Stoppard’s one novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, is an often-overlooked work which explores the actuality of a historical crisis in national identity. The novel is an imaginative appropriation of contemporary attitudes and tropes. It deserves attention as the work of a writer whose cultural and political antennae are as finely tuned as his literary sensibility.

When Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren can convince the Irish Times (19 July 1997) that he is planning a film with Steven Spielberg about how Wilde discovered rock 'n' roll in the United States, it is clear that his name has acquired a resonance and currency which even Oscar would have been surprised by. 'Wilde' is now a pop-cultural icon, a multiform signifier of youth, rebelliousness, individualism, sexual freedom, modernity. Indeed the commemorative industry surrounding the centenary of his death in 2000 resolutely commodified him as such: his image is now almost endlessly reproduced on playing cards, ties, T-shirts, mousemats and fridge magnets.

This relocation ofWilde among the ephemera of a supersophisticated consumer culture has been accompanied by an efflorescence of academic interest. Writing in the 1930s Wyndham Lewis dismissed Wilde as a ‘fat Dublin buffoon’, frozen into a posture of adolescent refusal and revolt: an historical curio who could be consigned to the snobbish ‘Naughty Nineties’. These remarks represent the nadir of Wilde’s critical reputation, while Christopher Nassaar’s Into the Demon Universe (1974) marks the beginning of a thorough and almost exclusively favourable reassessment of his writing.

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (R&GAD) opened in New York, an interviewer asked Stoppard what it was about. “It’s about to make me very rich,” came the Wildean (Malquistian?) response. The play had already made Stoppard’s name: Harold Hobson, in the Sunday Times, described the 1967 National Theatre production as “the most important event in the British professional theatre” since the opening of Pinter’s The Birthday Party in 1958. One of the springs of the play is probably Oscar Wilde’s observation in his prison letter De Profundis that the two deracinated courtiers are “little cups that can hold so much and no more,” who, in their dealings with the machiavellian Danish court, find themselves “merely out of their sphere”: a state of terminal bewilderment which, Wilde says, means that genuine tragic status “is really not for such as they.” However, the Wildean influence on Stoppard’s early work goes beyond this specific instance, and is demonstrably at work before Travesties. When the young Stoppard - then a journalist on the Bristol Evening World - had declared himself “a confirmed addict and admirer (literary)” of Wilde, he was acknowledging an affinity we can trace in Stoppard’s emerging aesthetic ideas and dramatic practice. Indeed, the way that Stoppard appropriates Wilde is central to our understanding of his characteristic strengths and weaknesses as a dramatist.