In a peculiar article in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Holroyd argues that if you had to choose between bringing Shakespeare back from the dead or bringing back George Bernard Shaw, it’s Shaw who should get the guernsey. It’s an odd dichotomy. Why Shakespeare versus Shaw? Why not, say, Chaucer versus J. P. Donleavy? It’s all because of a theatrical production of Aristophane’s The Frogs. In the original version, Dionysos brings back Euripides from the underworld. In a new, modernised version of the play, Dionysos has to choose between Shakespeare and Shaw. He chooses Shakespeare, naturally enough, but Mr Holroyd thinks the decision should be reversed. The article is long on praise for Shaw, but says almost nothing about Shakespeare. Holroyd isn’t really interested in fighting an imaginary bout between Shakespeare and Shaw. He is mainly interested in rescuing Shaw from relative obscurity.
The contest is a sterile exercise. Why Shakespeare and Shaw? Both were titanic talents, but what purpose would it serve to bring them back from the dead? Shaw’s last great play, St Joan, was written 27 years before his death. He wrote almost nothing toward the end of his life, managing only to squeeze out one now-forgotten piece in his last year after a ten-year hiatus. His final work, as irony would have it, was called Shakes versus Shav, and he died a noble death by falling from a ladder at the age of ninety-four.
Shakespeare’s last great play was The Tempest, written when he was 47 years old. This may well have been his retirement effort, as the next year brought three collaborative efforts with John Fletcher that nobody has any desire to revive: Henry VIII, Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and then nothing for four years except plays appearing under his name but clearly the work of other playwrights.
Both Shaw and Shakespeare wrote themselves out. And even if they did have some good work left in them, could we really expect their ghosts to provide another Macbeth, or another Arms and the Man? Why is this any more likely than another Cymbeline or Geneva?
There are plenty of other great writers I would not want to see resurrected. What, for instance, could Albert Camus add to his canon? He had already written his greatest works, and although he was still capable of writing clever, naunced pieces like The Fall, all the fire had gone from his breath. Mary Shelley is an interesting proposition, but she probably only had one great book in her. She lived a long life and wrote nothing of great value in her last decades.
Should we turn to talents who died young? Henri Alain-Fournier wrote Le Grand Meaulnes and then promptly died, age 27, on a World War One battlefield. Stephen Crane of The Red Badge of Courage only made it to 28 before tuberculosis chewed him up. Before him, tuberculosis had already consumed Anne Brontë at age 29, then her sister Emily at age 30, and Charlotte at age 38. Presumably TB would have kept on eating up Brontës had there been any more available. Sylvia Plath killed herself at 30, as did John Kennedy Toole at 31. Would these authors have anything more to contribute? Possibly. Or they may have done their dash already. Imagine that Marlon Brando had died after making On the Waterfront while James Dean survived to play Superman’s father. Perhaps these authors’ reputations were immortalised by their early deaths. It is impossible to know.
So I’m going to suggest someone altogether different. If I had the power to raise any writer from the dead, it would be Oscar Wilde.
Wilde, you see, was a prodigious talent who had scattered his wit for the most part on a parade of fripperies. His most beloved play, The Importance of Being Earnest, is above all a parlour game with language. There is plenty of satire of the upper classes in it, but this is merely leavening. He had within him the darkness to write The Picture of Dorian Gray, a savage moral horror story that is an oblique portrait of Wilde himself, but he did little to develop the darkness in his writing.
Wilde had the wit and the clarity of vision to write something astonishing and powerful and hilarious all at once, but it never congealed into a single work. But all that may have changed had he survived his 47th year, for he died in the aftermath of one of the great scandals of Victorian England: Wilde’s public shaming, vitriolic trial, and imprisonment for the crime of gross indecency — a codeword for buggery. Wilde had made the terrible miscalculation of having a passionate affair with a young man by the name of Lord Alfred Douglas. Unfortunately for the lovers, Douglas’s father was the Marquess of Queensberry, a powerful man who was ferociously unhappy at his son’s affair with the flamboyant Irish wit. Then Wilde made a second, graver miscalculation. When the Marquess left a note at Wilde’s club accusing him of “posing as a Sodomite,” Wilde decided to sue for libel — an action which had the effect of forcing Wilde to deny his very public homosexuality in testimony. Wilde was forced to withdraw his suit mid-trial, and was subsequently arrested and tried on the criminal charges of gross indecency, leading to a two-year sentence of hard labour. Wilde never recovered. He died three years after his release, in Paris and in poverty, and of a disease that would probably be readily curable today.
And so I wonder if Oscar Wilde, if brought back from his Père Lachaise grave, would come to write a stupendous work; maybe a Crucible of homosexual persecution; maybe a Catch-22 of criminal law in the hands of the aristocracy; or maybe something indescribable and sui generis, a Wildean fusion of flippant wit, class satire, and brooding horror.
Of all the long march of history’s dead, does any writer promise more than Mr Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, Restored?
Another Squiddite has washed up on the shores of ASif!’s author forums. This time around it’s Rob Hood.
