Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-mp689 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T20:33:28.763Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Dandy and the Dowager: Oscar Wilde and Audience Resistance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Joel Kaplan  and
Sheila Stowell
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Oscar Wilde was punished not for failing to amuse the high society audiences for which he wrote, but for offending that society's sexual attitudes. Ironically, as Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell point out, his death transformed him ‘from a criminal outcast to a figure both redeemed and bankable’. For those who wished to exploit his theatrical legacy, the problems arose first of sufficiently dissociating the plays from what was perceived as their author's irredeemable behaviour – and then of finding a theatrical language to make the ridiculing of Victorian virtues risible for a society which had settled into the more relaxed moral corsetry of the Edwardians. Here, the authors take two contrasting cases in which audience reaction was decisive – the failure in 1913 of the attempt to dramatize Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by converting it into a moral tract; and the process by which The Importance of Being Earnest, after a few attempts to render it timeless, became firmly pinned down in its period – and so a play at which audiences could safely laugh, confident they were no longer themselves the butts of the jokes. Joel Kaplan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include (with Sheila Stowell) Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes and (edited with Michael Booth) The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage. Sheila Stowell is Senior Research Fellow in Drama at the University of Birmingham, and the author of A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , November 1999 , pp. 318 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes and References

1. In an earlier form this paper was read at the William Andrews Clark Library at UCLA in March 1999. We are grateful to the Clark Library for the financial support that has enabled us to pursue our research as Clark Library Fellows.

2. The following introduction draws upon Kaplan, J., ‘Wilde on the Stage’, in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Raby, P. (Cambridge, 1997), p. 249–75Google Scholar.

3. For a full stage history of Wilde's Salome, including its realization in other media, see Tydeman, William and Price, Steven, Salome (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar.

4. Tellegen's, autobiography, Women Have Been Kind (London, 1932)Google Scholar, while a sensational catalogue of his sexual exploits and bizarre adventures, provides a disappointingly slim account of his stage career.

5. Dyall had appeared as Merriman in the St. James's premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest almost two decades earlier. It is his account that provides us with the most vivid first night record of the audience's response to Jack Worthing's long Act II entrance in mourning.

6. See Sinfield, Alan, ‘“Effeminacy” and “Femininity”: Sexual Poltics in Wilde's Comedies’, Modern Drama, XXXVII, No. 1 (1994), p. 34–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement (London, 1994).

7. After the war Goulding emigrated to the USA, where he became a highly successful Hollywood director. His best-known films, Grand Hotel (1934) and Dark Victory (1941), confirmed his reputation as ‘an expert handler of actresses [including Bette Davis and Joan Crawford] in romantic melodrama’. See Thomson, David, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (London, 1994)Google Scholar. We are grateful to Steve Nallon for information about Goulding's later career.

8. The observation is particularly ironic in view of Grein's own miscalculation of public sentiment in his disastrous revival of Salome five years later. For accounts of Grein's production, including the ensuing libel trial, which beggared both Grein and his Salome, Maude Allan, see Kettle, Michael, Salome's Last Veil (London, 1977)Google Scholar; and Hoare, Philip, Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (London, 1997)Google Scholar.

9. In Tellegen's memoirs the affair is cryptically truncated. After congratulating himself on filling the Vaudeville Theatre with ‘the glittering aristocracy of London’, he observes merely that he ‘lost some money there’ (p. 273).

10. Gielgud, John, Stage Directions (London, 1963), p. 78–84Google Scholar.