Oscar Wilde Studies: When Oscar Wilde first entered the Old Bailey on April 3rd, 1895, he stepped into the dock a celebrity, writes Jerusha McCormack. His latest play, The Importance of Being Earnest, had just opened at St James's Theatre. The preceding play, An Ideal Husband, was still pulling the crowds at the Haymarket.
Wilde was (officially) rich, he was successful, he was famous. Among certain circles, however, he was also rapidly becoming infamous - as the reputed lover of Lord Alfred Douglas (or "Bosie" as he was called), and, it was whispered, as a frequent companion of rent-boys. Ironically, it was to protect his reputation that Wilde initiated a libel suit against Douglas's father, the ("Scarlet") Marquess of Queensberry, who had left a card at his club accusing Wilde of "posing [as a\] somdomite".
Between the bad spelling (Queensberry rules were for boxing, not writing) and the accusation of "posing", there were surely enough loopholes for Wilde to let the whole nasty episode slip. Instead, he instituted legal proceedings for criminal libel, while assuring both solicitor and barrister that there were no grounds for the allegation. No one has ever succeeded in explaining why Wilde took this reckless course of action. But among the reasons must surely be Oscar Wilde's scornful post-modern disregard for "fact": a fact, argued, was the invention of literal people. He preferred the factitious - and certainly his respect for the vivid lie over humdrum data never deserted him. For Wilde appearances were everything, and, in such a context, "posing" as a sodomite might be construed as even worse than actually being one.
And, indeed, it is clear from Wilde's conduct at trial, he never learned the importance of being earnest. In court, he relished his role as the impeccable dandy - or the "Irish Peacock" of the title. After all, in his years of defending style over substance, and manners before morals, the script was already there, and, always his own best plagiarist, he proceeded to quote himself liberally. Thus did Oscar Wilde become the star of his own last drama. But this time the audience was not that of the London stage, but the London streets, and that greater Britain which extended even to the enclaves of Empire.
In the event, the libel trial proved a trap. By the time it had ended two days later, with Queensberry's acquittal, the defence had uncovered a large number of unsavoury witnesses with unsavoury tales: of soiled bedlinen and attempts at blackmail, princely gifts to obliging paupers, and even a floridly erotic letter from Wilde to "Bosie". On the basis of this evidence, Queensberry sprung the trap, having a warrant issued for Wilde's arrest under the terms of section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, for "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons". When this trial ended with a hung jury, Wilde was released on bail and then rearrested to stand trial a third time. This time round the jury found him guilty; the sentence of two years' hard labour ruined his health and virtually ended his artistic career.
Strangely enough, a full account of these three trials (not one, as the title indicates) has never before been made available. In 2000, as Oscar Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, was assisting the British Library in preparing its centenary celebration of Oscar Wilde, a longhand manuscript was brought into the Library to be exhibited. It contained the first complete record of these proceedings.
In preparing the manuscript for publication, Holland decided to present the text as a dramatic script. In this decision he is surely justified. Reading the trials in this format, one understands how completely Wilde had bought into his own performance and how completely his performance served to undermine him. Victorian high seriousness, embodied in the prosecuting barrister, one Edward Carson, asserted itself as hard-headed (Unionist?) Fact as opposed to Wilde's stylish (Southern Irish?) Flippancy. In the ensuing drama, high comedy turns quickly into black tragedy as Wilde repeatedly falls prey to his own rhetoric, or his own wit - in the end, literally sentencing himself. Certainly this script is almost as good as being there: everyone who has ever heard of Wilde should read it all, if only to remind themselves, once again, that Oscar was himself his own best work.
Dr Jerusha McCormack is an academic and writer, who now acts as Director of the Boston University Dublin Program. Her two most recent books are Wilde the Irishman and The Man Who Was Dorian Gray. She is currently at work on a book about the American 1890s
Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Merlin Holland, foreword by Sir John Mortimer, Fourth Estate, 340pp. £ 18.99