🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
Coming to Broadway in New York this Spring are two new productions of Oscar Wilde works—and each for a limited time only.
The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Music Box Theatre, and Salome at The Metropolitan Opera.
See below for details.
Continue reading “Wilde on Broadway”
WELL DONE, IT’S RARE
Assessing what is the rarest printed work by an author is not an exact science. For instance, a book might have many known copies but appears to be rare because it seldom comes up for sale. This is often the case if the present owners are institutions or collectors who have little interest in selling. We would call this scarce.
A better way to look at the question, perhaps, is to consider how many copies of a particular work actually exist?
Continue reading “Elf Exemplaren”
Oscar Wilde’s symbolist play Salome is notable for its licentious artwork by Aubrey Beardsley. But Beardsley’s infamous illustrations appeared only when the English edition of the play was released in 1894.
When the original French Salomé had been published a year earlier, it contained no illustrations pertinent to the text. The only graphical representation in the French edition was the Rops Vignette, which had nothing to do with Wilde’s play, but it rivals Beardsley in its decadence.
So what is the Rops Vignette?
Continue reading “The Rops Vignette”
Wilde’s play Salomé was published in the 1890s in two languages, and the bane of each was a lordly limitation.
Continue reading “First English”
In my last article I alluded to how that erstwhile sinner, Oscar Wilde, had achieved the exalted air of sainthood. Unfortunately, for collectors of Wildean memories, with that classification comes the saintly cliché that a good man is hard to find.
And nowhere is that maxim manifested more in Oscar Wilde’s case than in the promised land of lost pictures. On the artifact scale of hardness-to-find, the rarest commodities are gold dust, hen’s teeth, and, hardest of all, previously unseen photographs of Oscar Wilde.
Continue reading “Rediscovered”
Readers will recall my visit to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair a couple of years ago where I was offered a very rare Oscar Wilde document.
It was a typescript of the (originally) unpublished portions of Wilde’s passive-aggressive prison masterpiece De Profundis.
It was prepared by Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, for use in the 1913 trial when Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar’s lover Bosie) sued a young Arthur Ransome for having the temerity to imply that a person he didn’t name just might have had a hand in Wilde’s downfall.
Continue reading “Philadelphia Freedom”
Here is some America TV footage I recently discovered of Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland.
It is in the form of an interview alongside Brian Reade, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, during a segment on the CBS TV arts program Camera Three about a V&A Aubrey Beardsley exhibition which had transferred to New York’s (then-named) Gallery of Modern Art.
The rare TV showing was a opportunity for Vyvyan to rival his more media savvy wife, Thelma, who had made her latest appearance on American TV earlier in the month discussing fashion on the ABC show Girl Talk.
It provides a chance to see Vyvyan’s unassuming manner as he reveals personal experiences such as shooting moose and witnessing a bedridden bearded Beardsley. [this latter story was deemed a fabrication by Vyvyan’s son Merlin Holland in his retrospective After Oscar (2025), pp. 427/8.]
Continue reading “Vyvyan Holland”
I have somewhat of a preoccupation with the use of primary sources, and sources don’t come any more primary than the recent discoveries of Wildeana that were made at the Free Library of Philadelphia prior to the Oscar Wilde season early this year.
Continue reading “Salomé”