(Re)writing Wilde’s Last Years: From David Hare’s The Judas Kiss to Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince

Abstract

In his last days Oscar Wilde experienced a dramatic and yet magnificent fall, which turned his social failure into eternal literary fame, translating ‘Oscar Wilde’ into a cultural icon, into a paradigm of otherness to be performed and reproduced in a number of different rewritings. In the present study I will focus on David Hare’s 1998 play The Judas Kiss and Rupert Everett’s 2018 film The Happy Prince. Hare’s The Judas Kiss, narrates Wilde’s days immediately before the arrest and after his release from Reading Gaol; more specifically Act 1 – significantly entitled ‘Deciding to Stay’ – takes place at the Cadogan hotel in between the second and third trials, while Act 2 – ‘Deciding to Leave’ is set in Naples and recounts his last days with Bosie. Everett’s The Happy Prince recounts Wilde’s last ‘gutter’ days as a pariah and exile, first in France and then in Italy, rewriting Wilde starting from those years and experiences which are usually excluded from conventional film narrative portrayals of him. Hare’s play and Everett’s film portray the alterity of a writer, whose liminal position can function as a lens through which to read and deconstruct our own (success-obsessed and self-centred) age.