The Texts of O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon: Ruth Mayo, Agnes Boulton, and the Women of Provincetown

Beyond the Horizon appeared in two editions within four and a half years. The first, published March 1920, printed a text that O’Neill probably completed in 1918 but may have tweaked for publication. It has not been reprinted since 1922, has never been edited, and was only recently reissued online.¹ The second edition incorporated collaborative cuts made during a boozy span in mid-January 1920, prior to the play’s February 3 premiere. That edition debuted in O’Neill’s 1924 Complete Works and has been the basis of all subsequent editions. These are different texts, written at different times and representing different assumptions about authorship. Both are essential to our understanding of O’Neill. But I am aware of no study of the play or of O’Neill that engages the first-edition text.

My purpose is threefold. First, I will consolidate and clarify the textual history of Beyond the Horizon. Second, I will enumerate significant differences between the two editions, with special attention to the generosity that O’Neill initially accorded to Ruth Mayo, the depressive wife of the poet manqué Robert Mayo. Finally, I will argue that in the first edition O’Neill ponders the challenge of melding art and marriage in a gender-savvy manner reflective of his relationship with Agnes Boulton and characteristic of his fellow Provincetown playwrights Neith Boyce and Rita Wellman. The argument attempts to restore to Ruth a measure of dignity that O’Neill briefly allowed her, then withdrew. Judith E. Barlow discerns in the 1924 text “the venerable myth that domesticity, even when freely chosen, kills the male of the species” and “annihilat[es]” his “artistic soul.”² But the first edition attempts something more ambitious, thanks to O’Neill’s entry into the debate about “the problems inherent in male-female relationships, both inside and outside of marriage” that Barlow finds lively among female playwrights of the Players.³

The Texts of Beyond the Horizon

O’Neill began writing Beyond the Horizon in Winter 1918, during the early days of his cohabitation with Boulton in Provincetown.⁴ On April 14, two days after he and Boulton had married, O’Neill declared himself “up to the ears” in preparing the script for the producer John D. Williams, to whom George Jean Nathan had been singing his praises.⁵ O’Neill soon posted copies of his script to Nathan and to Williams, who, as Stephen Black notes, optioned the play “almost immediately.”⁶ By April 26, the happily capitalized newlyweds were headed to New York to see the Provincetown Players’ production of O’Neill’s The Rope.⁷

Black reports that O’Neill “began cutting and revising” the play after he and Boulton returned to Provincetown and that O’Neill “obtained a second copyright in early August for the revised version.”⁸ Evidently satisfied with his work, O’Neill set about soliciting comments from his former professor George Pierce Baker and his future biographer Barrett Clark. The process advanced slowly. O’Neill was partly to blame: having sent a typescript or carbon to Nathan and one or two to Williams, he apparently left himself short on copies.⁹ O’Neill’s later reference to Nathan as the play’s “godfather” notwithstanding, the critic seems not expeditiously to have returned O’Neill’s copy. ¹⁰ Clark reports that O’Neill wrote him in 1919, asking if he would read Beyond the Horizon “when I retrieve a borrowed script.”¹¹ Nathan is the likeliest delinquent, and the deference with which O’Neill regarded him at this stage of their friendship argues against the possibility that O’Neill would have badgered him about the script. By May 8, 1919, Clark had registered what O’Neill called his “favorable impression” of the play.¹² O’Neill wrote to Baker the next day requesting permission to send him scripts of Beyond the Horizon and two other plays. But Clark may have been no quicker to surrender his copy than Nathan seems to have been. On June 8, O’Neill assured Baker...