Wilde's Play: Response

Prasch's discussion of aristophanes and Wilde resonated with the conference's keynote address by carolyn Williams on parody in Patience (1881) and The Mikado (1885), in which she drew on research from her recent book, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. in the introduction to this book, though not in her address, she draws on the classic example of aristophanes's Frogs and its parody of euripides as a touchstone for criticism of gilbert and sullivan's use of parody, and she argues for the "powerfully modernizing" element of parody (9), which is necessarily conservative in its imitation of older forms but also progressive in its humorous, sometimes scathing, characterization of these forms as outmoded and ridiculous in relation to "its own, more highly valued, present" (7). throughout her study she does a service to gilbert and sullivan's current reputation by making more than usually strong claims for their ideological progressiveness throughout their oeuvre. the example of aristophanes, who is historically deemed a political conservative, points up the difficult problem in this definition: in both its intention and its effects, parody can easily be reactionary.\n i confess i was confused by the opening sequence of Wilde, Brian gilbert's 1997 biopic, because it began like a Western, representing the author's arrival in leadville, colorado, with very few contextual signals. i thought i had wandered into the wrong cinema by mistake. even though i am reasonably well-informed about the details of Wilde's american lecture tour, my imagination remains reluctant to place him in a frontier mining settlement.