Bibliographie
Augier Émile, Théâtre complet, Paris, Michel Lévy Frères, 1858.
Aston Elaine, Sarah Bernhardt. A French Actress on the English Stage, Oxford, New York, Munich, Berg Publishers, 1989.
Bancroft Marie Effie, Lady & Sir Squire Bancroft, Empty chairs, London, John Murray, 1925.
Beckson Karl, Oscar Wilde. The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Chothia Jean (Ed.), The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.
Douglas Lord Alfred, Oscar Wilde and Myself, New York, Duffield & Company, 1914.
Dubois J., Mitterrand H. & Dauzat A., Dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français, Paris, Larousse, 1964/1994.
Dumas fils Alexandre, Les idées de Madame Aubray, Paris, C. Lévy, 1868.
Dumas fils Alexandre, L’Étrangère, Paris, C. Lévy, 1877.
Ellmann Richard, Oscar Wilde, London, Hamilton, 1987.
Eltis Sos, “The Fallen Woman on Stage: Maidens, Magdalens, and the Emancipated Female”, in Powell K. (Ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 222–235.
Eltis Sos, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996.
Feydeau George, Théâtre complet de Georges Feydeau, Gidel H (Ed.), Paris, Garnier, 1988, 4 vols.
Gaillard de Champris Henry, Emile Augier et la comédie sociale, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1910.
Guy Josephine M. & Small Ian, Oscar Wilde’s Profession. Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Jackson Holbrook, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of the Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, London, Grant Richards, 1913.
Jerome Jerome K., Stage-land. Curious Habits and Customs of its Inhabitants, London, Chatto & Windus, 1889.
Lewes George H., On the Actors and the Art of Acting, New York, Grove, 1957.
Macfarlane Robert, Original Copy. Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007.
Mason Stuart, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, London, T. Werner & Laurie, 1914.
Matthison Arthur, A False Step. The Prohibited Play. Freely Adapted from Les lionnes pauvres. With a Copy of Correspondence between Arthur Matthison and Clement Scott Respecting its Prohibition, London, Lacy’s Acting Edition of Plays, no113, 1879.
Mikhail E. H., “The French Influences on Wilde’s Comedies”, Revue de littérature comparée, no42, 1968, p. 220–233.
Mullin Donald de, Victorian Plays. A Record of Significant Productions on the London Stage, 1837-1901, London, Greenwood, 1987.
Nicoll A., A History of English Drama 1660-1900, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1959, 5 vol.
Powell Kerry, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Powell Kerry,Women and Victorian Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Powell Kerry, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Rowell George, “Sardou on the English Stage”, Theatre Research International, October 1976, p. 33–45.
Raafat Zeinab M., The Influence of Scribe and Sardou upon English Dramatists in the 19th Century, with Special Reference to Pinero, Jones and Wilde, PhD. Dissertation, University of London, 1970.
Raafat Zeinab M., “Scribe’s Plays and their English Versions in the Nineteenth Century”, Revue de littérature comparée, no45, 1971, p. 237–255.
Ramos Gay Ignacio, Oscar Wilde y el teatro de boulevard francés, Valencia, Universidad de Valencia, 2007.
Sardou Victorien, Les pattes de mouche, W. O. Farnsworth (Ed.), Boston, New York, Chicago, D. C. Heath & Co., 1911.
Schwarz H. S., “The Influence of Dumas fils on Oscar Wilde”, The French Review, vol. 7, no1, nov. 1933, p. 5–25.
Stanton Stephen S., “Ibsen, Gilbert and Scribe’s Bataille de dames”, Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 17, no1, march 1965, p. 24–30.
Stanton Stephen S., English Drama and the French Well-Made Play, Columbia University, 1955.
Stanton Stephen S., “Shaw’s Debt to Scribe”, PMLA, vol 76, no5, December 1961, p. 575–585.
Tufescu Florina, Oscar Wilde’s Plagiarism. The Triumph of Art over Ego, Dublin, Portland, OR., Irish Academic Press, 2007.
Wearing J. P., The London Stage 1890-1900: A Calendar of Plays and Players. Metuchen, N.J., The Scarecrow Press, 1976, 2 vols.
Wilde Oscar, Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 1997.
Wilde Oscar, Selected Journalism. Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004.
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Notes
The Speaker, 27 February 1892, vol. V, p. 257–258.
Cf. Donald Mullin, Victorian Plays. A Record of Significant Productions on the London Stage, 1837-1901, New York, London, Greenwood Press, 1987; J. P. Wearing, The London Stage 1890-1900: A Calendar of Plays and Players, Metuchen, N.J., The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1976, 2 vol.; Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660-1900, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1959, 5 vol.
Cf. Zeinab M. Raafat, The Influence of Scribe and Sardou upon English Dramatists in the 19th Century, with Special reference to Pinero, Jones and Wilde, PhD. Dissertation, University of London, 1970; Zeinab M. Raafat, “Scribe’s Plays and their English Versions in the Nineteenth Century,” Revue de Littérature Comparée, no45, 1971, p. 237–255; George Rowell, “Sardou on the English Stage,” Theatre Research International, October 1976, p. 33–45; Stephen S. Stanton, “Ibsen, Gilbert and Scribe’s Bataille de Dames,” Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 17, no1, march 1965, p. 24–30; Stephen S. Stanton, English Drama and the French Well-Made Play, Columbia University, 1955; Stephen S. Stanton, “Shaw’s Debt to Scribe,” PMLA, vol. 76, no5, December 1961, p. 575–585.
Denunciations of plagiarism filled the newspapers. For instance, in a letter to Truth, January 2nd 1890, painter and former friend of Oscar Wilde, James Abbott McNeill Whistler accused the Irishman as follows: “Most Valiant Truth—Among your ruthless exposures of the shams of to-day, nothing, I confess, have I enjoyed with keener relish than your late tilt at that arch-imposter and pest of the period—the all pervading plagiarist! I learn, by the way, that in America he may, under the ‘Law of 84’, as it is called, be criminally prosecuted, incarcerated, and made to pick oakum, as he has hitherto picked brains—and pockets! How was it that, in your list of culprits, you omitted the fattest of offenders—our own Oscar?,” Karl Beckson, Oscar Wilde. The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, p. 63.
Florina Tufescu, Oscar Wilde’s Plagiarism. The Triumph of Art over Ego, Dublin, Portland, O.R., Irish Academic Press, 2007, p. 46.
Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of the Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, London, Grant Richards, 1913, p. 104.
Cf. E. H. Mikhail, “The French Influences on Wilde’s Comedies,” Revue de littérature comparée, no42, 1968, p. 220–233; Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996; Ignacio Ramos Gay, Oscar Wilde y el teatro de boulevard francés, Valencia, Universidad de Valencia, 2007.
Such a veneration of French authors led in no few cases to blatant and shameless textual appropriation. Max Beerbohm recalls an episode where Wilde boasted about his predilection to usurp other writers’ texts: “Speaking of plagiarism the other day, Oscar said: ‘Of course I plagiarise. It is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read [Gustave] Flaubert’s Tentation de St Antoine without signing my name at the end of it. Que voulez-vous? All the Best Hundred Books bear my signature in this manner’” (apud Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, London, Penguin, 1987, p. 355). Similarly, leading actor Squire Bancroft recollects a resembling statement when discussing the performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan: “He was talking with us about one of his comedies, just produced, when my wife remarked that the leading situation rather reminded her of the great scene in a play by Scribe, to which Wilde unblushingly replied: ‘Taken bodily from it, dear lady. Why not? Nobody reads nowadays’” (M. E. Bancroft & Sir Squire Bancroft, Empty chairs, London, John Murray, 1925, p. 112).
In a letter to Wilde scholar Kelver Hartley, Alfred Douglas declared that “I think Wilde did study the theatre technique of Sardou and Dumas fils” (apud Mikhail, op. cit., p. 220) and in his autobiography Oscar Wilde and Myself, Douglas would complete his former statement affirming that “[Wilde] told me that from Pinero and Dumas fils he had learnt all he knew of stagecraft and that he considered The Magistrate to be the best of all modern comedies. It is certain that for the plays, as for everything else he did, Wilde had to model himself on somebody” (Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde and Myself, New York, Duffield & Company, 1914, p. 221–222). Wilde, however, contradicted both Douglas’s words and his own aesthetic postulates when claiming romantic originality in his writings by asserting, in reference to some similarities between the use of stage props in An Ideal Husband (1895) and in Sardou’s vaudeville Dora (1877), that he had been “considerably amused by so many of the critics suggesting that the incident of the diamond bracelet in Act III of my new play was suggested by Sardou. It does not occur in any of Sardou’s plays and it was not in my play until ten days before production. Nobody else’s work gives me any suggestion.” Gilbert Burgess, “An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket Theatre,” The Sketch, 9 January 1895, p. 495 (apud Mikhail, op. cit., p. 230).
Cf. Josephine M. Guy & Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession. Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy. Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 169.
Oscar Wilde, Selected Journalism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 114.
Lady Windermere’s Fan, in Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 1997, p. 411.
J. Dubois, H. Mitterrand & A. Dauzat, Dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français, Paris, Larousse, 1964/1994, p. 163.
According to Eltis, the dramatic stereotype of the “fallen woman” had three main realizations—the “seduced maiden,” the “wicked seductress” and the “repentant magdalen”—whose theatrical destiny was essentially their seclusion from society, either by a sudden physical death or by “social death” as expressed by her exile or her confinement in a religious institution. (Sos Eltis, “The Fallen Woman on Stage: Maidens, Magdalens, and the Emancipated Female,” in K. Powell (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 223.
Jerome K. Jerome, Stage-land. Curious Habits and Customs of its Inhabitants, London, Chatto & Windus, 1889, p. 1.
Alexandre Dumas fils, L’étrangère, Paris, C. Lévy, 1877, p. 27.
Elaine Aston, Sarah Bernhardt. A French Actress on the English Stage, Oxford, New York, Munich, Berg Publishers, 1989, p. 27-28.
Sensuality and female acting were closely related during the Victorian era as a means for female performers to obtain the voice and physicality they had been deprived of by the patriarchal system. Bernhardt’s case was therefore not a rare exception, and a myriad of actresses enjoyed the same engouement when staging seductive personae that permitted them to reformulate their female role and contest male social control. In this sense, French actress Rachel’s animality on the stage was publicly eulogized by critics and playgoers, who described her as “a panther on the stage”; an actress who was “endowed with a panther’s terrible beauty and undulating grace [with which] she moved and stood, glared and sprang. There always seemed something not human about her . . . Scorn, triumph, rage, lust, and merciless malignity she could represent in symbols of irresistible power; but she had little tenderness, no womanly caressing softness, no gaiety, no heartiness” (George H. Lewes, On the Actors and the Art of Acting, New York, Grove, 1957, p. 32). On the Victorian actress and her male audience, cf. Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
As for the aesthetic and moral connections between dandyism—as embodied in Max Beerbohm, Wilde and Beardsley—and the “New Woman,” and the former’s progressive displacement at the end of the century by a new kind of womanhood, cf. J. Stein, “The New Woman and the Decadent Dandy,” The Dalhousie Review, vol. 55, no1, Spring 1975, p. 54-62. A similar analysis is carried out by Linda Dowling, who regards the decadent and the new woman as “twin apostles of social apocalypse” in their efforts to “transcend established notions of sexual consciousness and behaviour” (Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890’s,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, no33, March 1979, p. 434–453).
Alexandre Dumas fils, op. cit., p. 88.
Ibid., p. 427.
Stuart Mason, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde, London, T. Werner & Laurie, 1914, p. 440.
Oscar Wilde, Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 1997, p. 372.
The female denial of her “inherent” and “natural” role was regarded as a sign of distorted sexuality associated with new womanhood. Such a confusion of sexual identities was the result of a progression towards education, democratic participation, and economic autonomy. Therefore the “decline” of “female” attributes (passivity, abnegation, social invisibility, etc.), rather than a substantial loss, constituted a realignment with man’s privileges (Jean Chothia, The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. ix).
Alexandre Dumas fils, op. cit., p. 31.
Ibid., p. 30.
Alexandre Dumas fils, Les idées de Madame Aubray, Paris, C. Lévy, 1868, p. 48.
For a more profound analysis of the similitudes between the discourse of both playwrights, cf. H. S. Schwarz, “The Influence of Dumas Fils on Oscar Wilde,” The French Review, vol. 7, no1, 1933, p. 5–25.
These connections between French boulevardiers’ wit and Wilde’s may be extended to numerous vaudevillistes whose plays were attended by Wilde not only in Paris but also in London when adapted for the English stage. For instance, Victorien Sardou’s ironic aphorism “la véritable recette du bonheur, c’est de jeter par la fenêtre celui qu’on aime, pour épouser celui qu’on n’aime pas” (Victorien Sardou, Les pattes de mouche, p. 25), uttered by Prosper in his vaudeville Les pattes de mouche (1860)—a play sucessfully adapted by J. Palgrave Simpson with the title A Scrap of Paper; or, the Adventures of a Love Letter (1889) and revived on numerous occasions on the London stage—, has its own correlation in Wildean terms in Lord Illingworth’s statement “the happiness of a married man (. . .) depends on the people he has not married” (A Woman of No Importance, op. cit., p. 447), as well as in Algernon’s provoking statement “in married life, three is company and two is none” (The Importance of Being Earnest, op. cit., p. 552). In this sense, such requestioning of marriage values through irony and sarcasm is also found in the wittiest fin de siècle and belle époque’s vaudevilliste: Georges Feydeau. Throughout his plays, Feydeau demolishes the pillars of bourgeois society, with particular reference to fidelity in marriage. In Monsieur Chasse! (1892), a play adapted by William Lestocq in 1893 with the title The Sportsman, the tempter Moricet claims that “le vrai mari, c’est l’amant; l’époux n’est que le mari que la société vous donne, tandis que l’amant, c’est le mari que le cœur choisit!” In a similar tone, in La main passe (1904), Francine, a romantic young woman, naively speaks her mind when asserting “si les maris pouvaient laisser leurs femmes avoir un ou deux amants pour leur permettre de comparer, il y aurait beaucoup plus de femmes fidèles”. Later on, in the same play, Belgence remarks “on donne un tas d’idées fausses aux jeunes filles dans les familles: on leur parle de la fidélité conjugale. . . alors, elles s’imaginent que c’est fait pour le mari”.
Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 14.
Oscar Wilde, op. cit., p. 407.
Henry Gaillard de Champris, Émile Augier et la comédie sociale, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1910, p. 115–116.
Émile Augier, Théâtre Complet, Paris, Michel Lévy Frères, 1858, p. 11–12.
Arthur Matthison, A False Step. The prohibited play. Freely adapted from Les Lionnes Pauvres. With a Copy of Correspondence between Arthur Matthison and Clement Scott respecting its Prohibition, London, Lacy’s Acting Edition of Plays, no113, 1879, p. 3.
Oscar Wilde, op. cit., p. 897.
Ibid., p. 905.
Ibid., p. 407.
Ibid., p. 407.
Ibid., p. 922.
Arthur B. Walkley, op. cit., p. 123.
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