years, when a friend gave him a book entitled The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde, which was a collection of Wilde's epigrams and witticisms. Though Kaufman had read a lot of Oscar Wilde, he was shocked to read the last ten pages of this book which contained transcripts of Wilde's trials. Kaufman was fascinated by the concept of an artist in a court of law being asked to defend his art, and Wilde's responses about the nature and purpose of art intrigued him. He saw Wilde as a purist Ð "talking about art as art and trying isolate what only art can do that nothing else can do." The New York playwright and director immediately tapped into this concept; his history in the theatre has focused on the achievements which only theatre and no other medium can accomplish.

Kaufman's early theatre training in Venezuela focused on new and experimental works which did not try to re-create reality, but rather created a distinct reality, "a new world that could only exist on stage." After founding the Tectonic Theatre Project, Kaufman continued to focus on works that explored theatrical language and form. In creating Gross Indecency, he wanted to produce a work that fulfilled his artistic goals while telling the story of the trials.

Kaufman quickly learned through his research that there were as many different accounts of the trials as there were people involved: George Bernard Shaw, Lord Alfred Douglas, Frank Harris, the newspaper journalists, and Oscar Wilde himself all told the story as seen from their personal perspective. Kaufman's challenge was to create a play that would "encompass all the different stories, and yet have a coherent, dramatic through-line." The mosaic of people, places, and perspectives in Gross Indecency is his attempt to tell the story in as full a manner as possible. In Kaufman's introductory note, he explains the source material:

OTHER TREATMENTS OF OSCAR WILDE'S LIFE

It seems the public interest in Oscar Wilde comes in cycles: in 1960 two movies about his life and trials opened in New York in the same week Ð one with Robert Morley and one with Peter Finch. This summer, Gross Indecency played in New York City opposite the Broadway production The Judas Kiss starring Liam Neeson as Oscar Wilde; the two plays were complimented by the new movie Wilde starring Stephen Fry. Since the centennial anniversary of the trials three years ago, there has been a barrage of new books about Oscar Wilde, the trials, and his writing. Though the current Wildean entertainment options may seem a bit overwhelming, the three productions actually give quite a varying and even opposing picture of the playwright and his life.

The movie Wilde attempts to document the playwright's life from the time he entered London society to his release from prison in 1897. Though Julian Mitchell's screenplay is based on the authoritative Wilde biography by Richard Ellmann, there are moments of necessary dramatic interpretation. One such scene shows Wilde's young houseguest, Robbie Ross, instigating the seduction of the older artist into his first homosexual encounter. Other scenes include details of the happenings at Alfred Taylor's "home in the shadows" where the actual events that occurred with various young boys are still subject to question. The movie attempts to tell the story of Wilde's life, beginning with his trip to the United States and continuing through his release from prison. Universal praise has been given to Stephen Fry's "wonderfully nuanced, sweet-tempered, and charismatic performance as Wilde."

Another portrait of Oscar Wilde is painted in David Hare's The Judas Kiss, which ran on Broadway in the summer of 1998 and featured Liam Neeson in the leading role. In this dramatic reinterpretation of two days in the life of Oscar Wilde, the enigmatic Irish playwright is portrayed as a man of great humanity who sacrifices all for love. The play is divided into two acts, which in England were designated "Deciding to Stay" and "Deciding to Leave." Act One takes place in Oscar's hotel room the night after the criminal libel trial against Queensberry, just before Wilde himself is taken prisoner. Various friends and family urge him to leave the country before the authorities arrive; Oscar refuses. Act Two is set in Italy shortly after Wilde was released from prison and shows us the despair after the fall. The audience views the post-prison wreckage as Wilde attempts a reconcilliation with Bosie but realizes the love he sacrificed everything for has come to an end.

While Gross Indecency takes its text almost exclusively from nonfictional sources, The Judas Kiss is based largely on conjecture and is not focused on the facts of the trials. There are no details about the boys, the charges, the arguments Wilde made in court. Rather, playwright David Hare attempts to focus on the why. "I would like the audience to contemplate what it is to give up everything in one's life for love Ð and whether it's worth it," Hare commented in an interview. Hare's intent was to break the stereotypes about Oscar Wilde, starting with the casting of the robust and open-hearted Liam Neeson in the role Ð a casting choice which was not completely embraced by London critics. Hare also wanted to show the overwhelming generosity of the man (in one scene Wilde insists on giving all the cash he has on him to the servants who were cleaning his room) as well as his complete devotion to staying with his young lover no matter what the cost. But perhaps most compelling is Hare's second act, which reveals his views on the little-spoken-of matter of what happened to Wilde after prison. In Hare's words:

SYNOPSIS

• Oscar Wilde, aged 40 at the time of the trial
• Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's lover, aged 25 at the time of the trial
• Sir Edward Clarke, Wilde's attorney
• Edward Carson, attorney for the defense in Trial I
• Marquess of Queensberry, father of Lord Douglas and the defendant in Trial I
• The Narrators, who also play various persons in Oscar Wilde's life.

Act I opens with the first of Oscar Wilde's three trials as he is bringing a claim against the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. Sir Edward Clarke lays out the reasons for the suit: the history of Wilde's relationship with Lord Douglas and the obsessive stalking of the pair by the Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, culminating in the libelous calling card with the words "posing somdomite." Clarke asks Wilde about his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas as well as the content and style of his art. The proceedings of the trial are interspersed with commentaries from individual characters and recollections of past events. The voices of the press comment on both the trial proceedings and the nature of Wilde's art.

Wilde next comes under cross-examination by Edward Carson who produces Wilde's letters to Lord Alfred and questions their content, wordings and intents. Despite Carson's attempts to prove that Wilde was writing with homosexual intentions, Wilde is able to answer all his questions in a literary and theoretical plane. However, as they enter the second day of testimony, Carson begins to question Wilde as to his exact relationship not only with Douglas, but with the boys that Queensberry has rounded up to justify his libel. Carson introduces the names of Charles Parker, Fred Atkins, Sidney Mavor and others. Wilde admits to dining with them and giving them gifts. When Carson questions Wilde about the nature of his relationship with a waiter named Walter Grainger, he asks the playwright if he ever kissed the boy. Wilde's response that he had not kissed the boy because "he was an ugly boy" caught the courtroom off guard.

As the defense opens their case, they promise to bring forward all of the boys previously mentioned to testify to committing "acts of gross indecency" with Wilde. With the promise of this testimony and Wilde's self-incriminating statement, Clarke advises his client to withdraw the charges. As Act I ends, the Marquess of Queensberry celebrates his triumph by sending a letter to the Director of Public Prosecutions including the details of the trial and his own witnesses' statements, giving the authorities no choice but to arrest Oscar Wilde. Wilde retreats to the Cadogan Hotel, where he is advised by most of his friends to leave the country. After refusing to make the decision to leave the country, Wilde is arrested and denied bail. Public response is echoed in the newspaper accounts now introduced and as the curtain falls, Oscar Wilde stands ready for trial.

Act Two

Act II begins with an interview of Marvin Taylor, a Wilde scholar at New York University, conducted by the character of Moises Kaufman (the play's author). This segment gives a voice to the contemporary academician attempting to make sense of Wilde's case. He simultaneously illuminates and confuses the plethora of issues raised by the trials. At the end of the interview, the courtroom returns and the second trial begins. This time, Wilde is in the defendant's seat charged with several counts of gross indecency. As portions of the last trial regarding the morality of Wilde's writing are read aloud, Wilde presents his own views of art, taken from works like The Soul of Man Under Socialism and The English Renaissance of Art. Next, the prosecution brings to the stand the four young men who testify to the nature of their relations with Wilde. Charles Parker, Alfred Wood and Fred Atkins all come forth with stories of sexual encounters, money, and gifts. When asked by the prosecution to explain the phrase coined by Lord Alfred Douglas, "the Love that dare not speak its name," Wilde answers with a literary explanation of the unequivocal relationship between an older man and a young boy.

With all the conflicting testimony, the jury is unable to reach a mutual decision. Wilde is eventually granted bail, but is turned away at every restaurant and hotel in London, finally seeking refuge at his mother's house. His friend Frank Harris again urges him to flee the country. Wilde refuses to leave.

As the Solicitor-General opens the third trial, the evidence from the previous trials is again recounted. This time, the testimony is interrupted with sections from Wilde's DeProfundis, the now published letter he wrote to Douglas during his time in prison. As the prosecutor questions Wilde about the sexual nature of his relationships, Wilde expresses his undying love for Bosie. When the third jury finds him guilty, the judge voices the contempt he feels for Wilde and sentences him to the maximum penalty - two years in prison with hard labor. The play ends with a reading from "The House of Judgement" a prose poem written by Wilde a year after his release from prison.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

In the absolutely gripping Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar WildeÉ Mr. Kaufman has shaped a sharply intelligent, dramatically fresh take on a subject that ...would seem to have been exhausted.
-- The New York Times, March 19, 1997

One of the best things about Gross Indecency is that it emphasizes, with marvelous subtlety, Wilde's heart-stopping courage, stripped in the process of dramatization of none of its complexity or even pathology.
-- Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America

Gross Indecency makes a wonderful evening because the facts [of Oscar Wilde's life] speak so eloquently.
-- David Hare, author of The Judas Kiss

In Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde . . . playwright and director Moises Kaufman has dramatized that fall with the sort of rapier stylization that Wilde himself would have admired.
-- Time Magazine

The counterpoint of different journalistic voices is delicious.
-- The New York Times

Gross Indecency, thrillingly willing to ask its audience to think, comes with its own critical apparatus [the invention of the interview with Marvin Taylor] . . . I'm electrified by the dialectic in Gross Indecency between the carnal and the intellectual/historical/political.
-- Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America

It seems unlikely that [any of the other films or plays about Wilde] could match this work in scope, complexity and pure showmanship.
-- The New York Times

It's a dazzling coup de theatre, at once compelling history and chilling human drama.
-- Time Magazine

Here is a play that presents Wilde's passion in all its terrible, tragic force, presents it more intelligently, joyfully, sensually, and politically (which is to say, contradictions flaming) than anything I have ever read or seen on the subject.
-- Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America

Mr. Kaufman presents a world, and a man, struggling to define something ("the modern homosexual as social subject," as the cartoon academic puts it) that was never before the topic of such widespread public discourse.
-- The New York Times

SUGGESTED READING

Douglas, Lord Alfred. Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up. London: The Richards Press, 1950.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Holland, Vyvyan, ed. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Hyde, H. Montgomery. Lord Alfred Douglas. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1985.

Hyde, H. Montgomery. Oscar Wilde. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975.

Hyde, H. Montgomery, ed. The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. New York: University Books, 1952.

OTHER SOURCES

Cohen, Ed. Talk on the Wilde Side. New York: Routledge, 1993

The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas. London: Martin Secker, 1929.

Foldy, Michael. The Trials of Oscar Wilde: deviance, morality and late-Victorian society.

Harris, Frank. Oscar Wilde. Michigan State University Press, 1959.

Holland, Vyvyan. Son of Oscar Wilde. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954.

Hyde, H. Montgomery. The Other Love: an historical and contemporary survey of homosexuality in Britain. London: Heinemann, 1970.

Mikhail, E.H. Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, Vol. I & II. New York: The Macmillan Press, 1979.

Queensberry, Francis and Percy Colson. Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas. New York: Hutchinson & Co., 1950.

Sherard, Robert H. Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde. New York: The Greystone Press, 1937.