Beyond Sculpture

In the 1880s, Wilde responded with enthusiasm to reconstructions of classical Greek theatre staged in Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and his published reviews draw extensively on his own classical training together with ideas taken from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds. He took a similar interest in contemporary plays based on classical subjects, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Cup and John Todhunter’s Helena in Troas. This chapter describes how Wilde’s experience of Greek theatre and its offshoots in live performance contributed to his fascination with the art of the actor, with theatrical space, with the deployment of scenery, and with the relation of archaeology to architecture. It concludes by tracing an underlying shift in his dramatic theory from ‘plasticity’ to ‘psychology’.