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Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde, by Sos Eltis; pp. x + 226. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, 35.00, $60.00.
Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations, by John Stokes; pp. xiv + 216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 30.00, $49.95.
The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland, by Richard Pine; pp. xiv + 478. New York: St Martin's Press, 1995, $35.00.
Sos Eltis begins Revising Wilde by challenging the familiar impression that Oscar Wilde was a swift and careless writer, one who, as he once joked, required at least five minutes to write an entire scene in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Her attention to the manuscripts of Wilde's plays enables Eltis to show Wilde engaged in painstaking revision, usually with the result that the dramas moved away from the conventional theatre of the time while becoming at the same time more subtle and subversive of the bedrock values on which Victorian society was built. Nowhere in the book is this purpose more stunningly accomplished than in the chapter on Wilde's early play Vera (1883). It is easily, to my mind, the best commentary that has yet appeared on what may seem, after reading Eltis, an unduly neglected play.
The purpose of Eltis's analysis of Vera, however, transcends the play as such. Instead it uses the play as a means to fix Wilde's affiliations as an anarchist, socialist, and feminist. Drawing on recent histories of anarchism as well as The Soul of Man under Socialism ( 1891 ), Eltis traces Wilde's relations with various French anarchists such as Felix Fenelon and Adolphe Rette, his public support for the pardon of the Chicago anarchists in 1886, and the utopian anarchism that Eltis discovers in his own writing. Eltis caps this argument by bringing to light a lost tradition of "Russian" plays dealing with anarchism in the 1880s and 1890s, most of them, like The Red Lamp and The Nihilist, unpublished and unheard of today. Instead of following that tradition by presenting nihilists as misguided and guilty, Wilde portrays in Vera an idealistic and courageous group of revolutionanes-a group led by a woman, unprecedented in plays of this numerous type. Moreover, an analysis of the various drafts of Vera shows...