Wilde at heart.(author Oscar Wilde)

Whenever a quizmaster asks you to identify the author of a pithy and witty quotation, if you don't know the answer with certainty, then it's a fairly safe bet that an educated guess, or indeed a stab in the dark, of either George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde will prove to be the correct response.

But Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was so much more than just an endless source of harmless, humorous diversion. He may have played court jester to the English -- a fate Joyce chose to avoid by living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris instead of London -- but Wilde was tried and sentenced by that society for taking the joke too far -- for the ridicule of its sham of manners that lurked beneath the frothy surface of his plays. Like all first-class comedians, he was deadly serious, although he would never have admitted to taking anything seriously. "Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it," he wrote in his first play, Vera, subtitled The Nihilists. So here is a not-terribly-serious account of Wilde's life and work.

He was born in Dublin on Oct. 16, 1854, to Jane Francesca and William Robert Wilde. His mother had a sense of being destined for great things and imparted this to her son. She also communicated to him her nationalism and her determination to embody it in verse. She wrote poems about the coming revolution, the Famine, and the exodus from Ireland of the famished, which she submitted to Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation, under the pseudonym of "Speranza." His father was an eye-and-ear surgeon, and while he had his detractors, it is unlikely that anyone in Ireland, or even Britain, knew as much about the eye or the ear. His books Epidemic Ophthalmia (1851) and Aural Surgery (1853) were the earliest textbooks in their fields and stood up well for years. However, there is a story, typical of Dublin, that he operated on Shaw's father to correct a squint, and the operation was so successful that the squint went straight to the other side of the eye. This may account for latent animosity between the two sons in later years, when Shaw held Wilde's father responsible for blinding his own father. William Wilde also had a keen interest in Irish archaeology and folklore and published books on these subjects as well.

Oscar Wilde attended the same secondary school and university as another great Irish literary master, Samuel Beckett. He enrolled at the Portora Royal School, near Enniskillen, County Armagh, in February 1864, and then Trinity College in 1871. His name was inscribed in gilt letters on a scroll in Portora's hallway commemorating academic prize-winners, but was removed in 1895 after his conviction for what were then considered sexual offenses. Thus the one name that might have meant something to Beckett upon his arrival to the school in 1920 was not to be found. In recent years, Wilde's name has been regilded. Unlike Beckett, Wilde continued his academic education at Oxford, in 1874, where he found scholarly life tedious and left the college in 1878, loaded down with honors and prizes.

Admittedly a fellowship at the university would have been handy for an increasingly financially hard-pressed Wilde, but none were available in the classics, his main interest of study at this time. So instead, he set himself up in London, the city where he would eventually make and break his name. But it is worth pointing out that if he had wanted to pursue an academic career, he had the necessary qualifications. He chose instead for his talent to be recognized in a more public…