Preface
It will probably be within the general recollection that when, about eighteen months ago, Mr. Norman Marshall proposed to put on at the Gate Theatre an English version of Monsieur Maurice Rostand’s play about Oscar Wilde, I intervened and objected to the production. My objection, as I explained to Mr. Marshall in an interview I had with him at the time in my flat at Hove, was not because I considered then, any more than I do now, that a play dealing with more or less contemporary facts and persons may not rightly be presented on the stage, but simply because Monsieur Rostand’s play was a travesty of the truth and a deliberate misrepresentation of well-known and often-recorded facts. It is sufficient to point out that the whole idea of Rostand’s play was based on the false assumption that I had never seen or spoken to Oscar Wilde again after he came out of prison. This is, of course, so far from being the truth that it is well known, or notorious if one prefers the word, that I resumed my friendship with Wilde which, on my side at least, had never been interrupted, immediately after his release, that I wrote to him a number of letters and received a number of letters in reply while he was at Bernaval for three months after he came out of prison, that I then invited him to stay as my guest at my villa in Posilippo (Naples), where he remained for several months with me, that I left him there in possession of my villa, and after giving him a sum of money, only because my mother threatened to stop my allowance if I continued to reside in the same house with him, and that thereafter in Paris for three years, right up to the time of his death, I saw him constantly (often daily for months at a time), that I continually supplied him with money, and that when he died I paid for his funeral and was the principal mourner at the church of Saint Germain des Près, and at the cemetery at Bagneux. Naturally I objected violently to the production of a play which was based on what I can only describe as a deliberate perversion of the truth, and it did not take me ten minutes to convince Mr. Marshall that, quite apart from the legal aspect of the matter, it would be impossible for him as an honorable man to be a party to any such production.
Mr. Marshall entirely agreed as soon as he had grasped the facts and after I had shown him a number of Wilde’s letters written to me from Bernaval. He at once stopped the rehearsals and issued notices to the Press that the production was canceled.
At that time I told Mr. Marshall that if, and when, he cared to produce another play which did not falsify the story, I would not raise any objection to its production, and I pointed out that Monsieur Rostand, whatever may have been his motives (possibly he was only ignorant and had not taken the trouble to verify the facts), had merely succeeded in completely destroying what was and is, in truth, a very dramatic and romantic story.
Accordingly, when Mr. Marshall and Mr. Sewell Stokes visited me at Hove a few months ago and showed me the present play, I agreed at once to its performance, with a few minor alterations in the text. As it stands it represents an historically true story, allowing, of course, for dramatic license.
For example, when Wilde came out of prison he left England the same day and never returned. The house in Tite Street was no longer his, and his furniture and goods had all been seized and sold under distraint to satisfy his creditors, within a week or two of his arrest.
To place the second act of the play in Tite Street is therefore, of course, incorrect, but I think it is a legitimate piece of dramatic arrangement.
Again the scenes at Algiers and in Paris while not pretending to be exact reproductions of actual scenes are sufficiently close to the truth to be accepted without objection. I could have wished that poor Wilde had not been shown in the last act drunk on the stage. On the other hand, it is idle to deny that he was drunk, on occasions, at that period of his life, and if Byron and Browning and Shakespeare can be shown on the stage, why not Oscar Wilde?
I did not see the play myself, because I felt that it would be too painful for me, devoted as I still am and always shall be to the memory of this brilliant and wonderful man, and conscious as I am and always shall be of my own failings (though not in the direction of any unkindness or disloyalty to Wilde) to witness it. But as I have been asked to write a preface for the present publication, I can say that I regard the play as truthful and dramatic in a high degree, and I am glad to know from the evidence of numerous people who witnessed it that it aroused great sympathy for a man whom I consider to have been cruelly and unjustly treated and whose brilliant genius, if he had not been condemned by an ungrateful country to prison and resulting early death, would have enriched the English stage with many more masterpieces of dramatic art. Wilde was at his best a fine poet and a master of prose, and he was also the author of what I consider to be, apart from Shakespeare, the finest comedy ever written in the English language. If his fellow countrymen had treated him in a more Christian spirit, he would have written half a dozen more comedies as good. Let England bear the responsibility for what she did to him.
“From the beginning when was ought but stones for English prophets?”
—Alfred Douglas
St. Ann’s Court, Hove.
John Carol (Charlie Parker) and Robert Morley (Oscar Wilde) in Oscar Wilde, at the Fulton Theatre, 1938. (Photograph reprinted with permission from the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)
Oscar Wilde was first presented on Broadway at the Fulton Theatre on October 10, 1938. It was produced and directed by Norman Marshall, and the settings and costumes were designed by Raymond Sovey.
Cast
| (In order of appearance) | |
| Lord Alfred Douglas | John Buckmaster |
| Louis Dijon | Edward Trevor |
| An Arab Boy | Richard Charlton |
| Oscar Wilde | Robert Morley |
| An Hotel Waiter | Kenneth Treseder |
| Eustace | Wyman Kane |
| A Waiter | Reginald Malcolm |
| Frank Harris | Harold Young |
| Charlie Parker | John Carol |
| A Butler | Colin Hunter |
| Allen | Arthur Gould-Porter |
| Sir Edward Clarke, Q.C | J.W Austin |
| Mr. Justice Henn Collins | Frederick Graham |
| Clerk of the Court | Lewis Dayton |
| Mr. E.H. Carson, Q.C | Mark Dignam |
| The Solicitor-General | Gordon Richards |
| Mr. Justice Wills | Oswald Yorke |
| A Waiter | Jean Del Vial |
For Norman Marshall and Robert Morley to whom the authors owe more than they care to admit.
Authors’ note
The authors particularly wish to express their gratitude to Lord Alfred Douglas for his kindness in permitting them to portray him on the stage, and also for his help in checking the authenticity of several facts contained in this play. In addition they wish to acknowledge the various works on which they have drawn for information, especially, the following: Wilde: Three Times Tried (Ferrestone Press, 1912); Letters to the Sphinx, Ada Leverson (Duckworth, 1930); Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris; Oscar Wilde by Andre Gide; Poems in Prose by Oscar Wilde (Paris, 1905); The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins).
Act One
Scene I: The terrace of an Hotel in Algiers.
Scene II: A Private Room at a Restaurant.
Scene III: Wilde’s study, Tite Street, Chelsea.