by Oscar Wilde
35 Montaigne, “Of Friendship” (1570s, tr. John Florio, 1603), in Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essais, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt (New York: NYRB, 2014), 45, 50.
36 Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” 45.
37 Quoted in Dowden, introduction to The Sonnets of William Shakespeare, 9.
38 The “triumph” of the philosopher and Dominican friar Giordiano Bruno (1548–1600) was the four years (1579–1583) he spent lecturing at the Sorbonne, preparatory to the composition of his major works.
39 philosophy requires love
40 Ben Jonson signed an undated letter to John Donne “your ever true lover.” The letter is quoted in full in Four Centuries of English Letters, ed. W. Baptiste Scoones (London: Kegan Paul, 1880), 64; Jonson’s eulogy to Shakespeare was printed at the beginning of Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623).
41 Anon. [Richard Barnfield], The Affectionate Shepheard, containing the Complaint of Daphnis for the Loue of Ganymede (1584).
42 Virgil’s second eclogue, concerning the shepherd Corydon’s unrequited love for his master Alexis, is the most homoerotic of Virgil’s ten eclogues. The English poet Abraham Fraunce (c. 1559–c.1593) translated and published Virgil’s second eclogue in his The Countess of Pembroke’s Yvychurch (1591 / 2). Phineas Fletcher, “To Master W. C.” (c. 1610), in The Poems of Phineas Fletcher, ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (4 vols; privately printed, 1869), III:207–208.
43 See Introduction, p. 22 above; also headnote p. 175 above; and n.45 below.
44 George Chapman, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608). As Dowling observes, Wilde probably derived the quotation from Dowden, introduction to The Sonnets of William Shakespeare, 35. The quote is also, famously, the epigraph to Percy Shelley’s poem The Revolt of Islam.
45 Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries (Paris: Galignani, 1839), 3:291.
46 A confusing textual crux, in both Wilde’s manuscript and the 1921 printed text, never corrected or clarified by its author.
47 Walter Pater, “Pico de Mirandola,” in The Renaissance, ed. Hill, 29. Wilde’s account of Pico de Mirandola’s encounter with Ficino, as well as his wording, is derived from Pater.
48 Wilde is possibly alluding to Winckelmann’s letter to Freidrich von Berg, in which Winckelmann writes “the first time I saw you … I found in a beautiful body a soul created for nobleness, gifted with the sense of beauty” (quoted in Pater, “Winckelmann,” in The Renaissance, ed. Hill, 153).
49 Inserted in section 2 of the 1889 version after “between here and Lord Essex’s musician had come the boy-actor of Shakespeare’s plays” (p. 217 above). Together with the bulk of the paragraph beginning just before this (from “Once I thought that I had really found Willie Hughes” [p. 217 above]), this lengthy passage constituted the story’s new section 3.
50 Sonnet 40.
51 Sonnet 4.
52 Juliet, Beatrice, Perdita, and Ophelia are respectively the heroines of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, and Hamlet.
53 Wilde derived the following list of names and anecdotes of boy-actors of Shakespeare’s day from John Payne Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration (1831; new edition 3 vols., London: George Bell, 1879), as well as Collier’s Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1846).
54 Stephen Gosson (1554–1624) and William Prynne (1600–1669), both Puritan enemies of the theater.
55 Francis Lenton, The Young Gallant’s Whirligig (1629), quoted in John Addington Symonds, Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama (London: Smith Elder, 1884), 312.
56 Helena Faucit, Lady Martin, Shakespeare’s Female Characters (new and enlarged edition, Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1891), 4. Imogen, Miranda, and Rosalind are respectively the heroines of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, The Tempest, and As You Like It.
57 Symonds, Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama, 298.
58 As the editors of Wilde’s correspondence note, on 3 June 1880, by special permission of the Master of the College, a performance of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon was given (in Greek) at Balliol College, Oxford, in which the parts of Clytemnestra and Cassandra were played by the undergraduates Frank Benson and George Lawrence respectively. In December 1880 the production transferred to London for three performances, the last of which was attended by George Eliot five days before her death (CL 103n).
59 The playwright John Lyly (1554–1606), in whose play Gallathea—first performed in 1588 before Queen Elizabeth I by the Children of St. Paul’s, a troupe of boy-actors—the female characters Gallathea and Phillida both cross-dress as boys and then fall in love with one another. Wilde’s ideas and wording here draw heavily from Symonds, who writes in Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama that Lyly “discovered the ambiguity of the sexes as a motive of dramatic curiosity” and that “Shakespere bettered Lyly’s best” (533).
60 Viola and Julia are respectively the heroines of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and The Two Gentlemen of Verone.
61 Adolphus W. Ward. A History of English Dramatic Literature (London: Macmillan, 1875), 1:262.
62 Algernon Charles Swinburne, “John Ford,” in his Essays and Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 308, although Swinburne gives “outbreaks of” for Wilde’s “snatches of.”
63 Wilde had read of this transaction, dated 18 December 1597, either in The Diary of Philip Henslowe, ed. John Payne Collier (London: Shakespeare Society, 1845), 259, or else in Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, 3:238, where Henslowe’s diary entry for 18 December 1597 is quoted in full.
64 Will of Augustine Phillips, 4 May 1605, printed in Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, 3:329.
65 Undated petition of Henry Clifton, Star Chamber Proceedings, printed in full in James Greenstreet, “Blackfriars Theatre in the Time of Shakespeare,” The Athenaeum, no. 3224 (10 Aug. 1889), 203–204.
66 Ibid.
67 Register of St. Giles, Cripplegate, quoted in Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, 3:347.
68 Thomas Brande, letter to an unnamed recipient, 8 Nov. 1629, quoted in Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare, 1:453, also quoted in Symonds, Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama, 297n1.
69 Lady Macbeth, Queen Constance, and Volumnia are respectively the mature female protagonists of Macbeth, King John, and Coriolanus.
70 “Thy face is valanced since I saw thee last. Comst thou to beard me in Denmark?.… Pray God, your voice … be not cracked” (Hamlet, act 2, scene 2, lines 442–446).
71 Sonnet 19.
72 Sonnet 104.
73 The Tempest (1610 / 11) is thought to be the last play Shakespeare wrote alone. Wilde here implies that its protagonist, the elderly magician Prospero, is a surrogate for Shakespeare himself, a reading supported by Prospero’s two famous speeches towards the end of the play in which he abjures the magic arts and vows to “break my staff”:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
�
� (The Tempest, act 4)
graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
(The Tempest, act 5)
While Shakespeare is reputed to have written no more plays alone after The Tempest, he is purported to have collaborated with the playwright John Fletcher (1579–1625) on the composition of Henry VIII (1613), during a performance of which the Globe Theater burned to the ground, and Two Noble Kinsmen (1613–14).
74 Sonnet 126.
75 Inserted before the final paragraph of section 2 of the 1889 version, in lieu of the short paragraph beginning “From Willie Hughes’s life I soon passed to thoughts of his death” (p. 217 above). Together with a revised version of section 2’s final paragraph, this lengthy passage constituted the story’s new section 4.
76 The phrases “that Love’s own hand did make,” “cruel eye,” and “foul pride” derive respectively from Sonnets 145, 133, and 144; Wilde’s other allusions in this sentence are to Sonnets 127, 130, and 128.
77 John A. Heraud, “Appendix A: A New View of Shakspere’s Sonnets,” in Shakspere: His Inner Life (London: Maxwell, 1865), 501; see too Edward Dowden, The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (London: Kegan Paul Trench, 1881), 80, where Heraud’s argument is succinctly summarized.
78 William Minto, Characteristics of English Poets from Chaucer to Shirley (Edinburgh & London: Blackwood, 1874), 276; Henry Brown, The Sonnets of Shakespeare Solved (London: Smith, 1870).
79 See Massey, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Never Before Interpreted, 330ff; also Massey, The Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Unfolded (privately printed 1872), 330ff.
80 Tyler, introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The First Quarto, 1609: A Facsimile in Photo-Lithography (1886), xix-xxiii. See p. 180 n.7 above.
81 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. V. Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), book II, 190, 194.
82 King James I (King James VI of Scotland), quoted in Massey, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Never Before Interpreted, 348.
83 Dowden, The Sonnets of William Shakespeare, 17
84 Sonnet 141.
85 Sonnet 130.
86 Sonnet 144.
87 Sonnets 137, 150, 147.
88 Sonnet 150, described by the critic Theodore Watts-Dunton as “the greatest sonnet not only in the English language, but the world” (unsigned review of The Sonnets of John Milton, ed. Mark Pattison, in The Athenaeum, no. 2914 [1 Sept. 1883], 264.)
89 Sonnet 147.
90 Sonnet 141.
91 Sonnet 150.
92 Sonnet 152.
93 Sonnet 151.
94 Sonnet 35.
95 Anon., The Actors’ Remonstrance, or Complaint: For the Silencing of their Profession (London, 1643). As Ian Small notes, the wording of Wilde’s observation about The Actors’ Remonstrance is heavily indebted to Symonds, Shakespeare’s Predecessors, 310n1.
96 Thomas Cranley, Amanda, or the Reformed Whore (1635), quoted in Symonds, Shakespeare’s Predecessors, 310–311; also quoted in Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry, 411–412.
97 Cranley, quoted in Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry, 411–412.
98 Ibid. Wilde has altered Cranley’s “thy devotion” to “her devotion” and, more importantly, “changest hue” to “changes hews.”
99 All details about and quotations from Manningham’s Table-book are taken from Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry, 310–319.
100 Love’s Labour’s Lost, act 2, scene 1, line 72.
101 Love’s Labour’s Lost, act 4, scene 1, line 170.
102 Love’s Labour’s Lost, act 4, scene 3, lines 253–254; Sonnet 127.
103 Walter Pater, “Love’s Labours Lost,” in Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889), 173, 175.
104 [Henry Willobie], Willobie, His Avisa. or The true Picture of a modest Maid (London: John Windet, 1594). Swinburne calls Avisa “the one contemporary book which has ever been supposed to throw any direct or indirect light on the mystic matter [of the sonnets]” in A Study of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880), 62.
105 Willobie’s Avisa, ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (privately printed, 1880), 40–41.
106 Ibid, 41.
107 Wilde alludes to the capture of Basing House, a Royalist stronghold in Hampshire, by Parliamentary forces under Major Thomas Harrison, in October 1645, during the English Civil War. However, the identity of the actor “Robinson” who fought for the Royalist cause is uncertain. Marston Moor and Naseby, alluded to in the next sentence, were the sites of other important Parliamentary victories over the Royalist forces.
108 quotation untraced
109 Sonnet 96.
110 Built in 1483 and acquired by Shakespeare in 1597, New Place, in Stratford-Upon-Avon, was Shakespeare’s principal residence for the final five years of his life. It was purportedly the second largest house in Stratford.
111 Wilde alludes to Milton’s elegy Lycidas, written in 1637.
112 Inserted at the beginning of section 3 of the 1889 version (p. 221 above). Together with a revised version of 1889’s section 3 and the brief new passage concerning the pathetic fallacy of martyrdom immediately following this one, this passage constituted the story’s new section 5.
113 Robert Tofte, Alba, The Monthe’s Mind of a Melancholy Lover (1598), part 3. Schroeder suggests that Wilde’s familiarity with Alba derives from J. O. Halliwell-Phillips’s Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (1884), 310, where the stanzas from which Wilde quotes are printed in full.
114 The notion that “Art, and Art only, reveals us to ourselves” dominates Wilde’s writings in the early 1890s. Versions of it appear in Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose protagonist’s innocence is lost when he sees himself for the first time represented in a painted portrait; in “The Decay of Lying,” where Wilde writes that “the true disciples of the great artist are … those who become like his works of art” and that art “always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose”; and in “The Critic as Artist,” where Wilde suggests there are “books that can make us live more in a single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years” and, in a phrase closely echoing his formulation here, “it is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realize our perfection.”
115 The phrase “passionate friendship, that love of beauty and beauty of love,” is possibly an editorial or publisher’s interpellation, since it does not appear in Wilde’s surviving manuscript. As Small indicates, Wilde left a space of about two lines’ width in his manuscript, intending to fill this space later. But he failed to do so, and the missing words first appeared in Kennerley’s 1921 edition, which gives no indication of their provenance (The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 249n).
116 See n.25 above. “The purpose of love is the enjoyment of beauty,” Ficino writes (Opera Omnia [1576], quoted in Christopher S. Celenza, “Marsilio Ficino,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2017 ed., https://plato.stanford.edu/archive
s/fall2017/entries/ficino/). See too Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, tr. Sears Jayne, 2nd rev. ed. (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985).
117 As Schroeder and Small both note, this paragraph is heavily indebted to Symonds, Shakespeare’s Predecessors, 230–231. Wilde greatly admired what he called “the picturesqueness and loveliness” of Symonds’s prose (quoted CL 31, n.1).
118 For Burbage, see n.8 above. After Burbage’s death, Joseph Taylor (c. 1585–1652) became the outstanding performer in the role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
119 Schroeder comments that Wilde’s Greek quotation, meaning seeking knowledge alongside love, “breathes of course the spirit of the Symposium.” As Schroeder points out, it derives not from Plato but from Pater’s “Winckelmann,” 155.
120 As Small notes, Wilde had used the phrases “philosopher of the Ideal City” and “spectator of all time and of all existence” in previous works, notably his undergraduate thesis “The Rise of Historical Criticism” and his 1882 lecture “The English Renaissance of Art.” The first phrase alludes to Plato and the second, as Schroeder points out, is a quotation from Plato’s Republic, book 6, line 486.