Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece by Iain Ross (review)

Reviewed by: Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece by Iain Ross Niall W. Slater Iain Ross. Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 82. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xv, 274. $95.00. ISBN 978–1-107–02032–0. Ross’s richly researched and sometimes dauntingly detailed study of Oscar Wilde as inheritor and transmuter of the classical tradition offers matter of interest to any reader of Wilde and in particular to classicists engaged in any aspect of reception from the Victorian age onward. The succinct introduction, beginning with the image of Wilde’s tomb in Paris, lays out Ross’s literary/archaeological methods and major themes with an initial orientation to Wilde’s engagement with three major Victorian sages: Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds. The following four chapters trace major phases in Wilde’s intellectual and literary development. “1. Paideia” details not only Wilde’s career at the innovative Portora Royal School, at Trinity College Dublin, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, but also the influence of his father, Sir William Wilde, whose archaeological excavations in Ireland he joined and whose theories of inherited racial character also shaped the son’s views. Wilde’s interest in the orality of ancient literary culture began here and continued down through his essay on “The Critic as Artist.” Engagement with drama comes early too: Wilde won medals at both Portora and Trinity for examinations on the Agamemnon and the Greek comic fragments (surprising his contemporaries) and continued composing Greek dramatic verse at Oxford (Ross publishes texts in two appendices), with varied fruits later on. It has recently occurred to me, for example, that Wilde’s famous description of foxhunting as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” (A Woman of No Importance) is a devilishly brilliant reworking of the chorus’s description of [End Page 145] Iphigenia’s sacrifice as (Agamemnon 150) ἄνομόν τιν ̓ ἄδαιτον. After Oxford Wilde at first sought a career as a poet but had to settle for journalism before turning to fiction and drama. “2. Poiêsis” offers both close readings of key poems, especially “Charmides” and “The Sphinx,” in relation to Keats and Swinburne, as well as analysis of Wilde’s views of translation. Already here Ross points to the growing tension between Wilde’s more traditionally romantic affinity for classical myth and poetry and the more scientifically based archaeological approaches that gained ground in both academe and the public imagination in the later decades of the century. In “3. Archaiologia,” we find Wilde at first welcoming and supporting this wider popular interest. He was a founding member of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies; he praised the revivals of Greek drama in performance at Oxford and Cambridge (as well as now deservedly forgotten spectacles such as W G. Wills’ Claudian, produced and designed by E. W Godwin: “The ancient world wakes from its sleep”); and as editor of Woman’s World he commissioned articles on classical subjects, including Jane Harrison on Greek vases depicting Sappho. In time, though, Wilde, like the public at large, turned away from these enthusiasms for archaeological reconstruction, even as he sought to move away from journalistic reviewing and toward a reinvention of his own career as a prose stylist. “4. Philologia” will be the heaviest going for those not well versed in Victorian intellectual history. Conflicting interpretations of Aristotle, particularly that staple of the Oxford Greats curriculum, the Nichomachean Ethics, loom large here, and from Wilde’s notes in his own copy and the influence in his writings Ross makes the case that “For Wilde, the Ethics was a practical manual for fashioning one’s self.” Ross offers an intriguing reading of the influence of Plato and the theory of the forms in both the story of Dorian Gray and the debates within it. Where Hall and Macintosh, in Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660-1914 (Oxford 2005), suggested that either Verrall’s edition of Euripides’ Ion or the Cambridge Greek Play performance of the same in 1890 might have inspired the famous “handbag” scene in The Importance of Being Earnest, Ross offers a much more detailed reading of

Art · Art history · Character (mathematics) · Comics · Drama · Literature · Paideia · Classics · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · South Asian Cinema and Culture