About the work
De Profundis is a stage version of the famous letter that Oscar Wilde wrote in 1897 during his two-year imprisonment in Reading Gaol. The long letter is addressed to his former lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, whose father had triggered Wilde's conviction for "gross indecency". The text appeared only in 1905, five years after Wilde's death, posthumously and at first heavily abridged.
Plot
De Profundis (Latin for "from the depths") is not a dramatic plot but a reckoning and a confession. Wilde looks back on his meteoric rise as a celebrated dramatist and dandy and on his sudden fall into disgrace, bankruptcy and prison. He reflects on his destructive relationship with Douglas, on vanity and self-destruction, on suffering as a path to insight, and on the figure of Christ as the supreme artist and individualist. Out of the bitterest point of his life, Wilde develops a philosophy of suffering and humility. Stage versions condense this inner monologue into a moving solo confession by a fallen artist.
Cultural significance
De Profundis is one of the most moving documents in world literature on guilt, suffering and artistic self-knowledge, and Oscar Wilde's most intimate text. The letter reveals a wholly different side of the famous wit — vulnerable, philosophical, deeply earnest. As a theatrical monologue the text is interpreted again and again by great actors, because it draws the portrait of a man who fell from celebrated star to outcast and, in his downfall, found a new and humbler truth.