OSCAR WILDE
An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism Also by E.H. Mikhail
The Social and Cultural Setting of the 1890s John Galsworthy the Dramatist Comedy and Tragedy Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography of Criticism A Bibliography of Modern Irish Drama 1899-1970 Dissertations on Anglo-Irish Drama The Sting and the Twinkle: Conversations with Sean O'Casey (co-editor with john O'Riordan) J.M. Synge: A Bibliography of Criticism Contemporary British Drama 19 50-1976 J.M. Synge: Interviews and Recollections (editor) W.B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections (editor) English Drama 1900-1950 Lady Gregory: Interviews and Recollections (editor) OSCAR WILDE An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism
E. H. MIKHAIL E. H. Mikhail 1978 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1978 978-0-333-23239-2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission
First published 1978 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong]ohannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mikhail, Edward Halim Oscar Wilde. 1. Wilde, Oscar - Bibliography 016.828'8'09 Z8975
ISBN 978-1-349-03579-3 ISBN 978-1-349-03577-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03577-9
This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement Contents
Acknowledgements vii Introduction ix BIBLIOGRAPHIES [Including catalogues, indexes, and collections] 1 (a) Bibliographies Wholly Devoted to Wilde 3 (b) Bibliographies Partially Devoted to Wilde 7 II PUBLISHED BOOKS BY WILDE AND THEIR REVIEWS 17 Ravenna 19 Vera 19 Poems 19 The Duchess of Padua 19 The Happy Prince and Other Tales 20 The Picture of Dorian Gray 20 Intentions 20 Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories 21 A House of Pomegranates 21 Salome 21 Lady Windermere's Fan 22 The Sphinx 22 A Woman of No Importance 22 The Soul of Man 22 The Ballad of Reading Gaol 22 The Importance of Being Earnest 23 An Ideal Husband 23 De Profundis 23 The Works of Oscar Wilde 24 The Letters of Oscar Wilde 26 III CRITICISM ON OSCAR WILDE 29 (a)Books 31 (i) Books Wholly Devoted to Wilde 31 (ii) Books Partially Devoted to Wilde 57 (b )Periodicals 116 (c) Reviews of Play Productions, including Dramatisations and Films Based on Wilde's Life or His Works 190 Vera 190 The Duchess of Padua 190 vi Contents Lady Windermere's Fan 191 A Woman of No Importance 196 An Ideal Husband 198 The Importance of Being Earnest 202 Salome 209 A Florentine Tragedy 213 The Picture of Dorian Gray 213 Mr and Mrs Daventry 214 The Happy Prince 214 The Birthday of the Infanta 215 The Selfish Giant 215 Oscar Wilde [Play by Leslie and Sewell Stokes I 215 Flesh and Fantasy 216 The Canterville Ghost 216 The Ballad of Reading Gaol 216 The Nightingale and the Rose 216 Lord Arthur Savile's Crime 217 Oscar Wilde [Film I 217 The Trials of Oscar Wilde 217 The Importance of Being Oscar 217 A Wilde Evening with Shaw 218 I Must Be Talking to My Friends 218 Wilde! 218 The Critic as Artist 218 ( d)Dissertations on Oscar Wilde 219 (i) Dissertations Wholly Devoted to Wilde 219 (ii) Dissertations Partially Devoted to Wilde 222 (e) Discography 225 (f) Satires on Oscar Wilde in Punch 227
Index 232 Acknowledgements
It is a pleasant duty to record my appreciation to the staff of the University of Lethbridge Library; the British Library, London; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; Trinity College Library, Dublin; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; the University of California Library, Los Angeles; the Yale University Library; and the New York Public Library. I am also grateful to Miss Mary Babke and Miss Anninee Choukassizian for the useful material and information they supplied; to Miss Bea Ramtej for her patience and skill in typing and preparing the final manuscript; to Mr Tim Farmiloe of Macmillan for his enthusiasm and encouragement; to Mr Allan Aslett and his staff of the same firm for their help in seeing the book through the press; and to Mr John Prince for compiling the index. Introduction
No comprehensive critical bibliography of Oscar Wilde exists. Stuart Mason's Bibliography of Oscar Wilde ( 1914 ), though concerned mainly with primary works, contains also much useful critical material. This, however, is marred by the fact that the Bibliography, in addition to the numerous errors it contains, 1 is ill arranged, inadequately indexed, deficient in some important matters, and with much material that is of little use to Wilde ian scholars. Mason carefully corrected his Bibliography over the years. These corrections are to be found in his interleaved copy, rebound in three volumes, and now preserved at the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles. The corrections, however, do not appear in the new edition of Mason's Bibliography published in 1967, and the usefulness of this work, therefore, remains limited. 2 Mason, however, was not alone in making mistakes. Almost every work I have consulted during the preparation of this work, whether books on Wilde or bibliographical aids,3 contains errors, some of them perpetuated by Mason. Rupert Hart-Davis in The Letters of Oscar Wilde says (p. 450) that a letter to the Editor from Lord Alfred Douglas was printed in the Review of Reviews of 28 June 1895; this issue does not carry any letters to the Editor. He also gives (p. 448) wrong publication dates for the letters sent to the Editor of The Star during Wilde's trials. Blanch M. Baker in Theatre and Allied Arts says (p. 113) that there is a chapter on Wilde in Cosmo Hamilton's People Worth Talking About; this book does not even refer to Wilde. According to the MLA Bibliography for 1928 (p. 44 ), Gilbert M. Weeks's 'Sherard on Wilde' appeared in the London Saturday Review; It was published in the New York one. The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, XXXIII (p. 458), gives the year of A. J. Farmer's 'Aestheticism and Oscar Wilde' in Etudes anglaises as 19 57; the article was published in 19 58. Victorian Studies for 1968 states (p. 613) that Brian Inglis wrote a review article in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, XXXI (10 August 1967); the article does not appear in this issue and the volume number and date cited do not correspond. Studia Germanica Gandensia, III ( 1963) gives (p. 57) the date of Brian W. Downs's article 'Anglo-Dutch Literary Relations 1867-1900' in The Modern Language Review as 1931; it was published in the July 1936 issue. The Annals of the New York Stage, XIV, states (p. 539) that The Duchess of Padua was first produced on 21 January 1891; the correct date is 26 January 1891. The New York Times in its issue of 17 September 1918 refers (p. 11) to a revival of An Ideal Husband in New York as being presented for the 'First Time Here'; the play had already been produced in the same city at the Lyceum Theatre in 1895 and 1916. Even dissertations on Wilde have not always been accurate. Dorothy Johnson Hardman in a thesis entitled X Oscar Wilde 'Oscar Wilde's plays on the New York Professional Stage', submitted to the University of Washington in 1942, says (p. 26) that 'the only available review of the production [of Lady Windermere's Fan on 6 February 1893) is the one offered by the New York Daily Tribune'; I was able to obtain seven reviews, listed in the present work. The same author further says (p. 50) that 'There is no available review of the f1.rst production of The Importance of Being Earnest'; there are at least eight available ones, again listed in the appropriate section in this bibliography. A manuscript copy of Lady Windermere's Fan (No. 37943) in the British Museum incorrectly mentions that it was 'First acted at the St. James's Theatre, 22 February 1892'; the play was first produced on Saturday, 20 February 1892, as the reviews listed in this work show. Nor are existing bibliographical aids comprehensive in their coverage of Wildeiana. Various periodical indexes, for example, never mention the large number of interviews Wilde gave during his American lecture tour in 1882. Essay and General Index includes some essays on Wilde in books, but neither recollections of him in books of reminiscences nor references to him in books on dramatic literature. Another difficulty I have encountered is the vast amount of material that has been written on Wilde. As a result of Wilde's versatility as a writer, his French connections, and the scandal of his life, there has probably been more literature dealing with him than with any other modern writer. When I enumerated the various items that have been written on him · including gossipy material such as the newspaper descriptions of the garments which Constance Wilde's bridesmaids wore at her wedding; the coverage of Wilde's lecture tours both in America and in the United Kingdom; the various treatments of him as a dramatist, a poet, a novelist, and a critic in all the books dealing with these different genres; recollections of him by various contemporaries; the reviews of both his published books and play productions or adaptations based on his works by both professional and amateur companies; satires of him in Punch and other periodicals; dissertations wholly or partially devoted to him; various editions of his works; and anthologies containing some of these works- it came as no surprise to me that the number of items totalled some 13,000. Apart from the additional burden which this large number of items has put on me in deciding what to include and what to exclude, the items I eventually decided to include - totalling some 3500 - left me no alternative but to resort to the added task of annotations as the only way in which a reader might distinguish between, for example, the several items entitled 'Oscar Wilde'. The annotations, however, are not evaluative, but descriptive and indicative of the content of the material they describe. A number of items, though, have not been annotated; in these cases I felt that the title of the entry is indicative enough of its content. The annotations fall generally under broad categories such as 'Critical assessment', 'Biography', 'Wilde and Aestheticism', 'Wilde's trials', 'American lecture tour', 'Recollections of Wilde', and 'Satire Introduction xi of Wilde'. The cut-off date is 1975, although some later items have been included. 'Review articles' posed another problem. While it is true that a large amount of reviews of books on Wilde are superficial and do not add much to our knowledge of Wilde, those reviews by such writers as E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, and Max Beerbohm could not possibly be omitted from a bibliography of this nature. This, of course, does not mean that only reviews by such critics are worthwhile; it simply means that review articles, as a category, should not be ignored. I have therefore decided to include all these reviews, and have annotated them as 'review articles', meaning that they are reviews of books on Wilde. Reviews of books by Wilde are, of course, included in the appropriate section dealing with his works. Some of these reviews are also included in the section dealing with periodical articles, but have annotations which simply indicate the work they deal with: for instance, 'De Profundis', 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', or 'Poems'. In deciding which books that refer briefly to Wilde should be included, the number of pages has not always been a factor in my decision. James Joyce's one-page reference to Salome in his Letters has naturally been included rather than other books having longer references to Wilde. I have also included only those anthologies or editions of Wilde's works which contain commentaries. In the case of the interviews, I have included only those which, to the best of my knowledge, are authentic. Wilde himself was aware of this problem when he wrote to Ernest Dowson from Naples complaining that 'The Neopolitan papers have turned out to be the worst form of American journalism. They flll columns with me, and write interviews of fictitious nature' (Letters, p. 656 ). But there is nothing fictitious about a bibliographer's task, and, in addition to handling the huge outpouring of books and periodicals relating to Oscar Wilde, I have had the opportunity of examining the celebrated collections of Wildeiana: namely, the Library of William Andrews Clark, J r: Wilde and Wildeiana, at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Robert Ross Memorial Collection of Wilde at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Katherine S. Dreier Collection of Wilde at Yale University; the Arents Tobacco collection of Wilde at the New Yor:C Public Library; and the Wilde manuscripts at the British Library, London.
E. H. Mikhail
NOTES
1. Mason, for example, erroneously asserted on p. 270 that 'Wilde returned from America in Aprill883'. Wilde sailed from New York for England on 27 December 1882, on the Cunarder S. S. Bothnia, arriving in Liverpool on xii Oscar Wilde 6 January 1883. Robert Sherard made the acquaintance of Wilde in Paris in February 1883. Messrs Maggs Bros reproduced in their catalogue of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents, N628 (Summer 1936), Wilde's letter to Charles Waller dated Paris, 26 March 1883. Furthermore, The Duchess of Padua was finished by Wilde in Paris on 15 March of that year. Obviously, then, Wilde could not have 'returned from America in April1883'. 2. See Owen Dudley Edwards, 'Bibliography of Oscar Wilde', Book Collector (London), XVI, no. 4 (Winter 1967) 530-4. 3. See, for example, Donald L. Lawler, 'Oscar Wilde in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (N.Y.), LXVII (Apr 1973) 1972-88.