By T.S. Flynn

Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow are separated by more than half a century, yet both are haunted by the same reality: a prison preparing to kill one of its inmates. This essay explores how Wilde's prison masterpiece provided the moral and psychological architecture for Behan's great drama of Mountjoy Prison.

For the global Irish diaspora, the history of our literature is inseparable from the history of our rebellions. Some of Ireland's most enduring cultural statements were written in prisons, forged in exile, or shaped by public disgrace. Our greatest writers have often transformed personal suffering into national memory.

Irish history remembers not only soldiers, exiles, rapparees, and political outcasts, but also a parallel tradition of literary rebels. These were men and women who challenged authority with words rather than weapons, turning imprisonment and exclusion into enduring works of art. Among the greatest of these literary outlaws were Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan.

At first glance, they seem unlikely companions. Wilde was the cosmopolitan wit of Victorian London; Behan the hard-drinking republican from Dublin's north inner city. Yet both became prisoners, both achieved fame through extraordinary gifts of language, and both transformed confinement into literature. When Wilde emerged from Reading Gaol in 1897, he carried with him the scars of the Victorian penal system. His response was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a haunting meditation on imprisonment and execution. More than half a century later, Behan revisited many of the same themes in The Quare Fellow (1954), his groundbreaking drama set in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison.

To understand The Quare Fellow, however, one must first understand Behan's fascination with Wilde. Wilde was not merely a literary influence but a fellow Dubliner, a fellow prisoner, and, in many respects, a precursor.

The Jailbirds of Borstal Boy

Behan's admiration for Wilde runs through Borstal Boy. Imprisoned in an English borstal at sixteen after an IRA bombing mission, he turned to literature to survive the isolation. He did not see Wilde as a society wit or fashionable aesthete, but as an Irish outsider and fellow prisoner. To Behan, the Crown's prosecution of Wilde reflected the same hypocrisy that lay behind the imprisonment of political dissidents. He later recalled finding comfort in Wilde because he was a "jailbird like myself."

This identification extended beyond literature. In borstal, Behan formed a close bond with the young Cockney sailor Charlie Millwall, and Wilde's example provided a framework through which emotional complexity and unconventional attachments could be understood without condemnation. For Behan, Wilde represented a version of Irishness that was witty, rebellious, and defiantly individual.

Reading Gaol and Mountjoy: The Same Architecture

Behan's fascination with Wilde was not merely biographical. It was artistic. The strongest evidence lies in the parallels between The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Quare Fellow. Though one is a Victorian ballad and the other a realist stage play, both are built around the same central fact: a man is going to be hanged, and everyone around him must live with that knowledge.

In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde repeatedly returns to the condemned soldier Charles Thomas Wooldridge, observing his isolation and the effect of his approaching execution on the prison population. Behan achieves a similar effect by keeping the condemned prisoner in The Quare Fellow off-stage. The audience never sees him, yet his presence dominates every conversation, procedure, and routine. In both works, the condemned man becomes the gravitational centre of the institution.

The contrast is equally revealing. Wilde observed the condemned man; Behan knew the world that surrounded him. While imprisoned in Mountjoy, Behan experienced at first hand the rumours, rituals, humour, and anxiety that accompanied an impending execution. Wilde writes primarily as a witness; Behan writes as an insider. Yet both arrive at the same conclusion: an execution is never confined to a single prisoner.

Time itself becomes a character in both works. Wilde's prison clock marks the agonising countdown to the scaffold, while The Quare Fellow unfolds during the final day before a hanging. Every conversation is shaped by the approach of death. Neither writer is primarily concerned with guilt or innocence. Their true target is the institution. Wilde and Behan expose how governors, warders, doctors, and chaplains transform killing into an administrative routine, wrapping violence in procedure, ritual, and respectability.

The similarities extend even to sound. Wilde used the rhythms of the traditional ballad to bring prison life to a broad audience. Behan found a twentieth-century Irish equivalent in The Auld Triangle, the prison song that frames The Quare Fellow. In both works, music becomes memory, carrying the experience of imprisonment beyond the prison walls. Wilde supplied the moral architecture; Behan rebuilt it in the language of Dublin prison life. The result is not imitation but inheritance.

The Tribute: "Oscar Wilde"

Behan's fascination was so intense that he eventually composed a tribute poem to Wilde, originally written in Irish. The poem reveals not merely admiration but identification. Behan saw in Wilde a man who had experienced both extraordinary triumph and devastating humiliation, a man who had known "the gold of the morning sunshine" and "the dark of the prison days."

Exiled now from the cafes
To sanctity's desert.
The young prince of Sin,
Broken and withered.

A broad back bent over the grey stones,
The hands that wrote of beauty
Torn by the cruel hemp,
While the pious mock your moans.

My life on you, Oscar boy,
Yourself had it both ways,
The gold of the morning sunshine
And the dark of the prison days.

The poem portrays Wilde as victim and hero, sinner and saint. More revealing is its intimacy. Behan writes not about a literary monument but about a fallen comrade. The phrase "had it both ways" captures not only Wilde's trajectory from celebrity to exile but Behan's own. Both men possessed extraordinary literary gifts, larger-than-life public personas, and a self-destructive streak that threatened to overshadow their achievements. Wilde's famous remark that he put his talent into his works and his genius into his life could just as easily be applied to Behan.

Against the Gallows

The deepest connection between Wilde and Behan lies in their shared opposition to capital punishment. The Ballad of Reading Gaol emerged from Wilde's experience of witnessing the aftermath of Charles Thomas Wooldridge's execution. Its central insight is that an execution damages everyone compelled to participate in it. The warders, governors, chaplains, and prisoners are all implicated in the ritual. The gallows diminish the entire institution.

Behan carried that insight into Irish theatre. The execution of Bernard Kirwan in Mountjoy Prison during Behan's imprisonment left a deep impression on the young writer and is frequently identified as one of the inspirations behind The Quare Fellow. Kirwan, a County Offaly farmer convicted of murdering his brother during a dispute over land, was executed in Mountjoy on 2 June 1943. Although the condemned prisoner in Behan's play is never named and was never intended as a direct portrait of a single individual, Kirwan's presence in Mountjoy and subsequent hanging helped shape the atmosphere of dread and inevitability that dominates the drama.

The connection was more than abstract. Unlike Wilde, who largely observed the condemned man from a distance, Behan lived among prisoners whose lives revolved around the approach of an execution. He later recalled speaking to men awaiting the gallows and witnessing the mixture of humour, fear, routine, and fatalism that settled over a prison when a hanging was imminent. Neither writer attacks capital punishment through political argument alone. Instead, both immerse their audience in its emotional reality. Wilde uses poetry; Behan uses drama. The condemned prisoner may stand alone on the scaffold, but the moral damage extends throughout the institution.

By taking up Wilde's torch, Behan ensured that the ghost of Reading Gaol continued to walk through twentieth-century Irish theatre. One wrote the great prison poem of the Victorian age; the other the great prison play of modern Ireland. Together they transformed imprisonment into art and exposed the machinery of execution to public view. In a nation that has long celebrated its rebels, Wilde and Behan remind us that some of Ireland's most enduring revolutionaries carried not rifles, but pens.

About the Author

T.S. Flynn is an Australian-Irish writer whose work explores history, politics, culture, music, and national identity. His essays examine the intersection of folklore, popular culture, and historical memory, with a particular interest in how ordinary people use humour, storytelling, and music to make sense of social change.

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