Between his first popular and critical successes, the children's adventure story Treasure Island (published in book form 1883) and the ‘shilling shocker’ Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson spent a great deal of hope and time and effort on a book that received only lukewarm praise from reviewers and did little for his reputation as a writer: Prince Otto. Yet this is a fascinating text, best understood as an experiment in genre: Stevenson himself described it, in retrospect, as ‘a strange example of the difficulty of being ideal in an age of realism’ (Letters 5, 203). This introduction will explain how Prince Otto was written, published and received, and the literary sources and historical contexts on which it drew.

COMPOSITION, PUBLICATION AND EARLY RECEPTION

In his essay ‘A College Magazine’, written for the 1887 collection Memories and Portraits, Stevenson commented that he thought more tenderly of his first plays than of his other early exercises in literary emulation, ‘for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with resurrections’; and one of these, ‘originally known as Semiramis: a Tragedy, I have observed on bookstalls under the alias of Prince Otto’ (30). We do not know when exactly Semiramis was composed.