In honour of the wonderful Oscar Wilde, whose 159th birthday it is on the 16th, pictured here with his beautiful and beloved Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas. (My earlier posts featuring this dapper pair can be found here)
So many vintage photographs of two male sitters appearing intimately linked may be nothing more than platonic affection between friends or relations, but in this case they are undoubtedly lovers, as we know exactly who they are for a change, famous faces indeed!
[ID: A digital drawing of characters Zolf Smith and Oscar Wilde from the AP Podcast Rusty Quill Gaming. The drawing is fully coloured and square in format. Both characters are shown roughly from the chest up. Oscar takes up the left half of the painting. He is a white human man with long white hair, wearing a paisley patterned cream coloured jacket. His eyes are closed and his head is lifted as he laughs happily, a flush on his cheeks and nose. Zolf, a white dwarf, is leaning against his chest, hiding his face in Oscar’s throat. He has short white hair and a full, white beard. Zolf is wearing a matching, though unpatterned cream jacket over a green shirt. Zolf’s eyes are closed and he too is laughing softly, blushing beneath his freckles. Both characters are wearing golden accessories: Zolf’s beard is gathered by a slim bold ring and he also wears an ring around the upper curve of his ear shell. Oscar is wearing multiple matching rings, gathering one thick strand of his hair at the side of his face. In the background, fairylights and the shadows of dancing people are visible. /end ID]
I’ve watched “Wilde”. It was on my to-watch list for a pretty long time, thanks to @xenolinguistics-department ’s Instagram it was there even before I started making different segments for different actors. Be sure, though - I watched it because of Michael Sheen. I’ve seen clips from this movie in so many Ineffable Husbands Human!AU videos… Well, Michael Sheen is twenty-eight years old in that movie and it’s just illegal to be so young, pretty and charming! Have you seen those eyes? (And lips, and buttocks which were shown for the whole screen…) I probably should confess – I have read “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” and I didn’t like it… It felt boring and pretentious. I’ve read some of Oscar Wilde’s short stories (yes, the one about the giant too) and, what’s the most important - “The Importance of Being Earnest” – I’ve seen twice in the theatre and it was great! So, I’m a little familiar with Oscar Wilde’s works, but not a big fan of it. I’ve also seen Stephen Fry for the first time in that movie and I liked his performance a lot. I also wanted to make a note – I don’t know how historically accurate it is, so I’m not going to judge it those grounds. I enjoyed this movie so much! It’s dramatic, it’s romantic, it’s sensual (I was going to write sexy, but this word is just not good enough). I’ve seen so many beautiful naked young men in this movie. A lot of them was Jude Law, but I’m not saying it’s something bad. I cried a few times while watching – a lot of times, when I saw Michael Sheen, during the scene (Spoilers!) when Oscar and Bosie had a meeting in prison and started holding hands through the bars and I definitely cried in the end, which I didn’t expect to be at least slightly happy, however, it was. So, watching queer movies with no particular actors in them.
Stoker wrote Dracula as a direct reactionto the Wilde trials
Many of Dracula’s characteristics actually echo Wilde as described to the trials, and Dracula’s lifestyle resembles an exaggerated version of precautions to hide homosexuality
Stoker is basically the pro-closeted 1890s alternative to Wilde’s flamboyancy, and that comes out in how he portrays Dracula and Jonathan Harker
Like if you look deeper into Stoker’s letters to Whitman, he’s practically obsessed with feeling “naturally secretive” and “reticent”
(Also he and Wilde had some weird personal rivalry going on, since Stoker married Wilde’s definitely-not-straight ex-fiancee, though later they were friendly…there’s a lot to unpack here)
So, arguably, Dracula was Stoker’s way of apologizing for his silence during Wilde’s trials.
Some highlights:
Wilde’s trial had such a profound effect on Stoker precisely because it fed Stoker’s pre-existing obsession with secrecy, making Stoker retrospectively exaggerate the secrecy in his own writings on male love.
It is difficult, Stoker admits, to speak openly about “so private a matter” as desire. In carefully calibrated language, Stoker asks forgiveness from those who might see that his silence is a sin-to those few nameless souls who know his secret affinity with Wilde.
Since Dracula is a dreamlike projection of Wilde’s traumatic trial, Stoker elaborated and distorted the evidence that the prosecutor used to convict Wilde. In particular, the conditions of secrecy necessary for nineteenth-century homosexual life–nocturnal visits, shrouded windows, no servants–become ominous emblems of Count Dracula’s evil.
Dracula…represents not so much Oscar Wilde as the complex of fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments that Wilde’s name evoked in 1895. Dracula is Wilde-as-threat, a complex cultural construction not to be confused with the historical individual Oscar Wilde.
tl;dr:
Stoker is actually too repressed to function
Oscar Wilde (especially his trials) absolutely influenced Stoker
Dracula gay
If anyone wants to read a very well-written and surprisingly entertaining account on pretty much everything and everyone Stoker was influenced by, ESPECIALLY his connection with Wilde and Whitman, do yourself a favour and read “Something in the Blood” by David J. Skal. It’s the most thorough recent account on everything that made Dracula and the onlly one that doesn’t shy away from all the points in the above post (Also, it won the Stoker award, which is basically the Pulitzer for horror(-related) literature - There’s a joke in there somewhere, but my brain’s too tired to craft it rn
When Emily Dickinson said “How dreary to be somebody”, and Daffodils said “It’s been raining inside my head again”, and Oscar Wilde said “Behind sorrow there is always sorrow”.
I spent the past few days thinking about the pain of being split in two and the struggle as an artist to be accepted and accept yourself for who you are. This moment had it all. Toby Stephens as Oscar Wilde in Prisoner C33 is a revelation.
Prisoner C33 review THE GUARDIAN – Trevor Nunn directs a wretched, wonderful Wilde
In this dark, poetic one-man play, Toby Stephens gives it his all as the wrecked writer – imprisoned for gay sex in 1895 – as he rues his misfortunes with his younger self
Watching plays on television does require a certain mindset. Appearing as part of BBC Four’s Sunday Night Performance strand, Prisoner C33 is a brand new one-man play about Oscar Wilde’s time in Reading Gaol. It’s written by Stuart Paterson, directed by Trevor Nunn, and stars a very good Toby Stephens as Wilde, playing two very different versions of the writer in conversation with each other. If you are in the mood for an hour of one man talking to himself about the great misfortunes of his life, in a dim, candlelit cell, while the perforated eardrum that would contribute to his death causes him great pain, then this is a poetic and well-crafted play that I imagine would be even more electric on stage.
That hour doesn’t stretch patience or outstay its welcome. It begins with an animalistic moan, deep in the bowels of the Victorian prison, its candles and iron gates lending this a gothic chill. The moan is not coming from Wilde, yet, but from a disturbed man a few cells down, whose mutterings earn him an off-screen beating from a guard. This is 1895, and Wilde is in prison for gross indecency after the details of his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, his beloved Bosie, became public knowledge. He would emerge from his sentence having written De Profundis and with the material for The Ballad of Reading Gaol, but C33 is more concerned with what Wilde had to endure, and the ultimate cost of that.
Stephens plays him as a wretched, tortured soul brought to the depths of despair by his predicament. He’s cold, hungry, sick, dirty – and bored. “I can bear anything except losing my mind,” he says, as if the prospect is imminent. Perhaps it was. Most of the drama concentrates on this wretched version of Wilde, a man who can only refer to himself by his prisoner number, in conversation with his younger self – a witty, elegant man, dressed in immaculate velvet, with rouged cheeks, who is urging his counterpart to strive for survival. “I say, remember yourself for who you are. A great and exceptional man,” says the young Oscar to the prison Oscar, who refers to his surroundings as “this tomb for those who are not yet dead”.
Nunn directs with utter sparseness, as if for a stage production, and, clearly, this is about the dialogue and the performance (or should that be performances?). Wilde debates grand subjects with himself. He rails against England and “sound English common sense” and the English education system. He talks of morality and art and faith and God. Is art useless? Is he ashamed of the success of The Importance of Being Earnest, a play he wrote in haste for money, that the young Oscar says will be performed for the rest of time? Wilde’s ego and snobbery come and go. He is ashamed of his materialism, yet finds solace in imagining rich fabrics and good French soap.
There is much to say about love, too, from the betrayal of “sweet Bosie” to his adoration of his wife and children, though we know that he would never see them again. He wonders if his ability to see “all the beauty in the world”, in men and in women, makes him a superior man. It would truly be a crime if this famous wit were not allowed a glimmer of comedy in his musings, and among the trauma and the horrors, there are plenty of moments of sly humour. If his sexuality is superior, should he expect an honour from the Queen? “Well, certainly a tax rebate, at the very least,” he quips.
It is not an easy watch, and I mean that quite literally. The conditions of a prison in 1895 were grim, and the idea that his cell “lacks a woman’s touch” is laughable; no woman could improve on that filthy, freezing cesspit. It is dark and gloomy (if this were BBC One prime time, there would be issues raised by the viewers who complain about mumbling), its protagonists looking for light in the shadows, and there is a piercing, high-pitched noise every time Wilde repeats his refrain of “If it was not for my ear …”
But Stephens is remarkable, and gives it his all as both the wreck of a man who would live only for another four years, and as the suave, younger Wilde, exhorting his older, ruined counterpart to live. A man imprisoned for gay sex might be a relic of the past in this country, but it makes a pitch for contemporary relevance in other ways, too. “We cannot keep on living like this, governed by fools who think only of wealth and of war and the size of their estates,” Wilde rages, adding a touch of timelessness to this sorry, sad tale.
Prisoner C33, Toby Stephens’s excellent one-man rendition of Wilde’s incarceration in Reading and the way it tortured him, physically and mentally, wasted no time in confronting this squalor, the camera panning to the effluent-filled bucket within two minutes. Wilde implored the warders that it hadn’t been emptied in three days. “The smell will kill me!” he said, to deaf ears.
You would have to have a heart of stone not to be hugely moved by this play, written with skilful but harrowing intensity by Stuart Paterson and performed equally so by Stephens. Of course when you have the full canon of Wilde’s bons mots and one-liners to draw upon it makes the job easier, his light wit lifting the cruel spectacle of this wretched artist in his dark, stinking cell.
Stephens played two Wildes, one the broken prisoner, skinny with his hair cut; the other the Wilde of yore, foppish and adored in his burgundy velvet jacket. These two selves in conversation with each other meant that Stephens had double the work to do, but it allowed the play to explore Wilde’s brilliance and contradictions, as a man who claimed to despise materialism yet admitted, “I am fascinated by the rich.”
Occasionally Stephens’s theatricality edged towards the “Withnail”, but it was mostly beautifully judged and perfectly delivered. His imploring speech, stating, “We cannot continue keep on living like this, governed by fools who think only of wealth and of war and the size of their estate,” still feels perfectly applicable.
