His end was tragic, but let’s remember his years of theatrical glory
‘I don’t play cricket,’ said Oscar Wilde, ‘it requires one to adopt such indecent postures.’ He played golf, however, and had a white cat called the White Cat. He had a wife and children too – two sons, whom he adored, but whose birthdays he could never quite remember. He avoided celebrating his own (on 16 October) because he was averse to getting older. ‘Youth is the only thing worth having,’ he said with feeling (and quite frequently: he had a weakness for repeating his best lines), adding, as he approached forty, ‘To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early or be respectable.’ He was very funny, intellectually brilliant, the best talker of his time (‘Perhaps of all time,’ suggested Bernard Shaw), a poet, a polemicist and arguably the best English-language playwright of the Victorian age. Most of that seems...
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