Political Censorship on the Late-Victorian Stage: Rereading Oscar Wilde’s Vera; or, the Nihilist[s]

Abstract

The publication in 2021 of the Oxford English Texts version of Oscar Wilde’s Russian melodrama Vera; or, the Nihilist (1883), based, as it is, on new archival research by its editor Josephine Guy, deepens the mystery surrounding the alleged censorship of Oscar Wilde’s first play. While Wilde himself promoted the idea that the expression of democratic ideals in his Nihilist play had prevented its performance in England, a genetic analysis of an early manuscript version of the play (1881) made available in the OET Vera and Guy’s reconstructed play-text of the first performance, problematizes the putative censorship of the play on political grounds. In conjunction with new readings of Wilde’s Poems (1881) and his letters from the period, the genetic analysis that follows crystallizes attendant issues concerning the extent of Wilde’s radicalism at the outset of his career and the nature of his commitment to Irish republicanism per se. Where the Chief Examiner of Plays (E. F. S. Pigott) promoted the idea that there was no political censorship of the theatre at the end of the Victorian period, the examples of the alleged suppression of Wilde’s melodrama and the experiences of his mentor, the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, at the hands of the British press evince the multiple forms of political censorship and self-censorship that came to shape (and impede) the development of the late-Victorian stage.