WILDE, Oscar.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Woman of No Importance. First edition, large paper issue, one of 50 copies attractively printed on handmade paper with wide margins and bound in tan buckram. The trade issue consisted of 500 copies that were printed on smaller, machine-made paper and bound in pink linen.The play's premiere, at the Haymarket Theatre on 19 April 1893, was met with applause for the actors and boos for the playwright, causing Wilde to announce from behind a curtain, "Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that Mr Oscar Wilde is not in the house" (Ellmann, p. 381).Wilde's opulent production used "the market forces of luxury dressmaking to comment upon the worlds of his Haymarket patrons... Audiences in the stalls and boxes continued to be both flattered and vexed by the antics of their on-stage doubles, while viewers in the upper galleries enjoyed the additional spectacle of fashionable Society catching its likeness in Wilde's cunningly set mirrors" (Kaplan, p. 252).

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