Editor’s Foreword

A journal editor’s eye is always on the horizon. What’s out there? Will it arrive in time? Does “it” exist? A journal is like a telescope, peering to that point where something just appears. Or does not. Like Captain Keeney, I feel driven to get “the ’ile!” But like Captain Bartlett in Where the Cross Is Made, I sometimes look to a horizon across which no ship comes. I am haunted by the ghosts of scholarship past, but the treasure might come to seem illusory when I look at what I have on hand a month before the deadline. I love the voyagers, who in fact are out there, bringing us something new, something fascinating and double-spaced and adherent to the Chicago Manual of Style, with only one space between the sentences.

Midway through this summer I stared at that blank horizon, but then a small fleet of sturdy ships sailed into port, all bearing exotic goods. I think of the opening lines of that fate-filled play for our topic, The Count of Monte Cristo (James O’Neill version):

Man.

‘Tis she—‘tis she!

Woman.

I tell you ‘tis not.

Man.

I tell you it is!

Woman.

A ship in sight!

(Enter MOREL and CARCONTE)

Morel (to the crowd) Friends, yonder comes a rich cargo, and all must today partake of my good fortune.

Old Dantès, Edmund’s father, will not starve this season, we can hope.

First to arrive was Beth Wynstra with what is really the flagship of a developing book project on O’Neill and marriage. Here she looks at the promises of marriage in several early plays, considering also the marriage promises made by O’Neill himself in those years. His plays seem to rehearse the disaster that results when verity and mutual understanding are missing. In the last of these essays to enter my inbox, Alex Pettit looks more closely than anyone heretofore at one of those early marriage plays, Beyond the Horizon, which he now reveals in all its textual complexity (first edition, second edition, and performed script) to show that O’Neill did not remain true even to his own confused intentions. And so another marriage went “by the bi.” (Sorry.) The horizon for O’Neill in 1918 lay thirty blocks up Broadway, and his voyage to Provincetown and marriage to Agnes Boulton helped take him there, but what gratitude he might have expressed to her got blotted out before opening.

Patrick Maley measures Mary Tyrone’s “1912” utterances against the felicities and infelicities of the speech act theory that was emerging when the theatergoing public first heard her speak in 1956. The 1939–41 O’Neill who created that connection was having a deep discussion with his melancholy, and Jim Al-Shamma gauges that dark humor against the MacArthur Award–winning dysfelicity of Sarah Ruhl.

With archeological precision, Vivian Casper excavates “A Story of the Buried Life” that intertextually joins Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O’Neill, discerning in the literary history a line of descent not previously noticed. And Rob Dowling digs up yet another document of the unexorcised O’Neill, one that returns us to the actual pipe dream of Tomorrow. I like that recent issues of this journal have literally extended the shelf of pertinent readings for O’Neill studies, putting Cecil Rhodes and Rita Wellman, Dorothy Dix and J. L. Austin, Eurydice and Eliza Gant into a larger-than ever conversation.

What lies beyond?