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.)

*

<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.

Mazzini proti Carlyleu

Tokrat si ne morem kaj, da se ne bi malo zgražal nad najnovejšo kolumno Mihe Mazzinija [arhivski link]. Najnovejšo, seveda, predvsem v kronološkem smislu; po vsebini so tako ali tako vse njegove kolumne že kakšnih dvajset let bolj ali manj ena in ista kolumna, le vsakič malo drugače napisana. Ampak nad tem sem pred leti na tem blogu že godrnjal in ni pravega razloga, da bi še enkrat.

Ne, k pisanju me je spodbodla njegova zanikrna, obžalovanja vredna šlamparija v predpredzadnjem odstavku:

Kot je zapisal razvpito nesrečni Carlyle, ki ga puritanci venomer citirajo: edina krona, ki jo moramo nositi venomer, je Jezusova trnjeva krona.

URL, na katerega kaže beseda “Carlyle”, gre na eno od tistih cenenih neuporabnih strani, ki vsebujejo kopice citatov brez karkšnega koli konteksta in ki niti slučajno ne zbujajo zaupanja, da je kdo te citate tudi res preveril. Ampak že iz tega citata samega je očitno, da niti slučajno ne more pomeniti tega, kar mu Mazzini tukaj pripisuje:

Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.

To bi se dalo brez konteksta mogoče razumeti kot misel o tem, kako hudo breme je vladarski položaj; ali pa o tem, da je resnično plemenita le tista krona (karkoli bi krona v tem kontekstu že pomenila), ki jo spremlja nekakšno trpljenje. V vsakem primeru pa ni nobenega govora o tem, da jo moramo venomer nositi.

Še bolj očitno pa to, kako grdo je Mazzini tu s tem citatom zgrešil, postane, če ga pogledamo v kontekstu. Izkaže se, da je iz Carlylove knjige Past and Present.

Za začetek je tu en dober odstavek zgražanja nad aristokrati, ki so podedovali plemiške nazive in bogastvo, sami pa ne naredijo ničesar:

Is there a man who pretends to live luxuriously housed up; screened from all work, from want, danger, hardship, the victory over which is what we name work;—he himself to sit serene, amid down-bolsters and appliances, and have all his work and battling done by other men? And such man calls himself a noble-man? His fathers worked for him, he says; or successfully gambled for him: here he sits; professes, not in sorrow but in pride, that he and his have done no work, time out of mind. It is the law of the land, and is thought to be the law of the Universe, that he, alone of recorded men, shall have no task laid on him, except that of eating his cooked victuals, and not flinging himself out of window. Once more I will say, there was no stranger spectacle ever shown under this Sun. [vir]

Kmalu zatem Carlyle preide na razmišljanje o tem, kaj plemenitost pravzaprav sploh je:

What is the meaning of nobleness, if this be ‘noble’? In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. The chief of men is he who stands in the van of men; fronting the peril which frightens back all others; which, if it be not vanquished, will devour the others. Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns. The Pagan Hercules, why was he accounted a hero? Because he had slain Nemean Lions, cleansed Augean Stables, undergone Twelve Labours only not too heavy for a god. In modern, as in ancient and all societies, the Aristocracy, they that assume the functions of an Aristocracy, doing them or not, have taken the post of honour; which is the post of difficulty, the post of danger,—of death, if the difficulty be not overcome. [vir]

Carlyle torej pravi, da so resnično plemeniti tisti ljudje, ki so za človeštvo kaj velikega in pomembnega naredili in s tem postali njegov vodilni del; trnjeva krona je prispodoba za njihov trud in težave, ki jih morajo pri tem premagovati. Nikakor ne trdi, da morajo tako krono vsi ljudje ves čas nositi, še veliko manj pa s to krono misli na take vrste nesmiselno trpljenje, kakršno sebi in drugim nakopavajo puritanci, o katerih piše Mazzini v svoji kolumni. Jaz (kot zadrt egalitarist in nasprotnik kakršnega koli dela) Carlylea in njegovih nazorov sicer ne maram, ampak dejstvo je, da mu Mazzini tu dela krivico. Njegove kolumne pa bom odslej bral s še malo večjo količino nezaupanja kot že sicer.

BOOK: Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest"

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 9: Plays II: Lady Lancing. Ed. by Joseph Donohue. Oxford University Press, 2019. 9780198821595. xxv + 607 pp.

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 10: Plays III: The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘A Wife's Tragedy’. Ed. by Joseph Donohue. Oxford University Press, 2019. 9780198821601. xix + 581 pp.

[Note: the above ISBNs are useless; they are only selling both volumes as a set, under a separate ISBN: 9780198119586.]

I have long known and loved The Importance of Being Earnest as one of Wilde's funniest plays, but I had no idea that this play exists in two substantially different versions, a longer one with four acts and a shorter one with three acts; the second of these is the one we usually hear about. Of the present two volumes, vol. 9 deals with the longer version, Lady Lancing (the title is really a temporary fake one; Wilde was in the habit of making up such titles and using them until he was ready to reveal the real one; p. 4), and vol. 10 deals with the shorter version under its real title, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Similar to the first volume of Wilde's plays in this series (see my post about it from a few years ago), there is also an impressive mass of introductions by the editor, Joseph Donohue — a historical introduction, an editorial introduction, a historical editorial introduction, and even a plain old adjectiveless introduction — most of which make for very interesting reading and give us a good overview of the making of both plays, as well as a number of glimpses into the history of theatre (which seems to be the editor's chief specialty).

Wilde initially wrote Lady Lancing in a fairly short period, over a few months in the autumn of 1894. In terms of genre and length it was apparently something of a deviation from the norms; it combines elements of comedy and farce, and Wilde occasionally described it as a farcical comedy (pp. 7, 61, 155). But farces usually had three acts in his time (earlier in the 19th century they were even shorter, having just one act; pp. 34, 155), so Wilde's four-act play was unusually long by the standards of farce. I found these things very interesting because I had never been used to paying much attention to these details about genre before. I had the vague idea that if a play tries to make you laugh, it's a comedy (of which perhaps farce is a particular subspecies), whereas if it's serious it must be a tragedy — that is all (to borrow a favourite phrase of Wilde's :)). Here in the editor's introduction, however, it is clear that comedy and farce are thought of as two distinct genres with a number of quite clear differences between them (see e.g. pp. 107, 136, 155), and it seems that these aren't just things imposed upon them by later literary scholars but also something that the audience of Wilde's own time would have had in mind.

Anyway, Wilde tried to interest several theatre managers in his play, including one Charles Frohman in New York, which is fortunate since his archive preserved a complete text of the more-or-less final version of this play which might otherwise have been lost (pp. 35, 180). [Interesting factoid: Frohman later died in the sinking of the Lusitania; p. 177.] In London, a manager named Charles Wyndham accepted his play tentatively, but couldn't put it on right away as his actors were currently performing another play that was still going strong (ibid.). A few months later, in January 1895, George Alexander — the manager of another theatre, who had previously rejected Lady Lancing — found out that his current play, Guy Domville by Henry James, was doing poorly* and that he would need something new much sooner than expected. Wilde agreed to provide his play, but apparently he and Alexander had different ideas on what to do with it, so Alexander soon sent Wilde on a vacation while he and his actors adapted and rehearsed the play; in this process it was shortened from four acts to three and turned into something that is much more clearly a farce rather than something halfway between farce and comedy; the result is the Importance of Being Earnest as we mostly know it now. It seems that Alexander's reasons for making the play shorter were partly to bring it closer to being the sort of three-act farce that the audience was familiar with, and partly because this allowed him to perform a short one-act “curtain raiser” play before the IBE itself, and this in turn allowed “fashionable” (= upper-class) playgoers to “linger over dinner” (pp. 665, 750, 1023) a bit longer before coming to the play “fashionably late” (p. 1043; so they would skip the curtain-raiser and come just in time for the performance of the IBE itself). Donohue jokes that Alexander's efforts changed Lady Lancing so much that “even her own author did not know her” (p. 60), and Wilde himself jokingly complimented Alexander after the opening night that it was “charming, quite charming [. . .] from time to time I was reminded of a play I once wrote myself” (pp. 165, 667). Donohue estimates that Alexander's cuts shortened the duration of the play from three hours to about two and a half (p. 700) — frankly, from the amount of material removed, I'm surprised that the difference isn't even larger.

[*This was all quite new to me, and very interesting. Henry James is of course famous as a novelist, but apparently he was also a lifelong theatre enthusiast (p. 19), though his efforts as a playwright weren't too successful. His play, Guy Domville, was apparently liked well enough by the better-off sorts of people, but these constituted a minority of the audience and their applause was drowned out by “such an explosion of cat-calls and boos and hisses as was seldom heard even in those days when first-night disturbances were not uncommon” (p. 27). James “determined never to write for the theatre again” (ibid.).]

Nor does the history of the play end there. In 1898, after Wilde got out of prison, he prepared the IBE for publication as a book (by the (in)famous Leonard Smithers, the only publisher who dared to print Wilde's books in his last few years), resulting in a new version that restores some (but not much) material from LL. After Wilde's death, his friend and literary executor Robert Ross seems to have prepared a kind of mix of both versions (by taking the four-act version and importing into it some material from the three-act one), which formed a basis for a translation into German by Hermann von Teschenberg, an Austrian writer (pp. 40–2, 47–8); profits from translations into other European languages were an important part of the effort to repay the debts that Wilde had left when he died; these were successfully paid off by 1906 (p. 48). Later Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, tried to reconstruct Ross's version by comparing the German translation with various extant typescripts of both the LL and IBE (“an ingenious and novel approach”; pp. 52–3); some of the typescripts themselves were published by Sarah Dickson in 1956 (pp. 49–51); and finally Ruth Berggren (Donohue's Ph.D. student) published a critical edition of the four-act version in 1987 (p. 150).

Wilde seems to have revised his work quite a lot when working on this play, resulting in a series of typescripts, many of which are still extant. He would send a manuscript out to be typed, then annotate the resulting typescript with his changes, send the new version out to be typed again, etc. The amount of attention dedicated by the editor to these details is awe-inspiring if somewhat boring (e.g. there's a discussion of how some annotations are in pencil and some in ink, indicating that Wilde did two passes of editing on the same typescript; pp. 112–3). I wonder how the literary scholars of the future will deal with these things since present-day authors presumably edit their works in a word processor and don't leave a mass of typescripts and manuscripts behind. (And some of them are deliberately hostile in this process; I think it was either Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett who said something along the lines of “I keep several older versions of a novel in separate files while I'm working on it, but when it's finished I delete them all with a cry of ‘fuck you, literary scholars of the future, get an honest job!’ ”)

Anyway, this abundance of different variants of the text also means that the critical apparatus is bulkier than in most of the previous volumes of Wilde's works; often it takes up more than half of each page. But it seems that earlier manuscripts were even longer than the final version of Lady Lancing, so by looking at the critical apparatus you can discover a number of potentially interesting passages that Wilde removed in the process of reworking the text. This the editor advises us to do (p. 177), and I haven't regretted following his advice. Probably Wilde had a good reason for cutting these things, e.g. because a shorter play would be more effective (after all, we can see that Alexander later went a step further and cut it even more, from four acts to three), but many of the cut passages are witty and fun to read anyway.

There's also a useful appendix (pp. 507–607) showing the text of LL and of the IBE (as performed in 1895) side by side, so that you can see the deletions (and other smaller changes) very easily. The biggest cuts appear in acts 2 and 3 of LL, which were merged into act 2 of the IBE. This involved the removal of a very funny scene where a solicitor shows up ready to arrest Ernest Worthing over unpaid bills for dinners at a fancy London restaurant. The bills were actually Jack's, who had been in the habit of posing as his fictional brother Ernest on his trips to London; but now Jack's friend Algernon is posing as Ernest while visiting Jack's country house (and trying to seduce Jack's ward Cecily), so it is Algernon that nearly gets arrested until Jack magnanimously offers to pay ‘his’ bills.

I don't doubt that George Alexander knew what he was doing and had good reasons for this and other (smaller) cuts, and that the result was quite possibly a better piece of theatre; but I for my part liked the longer version better. I enjoyed the play and had no reason to want it to end sooner rather than later; and plenty of amusing, witty or funny things were lost through these cuts. (Donohue quotes a reviewer's opinion that the “[l]oss of so many witticisms was ultimately the equivalent of ‘chips that the diamond cutter must sometimes necessarily sacrifice’ ”; p. 147.) As one of the early reviews remarked, all the characters in this play speak “full and undiluted Wildese” (p. 1026) pretty much all the time, so any cut is a tragic loss of wit. In fact, if the material from the earliest manuscripts of LL were included, I would like it still better — these were things which Wilde himself had cut before finishing LL, and which now appear only in the critical apparatus. An example occurs early in Act 1, where Jack (posing as Ernest) is trying to conceal the location of his country house from Algernon (while visiting him in London). He tries to be vague about the location, until Algernon points out that what he had said so far puts his stables about 150 miles away from his house, which must surely be “rather inconvenient” :)) (P. 195.)

As usual in the OET edition of Wilde's works, the editor's commentary is also extremely exhaustive and full of interesting bits of information. I particularly liked the way he used late-19th-century reference books (e.g. Cassell's Domestic Dictionary: An Encyclopaedia of the Household (1877–9), various tourist guides to London, advertisements, railroad timetables, etc.) to show us what Wilde and his original audience would have known or thought about something. There's even a recipe (from a contemporary magazine) for cucumber sandwiches of the sort that Algy is stuffing himself with in act 1 (p. 867). There is also a long discussion about the names of the characters; Wilde liked to use English place-names for this (“territorial names have always a cachet of distinction; they fall on the ear full toned with secular dignity”, Wilde said to Frank Harris; pp. 367, 881*) and apparently put a good deal of thought into it. For example, Lady Bracknell of the IEB was called Lady Brancaster in LL, but he renamed her Bracknell after Lady Queensberry's estate (“deliciously appropriate”, p. 664). The title Lady Lancing comes from a town in Sussex (p. 4). I was surprised by the discussion of Bunbury, the name of Algernon's fictional invalid friend; Jack calls it an “absurd name” (p. 202), and I was happy to agree with him, but it turns out that there were actually number of very respectable Victorians with that name, as well as a village in Cheshire; and there was a Henry Bunbury, family friend of Wilde's parents (pp. 368–9, 884).

[*Donohue adds that Harris often embellished his anecdotes but that this one, “if it isn't true, it ought to be”.]

The editor also provides a very interesting account of the opening night of the play (pp. 615–22, 1015–23), based on various remarks scattered through some fifty or so newspaper reviews as well as from various later memoirs, e.g. those of Wilde's friend Ada Leverson (‘the Sphinx’). It was by all accounts a triumph, perhaps the acme of Wilde's theatrical career, the feeling of which is intensified by our knowing, while we read about this triumphant first night, what a terrible catastrophe was about to strike his life so soon after it. Some premonitions of it appear during the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest itself: we see the dastardly Marquess of Queensberry prowling about the theatre, determined to cause a scene if he can, and only being kept out thanks to massive precautions by Wilde and by the theatre manager (who apparently engaged some twenty policemen to keep Queensberry out; p. 617). Only a few days later the Marquess would leave that fateful calling card (“posing somdomite” etc.) at Wilde's club (p. 623), which then led to the lawsuit, the trials, and to Wilde's downfall.

In the Season

As an appendix, vol. 10 also includes In the Season, the short one-act play that was performed just before The Importance of Being Earnest during its first theatrical run in early 1895. It was written by Langdon E. Mitchell, an American playwright. I didn't like it very much; a man has just been definitely rejected by the woman he had been wooing, and he decides he is so over her that he even burns the letter of rejection that she sent him. But a friend convinces him to try talking to her once more after all. She is highly offended to learn that he has burned her letter, and takes it as a sign that he can hardly have really loved her at all, but, well, one thing leads to another and by the end of the conversation they get together again. Unfortunately I haven't got the life experience necessary to judge whether this sort of sudden vehement emotional shifts are plausible or not; but I guess they are — they certainly seem to appear often enough in fiction. For my part, while reading this play I couldn't help wishing that people would be a little more sober and reasonable about these matters, and that they would make up their minds and then stick to their decisions. Anyway, I think those fashionable theatregoers who, as Donohue says, skipped this curtain-raiser so they could prolong their dinner a little more, didn't miss much by doing so.

A Wife's Tragedy

This is an unfinished work of Wilde's, completely unrelated to The Importance of Being Earnest, and I had never heard of it before reading this book. It is extant in a short manuscript that is believed to date from around 1890 or so (p. 1072), i.e. relatively shortly before he started writing his triumphantly successful society comedies. It seems to be quite a rough and fragmentary early draft; the editor first gives the text of the manuscript as it is, then a lightly edited version, and then finally one in which the fragments have been rearranged into what seems to be the order that makes the most sense. It was quite impressive to see how much better and more readable the final version is thanks to these efforts by the editor.

I liked the play quite a bit even in its unfinished state, and I think it's a pity that Wilde didn't get around to finishing it. It deals with a sort of love-quadrangle involving four upper-class English people in Venice. There's Gerald, a poet, and his wife Nellie; he hasn't actually written much poetry since they got married, and he seems to regard the marriage as primarily an “intellectual union” (p. 1139) with “a delightful intellectual companion” (p. 1134), with the unsurprising result that his wife feels a bit neglected. Gerald makes a big deal out of following Paterian ideals of life (“Those of us live best who crowd into this little span of life the most fiery-coloured moments”, p. 1139). There's Arthur, an old acquaintance of his from their college years, who is a much more conventional person and is currently on leave from his military career. And finally there's the Countess, a somewhat older but apparently still quite good-looking woman, the widow of a French aristocrat.

Gerald falls in love with the Countess, who affects some of the same quasi-artistic ideals of life as he does; but after a while she realizes that she desperately needs to marry for money, due partly to her own debts (“economy is inartistic”, p. 1142) and partly those of her late husband (whose speculations on the stock exchange hadn't turned out well), so she wants to dump Gerald and marry Arthur instead. Meanwhile Arthur and the neglected Nellie have fallen in love, but decide that they shouldn't pursue this any further and Arthur departs from Venice. So at the end of the play, all the relationships have fallen apart: the marriage of Gerald and Nellie seems unlikely to survive; Nellie's relationship with Arthur is over; and the Countess has broken up with Gerald and is now unable to enter a relationship with Arthur, because he is gone. I think this is a very nice modernization of the traditional tragic ending where all the main characters get killed; here they just end up alone and miserable instead.

One thing that I found somewhat untypical of Wilde is that the character of Gerald is — or at least seems to me to be — presented as a negative one. Gerald is the proponent of the sort of ideals that we usually associate with Aestheticism, with art, with Walter Pater, etc. — the sort of things that Wilde himself (or so we imagine him) championed in his works and in his life. He often has characters that embrace these things, and they are usually portrayed in a way that makes it clear that he is on their side, and wants you the reader to be on their side as well: Lord Henry in Dorian Gray, Vivian in The Decay of Lying, Gilbert in The Critic as Artist, etc. — all these frivolous dandies, whose life is a nonstop sequence of outrageous epigrams and whom we know and love so much in Wilde's works. But Gerald is not one of these; neither he nor anyone else in this play says much in the way of typical Wildean aphorisms; his pursuit of the Paterian ideals is revealed as shallow and empty; and it leaves both him and his wife miserable. It is an interesting change from Wilde's other works, and shows that he could write in a more serious tone as well when he set his mind to it.

A lovely passage crossed out by Wilde, showing that he couldn't turn off his comic wit even when writing a tragedy: the Countess says that her husband “either died of a broken heart or got a situation in the Civil service, I really am not quite sure which. But I know he was wretched.” (P. 1136.) And the editor joins in on the fun by adding, in his commentary: “as an alternative to dying of a broken heart, the British civil service might be said to have much to recommend it” (p. 1158). But surely the late Count, being a Frenchman, would have joined the French civil service?

Miscellaneous

• The historical introduction includes a useful explanation of a few theatrical terms whose meaning I was only dimly aware of until now: stalls were individual seats while the pit was an area consisting of benches, where tickets were cheaper (p. 9). Over the course of the 19th century, benches were slowly getting replaced by stalls as the interest of better-off people in the theatre grew again (p. 10).

• The editor describes The Importance of Being Earnest as “Wilde's single best-known work” (p. 61) — this surprised me, as I would imagine that his best-known work must be either Dorian Gray or Salomé.

• Wilde poked fun at his publishers, Messrs. John Lane & Elkin Mathews of the Bodley Head, by naming two servants in Lady Lancing after them (p. 72; “a clear case of literary revenge”, pp. 349, 861). He later abandoned the name Mathews, but Lane is still there, even in the final version of The Importance of Being Earnest.

• Some interesting remarks about Wilde's handwriting: “He writes rapidly and with great facility; ideas crowd upon him, and his pen records them as swiftly as they occur, resulting in numerous elisions, especially of the endings of words and common last syllables as ‘-ly’, ‘-ing’, and ‘-tly’.” (P. 111.) See also the images of a few pages from Wilde's manuscripts scattered here and there in both volumes.

• Donohue occasionally quotes from Wilde's “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (e.g. p. 164, n. 67), which hasn't appeared in any of the volumes of the OET Complete Works of Wilde so far, but it did appear in Ross's 1908 edition of Wilde's works. Let's hope that it will be included in some subsequent volume of the OET edition; I thought that a few more volumes of plays are all that's missing now, but hopefully there will be a volume of miscellaneous stuff as well.

• Dr. Chasuble upon being asked by Jack if he would have any objections to christening him as an adult: “Oh, I am not by any means a bigoted Paedobaptist.” (Lady Lancing, act 2; p. 245. This sentence was omitted from IBE; p. 802.) This probably sounded much less funny in 1894 than it does now when everyone is so obsessed with pedophiles in the church :)))

• From early manuscripts of LL, act 2 (when Mr. Gribsby of Gribsby and Parker, Solicitors, shows up to arrest ‘Ernest’ (actually Algy) for his debts): “Jack. You are Gribsby, aren't you? What is Parker like?/ Gribsby. I am both, Sir. Grisby when I am on unpleasant business, Parker on occasions of a less severe kind.” (P. 256.)

• An interesting recurring theme in this play, as also elsewhere in Wilde's work, is the decline of the British aristocracy, which (especially if it relied on land for its income, as it traditionally did) was unable to keep up with the wealth of the industrial plutocrats and, by the late 19th century, also lost its stranglehold over politics.

Thus for example, in a manuscript of Lady Lancing, act 1, Lady Brancaster says of the Morning Post: “that paper has become sadly democratic lately: which is strange, as it is only a few years since it lowered its price in order to suit the diminished incomes of the aristocracy./ Jack. My dear Lady Brancaster, I don't care twopence whether the ‘Morning Post’ notices me or not. Who on earth would care?/ Lady Brancaster. The price of the paper is, I am glad to say, merely one penny.” (Pp. 218, 979.)

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell asks: “Who was your father? He was evidently a man of some wealth. Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?” (P. 782; not in LL, see p. 215. See also the commentary at p. 917.)

Elsewhere Wilde alludes to the recently introduced inheritance taxes, which devastated many an heir to an agricultural estate (pp. 213, 394; an “extremely timely” comment, p. 912); and to the “agricultural depression” which “the aristocracy are suffering very much from [. . .] just at present” (pp. 286, 819, 983; land was less and less profitable in Britain because their agriculture couldn't compete with cheaper foreign imports). Trollope summarized these changes by saying that now “[l]and is a luxury, and of all luxuries the most costly” (p. 912).

• Wilde uses “type-writer” in the sense “typist” (p. 220).

• Jack in early manuscripts of Lady Lancing, act 1: “The fact is, women aren't nearly as clever as we men say they are.” (P. 224.) And Cecily in early manuscripts of act 3: “Women are not so clever as men say they are. But they are much cleverer than men think they are.” (P. 279.)

• From Lady Lancing, act 3 (p. 285): “Cecily. When I see a spade I call it a spade./ Gwendolen. I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.” (Also in the IBE, act 2; p. 818.) The editor points out that Gwendolen was probably exaggerating; it's true that she was a city girl, but one could even buy a spade at Harrod's (p. 461).

• Wilde never misses a chance to poke fun at his fellow authors. Here's Jack in Lady Lancing, act 4: “To invent anything at all is an act of sheer genius, and, in a commercial age like ours, shews considerable physical courage. Few of our modern novelists ever dare to invent a single thing. It is an open secret that they don't know how to do it.” (Pp. 316–7. Omitted in the IBE; p. 840.)

• In an early manuscript of Lady Lancing, act 4, Jack says: “More young men are ruined nowadays by paying their bills than by anything else. I know many fashionable young men in London, young men of rank and position, whose rooms are absolutely littered with receipts, and who with a callousness that seems to me absolutely cynical, have no hesitation in paying ready money for the mere luxuries of life. Such conduct seems to me to strike at the very foundation of things. The only basis for good Society is unlimited credit. Wihout that, Society, as we know it, crumbles. Why is it that we all despise the middle classes? Surely because they invariably pay what they owe.” (Pp. 317–8, 935.) As they say on the internets: this but unironically :)

By the way, Wilde later reused this quip in an 1897 letter to his publisher, Leonard Smithers: “Where will you end if you go on like this? Bankruptcy is always in store for those who pay their debts. It is their punishment.” (P. 649. Alas, Smithers would indeed end up bankrupt eventually.)

• In Lady Lancing, act 4, Wilde strikes back at the Green Carnation, the novel parodizing him: “Lady Brancaster. This treatise, the ‘Green Carnation’, as I see it is called, seems to be a book about the culture of exotics. [. . .] It seems a morbid and middle-class affair.” (P. 338; omitted from IBE, p. 850.) This novel had been published in September 1894, shortly before Wilde started working on his play (p. 699).

• Wilde's opinion on Beardsley's drawing for the cover of the Yellow Book: “Oh, you can imagine the sort of thing. A terrible naked harlot smiling through a mask — and with ELKIN MATHEWS written on one breast and JOHN LANE on the other.” (Pp. 349, 862.) But on the cover as it was actually published, the harlot isn't naked and the publishers' names do not appear on her breasts.

• British theatre at the time liked to borrow from French plays,* but it was subject to a stricter system of censorship. A French critic, Augustin Filon, describes the ludicrous ways of getting around this: “Where our authors have had the effrontery to write the word ‘cocotte’ in black and white, they replace it by the word ‘actress.’ Where we have unblushingly written ‘adultery,’ they have inserted ‘flirtation.’ ” (P. 378. The audience had no difficulty translating these things back in their minds. See also p. 379 for a beautiful, impassioned statement by Wilde protesting against the censorship, quoted from pp. 370–2 of Stuart Mason's bibliography of Wilde.)

[*In fact this borrowing was so widespread that they had a special term, “Entirely Original”, used to advertise the fact that “the play was not an adaptation from the French” (p. 723, n. 70; and see also p. 1030).]

• Wilde said that while writing Dorian Gray, he “studied long lists of jewelry [. . .] spent hours over a catalogue published by a firm of horticulturists” etc. (pp. 435, 959) — the same naturalist methods that we know e.g. from Huysmans, who went from being a naturalist to being a decadent while keeping the same methods of work.

• An interesting remark from an unpublished notebook by Wilde: “I have never sowed wild oats: I have planted a few orchids” (p. 437). I wonder if that's just a reference to orchids being beautiful and exotic and decadent, or is it somehow a homosexual reference (due to the well-known fact that the word “orchid” comes from the Greek word for “testicle”).

• We have mentioned the fear of draughts on the pages of this blog before. Nowadays it is widespread in Central and Eastern Europe, but it seems to be unknown in English-speaking countries. So I was very interested to learn that little more than a hundred years ago it was a thing in England as well: “Most people of any experience are afraid of being exposed to draughts of cold air, and rightly so, because they are fruitful causes of rheumatism, colds, and coughs, and ought to be most carefully avoided by all” (Cassell's Domestic Dictionary (1877–9), quoted by Donohue on p. 440).

• An interesting factoid from p. 479: Wilde's mother, Lady Jane Wilde, observed that “about sixteen thousand women in London live by literature; that is, there are amongst us sixteen thousand bundles of abnormal nerves and sensibilities and quivering emotions, fiery fancies, tumultuous passions, and throbbing brains, all working day and night to formulate themselves into words”.

• One of my favourite lines from the play is Lady Bracknell's from the first act: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both seems like carelessness.” I was surprised to see that this appears in LL (p. 215) and in early manuscripts of the IBE, but not in the final version of the IBE, where it is reduced to “Both? That seems like carelessness.” (P. 782). I could have sworn that I've seen the longer version before, but where? The cheap Wordsworth edition of Wilde's works that I read years ago has the shorter version from the final text of the IBE.

• A lovely pun from The Importance of Being Earnest: “Gwendolen. I had no idea there were any flowers in the country./ Cecily. Oh, flowers are as common here, Miss Fairfax, as people are in London.” (P. 819. Not in LL; p. 286.)

• I thought that the type in these two volumes was unusually small, but after measuring it and comparing it with two of the previous volumes (3 and 5), it turns out to be the same size. The lines in the main body of the text are 11 points apart, while those in the commentary are 10 points apart. Either way, these two books waste no space and pack a prodigious quantity of material into a total of nearly 1200 pages.

• From Wilde's letter to Robert Ross while preparing the printed edition of The Importance of Being Earnest (1898): “I feel sure my ‘woulds’ and ‘shoulds’, my ‘wills’ and ‘shalls’ are all wrong. Perhaps you might look at them.” (P. 646) Frankly, after seeing the discussion of the gloriously abstruse traditional will-and-shall system in The King's English, I'm surprised that anyone ever got them right :)

• On my usual subject of gripes about errors and typos, there are a few in these two volumes but not as many as in some of the previous ones. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much — “in a long work 'tis fair to steal repose” (as Byron says), and all that.

• The wholesale decline and collapse of the postal system — I would like to say the British one, but I suspect it's more widespread than that* — seems to continue unabated. I ordered these two volumes directly from the Oxford University Press, as usual; soon I got an e-mail that the books had been sent off... and then waited another five weeks for the books to actually get here. This is insane. You could probably walk from England to Slovenia in this time. Perhaps Britain is not only exiting from the EU but also from planet Earth, if not from the entire solar system. And judging by some of the labels on the parcel, it seems to have passed through Hungary at one point. Why, just why?

[*But credit where it's due: books from Sweden still reach me in less than a week. That country at least doesn't seem to have quite gone to the dogs yet, though recent experiences with trying to order copies of old newspaper pages from the Kungliga biblioteket are starting to force me to reconsider this view... My first idea was that that department must have been outsourced to orangutans, but on second thought that would be a gross insult to orangutans.]

ToRead:

• Antony Edmonds: Oscar Wilde's Scandalous Summer: The 1894 Worthing Holiday and the Aftermath (2014). Mentioned here on p. 2, n. 3.
• Jonathan Fryer: Robbie Ross: Oscar Wilde's Devoted Friend (2000). Mentioned on p. 46, n. 30.
• Katharine Worth: Oscar Wilde (1984). Mentioned on p. 154, n. 48.
• Frank Harris: Mr. and Mrs. Daventry. Based on a scenario by Wilde (pp. 170, 648.).
• Ada Leverson: Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde with Reminiscences of the Author (London: Duckworth, 1930). Mentioned on pp. 384, 618. Judging by the quotes in these two volumes, it also contains some very interesting reminiscences of the overall atmosphere of the 1890s by Ada Leverson.
• Merlin Holland: Irish Peacock and the Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (2003). Mentioned on pp. xvii, 115.
• H. Montgomery Hyde: Oscar Wilde (1975). Mentioned on p. 433.
• George Ives: A Book of Chains (1897). Mentioned on pp. 366, 880. A volume of poems by Ives, who was a friend of Wilde's; Wilde used his address in the play as Jack's address when visiting the town (and posing as Ernest).
• John Gray, André Raffalovich: A Northern Aspect: The Ambush of Young Days. Two Duologues (privately printed, 1895). A “satirical sketch” (pp. 379; see also pp. 440, 893).
• Lady Wilde: The Works of Oscar Wilde: Essays and Stories by Lady Wilde (Speranza) (Sunflower edn., 1909). Donohue often quotes from her essays (pp. 432, 466 etc.).
• Theodore Wratislaw: Oscar Wilde: A Memoir, ed. by Karl Beckson (London: Eighteen Nineties Society, 1979). Mentioned on p. 433.
• Horace Wyndham: Speranza: A Biography of Lady Wilde (1951). Mentioned on p. 477.
• Linda Stratmann: The Marquess of Queensberry: Wilde's Nemesis (2013). Mentioned on p. 616, n. 18.
• Michael S. Foldy: Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (1997). Mentioned on p. 622, n. 41.
• Nicholas Franke: Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (2017). Mentioned on p. 639, n. 82; about Wilde's final years.
• James Albery: Pink Dominos (1877). In The Dramatic Works of James Albery, ed. Wyndham Albery, vol. 2 (London: Peter Davies, 1939). Mentioned here on p. 715; a comedy containing an idea similar to Wilde's ‘Bunburying’. Adapted from Les dominos roses by Alfred Hennequin and Alfred Delacour.
• Michael Seeney: From Bow Street to the Ritz: Oscar Wilde's Theatrical Career from 1895 to 1908 (High Wycombe, Bucks.: Rivendale Press, 2015). Mentioned here on p. 733, n. 98; Sweeney “compiled an exhaustive account of West End plays on tour during this period”.
• Stephen Philips: Paolo and Francesca (1895). Mentioned here on p. 736; this tragedy replaced Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in St. James's Theatre in from 6 March 1895.
• George Gissing: New Grub Street (1891). A novel, mentioned here on pp. 886, 904.
• John Francis Bloxam: The Priest and the Acolyte (1894). Published anonymously in the Chameleon, which he edited. Wilde contributed some aphorisms for the only issue of that magazine (p. 914 here).
• Frederic Whyte: William Heinemann: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928). Mentioned on p. 963.
• Hesketh Pearson: Beerbohm Tree: His Life and Laughter (1956). Mentioned on p. 13, n. 33.
• Hesketh Pearson: The Last Actor-Managers (1950). Mentioned on p. 11, n. 25; p. 1044, n. 2.
• Anna, Comtesse de Brémont: Oscar Wilde and His Mother: A Memoir (London: Everett, 1911). Anna was “an Irish-American woman named Anna Dunphy who, according to Richard Ellmann, had married ‘a putative count’ ” (p. 1151). She got to know Wilde during his visit to America in 1882 and kept up the acquaintance later.
• W. S. Gilbert: Patience; or, Bunthorne's Bride (1881). Mentioned on p. 1153; Gilbert was satirizing Wilde as “Bunthorne, the mystic poet”.
• Oscar Wilde: The English Renaissance of Art: Essays and Lectures (6th ed., 1928). Mentioned here on p. 1153. I wonder if these things will eventually appear in the present OET edition of Wilde's works as well.
• Elizabeth Aslin: The Aesthetic Movement: Prelude to Art Noveau (1969). Mentioned on p. 1153.
• Ian Small (ed.): The Aesthetes: A Sourcebook (1979). Mentioned on p. 1156.

BOOK: Oscar Wilde, "Duchess of Padua" and "Salome"

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 5: Plays I: The Duchess of Padua, Salomé: drame en un acte, Salome: Tragedy in One Act. Ed. by Joseph Donohue. Oxford University Press, 2013. 0198119577. xviii + 780 pp.

This is the fifth book in the Oxford English Texts edition of Wilde's collected works. It includes two of Wilde's plays (The Duchess of Padua and Salome); according to the introduction (p. xiii), there will eventually be three more volumes of plays in this series.

The Duchess of Padua

Wilde wrote this tragedy relatively early in his career, around 1883, and didn't have very much success with it. He tried to get a noted American actress named Mary Anderson to buy the rights to the play and act in it, and although she was initially interested, she changed her mind once she read the finished play (pp. 2–6). It was eventually performed for three weeks in 1891 (p. 15), and after that apparently never again during Wilde's lifetime, and very few times afterwards (p. 16).

One of the main objections seems to have been the same as in the case of Wilde's poetry around the same time: experienced readers felt that it wasn't original enough (p. 26). (Another objection from Anderson's point of view was that the play might appeal more to people who want to merely read plays and not go see them performed on stage; p. 44.) This sort of thing doesn't bother someone like me, who am not really familiar with most of the sources that influenced Wilde; but it might have bothered the regular theatre-going audience of Wilde's time, or at least Anderson seems to have thought so. Anyway, I rather enjoyed reading this play, and if I was a theatre-going type of person (which I'm not) I imagine I would also enjoy seeing it on stage.

Nevertheless, I was also very interested to read the editor's introduction and commentaries, where he points out numerous instances of earlier plays from which Wilde borrowed ideas, plot elements, even names (p. 29), and sometimes words or entire phrases. The only hint of derivativeness that I could notice if I hadn't read the introduction and comments would be that the play is written in a style that, for want of a better term, I would think of as vaguely Shakespearean; but I wouldn't see it as a problem as I would imagine that this is simply the normal way in which English tragedies were written before the 20th century or so :)

But judging by the editor's commentary, the influences go way beyond a vague similarity of style; the commentary points out numerous specific instances where this or that line in The Duchess of Padua is an echo of this or that specific line from some play by Shakespeare. Other influences include Thomas Otway's 17th-century play Venice Preserved (p. 26) and several romantic tragedies from the earlier part of the 19th century (Shelley's Cenci, pp. 34–9; and several plays by Victor Hugo, pp. 29–33, especially his Lucrèce Borgia).

Another thing I found particularly interesting in the editor's comments are extensive passages from Wilde's letters to Mary Anderson, in which he explains his intentions behind this or that passage in the play, or why he wanted the scenery done in a particular way, and so on. Rationally, we all know that a play, or indeed any sort of work of art, doesn't spring forth ready-made from the artist's inspiration (like Athena from her father's forehead), and that its creation in fact involves a fair bit of craftmanship, premeditated planning, revising, and the like; but we don't often get to see this process in action, as it were: usually, when you read a play, you just see the end-result of this process. But here we get a few glimpses into the creative process itself, which I found quite interesting.

One thing bothered me a little about this play, but isn't really specific to it; many other plays, movies, novels etc. suffer from the same problem. (There's even a tvtropes page page for it.) Namely, to set up sufficiently dramatic situations which will suitably stir the reader's (or viewer's) feelings, the author has to have his characters behave like idiots — if they behaved more reasonably, much of the drama simply wouldn't happen.

<spoiler warning>

In this play, Guido intends to avenge his father's death by killing the Duke of Padua, and has joined him as a courtier to wait for a suitable opportunity. The Duke is not only a tyrant but an all-round asshole; his wife unsurprisingly hates him, for many good reasons, and she and Guido soon fall in love; but then he is reminded of his oath to kill the Duke, and decides that this is incompatible with his love for the Duchess, so he callously sends her away, which pretty much breaks her heart. Here we already see the first instance of idiocy; he knew how much she hates the Duke, so he could easily confide his plan in her, they could plot the Duke's death together and then ride away into the sunset together, and all would end well. His scruples that he couldn't aspire to love after his conscience would be burdended by the horrible murder of the Duke, which he is planning to commit soon (2.453–460), are likewise stupid; murder might not be exactly commendable, but if you do decide to commit it, you should at least have the sense to not be all guilt-ridden afterwards. This is doubly so if you believe that your causes for murder were just, and indeed Guido's planned murder of the Duke would be as well justified as any murder could reasonably hope to be.

Then in the next act, Guido, in a sudden flash of magnanimity, decides that instead of stabbing the Duke in his sleep, a better revenge would be to leave him alive but put a dagger and a note on his chest while he sleeps; the note would explain what this is all about, how Guido could have killed him but didn't, and Guido would meanwhile run from the city. In a way, this is not a bad idea, though its efficacy depends largely on whether the evil old Duke would feel suitably shocked by knowing how easily he could have been stabbed in his sleep that night — and I'm not sure that he would be; he might just as well cynically mock Guido's weakness and simply ramp up the security measures in his palace a bit. (Guido isn't sure either, but he decides he doesn't care; 3.196–201.)

Anyway, just as Guido is on the way to the Duke's bedroom to carry out his plan, he meets the Duchess carrying a bloody dagger — it turns out she has just killed the Duke. In the previous act, Guido hadn't explained properly why he suddenly spurns her love, so she thought that it was because she was still married to the Duke, and this intensified her hatred of him enough to make her kill him. (Here's idiocy again — this misunderstanding could have been avoided if people could just be bothered to communicate plainly. But maybe I shouldn't complain too much, as this type of idiocy is very widespread in the real world as well.)

Further idiocy sets in at this point. If Guido had any sense, he should now decide that even if things didn't go exactly as he planned, his revenge is nevertheless accomplished as well as it can reasonably be, given the circumstances, and that he and the Duchess should run away from the city before the Duke's death is discovered — as indeed she urges him to do. But instead, he decides that he now cannot love her any more, because she murdered her husband or something like that. They keep arguing at great length, until eventually soldiers show up and the Duchess, now angry at Guido for rejecting her yet again, has him arrested and claims that it was he who murdered the Duke.

In the next act, Guido is on trial for killing the Duke, and although he has an opportunity to explain that it was actually the Duchess that killed him, he does not do so, because apparently he still loves her after all, and would rather get executed himself than try to save his life by blaming the Duchess. This is nice, but if he still loves her that much, why the hell did he reject her idea to run away together in the previous act?! I suppose the idea is that he doesn't want to live without her (because he still loves her), but not with her either (because she murdered the Duke, or something like that); but that's idiocy, as far as I'm concerned. They should have ran away together while there was still time, and they could still break up afterwards if they wanted to.

High drama continues in the last act. After she saw how Guido refused to betray her during his trial, the Duchess is in love with him again; she visits him the night before his execution and tries to convince him to run away, wearing her cloak so the guards will think it's her. He refuses, either because he doesn't want to live without her, or because he thinks she'd get in trouble for helping him escape; he might be right about this second part, though I'm not sure if we really find out enough about the legal machinery of Padua to know how this would turn out. (We definitely see that the Duchess's influence on the judicial system is relatively limited. Still, in one of the earlier manuscripts of the play, the Duchess does seem to think that she could get away with it: “he will escape tonight and I being Duchess/ am set above suspicion”, p. 306.) In any case, she wouldn't stay alive anyway, as she took poison before this whole conversation started, but he doesn't know it yet. They keep bickering long enough that the soldiers almost show up to take Guido to his execution, and then he, learning that she has taken poison (and is indeed by now almost dead from it), commits suicide by stabbing himself with her dagger (the same with which she had killed the Duke). So instead of having at least one of them, possibly both, get out of this mess alive, we end up with both of them dead. I suppose this is very passionate and very romantic, and appropriate in a tragedy, and they might even hope to meet again in the afterlife or something like that; but I still couldn't help feeling annoyed by so many instances of people making so many unreasonable decisions throughout the play.

</spoiler warning>

I wonder if it's possible to make a decent tragedy without having your character make annoyingly idiotic decisions. I suspect you can already see this problem in ancient Greek tragedies, but at least they had a better excuse — they could blame the characters' stupid behavior on the influence of the gods.

Some of my favourite lines in the play come from the Duke's deliciously wicked and cynical opinions: “Why every man of them has his price,/ Although, to do them justice, some of them/ Are quite expensive.” (Act I, ll. 269–71; p. 110.) “Have prudence: in your dealings with the world/ Be not too hasty; act on the second thought,/ First impulses are generally good.” (Act I, ll. 282–4; p. 111.) And he says of his wife: “Why, she is worse than ugly, she is good.” (Act II, l. 2; p. 117.) You can practically see him twirling his moustache while saying this stuff :))

“I like no law at all,/ Were there no law there'd be no law-breakers,/ So all men would be virtuous.” (Spoken by the Second Citizen in Act IV, ll. 429–31; p. 172.)

From Act V (ll. 252–5, p. 185): “Guido: Sweet, it was not yourself,/ It was some devil tempted you./ Duchess: No, no,/ We are each our own devil, and we make/ This world our Hell.” This passage reminded me of some fine lines from Donne: “Tentations martyr us alive; a man/ Is to himselfe a Dioclesian.”

Introduction and commentary to Salome

I was really impressed by this part of the book. I'm accustomed to extensive introductions and generous commentaries in the OUP edition of Wilde's works, but here they have really outdone themselves; the total length of introductions and commentaries to Salome is approx. 330 pages, and they touch on a number of interesting topics.

There's an interesting discussion on the sources and historical background of the Salome story. It is briefly mentioned in two of the gospels (Matthew 14:1–12 and Mark 6:14–29; quoted on pp. 366, 429), but Salome's name doesn't appear there at all. The other early source is Josephus's history of the Jews (pp. 419, 422), which gives Salome's name (p. 423). The editor mentions several 19th-century works that deal with the story of Salome, although many of them refer to her as Herodias (same name as her mother). For example, there's a little-known play The Daughter of Herodias by Henry Rich (who later became a notable politician; p. 372), and several by an American author, Joseph Cameron Heywood (Salome, Herodias, and Antonius; p. 386). Wilde was also influenced by Flaubert's version of the Salome story, Herodias (one of his Three Stories; p. 381; Wilde borrowed a number of details from it, p. 383); as well as by his Salammbô and Temptations of St Antony (pp. 384–5). Another big influence on Salomé was the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (pp. 391–412), who seems to be a kind of pioneer of Symbolist drama. And the editor even identified exactly which French translation of the Bible Wilde was using as an inspiration for Iokanaan's ravings (de Sacy's 17th-century translation, p. 413).

The extent of Maeterlinck's influence on Wilde's Salome is demonstrated by the reaction of his friend, W. Graham Robertson: when Wilde read a few passages of Salome to him, Robertson thought it was intended to be a parody of Maeterlinck's writing; Wilde, for once, was not amused (pp. 405–6).

The editor also points out how Wilde took a number of liberties with the historical background; for example, in earlier versions of the story, it is Salome's mother that tells her to ask Herod for John the Baptist's head, whereas Wilde's Salome explicitly says that she is doing this for her own pleasure and not at her mother's suggestion (p. 431; though the mother is definitely very pleased by the prospect of being rid of the saint, whom she finds very annoying: p. 726).

There's an interesting discussion of the early performances of Salomé in Europe. Sarah Bernhard, the famous French actress, was going to play Salome in London (p. 467), but the censor forbade the play, describing it as “written in French—half Biblical, half pornographic—by Oscar Wilde himself” (pp. 439, 470), and in fact it remained banned in Britain until 1931 (p. 487)! So the first performance of Salomé was in France (with a different actress, Lina Munte; p. 476), and in the next few years it was performed in many countries, being quite successful in Germany (p. 485), and even coming as far as Greece (p. 486). Richard Strauss turned it into an opera of the same name (p. 400).

See also p. 470 for more shocked comments by the British censor, E. F. Smyth Pigott (“a miracle of impudence”, “[Salome's] love turns to fury because John will not let her kiss him in the mouth—and in the last scene, where she brings in his head—if you please—on a ‘charger’—she does kiss his mouth”). Foreign-language plays were treated more leniently by the censors since the average British playgoer was unlikely to see them (p. 471), but in Salome's case that still wasn't enough.

I was also interested by the discussion of the process of creating Salomé and its English translation. Many decades later, Lord Alfred Douglas claimed in one of his autobiographies that Wilde's French was so poor that he initially wrote the play in English and then asked his French friends (writers such as Pierre Louÿs, André Gide, and Marcel Schwob) to translate it into French. But the editor of this edition points out that there is no evidence of this, and in fact several manuscript drafts of Salomé are extant, from which you can clearly see that Wilde worked in French throughout this process (although he did ask his friends for comments at some point); p. 673.

The story of Salome's English translation is even more interesting. It is well known that Wilde was unhappy with Douglas's translation, but it's unclear just how much he revised it before its publication. Judging by the introduction to the English translation of Salome in this book, it seems that Wilde didn't actually modify Douglas's translation much; for example, many phrases or even entire sentences from the French original are missing in the translation, and Wilde would have presumably fixed these omissions if he had revised the translation carefully (pp. 692–4). (Nevertheless, Douglas caused a ridiculous amount of drama by objecting to even the slightest changes and demanding that he not be mentioned as the translator if anything is changed in his translation. Wilde tried to smooth over the issue by dedicating the translation to him instead of mentioning him as translator; p. 665–8.) The editor suggests (p. 664) that Wilde didn't care much about the translation since his main interest in Salome had been in writing the original French text (he compared writing in French to a musician trying to play a new instrument; pp. 327–8).

I also remember reading in several biographies (e.g. Ellmann's life of Wilde, and Sturgis's life of Beardsley) that Aubrey Beardsley prepared his own translation of Salome as well, though Wilde eventually chose Douglas's anyway. But it seems that this is all based on just one mention in a 1931 memoir by Douglas, which is unreliable in several other aspects, and there's no other solid evidence that Beardsley even started such a translation, let alone finished it (pp. 669–73).

Robert Ross, Wilde's friend and literary executor, later prepared a slightly improved version of Douglas's translation in 1906, and a still further improved version in 1912, but neglected to announce these changes explicitly enough. As a result, for the rest of the 20th century, various reprints and theatrical productions used either the original 1894 translation, or the 1906 version, mostly without knowing which one they are using or even that they are different at all; whereas the 1912 version was largely forgotten and never reprinted (pp. 676–80, 690).

A note on p. 690 mentions that five other people have also translated Salome into English, most recently Donogue himself (in 2011). He comments that “[o]ther English translations [. . .] have been slow in emerging”, but TBH I find this number of translations impressively high. I always imagined that Douglas's translation is so closely associated with Wilde that it's almost like an original, so it didn't occur to me that anyone would attempt to make a new English translation.

There's an interesting discussion of “closet drama” (i.e. plays intended to be read rather than seen on the stage) on p. 390; apparently, for much of the 19th century, this was “considered a purer form, a breed apart from a script intended for performance before a live audience”.

There's a delightful anecdote on p. 335, from the memoirs of Vincent O'Sullivan, who recorded what Wilde told him of how he had written Salomé: “He went out to a nearby café, where he said to the leader of the gypsy orchestra, ‘I am writing a play about a woman dancing with her bare feet in the blood of a man she has craved for and slain. I want you to play somthing in harmony with my thoughts.’ The orchestra played ‘such wild and terrible music’ that it stopped all conversation. ‘Then,’ Wilde concluded, ‘I went back and finished Salomé.’ ”

Salome

As for the play itself, it was pleasant to read Salome again; and I regretted more than ever that I don't understand any French so I could read the original instead of just the translation. I found it beautiful, enjoyable and suitably decadent, but I also have to admit that I mostly have no idea what it's meant to tell us. Judging by the many mentions of Symbolism (and Maurice Maeterlinck) in the editor's introduction, I guess this play also belongs to that school; unfortunately I know next to nothing about Symbolism and as always I'm no use at trying to figure out what exactly the symbols are and what do they stand for. On the face of it, it seems just a silly (but pleasant) little episode of art for art's sake, with its stupid drunken monarch, his hasty oath, a spoiled princess with her ridiculous obsessive lust for John the Baptist, etc. — but I'm sure there's much more to the play than this, I'm just not the sort of person who would notice it.

I know the play is supposed to be a kind of tragedy, but I also liked the fact that there are many funny passages in it, most of them involving Herod's wife, Herodias, who is constantly upbraiding him for his stupid superstitiousness (pp. 716–7; “the moon is like the moon, that is all”), his lechery towards Salome (his stepdaughter! “You must not look at her! You are always looking at her!”, p. 716), and even his supposed humble family background (“My daughter and I come of a royal race. As for thee, thy father was a camel driver! He was a thief and a robber to boot!”, p. 718; he seems to have forced her into marriage after he killed her previous husband, p. 721). There are also some funny scenes in which representatives of different Jewish sects bicker about some of the finer points of their theology (pp. 718–20).

One of my favorite passages in Salome is near the end, when Herod is desperately trying to get Salome to change her mind and ask for something else than Iokanaan's head (and eventually manages to sound like a modern-day TV salesman: “But this is not all”, p. 728); the result is a long paragraph of extremely purple prose in which Herod lists all kinds of exotic treasures, offering them to Salome. According to the editor's comments, this list was partly inspired by certain passages in Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony (where the Queen of Sheba is trying to tempt the hermit with offers of treasure; p. 647), and to some extent Wilde drew on the same sources as for the famous Chapter 11 of the Picture of Dorian Gray, which he wrote a year or two before Salomé.

At some point, Herod lists something like 15 different kinds of gems, including three kinds of topazes, one of which is “pink as the eyes of a wood-pigeon” (p. 728). By then I was so accustomed to the exhaustive thoroughness of the editor's notes that I knew there would be a long paragraph about each of those gem types, and I was not disappointed (pp. 647–50); and I was indeed rather surprised that there was no discussion of the wood-pigeon's eyes so we could find out if they really are the same color as that type of topaz :)

Miscellaneous

One very nice improvement compared to the previous volumes in this series is that there are very few typos in this volume — they are pretty much negligible compared to the heaps of typos in e.g. volume IV. I guess that at some point between 2007 and 2013, OUP finally hired a proofreader :P

There are a few instances of wrong indentation, e.g. on line 154 on p. 145, line 163 on p. 163. There's a typo on p. 244 (“Dikstra” instead of “Dijkstra”), and another on p. 420 (“putrified” instead of “putrefied”; but it's in a quotation from Josephus, so maybe it's just quirky spelling in the source material); and there's “Pharoah” on p. 569, “Huysman's” on p. 614, “Huysman” on p. 621; and two spaces are missing on p. 733.

One thing that annoyed me about the book is that the paper seems to be much thicker than necessary. This volume is almost twice as thick as volume IV, but it has just 14% more pages (800 vs. 700). The book would be much easier to handle while reading if it was a bit thinner.

I also wished that the book had more illustrations. The only illustration in it is a sketch of how the stage should look, from one of the manuscripts of Salomé (p. 508). But for example on pp. 362–3 there is a long, detailed description of a kind of logo (or ‘device’) designed by Félicien Rops for the title page of the French edition of Salomé; and on pp. 479–80 there is a detailed description of a photo of the actress Lina Munte in her role as Salomé on the French premiere of the play — it seems to me that it would make a lot of sense to include these things as illustrations instead of just describing them.

An interesting difference compared to previous volumes is the number of references to resources on the web. This is often to online texts of various old books (e.g. there's one from sacred-texts.com, cited on p. 613); and there's even one reference to a Wikipedia page (“Shaving in Judaism”, p. 587)! I was pleasantly surprised by all this, since my impression so far has been that academic authors, especially in the humanities, have a huge distrust about citing web sources, especially the Wikipedia. I still have a little bit of a prejudice myself — namely, I can't help feeling that URLs look extremely ugly in print.

ToRead:

A huge number of potentially interesting books are mentioned in the notes of this volume:

• André Gide: Oscar Wilde, tr. by Bernard Frechtman (NY, 1949). P. 329.
• Jonathan Fryer: Andr & Oscar: The Literary Friendship of Andr Gide and Oscar Wilde (NY, 1997). P. 329. Gide got to know Wilde during the latter's visits to Paris.
• Vincent O'Sullivan: Aspects of Wilde (London, 1936). P. 335. Another book of memoirs by one of Wilde's friends.
• Jean Paul Raymond and Charles Ricketts: Oscar Wilde: Recollections (London, 1932). Pp. 336, 360, 468.
• William Rothenstein: Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein (NY, 1931). P. 384.
• Max Beerbohm: Letters to Reggie Turner, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 1964). P. 384, 662.
• Edgar Munhall: Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). Montesquiou was the aesthete upon whom Huysmans based his des Esseintes. P. 448.
• Holland: Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. P. 465.
• Margery Ross (ed.): Robert Ross Friend of Friends: Letters to Robert Ross (London, 1952). P. 486.
• Edgar Saltus: Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression (Chicago, 1917; rpt. NY, AMS Press, 1968). P. 657. Wilde met Saltus during his American tour and they remained in contact (vol. 6, p. 297).
• Norman Page: An Oscar Wilde Chronology (Boston, 1991). P. 325.
• E. H. Mikhail (ed.): Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollection (2 vols., London, 1979). P. 328.
• Arthur Symons: The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London, 1889). P. 401.
• Arthur Ransome: Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (London, 1912). P. 403.
• Stefano Evangelista (ed.): The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (London, 2010). P. 328.
• John Stokes: In the Nineties (Chicago, 1989). P. 352.
• Karl Beckson: London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (NY, 1992). P. 353.
• Jean Pierrot: The Decadent Imagination 1880–1900, tr. Derek Coltman (Chicago, 1981). P. 353.
• Linda Dowling: Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton, 1986). P. 353.
• A. H. Church: Precious Stones Considered in Their Scientific and Artistic Relations (London, 1883). P. 387. This book was one of the sources for Wilde's decriptions of gems in Dorian Gray and Salomé.
• W. Graham Robertson: Time Was: The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1931). P. 406, 592.
• Helen Grace Zagona: The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art's Sake (Geneva and Paris, 1960). P. 353.
• Neil Bartless: Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (London, 1988). P. 592.
• Peter Raby: Aubrey Beardsley and the Nineties (London, 1998). P. 669.
• Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan, W. G. Good (eds.): The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley (Rutherford, NJ, 1970). P. 669.
• H. Montgomery Hyde: Lord Alfred Douglas: A Biography (London, 1984). P. 662.
• Lord Alfred Douglas: The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas (1931), also published in the US as My Friendship with Oscar Wilde (NY, 1932). The first edition of 1929 is missing some footnotes, so use the 2nd ed. of 1931. See p. 673.
• Lord Alfred Douglas: Without Apology (London, 1938). P. 673.
• Lord Alfred Douglas: Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up (London, 1940). P. 674.