Some New Drafts of a Wilde Play

SOME NEW DRAFTS OF A WILDE PLAY By Russell Jackson The Shakespeare Institute University of Birmingham and Ian Small Department of English University of Birmingham One of the more encouraging aspects of recent research into nineteenth-century English literature is the increasing accessibility of primary information about writers of the 1880s and 1890s. In particular some significant documents concerning Oscar Wilde's work and life have come to light. Two major sales at Sotheby's in London (22-23 July 1985 and 10-11 July 1986) brought a wealth of material concerning his life to the attention of the collector and the scholar alike. The catalogue for those sales revealed, for example, Constance Wilde's passionate love for Arthur Lee Humphreys, the London bookseller, author and publisher in 1894: at exactly the same time, that is, as Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas was at its most intense. As a consequence the view of Constance as the archetypical "wronged" Victorian wife, developed in recent biographies, becomes less easy to sustain. In addition, interesting new evidence about Wilde's writing practices has been discovered. For a long time textual scholars have regretted the fact that Wilde's manuscripts and typescripts, and the rehearsal and prompt copies for his plays, became so thoroughly dispersed after his bankruptcy that it is rarely possible to "reconstruct" the first performances of a play or to establish the stemma of an individual work. However in this area, too, there have been some significant new discoveries. For example, the same sales at Sotheby's brought to scholarly attention Wilde's working typescript of De Profundis. Equally importantly, some recent discoveries among the typescripts in the Herbert Beerbohm Tree Collection in the Bristol Theatre Collection have added vastly to our knowledge of the composition of A Woman Of No Importance and have also made the reconstruction of the complete stemma ofthat play possible. It has been known for some time that Wilde was a tireless and fastidious reviser. In particular the social comedies were frequently and copiously reworked. We know that three of the comedies—Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman Of No Importance and An Ideal Husband—began as brief sketches and were developed through manuscript and numerous typed drafts. Despite Wilde's regular advertisements for the integrity of the artist, his later revisions show his willingness to adapt his initial dramatic conception as the occasion demanded Jackson and Small: New Drafts and to collaborate with the theatrical instincts and judgments of the managers for whom he was writing. Yet, as we have said, the study of the composition of Wilde's plays, and of related questions, such as determining the extent to which they were produced collaboratively, has always been hampered by the stark but simple facts of his biography. Following his trial and conviction in 1895 Wilde was declared bankrupt and the manuscripts and drafts of his works were sold. Clearly, much material was lost; those drafts of Wilde's plays that survive, either in the hands of private collectors or research libraries, have had chequered careers. Wilde often revised haphazardly, discarding material from an early draft only to re-incorporate it into a much later one; and as his drafts are rarely dated, it is difficult to establish a chronology of revisions. Moreover, despite their best intentions, the individuals and bodies who preserved Wilde's drafts and sketches have also muddled the picture. Occasionally what is represented as a "complete" early draft of all the early acts of a play is simply the result of piecemeal or careless collecting. So, for example, the British Library's two typescript drafts of A Woman Of No Importance (MS Add. 37945) are not "drafts" in the sense of representing any one stage in the play's genesis. In fact, they are drafts of different acts, made at quite different moments in the play's composition, presumably bound together inadvertently. Wilde wrote A Woman OfNo Importance in 1892-1893 for Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who had been actor-manager of the Haymarket Theatre since 1887. The play began as a sketch book of early working drafts. Wilde then composed a full manuscript draft of the play under the...