Oscar Wilde

by Leonard Cresswell Ingleby

"The play was written," he said, "for Mr George Alexander, but for certain reasons was not produced by him. In April 1895, Mr Wilde requested me to go to his house and take possession of all his unpublished manuscripts. He had been declared a bankrupt, and I reached the house just before the bailiffs entered. Of course, the author's letters and manuscripts of two other unpublished plays and the enlarged version of 'The Portrait of Mr W. H.' upon which I knew he was engaged—had mysteriously disappeared. Someone had been there before me.

"The thief was never discovered, nor have we ever seen 'The Florentine Tragedy,' the 'Mr W. H.' story, or one of the other plays, 'The Duchess of Padua'—since that time. Curiously enough, the manuscript of the third play, a tragedy somewhat on the lines of 'Salomé,' was discovered by a friend of Mr Wilde's in a secondhand bookshop in London, in 1897. It was sent to the author in Paris, and was not heard of again. After his death in 1900 it could not be found. With regard to 'The Duchess of Padua,' the loss was not absolute, for this play, a five-act tragedy, had previously been performed in America, and I possessed the 'prompt' copy.

"To return to 'The Florentine Tragedy.' I had heard portions of it read, and was acquainted with the incidents and language, but for a long time I gave it up as lost. Then, after Mr Wilde's death, I had occasion to sort a mass of letters and papers which were handed to me by his solicitors. Among them I found loose sheets containing the draft of a play which I recognised as 'The Florentine Tragedy.' By piecing these together I was able to reconstruct a considerable portion of the play. The first five pages had gone, and there was another page missing, but some 400 lines of blank verse remained. Now the introductory scene of the single act of which the play consists has been rewritten by Mr Sturge Moore, and the 'Tragedy' will be presented to an English audience for the first time at the King's Hall, Covent Garden, next Sunday.

"On the same occasion the Literary Theatre Club will give a performance of Mr Wilde's 'Salomé,' which, as you know, cannot be given publicly in this country, owing to the Biblical derivation of the subject. But 'Salomé' has been popular for years in Germany, and it has also been played in Sweden, Russia, Italy, and Holland."

It seems that "The Florentine Tragedy" has also been played with great success in Germany. It was translated by Dr Max Meyerfeld, and was produced first at Leipsic, and afterwards at Hamburg and Berlin. According to Mr Ross, "The Florentine Tragedy" promises to become almost as popular with German playgoers as "Salomé" is now.

"The Florentine Tragedy," as already indicated, is a brief one-act drama. There are only three characters: an old Florentine merchant, his beautiful wife, and her lover. The simple plot may be briefly indicated. The merchant, arriving suddenly at his home after a short absence, finds his wife and his rival in her affections together at supper. He makes a pretence at first of being profoundly courteous, and the ensuing conversation (as need hardly be said) is pointed, epigrammatic, and witty. Then the old man gradually leads up to what, it becomes obvious, had been his fixed purpose from the beginning. He draws the lover into a duel. This takes place in the presence of the wife, who, indeed, holds aloft a torch in order that the two swordsmen may fight the more easily. The contest waxes fiercer, and the swords are exchanged for daggers. The wife casts the torch to the ground as the two men close with each other, and the younger one falls mortally wounded. The ending is dramatic. The infuriated husband turns to his shrinking wife and exclaims, "Now for the other!" The woman, in mingled remorse and fear, says, "Why did you not tell me you were so strong?" And the husband rejoins, "Why did you not tell me you were so beautiful?" As the curtain descends, the couple, thus strangely reconciled, fall into each other's arms.

The character of outstanding importance, of course, is that of the old merchant. According to those who have studied the play, he is a strikingly effective figure, most cleverly and delightfully drawn. In the opinion of Mr Moore the part is one that would have fitted Sir Henry Irving excellently well. The action of the drama occupies less than half-an-hour.

In this connection it may be well to recall the testimony of an Irish publisher quoted by Mr Sherard in his "Life of Oscar Wilde." This gentleman attended the sale of the author's effects in Tite Street, and in a room upstairs found the floor thickly strewn with letters addressed to the quondam owner of the house and a great quantity of his manuscripts. He concluded that as the various pieces of furniture had been carried downstairs to be sold their contents had been emptied out on to the floor of this room. Presently a broker's man came up to him and inquired what he was doing in the room, and on his replying that finding the door open he had walked in, the man said, "then somebody has broken open the lock, because I locked the door myself." This gentleman surmises that it was from this room that various manuscripts that have never been recovered were stolen!

When the piece was produced by the Literary Theatre Club it suffered from inadequate acting. Mr George Ingleton was quite overweighted by the part of Simone, the Florentine merchant. It is a part that requires an Irving to carry it through, or, at anyrate, an actor of great experience, and for anyone else to attempt it is a piece of daring which can only result in failure.

It is curious that the denouement, which was so severely handled by the critics when the play was produced in Berlin, was the part of the piece that seemed most to impress an English audience. The epigram and the praises of strength and beauty provoked no protest or dissatisfaction, as those who had seen the German production expected they would, nor was the audience in the least shocked when the wife holds the torch for her husband and lover to fight, nor when, at the close of the encounter, she purposely throws it down. This, of course, is the unlooked-for climax of the piece, and the dramatic character of the situation completely saved it.