In the period following Wilde’s death in November 1900, Robert Ross, his faithfu
In the period following Wilde’s death in November 1900, Robert Ross, his faithful friend and the executor of his estate, lost no time in devoting his considerable energies to the publication of a collected edition of Wilde’s complete works. He faced a daunting task, and the challenge differed substantially from volume to volume. As far as Wilde’s dramatic works were concerned, in the cases of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest he would have had to approach Lewis Waller and George Alexander for copies of scripts in their possession, had it not been for the assiduous efforts of the risk-taking London publisher Leonard Smithers, who came on the scene only after Wilde had been released from prison. At that point Ross made it his business to introduce them to one another and to urge Smithers to publish the long poem begun by Wilde before his release. A work motivated by the melancholy facts of his incarceration and events that occurred in prison, The Ballad of Reading Gaol was brought out in 1898, becoming the first of three book-length publications by Smithers of works by Oscar Wilde.
The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband had followed from Smithers’s press in the summer of 1899. As a result of Wilde’s insistent requirements, these two volumes were uniform in every way with the two major plays of his that had already been published, Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance.[1] And so, in the first years after Wilde’s death, when Ross was gathering texts and materials for the purpose of bringing together a complete, multi-volume collection of the works of his deceased friend, in an edition to be published by Methuen and Company, instead of having to depend on house typescripts or inelegant acting editions of the plays, where they existed, he was able to use the texts of those much superior editions published by Elkin Mathews and John Lane (Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1893), by John Lane (A Woman of No Importance, 1894), and by Leonard Smithers (The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, 1899). In this way, Wilde can be seen to have taken care to leave for the benefit of posterity properly edited and published texts of his major dramatic works.[2] And so Ross found himself in the enviable position of using as copy-texts for his Complete Works editions of these four plays that had all been seen through the press by the author himself.
The first collected edition of Wilde’s works was published by Methuen in 1908, under the general editorship of Ross, in a limited edition of one thousand copies, plus an additional eighty copies on Japanese vellum. Wilde’s literary aspirations, as interpreted by Ross, are fully embedded in the style and substance of this publication. Stuart Mason, Wilde’s bibliographer, added greatly to the potential store of information about the reception of Wilde’s published works by appending to his citation of each work a list of reviews. Following up many of the thirteen reviews Mason a