Mr Steele Mackaye has written to me estimating the cost of production at 10,000 dollars: you will appear in a more gorgeous frame than any woman of our day. This price I do not consider at all excessive, as, for your production of it in London, the properties, dresses, etc. will of course be available.
I will hope to hear from you soon on the matter. Mr Barrett is a good manager and actor, but for my Duchess I need you.
However there it lies. Think seriously and long about it. Perhaps for both of us it may mean the climacteric of our lives. OSCAR WILDE
To Steele Mackaye
[Postmark 11 October 1882] Halifax, Nova Scotia
My dear Steele, Mary Anderson has written to me, accepting you as director and supreme autocrat (I think that over the ‘supers’ you should have the power of life and death: we will have no serious dramatic art until we hang a super), offering to take Booth’s Theatre for October, and to get a good young actor for the hero, and indeed she seems most willing to do everything requisite for our success. She is simple and nice, and the Griffin must have his claws clipped.
I will see of course that in our contract you shall be named as the man under whose direction the play shall walk the stage. I will be back in a fortnight; and we will settle matters about The Duchess and about Vera. Any and all of your suggestions will be most valuable. I am glad you like it and if we can get Miss Mather it will be a great thing.
Pray go over the play carefully, and note on the blank interleaf your changes, so that over the walnuts and the wine at some little Brunswick dinner we may settle everything.
I long to get back to real literary work, for though my audiences are really most appreciative 1 cannot write while flying from one railway to another and from the cast-iron stove of one hotel to its twin horror in the next.
I will be at the Vendome Hotel, Boston, on Sunday next. Send me a line there to say how things are going with you.
Remember me to Frank Pierrson, and believe me, very truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
‘I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few, I am gratified. If it does not, it causes me no pain.’
Wilde sailed home from New York on the Bothnia on 27 December 1882 and arrived in Liverpool on 6 January. During his year in America he had delivered nearly 150 lectures and earned himself around $6000. After two or three weeks in London he used what was left of his American earnings to spend three months in Paris. He stayed at the Hotel Voltaire on the Left Bank, had his hair curled in imitation of a bust of Nero in the Louvre and dressed in the height of fashion. ‘We are now concerned with the Oscar of the second period,’ he said, ‘who has nothing whatever in common with the gentleman who wore long hair and carried a sunflower down Piccadilly.’ Some years later he would further modify his account of this stunt by saying that he never carried a flower down Piccadilly: ‘To have done it was nothing, but to make people think one had done it—that was a triumph.’
It was in Paris that he met and befriended a young English journalist, Robert Sherard, a great-grandson of Wordsworth. Sherard was later to become his first and most voluminous biographer, though in his muddle-headed way and spaniel-like devotion he entirely overlooked his friend’s homosexuality before his arrest and misunderstood it thereafter. It was through Sherard that Wilde met many of the foremost literary Frenchmen of the time: Verlaine and Victor Hugo, Mallarme, Zola, Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt, as well as the painters Degas and Jacques-Emile Blanche. Impressing Paris was considerably more difficult than London or New York, which had looked upon his eccentricities and showmanship with amused tolerance; Zola and de Goncourt were especially critical, the latter writing rather unflatteringly of Wilde in his diary as ‘cet individu au sexe douteux, au langage de cabotin, aux récits blagueurs’.
The Duchess of Padua was duly sent off to Mary Anderson, who within a month had turned it down, which was as much of a blow to his finances as it was to his ego. However it must have been some consolation that he had almost finalised the arrangements for Vera to be produced with Marie Prescott in the title role in August.
To Mary Anderson
23 March 1883 Paris
My dear Miss Anderson, The play was duly forwarded some days ago: I hope it arrived safe: I have no hesitation in saying that it is the masterpiece of all my literary work, the chef-d’oeuvre of my youth.
As regards the characters, the Duke is a type of the Renaissance noble: I felt that to have made him merely a common and vulgar villain would have been ‘banal’: he is a cynic, and a philosopher: he has no heart, and his vileness comes from his intellect: it is a very strong acting part as you see, and must be given to an experienced actor. To write a comedy one requires comedy merely, but to write a tragedy, tragedy is not sufficient: the strain of emotion on the audience must be lightened: they will not weep if you have not made them laugh: so I proceeded in the following fashion.
At the beginning of the play I desired merely to place the audience in full possession of the facts, of the foundation of the play: comedy would have been disturbing, so with the exception of Ascanio’s few prose speeches there is none: the action begins with the entrance of the Duke, whose comedy is bitter but comedy still, and the culmination of the act is the entrance of the Duchess: 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.
The comedy of Act II is the Duke’s comedy, which is bitter, the citizens’, which is grotesque, and the Duchess’s comedy which is the comedy of Viola, and Rosalind; the comedy in which joy smiles through a mask of beauty.
Act III. 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. The Duchess’s
Sure it is the guilty
Who being very wretched need love most:
Guido’s
There is no love where there is any sin:
and the great speech of the Duchess that follows give to the audience exactly what one wants to produce: intense emotion with a background of intellectual speculation. Which is right? That is what they will ask.
The comedy of Act IV is elaborate, and necessary to relieve the audience: you must not think it too long: believe me it is vitally necessary to make our audience merry after the horror in the corridor. I have selected, as you see, the style of comedy which never fails to raise laughter: the unconscious comedy of stupidity, missing the meaning of words, yet in all its solemn ignorance stumbling now and then on a real bit of truth.
Act V. The comedy of the soldiers: this relieves the audience from the strain of the trial: and is a bit of realism not I think put before into a dungeon scene.
Well, there is my comedy: and I hope that you have laughed over it as you read it: for myself, I am devoted to the ‘second citizen’ who seems to me an unconscious humorist of the highest order: he should get a great deal of fun out of his part. […]
Will you present my compliments to Mr and Mrs Griffin: and believe me that writing this play for you has been a task of pleasure, and a labour of love. I remain, dear