Some time in the early 1970s a well-known Duke alumnus and book collector, Harry L. Dalton '16, added to the first and early editions of Oscar Wilde that he and his wife Mary had donated to Duke in 1970 a unique copy of Wilde's early verse tragedy, The Duchess of Padua. The title page declared Wilde's exalted ambitions and sense of the moment in near-epochal tones: OP. II. The Duchess of Padua: A Tragedy of the XVI Century by Oscar Wilde, Author of "Vera," etc. Written in Paris in the XIX Century. Privately Printed as Manuscript. On the cover of the manuscript (now in a private collection) is scrawled, in red pencil, "20 copies," presumably an instruction to the printer. Concrete testimony to Wilde's youthful attempt at a drama in the gloomy baroque style of Webster and Shelley, those copies were also to function in more practical ways, serving Wilde's intention of tempting some star actor or actress or a theatrical producer into buying the play from him and bringing it out. One of these copies, later
considerably revised by Wilde, served as the textual basis for the publication of the play in the first collected edition, published by Methuen in 1908, seen through the press by Robert Ross, Wilde's friend and literary executor; Ross later donated it to the British Museum.
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Godwin's sketches for the ground plan and realization of the setting for Act III
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Aside from this heavily annotated copy, very few others still exist. Of them, by far the most important and interesting is the copy of The Duchess now in the Duke Rare Books collection. Its text has been extensively cut, annotated, and illustrated with pencil drawings, and it also contains a long draft letter pasted into the front endpapers and another, shorter letter loosely inserted-all of this the work of Wilde's friend and mentor, the architect, designer, and polymath Edward William Godwin, called by Max Beerbohm "the greatest aesthete of them all." This fascinating copy of Wilde's play records the attempt of Wilde and Godwin, late in 1884, to secure a production of it at the Olympic Theatre, London.
Proposing to act as Wilde's agent, producer, designer, and stage director for this hoped-for London premiere, Godwin had used the privately printed copy of The Duchess given him by Wilde to begin preparing a detailed production book. He cut the text heavily and inserted stage directions keyed to small but lucid pencil sketches, at the beginning of each act, of ground plans for the five separate scenes of Wilde's tragedy. He also included a perspective sketch for Act III. In the draft of the letter, written to a Mr. Beck, presumably acting as agent for Anna Conover, the new manager of the Olympic Theatre, Godwin offers terms and sets a near deadline, reiterated in a separate draft note dated 21 November 1884, calling for an agreement by 10 February 1885. The specifics of the letter, advantageous to both Godwin and the author and covering the London production and subsequent provincial tours, indicate that Godwin had much experience of the business side of theatrical production, in addition to his immense talent for designing historically correct costume and mise en scène. Godwin had even gone so far as to identify likely actors for the chief roles, penciling their names into the list of dramatis personae.
Unfortunately, for reasons now probably not recoverable, Godwin's proposed production failed to materialize. Godwin's papers, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, are silent on the subject, as are Wilde's surviving letters. Godwin's ambitions on Wilde's behalf had perhaps been buoyed by successes earlier in 1884, especially by his outdoor production in July, in the woodlands of Surrey, of Shakespeare's As You Like It, in which the intelligent and flamboyant Lady Archibald Campbell (who had sat-or stood-for a shocking portrait by Whistler) appeared cross-dressed in the role of Orlando. It may have been that Godwin's scandalous reputation-he moved in Whistler's bohemian circle and had lived for several years with the actress Ellen Terry, who had borne him two children-made some persons reluctant to associate with him. Mrs. Conover, who would appear at the Olympic as Lady Macbeth in 1886, might have found the role of the Duchess too sweet and yielding for her. In any case, Wilde's disappointment over the failure of his pseudo-historical play to reach the stage would not be allayed for some years, until in 1891 the American actor Lawrence Barrett produced The Duchess of Padua in New York under the title Guido Ferranti, the name of the play's male protagonist.
Still, it must be said that Godwin's marked and amplified copy of The Duchess of Padua transparently reflects the approach of a multiply talented artist to producing this early effort of Wilde's in an outdated genre. It was only Wilde's second play, and the first,
Vera, or The Nihilists, a prose drama about conspirators in late Czarist Russia, had misfired. Godwin would die prematurely in 1886 and only in the next decade would Wilde advance to a series of great successes as the author of more timely comedy-dramas such as Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and, ultimately, of the great farcical comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Had Godwin succeeded in mounting his heavy-handed redaction of Wilde's florid script-a more stageworthy vehicle for Wilde's dramatic ideas than Wilde himself had been able to effect-the stage history of this early drama, and perhaps Wilde's own career as a dramatist as well, might have been very different. Set in these larger contexts of Wilde's developing authorial ideals and the unfriendly climate of late nineteenth-century English theatre practice, the Duke copy of Wilde's play may be seen as a significant potential but unrealized turning point in the career of one of the foremost dramatists of his day-and of ours.
Joseph Donohue
Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst
