Oscar Wilde was at once a family man and a homosexual outsider, a socialite, socialist, and Irish nationalist. His contradictions inspired him to ponder the roles and masks donned in conventional society, and his acute and wry insights are wonderfully displayed in this collection of his essential plays. Known not only for his brilliant, epigrammatic language, but also for his sense of theatrical design, color, and staging, Wilde created an enduring body of finely crafted works, whose delights and ironies still speak to...

"It takes years to get my plays right." So Yeats informed Margot Ruddock on October 11, 1934, from Rome, where he had begun to redraft The King of the Great Clock Tower to give her a role to act. In June of that year Yeats had begun to rewrite his first prose version of the play before it had even been staged (it was performed most successfully at the Abbey Theatre from July 30 that summer). Two versions of The King of the Great Clock Tower (one in prose and one in verse) and a new play, A Full Moon in March, derived from the first, were to emerge from a period...