Wilde and the emergence of literary drama, 1880-95 Wilde’s career from c. 1880-1895 spans a radical shift of focus in the concept of theatre, from a knowing and complicit communication with and about a present audience, to the objective interpretation of a timeless, autonomous work of art. In the early 1880s, Wilde, Benjamin Jowett, Lewis Campbell, Frank Benson, W.L. Courtney and others involved with the 1880 Oxford Agamemnon On which see Macintosh (2005), 139-162; Wrigley (2011), 39-55 (APGRD 51) and Foster (2015), 9-17, and 50-67, accounts which draw from Benson, F. (1930), 117-133; Campbell (1891), 317-22; Carr (1898), 53-56; Courtney (1925), 60-70 et al. understood themselves as actively promoting such change. They wanted to establish respect for the authored performance text, and for theatre as a serious art; a respect Wilde would explore in practice years later in his own publishable plays. Recent discussions of Wilde’s excitement about early so-called ‘archaeological’ productions of Greek plays Ross (2013), 111-118; Hall and Macintosh (2005), 151, 452-3; Wrigley (2011), 39-55; Stokes in this volume. For discussion of these plays, an uncertain category at the time and since, see Foster (2015). raise the question of why his initial enthusiasm appears to abruptly disappear after 1887; and how this brief interest in authentic performance might be related to his later use of the formal structures and dramaturgy of classical plays in his own playwriting, such as the anagnorisis scene from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in The Importance of Being Earnest. By considering Wilde’s interest in the authentic performance of Greek plays together with his interest in the authentic performance of Shakespeare, a picture emerges of the crucial role played by early ideas of the historically actual or real in creating receptive conditions for early ideas of drama as literary. For imagined archaeological accuracy in the physical mise-en-scène modelled a new relationship for audiences to dramatic texts: that of being in the presence of an object, a thing itself - autonomous, actual, provocative in its historic reality. It was the ability of historic dramatic texts to communicate across vast gulfs of temporal and cultural difference which was held by commentators to be precisely the ‘discovery’ of the 1880 Oxford Agamemnon, 1881 Harvard Oedipus, and 1882 Cambridge Ajax. By 1895, Wilde can be seen as artfully combining old audience-centered ideas of theatre with new ideas of text-centered drama, by knowingly speaking to, and about, his present audiences, but via a highly economic and poetic literary form, whose deeper structures and verbal patterning, like those of ancient drama, are transcendentally intelligible. Wilde’s early support for ‘archaeological’ productions of Greek drama and Shakespeare can thus be seen as coherently related to his own later use of ancient comic and tragic dramaturgical structures in modelling a new idea of performed drama as a literary art. ‘Text? Text? What the hell is text?’ Literary drama (or modern drama, or the new drama, or simply the drama), See e.g. Chothia (1996) and (2009); Gale and Deeney (2010). is usually associated with the 1890s and the work of Ibsen, Antoine, Strindberg, Shaw, and Stanislavsky. But Antoine opened his Théâtre Libre in Paris Which would inspire Berlin’s Freie Buhne, Strindberg’s Intimate Theatre, the Moscow Art Theatre and in London, Barker and Vedrenne’s Court Theatre, later the Royal Court: Chothia (1996), 178-203. and William Archer first translated Ibsen in London in 1887, after a seven-year period in Britain during which Wilde, Benjamin Jowett, Lewis Campbell, Frank Benson, W. L. Courtney, and others involved in the 1880 Agamemnon had been actively promoting the serious public performance of the authentic texts of Greek drama and Shakespeare. The role of historic Greek drama and Shakespeare in laying the foundation for literary drama has been missed, in part, because (with the advent of modernism and the modern university) the idea of a play as its text gained such a rapid foothold after this change that theatre history in all periods was retroactively conceived in these terms. This had the effect of diverting attention from theatre’s immediately previous association with visual spectacle and the assembly of an audience. But it was precisely the idea that theatrical performance could be about the objective and detailed quality of authored texts which initially excited Wilde, and his fellow theatrical pioneers: the now normative idea of a dramatic text as a set of instructions, to be interpreted by performers and public alike, whose codes and meanings could still communicate in vastly different circumstances, qua their common humanity. Frank Benson and the Agamemnon cast and crew, and like-minded colleagues in London and Cambridge, were hailed by Wilde and others as launching a ‘new theatre’, Adderly (1888), 19. a ‘modern dramatic Renaissance’ Vanity Fair, of the Cambridge Ajax, December 9, 1882., and promoting ‘the cause of a rejuvenated Classic stage in England’, Daily Telegraph, of the Cambridge Ajax, November 30, 1882. because they seriously and publicly performed, at a time when theatre was seen as either popular entertainment or a form of social event, particularly venerated dramatic texts. Memoirs which describe this change include Benson (1930) Courtney (1925) Mackinnon (1910) Adderley (1888) and Nugent (1898). Shakespeare’s authentic texts had been championed before, both earlier in the century Kean and Macready both fought to restore the tragic ending to King Lear in the 1820s and 1830s. and more recently: in 1864, for example, a temporarily convened amateur company in Cambridge staged complete unedited versions of The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It to raise money for a statue of Shakespeare in Piccadilly Circus, in an effort to promote him as ‘poet of all Britons’. Dobson (2011), 89-91. For the 1864 tercentenary, Foulkes (1984). Despite being performed as double bills, each with a popular farce (The Railroad Station and The Artful Dodger) these productions were not enthusiastically received, especially by university student audiences who then expected, as Frank Benson would later put it, a ‘laugh and a jolly rag’. Benson (1930), 118. These were the attitudes - at a time when auditorium and stage were a shared space, equally lit - which the first serious productions of Greek plays in Greek in the early 1880s sought to change. They were useful allies in this cause because they were emblematically associated (especially in the original Greek) not only with intellectual difficulty, hermeneutic challenge, And scientific accomplishment: their performance would not have been possible at all without the achievements of textual criticism earlier in the century, as some commentators pointed out. but also with the origins of theatre itself. Shakespeare’s poetry, and the poetry of Greek drama, had long been respected, but in environments which precluded their embodied performance as any kind of ‘theatre’. Elite educational contexts – Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge – were key in initially suggesting that they could be respected by being performed. The first productions of Greek plays in Greek were staged in newly built or repurposed theatrical spaces, which helped avoid association with old ideas of theatre. In Oxford, the 1880 Agamemnon was staged in the just-finished Balliol Hall; the Cambridge 1882 Ajax was staged in an ice-rink specially converted for the purpose; and the completion of the new Sanders theatre in 1876 was given as a reason for producing the Harvard 1881 Oedipus Tyrannus. Heller (2005), 22. Courtney, in an attempt to convey what was revolutionary about Jowett’s attitude to theatre, describes him in the front row of a proto-OUDs production of The Merchant of Venice in 1883 as ‘keeping his eyes on the text, hardly lifting them to glance at the stage, and afterwards [noting] with surprise that we had taken out some portions of the play, which seemed to him a sort of desecration.’ Courtney (1925) 70. For the founding of the OUDS out of James Adderley’s Philothespians, and its relationship to the Oxford 1880 Agamemnon, see Foster (2015), Ch. 2. Useful OUDS histories include Carpenter (1985), Chapman (2008) and Wrigley (2011) Chs. 2-3. A measure of the extent to which a performance was then not seen as ‘of the text’ is hinted at in the Oxford Magazine’s comment on Gilbert Coleridge’s performance as Falstaff in the 1885 OUDS Henry IV (allegedly not performed since 1815): ‘seeing there was (as we believe) little stage tradition for Mr Coleridge to work on, his Falstaff was most remarkable’. Carpenter (1985), 36. The word ‘text’ was not yet familiar theatrical parlance in the early 1880s: the older actors at Irving’s Lyceum theatre, Benson recalls from his year there in 1882, ‘were outraged at the sight of a book’: ‘“Text, text? I have never heard of it,” they would say. “What the hell is text? All I want, laddie, is, first the bizness, then the cues; and I bet my last bob I get a bread-and-butter notice”.’ Benson, F. (1930), 184. It was after this period that Shakespeare’s greatness as a national icon became rooted in an appreciation of his authentic texts: in which the future scholarship of A. C. Bradley, a young don in the Agamemnon chorus, would play a pivotal role. Dobson (1994). For Bradley, Cooke (1972) 34, 185. Wilde reflects this emergent understanding when in his review of the Oxford 1887 Alcestis (an early OUDS fundraiser Nugent (1898), 184-85.) he opens by introducing the literary characteristics of its author, Euripides - then little known even to the progressive readers of a new magazine like the Dramatic Review. Wilde distinguishes Euripides from his fellow playwrights Aeschylus and Sophocles for his ‘broad acceptance of the actual facts of life, his extraordinary psychological insight into the workings of the human mind, [and] his keen dramatic instinct for scene and situation’, identifying him as the ‘most modern of the ancients’ for his understanding that ‘men and women as they are, are more interesting than men and women as they ought to be.’ Wilde, Journalism, in Collected Works Stokes and Turner (eds) Vol VI, p. 173. The idea that Euripides was modern would soon become a commonplace: e.g. Cambridge classicist A. W. Verrall notably promoted Euripides’ modernity: Ford (2005), 1-5; by 1911 William Henry Salter could say ‘That Euripides is a ‘modern’ requires no proof’: Salter (1911), 9. But this assertion of a profound interest in psychological realism sits oddly with how Wilde goes on to describe the performance itself, allegedly the ‘first’ production of this play since antiquity: ‘Apollo entered first, with flowing hair and delicate raiment, a figure such as Praxiteles might have wrought out of gold and ivory; then from the ground rose a strange vapour, that took human shape, and Death stole into the house with stealthy feet. The chorus followed … some of the blues seemed a little harsh, but it is difficult to get a pure blue in artificial light, and in all other respects the colour-harmonies were excellent, the browns, pinks and yellows being particularly pleasant.’ This abrupt switch of attention to ‘colour-harmonies’ seems odd in present terms; as does the fact that Wilde does not mention exactly how Euripides’ interest in realism (‘men and women as they are’) could be appreciated via actors delivering his text in phonetically-memorized lines of ancient Greek: indeed, Wilde writes that Jane Harrison’s delivery as Alcestis was ‘monotonous’ without mentioning this important factor. Wrigley (2011), 239-241; CGPA AL 1887. Given that speaking in ancient Greek was a feature of the production singled out for ridicule by other reviewers, this omission perhaps signifies journalistic tact, and an effort to support old friends in an old cause (Benjamin Jowett, W. L. Courtney and Alan Mackinnon from the 1880 Oxford Agamemnon). But Wilde repeats this same omission in his review of the Cambridge 1887 Oedipus Tyrannus, where he says that undergraduate actor J. H. G. Randolph failed to sound sufficiently king-like for most of the play, again without mentioning that this effort to sound king-like was made in ancient Greek. Perhaps Wilde’s emphasis on colour, set and costumes here reflects the fact that, at this time, ‘scenic illusion then defined what was a play’, as Jackie Bratton puts it. Bratton (2007), 253. But if so, were audiences here looking at Helena in Troas, or Euripides’ Alcestis? For Wilde repeats his description of the same tessellated pavement, the same white altar of Dionysus, the same painted bas-reliefs from Apollo’s temple at Bassae, and lion-embroidered curtains as he used in his review of Helena in Troas from the previous year, Stokes (this volume). without revealing this was in fact physically the same Helena in Troas set, purchased and physically re-installed in a proscenium-arch setting, the very theatrical context it had been created to avoid (he says only that the scenery was ‘from a design by the late E. W. Godwin’ Wilde, in Stokes and Turner (eds) (2013), Vol VI, p. 175. ). This somewhat cynically-undertaken production Nugent (1898), 184-185. of Alcestis appeared so anomalous to other commentators Wrigley (2011), 59. that a supportive review was perhaps bound to take the approach Wilde takes here, of talking about the text in general as an author’s accomplishment, and then describing the play as a series of visual effects. But Wilde follows exactly the same formula in his review of the 1887 Cambridge Oedipus, opening with an assessment of its author’s literary accomplishment, then immediately switching to describing its ‘colour-effect’: ‘The King Oedipus of Sophocles is one of the greatest plays ever written. As ethical as Hamlet, as passionate as Lear, and as finely constructed as Macbeth, it is the artistic masterpiece of the Athenian stage; while to find any parallel to it in the dramatic literature of other countries, we have to go to Shakespeare.’ Oedipus is the greatest play ‘ever written’, Wilde begins, but then goes on to say (after five column inches of set description): ‘Four tall, graceful soldiers in silver armour come slowly down the steps, and Oedipus himself appears in a long robe of golden tissue and a cloak of crimson silk. Then we see Creon in his pilgrim’s dress, the blind prophet Tiresias in pale blue, and the Queen Jocasta, in white and yellow … while the chorus of Theban elders [appear] clad in dark reds, fine browns, and rich greens. The whole colour-effect of the piece was quite admirable. Wilde, in Stokes and Turner (eds) (2013), Vol VII, p. 18-19 (emphasis added). The incongruities in both these 1887 reviews speak to a concept of theatre on the cusp of change: from visual spectacle to literary experience; from social gathering to act of personal analysis; from a phenomenon for and about its audiences, to one about an autonomous object whose particular detail the audience is expected to notice and interpret (a ‘pure blue’ is difficult to get in artificial light). A similar dual focus on both text and visuals characterizes Wilde’s supportive reviews of two OUDS ‘authentic’ productions of Shakespeare Wilde reviewed just before these Greek play in Greek. In these he repeats various opinions about theatre he had already expressed in the early 1880s. Compare, for example, Wilde in J. Guy (ed) (2007), Vol IV (Criticism) p. 216 on Claudian, where Wilde says theatre is a ‘meeting point of all the arts’ with Wilde in Stokes and Turner (eds) (2103) Vol VI, p. 64 on Twelfth Night, where he says theatre is the place ‘where all muses may meet.’ In Shakespeare on Scenery, for example, he had argued that that ‘a noble play, nobly mounted, gives us double artistic pleasure’. Wilde in Stokes and Turner (eds) (2013), Vol VI, p. 43 (emphasis added). When he expands this line of thought in his review of the OUDS 1885 Henry IV, an underlying logic begins to emerge: ‘I know there are many who consider that Shakespeare is more for the study than the stage. With this view I do not for a moment agree: Shakespeare wrote his plays to be acted, and we have no right to alter the form which he himself selected for the full expression of his work. For the history of this view see Stokes and Turner (eds) (2013), Vol VI, p. 257, n. 46-51. Indeed, many of the beauties of the work can only be adequately conveyed through the actor’s art. … Even the dresses had their dramatic value. Their archaeological accuracy gave us, immediately on the rise of the curtain, a perfect picture of the time. … the fifteenth century in all the dignity and grace of its apparel was living actually before us, and the delicate harmonies of colour struck from the first a dominant note of beauty which added to the intellectual realism of archaeology the sensuous charm of art.’ While the text’s merits are only fully appreciable in performance (‘no right to alter’) at the same time, ‘perfect picture ... living actually before us’ verbally conjures tableaux vivants, the category of theatrical presentation with which ‘archaeological’ productions like the Oxford 1880 Agamemnon, Harvard 1881 Oedipus, Cambridge 1882 Ajax and 1883 Birds, and George Warr’s 1883 The Tale of Troy were first associated. Foster (2015), 84-118 (Ch 3). For The Tale of Troy, see Beard (2000), 37-48, Hall and Macintosh (2005), 462-73, and Robinson (2002), 82, discussed in Foster (2015), 20-25. Present were classical archaeologist Charles Waldstein, the driving force behind the Cambridge 1882 Ajax, Wilde’s future wife Constance, and from the Oxford 1880 Agamemnon, Wilde’s friend Rennel Rodd, Frederick Leighton, W. B. Richmond, J. K Stephen (‘Ajax’ at Cambridge, who took the part of Hector when Whistler allegedly turned it down). The event brought together Britain’s famous painters with its famous poets, and commercial theatre figures like Beerbohm Tree with scientific authorities like Charles Newton, British Museum keeper of antiquities. The difference between that old familiar practice and these new Greek and Shakespeare plays is the ‘dramatic value’ and ‘intellectual realism’, afforded by the idea of ‘archaeological accuracy’. Like ‘ancient’, ‘archaeological’ could then still mean simply ‘old’, or of the past. This is a different kind of ‘living picture’ than one which imitates a painting, or a sculpture: this is the representation, or re-presentation, of the actual or real - of the past itself. It is in this respect that text and visuals are alike. As Wilde continues: ‘The real value of the whole presentation was to be found in its absolute unity, in its delicate sense of proportion, and in that breadth of effect which is only to be got by the most careful elaboration of detail. I have rarely seen a production better stage-managed. Indeed I hope that the University will take some official notice of this delightful work of art. Why should not degrees be granted for good acting? Are they not given to those who misunderstand Plato and mistranslate Aristotle? And should the Artist be passed over? No. … I hope that the OUDS will produce every summer for us some noble play like Henry IV. For in plays of this kind, plays which deal with bygone times, there is always this peculiar charm, that they combine in one exquisite presentation the passions that are living with the picturesqueness that is dead. Repeated in the Truth of Masks: ‘[they] combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world’: Wilde, in Stokes and Turner (eds) (2013), Vol IV, p. 217. And when we have the modern spirit given to us in antique form, the very remoteness of that form can be made a method of increased realism.’ In his comparison of the good actor with the bad scholar Wilde unmistakably identifies a concept of acting as an interpretation of a text. The actual words (‘misunderstand ... mistranslate’) are seen as autonomous and objective, a challenge to sophisticated understanding. Wilde sees in ‘plays of this kind’ - i.e. to any play from a historical period, or ‘bygone time’ - an ‘absolute unity’ in a combination of text and visuals for which both actor and scenic artist deserve equal laurels: the more ‘remote’, the more felt its reality (‘increased realism’). Whether Byzantium or Greece, Shakespeare or Euripides, theatre, Wilde argues here, has a special capacity to dramatically render the past’s autonomy: to represent, re-enact, or revive a pre-existing ‘thing itself’. A view Ross notes is prominent in Wilde’s review of Claudian in 1883: Ross (2013), 115. As Zoe Svendsen says, after the watershed of modern drama, whether plays are classified as naturalist, modernist, or symbolist, the key change during these years was the ‘historic incursion into theatre of ideas of autonomy, and consequent changes in audience attitudes and behaviour’. Svendsen (2012). See also Szondi and Hayes, eds. (1965, reprinted 1987); and for a practitioner perspective, Mitchell (2010). It is this space of transition from an audience- to an object-focussed idea of theatre - coincident with the darkening of the auditorium Emeljanow 1998. - that Wilde’s own work as a dramatist would later productively straddle. Greek plays as audience events R. C. Jebb, writing in 1883, explained that the performance of authentic Greek plays had never been attempted before because it was assumed they would be intelligible only to an Athenian audience. The assumption had been that ‘a successful Sophocles presupposed a Periclean Athens.’ Jebb (1883), iv. As The Times said, ‘no one could expect or require that a play of Sophocles should evoke excitement from a modern audience’. The Times, 28 November, 1882. It was precisely the capacity of the historic dramatic text to appeal beyond the boundaries of its original audience context that was held by many to be the discovery of these early productions. This was what was ‘surprising’, in Jebb’s words, the thing the plays ‘demonstrated’, which had long been ‘needed’. Jebb (1883), vii. As the Saturday Review said of the Cambridge 1882 Ajax: ‘The best passages seem to have a power of their own to make themselves appreciated, independent of the language in which they were written.’ Saturday Review, December 9, 1882, 761. Archaeologist Percy Gardner also resorted to a reflexive pronoun: ‘when performed in an utterly different state of society, amid inventions and devices of which [Sophocles] could not have dreamed … [his words] have a force and life in them to adapt themselves to changed modes of thought, and to satisfy even an audience used to Shakespeare and Victor Hugo.’ The Academy, December 9, 1882 (emphasis added). Charles Waldstein, the newly-appointed Classical Archaeologist and creative spirit behind the first two Greek plays at Cambridge, and trainer of the actors for the 1883 Tale of Troy, said ‘It is in the inherent nature of a Greek play to act well.’ Scotsman, November 25, 1887 (emphasis added). The unintelligibility of spoken ancient Greek at first dramatically delivered this autonomy. It rendered the familiar vividly alien in its unfamiliarity – the Greeks not as ‘us’ but as ‘other’. And if a British play had previously been assumed to imply a British audience, and an Athenian play an Athenian audience, the first experiences of authentic historic texts in performance necessarily conjured a space (‘the very same play’) where audiences from the past and present were brought into dramatic co-presence: Imagination flew back to the first time when this very same play was exhibited, two thousand two hundred years ago, under the clear air of Athens. Banish the gaslights and the black coats of the audience, and the roof over our heads, and we are sitting, instead, amid a crowd of curious, spectacle-loving Greeks, with sandals on their feet and the chlamys round their shoulders … who chatter about … the latest news from Samos where Pericles is fighting … we are on stone seats under the open sky. Daily Telegraph, Nov 30, 1882. The idea they were in the presence of an actual past caused audiences to reflect on their present in comparison. Foster (2015), 82-83. For historicism, Brooks (1998), 1-19; as a mirror, Culler (1985). Like historicism more broadly at this time, this self-reflection made these productions initially modern – a word and its cognates which is a marked feature of early reviews (e.g. ‘these modern revivals’ Henry Norman in The Portfolio, January 1884. ‘the representation of Greek plays by the moderns’ The Times, November 28, 1882., ‘a valuable contribution to the modern movement’ The Spectator (of the Cambridge 1883 Birds) December 8th, 1883.). As Wilde said in 1882, ‘he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of what is accidental and transitory, stripped it of that ‘mist of familiarity which makes life obscure to us.’ In The English Renaissance of Art: in J. Guy (ed) (2007), Vol V. The mist of familiarity which had obscured Greek plays included reading them at school as exercises in metre and grammar, or philosophical treatises, the mid-century British craze for classical burlesque, and a Victorian public iconology in which ancient Greece had for decades connoted empire, establishment, and nation: Foster (2015), 118-123. Christopher Stray has shown how ancient Greek, instrumentalised as a symbol of exclusive education, underpinned all three. Stray (1998) passim (p. 118). To draw attention to this symbolic appropriation was one of the reasons performing the authentic texts (‘intellectual realism,’ ‘increased realism’, above) of Greek drama was initially associated with progressives like Wilde: women had been the first to have the idea, in 1877. The Newnham Electra: on which see now Prins, forthcoming [2016]. W. B. Richmond, who had been involved in the set and costume design of the Oxford 1880 Agamemnon, undoubtedly refers to this topical event in his 1884 painting of an audience in Athens watching the Agamemnon ‘by Aeschylus’ (Fig. [1]). Fig [1]. W.B. Richmond’s ‘An Audience in Athens During Agamemnon by Aeschylus’ (1884). The direct gaze at their modern audience, reinforced by frontality and symmetry – the plane of the painting becoming Wilde’s ‘mirror’ – raises the question of the capacity of past and present audiences to relate, as authentic Greek plays were then held to do. Speaking in ancient Greek initially supported the impression that an entire archaeological reality (Wilde’s ‘absolute unity’, above) was on display. But at the same time the alien language meant the actors were understood to be interpreting and communicating precisely the latent. They could not deliver a line knowingly to an audience, as Strindberg famously denounced in his 1888 call for change at the end of the preface to Miss Julie, Tornqvist (2007), 72. For discussion, Robinson, M. (2009); Prideaux (2012). as the verbal plane of language was unintelligible to most. Rather, the audience had to interpret, or translate: to ‘read’, in the widest sense. It is not surprising that the performances of Frank Benson, G. Lawrence, J. K. Stephen, J. R. Macklin, W.L. Courtney, Alan Mackinnon, and Arthur Bourchier – all players in both Greek plays in Greek and serious Shakespeare from 1880 to 1887 – were also all associated with the ‘modern’ style of acting: for example, the innovation of walking while speaking, or of maintaining emotional verisimilitude even when having no lines to speak. ‘Ajax and Tecmessa acted in the modern sense of the word, and acted well’ said Percy Gardner; In The Academy, December 9, 1882 (original emphasis). ‘conformably to modern ideas of truthfulness to nature’, said The Times. The Times, November 28, 1882. When the proto-OUDS production of The Merchant of Venice toured to London in 1883, a veteran Shakespearean actor in the audience thought Arthur Bourchier’s Who played ‘Death’ in the 1887 Alcestis: photograph in Eliot (1898), 59. pauses for dramatic effect were ‘dries’, and prompted him. Carpenter (1985), 3. This new focus on the detail of the performance onstage, as Svendsen says, offered playwrights and performers the possibility of suggesting connections between cause and effect. Svendsen (2012). Psychological realism in acting as the interpretation of a dramatic text developed in reciprocity with ideas of its literary autonomy. It is significant that Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting and Waldstein’s own intellectual mentor E. H. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy, which both advocated strict adherence to the playwright’s text, were reprinted in English in 1883 and 1890 respectively. Diderot 1773 (2007); Lessing 1767 (1962). Waldstein had studied under Wilhelm Wundt at his Psychophysiological (later, ‘psychological’) laboratory in Heidelberg during his doctorate from 1873-5. Cf. his ‘The Balance of Emotion and Intellect’: Waldstein (1878). He met Pater and became a friend of J. A. Symonds, as well as George Eliot and Karl Marx. As Jane Harrison said, who did not like the energetic young German New Yorker, when Waldstein showed her how to act ‘that ugly little man … became Helen of Troy’. Robinson (2002), 82. Performance in ancient Greek, then, initially helped those who wished to argue that as works of art, plays could only properly be appreciated in performance: for it was the drama of situation, of relationship, of bodily re-enactment, of the unfolding through time, the structure and dramaturgy of the play, and especially the way in which text and visuals combined to create a whole effect which were all made clear when language was not. As continuing performance in ancient Greek began to bewilder and disappoint, the Saturday Review remarked in 1887 that ‘Even an adverse critic must admit that the dramatic mania has done one good thing, it has led the world to discover the mine of dramatic wealth that lay hidden away in Greek plays.’ Saturday Review May 28 1887, p.762 (emphasis added). The Impossibility of Being Earnest The defensiveness in this reviewer is typical, for by 1887, with repeat performance, the meanings of both performance in ancient Greek and the university context had changed. This background helps explain why Wilde might have preferred not to mention that either the OUDS 1887 Alcestis or the Cambridge 1887 Oedipus were performed in ancient Greek. For once such performances were no longer a novelty, the unintelligibility of ancient Greek redirected attention back onto on the audience: who could understand the Greek? Who was in the Greek ‘club’? See, for example, F. C. Burnand’s review: Burnand (1887). And once no longer unprecedented experiments, the self-ascribed seriousness of the productions recalled earlier uses of ancient Greek and Greek tragedy to connote the establishment. Both combined to make the elite educational context signal now not importance and seriousness, but the previous era of the old-fashioned amateur dramatic club. For elite amateur dramatics, see Foster (2015), 124-139. Unsurprisingly, the Oxford 1887 Alcestis was burlesqued the following week, with the participation of at least one member of the cast, as Alcestis Run Amuck: A Sporting and Musical Drama. Wrigley (2011), 60. As Amanda Wrigley has pointed out, after this embarrassment, Greek tragedy in ancient Greek, with two don-driven exceptions, would not occur regularly again in Oxford until 1960. Wrigley (2011), 53-80, 236-268. The Cambridge 1887 Oedipus - the fourth play produced by the Cambridge Greek Play Committee, but now without Charles Waldstein’s involvement - was also burlesqued, by an early Footlights production, The Sphinx, in 1888. Elliot (1898), 94. A burlesque on the same night as the official performance was successfully blocked by Cambridge Greek Play Committee Secretary J. W. Clark: Punch November 19, 1887. This may seem inevitable given that it had been stage-managed by J. W. Clark, co-initiator of the Cambridge Greek plays with Waldstein, but then better known in Cambridge as the co-founder (with F. C. Burnand, in 1855) and long-time mainstay of Cambridge’s Amateur Dramatic Club. From the mid-1880s performances and reviews of all kinds of Greek plays are increasingly located in the spoudegeloion self-satiric discourse of elite amateur dramatics. Wilde’s brother’s wry review of Helena in Troas is a good example, where he uses the word ‘earnest’ to underscore that it was the genuine seriousness with which the enterprise was undertaken that was funny. Stokes (this volume). This ironic seriousness, which Wilde would apotheosize in the relentless inversions of The Importance of Being Earnest, and which performs a collusive bond with the audience, was precisely what those involved in the Oxford 1880 Agamemnon thought they were overturning. Campbell (1891) 321; Benson (1930), 117-29. If it had never been easy to write earnestly positive reviews of these plays, it became even more difficult after the satiric responses to the next Cambridge Greek play, the 1890 Ion. Foster (2015), 154-158. The Daily Graphic said ‘the orchestra did Mr Wood [the composer] more justice than the actors did to Euripides’; Daily Graphic, November 27, 1890. the Daily Chronicle that ‘Greek plays are a fashion not likely to last … at most harmless vanity and at best an invaluable object-lesson in Greek life and art.’ Daily Chronicle, 1890 (cutting undated: in CGPA AL 1887). The Granta staunchly disagreed: ‘It is very pleasant to be able to say that the performance from start to finish went admirably … the chorus had … reached a pitch of excellence not often attained by amateurs. Moreover it was agreeable, from an aesthetic point of view, to notice what a high standard of beauty is supposed to have prevailed amongst attendant maidens in the days of Euripides. Mr E. A. Newton, as Creusa, wore a most beautiful dress and grappled successfully with a very trying part.’ It is possible at first to mistake this for a conventional euphemistic review, like Wilde’s two reviews in 1887 (above). But it continues: ‘To Mr T. A. Bertram, who was not on stage more than ten minutes, I must devote a special paragraph. Since the Ajax of J. K. Stephen, I have seen no actor who from entrance to exit so completely gripped and held the attention of his audience … Mr Wynne-Wilson had grace of a mermaid, a feminine voice and a pea-green dress. Mr Balfour looked tall in pink; Mr Oliver had red-gold hair and a lovely complexion. Mr Head looked Greek and graceful. As to Mr Bampfield, words absolutely fail me. Anything prettier I have not seen for a long time.’ Granta, November 29, 1890. For discussion, Foster (2015), 147-171. This is satire of newspaper reviews themselves. It suggests the ‘Greek Play’, once institutionalized (‘not since the Ajax of J. K. Stephen’), is recognizable as a self-parodic tradition comprised not only of occasions of performance, but ritual cross-dressing, and euphemistic reception. Janet Case had played Athena in the 1885 Eumenides, the first and last woman to act in a Cambridge Greek Play Committee production until 1950. The unblinking commitment to pretended surface meaning performed here in print operates as a critique of the pretensions of the establishment itself; a sincere insincerity which anticipates the absorbed commitment of Wilde’s later characters to their outrageously reversed moral positions – Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, for example. It implicates the audience in a far wider farce. The necessity of adaptation Three weeks after the 1887 Cambridge Oedipus, the Journal of Education said ‘The fashion for Greek plays has come and gone’. Journal of Education January 1, 1888. In 1889, another Footlights spoof called Nydia, or the Very Last Days of Pompeii, included the lines: Pretty polly, politechnico, pantechniconKitty katty, kata-leptico kamtulicon,Huper hipper, Hypercritico CriterionHaggravating vaga vagabond Agamemnon. Written by a Mr Leese, Mr Willoughby and Mr Langworthy: APGRD 828. Performed in J. W. Clark’s own ADC, this mocks not only performance in ancient Greek itself (‘pretty polly … kitty katty’), language, metre, and dreary ‘study’ (‘Haggravating’), but specifically a now-established tradition of Greek plays in Greek (‘Hypercritico Criterion’ Wyndham’s Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly (opened 1874 and recently refurbished in the mid-1880s) was one of London’s leading comedy venues.) with the by-then famous Agamemnon as its origins. By this time, however, a ‘vagabond Agamemnon’ had the capacity, in theory, to refer not only to the original Oxford 1880 Agamemnon, but also to two other more recent Cambridge Agamemnons – the Oxford production revived and toured to Cambridge by Frank Benson in 1883, and the first part of his ‘Orestean Trilogy’ which premiered in Cambridge in 1885 before embarking on an international tour. Like the Oxford 1880 Agamemnon in Greek, this was primarily Frank Benson’s energetic initiative, and a ‘first’ of its kind - the Agamemnon in English translation. The touring production which launched the F. R. Benson Company, it was stage managed by William Poel, later known for his pioneering authentic productions of Shakespeare. For Poel see now Dobson (2011), 65-108. Benson’s Cambridge premiere of his English Oresteia before it left for Australia in 1885, the same year as the Cambridge Greek Play Committee put on their third production, the Eumenides, in Greek, neatly marks the divergent directions which were already developing out of the spontaneous flurry of enthusiasm in the early 1880s: an ambition to establish a modern, serious, and text-based theatre on a national and international scale on the one hand, and amateur university performance in Greek as an affirmation of local community on another. J. W. Clark later said in a letter to Waldstein that one cause for the decline in public interest in Greek plays since the Cambridge 1887 Oedipus was performance of other Greek plays in Cambridge: whether he was referring to Benson’s English Oresteia is not known. But a shift away from public interest is evident in the other cause he offers, the stupidity of the British public, ‘being le public le plus stupide qui existe, [who] only goes to what Mr P … and such and such journals tell it it ought to go to.’ Euripides, Clark added (in line with his background as the aging co-founder of Cambridge’s ADC) ‘being unknown, does not attract.’ May 14, 1895 (Chris Stray private collection). Both the Cambridge 1890 Ion and 1894 Iphigenia in Tauris were poorly received by audiences and critics (CGPA AL 1890, 1894). Of the 1890 Euripides’ Ion (again, allegedly the first time that text had been performed in modern times) the Pall Mall Gazette had said ‘Throughout the play we feared that if the audience had kept its eyes shut it would have been better pleased. How many who were there tonight will go to the burlesque of the Ion, which one of the performers has prepared for next week, and will they enjoy it better?’ PMG undated cutting (CPGA AL 1887), no. 9. Oscar Wilde was one of the drama reviewers for the Pall Mall Gazette. Whether he was in the audience for the 1890 Ion, or behind this review (‘From Our Correspondent’) is not known. But the year before he had been notably present (along with William Archer, G. B. Shaw, J. T. Grein, and Elizabeth Robins) in the audience for the first closed-house production of Archer’s English translation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in June 1889, at the Novelty Theatre. Chothia (1996), 25-27. Wilde was sympathetic to the independent theatre movement and interested in writing plays which might be published (William Archer’s first translations of Ibsen, in 1887, had caused a sensation as read texts before they were performed). As Greek plays in Greek at Cambridge became explicitly satirized for their institutionalization as a tradition, the movement towards a newly literary and serious theatre with which their first performances had been associated continued as a location of avant-garde modernity. The term was coined to describe André Antoine’s productions: Chothia (2009) xvii, 15-16, 20-37. Indeed, it was actively debated by Lewis Campbell at this time which tradition the Oxford 1880 Agamemnon should be seen as having launched – Greek plays in Greek in the ancient universities, or the modern dramatic movement. Campbell, who like Wilde Ross (2013), 111. claimed to have been a moving force behind the Oxford 1880 Agamemnon, argued passionately for the latter in his ‘A Guide to Greek Tragedy for English Readers’, written in 1890, the same year as the Cambridge Ion. He says it was the potentials of the authentic text in performance which the 1880 Agamemnon had demonstrated, regardless of language; and he makes the case for translation as the more authentic choice, criticising continuing performance in ancient Greek, which for him, is ‘not to revive Greek tragedy’. Campbell (1891) 326, 321. Campbell’s own translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon had been performed the month before: Macintosh (2005). He went on to advocate for Shakespeare and Greek drama in translation as the basis for a national theatre: Campbell (1904). In the early 1890s, while Campbell continued to promote the literary potentials of authentic dramatic texts by writing a book for the general public, Wilde, after wittily adapting the form and dramaturgical structures of Platonic dialogues in The Artist as Critic, began to adapt the form and dramaturgical structures of Greek plays. Wilde’s Tragi-Comedy Responses to the Alcestis in 1887 and Ion in 1890 included the observation that these Euripidean plays were generically unstable; they were ‘proto-satyric’, Wrigley (2011), 56. or ‘tragi-comic’. E.g. Saturday Review of the Alcestis, May 28th 1887; Daily Chronicle of the Cambridge Ion, November 26 1890. Euripides appeared to be playing with the expectations generated by the recently-established genre of Athenian tragedy, in works which raised questions of generic boundaries, definition, and mixing. Wilde himself was seen as a modern Euripides in Oxford (Wrigley (2011), 66-74), a role later ascribed to Gilbert Murray (Hall and Macintosh (2005), 488-508). Various scholars have separately remarked on the latent presence of Menander, Plautus, Sophocles, and Euripides in Wilde’s 1895 The Importance of Being Earnest: Hall and Macintosh (2005), 151; Ross (2013) 119, 173-174; Witzke (2013), 214-232; Loewenstein (1985), 394. this range, from comedy to tragedy, is significant. For what both ancient genres have in common is the implication of audience knowledge and expectation in their dramatic effects. Ancient tragedy and comedy characteristically foreground – by choral or prologue statement, or allusion – the knowledge necessary to appreciate the characters’ situation; knowledge which the characters often do not have. Drama - whether farcical or terrible - arises in part from the staging of these differences in knowledge. In his 1887 review of the Oedipus Tyrannus Wilde had lamented that the grand themes of Sophocles’ Oedipus, its ‘wide issues’ and ‘great ethical and intellectual elements’, had ‘passed out of the sphere of the modern playwright … who is condemned either to make the groundlings laugh or to mirror all that is most mean and valueless.’ Wilde, in Stokes and Turner (eds) (2013), Vol VII, p. 19. But in 1882 he had also said that ‘not only in its plot, but in its construction, dramatic conception and effect’, Sophocles’ Oedipus ‘gives one an excellent motive for a modern play’. Stokes and Turner (eds) (2013). Vol VII, p. 342, n. 48-52. It is Wilde’s appreciation of this ‘construction, dramatic conception and effect’ which is put into practice in The Importance of Being Earnest. In Earnest much of the action, as in Greek tragedy, revolves around speech and the speech act, or words and their slippery significance. Not only the pun of Earnest and earnest, and the logic of the plot (Earnest being called Earnest as a condition of Gwendolyn’s love), but the humour, say, of Gwendolyn insisting Earnest actually say the formal words of a proposal they both have already been discussing and which she has told him in advance she will accept; or the characters’ collusive attitude to Algernon’s Bunburyism (an invented ailing relative used as an excuse); or the constant use of words in contrary contexts or senses - all combine to underscore the unreliability of meaning, linguistically and morally. The systematic reversal of expected language use recalls the emptying of meaning which accompanies opposing sides’ claims to dikē in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, or mainē in Euripides’ Bacchae, or the ironic use of the vocabulary of knowledge and sight (‘seeing’) in Oedipus. The performative potentials of language, as in Greek tragedy, are the medium and matter of Wilde’s society plays - terrible not for their inherent power to persuade, but for their inherent capacity to generate hypocrisy. Algernon begs Ernest to give him as ‘improbable’ account as possible of why he is called both Jack and Ernest; Gwendolyn asks that Ernest not talk about the weather, as ‘Whenever people talk about the weather I always feel quite certain they mean something else’; in Wilde’s hands words such as ideal, importance, and earnest are made capable of meaning the opposite, or stripped of the capacity to meaningfully mean at all: Gwendolyn. We live in an age of ideals. The fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines, and has now reached the provincial pulpits, I am told; and my ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Earnest. Holland (2003). The critique implicit in Wilde’s characters’ use of language is combined with explicit aphorisms and injunctions about how people ‘should’ behave, which pepper their speech like the self-conscious pronouncements of an ancient chorus. As Algy says, when Jack finally accuses him of never talking anything but nonsense: ‘Nobody ever does.’ Or when Jack explains the lie about Earnest, his platitude - ‘That’s the truth, pure and simple’- is taken ‘literally’ in a meta-theatrical nod to the audience: ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple; modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.’ The importance of all this verbal play is that it discovers a way to elevate an earlier kind of knowing dramatic writing - with a relationship to audience like that of the music hall - to the status of a self-reflexive and self-conscious art form. Like Greek tragedy, this is based on the patterning of predictability itself, a predictability which intimately involves - and illuminates - the assumptions and expectations of the audience. Lady Bracknell’s interview of Earnest dramaturgically imitates the most famous sequence in Oedipus, the extended crescendo of Oedipus’ anagnorisis. The drama in the latter lies in the fact the audience know what Oedipus does not: it is compelling to watch him put together clues long available to the audience only to wish he had never been fatefully ‘found’ - the English word Wilde chooses for Lady Bracknell’s penultimate sticomythic one-word climax. The other - ‘A handbag?’ - simultaneously channels both its inverted ancient tragic model and the high-made-low dialectic of elite amateur dramatics. Whether Wilde’s audience recognize Sophocles’ text at this point or not, the pleasure, as in that ancient play’s climax, lies in witnessing the process, not the content, of revelation. The audience are invited to anticipate Lady Bracknell’s extended reaction and relish the inevitable ‘performance’ of her disapproval. By controlling what the audience knows, and what the characters know, Wilde stages the ways in which all pretend: suggesting that life is scripted, social relations a performance, and dramatizing the extent to which both depend on the collusion of internal audiences. Wilde, through Lady Bracknell’s insincere sincerity in pretending to be shocked - both the character and the actor playing her - harnesses audience relations of knowledge and prediction from ancient drama to a contemporary critique of the performance of society as farce. Jowett is said to have commented on Gilbert Coleridge’s 1885 performance as Falstaff that ‘When a comedian soliloquizes, he should look at his audience and take them into his confidence, and not look at the boards or scenery – select someone at the back of the audience, preferably a fat man, and play at him until he laughs’. Carpenter (1985), 36. This advice surfaces in Wilde’s 1885 review in the comment that ‘Mr Coleridge’s Falstaff was full of delightful humour. Though perhaps at times he did not take us sufficiently into his confidence. An audience looks at a tragedian, but a comedian looks at his audience.’ Jowett’s observation is turned by Wilde into a chiastic aphorism of the kind which would later characterize the witty dialogue of his own plays. It gives a glimpse of old ideas of theatre in which, whether tragedy or comedy, the play is a function of its relationship to audience. But the coming change is arguably already latent in the idea that tragedy involves a ‘looking at’. In Earnest, Wilde combines both these comic and tragic directions of gaze, inviting the audience to ‘look at’ a finely crafted literary text in which they are also mirrored. The play bridges old audience-centered ideas of theatre with the new object-focus of literary drama, by creating characters so committed to absorption in their ‘performance’ that it lies with the audience to ‘read’ the satire. The knowing nod to the audience is now by the author, not the actor. Lady Bracknell does not, like Falstaff ten years before, herself wink to the back row across the footlights: rather, the audience are encouraged to observe, analyse, and interpret, much in the way they are also being invited to do by, say, Ibsen, or Strindberg, in 1895. But with Wilde, in this new role as interpreter or reader, they are also invited to recognize their own theatrical behaviour - to see themselves reflected (cf. Fig. 1). The very ability of The Importance of Being Earnest to make its audience laugh, then, implicates them in its serious critique. 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