BOOK: Oscar Wilde, "Vera" and "Lady Windermere's Fan"
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 11: Plays IV: Vera; or, the Nihilist and Lady Windermere's Fan. Ed. by Josephine Guy. Oxford University Press, 2021. 9780198870296. xxii + 595 pp.
Vera
Vera is one of the few works by Wilde that I hadn't read before getting the present volume. It was not included in the one-volume Wordsworth Editions paperback of Wilde's collected works that I read years ago (though I seem to vaguely remember seeing a later printing of that paperback in a bookstore and finding, to my surprise, that it had been updated and that Vera and several other missing works were now included). I had a peek at an e-text of it some time ago, and was intrigued by the character of the ‘President of the Nihilists’ which appeared in the play.
My idea of nihilism was as a sort of philosophical position which finds it difficult, or perhaps impossible, to ascribe any genuine meaning or importance to things. Under this view, in a certain fundamental sense, nothing *really* matters, we're all just walking blobs of chemicals and any sort of values, any sort of morality that we can think of, is in some sense arbitrary. It's the nihilism of the old creed of the Assassins — ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’ — and of that classic scene in The Big Lebowski where the protagonists encounter a group of edgy, all-black-clad Germans, whom they initially take to be neo-nazis until it turns out that they are actually nihilists — much to the disgust of Walter Sobchak, who despite being an ardent convert to judaism considers nihilists to be even more despicable than nazis: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos” :)) Nihilism in this sense is a view that, as far as promoting human happiness is concerned, does not have much to recommend itself; unfortunately for me, it is also a view to which I subscribe myself. I slipped into it somewhere towards the end of my secondary school years and have never been able to extricate myself from it since (or perhaps it is just a mild form of depression?).
Anyway, nihilists in this sense are the last people you'd expect to form societies and agree to be led by presidents, and indeed it turns out that the nihilists of Wilde's play are something quite different. The present volume contains an introduction by the editor with a wealth of interesting background information about Nihilism as a political and cultural phenomenon in the second half of the 19th century. It started in Russia in the 1860s as a movement focusing on “self-improvement, personal freedom [. . .] and experiments in communal living” (p. 15; see also p. 3), but from the 1870s on morphed into more of a political movement which occasionally really did form secret societies and carried out bombings and assassinations and the like. And apparently it became a topic of surprisingly widespread interest in western Europe as well; over the next few decades, it was discussed in nonfiction books and magazine articles, nihilist trials in Russia were widely covered in the western press, numerous nihilist-themed novels and plays appeared, some serious, some luridly melodramatic, and the editor suggests that Wilde's decision to write a play about nihilists may well have been due to an attempt to benefit from following a popular trend (outside of writing this play, Wilde himself doesn't seem to have had any very extensive interest in or contact with the subject of nihilism, or that of Russian culture in general); p. 34.
Even the name Vera may be a case of following a trend, for it appears surprisingly often in connection with nihilism: at least two prominent real-life nihilists, whose trials in Russia attracted a lot of attention in the west as well, were named Vera, as were the heroines of several prominent nihilist-themed works of fiction (p. 56). A curious downside of this: initially Wilde's play was promoted simply as Vera, until one Mr. Frank P. Hulette threatened to sue because he held the copyright to an earlier book of the same title (p. 74). Apparently adding the subtitle was enough to avoid this problem, which is why the play became known as Vera, or the Nihilist. Actually, speaking of the subtitle, I have hitherto known the play as Vera, or the Nihilists; apparently this was used in the earlier versions, but the switch to singular comes from Wilde's revisions in the final period before the play was staged (pp. 76, 212.)
As is well known, Wilde's Vera was not a success, and the introduction here contains an interesting discussion of why that was the case. Some of the reasons may be quite banal: it was a hot summer and there was no air conditioning, so people were probably less than keen to spend the evening in a stuffy theatre (p. 80). Some critics complained that there was just one prominent female character in the play, i.e. the eponymous Vera herself (p. 85); and furthermore, that Marie Prescott, the actress who played Vera, was not very good (p. 86). Some of the other actors were well-known for comic or melodramatic roles, so the audience may have been disappointed when it turned out that the play is meant to be a serious tragedy (p. 87); but then it also has its comic elements, which may have seemed like an odd mixture to some people. The American public knew Wilde for his witty epigrams and his lectures on Aesthetical subjects, which is another reason why they didn't expect a Wilde play to be a tragedy (p. 82). Prescott, incidentally, also put up the money for the production and made many of the decisions about casting, costumes, revisions to the play etc., so possibly some of the reasons for the failure may be due to her choices. Wilde, for his part, was then very new to writing plays and happy to defer to more experienced people (unlike later in his career). The play also seems a bit unsure whether it's taking place in the late 18th or the late 19th century (sometimes they talk as if the French Revolution were a recent event, but then there is a mention of a train on p. 151), and whether in Moscow or in St. Petersburg (p. 210). (A bizarre detail: in a desperate effort to increase the popularity of the play, there was even some talk that Wilde himself would appear on stage every night and address the audience, but nothing came of it (p. 80). Considering how popular his lecture tours were about that same time, the idea was perhaps not as crazy as it sounds at first.)
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<spoiler warning>
Since I haven't read the play before, I guess I might just as well give a short summary of the story. The titular Vera is a peasant girl whose brother got involved in revolutionary activities as a student and was exiled to Siberia for that. To take revenge, she moves to the city and joins the Nihilists, where she soon becomes one of Russia's most wanted and feared revolutionary assassins. We witness a meeting of the Nihilists in Act 1, where the news arrives that the Tsar is about to impose martial law all over the country, which will surely give him the chance to suppress their movement for good; if they want to prevent this, they must assassinate the Tsar and start a revolution within hours.
The Nihilists are supposed to abandon all personal feelings upon joining the movement, but Vera is rather fond of one fellow Nihilist, a handsome young man named Alexis. His suspicious movements around the imperial palace lead some to suspect him of being a spy, but it turns out that he is no less than the Tsar's son! He proves his loyalty to the movement when a group of soldiers interrupts their meeting and Alexis uses his status to convince their commander that this is totally not a revolutionary cell, he's just slumming it a bit with a group of travelling actors, and the soldiers consequently leave them alone.
In Act 2, we meet the Tsar and his cabinet. He is a paranoid wreck who sees assassins in every shadow;* his ministers are a bunch of corrupt aristocrats led by Prince Paul, who is the obligatory cynical dispenser of Wildean epigrams (there must be at least one such character in every work by Wilde, it's practically a law of nature). It seems that the Tsar wasn't necessarily always such a tyrant, but became one under Prince Paul's influence. Alexis is also present, tries unsuccessfully to dissuade his father from imposing martial law, and somewhat uselessly reveals himself to be a Nihilist. Anyway, at the end of the act the Tsar unwisely steps onto a balcony and is shot by Michael, one of the Nihilists who had infiltrated himself into the imperial guard.
[*But then, does it still count as paranoia if they really are out to get you? :)]
In Act 3, the Nihilists are having another meeting. Alexis is conspicuously absent; since the assassination of his father, he has become the new Tsar and is appearently planning to introduce sweeping reforms. The other Nihilists, however, regard this as a betrayal, convinced that his reforms will turn out to be insignificant and oppression will go on as before. A surprising new member is present at the meeting: Prince Paul, whom Alexis has already sacked and sentenced to exile (but to Paris rather than Siberia — Alexis is no tyrant after all :]). Vera pleads for Alexis's life, but eventually the others convince her that Alexis must be assassinated so that Russia can become a republic; they draw lots, and the task falls upon Vera herself.
In the last act, we see Alexis at work, and his efforts seem to be genuine enough. Having already banished his prime minister, he now does the same to the rest of the cabinet; he orders political prisoners to be released and allowed to return from Siberia; he gets rid of most of his palace security, convinced that a just ruler can have nothing to fear from his people. Vera shows up, but can't bring herself to assassinate him; she sees that his reforms are real, and he even wants to marry her. But the other Nihilists are waiting outside and if she doesn't throw her bloodied dagger outside soon as a proof of her deed, they are going to storm inside and kill them both. She solves the conundrum by stabbing herself and throwing the dagger out just before dying, so that Alexis can escape assassination and continue his reforms.
</spoiler warning>
*
After reading all about the deficiencies of the play in the editor's introduction, I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well I liked it. But then perhaps I shouldn't have been; the summer heat of a New York theatre, the less than perfect acting of Miss Prescott, the strange choice of costumes — none of that affected me as I read the play from a book. I liked its curious mixture of, and tensions between, the personal and the political, and the questions it raises about how to reform a tyrannous political system such as that of Tsarist Russia.
Alexis' approach is that of gradual (though actually fairly fast) reforms imposed from the top. This could work, I guess, if it was sustained for long enough; we know that some of the 19th-century Russian tsars did actually carry out useful reforms that way, and that countries like Britain or Sweden transitioned from real monarchy to democracy by a gradual process extending over the reigns of several kings. But this approach has its risks: the reformist tsar could die young or be deposed by reactionaries who oppose his reforms, and his successor could reverse the reforms again. And the biggest risk, which the Nihilists in this play also point out, is that the reforms might not go far enough; the tsar might find that he enjoys being in charge and decide, on second thought, not to give up too much of his power after all; worst of all, the reforms, although insufficient, might defuse just enough of the popular discontent to make any sort of real revolutionary change impossible (p. 190, ll. 222–3).
But the alternative proposed by the Nihilists is also very risky: sure, they can assassinate Alexis, but what guarantee do they have that they can steer the subsequent events in such a way that the country will become a republic, as they hope? It isn't particularly obvious to me that they have made sufficient preparations towards that. In fact we see Prince Paul encouraging the Nihilists to assassinate Alexis precisely because he doesn't think this will turn the country into a republic — he is sure that some Grand Duke or another will succeed to the throne and be quite amenable to Prince Paul's influence, so that the regime can revert to its usual tyrannous form.
And even if your revolution actually manages to introduce a republic, that doesn't actually guarantee you a democratic government; you could simply end up with a dictator instead — Napoleon in the first French republic, Hitler in the Weimar Republic, third-world countries today that somehow keep electing one strongman after another as their presidents; it's a very common phenomenon. There's something about democracy that goes against human nature, which is why it requires constant care to maintain it; it's worth the effort, but we shouldn't be surprised if it often fails.
Probably an attempt to impose a republic in 19th-century Russia would have fared little better, as it seems clear enough that the broad masses of the people had no real notion of democracy. This is demonstrated by a sad experiment by the early Russian Nihilists, described in the notes on p. 234 (see also pp. 15, 229): believing that they should foment a revolution from the bottom up, Nihilist activists travelled among the people — which, in practice, meant the peasantry — and tried to spread their ideas; but the peasants were so suspicious of such wild talk that most of the activists found themselves turned over to the police in short order, and the Nihilist movement then switched to their policy of assassination in order to change the system from the top down.
*
But much of the drama of Vera derives not from any of these political considerations, but from Vera's conflict between her love for Alexis and her commitment to the Nihilist movement with its oath about disregarding all personal ties and affections. The latter is no doubt very useful if you want to form an effective small group of assassins or terrorists, but as a basis of a broader political change it strikes me as very dubious: would you really want the political makeup of your country to be dismantled and rebuilt exclusively by a group of people who have been (self)selected entirely on their ability to suppress all human affection in pursuit of a higher goal? Frankly, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Surely they are precisely the sort of people who would be the first, and the most keen, to establish inquisitions, reigns of terror, and prison camps. If they suppressed all human affection in the service of a higher ideal, how can we expect them to be nice to ordinary flesh-and-blood people who constitute the vast majority of the population under their control?
My ideal society would be something like the Shire as we see it at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings (without the class differences, preferably (and the Ringwraiths, of course; definitely without those)), a calm and peaceful society populated by friendly and content people, preferably slightly on the chubby side and, as a rule, not too clever. Can we imagine the Nihilists of this play presiding over, or facilitating, a society like that? Can we imagine them mostly just letting such people be their regular bumbling selves? Surely that would be the very farthest thing from their minds. Someone who has been willing to tear up all ties of affection in pursuit of his political goals will before long be willing to demand similar sacrifices from the people whom he is now supposed to govern. I am sympathetic to the Nihilists as a revolutionary group, but I'm not sure if I would like to be actually governed by them.
In the play, it's the opposite approach that sort of prevails: Vera ultimately refuses to assassinate Alexis (even at the cost of her own life), and this proves to be the correct decision, the decision leading to a better outcome: if she had assassinated him, his reforms would come to naught and in all probability a new (and tyrannous) tsar would soon take his place. (And, of course, you can't help feeling that refraining from murdering someone is surely at least slightly commendable, no matter who that someone is.) But, more commendably still, Vera is aware of this when making her decision: what dissuades her from assassinating him isn't just her love for him but also her realization that letting him live will lead to a better outcome for the country. She has made an important political decision by thinking about the matter for herself, rather than blindly following an ideological commitment — and even though it cost her her life to do so. The latter makes her tragic, the former makes her a heroine in the best sense of the word. People thinking for themselves when it comes to political questions — the world could use more of that right now. And at every other time, I suppose.
Lady Windermere's Fan
I was surprised, after looking at the page numbers in the table of contents, that the editor's introduction to Lady Windermere's Fan was shorter than that to Vera, because it certainly felt much longer. That must be because I didn't find it as interesting. It seems that an unusually large number of manuscripts and typescripts of this play have been preserved, and the introduction spends a good deal of time discussing them. In principle this might be interesting as it lets you peek over Wilde's shoulder while he works on the play, so to speak; but in practice I found that I'm just not that interested in how the play changed from one manuscript to another. It did change a good deal in various minor details; some characters get renamed, minor ones get shifted in or out, etc. (For instance, Lady Windermere used to be Violet instead of Margaret; p. 275. I approve of this change — ‘Violet’ is too sensual a name for a woman as prissy as Lady Windermere is most of the play.)
<spoiler>Much of the plot revolves around the fact that Lady Windermere doesn't know that Mrs. Erlynne is her mother;</spoiler> this led to the question of when this fact should be revealed to the audience. Wilde initially wanted to reveal it quite late in the play, but George Alexander, who directed the play (and also played Lord Windermere), wanted it to be revealed early (p. 297); in the final version it is revealed about halfway into the play, which seems like a good compromise. In principle I like the idea of keeping the audience in suspense until the end, but in practice this only works on the first night; later, people will have heard about this key plot element from those who had seen the play earlier, or will have read about it in the newspapers and the like. So you might just as well reveal it early and not pretend that the audience doesn't know it yet.
Another interesting compromise that Wilde found himself obliged to make was to set two of the four acts of the play in the same room, so that Alexander could save some money by reusing the scenery :) (Pp. 284–6. It seemed to work out well, and the scenery actually won praise from reviewers.)
The abundance of extant manuscripts also means that the critical apparatus in this edition of the play is heavily bloated; on average, the text covers maybe a third of the page, the rest being taken up by the apparatus. There is even one page that is all apparatus* :)) (p. 385). This was painful to read, as you spend so much time going over the apparatus that you forget what's happening in the text; and it was also unrewarding — I was hoping to find some interesting bits of material that didn't make it into the final version, but there was very little of that. Mostly you just get lots and lots of small and not particularly interesting changes. (Not interesting to me, that is; but a subtler reader may get something out of them, as we can see e.g. from the editor's introduction.)
[*I'm reminded of the well-known anecdote where Ada Leverson, referring to the fin-de-siecle fashion for books with unusually wide margins, suggested to Wilde that his next book might be all margin, without any text at all. Well, here the zealous editors will eventually bring textual criticism to a point where their books will be all apparatus without any text at all :)]
The editor's notes at the end of the volume are also very abundant (again to the point where this posed something of an inconvenience while reading the play), but they were also very interesting, especially in discussing the finer points of contemporary upper-class etiquette which were obvious to Wilde and his original audience but which someone like me wouldn't even notice. (For example: why does Lord Windermere try to get his wife to invite Mrs. Erylnne to their dance, instead of simply inviting her himself? It turns out that by the etiquette of their day, such invitations were supposed to come from the lady of the house. Thus Lady Windermere, by refusing to invite Mrs. Erylnne, can force her husband to commit a faux pas by inviting her himself (p. 545).)
Fortunately, you get to read the play twice: first there's the version as it was initially performed (as far as this can be reconstructed from the manuscripts), then the form in which it was published as book a year later. This second version has almost no apparatus, so I was able to read the whole play normally in one sitting. The two versions don't differ very much anyway.
*
It's been a long time since I last read Lady Windermere's Fan, so I remembered practically nothing about the play itself.
<spoiler warning>
Lady Windermere is about to turn 21, she has been happily married for two years and has a small child; but she finds out that her husband has been seeing an awful lot of Mrs. Erylnne, a woman of a decidedly doubtful reputation, and even paying her large sums of money. When she confronts him about this, he denies being Mrs. Erylnne's lover but refuses to explain their relationship in any real detail. He even asks his wife to invite Mrs. Erlynne to an upcoming ball at their house, which would help her return into respectable society.
In actual fact, Mrs. Erlynne is Lady Windermere's mother, who abandoned her husband and baby soon after giving birth, in favour of another man (who then abandoned her in turn); but neither she nor Lord Windermere want to reveal this fact to Lady Windermere, as the latter is morally very uptight and would be mortified to learn that her mother is a ‘fallen woman’.
At the ball, Lady Windermere just barely manages to resist making a scene by hitting Mrs. Erlynne with her fan; but she is sufficiently disgusted by what she continues to believe is her husband's infidelity that she resolves to leave him in favour of his friend Lord Darlington, whose attentions she had previously spurned. Mrs. Erlynne realizes that by doing so, Lady Windermere will ruin her life exactly the way Mrs. Erylnne has ruined hers twenty years before; but how to prevent her from doing so without revealing their relationship? She follows Lady Windermere to Lord Darlington's apartment and they argue there for some time, but then he suddenly comes home, accompanied by Lord Windermere and a few more of their friends, and the two women hide in haste.
At some point the men discover Lady Windermere's fan in the room, as she forgot to grab it when hiding. To prevent her from being discovered (which would surely ruin her relationship with her husband), Mrs. Erlynne reveals herself and says she took the fan by mistake instead of her own when leaving the Windermeres' house earlier that night. Lady Windermere uses the opportunity to run away unnoticed.
Mrs. Erylnne has saved Lady Windermere, but at considerable cost to herself, as Lord Windermere now thinks that she is Lord Darlington's mistress and that her bad reputation is thoroughly deserved. Next morning Lady Windermere, touched by Mrs. Erylnne selfless sacrifice, wants to return the favour by admitting to her husband that she herself has been to Lord Darlington's the night before; but fortunately Mrs. Erylnne shows up just in time to return the fan and prevent her from making such a rash confession. She convinces Lady Windermere that the best way to return the favour will be to say nothing and to stay with her family; as for Mrs. Erlynne herself, she announces that she has accepted a marriage proposal from Lord Augustus, an older friend of Lord Windermere's, and that they are going to leave England and live abroad.
</spoiler warning>
*
You might say that most of this plot summary looks like it might just as well be the plot summary of a tragedy, and indeed one thing that surprised me about this play was how serious it is much of the time. I wasn't expecting that from a comedy. The Importance of Being Earnest, which I read a couple of years ago, is light-hearted pretty much all the time. At no point do you feel that anything tragic is going to happen to anyone, and you never have to feel sorry for any of the characters. Here in Lady Windermere's Fan, this is not the case. Sure, it has its fair share of cheerful moments, witty Wildean epigrams and the like; but it also has plenty of times when things feel quite serious indeed, no less than they would in a tragedy. Lady Windermere herself is for all practical purposes a tragical heroine, one who has found herself in a comedy rather than a tragedy purely by dint of good luck.
I did not entirely like that; it was not what I expected from a comedy. But perhaps it is my expectations that are miscalibrated. Perhaps one shouldn't expect a comedy to be completely devoid of serious elements, and to make you laugh all the time. I vaguely remember that there was an old idea according to which the difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that comedies have happy endings and tragedies don't. (That is why Dante's poem was called the Divine *Comedy* — because it ends in heaven.) Well, Lady Windermere's Fan certainly is a comedy in that sense of the word; the end is happy indeed, and both times when I got to the end of the play, it brought a big smile upon my face and a warm glow to my heart. I'd take that over the catharsis of tragedy any time!
One thing I disliked about Lady Windermere's character is her rigid sense of morality; this makes it harder to sympathize with her, but on the other hand it provides an opportunity for character development: by the end of the play she realizes that people cannot be neatly divided into good and bad. [Funnily, Lord Darlington makes a typically Wildean variant of the same observation earlier in the play: they cannot be divided into good and bad, but into charming and tedious. :)]
I couldn't help noticing that the only instance in this play where any character has done anything bad was Mrs. Erylnne's abandoning her family, and that was more than twenty years before the action of the play. Other than that, whatever anguish the characters of the play undergo here is not really their own fault, but that of the unfortunate arrangements of the society that governs their lives. For example, there's the idea that someone without a known pedigree and a sufficiently spotless past cannot be admitted into polite society; and in particular, that a woman with any hint of infidelity about her is hopelessly and permanently tainted — it is to bypass these monstrously rigid principles that Mrs. Erylnne has to resort to the stratagem of getting herself invited by the Windermeres (whose status will be sufficient to make her acceptable to the rest of high society thereafter as well). If these principles had not been in effect, none of the complications of the play would have had to happen at all. One hopes that such things could not happen nowadays, when divorce is an easy and unremarkable thing.
Insofar as there is comedy in this play, much of it comes from the side characters. For example, there's the Duchess of Berwick, desperately trying to marry her decidedly unexciting daughter off before the season is over. Eventually they manage to bag a rich Australian named Mr. Hopper — there has got to be a kangaroo joke in that name :) Speaking of kangaroos, the Duchess herself has remarkably odd ideas about them: “It must be so pretty with all the dear little kangaroos flying about” (Act 2, p. 378); but after hearing that Hopper proposes to take her daughter to Australia, she says they should live in Grosvenor Square where “there are no horrid kangaroos crawling about” (p. 401). :)
There's an interesting remark in the editor's introduction (p. 309): judging by the reviews, “it was the play's witty one-liners that filled seats, rather than the plotting and characterization, both of which were widely deemed to be completely implausible, psychologically speaking”. Perhaps Wilde took a lesson from that, and made sure that his subsequent comedies (Lady Windermere's Fan was his first comedy) were packed with one-liners and had a minimum of plotting and characterization?
One thing that did strike me as implausible is the idea that Lord Windermere should be suspected of cheating on his 21-year-old wife with a woman old enough to be her mother; but apparently Mrs. Erylnne is very well preserved, and passes herself off as 29 “or thirty at the most” (p. 443).
Miscellaneous: Vera
The introduction to Vera mentions Wilde's monetary problems around 1880, stemming in part from an “ ‘impossibility of getting rents’ from the family properties he had inherited in Ireland” (p. 40). Later on the same page we see him trying to rent out his “fishing lodge on Lough Fee, at £90 for the season, but probably without success”. We are used to seeing Wilde in many roles and many guises, but never before have I thought of him as an absentee landlord :)))
An interesting observation from p. 10: “Nihilism ‘bore the same relation to melodrama that Roman Catholicism had to the Gothic novel or terrorism has to the action film: it was deep-dyed villainy in an up-to-date disguise’.”
And from p. 14: Nihilism was not so much an ideology (like e.g. Marxism) but more like “a cluster of attitudes and social values and a set of behavioral aspects—manner, dress, friendship patterns. In other words, it was an ethos.” Take that, Walter Sobchak :)))
American newspapers poked fun at the failure of Vera by observing that “a prominent figure in the New York Theatre, Charles T. Mills, had died on Broadway, ‘shortly after leaving Vera's premiere’ ” (p. 79, n. 243). :))
On hearing that martial law is about to be proclaimed: “Alexis. Martial law! Impossible! / Michael. Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform.” (Vera, Act 1, p. 120.)
The editor's notes at the end are supposed to show the connections between different works by Wilde, and often they do, but I have found one case of regrettable oversight. Prince Paul says in Act 2 of Vera: “Experience, the name men give to their mistakes.” (P. 128.) I knew I had seen this somewhere else before, but where? Later it turned out that it also appears in Lady Windermere's Fan (Mr. Dumby in Act 3: “Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.” P. 429.) Wilde also reused this epigram in The Picture of Dorian Gray (near the end of chap. 4): “Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.” Of these works, Vera is by far the earliest, so it must be the first time Wilde used this epigram, unless some still earlier use is found somewhere else. Anyway, you would expect the editor's notes to point out these things, but there is no note for either of the two occurrences of this epigram here, neither in Vera nor in Lady Windermere's Fan.
Prince Paul, the chief enabler of the Tsar's despotism, upon being asked by the Czarevich how he expects to fare after death, shrugs and says: “Heaven is a despotism. I shall be at home there.” (Vera, Act 2, p. 131.)
Another case of oversight: in Act 2 of Vera, the Tsar wishes that “this people had but one neck that I might strangle them with one noose!” (P. 132.) Considering how abundant the editorial notes are in explaining all sorts of references, including occasionally quite obvious ones,* you would expect there to be a note pointing out that this is an allusion to a statement attributed to Caligula (by Suetonius) — but there is none.
[*E.g. do we really need to be explained the meaning of such terms as “steppe” (p. 216), “whelp” (p. 228) or “bated breath” (p. 230)?...]
Prince Paul recommends himself to the Nihilists: “Well, you will find me the best informed man in Russia on the abuses of our Government. I made them nearly all myself.” (Vera, Act 3, p. 141.) :))
One of the Nihilists is a Professor and prolific writer of pamphlets, while by contrast Michael is a man of action. When the former makes yet another reference to Aristotle, Michael asks: “Who is this man Aristotle you are always talking of? Is he honest? Is he a good conspirator?” :)) (From a manuscript of Act 1, p. 170. Not much was left of this scene in the final version; p. 119.)
One of the manuscripts of Vera includes two pages of “neatly written drafts of aphorisms” (p. 203). Unfortunately they have not been printed here, as they don't form part of the play.
I knew that “The Sphinx” was Wilde's nickname for Ada Leverson, but a fuller version is mentioned here on p. 240: “The Sphinx of Modern Life”.
Miscellaneous: Lady Windermere's Fan
Several epigrams deal with the declining wealth of the aristocracy, a recurring subject in Wilde's works. When Lady Windermere complains that Lord Darlington has been paying her too many compliments, he says: “Ah, now-a-days we are all of us so hard up, that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay.” (LWF, Act 1, p. 351.)
Lord Darlington in Act 1: “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming, or tedious. I am on the side of the charming” (p. 354).
Lord Darlington in Act 3: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” (Pp. 426, 503.)
Words of wisdom from Mrs. Erylnne: “Believe me, my dear Windermere, you take life too seriously and so does your wife. Nothing matters much in the nineteenth century, except want of money.” (LWF, Act 4, p. 444.)
Words of wisdom from the Duchess of Berwick: “Now I know that all men are monsters. The only thing to do is to feed the wretches well. [. . .] If I could get hold of a chef as good as yours, I know Berwick would dine home at least once a week.” (LWF, Act 1, p. 474. The last sentence appears only in a manuscript.)
Mrs. Erlynne on two of her friends: “One of them never speaks the truth, so no one ever believes a word he says. The other always speaks the truth, so no one believes a word he says either...” (In a manuscript of Act 4, p. 449.) Now all you need is a third one that stabs people who ask tricky questions, and you can get yourself an xkcd comic :)
An interesting tidbit from the notes: Wilde “did not like Switzerland” and had “a life-long antipathy to both country and people”, describing it as “so vulgar with its big ugly mountains”, and the people as “like cavemen . . . their cattle have more expression” :)))) (Pp. 540–1.) I didn't know about this before, but it makes sense — Wilde always prioritized the artificial over the natural. Of course he would prefer a bustling metropolis like Paris or London over a bucolic country like Switzerland.
The notes on p. 570 quote an “unpublished aphorism” by Wilde, which was eventually published in Ian Small's book Oscar Wilde Revalued (1993). I wonder if such things will eventually appear in a subsequent volume of this OUP edition of Wilde's complete works. Well, I guess Small's book should be interesting to read regardless of that.
Errors and grumbles
I have complained about errors in previous volumes of the OUP edition of Wilde's works, but this volume has far more errors than any other. It was really disappointing, especially when you consider the enormous amount of work that obviously goes into a volume like this — all the research, collating of manuscripts, preparing the critical apparatus; and then the publisher decides to scrimp and save a few pennies by dispensing with a proofreader?! This civilization really is going to the dogs. I guess this is how 5th-century Romans must have felt.
• P. vii mentions earlier volumes of Wilde's plays in this series as “Plays 2 (2018) and the two-volume Plays 3 (2019)”, but of course Plays 2 and 3 came out together as a two-volume set in 2019. Previously there was Plays 1 in 2013.
• On p. xvii, the entry for vol. 7 says Journalism I instead of II (a classical copy-and-paste error).
• “Oudia” (p. 9) should be “Ouida”.
• “resistance to any form change” (p. 17) is missing an “of”.
• “Morfill became expert in several Slavonic languages, including Russian, Serbian, Polish (for which he published grammars), and Georgian.” (P. 32, n. 96.) I am a big fan of obsolescent vocabulary, so the editor's use use of “Slavonic” counts as a plus in my eyes, but listing Georgian among Slavic languages is just plain bizarre.
• There are a few instances of whom that strike me as dubious; I think these should be who: “with the Wilde whom [. . .] consciously positions his work” etc. (p. 41); “disagreements [. . .] over whom should occupy the throne” (p. 227); “the direction of the actors whom [. . .] were not delivering his dialogue accurately” (p. 282); “from Alexander whom [. . .] ‘had consented’ to sell them” (p. 323); “those [. . .] whom [. . .] were newly gaining access to such institutions” (p. 559).
• There are a couple of mentions of “Banjeri”, which should surely be “Banerji” (p. 46, n. 139, and p. 52, n. 160).
• “later research [. . .] suggest” (p. 62, n. 192) is missing an s.
• “Wilde's apparently inability” (p. 89).
• “a lacunae” (p. 159).
• “Tsarita” appears on pp. 215 and 228, but surely that makes no sense; it should be “Tsaritsa”, as the two Russian letters represented by “ts” are exactly the same.
• “a devasting pandemic” (p. 219).
• This isn't really an error, but I was interested to see “hung” (rather than “hanged”) used of a person being executed — by the editor on pp. 241, 242, and also by Wilde on p. 144 (l. 190).
• “Teixeria” (p. 267, n. 15) should surely be “Teixeira”.
• “the reforms [. . .] which lead to” (p. 278); given the context, this should surely be “led”.
• “The relationships between these documents is not straightforward” (p. 283).
• This is apparently not an error: “Alexander had apparently been pressurising Wilde” (p. 297). I thought pressurize can only be used about pressure being increased in some container, but according to the wiktionary it can in fact be used in the “to put pressure on” sense in Britain.
• A review “was highly complementary of the time and effort put in” (p. 314) — surely this should be “complimentary”.
• “continu[ing]]” (p. 320) has one bracket too many.
• “Edmund Goss” (p. 330) should be “Gosse”.
• “He does not understand what love it” (p. 416, l. 72, and p. 498, l. 106) should be “is”. This is in the text of Wilde's play, but I'm sure that it's a misprint in the present edition rather than an attempt to faithfully reproduce an error made by Wilde himself. The occurrence on p. 498 is in the reproduction of the 1893 printed text of Lady Windermere's Fan, and you can see from the scans on archive.org that the error did not occur in that edition.
• “350.1” (p. 529) should be “350.12”.
• “and, mortifying for a man of W[ilde]'s sartorial habits, even the ‘wine’ was ‘horrid’ and ‘revolting’ ” (p. 541). This is about Wilde's impressions of Switzerland from one of his letters; but what on earth does wine have to do with sartorial habits?
• This is, surprisingly, not an error: the “Doria-Pamphilj family” is mentioned on p. 555, and judging by the wikipedia those people really made the medieval habit of spelling the final long i as j into a regular part of the spelling of their surname.
• “used was” (p. 569, second line) should be “was used”.
• “manged” (p. 570) should be “managed”.
• The following is not exactly an error, but a persistent and extremely annoying stylistic quirk of the editor: when inserting a subordinate phrase between commas, she likes to start it with an “and” which in most instances struck me as perfectly useless: “None of this is to deny, and as Alpern Engel has argued” (p. 22); “However, for clarity, and as in the transcription of the CMS1” (p. 203); “likewise, also added, and for reasons of clarity” (p. 203); “Although, and as noted in the introduction” (p. 209); “In the case of Vera, and unlike nearly all his other major works” (p. 209); “Act IV of CTS1 has some elements not found in either BLMS1 or the production typescripts, and chiefly involving, and as noted earlier, Lady Windermere's (ultimately abortive) search for a miniature” (p. 277); “Whether, and as Wilde had initially complained to Alexander,” (p. 308). Sure, if you squint a little, you can see how the additional and makes a slight difference to the meaning; and if done once or twice it would be tolerable, but she does it so often that it gets really annoying. Practically none of the passages quoted here would be made worse, and most of them would be considerably improved, if you simply deleted the superfluous ands.
Interestingly, the same editor also edited vol. 4 and I don't remember encountering this quirk there. I had another glimpse at the first five pages of her introduction to that volume now, and I didn't notice any ands quite as superfluous as those quoted in the previous paragraph.
• Another unfortunate stylistic quirk is the tendency to break sentences inappropriately, as in the following examples: “the question [. . .] of whether his interventions should be viewed as a form of censorship akin to that imputed to James Stoddart in the publishing history of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Or whether Alexander should more properly be viewed” (p. 262); “documents are often incomplete, in that what survives may only be a typescript of a single act, rather than that of the entire play. While drafts which appear complete may in practice be made up of acts belonging to separate typescripts from different stages of composition (individual acts are usually numbered separately).” (P. 264.) This is the sort of thing you might expect to find in a very informally and carelessly written text, not in a book such as this one :(
• And finally, one more complaint: the paper on which this book is printed is annoyingly thick. It has 600 pages but looks more as if it had 800. It is about 1/3 thicker than vol. 10, even though that volume also had 600 pages.
[Sure, you may call me petty for writing at length about all these minor complaints. But when I pay £170 and get a book riddled with errors and misprints, I'm going to be precisely as petty as I damn well please.]
ToRead:
- Josephine M. Guy (ed.): The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh, 2018). Mentioned here on p. 8, n. 13.
- Joseph Bristow (ed.): Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives (Toronto, 2013). Mentioned here on p. 6, n. 7.
- Merlin Holland: Album Oscar Wilde (Paris: Gallimard, Coll. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1996). Mentioned here on p. 46, n. 136. I wonder why she's citing the French edition of that book? The English edition (London, 1997) was cited in vol. 6, p. 232. Perhaps she cites the French edition because it is earlier.
- George Mackie: Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde's Extraordinary Afterlife (Toronto, 2019). Mentioned here on p. 72, n. 270.
A number of Nihilist-themed works are mentioned in the editor's introduction to Vera. I'm not sure how keen I am to read more in that genre, but here are a few of them anyway:
- Ernest Lavigne: A Female Nihilist (1881). Originally published in French as Le roman d'une nihiliste (1879). Mentioned here on pp. 9, 28–9.
- John Baker Hopkins: The True History of Nihilism: Its Words and Deeds (1880).
- Louise Mignerot Gagneur: A Nihilist Princess (1881). Pp. 9, 55–7.
- Ouida: Princess Napraxine (1884). P. 9.
- Joyce Emmerson Muddock: Stormlight: A Story of Love and Nihilism in Switzerland and Russia (1888; later reprinted as Stormlight, or, The Nihilist's Doom, 1892). P. 10.
- Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky: Underground Russia (1883), A Female Nihilist (1885), The Career of a Nihilist (1889). Pp. 13, 26.
Labels: books, drama, Oscar Wilde
posted by ill-advised at 4:34 PM
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