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A Wife's Tragedy: An Unpublished Sketch for a Play by Oscar Wilde

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Rodney Shewan
Rodney Shewan
Affiliation:
From the manuscript in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

The MS of Oscar Wilde's A Wife's Tragedy belonging to the Clark Library comprises 28 unbound foolscape sheets, including one partial sheet, all of which are feint ruled except for one (20 A) which is plain. There is an additional small quarto sheet of plain correspondence paper with the watermark ‘Silver Linen’. Wilde provides no continuous pagination (and litte pagination of any kind), so I have numbered the sheets according to what I consider their most likely and satisfactory continuity, denoting the two sides of each sheet by A and B. The single quarto sheet, bearing merely an incomplete title, ‘Wife's Tragedy’, is not included in this sequence of pagination.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Spring 1982 , pp. 75 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1982

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References

Notes

1. MS torn at these points.

2. Between the lines recorded in the transcription, ‘I don't champion pigstickers’ and ‘his of the Punjaub’ appears a doodle of six spears radiating from a point:

3. Conceivably ‘improvise’. Gerald either says that Lord M isn't the man to improvise a big passion to allay the distress of losing a little one, or that his failed affair was the ne plus ultra. Later developments seem to demonstrate the truth of either possibility.

4. Could equally well be a statement or a question.

5. Either, as I suggest, ‘who knew you’, or simply ‘who knew’: i.e., ‘I used to hear a great deal about you from a friend who knew, <as> I think I know, every line that you wrote.’

6. A simple ‘Arthur’ here in the MS suggests a retort that I have supplied from the incomplete p. 27A. At the foot of that page three heads are sketched – of a bearded, aristocratic-looking man, of a foolish bespectacled man, and of a young woman of Aesthetic profile and a kind of cinquecento page-boy hairstyle under a small skull-cap.

7. Sketch of a Jane Morris-like head at the foot of the page. Gerald's line, ‘But nothing can harm me: I have stood face to face with beauty’, recalls Guido's unjustified visionary optimism in Act IV of The Duchess of Padua (1883).

8. MS torn at these points.

9. Perhaps ‘I cannot leave you now’ – i.e. now that Lord M loves Nellie or now that Gerald has placed her in such a potentially dangerous position.

10. For the dating of this scene, and the difficulties raised by ‘two months’, see Preface.

11. The Comtesse may be asking an impatient, interrupted question.

12. A double rule at the foot of this page may indicate that 17B takes up the conversation at a later stage in the scene.

13. A meaningless line which looks like an obscure legal technicality left for later.

14. ‘So’ may be the beginning of a summarising clause or, as suggested here, a short defiant digging in of the toes.

15. MS sic. Perhaps this awkward construction, not uncharacteristic of Nellie's other kinds of awkwardness, should read “you are not asking his wife of your friend?”

16. Double rule here, followed by a doodle of an arch and capital.

17. ‘Always’ – i.e. since arriving in Venice (unless one accepts the de Saix scenario).

18. This speech could equally well be Nellie's. The ‘Lord Mordaunt’ which follows may be a stage direction, which Wilde tends to indent or centre. Alternatively, it might be Parker's announcement of Lord M's arrival (assuming that he is no longer the Lovel's guest) or, perhaps more feasibly, a hasty enquiry by the Comtesse anxiously in pursuit of him.

19. C.f. Keats's ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’. Gerald has Keats on his mind, as we know from 17A.

20. C.f. Swinburne's ‘Laus Veneris’, 105, 12, in which Tannhaüser envies the happy lives and loves of ordinary mortal couples, as opposed to his own, bound to Venus, the divine, unpitying femme fatale.