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Oscar Wilde and A Wife's Tragedy: Facts and Conjectures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Rodney Shewan
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Extract

Whenever a new fragment by Wilde appears, it inevitably raises hope that the often vulgarized but still fascinating relationship between the life and the work will somehow be clarified. Did the one really get all the genius, the other merely the talent, as he told Gide? Were the two always so disparate, so irreconcilable, as he insisted? Did work always seems, as he once said it seemed, ‘not a reality but a way of getting rid of reality’? If so, was this why ‘the real life is the life we do not lead’, the life of the literary imagination? Or was it that the ‘real life’ and ordinary life alternately promised Wilde those intense experiences his imagination craved, then took it in turns to double-cross him?

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Summer 1983 , pp. 83 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1983

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References

Notes

1. The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962, p. 352.Google Scholar

2. Wilde, Oscar, ‘The English Renaissance of Art’, Essays and Lectures, 1908 (repr. 1978), p. 128.Google Scholar

3. T.R.I. VII Vol. V, no. 2 (Spring 1982), 75–131.Google Scholar Cited hereafter as AWT; page, references given in the text.

4. See Letters, pp. 390 and 427.Google Scholar

5. See Letters, and Bell, T. H., ‘Oscar Wilde's Unwritten Play: A Personal Reminiscence’, Bookman, 04–05 1930, 144–49.Google Scholar

6. The Picture of Dorian Gray, chapter 14.

7. Ellmann, Richard, ‘Overtures to Salomé’, in Oscar Wilde: Twentieth Century Views, ed. Ellmann, 1969, p. 90.Google Scholar

8. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

9. AWT, pp. 103–03Google Scholar; The Duchess of Padua, Act 4.Google Scholar

10. Unless one counts Salomé, who occupies that position in a metaphorical sense. See Shewan, Rodney, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism, 1977, pp. 46, 142–43.Google Scholar

11. Letters, p. 698.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., p. 146.

13. See Shewan, , pp. 18–24.Google Scholar

14. Letters, pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 14.

16. It is worth recalling that Wilde originally planned in 1889–90 to send the baroque tale ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ to the American magazine, Lippincott's, but thought of a ‘better story’ of a more marketable and popular kind, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which, however, grew from the same basic theme.

17. See Shewan, , pp. 158–59.Google Scholar

18. Letters, pp. 331–32.Google Scholar

19. In an early draft of An Ideal Husband, Lady Chiltern congratulates herself on being childless, for it is thus only on ‘ourselves’ that her husband's potential (political) disgrace will fall. C. f. Shewan, , p. 177.Google Scholar

20. Wilde again used such a figure, this time called Lady Markby, in An Ideal Husband, the maturest of his three ‘serious’ comedies. Missing jewelry plays a minor role in the plot.

21. Letters, p. 282.Google Scholar

22. Wilde was offering ‘my play A Good Woman’ to the American manager, Augustin Daly, in a letter dated [Autumn 1891] (Letters, p. 296).Google Scholar Alexander may therefore have chosen to accept the cheque, or Wilde may have been negotiating merely for the American rights.

23. Letter to the author, 24 July 1982.

24. Letters, pp. 285–86.Google Scholar