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CLASSICS AND OSCAR WILDE

This volume, comprising eighteen essays, had its origins in a one-day colloquium held in Oxford in July 2014, and its scope has been expanded to include newly commissioned essays. In her illuminating introduction, ‘Taking Parnassus to Piccadilly’, Riley sets out with refreshing directness the provocative question that this volume sets out to explore. S. Goldhill, responding to I. Ross’s detailed study, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (2013), commented that Wilde’s ‘knowledge of Greek and his treatment of classical subjects by and large seem remarkably ordinary and usual for the time’, and went on to ask: ‘What, then, is the relation between Wilde’s genius as a writer and his ordinariness as a classicist?’ (quoted by Riley, p. 9). These essays seek ‘to answer that question, to demonstrate in what ways Wilde’s classicism is typical, in what ways heterodox or distinctive and where it is situated in relation to Victorian and intellectual frameworks’ (p. 9). Wilde’s genius as a writer is, reasonably enough, largely taken for granted here. His ‘ordinariness’, or otherwise, as a Classicist is harder to discern. What does come through, however, is the enduring impact upon his art and his thinking made by his seven years of classical study at Trinity College Dublin, followed by his double First at Oxford. It is no surprise that Wilde’s first published work was an English translation of the Chorus of Cloud-Maidens in Aristophanes’ Clouds (in the November 1875 issue of the Dublin University Magazine). But the lasting impact of Greece, and all things Greek, on Wilde’s mind and imagination emerges on page after page of his 1897 letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis. When Wilde was at his lowest point, he turned instinctively to classical, and especially Greek, models, in an attempt to refashion himself once more in his time of Sorrow and Suffering, just as he had when creating his persona at Oxford 20 years before, in his days of Joy and Laughter. Wilde draws on other models and frames of reference, of course, but his synthesis reveals a deep and lasting immersion in Greek art and philosophy, as Riley argues compellingly in her key essay ‘“All the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy”: Wilde’s “Epistola” and the European Christ’. Whatever his distinction as a pure Classicist – and his array of glittering prizes certainly suggests others recognised his quality –, Wilde’s mind and mode of thinking was profoundly affected by his education, and he continued to reflect upon and develop his intellectual relationship to a number of key figures and forms, including Plato, Herodotus, Heraclitus and the Greek dramatists, above all Euripides. Riley quotes T. Wright’s comment that Wilde could draw upon his Oxford education ‘with the help of the vast library he carried around with him in his head’ (p. 182). In this respect, he was extraordinary. The book is organised into five sections, with three or four essays in each. Most of Wilde’s major texts come under scrutiny, with the slightly curious exception of his poetry, from which only the late work The Ballad of Reading Gaol receives significant attention. The insights provided on almost everything else make one conscious of the omission. Nevertheless, the range provides not only a substantial account of Wilde’s relationship with Classical Antiquity, but a coherent, cumulative reading of his own development as artist and thinker. Section 1, ‘Wilde’s Classical Education’, guides us through Wilde’s career at first Dublin and then Oxford, beginning with what he learned from Tyrrell and, especially, Mahaffy at Trinity College, and how he differed from him. As A. Blanshard states, ‘On THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 309