Department of English

Rediscovering Beatrice and Bianca: A Study of Oscar Wilde’s Tragedies The Duchess of Padua (1883) and A Florentine Tragedy (1894)

Minon Alexandra Weber Master’s Thesis Literature Spring, 2020 Supervisor: Giles Whiteley

Abstract

Towards the end of the 19th century Oscar Wilde wrote the four society plays that would become his most famous dramatical works: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The plays combined characteristic Wildean witticisms with cunning social criticism of Victorian society, using stereotypical characters such as the dandy, the fallen woman and the “ideal” woman to mock the double moral and strict social expectations of Victorian society. These plays, and to an extent also Wilde’s symbolist drama Salomé (1891), have been the object of a great deal of scholarly interest, with countless studies conducted on them from various angles and theoretical perspectives. Widely under-discussed, however, are Wilde’s two Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, The Duchess of Padua (1883) and A Florentine Tragedy (1894). This thesis therefore sets out to explore The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy in order to gain a broader understanding of Wilde’s forgotten dramatical works, while also rediscovering two of Wilde’s most transgressive female characters— Beatrice and Bianca. Challenging traditional ideas of gender and female sexuality, Beatrice and Bianca can be read as proto-feminist figures who continually act transgressively, using their voice and agency to stand up against patriarchy and asserting their rights to experience their lives on their own terms. Through an in-depth study of these plays, this thesis will demonstrate that Wilde’s Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, with their strong, modern female characters Beatrice and Bianca deserve greater critical attention on a par with the extensive scholarship on Wilde’s well-known dramatical works.

Keywords: Oscar Wilde; Victorian Literature; Drama; 19th Century Literature; A Florentine Tragedy; The Duchess of Padua; Elizabethan Drama; Jacobean Drama; Renaissance Drama; Theatre

List of Abbreviations

Collins Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, intro. by Merlin Holland, Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994.

CW V The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume V: Plays: 1: The Duchess Of Padua, Salome: Drame en un Acte, Salome: Tragedy in One Act, ed. by Joseph Donohue, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

CW VII The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume VII: Journalism II, ed. by John Stokes and Mark Turner, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

CW IX The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume IX: Plays: 2: Lady Lancing (The Importance of Being Earnest), ed. by Joseph Donohue, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

DG The Picture of Dorian Gray, in Oscar Wilde: The Major Works, ed. by Isobel Murray, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

HD The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Rupert Hart-Davis, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1962.

Murray Oscar Wilde: The Major Works, ed. by Isobel Murray, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Raby The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. by Peter Raby, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

I quote The Duchess of Padua and Salomé from Donohue’s edition, A Florentine Tragedy from the Collins edition, The Picture of Dorian Gray from Murray’s edition and Wilde’s other plays from Raby’s edition as appropriate, by act, scene and line number. Poetry by Oscar Wilde is cited by line number to Murray’s edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………………..……1

Historical Context Wilde and Women……………………………………………………….….….4 The Society Plays and Salomé……………………………………...…………12 Genre…………………………………………………………………………17

The Plays The Duchess of Padua—Beatrice…………………………….………………21 A Florentine Tragedy—Bianca………………………………….……………38

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...49

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………52

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Introduction

Born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland, Oscar Wilde grew up to become one of the most famous writers and playwrights of his century. Today, 120 years after his death, he still continues to fascinate readers and scholars all over the world. But if Wilde has never really gone out of fashion, recent work after the neo-historical turn has sought to situate Wilde firmly as a product of his time. The late 19th century was, after all, a time of incredible change. The repressive moral strictures that had previously separated men and women, confining women to the domesticity of the home while men ruled the public world, were challenged by modern, radical ideas about gender equality. For instance, during the period, the New Woman ideal emerged, inspiring women to be independent and to pursue careers, even if traditional patriarchal ideas were still in majority. While Wilde was an established writer and poet by the turn of the century, publishing his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890, and famous for his clever wit and flamboyant style, it was during this same period towards the end of the century, that he wrote the four society plays that would become his most famous dramatical works: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). However, he had already written two earlier plays: Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880) and The Duchess of Padua (1883), both of which were largely unsuccessful. Furthermore, Wilde published his biblical symbolist drama Salomé in 1891, and had started writing on a La Sainte Courtisane in 1894, a play similar in style and setting to Salomé of which only a fragment has survived. Additionally, Wilde worked on three other unfinished plays:

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A Florentine Tragedy (1894), A Wife’s Tragedy, and Love Is Law. Of these less well- known plays, two in particular, his Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, present interesting figures of strong transgressive women which compare with Wilde’s more famous female characters, who have been widely analysed, while these other women have been left under-discussed. This essay will begin to rectify that gap in the critical heritage. After more than a century of studying Wilde and his works from various angles and theoretical perspectives, the scholarly interest remains immense. Numerous studies have been conducted on The Picture of Dorian Gray, and on Wilde’s poetry and essays. Furthermore, his society plays, and to an extent Salomé, have been the objects of several extensive research projects and books. Sos Eltis (1996) has written extensively on the society plays, as has Kerry Powell (1990). Also of significance, are the Oxford University editions of Wilde’s plays in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, edited by Joseph Donohue, the only fully annotated, complete collection of Wilde’s works, including exhaustive introductions and commentary to each work. Another valuable study is Eleanor Fitzsimons’s Wilde’s Women (2016), which examines the relationships Wilde had with women during his lifetime, illustrating their profound influence on his life and works. However, despite the plethora of research, Wilde’s two tragedies The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy have remained largely unexplored. A number of scholars have described them briefly, an even smaller number have treated them in detail, this in spite of the fact that Donohue’s 2013 volume in the Complete Works includes the first ever scholarly edition of The Duchess of Padua. Regenia Gagnier explored A Florentine Tragedy in an appendix to her book Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (1986), in which she analyses the play from an economic perspective, an angle she returns to in her article “Aesthetics and Economics in A Florentine Tragedy” from 1994. Sherry D Lee indirectly explores A Florentine Tragedy in her article “A Florentine Tragedy, or woman as mirror” from 2006, in which she studies the homoerotic subtext of Zemlinsky’s opera Eine florentinische Tragödie, based on Wilde’s play. Katharine Worth includes The Duchess of Padua in her book Oscar Wilde (1983), and while Worth acknowledges and describes the Duchess’s actions, she does not in detail analyse the rebellious transgressiveness of her character. Instead, Worth emphasises the play’s “filmic quality” (48) and visual sense, which she discusses in an intriguing analysis of the play’s colour schemes, archaeological inspirations and musical sounds. Also interested in the theatrical archaeology of the

Weber 3 play is Gregory Mackie, who treats The Duchess of Padua in his article “The Modern Idea under an Antique Form: Aestheticism and Theatrical Archaeology in Oscar Wilde’s Duchess of Padua” (2012), which focuses on the play’s historical costume and stage design. However, none of these studies focuses exclusively on the female characters in these two plays. Throughout the oeuvre of Oscar Wilde, we find several strong-minded, radical women who challenge traditional gender norms, and many of them, particularly in the society plays, have been analysed in various studies throughout the years (for instance Powell 1990, pp.14-32; Eltis 1996, pp.130-169).Yet, Beatrice and Bianca, the two transgressive women in The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy, have not been given a great deal of scholarly attention. I argue that Beatrice and Bianca deserve to be considered alongside Wilde’s other transgressive characters, such as Salomé, for example. Both The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy are very modern plays, despite their Renaissance setting, and their female characters, Beatrice and Bianca, both demonstrate radical ideas regarding womanhood and sexuality, and are explicit in their reactions against patriarchy. Exploring these two plays allows us to broaden our understanding of Wilde’s largely forgotten dramatical works, while also shedding light on two of Wilde’s broadly overlooked female characters. This thesis consists of two parts. The first part, divided into three subsections, will establish the historical context in which The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy were written. In the first subsection on “Wilde and Women”, I describe the situation for women in the 19th century, before examining Wilde’s relationship to several women that had an influence on him, as well as his work with the magazine The Woman’s World, demonstrating that Wilde knew a number of women who advocated for the rights of women, and invited several of them to publish their texts in The Woman’s World. Furthermore, Wilde’s work with The Woman’s World radically changed the magazine’s philosophy, attempting to be, in Wilde’s words, “a magazine that aims at being the organ of women of intellect, culture and position” (HD, 203). In the second subsection, “The Society Plays and Salomé”, the essay then turns to consider Wilde’s society plays and his symbolist drama Salomé, upon which a great deal more has been written than his Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, focusing on previous research on these plays which have broached the question of the role of women in society and Wilde’s work. Lastly, in the third subsection on “Genre”, I consider the types of genres that were prevalent at London theatres at the time and explore the textual

Weber 4 models for A Florentine Tragedy and The Duchess of Padua, in order to consider precedents for Wilde’s treatment of women in his plays. The second part of the thesis then considers the two plays in detail, starting with The Duchess of Padua. Finally, I summarize my findings in the conclusion of this thesis. Throughout this thesis, I engage not only with other scholarly voices on the topic of Oscar Wilde’s plays, but also with letters written by Wilde, considering them a significant source of information regarding Wilde’s creative process during the period of the writing of these plays. I set out to demonstrate how the female characters in The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy, Beatrice and Bianca, manifest transgressive behaviour and use their agency in radical, nonconforming ways.

Historical Context

Wilde and Women Throughout his life, Oscar Wilde was influenced and inspired by several free-spirited women who challenged the narrow role given to women in Victorian society. By exploring some of the friendships and relationships that Wilde had with women, we gain an insight into the milieu of strong women that informed his life and works. In Victorian England, being a woman meant following strict rules about what was appropriate in society and not. Coventry Patmore’s canonical poem “The Angel in the House”, first published in 1854, became a reference for the ideal Victorian woman, presenting a docile woman who is devoted to her husband and children. Furthermore, the poem illustrates the Victorian idea of separate spheres, which supports the concept that women and men are to be separated in their daily lives, women belonging to the private, domestic sphere of the home, and men belonging to the public life. John Ruskin, with whom Wilde studied at Oxford and who was a formative influence on his early thoughts, explored the same theme in his famous dramatic monologue Sesame and Lilies (1865). There, Ruskin promotes the view that woman’s place is in the domestic sphere of the home, where she is “protected from all danger and temptation” (Ruskin 2002, 77), whereas men belong to the public world, where they “must encounter all peril and trial” (Ruskin 2002, 77). Furthermore, the poem makes a distinction between the powers of the two genders, man’s power being described as “active, progressive, defensive” (Ruskin 2002, 77), whereas woman’s power is “for

Weber 5 rule, not for battle” (Ruskin 2002, 77). The man’s role is to use his intellect and inventiveness to create and discover, fulfilling the role of the “doer”. The woman, on the other hand, should use her intellect “for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision” (Ruskin 2002, 77). A great deal of emphasis is put on the woman’s moral and peaceful personality: “She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise—wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side” (Ruskin 2002, 77). Regarding education, the poem suggests that it should be the same for both sexes, however it needs to be directed in different ways. Whereas men should establish a foundational and progressive command of their education, women “ought to know whatever her husband is likely to know” (Ruskin 2002, 77), but in a general way, for “daily and helpful use”, which “may enable her to sympathize in her husband’s pleasures, and in those of his best friends” (Ruskin 2002, 77). Women, made to “be the helpmate of man” (Ruskin 2002, 70), were thus confined to their homes, while men ruled the public space, which included commerce, politics and careers. The ideal marriage, then, was one where the woman was supposed to assist her husband in his interests and engagements and, at the end of the day, welcome the husband home to a peaceful sanctuary after spending the day working in the public sphere. Despite the repressive role of the “Angel in the House”, 19th century middle-class women were allowed education to a certain degree, but the purpose of this education was not self- development, but rather to improve their suitability for marriage, or to become better wives and mothers. Later in the century, when education reforms were established, the situation for middle and upper-class women improved when high-quality universities like Oxford and Cambridge started to allow women to take part in higher education. Still, educational opportunities for working-class women would remain limited into the 20th century (Newnham College, n.d.). The situation for women improved further with the Married Women’s Property act of 1882, which allowed women the right to own property as a feme sole (National Archives, n.d.), something that Wilde’s mother, Jane Wilde, considered “a new era in English and Irish social life” in which women would no longer enter marriage “as a bond slave, disenfranchised of all rights of her fortune” (qtd. in Powell and Raby 2013, 389). Changes like these contributed to the fin de siècle new ideal for femininity and womanhood: the “New Woman”. Challenging the repressive strictures under which women had been—and were still held, the New Woman strived to be free-thinking, independent and sharp. Perhaps most radically, the

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New Woman saw other opportunities for her future than marriage and motherhood, as presented in, for example, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) by Ella Hepworth Dixon, who would later succeed Wilde as editor for The Woman’s World. Better understanding the various “New” women and proto-feminists that Wilde encountered during his life can help us when attempting to unpack the strong female characters of Beatrice and Bianca in his Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies. The foremost and first influence on Wilde from his youth was his mother, Jane. As Fitzsimons argues, “without Jane there would be no Oscar as we know him” (2016, 16). Jane Wilde was a respected writer and translator of literature, fluent in various languages and held an interest in ethnology and the folklore and traditions of Ireland (Fitzsimons 2016, 32). She loved being a mother, and initially felt torn between her deep admiration of her children and her passion for politics and literature, expressing surprise at her own feelings after the birth of her firstborn: “How is it I am enthralled by these tiny hands? Was there a woman’s nature in me after all?” (qtd. in Fitzsimons 2016, 34). Nevertheless, she declared that there was more beyond the domestic role as a mother that she still wished to achieve: “I have not fulfilled my destiny yet”, she claimed, “Gruel and the nursery cannot end me” (qtd. in Fitzsimons 2016, 34). She was passionate about politics, especially regarding Ireland’s independence and women’s issues. In the Swedish writer and feminist Charlotte “Lotten” von Kraemer, Lady Wilde found an equal, and the two would come to form a strong friendship. Briefly considering this Swedish context puts Jane’s views, placed within British social norms, into stark relief. In Sweden, Von Kraemer founded the highly respected literary academy “Samfundet De Nio” (The Nine Society), whose primary goal, to this day, is to promote Swedish literature, peace and women’s issues (Svenska Dagbladet 2006), and she supported the Country Association for Women’s Suffrage with major funds. Jane Wilde was greatly influenced by Lotten, and the friendship introduced her to other prominent and free thinking Swedish women, such as Rosalie Olivecrona, who co- founded Tidskrift för Hemmet (Journal for the Home), the first women’s magazine in Sweden, “devoted to general literature and the advancement of women politically and intellectually” (Fitzsimons 2016, 40). In her travel book Driftwood from Scandinavia, Jane Wilde reflected upon how advanced gender equality seemed in Sweden: it appears that they are now almost on an equality with men as regards to educational advantages. The franchise, certainly, is denied as yet in Sweden, as in England; but all professions are now open to female intellect and energy, and many of the government offices: so there are

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thousands of ladies at the present time in Sweden who are not only self- supporting, but in the receipt of good and assured incomes by the exercise of their various talents. (Wilde 1884, 201) In Britain, however, the situation was wholly different: “Intellect, as such, is the least honoured of all God’s gifts in England, especially literary power when manifested by a woman” (Wilde 1884, 202). Inspired by Lotte, Jane formed her own literary society, aiming to “agglomerate together all the thinking minds of Dublin” (Fitzsimons 2016, 41). The weekly conversazione, as she called the soirées, were an immediate success and the Wilde house at 1 Merrion Square became a hub for writers, journalists, artists and other intellectuals, “the first, and for a long time the only, bohemian house in Dublin” (Fitzsimons 2016, 41). Apart from her interest of literature and women’s issues, Jane was a passionate Irish nationalist and took part in the revolutionary Young Ireland movement, fighting for independence from England. Under the pen name Speranza she published Poems (1864), which included one of her most famous poems “The Famine Year”, a protest against food being exported to England while the potato famine of the 1840’s claimed countless of lives in Ireland (British Library, n.d.). Wilde admired his mother’s passion and talent for politics, writing about her in 1881 that “I don’t think that age has dimmed the fire and enthusiasm of that pen which set the young Irelanders in a blaze” (HD, 10). She was devoted to her children, predicting about little Oscar that “he will turn out something wonderful” (Fitzsimons 2016, 42). They had much in common, such as their passion for language and writing, politics and socializing. What is more, they seemed to have been similar to one another in spirit. Fitzsimons notes that Lady Wilde’s way of speaking “was like fireworks—brilliant, whimsical and flashy”, and adds that “In time, Oscar’s conversation would also be likened to fireworks” (Fitzsimons 2016, 42). Undoubtedly, Oscar was greatly influenced by his mother. If the younger Wilde would have gained a keen interest in women’s rights through his proto-feminist mother, Wilde the writer would have encountered new voices during his time in London. In 1886, Oscar Wilde took on the position as editor of the magazine The Lady’s World. His time as editor for the magazine would be brief, yet his reconstruction during the one year in charge would alter the magazine entirely. He began by changing the magazine’s name from The Lady’s World, to The Woman’s World, as he found that the former name had “a certain taint of vulgarity around it” and would therefore be “extremely misleading” (HD, 203). He explained that while the

Weber 8 former name “is quite applicable to the magazine in its present state; it will not be applicable to a magazine that aims at being the organ of women of intellect, culture and position” (HD, 203). Wilde saw a gap in the British periodical market, as, he declared in a letter, “there is at present no such magazine in England, though America can boast of many” (HD, 199). During his tour of America, he had been greatly impressed by American women and the active role they had in society, especially in literature and the arts. This he mentioned in the first edition of the magazine, in his own column called “Literary and Other Notes”: Nothing in the United States struck me more than the fact that the remarkable intellectual progress of that country is very largely due to the efforts of American women, who edit many of the most powerful magazines and newspapers, take part in the discussion of every question of public interest, and exercise an important influence upon the growth and tendencies of literature and art. (CW VII, 9) Wilde’s aim with the magazine, then, was to widen its range of content, dealing with not only “what women wear, but with what they think, and what they feel” (HD, 194). Formerly a magazine revolving around fashion, The Woman’s World would instead publish articles on subjects such as literature, art and modern life (see for instance Wilde’s statements in three of his columns: CW VII, 5, 10, 71) Furthermore, Wilde wanted to broaden the audience, hoping that men too would read it and would want to contribute to it, stressing that “artists have sex but art has none” (HD, 195). He also planned to include news from the university colleges that allowed women to study, hoping that members would write articles about their experience, or, “on the attitude of Universities towards women from the earliest times down to the present—a subject never fully treated of” (HD, 196). To reconstruct the magazine into a more serious, intellectual version, Wilde had the fashion section moved to the end of the magazine, making literature, art, travel and social studies the primary content. In order to succeed with his vision for the magazine, Wilde needed respectable contributors to write the articles. A statement in the first edition of The Woman’s World informed the readers that contributions would “appear from the pens of those best qualified to speak of the literary, charitable and social movements which have tended so greatly in recent years to the advancement of English women” (qtd. in Clayworth 1996, 93). Wilde contacted several prominent men and women, even Queen Victoria, asking if they would be interested in contributing to the magazine. Amongst the contributors were many suffragists, and many women who would be considered New Women, for example

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Wilde’s close friend Helena Sickert (later Mrs. Swanwick). Sickert was a prominent suffragist and became the first president of the Women’s International League in 1915 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1931 (HD, 60). With a degree from Girton College, Cambridge, Sickert was a writer, lecturer, delegate for the British Government and journalist passionate about peace activism, feminism and social justice. While she became a longstanding contributor to The Manchester Guardian, which supported the campaign for women’s suffrage (Fitzsimons 2016, 78), her journalistic debut was an article for The Woman’s World on “The Evolution of Economics” (HD, 207). Oscar often visited the Sickerts in London, and Helena mentioned him at several occasions in her memoir, I Have Been Young (1935), in which she describes their friendship: “He discussed books with me and gave me my first volume of poetry, Selected Poems of Matthew Arnold, marking his favourites” (HD, 60). Wilde had inscribed the volume, “Nellie Sickert from her friend Oscar Wilde 2 October 1879” (HD, 60). Later, Helena would defend Wilde during the critical coverage against him in the English press (HD, 110). Another remarkable “New Woman” that Wilde encouraged to contribute to The Woman’s World was Amy Levy, who in 1879 became the first Jewish woman to attend Newnham College at Cambridge University (Hetherington and Valman 2010, 2). At a very young age, she demonstrated profound talent as a writer and poet, and was described by Wilde as “a mere girl, but a girl of genius” (qtd. in Fitzsimons 2016, 167). In “Xantippe”, Levy’s dramatic monologue from 1880, we recognize a clearly feminist perspective, articulated through the fiery voice of Socrates’s wife Xantippe. It is an ardent appeal for women’s education, a hopeless yearning for learning and intellectual appreciation, perhaps best expressed in the lines, My soul which yearned for knowledge, for a tongue That should proclaim the stately mysteries Of this fair world, and of the holy gods. (Levy 1891, ll. 42-44) Xantippe questions why her thirst for knowledge is seen as a sin, when: the gods who fashion us have given us such promptings (ll. 50-51) In awe of seeing people admiring Socrates for his wisdom, Xantippe tells of how she married Socrates in the hopes of being included into the group of male philosophers, only to find out that even marriage would not grant her access to the male sphere of intellectual debate: ‘Twas only that the high philosopher,

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Pregnant with noble theories and great thoughts, Deigned not to stoop to touch so slight a thing As the fine fabric of a woman’s brain. (ll. 127-130) In despair and humiliated, she realizes the hopelessness of her dreams, and returns to being a “household vessel” (l. 135), telling the reader: I spun until, methinks, I spun away The soul from out of my body, the high thoughts From out of my spirit. (ll. 263-265) Years later, Levy revisited a similar theme in an article for The Woman’s World. In “Women and Club Life”, one of several stories she published in the magazine, she discussed how women were gaining greater access to clubs previously reserved exclusively for men. This, she considered crucial, as social clubs were well known to be effective locations for maintaining professional connections and for making business. Levy argues for the social opportunities of those clubs from which women had been excluded: “How many a valuable acquaintance has been improved, how many an important introduction obtained in that convenient neutral territory of club-land!” (Levy 1888, 364). She further stressed the negative consequences exclusion had upon women’s careers: “What women engaged in art, in literature, in science, has not felt the drawbacks of her isolated position?” (366). She then targeted the difficulties women faced when entering the male public sphere, and how the established gender inequality had given men a tremendous vantage point in the form of social networks: She has had to fight her way unknown and singlehanded; to compete with a guild of craftsmen all more or less known to one another, having easy access to one another, bound together by innumerable links of acquaintance and intercourse. It is all uphill work with her, unless she be somebody’s sister, or somebody’s wife, or unless she have the power and the means of setting in motion an elaborate social machinery to obtain what every average follower of his calling has come to regard as a right. (Levy 1888, 366) Levy’s words display just how difficult it was for women to claim their space in a male world, having no connections of their own. Her article is a cutting criticism of patriarchy, but nevertheless also a celebration of the small, but significant progress of allowing women the right to frequent clubs. And in reply to those critical of the ways in which access to clubs would demean a woman’s character, Levy replied: “There is no reason to suppose that because she is a member of a club a woman will develop the selfishness of her husband and brother” (Levy 1888, 367).

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Another significant woman in Wilde’s life was Ada Leverson, whom he gave the nickname “Sphinx”. From their correspondence, it seems as though Wilde felt that he found an equal in Ada, admiring both her style of writing and her sharp mind. At one point, he suggested she collect her “wonderful, witty, delightful sketches—so slight, so suggestive, so full of esprit and intellectual sympathy” (HD, 343). Indeed, Ada was a talented writer of sketches, and wrote numerous parodies of contemporary plays and literature. On several occasions she included Wilde’s works and characters in her pastiches, for example in “The advisability of Not Being Brought up in a Handbag: A Trivial Tragedy for Wonderful People”, an obvious parody of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (HD, 383). She also transformed Wilde’s poem “The Sphinx” into humorous prose for the magazine Punch, titled “The Minx”, in which she created a dandified version of the Sphinx, one who can read hieroglyphs fluently but never does, as they “are not in the least amusing” (Leverson 1894, 33). From a letter Wilde wrote to Ada, we learn that he found the piece “delightful” (HD, 357), and, regarding the Sphinx he added, “I am afraid she really was a minx after all. You are the only Sphinx” (HD, 357). Ada was a great inspiration to Wilde, not only as a friend, but also for his works. Fitzsimons notes that Ada “almost certainly inspired Mrs Allonby, a female dandy and one of the wittiest and most recognizably Wildean characters in any of his plays” (Fitzsimons 2016, 247). Her style of writing was modern for its day, cunning and bold, or, in Wilde’s words, “brilliant and delightful and dangerous” (HD, 347). Robert Ross, Wilde’s close friend and literary executor, described Ada as “a friend to whom Oscar Wilde owed, and gave, the homage of his intellect” (qtd. in Fitzsimons 2016, 248). Their strong bond continued through the difficult times of Wilde’s trial and arrest, and during his imprisonment in Holloway in 1895, he expressed his profound gratefulness to Ada: I hear that wonderful things are being done for me—by people of noble beautiful souls and natures. Of course I cannot thank you. Words may not bear such burdens. I cannot even try. I merely say that you will always remain in a niche of a heart—half broken already—as a most dear image of all that in life has love and pity in it. (HD, 392) After the trials and Wilde’s incarceration, the two would never meet in person again. However, they kept in contact through letters and telegrams. Poignantly, Ada’s last published work was a collection of letters she received from Wilde, called Letters to The Sphinx (1930), including three essays of reminiscence.

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The women in Wilde’s life all have in common strong, intellectual minds, free thinking spirits, and quick wit. Through their works, engagement in women’s questions, and proto-feminist ideas, they belonged to a group of 19th century women who challenged traditional gender roles. They fought for breaking the status quo, advocating for a society in which women could educate themselves and pursue professional careers outside of the repressive female sphere of the home, a society where the future for women was wider than merely marriage and childbearing. Wilde admired these traits in the women around him, from early childhood through his mother, to his adult life through the many female friendships he cultivated, both privately and professionally. Throughout his life, Wilde was immensely influenced and inspired by these women. As emphasized by Fitzsimons, “the impact of each one on the life and work of one of the most written-about men in the world is profound” (Fitzsimons 2016, xi). It is not surprising, thus, that we see inspirations of women he knew in many of his works, and, as in the plays analysed in this thesis, articulations of proto-feminist ideas and transgressive female characters. Reading about these important women in Wilde’s life helps us form a better understanding of Wilde’s motivation to create strong female characters such as Beatrice and Bianca. Undoubtedly, Wilde drew inspiration from the women he knew and their modern, often radical opinions on womanhood when he shaped these two transgressive female characters who challenge and question traditional gender norms. The women presented above all fought for the right to voice their opinions and to change the repressive role they were forced into as 19th century women. In Beatrice and Bianca, Wilde has created two fearless women who act in transgressive ways, and together with Wilde’s other strong female characters they address and highlight many of the issues that the women in Wilde’s life were passionate about.

The Society Plays and Salomé Oscar Wilde’s society plays remain incredibly famous and continue to prompt a great deal of scholarly interest, not least of all with respect to the strong roles women play in these works. Although they differ in tone and genre (melodrama through to farce), they have in common their setting in fashionable upper-class Victorian circles. Through these plays, Wilde criticised and made fun of Victorian society with its traditional manners and strict social expectations. Woven into the plots are contemporary topics

Weber 13 and conflicts, such as the separation of men and women into separate spheres, the radically modern ideal of the New Woman, Victorian morality and the ideals of marriage. Reading the women of Wilde’s society comedies and the critical heritage on these figures can help us better understand the characters of Beatrice and Bianca from his tragedies. Though the society plays are based on conventional plots and stereotypical characters such as the fallen woman, the good woman and the dandy, Wilde manipulates and subverts generic expectations, and presents to us women who attempt to transgress their gender boundaries. Wilde’s first successful play was Lady Windermere’s Fan, first performed in 1892. The plot is simple: Lady Windermere suspects that her husband is having an affair, which leads to her almost leaving her husband and child. However, she learns that her husband is in fact not being unfaithful, and, what is more, the woman that she suspected to be her husband’s lover, Mrs Erlynne, turns out to be her own mother, who abandoned her when she was an infant. Kerry Powell, who examines Wilde’s treatment of women in the society plays, names Lady Windermere’s Fan as one of the plays in which Wilde follows the melodramatic structures and generic conventions close enough that it gives extra impact when he breaks from them in the end, by “repudiating the categorical assumptions about right and wrong, sin and punishment” (Powell 1990, 21). Powell observes, that Mrs Erlynne differs from other “vagrant” mothers in plays at the time, in that she “scorns remorse” and explicitly discards one of the set scenes of the genre, that in which the mother breaks down and cries, lamenting her poor choices, “Mrs. Erlynne declines to repent her unmaternal past and, what’s more, gets away with it” (Powell 1990, 21). In Wilde’s second society play, A Woman of No Importance, Mrs. Arbuthnot, an unmarried woman with an adult son, learns that her son has been offered a position working for his biological father, which leads to a situation in which Gerald, her son, has to choose between loyalty to his mother who has raised him singlehandedly, or working for his father, who up until that point had no part in his life. Sos Eltis considers the play radical in its “interaction between human nature and the laws which seek to confine it” (Eltis 1996, 129), arguing that on the one hand the play is “a successfully sentimental play apparently pleading for greater leniency towards fallen women”, and on the other hand, that despite its clichés, such as “the vulnerable woman who becomes a victim of male depravity”, Wilde successfully “recast these conventional elements in order to question the sexual and social mores on which they were based” (1996, 96).

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Wilde’s third society play, An Ideal Husband, revolves around blackmail and political corruption, as it treats the Victorian idea of public versus private spheres. In a reversal of Victorian traditions, it is here the man who is supposed to be ideal and pure. Powell notes that An Ideal Husband was one of several plays at the time that presented the idea of the “ideal husband” and that they were contemporaneous with a heated debate within late 19th century literature and journalism, “which makes clear that time- honored ideals of marriage and relations between the sexes were being challenged as never before” (Powell 1990, 91). Similarly, Eltis concludes that it is an ambiguous play that examines “the issue of private and public morality and their relation to the contemporary debate on the role of women in society” (Eltis 1996, 130). The last of the society plays is The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), the play deemed by Eltis as Wilde’s “most frivolous, most capricious and most uniquely Wildean” (1996, 170). In contrast, Powell argues that the play is “perhaps the one most conditioned by literary precedent”, albeit, he adds, “a precedent transfigured in its rewriting” (1990, 5). Undoubtedly a farce, the play takes places both in the city and on the countryside and consists of constant epigrams and a dialogue “delightfully void of rational argument” (Eltis 1996, 170). Despite its humorous surface, however, The Importance of Being Earnest is, according to Eltis, “Wilde’s most subversive and satirical work” (1996, 171). Wilde had previously articulated the revolutionary potential of satire in “The Soul of Man under the Influence of Socialism” (1891) where he stated that burlesque and farcical comedy are “distinct forms of art”, that provide for the artist in England “very great freedom” (Collins, 1185). Wilde used that freedom in The Importance of Being Earnest, which “mocked every principle, law and custom, of the society he lived in” (Eltis 1996, 171). In my summary of these plays, I have focused in particular on the responses of two of the most percipient of Wilde’s critics, Sos Eltis and Kerry Powell. In Eltis’s Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (1996), she challenges the view of Oscar Wilde as dilettante and dandy, instead considering him a serious thinker and social critic. While Eltis studies Wilde’s society plays, as well as his first dramatic work Vera; or, The Nihilists, concentrating on Wilde’s radicalism and “in particular his anarchist, feminist, and socialist sympathies” (Eltis 1996, 5), and concludes that his society plays “subverted the conventions of the popular stage, challenged the strict morality they upheld, and offered instead a creed of understanding, sympathy, and forgiveness” (Eltis 1996, 209), she does not include discussions of

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Salomé, The Duchess of Padua or A Florentine Tragedy. Powell, for his part, sets out in Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890’s (1990) to contextualise Wilde’s plays in order to demonstrate the influence that other contemporary plays had on his writing. Moreover, he illustrates how Wilde worked with generic conventions, manipulating and reversing them, so that “what begins in cliché finishes in breaking the expectations, in paradox” (Powell 1990, 4). For Powell, Wilde’s “plays take on bold individuation, making it feel as though earlier plays by others are mere imitation of Wilde’s later successes” (Powell 1990, 4). Powell also explores Salomé in depth, observing that Wilde “detached Salomé from her biblical incarnation as a marginal passive woman and gave her an eruptive nature, swerving between violence and listless yearning” (1990, 6-7). But again, Wilde’s two Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies go largely undiscussed by Powell. As we can see, then, critics have been keen to discuss the ways in which Wilde’s women in the society plays pass comment on his contemporary moment. Likewise, numerous critics have given attention to the protagonist of Wilde’s symbolist play Salomé. Initially largely overlooked, the last 20 years or so have seen a rise in scholarly interest for the play. Salomé is in many ways a misogynistic play, with its ever-present male gaze and objectification of the female body, but we also find in it one of Wilde’s most transgressive female characters. One could read Salomé as being acutely aware of the male gaze, manipulating it so as to use it for her own gain, deriving power from misogyny and revenging it simultaneously in a most calculating way. Originally a marginalised biblical figure, Wilde transforms Salomé into a sexually transgressive, sadistic character who uses her sexuality to gain power, perhaps best illustrated through her famous “Dance of the Seven Veils”, in which she sensually dances for Herod in order to possess and kiss the decapitated head of John the Baptist, described by Hutcheon and Hutcheon: Her dance is a calculated move in a game of exchange with Herod in which she offers her body as a sensual, sexual spectacle to his eyes, in return for a promise that will fulfil both her childlike willfull stubbornness and her consuming sexual obsession to kiss the mouth of the resistant prophet. (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 1998, 14) In this light, Salomé becomes a femme fatale, aware of her allure, using men and their misogyny to get what she wants. In Salomé’s Modernity (2011), Petra Dierkes-Thrun notes this “paradoxical feminist-misogynist potential” (2011, 3), and describes the play as a mixture of “transgressive aesthetics, perverse sexuality, shocking blasphemy and

Weber 16 modern individualism” (2011, 3). Significantly, Wilde manipulates the traditional male gaze where the male observer is in control of what he sees and shifts the power instead over to the female objectified body, reversing the process so that the woman being looked at becomes the master of the observer. The play, in Powell’s words, shattered “Victorian conceptions of womanhood” by “pursuing sex for sex’s sake, without purpose or production” (1990, 34). Salomé was banned until 1931, and was then only staged infrequently (Powell 1990, 33). Alongside Eltis and Powell’s work, another essential study of Wilde’s plays is Katharine Worth’s Oscar Wilde (1983). Worth sets out to re-evaluate Wilde’s wit and comic genius which, in her words, “have always been acknowledged but often grudgingly or with an element of disparagement” (1983, 1). Furthermore, she stresses that Wilde’s plays, at the time, had “received surprisingly little critical attention” (1983, 2) and that her study would consider the plays as theatrical pieces, unlike much of the past criticism which, she observes, ”has been disguised biography” or has treated the plays as merely elements in an oeuvre (1983, 2). Worth emphasises that Wilde through his portrayal of women articulated radical ideas regarding Victorian gender roles and women’s position in society, concluding that “his first play was about a revolutionary movement and his later plays of fashionable life can all be seen as thoroughly undermining the Victorian hierarchy” (Worth 1983, 11). In her section on The Duchess of Padua, Worth describes the plot of the play and its heroine, who she considers “a victim of male tyranny” (1983, 45) and “a modern woman in spirit” (1983, 42). However, while acknowledging and describing the Duchess’s radical actions, such as killing her husband and sending Guido to prison for her own crime, Worth does not analyse the transgressiveness of these actions in depth. Worth’s main focus in her analysis of The Duchess of Padua lies instead in the visual sense of the play and the detailed staging methods Wilde had in mind for it, as Worth argues that the play demonstrates Wilde’s “grasp of the physical aspects of theatrical art even at a time when he had no experience in the theatre” (1983, 47). Worth is one of few scholars who examines The Duchess of Padua and her study is indeed a valuable contribution. However, she does not include A Florentine Tragedy in her study. So, while the question of the role of women in Wilde’s plays is widely discussed and has been dealt with by numerous critics for a long period of time and from a variety of different theoretical and critical perspectives, there is a lack of research on The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy and the women in them.

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Genre Wilde’s two Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy, were conceived and composed in fin de siècle London, and so it is of interest to consider the theatrical traditions upon which Wilde replied when writing these two plays, as well as how Wilde might have expected his audience to engage and navigate with them. Furthermore, while there has been little extensive research on these plays, when they are mentioned, one notable feature is that critics seem to disagree as to what the genre of these plays are. Therefore, it is significant to consider the textual models that Wilde was looking at and drawing from for these plays, in order to better understand what influenced Wilde to create these two strong female characters. The theatre of the 1890’s was largely characterized by comedy, farce and musical entertainment. These categories accounted for 50 percent of the numbers of productions, and 60 percent of the performances at the approximately thirty London theatres known as “The West End” (Wearing 1977, 323). Tragedies, on the other hand, accounted for only two percent of all productions, and a mere one percent of all performances (Wearing 1977, 325). Noteworthy, is that the late Victorians highly appreciated contemporary drama, with plays first produced during the 1890’s completely dominating the stage, accounting for 63 percent of the total number productions and 80 percent of the number of performances (Wearing 1977, 326). Furthermore, it is to be noted, that Restoration drama was entirely neglected, while Pre- Restoration drama represented three percent of all productions and two percent of all performances. Remarkably, as Wearing notes, “apart from contemporary drama and the drama of the recent past, the average late Victorian viewed only Shakespeare, Sheridan and Goldsmith” (1977, 327). Given that we will focusing on Wilde’s two Elizabethan- Jacobean tragedies, this is a key consideration: even though his were modern plays set in this period, his audience would not have a great deal of familiarity with the canon. Indeed, only two-thirds of Shakespeare’s theatrical oeuvre were produced during the period, with The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, As You Like It and Othello being the most popular productions (Wearing 1977, 329). Plays such as Titus Andronicus, which

Weber 18 in their portrayal of feminine sexuality and gendered violence stand to a degree somewhere behind Wilde’s contributions to the genre, were not produced1. Wearing also remarks, that the Victorian theatregoers had a great deal of power and influence over which plays were produced and performed, frequently exercising “their power in the commercial theatre, either by staying away (and so forcing a piece to close), or by voicing their disapproval” (1977, 329). Another crucial aspect of the operation of the 1890’s theatre was the censorship exercised by the Lord Chamberlain. The censorship was absolute and very strict, and playwrights could often foresee what would be censored and not and could therefore adapt their works accordingly. It was partly therefore that Wilde wrote Salomé in French, as it was generally known that works in French could evade censorship more easily, and could thus get away with more risqué content (Powell 1990, 35), although, in point of fact, when the Lord Chamberlain Edward Pigott read the play, Salomé was not granted a licence for performance on the London stage. Although few scholars have analysed The Duchess of Padua in detail, when they do mention the play they seem to differ in opinion in terms of genre. It could be suggested that The Duchess of Padua is a revenge tragedy (Kohl 1989, 43, 47), which would place Beatrice in line with transgressive women like Tamora in Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus. But if so, it is not a simple revenge tragedy; as Kohl writes, “Wilde’s ambitious attempt to fuse elements of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy and the romantic drama into a great verse tragedy must be regarded as failure”, since the play “develops into a tragic love story” (1989, 47). Amongst other scholars who have expressed their views on the genre of the play are Richard Canning, who considers it a Jacobean melodrama (n.d.), Gregory Mackie, who regards it a tragedy (2012, 219) and Kerry Powell, who maintains that “its atmosphere is Jacobean and its imagery Webster’s” (1990, 9). Joseph Donohue’s description is perhaps the most detailed. He notes that The Duchess of Padua “works quite efficiently as a melodramatic construct” (CW V, 21), and further describes that “Wilde was aiming at quasi-archaic lexis, syntax and register that would place his work squarely in the faux-Elizabethan-Jacobean style, strongly dosed with melodrama”, its characters speaking “the idiosyncratic, rolling- cadenced, high-serious and partly ironic lingua franca of time-out-of-mind English tragedy (CW V, 25). Indeed, the Elizabethan and Jacobean influences are distinct, both

1See G. Harold Metz, “Stage History of Titus Andronicus” p. 159.

Weber 19 in The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy, and both plays are characterized by melodrama, often anticipating elements we would come to recognize in the society plays. While it might seem surprising for Wilde to draw inspiration from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, given the limited representation they held in the theatre of the 1890’s, Pascale Aebischer interestingly points out, that “not only the Romantics, but also the fin de siècle ‘decadents’ […] saw the Jacobeans as fellow spirits” (2010, 11). Certainly, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama inspired Wilde elsewhere. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, after the death of Sybil, Harry tells Dorian that he must think of her death as “a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur” (DG, 124-25). For fin de siècle dramatists and poets who admired the aesthetic qualities of Jacobean tragedies, Aebischer observes, it is “the very luridness of these plays that is ‘wonderful’” (Aebischer 2011, 11). Alex Murray, too, observes the appeal of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to decadent writers, pointing out that texts from those ages “seemed far more liberal and tolerant than that in which they were publishing” (2019, 488), and that those texts bore two distinctive characteristics important to the decadents, namely “spontaneity and freedom” (Murray 2019, 488). The “wonderful” luridness that Harry speaks of in The Picture of Dorian Gray is, of course, also found throughout the oeuvre of William Shakespeare, which Wilde undoubtedly used as a textual model for both The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy, so much so that Joseph Pearce comments that “sometimes it seems that the Shakespearean shades are daubed on so heavily that the Wildean touch is almost smothered completely” (2000, 108). However, as Pearce also notes, “if The Duchess of Padua is an imitation of Shakespeare, it is a very good imitation” (2000, 111), like the portrait of Mr. W.H., so convincing, in Wilde's short story of the same name. In fact, Wilde himself indicates the Shakespearean inspiration behind The Duchess of Padua in a letter to Mary Anderson, the actress he wished would play the role of the Duchess. He writes that, “suspense is immensely important for the audience: Macbeth must hesitate at the door of Duncan’s room, and Hamlet behind the praying King, and Romeo before Juliet’s body” (HD, 141), and he sought to situate the Duchess as a tragic figure in this lineage. It is evident that Wilde used similar textual models for both The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy. The similarity between the plays is evident not only in the similar settings, both plays taking place in Renaissance Italy, but the plays seem

Weber 20 to be shaped from roughly the same mould. In both plays we find a male character named Guido; Bianca in A Florentine Tragedy started out with the name Beatrice, the name of the lead in The Duchess of Padua; likewise, the language and subject matter in both plays are similar. It is thus clear, that the plays shared similar textual models. However, while both plays are certainly in the style of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, with their blood, gore and sexual transgressions, we find more of typically Wildean bon mots in The Duchess of Padua. The Duke in The Duchess of Padua, despite his vicious nature, bears elements of Wilde’s later witty dandies. Complaining of his wife, the Duke tells the Cardinal: “I weary of her! / Why, she is worse than ugly, she is good.” (II.1-2) And, when the Duchess brings the poor citizens of Padua into the palace to beg for the Duke’s help, he exclaims: “Am I a tailor, madam, that you come / With such a ragged retinue before us” (II.30-31). When the Duchess, on her knees, informs the Duke that the people have no clean drinking water, his response is: “They should drink wine; water is quite unwholesome” (II.45). Furthermore, we find comedy in the play through the “Second Citizen”, who seems to Wilde “an unconscious humorist of the highest order” (HD, 137), a character that reminds us of the comical nurse in Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet. Indeed, when the Duke informs the suffering people of Padua who are begging for bread and hoping for lightened taxes, that “Next Sunday, the lord cardinal / Shall, after holy mass, preach you a sermon, / Upon the beauty of obedience” (II.126-129), the “Second Citizen” states: “A sermon is but a sorry sauce, when / You have nothing to eat with it.” (131-32) We do not quite find this type of humour in A Florentine Tragedy, but then again, Wilde seems to have had other intentions for the play. In his letters, he linked the play together with Salomé and La Sainte Courtisane as, “beautiful coloured, musical things” (HD, 492). This suggests that even though the setting is akin to The Duchess of Padua, he considered A Florentine Tragedy closer in relation to his symbolist dramas Salomé and La Sainte Courtesan, a play of which only a short fragment exists. Certainly, it is easy to see the links between A Florentine Tragedy and Salomé, with its dark and mystical moonlit setting and themes of sexual transgression. In this sense, A Florentine Tragedy is decidedly more serious. However, in the many romantic lines of Guido (whose namesake in The Duchess of Padua is equally romantically inclined), it too has a significant dose of melodrama, and its ending is so absurdly surprising it is almost comical. Nevertheless, as I will argue in my analysis of the play, the ending of the play demonstrates a transgressive, sadistic perspective. In view of this, I consider both plays Elizabethan-Jacobean melodramatic

Weber 21 tragedies, even if A Florentine Tragedy is, certainly, on the verge of a drama. It is perhaps therefore, that The Duchess of Padua has had considerably fewer productions, while A Florentine Tragedy was turned into a one act opera by Alexander von Zemlinsky in 1915-1916, based on a German translation of the play, its more formal, serious elements being better suited for the stage. Considering the genre and literary precedents for The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy helps us better understand Wilde’s motivation for his treatment of Beatrice and Bianca, as we can form an idea of what types of theatrical traditions and characters he drew inspiration from for his two Elizabethan-Jacobean plays.

The Plays

The Duchess of Padua—Beatrice

In a long letter to the American actress Mary Anderson, written on March 23, 1883, Wilde introduced his new five act blank verse play The Duchess of Padua. Wilde was immensely proud of it, declaring, “I have no hesitation in saying that it is the master- piece of all my literary work, the chef-d’œuvre of my youth” (HD, 135). Evidently, Wilde was eagerly trying to convince Anderson to take on the role of Beatrice, the Duchess, for an American production of the play produced by Steele MacKaye, American actor and theatre producer. Wilde had seen Anderson playing Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet two days after his arrival to New York, where she was generally known as “Our Mary” (Fitzsimons 2016, 118). At this point, Anderson was an experienced and popular actress with a ten-year career behind her and numerous American tours and New York performances. After meeting with Anderson and agreeing on an advance, Wilde was certain that she would accept the role. It must have come as a surprise, therefore, when Anderson declined the part. In a letter to the New York Tribune’s drama editor William Winter she wrote, “I have had a play from Oscar Wilde, which I shall decline […] the situations and business are fine—but crime is its sole aspect—and I cannot deal with crime even in an artistic way” (qtd in Fitzsimons 2016, 124). It seems the role of Beatrice was too callous for Anderson, and the production was cancelled. Years later, in 1889, American actor-manager Lawrence Barrett produced the play in New York, now under name of Guido Ferranti (CW V,

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11). Ever since, The Duchess of Padua has remained largely under-discussed in comparison to Wilde’s more famous society plays and symbolist dramas. Of those who have treated the play, Katharine Worth’s reading is perhaps the most perspicacious. She describes Beatrice, the eponymous Duchess of Padua as “a modern woman in spirit, resentful of men’s domination, vigorous in pursuit of her own fulfilment” (Worth 1983, 42-43). Eleanor Fitzsimons draws a brief but similar conclusion, observing that the play features “a strong condemnation of gender inequality” expressed through Beatrice’s “hard-hitting lines” (124). But while The Duchess of Padua has been relatively under-discussed by Wilde’s critics, it is in this play that we find one of the most transgressive female characters in his theatrical oeuvre. The eponymous Duchess possesses both agency and voice, and throughout the play acts in a transgressive manner. This is evident in, for instance, the power that she has over the life of her lover Guido, her resistance towards her corrupt husband, and her radical political speeches against poverty and against the abuse of women in sixteenth-century Padua, where the play is set. In The Duchess of Padua, we are introduced to Guido Ferranti, who is about to avenge the Duke of Padua for killing his father. However, he decides that rather than stabbing the Duke to death, there is a nobler revenge: I purpose to ascend to the duke’s chamber And as he lies asleep lay on his breast This dagger and this writing; when he wakes Then he will know who held him in his power And slew him not: this is the noblest vengeance Which I can take. (III.59-64) Simultaneously, Guido and the wife of the Duke, the Duchess of Padua, have fallen in love. In a characteristically Wildean misunderstanding, Beatrice kills her husband because she thinks that Guido considers the Duke a hindrance to their love. However, the only hindrance for Guido is the fact that he cannot imagine being with Beatrice after plotting and almost executing the killing of the Duke. Horrified by the Duchess’s gruesome deed, he rejects her, and a series of dramatic events unfold. Beatrice seeks revenge and sends the palace guards upon Guido, who is brought before court, accused of murdering the Duke. But at court, Beatrice is touched by Guido’s chivalry and refusal to name the Duchess as the real murderer; she changes her mind, but it is too late, and Guido is sent to the prison dungeons to await his death. In the final act of the play, Beatrice manipulates her way into his prison cell in order to rescue him, and trades

Weber 23 places with him, drinking poison meant for Guido. She dies in his arms, and in despair Guido kills himself with her dagger, the very same that had killed the Duke. The aforementioned March 1883 letter to Mary Anderson gives us a unique insight into Wilde’s intentions with The Duchess of Padua. Furthermore, it contains an exhaustive description of the play and its five acts, comprising what Donohue describes as “by far the most detailed and comprehensive statement that survives of any set of Wilde’s dramaturgical intentions” (CW V, 5-6). Of the culmination of the first act Wilde writes, “I have ended the act with the words ‘The Duchess of Padua’ which strike the keynote of the play, and make a very novel and striking effect” (HD, 136). With respect to the third act, Wilde writes, Here there is no need of comedy: the act is short, quick, terrible: what we want is to impress the audience clearly with the two great speculations and problems of the play, the relations of Sin and Love: they must see that both Guido and the Duchess have rights on their side: Guido is cruel, and the Duchess has done wrong: but they represent great principles of Life and Love. (HD, 136) This crucial passage of the letter stresses the thematic intertwining of sin and love that runs throughout The Duchess of Padua. It also confirms that even though Beatrice kills her husband so that she can be with her lover, she is still in the right. Describing the Duchess, Wilde comments: Her first effect is that of pure Beauty merely: she passes across the stage and says nothing: but it is not enough to make her stir the artistic sensibility of the audience, so in Act II she appears as the image of pity, and mercy: she comes with the poor about her: she stirs the sympathy of the galley and pit. I do not know how it is in New York, but in London, where the misery is terrible among the poor, and where the sympathy for them is growing every day, such speeches as the one about the children dying in the lanes, or the people sleeping under arches of the bridges, cannot fail to bring down the house: they will not expect to find in an Italian tragedy modern life: but the essence of art is to produce the modern idea under antique form. (HD, 137) Significantly, Wilde here points out the connection between the play, with its Renaissance setting, and contemporary Victorian society, suggesting that he intended certain parts of the play to resonate clearly with modern society, and that Wilde expects his audience to recognise these parallels. And, what is more, it links to Wilde’s own interest in “revolutionary” ideas, that idiosyncratic brand of socialism that he would later develop in the early to mid-1890s. For Wilde, the Duchess is “politically reformist”, with an “even revolutionary advocacy of the common people” which he felt “could enhance her contemporary appeal to the social and political realities of ‘modern

Weber 24 life’” (Mackie 2012, 229). Wilde would make use of this technique again, with the Duchess’s harrowing speech about matrimonial domestic abuse. If the Duchess is transgressive politically, espousing radical views about both the situation of the poor and with respect to domestic violence, then she is also transgressive in terms of how she relates to her own desire. As Wilde writes in his letter to Anderson, what is crucial is not the premeditation of the Duchess’s act of violence, but rather that the deed is committed “under a momentary impulse” (HD, 137). Far from being a demure angel of the house, passive and vulnerable to patriarchal power, she is the very definition of agency, even if capricious, able to murder her husband under a sudden impulse. Wilde continues, “it must produce a thrill of horror” in the audience “when she says, ‘I have just killed him’”, lines which Wilde intended to become “the bloody background of the play” (HD, 137). But Wilde also stresses that the audience’s sympathy should be with Beatrice, writing that “the pity of the audience is aroused for the Duchess though she has done murder” (HD, 141). It is thus clear, that Wilde sought to create in Beatrice a character that despite her transgressiveness appeals to the audience. Comparing The Duchess of Padua to the characters of Wilde’s society plays, and particularly those of An Ideal Husband, presents a stark contrast in terms of how the women respond to patriarchal notions. Studying the character of Guido, we recognize in him a typically Victorian approach regarding how women should be and act that reminds us of characters in Wilde’s later society plays. Lord Goring, in An Ideal Husband, delivers a speech to Lady Chiltern in which he presents his (Victorian) image of the ideal woman: Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission [...] A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses. Don’t make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man’s love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them. (IV.450-60) His speech, very much in the same spirit as Patmore’s “The Angel in The House” and Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, promotes a patriarchal structure and defines conventional definitions of gender roles, expressing that the duty of women is to support their husbands and forgive their mistakes. Guido, in act two of The Duchess of Padua, makes a similar claim:

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Women are the best artists of the world, For they can take the common lives of men Soiled with the money-getting of our age, And with love make them beautiful (II.378-81) There is a significant distinction to be made, however, in that An Ideal Husband in many ways is an ambiguous and complex play, and the character of Lord Goring equally so. There is an ironic nuance to his speech that necessarily needs to be taken into consideration. As Sos Eltis points out, “Lord Goring’s speech advocating separate spheres and values for men and women lies at the end of a play which effectively argues for the rejection of precisely such divisions” (Eltis 1996, 168). Eltis notes, for example, that Lord Goring’s use of the word “ambitions”, cannot “pass without an echo of irony”, as throughout the whole play the word has been associated with Lord Chiltern’s corruption, therefore, “greater ambitions, in the context of An Ideal Husband, mean unscrupulousness, self-interest, and a driving obsession which temporarily unbalances the individual’s judgement” (Eltis 1996, 165). Guido, from The Duchess of Padua, however, lacks this ambiguity and complexity, which suggests that his speech bears little irony. Lady Chiltern, the addressee of Lord Goring’s speech, is relatively progressive and attempts to transgress gender boundaries by pursuing an interest in politics. Being a member of the Women’s Liberal association, she gains access to the predominantly male sphere of politics, where she takes part in debating on “Factory Acts, Female Inspectors, the Eight Hour’s Bill, the Parliamentary Franchise” (II.306- 308). Ultimately, however, she cannot escape being a docile wife after all, and ends up yielding to patriarchal notions and to her husband. In this sense, she differs greatly from the Duchess. Indeed, somewhat surprisingly given her background, Lady Chiltern does not even question Lord Goring after his lecture on the ideal woman and, what is more, she echoes his very words when she says, “I forgive. That is how women help the world. I see that now” (II.491-92). In contrast, Beatrice in The Duchess of Padua, continually asserts dominance and power over the people around her. From his detailed summary of the play in his letter to Anderson, we understand that Wilde wanted his audience to identify with the Duchess. Wilde points out that he has tried to make Beatrice “not merely an individual woman, but in some way the incarnation of the lives of all women: she is universal” (HD, 138). Thus, when the Duchess accuses Guido of having murdered the Duke and leads the soldiers to him, uttering the last thrilling line of the act, “This way went he, the man who slew my lord” (III.500), Wilde tells Anderson that he would expect every woman in the audience to

Weber 26 think “I would have done likewise” (HD, 138). This is fascinating, as by extension, Wilde thereby makes his intended female audience to some degree, if not complicit, then at least sympathetic towards transgression: the women in the theatre would be identifying with a woman who has just killed her own husband in order to have an affair with her lover. Furthermore, what leads the Duchess to kill the Duke also attests to Beatrice's transgressive nature. Transgression, by definition, implies the existence of barriers which must be transgressed, a point that Michel Foucault has famously made, arguing that “the limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.” (qtd. in Whiteley 2015, 230) Intriguingly, Beatrice’s and Guido’s ideas of limits and transgressions are starkly different, yet they inform their actions and are thus intertwined, reshaping their limits. When Guido tells the Duchess that “There lies a barrier between us two / We dare not pass.” (II.464-465), we understand that Guido means that he cannot imagine being with her after planning to stab the Duke to death, it would be to transgress his limits. Moments before, Guido laments in horror at his almost committed crime: “Could I with lips fresh from this butchery / Play with her lips?” (II.455-456). However, Beatrice has no knowledge of his murderous plans. Perplexed by Guido’s rejection, she exclaims, “Barrier! Barrier! / Why did he say there was a barrier? / There is no barrier between us two” (II.541-543). Clearly, the Duchess does not consider her marriage a hindrance for their affair at all, indicating again the sense in which she is out-of-step with a Victorian morality, for as Donohue remarks, Wilde's audience would have understood the barrier to be “real and obvious enough: she was a married woman” (CW V, 22). But for Beatrice, the barrier only has force since it has force for Guido, as seen in her epiphany as she lies in bed next to the Duke: “as I looked upon that evil face / Suddenly like a flame there flashed across me / There is the barrier which Guido spoke of” (III.260-262). The fact that Beatrice killed her husband so callously and impulsively was presumably distressing for the audience of the short-lived American production of Guido Ferranti. Donohue notes that some reviewers found it distasteful, such as George Odell who expressed his opinion that Beatrice and Guido’s relationship was “worthy of Ford or any other late Elizabethan dramatist”, yet “a little too morbid for playgoers of 1891” (qtd. in CW V, 12-13). Perhaps this was precisely Wilde's point: to make his audience uncomfortable by

Weber 27 deploying conventions from the Jacobean tradition and thereby challenging his Victorian audience. In another review, Beatrice is described as being “practically insane”, and, William Winter continues, “she stabs and murders her objectionable husband, in order that she may remove all obstacles to the gratification of her passion” (qtd in CW V, 13). It is precisely in her transgression that she challenges the normative vision of the “sane”, allowing her “passions” free rein and thereby damned as “mad” by the patriarchal discourse. One hears in Winter’s objections an echo of Herod on Salomé, “She is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers.” (ll.386-387) While The Duchess of Padua was written in fin de siècle Victorian London, it is set in Renaissance Italy during the 16th century. Thus, studying Beatrice’s character in terms of her transgressiveness and agency becomes complex, as we are dealing with the issue of historicity. A double reading of the play is certainly implied, which brings to mind a passage in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885), set in 161–177 AD in the Rome of the Antonines. Wilde very much admired and was influenced by Pater and his writing. He considered Marius the Epicurean his “golden book” and expressed that “I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written” (qtd. in Yeats 1999, 124). In a famous passage, Pater’s narrator breaks off from the story to address the reader: “That age and our own have much in common—many difficulties and hopes. Let the reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives—from Rome, to Paris or London” (1985, 181). Pater here addresses a similar kind of double vision that we can detect in The Duchess of Padua. Given this double perspective, we need to consider on the one hand, what was allowed and permitted in Renaissance society, and on the other hand, what was allowed and permitted in 19th century British culture. This marks these two plays apart from Wilde’s society plays, which are all contemporary. Gregory Mackie picks up on the intricacy of temporality in The Duchess of Padua, commenting on the subtitle Wilde gave the play on transcripts for an 1883 production that, evidently, never took place. Mackie observes that the transcripts presented the subtitle: “A Tragedy of the XVI Century”, but also that underneath was noted: “written in Paris in the XIX Century.” As Mackie comments, “these conspicuous temporal markers—in Roman numerals, no less—make explicit the self-conscious artifice of the play’s distance from the historical (sixteenth century) and cultural (Italian) milieu it depicts. This is a Renaissance of the

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Victorian imagination” (2012, 225). Indeed, this demonstrates the complexity of historicity in a play like The Duchess of Padua. The double reading, Italian Renaissance and Victorian England, becomes even more interesting considering that Wilde, in the letter to Anderson, writes that the intended 1880’s London audience of The Duchess of Padua “will not expect to find in an Italian tragedy modern life: but the essence of art is to produce the modern idea under an antique form” (1962, 137). This allows us to speculate that Wilde expected his audience to understand that the play implied a double reading. This is perhaps best seen in the Duchess’s soliloquy in act three. There, she laments the critical situation for women in Padua: There is many a woman here in Padua, Some workman’s wife, or ruder artizan’s, Whose husband spends the wages of the week In a coarse revel, or a tavern brawl, And reeling home late on the Saturday night, Finds his wife sitting by a fireless hearth, Trying to hush the child who cries for hunger. And then sets to and beats his wife because The child is hungry, and the fire black. Yet the wife loves him! and will rise next day, With some red bruise across a careworn face, And sweep the house, and do the common service, And try and smile, and only be too glad If he does not beat her a second time Before her child! That is how women love. (III.403-417) As Donohue notes, the Duchess’s description “seems more specific to 19th-century British society than to the earlier Italian Renaissance setting of Padua that she invokes” (CW V, 232). Considering that Wilde tells Anderson that in the opening line of the soliloquy, instead of saying “here in Padua”, she could say “in this city here” when she performs the play on stage in London (HD, 138), the double register of the social criticism becomes even more apparent. Wilde is convinced that the Duchess’s soliloquy in act three, with its heart-breaking description of how husbands abuse their wives, will “produce an extraordinary effect” (HD, 138) in London, “where the misery among the wives of our artisans has required special legislation, so dreadful is it” (HD, 138). Though Wilde does not specify which legislations he is referring to, we can deduce that he most likely had the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act in mind, which allowed women victims of male violence in marriage to obtain separation orders; seeing as it was not costly, these provisions were available to working class women as well, such as the

Weber 29 wives of “artizan’s” that Wilde is referring to (Parliament UK, n.d.). The Duchess’s political speech would undoubtedly stir the empathy and emotions of the audience, just as her passion for the cause of the situation of women and the lower classes would place her directly in line with contemporary 19th century social and political movements. One such movement, of course, was that of the New Woman. As discussed in the previous section of the essay on the historical contexts underwriting the writing of Wilde’s plays, the late 19th century saw the rise of this ideal, and Wilde was personally connected to various advocates of contemporary feminism. In a passage from act II, the Duchess demonstrates great confidence, speaking up against her cruel husband. The Duke disciplines Beatrice, commanding her that: While I am Duke in Padua: listen, Madam, I am grown weary of your airs and graces, Being mine own, you shall do as I will, And if it be my will you keep the house, Why then, this palace shall your prison be; And if it be my will you walk abroad, Why, you shall take the air from morn to night. (II.198-204) The Duchess replies by challenging his authority, “Sir, by what right—?” (II.206). Interestingly, Beatrice will repeat this exact phrase in act four in the court of justice, when the Lord Justice informs her that she may not leave the court until Guido “be purged or guilty of this dread offence” (IV.455). Wilde no doubt meant to play upon the difference between the two usages. On this later occasion, the Duchess replies: Cannot, Lord Justice? By what right do you Set barriers in my path where I should go? Am I not duchess here in Padua, And the state’s regent? (IV.456-59) Essentially, Beatrice is here making a claim about class. She is questioning if a civil body like the court of justice has the right to make any claims upon higher authority, in this case the nobility. With her husband, however, it is a different kind of right that she is questioning, one of equality: does the Duke, in his position of being a man and her husband, have the right to control her agency? It is performative, certainly, and a declarative which asserts her power through her command, both publicly and privately. Her boldness towards her husband provokes the Duke to threaten her by alluding to the unfortunate fate of his second Duchess: Madam, my second Duchess Asked the same question once: her monument Lies in the chapel of Bartholomew, Wrought in red marble; very beautiful

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Guido, your arm. Come, gentlemen, let us go And spur our falcons for the mid-day chase. Bethink you, Madam, you are here alone. (II.207-213) It is a fascinating passage, implying that by asking the very same question as Beatrice did, questioning the Duke’s authority, his second Duchess ended up dead and buried. The Duke is threatening Beatrice, callously informing her that she might very well meet the same fate if she continues to challenge him. Note here, also, the hunting reference. Throughout the play there are various instances where the Duke is linked to animals of prey and other animals associated with hunting. In this passage, the Duke gathers the men to prepare their falcons for falconry, an activity associated with masculinity and potency, to which I will shortly return. In the Duke’s threatening and superior tone when speaking about his dead “second Duchess”, one suspects another intertext lying behind Wilde’s The Duchess of Padua: Robert Browning’s famous dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” (1842)2. Set in Renaissance Italy, the speaker of the poem, the Duke of Ferrara, is showing his art collection to the representative of the family of his soon to be new wife. Amongst the art works is a painting of his last wife, hidden away behind a set of curtains: That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said (ll. 1-5) The Duke merges the Duchess and the portrait of her into one, personifying the painting multiple times by speaking about it as if it were the actual Duchess, much like Basil does with the portrait of Dorian in The Picture of Dorian Gray (see Whiteley 2015, 119). By personifying the portrait, The Duke of Ferrara is objectifying and commodifying the Duchess, making her one of many artworks of his collection—a possession to be looked at and praised, rather than an actual human being. After introducing the painting to the emissary, the Duke makes clear that only he has access to it: “since non puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I” (ll. 9-10), proving, again, that he is in control and that she belongs to him only. A few lines later, we learn of the events that lead Browning’s Duchess to her grim fate. The Duke tells us that he

2 Wilde read and greatly appreciated Browning. Upon sending Browning the first copy of his newly published Poems in 1881, Wilde expressed it was “the only tribute I can offer you in return for the delight and the wonder which the strength and splendour of your work has given me from my boyhood.” (Holland and Hart-Davis 2000, 111)

Weber 31 was not the only one who could provoke the “depth and passion” of her “earnest glance” (l. 8), “'twas not / Her husband's presence only, called that spot / Of joy into the Duchess' cheek (ll. 13-15). He elaborates: She had A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast, The dropping of the daylight in the West, The bough of cherries some officious fool Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule She rode with round the terrace—all and each Would draw from her alike the approving speech, Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name With anybody’s gift. (ll. 21-34) According to the Duke of Ferrara, the Duchess was flirtatious with everyone, and was made just as glad by some cherries given to her by a stranger as for his “nine-hundred- years-old name” (l. 33). He is suggesting that the Duchess was ignorant and ungrateful, not considering the noble ancestry she married into more significant than any other simple gift. The Duke soon has enough of her gentle and flirtatious nature, and the poem takes a violent turn: Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. (ll. 43-46) From this passage we can infer that the Duke had his last Duchess killed: again, the Duke’s possessive nature is evident, wanting the Duchess to smile at him only, thus controlling her sexuality and independence. The comparison with Browning's poem gives us useful perspective on the dynamics of Wilde’s characters’ relationship. If the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara parallel the relationship of the Duke and Duchess of Padua, there is one crucial difference: the Duchess of “My Last Duchess” has no voice, she is reduced to the status of an object, her story and experience marginalised and buried by the violent power of her husband. In The Duchess of Padua, however, Beatrice is given a strong voice to declare her often radical opinions. When a mob of two thousand citizens have gathered outside of the palace to demonstrate their anger at the Duke and his cruel politics, the Duke orders his men to shoot them. Suddenly, the Duke hears that the clamour of the

Weber 32 people has shifted into cheering. Beatrice has gone into the square and positioned herself between the people and the prison guards, stopping them from shooting at the citizens. Learning of this, the Duke exclaims, “Our duchess waxes bold” (II.28). Much as the Duke of Ferrara, the Duke of Padua too seeks to silence and rebuke his wife, albeit for different reasons. After the Duchess’s manifestation in the square, and after seeing how her benevolence towards the poor citizens of Padua is greatly appreciated, he tells her: Well, madam, You spread rebellion ‘midst our citizens, And by your doles and daily charities Have made the common people love you. Well, I will not have you loved. (II.159-163) By advocating for change and proposing to help the poor of Padua by giving them money from her “private purse” (II.135), the Duchess opposes the Duke’s cruel treatment of the citizens, challenging his leadership and politics. Unsurprisingly, then, the Duke considers the Duchess a threat, especially because he is well aware that the people are against him. Interestingly, his keen effort to silence her works to prove her powerful influence. Arguing for the right of the people, Beatrice appeals to her husband that “the poor have rights you cannot touch, / The right to pity, and the right to mercy” (II.166-67), to which the Duke replies: So, so, you argue with me? This is she, The gentle duchess for whose hand I yielded Three of the fairest towns in Italy, Pisa, and Genoa, and Orvieto. (II.168-171) Wilde's Duke here does something very similar to Browning’s Duke, insinuating that Beatrice should be grateful for, and take personal pride in, the price of her dowry, her economic worth, instead of rebelling against his authority: his version of Ferrara’s “nine-hundred-years-old-name” are three Italian towns. It is the same kind of manipulation, alluding to wealth and nobility in an attempt to silence the Duchess by proving that she is his possession, that he paid expensively for her. But again, Beatrice’s rebellious voice challenges the words of her husband, exposing his false character: “Promised, my lord, not yielded: in that matter / Brake you your word as ever” (II.72- 73). It is on the heels of this reply that Beatrice delivers her scathing monologue, perhaps the most ardent speech of the play. It constitutes a radical attack on men and

Weber 33 their treatment of women as their objects and slaves, her words expressing both rage and anguish Men when they woo us call us pretty children, Tell us we have not wit to make our lives, And so they mar them for us. Did I say woo? We are their chattels, and their common slaves, Less dear than the poor hound that licks their hand, Less fondled than the hawk upon their wrist. Woo, did I say? bought, rather, sold, and bartered. Our very bodies being merchandise, I know it is the general lot of women, Each miserably mated to some man Wrecks her own life upon his selfishness: That it is general makes it not less bitter. I think I never heard a woman laugh, Laugh for pure merriment, except one woman, That was at night-time, in the public streets; Poor soul, she walked with painted lips, and wore The mask of pleasure on a face of pain (II.221-237) In this passage the Duchess’s transgressive perspective is made, perhaps, more explicit than ever. She is addressing the way in which men belittle women, treating them much like they would a child that is unable to make adult decisions. The rhetorical technique of using repetition has a striking effect. She begins quite calmly, to then question “Did I say woo?” (II.23), which then turns into an antimetabole, repeating the words but in reverse order, “Woo, did I say?” (II.27). We can feel her rage intensifying, as if she was reacting to her own innocence and naïveté in initially describing the men’s treatment of women as “wooing”. Beatrice uses the lexical echo here to articulate the slippage of values that have taken place, describing that what is nominally a formal, respectful and polite kind of discourse has shifted into something abusive and disrespectful, so that the idea of what it means to woo has lost its original sense. Furthermore, she points out the inhumanity of men’s treatment of women, drawing a standard image of the active man and his slave as the passive recipient: “We are their chattels, and their common slaves” (II.224). She is saying that women are objects, subordinated to man’s will. In the speech, Wilde also deploys anaphora, drawing an association to hunting: “Less dear than the poor hound that licks their hand, / Less fondled than the hawk upon their wrist” (II.225-26). Both of these are hunting animals, linked alliteratively (“hound” and “hawk”). The association of men and hunting, a symbolic activity traditionally associated with heroic masculinity and potency in the literary tradition of the west (Bates 2013, 1), works to illustrate patriarchy as a sense of violence, as something

Weber 34 brutal, a world in which woman is below the animal. The Duchess then comments on the commodification of the female body as object, “Woo, did I say? bought, rather, sold and bartered, / Our very bodies being merchandise” (II.27-28). The speech also considers that essential nineteenth-century urban preoccupation of the figure of the prostitute, deemed by Walkowitz “the quintessential female figure of the urban space” (1992, 21), here standing as a barometer of the dehumanisation of women more broadly in patriarchal society, but also to some degree transgressing these strictures. Towards the end of the monologue, Beatrice remarks that the only woman she ever heard laughing “for pure merriment” (II. 234) is a prostitute. We find various laughing prostitutes in Wilde’s works. In his poem “The Harlot’s House” (1885), the prostitutes at a brothel are presented as dehumanized, “wire-pulled automatons” (l. 13) and skeletons (l. 14). Significantly, while dancing an eerie danse macabre-like dance, “their laughter echoed thin and shrill” (l. 18). What the prostitutes all have in common is that they walk the streets, and are able to do so because they are not under the same strict constraints as middle or upper-class women, thus transgressing the “border between the classes and sexes” (Walkowitz 1992, 22) and becoming a female version of the flâneur (Buck-Morss 196, 119). As mentioned earlier in this thesis, there is a complex relationship in 19th century understandings of the separate spheres. The separation of men and women in private and public spheres permeates much of Victorian literature, we can see it presented in, for example, the gentlemen’s clubs in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Consequently, women walking the streets is complex. On the one hand, the laughing prostitute walking the street in The Duchess of Padua can be considered transgressive and affirmative because the woman is, as it were, claiming the street. On the other hand, by walking the streets, she is made into a public figure, her commodified body becoming merchandise, in Benjamin’s famous words, “a precursor of commodity capitalism” (2002, 348). By saying that the prostitute is the only woman she has heard laughing “for pure merriment” (II.234), Beatrice makes a distinction, saying that women are allowed to laugh, but when they laugh, they laugh because it is expected of them to do so. The prostitute, however, is, to some extent, free of that in her capacity to “derail bourgeois notions of romantic love, domesticity, and reproduction” (McCann 2014, 101), and can therefore laugh in a more sincere way. The Duchess notes that the prostitute wears a “mask of pleasure on a face of pain” (II.237). The motif of the mask is particularly intriguing, as it recurs in different

Weber 35 forms in connection to The Duchess of Padua, but also in other works by Wilde. In Wilde’s letter to Anderson, he likens the Duchess’s comedy to that of “Viola, and Rosalind; the comedy in which joy smiles through a mask of beauty” (HD, 136). Interestingly, both Viola and Rosalind are Shakespearean characters who challenge the fixedness of gender. Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night takes on a male identity, going under the name of Cesario. When the countess Olivia falls in love with Cesario, she is unaware that Cesario is really Viola, and when Viola, disguised as Cesario, falls in love with Duke Orsino, he is unaware that Cesario is a woman. Her love for Orsino is reciprocated, in a homoerotic moment, since he knows Viola only as Cesario; Orsino falls in love with the gendered figure who happens to be a woman but who he thinks is a man. Later, Cesario’s real identity is revealed, and even though Orsino finds out the truth, Viola and Duke Orsino marry. In her influential book Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler draws the conclusion that “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 2006, 34). In a similar manner, the playing with gender in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night suggests that gender is a construction, a performative, something which can be applied and removed. When Viola takes on the identity of Cesario, she becomes Cesario and is perceived so by the other characters. So too Rosalind in As You Like It, where Rosalind dresses up as a shepherd and takes on the male identity of Ganymede. While disguised as Ganymede, Rosalind makes Orlando, the man that she is in love with, court Ganymede, as though he were courting Rosalind, initiating a role play in which a male actor would dress up as Rosalind, who would dress up as Ganymede, who would be wooed by Orlando. Rosalind also appears in The Picture of Dorian Gray, as one of the roles that Sibyl Vane plays that entrance Dorian: She is everything to me in life. Night after night I go to see her play. One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen. I have seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb, sucking the poison from her lover’s lips. I have watched her wandering through the forest of Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap. (DG, 86) It seems, that Dorian is attracted to Sybil whenever she is playing roles that during the Renaissance would be played by male actors dressing up as female characters, who in turn would dress up as men. Rosalind is also mentioned in “The Portrait of Mr. W.H” (1889), arguably Wilde’s most Shakespearean text, where the narrator is fascinated with his college friend Cyril Graham’s acting in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. He

Weber 36 describes Cyril as “the only perfect Rosalind I have ever seen. It would be impossible to describe to you the beauty, the delicacy, the refinement of the whole thing” (Collins, 305). So, in characters such as Viola and Rosalind, homoerotic desire becomes more complicated, because there are multiple layers of genders. In this sense, it seems clear that when Wilde compares Beatrice to Viola and Rosalind in his letter to Anderson, complex questions of gender are involved, implying that Beatrice, too, is a character of various layers in terms of her agency and her treatment of her own gender, which suggests that she is a transgressive woman as she on some levels transgresses the norms of gender identity. Linking Beatrice from The Duchess of Padua to strong Shakespearean heroines like Viola and Rosalind allows us to explore the kind of characters that might have inspired Wilde to create his very own Beatrice. The first effect of the Duchess may be “that of pure Beauty merely” (HD, 137), but there is certainly more beneath the beautiful surface, beneath the mask. Beatrice’s character is striking, as she is the only character in the play that possesses this kind of complexity. The Duchess’s transgression of gender norms is also evident in the fact that most of the action plays out in her own territory, in spaces that she is in full control of. After the death of the Duke, the Duchess takes on his role of power and becomes what could be described a patriarchal character, who has the right and the power to decide over the space. She has access to, and is in power of, both closed private spaces such as her chamber, for example, and open public spaces such as the Court of Justice, as well as the prison dungeons. This makes Guido merely a visitor, a subordinate to Beatrice who has to adapt to her commands. Take for example the dungeon scene in the last act of the play, where Guido is sitting in his prison cell awaiting his call to the headsman. The Duchess, cleverly disguised so that the five guards will not recognize her, uses her signet ring of Padua to gain access to Guido’s cell. The “First Soldier” confirms the Duchess’s authority, “Madam, with this ring you can go in and out as you please: it is the duchess’s own” (V.69). In the prison cell, where Guido sleeps, we understand that the Duchess plans on giving Guido her cloak and mask, so that he can escape his death and Padua. Standing about in the prison cell, Beatrice deviously tells us of her plan to save Guido’s life: Still that white neck Will ‘scape the headsman: I have seen to that. He will get hence from Padua to-night, And that is well. You are very wise, Lord Justice, And yet you are not half so wise as I am.

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And that is well. (V.107-12) Her repetition of the phrase “And that is well” is undoubtedly performative: she is confirming her own agency, affirming that she has outmanoeuvred the Lord Justice and, through him, the whole court and legal body of Padua. It could be suggested that the final act, in which Beatrice commits suicide to rescue Guido, in fact presents a standard misogynist perspective, where Beatrice dies as a sacrificial victim in order to trade places with the man. However, Wilde subverts that perspective: after Beatrice drank the poison, Guido wakes up unknowingly of what she has done, and she tells him that she told the lords justices that she was the true murderer: And, when I sware it on the holy book, They bade the doctor cure me. They are ten, Ten against one, and they possess your life. They call me duchess here in Padua. I do not know, sir, if I be the duchess, I wrote your pardon, and they would not take it; They call it treason, say I taught them that, Maybe I did. Within an hour, Guido, They will be here, and drag you from the cell, And bind your hands behind your back, and bid you Kneel at the block. I am before them there; Here is the signet ring of Padua, ‘Twill bring you safely through the men on guard. There is my cloak and vizard; they have orders Not to be curious. When you pass the gate Turn to the left, and at the second bridge You will find horses waiting: by to-morrow You will be at Venice, safe. (V.145-162) She describes how she has fought to turn right what went wrong, yet as the court would not hear her admission to the crime, she organizes her own rescue mission, cheating the system and cleverly arranging a meticulous plan. Significantly, she does so not only for Guido’s sake, but also for her own. Giving Guido her ring, she tells him, “Here is the ring; / I have washed my hand: there is no blood upon it.” (V.167-68), suggesting that the sin from stabbing her husband to death is absolved through the act of releasing Guido from his death sentence. Drinking the poison is an active decision, part of her plan and a demonstration of her agency. Ironically, Guido is so struck with despair upon learning that she drank the poison, that he kills himself using Beatrice’s dagger, the one she used to kill the duke. The ending of the play, with its double suicide, bears obvious echoes of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, though Wilde reverses the roles, so that Beatrice dies of poison, and Guido commits suicide using her dagger. Wilde further

Weber 38 twists the action by prolonging the death scene, giving the Duchess and Guido fully fifteen to eighteen minutes of dialogue from the moment that Beatrice drinks the poison until she starts to experience its effects (CW V, 248), during which the two can reconcile and ultimately die in each other’s arms. Throughout the play, the Duchess demonstrates a transgressive perspective through her resistance towards patriarchy. She refuses to be rebuked by men, be it her own husband, the Duke of Padua, or a civil body like the Court of Justice. Furthermore, she dismisses the fact that she is a married woman as being an obstacle, a “barrier”, for a romantic relationship with Guido, and stabs her husband to death because she believed Guido considered him a barrier for their love. What is more, Beatrice explicitly questions the commodification of the female body and men’s cruel treatment of women, expressing proto-feminist opinions regarding issues that the intended 19th century audience of the play would undoubtedly relate to. It is thus, and this is significant, a very modern play, despite its Renaissance setting, with a modern, transgressive heroine.

A Florentine Tragedy—Bianca

Only a fragment exists of A Florentine Tragedy, Oscar Wilde’s unfinished one act play, written in blank verse. While there is no precise date known as to when Wilde began writing on the play, there are several documented clues that make it possible to form an understanding of approximately when he was working with it. At the end of a bound notebook containing the earliest surviving manuscript of one of Wilde’s other unfinished plays, Lady Lancing, five pages can be found with fragments that refer to two other plays, namely La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy. That manuscript can be dated to October 1894, or earlier (CW IX, 169). Thus, we can conclude that, at the same time as working on what would become one of his most famous plays, The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde was also working on A Florentine Tragedy. Reading through the letters of Oscar Wilde, we find further indication that he started working on the play in 1893. On November 8, 1893, Wilde writes to Sybil Montgomery (Lady Queensberry), the mother of Lord Alfred Douglas, his on-again, off-again lover, to persuade her to send Douglas abroad to Egypt, given Wilde’s deep concern over Douglas’s lifestyle. Reading this letter in relation to a later one, the long letter that Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas while in prison in 1897,

Weber 39 known as De Profundis, we find a crucial passage which reveals to us part of the history of Wilde’s writing of A Florentine Tragedy. Wilde laments: When you were away I was alright. The moment, in the early December of the year to which I have been alluding, I had succeeded in inducing your mother to send you out of England, I collected again the torn and ravelled web of my imagination, got my life back into my own hands, and not merely finished the three remaining acts of An Ideal Husband, but conceived and had almost completed two other plays of a completely different type, the Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane, when suddenly, unbidden, unwelcome, and under circumstances fatal to my happiness you returned. The two works left then imperfect I was unable to take up again. The mood that created them I could never recover. (HD, 427) We can be confident, then, that the year that Wilde alludes to here is 1893, when Douglas sampled “the fleshpots of Egypt” (HD, 443). The dating of Wilde’s creative process with A Florentine Tragedy is of interest, as it tells us that he was writing on it at the same time as his famous society plays, which suggests, as Guy and Small remark, that Wilde “retained a lifelong interest in another sort of drama altogether, one more self-consciously ‘literary’” (2000, 102). If Wilde had definitely begun A Florentine Tragedy by 1893, then he was still at work on it two years later. In February 1895 Wilde wanted to pursue the play again, and wrote to George Alexander, theatre manager at the St James’ Theatre in London where Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest were produced: “On Sunday I hope to send you, or read you, the vital parts of my Florentine play. I think you will like it” (HD, 383). However, the production never took place. While Wilde was incarcerated at Reading Gaol for gross indecency, he tried to continue his work on the play, but his pursuit proved fruitless. In a letter to More Adey dated September 25, 1896, he reflected that “I have tried to remember and write down the Florentine Tragedy, but only bits of it remain with me, and I find that I cannot invent” (HD, 410). Years later, Robert Ross, one of Wilde’s closest friends, found loose sheets of manuscripts amongst papers that had been rescued from Wilde’s home at Tite Street in London when Wilde’s belongings were being auctioned out to the public. In his preface to the 1917 edition of Salomé; La Sainte Courtisane; A Florentine Tragedy, Ross declares that he recognised the manuscripts as belonging to A Florentine Tragedy (Ross 1917, xvii). The play did not have an opening scene, however Ross notes, with wry humour surely, that “It was characteristic of the author to finish what he never began” (1917, xviii). For the purpose of presentation, the poet and dramatist

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Mr. Thomas Sturge Moore was asked to write an opening scene for the first British production of the play by the Literary Theatre Society in 1906 (Ross 1917, xviii). But if the need for an opening scene was understandable when considering a theatre production, for my own purposes, I have chosen to focus exclusively on Wilde’s own work, as presented in the Collins Classics Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. The fragment of A Florentine Tragedy is brief and intense. A love triangle stands at the centre of the play between the only three characters of the extant fragment: Simone, a merchant, his much younger wife Bianca, and Guido, a young and handsome prince. Set in Florence in the 16th century, the play begins at the apartment of Simone and Bianca. The two lovers, Bianca and Guido, are surprised by Simone who has returned home from work, the two “separate[ing] guiltily” at the sudden opening of the door, as per the stage directions at the beginning of the play. What then unfolds is an intense conversation between the two men predominantly, in which they spar with each other, competing, as it were, for Bianca (which has been read homoerotically by Lee 2006, 46). The play ends in a most surprising way, with Simone killing Guido in a duel, resulting in an unexpected rekindling of Simone and Bianca’s relationship. Reminiscent tonally of The Duchess of Padua, the husband in A Florentine Tragedy is presented as cruel and rude to his wife. Upon finding Bianca and Guido in the apartment, Simone says: But who is this? Why you have here some friend. Some kinsman doubtless, Newly returned from foreign lands and fallen Upon a house without a host to greet him? I crave your pardon, kinsman. For a house Lacking a host is but an empty thing And void of honour; a cup without its wine, A scabbard without steel to keep it straight, A flowerless garden widowed of the sun. Again I crave your pardon, my sweet cousin. (7-16) While Regenia Gagnier, one of few scholars who have treated the play, suggests that Simone is initially unaware of the affair, and that Guido and Bianca “make a fool, nearly a cuckold of him before his eyes” (Gagnier 1986, 209), I would rather argue that he is unquestionably conscious of his wife’s affair. Not only does his sardonic language in this initial exchange suggest so, but the fact that there is no moment of revelation throughout the play strongly suggests so, with Simone’s treatment of Bianca and Guido continuing in the same cunning style until the very end of the play. The intense opening dialogue gives us a sense of the fascinating power dynamics at play, a cat-and-mouse

Weber 41 game that will continue and increase in intensity throughout the play. Simone goes on to alienate Guido, by alluding to him having been to “foreign lands” (9), making him an invader and an Other, clearly creating a distinction between what is known and what is foreign. There’s a possible sexual innuendo here, alluding to Guido having an affair with Bianca, entering “foreign land” where he is not supposed to be. Simultaneously, read from a post-colonial perspective considering Wilde’s Irish heritage, it is also possible to read these lines as oblique critique of British Imperialism. This motif will return later in the play, when Simone is complaining that, “certain of the English merchants” in Pisa are selling their woollens for a lower price than allowed according to the law (213-16), which poses him to ask: Is this well? Should merchant be to merchant as a wolf? And should the stranger living in our land Seek by enforced privilege or craft To rob us of our profits? (218-22) The sentiment behind Simone’s words bears a striking resemblance to a poem written in 1847 by Oscar Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane. She contributed her poem “The Famine Year” to the Irish Nationalist newspaper The Nation, in which she laments, “Weary men, what reap ye? — Golden corn for the stranger” (1), and, she continues, “Accursed are we in our own land, yet toil we still and toil; / But the stranger reaps our harvest — the alien owns our soil” (17-18). However, Simone’s concern regarding the English merchants is quickly shut down by Guido, who declares that his “wits have other quarries” than wool-selling (228-229). We also find the imagery of the house in the introductory passage, here as a marital home of Simone and Bianca, a private and intimate location, its privacy now being disrupted by a stranger. Significantly, the entire conversation between Simone and Guido is characterised by an implied double entendre. There are two wholly separate dialogues at work here. The undoubtedly phallic metaphor of “a scabbard without steel to keep it straight” (14), and the psychoanalytically suggestive symbol of the “void” (13), when read in the context of the play's setting during the Renaissance, suggest Shakespearean resonance. The double entendre, so common in the Elizabethan-Jacobean dramatic traditions, would likely be picked up and be understood by an audience. Bianca’s first line of the play is delivered almost indifferently, as she coolly informs Simone that Guido is “no kinsman and no cousin neither” (17). In other words,

Weber 42 she is calling Simone’s bluff and proving her awareness of his false facade. Learning of his true identity, Simone intensifies his deceitful kindliness: What! The son Of that great Lord of Florence whose dim towers Like shadows silvered by the wandering moon I see from out of my casement every night! Sir Guido Bardi, you are welcome here, Twice welcome. For I trust my honest wife, Most honest if uncomely to the eye, Hath not with foolish chatterings wearied you, As is the wont of women. (22-31) Simone is accentuating the differences between himself and Guido, parodying Guido’s high status. What comes next is significant, Simone qualifies the honesty of his wife. He does not truly trust her, and instead seems to be suggesting that he trusts her honesty because, in his opinion, she is unattractive, “uncomely to the eye” (28), and “has her virtues as most women have, / But beauty is a gem she may not wear. / It is better so, perchance” (339-340), as though being unattractive would preserve her honesty. What makes this even more curious, is the fact that Simone knows that this is not the case, because clearly Guido finds her attractive, so attractive in fact that he describes her beauty as “a lamp that pales the stars” (33) and that the earth when she speaks would “fix / His cycle around her beauty” (336-337). However, Simone refuses to acknowledge Bianca’s beauty, and instead goes on to insult her and all of womankind’s “foolish chattering” (30). Guido, in contrast, assures Simone that Bianca: Has welcomed me with such sweet courtesies That if it be her pleasure, and your own, I will come often to your simple house. And when your business bids you walk abroad I will sit here and charm her loneliness Lest she might sorrow for you overmuch What say you, good Simone? (35-41) Here, Guido proves that he too can feign amiability. In a most diplomatic matter, Guido is saying that Bianca has taken well care of him, clearly alluding to their affair, and that he intends to see her again, even when Simone is out of town. The ambiguity in the dialogue of A Florentine Tragedy recalls Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess”. We saw in The Duchess of Padua, something perhaps even more evident here, the sense in which there may be two levels of exchanges at work when a person in power addresses a supposedly innocent auditor, while simultaneously

Weber 43 implying that the auditor also understands an underlying message, grasping a violence, aggression and threat which lies behind the seemingly innocent words. For this to work, both levels of this double register are required. It is this same kind of double register that creates a great deal of the tension of A Florentine Tragedy, where on the one hand, the entire exchange must skirt the formalities of polite social discourse, while at the same time there is an intense sparring constantly going on between the men and where the threat of the situation is implied, rather than explicitly articulated. This becomes most evident in the fact that the entire action of the play revolves around Simone presenting his lavish goods to Guido, while it is heavily implied that Bianca is the true commodified object being traded between the men, the prize of this competition. In conversation with Guido, Simone expresses his hope that Some other night We trust that you will come here as a friend, To-night you come to buy my merchandise. Is it not so? Silks, velvets, what you will, I doubt not but I have some dainty wares Will woo your fancy. True, the hour is late But we poor merchants toil night and day To make our scanty gains. The tolls are high, And every city levies its own toll, And prentices are unskilful, and wives even Lack sense and cunning, though Bianca here Has brought me a rich customer to-night. Is it not so, Bianca? (55-67) In a cunning move, Simone uses the fact that he is aware of the affair as a kind of blackmail to force Guido into buying his luxury goods. Questioning “Is it not so?” (58) makes it impossible for Guido to reject his offers, as the true reason for his presence at the home of Bianca and Simone is adultery. Also noteworthy, is the usage of rhetorical repetitions here, previously used, as already discussed, in The Duchess of Padua. Interestingly, Simone is first addressing Guido here, and then shifts to addressing Bianca, asking her the question. However, the implication here is that she has not brought him a customer. Rather, by asking her “Is it not so, Bianca?”, Simone is challenging her, challenging her to verbally confess what he already knows—namely who Guido really is, and that they are having an affair. The rhetorical repetition creates a subtle but violent shift in power and register, intensifying the power dynamics at play. Slyly Simone refers to, and takes advantage, of Bianca’s infidelity and turns it into profit. He then asks for Bianca’s help with displaying his goods, as though she were a mannequin in a nineteenth century arcade, commanding she kneel to the floor:

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Where is my pack? Where is my pack, I say? Open it, my good wife. Unloose the chords. Kneel down upon the floor. You are better so. Nay not that one, the other. Despatch, despatch! (68-71) After describing his myriad of extravagant products, including a luxurious Lucca damask with roses “So cunningly wrought that they lack perfume merely / To cheat the wanton sense” (78-79), Guido makes clear that he will not purchase anything that night, but that he will send a servant the next day who will “pay twice your price” (98). Remembering that he has an exquisitely expensive robe to sell, Simone demands Bianca’s help: “entreat him; / He will refuse you nothing” (127-128). Again, Simone is greedily exploiting his wife’s adulterous affair for his own personal gain. However, Bianca objects, asking, “Am I your prentice? / Why should I chaffer for your velvet robe?” (131). Her question recalls Beatrice’s assertion of her agency in The Duchess of Padua, challenging first her husband, then the Lord Justice, “By what right?”. Similarly, Bianca is here claiming her position, affirming that Simone is neither her master, nor is her task to work for him. After incessant persuasion, Guido agrees to purchase the velvet robe for a hundred thousand crowns, “If that will serve your purpose” (166). Simone exclaims: A hundred thousand! Said you a hundred thousand? Oh be sure That will for all time, and in everything Make me your debtor. Ay! From this time forth My house, with everything my house contains Is yours, and only yours. (167-172) Simone offers Guido all his belongings, including his wife Bianca. However, we cannot be entirely sure he is honest here. On the one hand, the passage could be read as Simone, whose “soul stands ever in the market-place” (232), assessing how much Guido is willing to pay for Bianca. On the other hand, considering Simone’s calculating personality, it might very well be a false, ironic promise based on his awareness that a sum that large is impossible to pay, even for Guido. Interpreted this way, Simone’s offer becomes a provocation, rather, challenging Guido by indirectly saying “pay me that much money and you can have my wife”. Simone continues: My brain is dazed. I will be richer far Than all the other merchants. I will buy Vineyards, and lands, and gardens. Every loom From Milan down to Sicily shall be mine, And mine the pearls that the Arabian seas Store in their silent caverns.

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Generous Prince, This night shall prove the herald of my love, Which is so great that whatsoe’er you ask It will not be denied you. (174-183) Taking his ironic offer one step further, Simone now emphasizes that not only will Guido obtain all that belongs to him, and all that his house contains, but nothing will be denied him. Guido is quick to reply, “What if I asked / For white Bianca here?” (184- 85). If previously the exchanges of trade had borne an implied meaning of Bianca being the object on offer, it is now made explicit that Bianca, as Lee notes, becomes “the real object of exchange” (2006, 34). The female body, here, is literally being commodified and treated as one of Simone’s many wares, “sold and bartered”, in Beatrice’s words from The Duchess of Padua (II.27). It could be argued, that Guido’s mild tone and constant praise of Bianca, especially in contrast to Simone’s cruel insults, make him a respectable character. However, he too objectifies her, making her an idolized object rather than a human being, reminding us of Lord Darlington’s treatment of Lady Windermere in Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (see Whiteley 2015, 163). Lee observes that Guido’s “objectification of her ‘pure’ beauty is false, in that he simultaneously possesses her sexually”, making her both “an ideal and a whore” (Lee 2006, 36). There is also a fascinating passage in the play, where Guido reveals that he uses Bianca, just like Narcissus did a pool of water, as a mirror to admire his own beauty. He tells Bianca to, “Loose the falling midnight of your hair / And in those stars, your eyes, let me behold / Mine image, as in mirrors” (385-387), before adding, “I am jealous / Of what your vision feasts on” (390-391). His admiration shifts from her beauty, to the image of his own beauty, transforming Bianca into a mere vessel, the object through which he can desire himself. In Guido’s narcissism we can trace an echo of Jacques Lacan’s words from Seminar 1, where he explains that “it’s one’s own ego that one loves in love” (1988, 142), which is precisely the process that we can identify in Guido, his desire being directed at Bianca, the object, and back to himself through the very image of himself. However, Simone tells Guido that Bianca is not worthy of him, as “She is but made to keep the house and spin” (188). He commands Bianca to sit down, where her distaff awaits her. Bianca, who has been a silent spectator of the men’s dialogue, asks calmly, “What shall I spin?” (194), before declaring: The brittle thread is broken, The dull wheel wearies of its ceaseless round,

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The duller distaff sickens of its load; I will not spin to-night. (203-206) While Bianca’s description of her broken spinning tools may refer metaphorically to her unhappy marriage with Simone, the allusion to Homer’s Penelope reinforcing the metaphor, it certainly also implies double entendre, which would be the second demonstration of her sexually transgressive nature, the first being her extra-marital affair with Guido. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, we too find a phallic distaff used for conveying risqué messages, when Sir Toby notes that his friend’s hair “hangs like flax on a distaff; and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs and spin it off” (I.3.208-210). Considering that round forms, in Medieval and Renaissance context, often implied associations with the womb and with women (Stewart 2003, 130), we understand that Bianca is unsatisfied and tired of her and Simone’s sexual (and non- sexual) relationship, and even more tired of Simone’s “duller distaff”. Simone is attentive, and responds with a cutting remark: It matters not. To-morrow you shall spin, and every day Shall find you at your distaff. So, Lucretia Was found by Tarquin. So, perchance, Lucretia Waited for Tarquin. Who knows? I have heard Strange things about men’s wives. (207-212) Simone refers to the rape of the Roman noblewoman Lucretia, which was also the subject of Shakespeare’s narrative poem “The Rape of Lucretia”, however he alters the story, so that instead of being brutally raped by Tarquin, he suggests that Lucretia was the one tempting and seducing him. He then draws a connection between Lucretia and Bianca, suggesting that Bianca, too, is a sexually transgressive woman. Adding, “Who knows?” and that he has “heard strange things about men’s wives”, which lets Simone take advantage of the double register earlier mentioned in this thesis, in which exchanges like these necessarily have to be interpreted in two different ways. He makes his claims speculative, yet all three characters in the play, and its audience, certainly, know very well what is being suggested. Simone alludes to Bianca’s sexual transgressiveness several times throughout the play, once implying that Guido, too, has a habit of engaging in unchaste activities: They say, my lord, These highborn dames do so affect your Grace, That where you go they throng like flies around you, Each seeking for your favour. I have heard also

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Of husbands that wear horns, and wear them bravely, A fashion most fantastical. (146-152) Simone refers to gossip about Guido being a philanderer, with various women seeking “his favour”, while being aware that his own wife is currently in a romantic relationship with Guido. Then, Simone alludes to cuckolded men wearing their “horns” bravely and in “A fashion most fantastical”. The phrasing is intriguing, because, characteristically for Simone, it is guileful and aggressive. Inscribed between the words, here, is violence and threat: Simone is essentially challenging Guido, questioning if he is taking Simone for being one of the men who wear their horns bravely. Towards the end of the play, Bianca becomes more vocal and expresses to Guido how much she hates her husband, “Oh, would that Death might take him where he stands!” (285). Simone turns around (as per stage directions), and exclaims, “Who spake of Death? Let no one speak of Death” (286). He continues: What should Death do in such a merry house, With but a wife, a husband, and a friend To give it greeting? Let Death go to houses Where there vile, adulterous things, chaste wives Who grow weary of their noble lords Draw back the curtains of their marriage beds, And in polluted and dishonoured sheets Feed some unlawful lust (287-294) Simone, perhaps more vicious than ever, condemns his wife’s infidelity, creating an image of her transgressive sexuality as being a monster that needs to be fed, something repulsive and vulgar, bearing an echo of Hamlet’s words of disapproval at his mother’s “incestuous sheets” (1.2.156). The conversation continues, and soon Guido makes clear that he will go home for the night and will return another time. Fetching Guido’s cloak and sword, Simone expresses his interest in Guido’s sword. A passage follows, in which Simone describes the sword repeatedly in phallic terms, asserting that it is “pliant as a snake” (447) and that he “never touched so delicate a blade” (450), before adding that he has a blade too, but that his is “somewhat rusted now” (451). This leads to a pivotal moment in the play, in which Simone proposes a duel between the men in order to find out “Whether the Prince’s or the merchant’s steel / Is better tempered” (479-480). Seeking Guido’s confirmation, he adds, “Or is my state too low / For you to cross your rapier against mine, / In jest, or earnest?” (472-474). The phallic innuendo reaches its peak, with Guido replying, “Naught would please me better / than to stand fronting you with naked

Weber 48 blade / In jest or earnest” (475-477). Simone asks Bianca to fetch his sword and tells us that “Good Bianca here shall hold the torch / Lest what is but a jest grow serious” (488- 489). Significantly, the duel begins in a mock mode, still in the ambiguous, double register sense of it not being explicit if the situation is playful or violent. Then, in what we can assume to be an aside, Bianca calls to Guido, “Oh! Kill him, kill him!” (490), which she will repeat again when the two men have started to fight. At one point during the fight, Simone begs Bianca to put out the torch, and in the darkness, we hear Simone, “There and there. / Ah, devil! Do I hold thee in my grip?” (609-510). Simone overpowers Guido and strangles him until Guido, in a last attempt of rescue, begs for Bianca’s help. She stands silent and instead it is Simone who replies: “What, is there life yet in those lying lips? / Die like a dog with lolling tongue! Die! Die!” (535-536). Having successfully killed Guido, Simone utters something crucial: “Now for the other” (600), thus indicating that he intends on killing Bianca as well. It is after this utterance, that the play ends in a most surprising way: BIANCA: Why Did you not tell me you were so strong? SIMONE: Why Did you not tell me you were beautiful? (601-604)

In this remarkable final anaphora, Simone’s strength is equated and juxtaposed with Bianca’s beauty. But where does her beauty come from at this moment? She becomes attractive to him only because she is attractive to other men, because he realizes her value as a sexual object in a commercial sense. Essentially, she becomes an erotic object for him because someone else has wanted, and has succeeded, in possessing her. Bianca, on the other hand, is aroused by his strength. But there are more layers to Bianca’s sudden articulation of attraction to Simone. The fact that Bianca exhibits this interest for her husband after he has violently killed her lover, and, what is more, expressed the intent of killing her as well, implies a sadistic perspective in which she is aroused by his power over her. By killing Guido, Simone regains Bianca as his possession, thus regaining his power over her, but he also proves to her that he has the power to kill her as well, that he is capable of doing so, which ignites her passion. Furthermore, a possible reading of the passage is that Bianca in fact fetishizes herself. She seems to have internalised the male gaze, as Laura Mulvey might put it. Bianca is aroused by her own objectification and takes pleasure, not only in the potential for her

Weber 49 real death (a masochistic expression of what Freud would call the death drive) but also in the potential destruction of herself as independent subject and agent. Throughout the play, when Simone and Guido objectify and commodify her body, there is a sense in which humanity and subjectivity is taken away from her, and she is aroused by that very process, which is even more transgressive than her showing interest in her husband again after he has murdered her lover, because it means that she is participating in her own destruction, enjoying it and deriving pleasure from it. Her silence, then, is not evidence of submissiveness, rather it is a demonstration of her agency. She is acutely aware of what is going on, and takes delight in observing, choosing to intervene at her will, for example when she refuses to spin, or when she urges Guido to kill Simone. She is not silent because she is denied voice, she is silent because she prefers to watch and indulge.

Conclusion

By studying Wilde’s two largely under-discussed plays The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy, focusing on the characters of Beatrice and Bianca, I have attempted to rediscover two forgotten female characters in the oeuvre of Oscar Wilde that act in transgressive manners. Despite the lack of critical attention these plays have received, I argue that they constitute a significant part of Wilde’s work as a dramatist. As I have shown, Wilde was working on A Florentine Tragedy simultaneously as he was working on the society comedies, which is intriguing because it testifies that while writing characters and works that contemporary audiences found transgressive, such as Mrs. Erlynne from Lady Windermere’s Fan, Wilde was also working on these even more transgressive characters, providing a hidden and today largely forgotten Other, as it were, to his famous transgressive women. What is more, it demonstrates that he was interested in wildly different genres and subject matter at the very same time, establishing that he used his creativity for drama both for the commercial, popular stage, and for a more narrow, literary kind of drama at once. Furthermore, I have suggested which textual models Wilde drew inspiration from for The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy, namely Elizabethan-Jacobean drama and especially William Shakespeare. Indeed, if 19th century dramatists on occasion sought to find ways to evade censorship through, for example, writing their plays in French, we may speculate

Weber 50 that by situating the action of these two plays in the distant past, imitating the past, Wilde sought to investigate material he might not have been able to broach in more traditional theatre. In doing so, he made space to create female characters that explored radical ideas and sexual transgressions in a way that contemporary drama could not. Wilde was acutely aware of these tensions, consciously merging the Renaissance setting of The Duchess of Padua with fin de siècle social issues, emphasizing that if the audience “will not expect to find in an Italian tragedy modern life” (HD, 137), nevertheless they would do so, and be shocked and challenged by the experience. I have also presented several strong and outspoken women that have had a profound influence on Wilde and his works, in order to demonstrate that he was surrounded by strong-minded women from an early age and highly appreciated those relationships both privately and professionally, as during his time as editor for The Woman’s World. These women have undoubtedly informed Wilde’s work throughout his oeuvre, perhaps most evidently in his transgressive female characters, such as Beatrice and Bianca. Beatrice in The Duchess of Padua is certainly a transgressive woman. She challenges traditional 19th century gender norms through her sexual transgression, having an affair with Guido while married with the Duke. Furthermore, she never considered the Duke a hindrance for her affair until she believed that Guido considered the Duke a “barrier” for their love. In an impulsive act, Beatrice stabs her husband to death so that she can be with her lover, and when he rejects her, she blames the murder on him, well aware that he will be sentenced to death. What is more, Beatrice continually challenges her patriarchal husband, both publicly, by going against his commands in order to help the poor people of Padua, and privately by questioning his authority over her. She articulates radical, proto-feminist ideas in her speeches regarding men’s violence against women and the objectification and commodification of the female body. Also significant is that after her husband’s death, Beatrice takes over his position as patriarch, ruling over Padua by herself, making her lover Guido merely a visitor in her space. She also challenges authority by questioning the power that a civil body like the court of justice holds over her and goes against their orders at her will. Likewise, Bianca in A Florentine Tragedy also demonstrates transgressive behaviour, mostly through her sexuality. In A Florentine Tragedy, we immediately learn that Bianca is having an extramarital affair, and we soon learn that she does not

Weber 51 try to hide it. On the contrary, Bianca enjoys observing her husband and her lover spar over her and derives sadistic sexual pleasure from the men objectifying and commodifying her body. She thus fetishizes herself and is aroused by that objectification. Furthermore, Bianca’s desire for her husband Simone is rekindled only after she has witnessed him violently kill her lover, and only after she has understood that Simone intended to kill her too, which suggests that she gains sadistic pleasure from seeing her husband’s strength because it manifests his power over her. Nevertheless, as I have argued, just as the Beatrice in The Duchess of Padua, precisely in asserting her own right to experience life intensely on her own terms and according to her own "passions", Bianca too can be conceived to stand as a proto-feminist figure. To summarise, in The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy we find several themes that return in Wilde’s other works, particularly in the more famous and widely analysed society plays and the symbolist drama Salomé, such as the commodification of the female body, the challenging of traditional gender roles, and transgressive female sexuality. Both Beatrice and Bianca are radical female characters who challenge traditional ideas of womanhood and female sexuality. Significantly, despite their Renaissance setting, The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy are modern plays, dealing with modern ideas and presenting radically modern women— precisely corresponding with Wilde’s belief that “the essence of art is to produce the modern idea under antique form” (HD, 137). Due to the limited scope of this thesis, I have focused exclusively on the female characters in Wilde’s Elizabethan-Jacobean plays. This thesis therefore provides a good starting point for future research into Wilde’s other forgotten women, including the intriguing characters Myrrhina from La Sainte Courtisane and Ellen Lovel from A Wife’s Tragedy. Further research might also consider why Wilde wanted to write these Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies to begin with, as it remains an odd choice. Indeed, in Bristow’s words, still as relevant today as when he wrote them just over a decade ago, “at present, there seems to be no end in sight to Wilde’s enduring attractiveness to our contemporary world” (2009, xiii).

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