OUP’s Complete Wilde: Volume 5

THIS FIFTH VOLUME in Oxford University Press’s The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde is the first devoted to Wilde’s plays. It contains editions of Wilde’s early verse tragedy The Duchess of Padua and the later Salomé in French and Salome in English, the latter two presented as separate texts distinguished by the two titles. The volume’s editor Joseph Donohue reports doing his research in “five countries over a period of much more than a decade.” The result is a volume meeting the requirements of a critical edition with unusual thoroughness. Donohue presents his material throughout in a manner that keeps its significance clearly in view, an important virtue given the amount of material that he considers. In what follows, in addition to indicating how scrupulously Donohue discharges his editorial obligations, I will consider his answers to questions these texts may pose for admirers of Wilde, note a perplexing aspect of The Duchess, and identify questions that linger about Salomé.

Persons coming to The Duchess from Wilde’s social comedies and The Picture of Dorian Gray are likely to ask two questions: why did Wilde attempt a revenge tragedy in what Donohue calls a “faux-Elizabethan-Jacobean style”? And, why is the play mediocre at best? (Near the end of his life, Wilde himself admitted to Robert Ross that “The Duchess is unfit for publication.”) Donohue’s answers emerge in his introduction’s account of the play’s genesis and extend into his commentary on the printed text. Wilde wrote the play for the young American actress Mary Anderson, though he later denied this. Before finishing the script in 1883, he sent Anderson what Donohue describes as “a long, analytical letter about the play, comprising what is by far the most detailed and comprehensive statement that survives of any set of Wilde’s dramaturgical intentions.” Besides Wilde’s extended analysis he predicts that The Duchess will bring fame for both playwright and actress. When Anderson got the completed script, however, she refused it, and did so, in Donohue’s view, because she saw how thoroughly derivative it was. Donohue supports her judgment by documenting in extensive detail Wilde’s reuse of language from other plays, especially Shelley’s The Cenci and Shakespeare’s plays at large. An even deeper reason for the play’s weakness, Donohues argues, is that Wilde, without realizing it, had divided aims: he wanted literary fame and he wanted a theatrical hit. Thus what Anderson would have seen in the completed script, “in addition to [the play’s] blatant derivativeness, was its ambivalent artistic and rhetorical posture, attempting to be a fully actable play with much appeal for a contemporary audience, yet at the same time aspiring to an a priori literary immortality outside the theatre.” The nature of this aspiration—the explanation of why Wilde attempted a play in this register at all—can be discerned in Donohue’s analysis of how the play’s many echoes of Shakespeare function. Rather than being intended to recall specific speakers and situations in Shakespeare, these echoes “serve as an assurance that The Duchess of Padua participates in the same tradition of high seriousness as do Shakespeare’s plays and moreover, uses the same familiar, hollowed vocabulary.” A young Wilde, according to Donohue, hoped to join a great dramatic tradition by sounding as though he already belonged there.

While The Duchess may be of limited interest taken in itself, it does offer the opportunity to consider Wilde’s intellectual development. In the letter to Anderson, Wilde states with emphasis, “art should always surprise, but never be paradoxical.” While in context this simply means that a character’s actions should not be so inconsistent as to confuse an audience, the remark makes us realize that The Duchess isn’t “paradoxical” in the typical Wildean manner. Wilde also defines the play’s thematic concerns as “the relations of...