Oscar Wilde admirer discovers a `lost’ play of the playwright

The work, A Wife’s Tragedy, is a manuscript in the flamboyant playwright’s own hand, one-third in ink, two-thirds in pencil. It was billed this week as a work which “provides fresh insights into (Wilde’s) betrayal of his wife as he embarked on a destructive series of homosexual adventures”.

“Wilde’s lost play reveals his torment,” said Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper. In Australia, the Herald Sun newspaper said a British Wilde fan “unearthed the manuscript while looking through Wilde’s works in the University of California’s (W A Clark Memorial) Library.”

That fan, Neal Kydd, said, “There, lingering in the Clark (library), deep in the vaults, I came across 52 pages of Wilde’s own hand-writing, which was the script of a play,” he said.

The playwright’s grandson was intrigued by this description of unearthing the script.

“Wilde scholars have known about this for years,” he said in an interview. “It certainly has not been dug out of a deep and dusty vault.”

In fact, the manuscript was catalogued as long ago as 1929, by Dulau and Company of Bond Street, London. It was item number one on a list of manuscripts, books and letters by Wilde, which they offered for sale.

“It’s also in the Finzi catalogue, published in 1957, of Wilde’s holdings in the Clark Library. It has been published in its full scholarly transcription in Theatre Research International in 1982, and a full critical apparatus of it was published in the summer of 1983,” Holland said.

“So, I’m afraid this is a non-starter.”

To add to this, both Holland and the head of reader services at the library confirmed that Kydd, enthusiastic though he is, has never visited the Clark Library in California.

“People are forever discovering new things about Wilde — supposedly," Holland said in an interview.

“Angry is the wrong word,” he says. “I don’t get angry. I heave a great sigh and shrug my shoulders and think: `Oh God, not again’.”

“What annoys me is this assumption that the academic world is useless…and that it takes an amateur to uncover things.”

“The whole fascination with Wilde has, over the years, even caused academics to exaggerate and twist the facts.

“There is so much still to discover of a nature which shows Wilde as an important literary figure — and these over-sensationalised discoveries are just a distraction from the good work that is being done.”

Holland tells a similar tale involving a sale by auctioneers Sotheby’s in July 1995, of a manuscript, which they said, was an unpublished poem by Wilde.

In fact, a year earlier, Holland had published it, as one of 12 previously unpublished poems by the writer, in the new complete works of Oscar Wilde by Harper Collins.

When asked again about his story of uncovering A Wife’s Tragedy, Kydd conceded that he had never visited the Californian library, but said his words had been misinterpreted.

Holland, while keen not to dampen Wildean enthusiasm, has a few words of warning.

“In a sense, I’m a conduit through which the public understands some of the very exciting things that are being discovered about Wilde in the academic world,” he said.

“When somebody from the public world comes out and says `Gosh! Look what I’ve found’, my first reaction is that they really ought to have done a bit more homework.”