IN HIS FINAL year at Portora, Wilde declared his genius to his peers. He won the Carpenter Prize for achieving the highest mark in an examination on the Greek Testament, for which he was awarded, at the school’s annual prize-giving ceremony, a seven-volume edition of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.1 A few months later he sat the entrance examination to Trinity College, Dublin, and came second only to a boy who would go on to become the college’s Professor of Latin. Portora acknowledged his prowess by awarding him one of its three school scholarships to Trinity.
Wilde matriculated at Trinity as a Classical Honours student on 10 October 1871, six days before his seventeenth birthday. In his first year he resided at home in Merrion Square, a short walk from Trinity; the remaining two years of his time there were spent in college rooms. As an undergraduate, Wilde reprised the authors who had appeared on his entrance examination, and studied many others, to acquire, during his three years at college, a deep and catholic knowledge of classical literature.* Trinity’s University Calendar, which was handed to Wilde on his arrival, outlined the details of the course and the various examinations that lay ahead. His ‘minute and critical knowledge’ of ancient texts would, it informed him, be rigorously tested; he would be assessed, too, on his ‘power of expressing the full meaning and force of an ancient author by writing such a translation of a given passage as may deserve commendation, not merely for its correctness, but for its excellence as a piece of English Composition’.4
The classical volumes Wilde used as a student are copiously marked and annotated. The annotation of ancient texts has a long history. Before the birth of printing, scholars ‘glossed’ manuscripts with footnotes and marginal notes in which they offered variant readings of a text and suggested emendations; they also included translations of words and phrases and cited parallel passages from other classical authors. The first printed editions of the classics, issued during the Renaissance, followed these early annotators by accom panying texts with Latin notes that contained similar infor mation. In the margins of these volumes students then wrote their own annotations, which, likewise, generally concerned literary parallels, variant readings of the text and the translation of obscure words.
Wilde’s annotations and markings conform very closely to these scholarly conventions. Their focus is generally on textual elucidation and on the fine points of language and grammar. The earliest of his extant volumes is a copy of Livy’s Roman History which bears the date ‘November 1868’, when Wilde was still at Portora. It is full of marginal notes dealing with linguistic matters.5†
Wilde’s copy of The Bacchae of Euripides edited by one of his Trinity tutors, R.Y. Tyrrell, has also survived.8 On the title-page of the famous play, which concerns Dionysus and the riotous orgiastic rites of his followers, Wilde wrote ‘Oscar Wilde T.C.D. Trinity [i.e. summer term], 1872’. Clearly intent on acquiring a ‘minute and critical knowledge’ of the text, Wilde underlines countless words and phrases which he then presumably looked up in his lexicon; he frequently glosses lines in the drama with notes such as ‘Cf Xenophanes’, ‘Cf [line]342’.9
Wilde covered every available blank space of his Euripides and, in the process, damaged the spine and knocked its corners. All of his surviving classical texts are in very poor condition, with their tops and tails bumped and their hinges loose. Wilde had his rough scholarly pleasure with them, cramming the margins and end leaves full of notes and doodles, and sometimes even tearing out entire pages. He obviously used them exclusively for the purposes of study, which is doubtless why he purchased them in relatively cheap editions. The label of Galway & Co. bookshop, Eustace Street, is pasted in the endpapers of The Bacchae. Next to it Wilde has jotted down some sums in which he appears to calculate the relatively small amount of money he has spent, or is about to spend, on other books by Euripides as well as on volumes by the Latin poets Ovid and Horace.
Perhaps Wilde also bought his copy of The Iliad of Homer from Galway & Co.10 This economically priced student edition of Homer’s epic on the Trojan war is autographed ‘Oscar F. Wilde Trin. Coll.D. August 1873’. The date suggests that he purchased books in accordance with the college syllabus, because ‘Iliad, XIII–XIV’ was taught in Trinity term of 1873.11* At Trinity, Wilde doubtless immersed himself fully in Homer’s world of rosy-fingered dawns and wine-dark seas, and in the intense drama of the war between the gods, and among the heroes on the blood-soaked Trojan battlefield. A fellow student described him ‘as a queer lad’ who was ‘ever moping and dreaming’, and it was probably on ancient battles and the intricate web of doom that Wilde dreamed. To him, Homeric heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus were no mere ‘Shadows in song’. ‘No,’ he commented, ‘they are real’ – far more real than the people who inhabit the everyday world.
Wilde’s thoughts were carried away by Homer’s winged words; but sometimes they wandered from his reading involuntarily. His classical volumes and the various notebooks he kept at university are covered with doodles and amusing sketches of dragons, people in profile and paper kites (See p. 65). The kites may be seen as symbols of the lightness and sensitivity of a mind which soared on the currents of its reading, yet they also testify to the fact that even the most dedicated of classicists was sometimes known to nod.
Generally, however, Wilde read hard, and with an intense and sustained concentration that would pay dividends in his exams. He arrived first out of his entire year in his 1872 Freshman Classical examinations. The following year he secured one of the college’s ten foundation scholarships and also sat an examination for Trinity’s prestigious annual Berkeley Gold Medal Prize. That year the exam was on The Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets, a multi-volume book edited by the German scholar Meineke.
Annotations in Wilde’s copy of The Iliad of Homer.
The notes Wilde made in preparation for the examination (along with the evidence of the paper itself)12 display the meticulous nature of his reading at Trinity, as well as his impressive intellectual calibre. Contestants were asked to revise incorrectly transcribed lines of Greek comic verse and then translate them into particular styles of English. In his notes Wilde translated a fragment on the Homeric hero Odysseus into the colloquial English of the Elizabethan period.
Students then had to render, into the ancient Greek characteristic of the comic verse fragments, an English passage beginning ‘A good sherries-sack hath a twofold operation in it’. This complex task must have been relatively easy for Wilde, because his notes include brilliant Greek verse translations of the poems of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Arnold. His efforts were certainly accomplished enough for the examiners who awarded him the coveted Gold Medal. It would prove to be the most useful of all Wilde’s academic prizes. Whenever he was short of funds in later life, it was the first thing he pawned.
Pages from Wilde’s Trinity College Notebooks.
Ironically, Wilde’s spectacular triumphs may have prompted his premature departure from Trinity. Buoyed up by his success he attempted to secure one of the two Classical scholarships Magdalen College, Oxford advertised in 1874. At the examination in June of that year, which took place in Oxford, Wilde appeared insouciant, ostentatiously asking the invigilator, on numerous occasions, for extra paper. His arrogance was justified: he achieved the highest mark of all the candidates by some distance, and secured a substantial scholarship of £95 per year. Thus Wilde would finish at Oxford the degree course he had begun in Dublin, matriculating at Magdalen on 17 October 1874, the day after his twentieth birthday. His intellectual prowess made an instant impression on the English public school boys who were now his peers. Wilde ‘came up having read much more than the rest of us’, one of them recalled; the extent of his classical culture ‘excited awe’.13
* In the entrance examination, Wilde was tested on four authors of his choice – two Greek and two Latin. The list of Greek writers included the epic poet Homer, the tragedians Euripides and Sophocles, and those masters of the philosophic dialogue, Plato, Lucian and Xenophon. On the Latin list there were the poets Virgil and Horace, the historians Sallust and Livy and the dramatist Terence.2 The paper testifies to the breadth of classical culture Portora offered its pupils. At Trinity Wilde revised many of these authors and augmented his knowledge by studying, among other writers, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the Greek historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Isocrates and the Roman orator Cicero.3
† Similar annotations can be found in Wilde’s undergraduate copies of Cicero’s Philippic Orations,6 a collection of the Roman politician’s speeches, and his Aristophanes’ Nubes (The Clouds), an amusing satirical play about the Greek philosopher Socrates. In the latter volume, Wilde circles obscure words and phrases, scribbling English translations in the ample margins. As was customary with Wilde, some of the annotations are in Latin and Greek as well as in English.7 (See p. 10.)
* Most of Wilde’s notes relate to the meaning of words and their age, gender and derivation, and to specific points of grammar; others offer English or Latin translations. Wilde again makes numerous cross-references, and compares certain passages to the works of other classical authors (at Book XXIII, lines 255–60, we find the note ‘CF Bacchae [line] 1007’). This bears witness to Wilde’s prodigious memory, because he had studied Euripides’ play a year before he sat down with his Homer. (See p. 64.)