The Complete Plays Read online

  In the summer of 1880 Wilde had a few copies of Vera privately printed at his own expense, one of which he sent to the actress Ellen Terry, for whom he said he hoped to write a play. She thanked him for it but took no further action.13 Determined to have it produced, he eventually persuaded the actor-manager Dion Boucicault to take it on with Mrs Bernard Beere in the name part which he arranged to be presented for a morning performance at the Adelphi Theatre in London on 17 December 1881.14 However three weeks before that date, it was publicly announced that ‘considering the present state of political feeling in England, Mr Oscar Wilde has decided on postponing, for a time, the production of his drama Vera.’ The fact was that the new Russian Czar Alexander III, who had succeeded his murdered father a few months previously, was married to the Danish Princess Dagmar; she was a sister of Alexandra Princess of Wales, and in the circumstances the production of a play on the theme of Nihilism at this time was inappropriate.

  Wilde thereupon revised the play, adding a prologue, and took the new edition to the United States with him on his American lecture tour. Here he succeeded in interesting the leading actress Marie Prescott in Vera, who was so impressed by it that she bought the American rights and proposed to stage it in the following season with herself in the title role.

  ‘It is with great pride and pleasure that I look forward to seeing you in the character of the heroine of my play,’ he wrote to her in a letter published in the New York World of 12 August 1883 as a puff for Vera – ‘a character which I entrust to you with the most absolute confidence, for the first night I saw you I recognised in you a great artist.’

  The American opening of Vera took place at the Union Square Theatre in New York on 21 August 1883, ten days after Wilde had arrived on his second and last visit to the United States, his arrival being timed so that he could attend rehearsals. Marie Prescott had taken the theatre for a month, which Wilde thought was over-optimistic, but as she had given him an advance of $1,000 with a promise of $50 for each performance he could not shorten the timetable, since she owned the American rights.

  The opening night took place in sweltering heat, and although the audience were enthusiastic, cheering the author when he took a call and made a short speech before the curtain, probably repeating that the play was about passion and not politics, the newspaper critiques were on the whole unfavourable. The Times dismissed the play as ‘valueless’ and its author as ‘very much of a charlatan and wholly an amateur.’ It only lasted a week, but after it had been withdrawn Marie Prescott took it on tour with more success since she was playing it in Detroit in December.

  Vera was followed by The Duchess of Padua, which the author described in a subtitle in the few acting copies he had privately printed as A Tragedy of the XVI Century.15 He took the scenario with him to America on his American lecture tour in 1882 and showed it to the young actress Mary Anderson, whose performances had impressed him and who agreed to play the title role if she liked the play. It was written largely in blank verse. The scene was laid in Padua, and the plot was a complicated one revolving round the Duchess and her lover, a young man called Guido Ferranti. Wilde entered into a contract by which he was to receive $1000 down and a further $4000 when it was finished, which Wilde agreed should be not later than 1 March 1883. He wrote the play in Paris where he went immediately after his return from the United States and delivered it by the agreed date. However, much to his disappointment, Mary Anderson turned it down, although he had taken enormous trouble over it, as his correspondence with Mary Anderson confirms. ‘The play in its present form, I fear,’ she wrote to him ‘would no more please the public of today than would Venice Preserved or Lucretia Borgia.’16

  The Duchess of Padua, under a new title Guido Ferranti, was produced anonymously by the actor-manager Lawrence Barrett in the Broadway Theatre, New York, on 26 January 1891, with Barrett in the name part and Minna Gale as the Duchess. The New York Tribune praised it and revealed the author’s anonymity. Although Barrett called it a huge success and said he intended to run it for the season, it was withdrawn on 14 February after only 21 performances. Nevertheless this gave Wilde some satisfaction after Mary Anderson’s rejection and the failure of Vera. In 1904 and 1906 it was performed in Germany in a translation by Dr Max Meyerfeld, and a single copyright performance was given at the St James’s Theatre in London on 18 March 1907. It was published in the collected edition of Wilde’s works by Robert Ross from the corrected acting edition which Wilde had given him.’17

  Wilde’s next play was Salomé based on the biblical story in the New Testament.18 He wrote it in the course of two months which he spent in Paris in the autumn of 1891, actually completing three drafts during this period. The first which is now in the Bodmer Library in Coligny, Geneva, was written in what was virtually a single sitting. Years later Wilde told the Irish poet and novelist Vincent O’Sullivan how he did it. He had been lunching with a party of young French writers including André Gide, and he told them the story of the play which he said he has been thinking about for some weeks, inventing and filling it in while he talked. Then, after a prolonged meal, he returned to his lodgings in the Boulevard des Capucines. He was alone and it was getting dusk. A blank notebook which he had bought some time before at a local stationers was lying on the table. It now occurred to him to write down what he had been ‘narrating’, to use Gide’s word. ‘If the blank book had not been there on the table, I should never have dreamed of doing it,’ he told O’Sullivan. ‘I should not have sent out to buy one.’

  He wrote and wrote. Finally, he looked at the clock. It was between ten and eleven at night, and he felt he could not go on any longer without getting something to eat. So he went over to the Grand Café, on the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue Scribe. After he had ordered some food, he beckoned the leader of the Tziganer orchestra across to where he was sitting and said to him, ‘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 something in harmony with my thoughts.’

  The orchestra leader, an accomplished musician, proceeded in Wilde’s words to play ‘such wild and terrible music that those who were there ceased their talk and looked at each other with blanched faces.’ Then, Wilde said, he went back to his rooms and finished the play.

  Since some confusion exists about whether Wilde wrote Salomé in French or English, it is well to set the record straight. Lord Alfred Douglas, who was later to translate the French text into English at Wilde’s request, has stated his belief that Wilde ‘originally wrote the play in English and translated it into French with the assistance of Pierre Louys and André Gide, since he did not know French well enough to write a play in that language.’ This is not correct. It was written in French by Wilde, then revised and corrected by the French Symbolists Stuart Merrill, Adolphe Retté and Pierre Louys in that order, ‘but solely from the point of view of the language’, according to Merrill, since Wilde wrote French as he spoke it. Before it was published, which it was jointly by the Librairie de l’Art Independant in Paris and Elkin Mathews and John Lane in London in 1893, the French-language proofs were corrected by Pierre Louys, to whom the work was dedicated.

  In 1894, Elkin Mathews and John Lane brought out the English version with a cover design and ten illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley had drawn several additional pictures, but these were altered or suppressed by the publishers as being too daring or obscene. Although Douglas’s name did not appear on the title-page, where it was simply stated that the work was ‘A Tragedy in One act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde,’ the work was dedicated by the author ‘To my Friend Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas the translator of my Play.’ It is true that Douglas did produce a translation, but it was rejected by Wilde, as was a later effort by Aubrey Beardsley. Who was responsible for the English version as published remains a mystery: it may have been Wilde himself, although Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland has denied this. Certainly Douglas never considered the published transl
ation as his work, as indeed he makes clear in the second edition of his Autobiography (1931). ‘I do not claim it as my translation,’ he wrote. ‘I think my own translation, as a matter of fact, was better!’ This view of its merit was not shared by Robert Ross. ‘Douglas’s translation omits a great deal of the text,’ Ross told Frank Harris, ‘and is actually wrong as a rendering of the text in many places.’

  In the spring of 1892 the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt came to London for a season and at a party given by the actor-manager Henry Irving the ‘divine Sarah’ told Wilde that she had heard about Salomé and asked him to read it to her. ‘I did so,’ the author stated shortly afterwards, ‘and she expressed the wish to play the title role.’ She saw it as ‘heraldic … a fresco … with stylized gestures. The words should fall like pearls on crystal…’ In the result she took the Palace Theatre, and the play went into rehearsal after she had arranged for the French actor Alfred Darmont to play Herod and Graham Robertson to design the costumes. The author was delighted that Sarah Bernhardt, whom he regarded ‘as undoubtedly the greatest artist on any stage,’ should have been so ‘charmed and fascinated by my play’ that she should have wished to act in it. ‘Every rehearsal has been a source of intense pleasure to me,’ he said. ‘To hear my own words spoken by the most beautiful voice in the world has been the greatest artistic joy that it has been possible to experience.’

  Then the blow fell. It did not come altogether as a surprise since Wilde had learned, when the play was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain (the official responsible for licensing stage performances) that it was unlikely to be passed, on the ground that it portrayed biblical characters whose representation on the stage was forbidden by an old rule dating from the Protestant Reformation in England and aimed at the suppression of Catholic ‘mystery plays’. In the event Salomé was banned by the Lord Chamberlain, an action which so enraged Wilde that he threatened to become a naturalized French citizen. ‘I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country which shows such narrowness in its artistic judgement,’ he remarked in a press interview at the time … ‘I am not English I am Irish – which is quite another thing.’ However, he did not carry out his threat.

  Salomé eventually received its first public performance on 11 February 1896 when Wilde was in prison. This took place at the Theatre de l’Oeuvre, under the management of Stuart Merrill, in Paris, where it was produced by Aurelien Lugné-Poe who himself took the part of Herod with Line Munte as Salomé, Max Barbier as Jokanaan, and Gina Barbieri as Herodias.

  The next production, by Max Reinhardt, was in Berlin in 1901, by which time Wilde was no longer alive. Nor since he died a bankrupt did he have the consolation of knowing that productions during the next five years resulted in his estate becoming solvent, particularly the operatic version by Richard Strauss, which opened at the Royal Opera House in Dresden in 1905, and was an immediate success.

  In England the Lord Chamberlain’s ban did not extend to private performances of the original play, and these were given in English on five occasions in London between 1905 and 1931, usually on Sundays when the theatre would not be open to the general public.

  The last of the five private performances began at the Gate Theatre, Charing Cross, in May 1931 with Robert Speaight as Herod, John Clements as Jokanaan, Flora Robson as Herodias and Margaret Rawlings as Salomé. Although the Lord Chamberlain’s control of plays did not disappear from the statute book until 1968, in practice it had already been considerably relaxed. Consequently when he was approached after this last private performance, the Lord Chamberlain came to the conclusion that in the case of Salomé, at least, the ban was a complete anachronism, and he decided to license its performance in public. Consequently the play received its first public performance in London at the Savoy Theatre, where it opened in October 1931. It was an interesting production, by Nancy Price, in that the parts of Herodias and Salomé were played by a real-life mother and daughter in the persons of Nancy Price and Joan Maude, while Robert Farquharson played his old part of Herod.

  In 1894 Wilde wrote two short and unfinished plays and two scenarios, all on the theme of illicit love. The plays were La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy. The first scenario was originally contained in a letter from the author to George Alexander. He sold it with some others to Frank Harris during his post-prison exile. The scenario was converted into a play by Harris entitled Mr and Mrs Daventry and produced by him at the Royalty Theatre in London on 25 October 1900 with Mrs Patrick Campbell in the role of Mrs Daventry.19

  At the time of Wilde’s trial the manuscript of La Sainte Courtisane was entrusted by the author to his friend Mrs Ada Leverson (‘The Sphinx’) who took it to Paris some time about 1898 and restored it to Wilde. Immediately afterwards Wilde left the manuscript in a cab, ‘a very proper place for it’, as he laughingly informed Robert Ross. All Ross’s attempts to recover the lost drama failed and the published version was reprinted from some odd leaves of a first draft. In some ways it is not unlike Salomé and though written in English Wilde may have had it in mind for the French theatre. The paradox of a female sinner converting a righteous male rarely fails to attract an audience and has been used by many other writers notably Somerset Maugham.

  A Florentine Tragedy, a blank verse drama set in the 16th century, lacked the opening scene when Ross came to publish it in the collected edition of Wilde’s works. He thereupon commissioned the Irish poet Thomas Sturge Moore, brother of the philosopher George Edward Moore, to compose the missing scene. This Moore did and in this form it was first performed by the Literary Theatre Society in the King’s Hall, London, on 10 June 1906 as a curtain-raiser to Salomé. It has been repeated on a number of occasions, notably in Edinburgh on 19 September 1908 with Mrs Patrick Campbell playing the heroine Bianca. In 1906 the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini wrote to Robert Ross asking permission to turn A Florentine Tragedy into an opera, which Ross presumably granted as Wilde’s literary executor, but nothing further came of the idea.20

  The second scenario was for the Cardinal of Avignon. Robert Ross has stated that he never saw the manuscript of it as a play. ‘I scarcely think it ever existed, though Wilde used to recite proposed passages for it,’ he has written. However he discovered the MS of the scenario amongst Wilde’s papers and he gave this to Stuart Mason, who reproduced it in his Wilde bibliography.21

  Finally, what did Wilde feel about himself as a dramatist? ‘I am not nervous on the night I am producing a new play,’ he characteristically remarked in a press interview. ‘I am exquisitely indifferent. My nervousness ends at the last dress rehearsal. I know then what effect my play, as presented upon the stage, has produced upon me. My interest in the play ends there, and I feel curiously envious of the public – they have such wonderfully fresh emotions in store for them … It is the public, not the play, that I desire to make a success … The public makes a success when it realises that a play is a work of art.’22

  H. MONTGOMERY HYDE

  Lady Windermere’s Fan

  To

  The dear memory

  of

  Robert Earl of Lytton

  in affection

  and

  admiration

  Lady Windermere’s Fan was first performed at the St. James’s Theatre, London on 22nd February, 1892, with the following cast:

  LORD WINDERMERE

  Mr. George Alexander

  LORD DARLINGTON

  Mr. Nutcombe Gould

  LORD AUGUSTUS LORTON

  Mr H. H. Vincent

  MR. CECIL GRAHAM

  Mr. Ben Webster

  MR. DUMBY

  Mr. Vane-Tempest

  MR. HOPPER

  Mr. Alfred Holies

  PARKER (Butler)

  Mr. V. Sansbury

  LADY WINDERMERE

  Miss Lily Hanbury

  THE DUCHESS OF BERWICK

  Miss Fanny Coleman

  LADY AGATHA CARLISLE

  Miss Laura Graves

  LADY PLYM
DALE

  Miss Granville

  LADY JEDBURGH

  Miss B. Page

  LADY STUTFIELD

  Miss Madge Girdlestone

  MRS. COWPER-COWPER

  Miss A. de Winton

  MRS. ERLYNNE

  Miss Marion Terry

  ROSALIE (Maid)

  Miss Winifred Dolan

  Lessee and Manager: Mr. George Alexander

  THE SCENES OF THE PLAY

  ACT I

  Morning-room in Lord Windermere’s house.

  ACT II

  Drawing-room in Lord Windermere’s house.

  ACT III

  Lord Darlington’s rooms.

  ACT IV

  Same as Act I.

  TIME:

  The Present

  PLACE:

  London

  The action of the play takes place within twenty-four hours, beginning on a Tuesday afternoon at five o’clock, and ending the next day at 1.30 p.m.

  First Act

  SCENE

  Morning-room of Lord Windermere’s house in Carlton House Terrace. Doors C. and R. Bureau with books and papers R. Sofa with small tea-table L. Window opening on to terrace L. Table R.