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“THE MODERN IDEA UNDER AN ANTIQUE FORM”: AESTHETICISM AND THEATRICAL ARCHAEOLOGY IN OSCAR WILDE'S DUCHESS OF PADUA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2012

Gregory Mackie
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Extract

During his final years in exile, Oscar Wilde derived as much income as he could from selling the rights to his as-yet-unpublished writings. Although at that time he was as pragmatic in his approach to the business of authorship as he had been during the height of his dramatic career in the early 1890s, Wilde nonetheless resisted publishing one of his earliest plays, the 1883 blank-verse tragedy The Duchess of Padua. In an 1898 letter to Robert Ross, Wilde noted of the play (which was finally produced in 1891) that “The Duchess is unfit for publication—the only one of my works that comes under that category. But there are some good lines in it.” Wilde had not always had such a dim view of his second completed play. Indeed, he once promoted it as “the masterpiece of all my literary work, the chef-d'oeuvre of my youth” and had worked hard to see it produced. Literary history, however, has tended to concur with Wilde's more mature assessment of the play's artistic merits. Katharine Worth, one of the few critics to assess the play in detail, suggests that it “is the one completed play of Wilde's which can scarcely be imagined in a modern performance.” Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small place the play among a group of early works by Wilde that “have been judged by modern critics to be failures.” According to their view, The Duchess “is seen as an embarrassment.” This essay instead regards The Duchess as an uneven experiment in both staging aestheticism and late Victorian theatrical “archaeology,” a practice that sought to mount historical dramas with as much accuracy and precision in costume and design as possible. In a letter to Mary Anderson, the American actress whom he hoped would star in the play, Wilde contextualized the spectacle to which he aspired in The Duchess: “the essence of art is to produce the modern idea under an antique form.”

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Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , September 2012 , pp. 219 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2012

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References

Endnotes

1. A. Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross, 29 July 1898, in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Holland, Merlin and Hart-Davis, Rupert (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 1091Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., 196.

3. Worth, Katharine, Oscar Wilde (London: Macmillan, 1983), 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. See Guy, Josephine M. and Small, Ian, Oscar Wilde's Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Oscar Wilde to Mary Anderson, 23 March 1883, in Complete Letters, 197 (Wilde's italics).

6. Guy and Small, 100.

7. Ibid., 102.

8. Wilde enthusiastically reviewed a production of Shelley's play that was mounted privately by the Shelley Society in 1886, which he called “an era in the literary history of this century.” See Wilde, “The Cenci,” Dramatic Review, 15 May 1886, reprinted in Oscar Wilde: Selected Journalism, ed. Clayworth, Anya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 60–2, at 60Google Scholar.

9. See Donohue, Joseph, “Translator's Preface,” in Salome: A Tragedy in One Act by Oscar Wilde (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), vii–xxviii, at xxiGoogle Scholar.

10. Ibid., xxi.

11. Ross, Robert, “To A. S.” [1906], in The Duchess of Padua: A Play, in The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, 14 vols., ed. Ross, Robert (London: Methuen, 1908), 1: n.pGoogle Scholar.

12. On Wilde's impact on aestheticism in the United States, see Blanchard, Mary Warner, Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. On the aesthetic movement more generally, see Lambourne, Lionel, The Aesthetic Movement (London: Phaidon, 1996)Google Scholar; Calloway, Stephen and Orr, Lynn Federle, eds., The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement, 1860–1900 (London: V & A Publishing, 2011)Google Scholar.

13. See Powell, Kerry, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15Google Scholar.

14. The discourse of practical aestheticism, which provided advice on displaying “artistic” taste in the household, especially by means of arranging eclectic objects from different cultures and time periods, can be traced through the writings of a number of tastemakers whose work influenced Wilde. See, for instance, Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1878)Google Scholar; Haweis, Mrs. [Mary Eliza], The Art of Beauty (London: Chatto & Windus, 1878)Google Scholar; and Macmillan's “Art at Home” series, especially Mrs. [Lucy] Orrinsmith's The Drawing-Room (London: Macmillan, 1878)Google Scholar. On Wilde and the aesthetic interior, see Charlotte Gere, with Hoskins, Lesley, The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2000)Google Scholar.

15. See Ivory, Yvonne, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Gagnier's, RegeniaIdylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar arguably inaugurated this influential line of contemporary Wilde criticism, although Wilde's role in disseminating aesthetic ideals is the subject of a chapter in the first book on the subject, Hamilton's, WalterThe Aesthetic Movement in England (London: Reeves & Turner, 1882)Google Scholar.

17. Ivory, 84.

18. Ibid.

19. For an important account of the invention of the Renaissance as a means of articulating same-sex desire by nineteenth-century historiographers such as Burckhardt, Pater, and Symonds, see Fisher, Will, “A Hundred Years of Queering the Renaissance,” in Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, ed. Nardizzi, Vin, Guy-Bray, Stephen, and Stockton, Will (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 13–40Google Scholar.

20. Wilde, , “The English Renaissance of Art,” in Miscellanies, in First Collected Edition, ed. Ross, (London: Methuen, 1908), 13: 241–78, at 265Google Scholar.

21. Ibid., 268.

22. Worth, 39.

23. See Marshall, Gail, “Introduction,” in Victorian Shakespeare, vol. 1: Theatre, Drama and Performance, ed. Marshall, Gail and Poole, Adrian (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1–12, at 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Wilde, “Olivia at the Lyceum,” Dramatic Review, 30 May 1885, reprinted in Selected Journalism, 53–6, at 54.

25. On Shakespeare's many sources and textual borrowings, see Bullough, Geoffrey, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–75)Google Scholar.

26. According to Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist,” for instance, “every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious effort.” See Wilde, “The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks upon the Importance of Doing Nothing: A Dialogue,” reprinted in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 4: Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Guy, Josephine M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 123–206, at 143Google Scholar.

27. According to W. B. Yeats, Wilde called Pater's Renaissance, which he had read as an undergraduate and which is arguably the single most important source for his aesthetic theories, “my golden book.” See Yeats, W. B., Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1950), 130Google Scholar. Wilde reviewed Symonds's Renaissance in Italy in 1886 and Pater's Imaginary Portraits in 1887.

28. Wilde, Duchess of Padua, 29. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.

29. I borrow this description from Worth, 46.

30. Stokes, John, “Wilde's World: Oscar Wilde and the Theatrical Journalism of the 1880s,” in Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, ed. Bristow, Joseph (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 41–58, at 51Google Scholar.

31. Sofer, Andrew, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. See Rayner, Alice, Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomenology of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 74Google Scholar.

33. See Marcus, Sharon, “Salome!! Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, and the Drama of Celebrity,” PMLA 126.4 (2011): 999–1021, at 1018CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. This, of course, is a pattern that continues throughout Wilde's career as a playwright, as the later titles Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, Salome, and the fragmentary La Sainte Courtisane and A Wife's Tragedy attest.

35. Koestenbaum, Wayne, “Wilde's Divas and the Pathos of the Gay Page,” Southwest Review 77.1 (1992): 101–8, at 104Google Scholar.

36. See, e.g., Koestenbaum, Wayne, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon, 1993), 110Google Scholar.

37. Anderson is perhaps best known to theatre history for her 1887 performance (which Wilde reviewed) in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Her career in London was successful but relatively brief, and she retired from the stage in 1889. Her 1896 memoir A Few Memories (London: Osgood, McIlvaine) omits any reference to The Duchess of Padua and the then-disgraced and imprisoned Oscar Wilde.

38. MS Wilde W6721 M2 D829, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. The MS was dispersed after the sale of Wilde's property following his 1895 bankruptcy; another portion is held in the Eccles Bequest at the British Library.

39. Oscar Wilde to Mary Anderson, 23 March 1883, in Complete Letters, 202–3 (my italics).

40. Oscar Wilde to Mary Anderson, September 1882, in ibid., 181.

41. Wilde quoted in Sherard, Robert Harborough, The Real Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, [1916]), 235Google Scholar.

42. Oscar Wilde to Mary Anderson, 23 March 1883, in Complete Letters, 197.

43. See Wilde, “Henry the Fourth at Oxford,” Dramatic Review, 23 May 1885, reprinted in Selected Journalism, 50–3, at 51.

44. Wilde, “English Renaissance of Art,” 258.

45. Oscar Wilde to Mary Anderson, 23 March 1883, in Complete Letters, 197.

46. Guy and Small, however, discern a less than confident playwright in what Wilde called his “Titan” of a letter. According to them, “the letter is an anxious attempt to ‘sell’ the play and discloses a deep lack of confidence on Wilde's behalf.” See Guy and Small, Oscar Wilde's Profession, 100.

47. Stokes, John, “‘Shopping in Byzantium’: Oscar Wilde as Shakespeare Critic,” in Victorian Shakespeare, vol. 1: Theatre, Drama and Performance, ed. Marshall, and Poole, , 178–91, at 180Google Scholar.

48. Oscar Wilde to Mary Anderson, 23 March 1883, in Complete Letters, 200.

49. Anderson quoted in Wilde, Complete Letters, 203.

50. Robert Harborough Sherard, Wilde's close friend in Paris and later his biographer, records the playwright's bizarre reaction to Anderson's telegrammed rejection: “Wilde opened it and read the disappointing news without giving the slightest sign of chagrin or annoyance. He tore a tiny strip off the blue form, rolled it up into a pellet, and put it into his mouth.” See Sherard, 236. Yet again, the playwright is dining on the Duchess.

51. Godwin had also decorated the interior of Oscar and Constance Wilde's Chelsea house in 1884. See Gere, 97–101.

52. See Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” first published in Wilde, Intentions (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1891)Google Scholar, reprinted in the Oxford Complete Works, 4: 207–28, at 216.

53. Wilde, “As You Like It at Coombe House,” Dramatic Review, 6 June 1885, reprinted in Selected Journalism, 56–8, at 57–8.

54. See Stokes, “Wilde's World,” 43.

55. Donohue, Joseph, “E. W. Godwin's Failed Production of The Duchess of Padua,” The Wildean 30 (January 2007): 36–44, at 40Google Scholar.

56. Ibid., 42.

57. Oscar Wilde to Mary Anderson, September 1882, in Complete Letters, 181.

58. Anonymous review quoted in Beckson, Karl, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 89Google Scholar.

59. Oscar Wilde to Mary Anderson, 23 March 1883, in Complete Letters, 202.

60. Anonymous review quoted in Beckson, 87.

61. See [Edward Robert Bulwer-]Lytton, “Miss Anderson's Juliet,” The Nineteenth Century 16.84 (December 1884): 879–900, at 880.

62. Ibid., 883.

63. Ibid., 886 n. 1.

64. Wilde, “Truth of Masks,” 224–5.

65. Wilde, “Shakespeare on Scenery,” Dramatic Review, 14 March 1885, reprinted in Selected Journalism, 44–7, at 45–6.

66. On the journalistic debates over the “archaeology craze” in 1880s theatre, see Stokes, “Wilde's World,” 41–58.

67. Wilde, “The Winter's Tale at the Lyceum” [1887], reprinted in Mason, Stuart, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), 44Google Scholar.

68. See Orgel, Stephen, The Authentic Shakespeare, and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2002), 256Google Scholar.

69. Anderson, A Few Memories, 249, 248.

70. Wilde, “Henry the Fourth at Oxford,” 51.

71. See Orgel, 256.

72. Oscar Wilde to Henry Irving, 30 December 1888, in Complete Letters, 378. For an extended discussion of Wilde's response to this production and to Ellen Terry's famous Lady Macbeth costume, see Stokes, “ ‘Shopping in Byzantium.’ ”

73. Schoch, Richard W., Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4Google Scholar.

74. Wilde, “Truth of Masks,” 222.

75. Wilde does, however, observe in “Hamlet at the Lyceum” (1885) that “the Player Queen should have come in boy's attire to Elsinore.” See Wilde, Selected Journalism, 50.

76. Wilde, “Henry the Fourth at Oxford,” 51–2.

77. Sofer, 3.

78. On the linkages between historical theatrical productions and the nineteenth-century discourse and practice of antiquarianism, see Schoch, chaps. 2 (55–80) and 3 (81–112).

79. The history of aestheticism and the role of the museum in Victorian culture are deeply entwined. The design reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century, for example, led to the creation of the South Kensington (1857; renamed Victoria and Albert, 1899) Museum, a repository defined by eclecticism and aesthetic beauty whose Cast Courts displayed reproductions of ancient artifacts for educative purposes. See Burton, Anthony, Vision and Accident: The Story of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London: V&A Publications, 1999)Google Scholar; and Kreigel, Lara, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80. Pater, Walter, “Romanticism,” Macmillan's Magazine 35 (November 1876): 64–70, at 64Google Scholar.

81. Wilde, “Truth of Masks,” 226.

82. Wilde, “English Renaissance of Art,” 251.