Monty Python’s witty take on literary parasitism at Oscar Wilde’s residence
Apart from producing The Picture of Dorian Gray and all those prized works of art, Oscar Wilde is popular for peppering them with his brilliant epigrams. Perhaps it wouldn’t be farfetched to say that of all that he had done during his lifetime his quotable quotes contribute most in keeping him omnipresent in our literary exhibitions in this age of social media statuses and updates. So imagine the frustration of a dear friend of mine who so in love with a particular Wilde-line realised it was also attributed to Gustave Flaubert. But “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” had been posted on her statuses before, that couldn’t be undone.
This isn’t a stray incident of Wilde borrowing from other writers. With regard to Flaubert, who was one of his favourites, he is supposed to have told the essayist Max Beerbohm, “Of course I plagiarize. It is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read Flaubert’s Tentation without signing my name at the end of it.”
This habit or literary technique of his earned him many detractors with some such as Arthur Ransome going as far as calling his most celebrated novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, “a mosaic hurriedly made by a man who reached out in all directions and […] used in his book whatever scraps of jasper or porphyry or broken flint, were put into his hand.”
But more than a century later now it must be recognized that Oscar Wilde was more aware than his contemporaries of the inability of art to create anything ‘original’. Jorge Luis Borges and the legion that followed him had Wilde as their literary forefather. The best defences of this literary parasitism is seen in fiction in Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” about a writer who re-writes Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and betters it, in prose there might not be any parallel to T.S Eliot’s essay on Philip Massinger, who was accused of plagiarizing Shakespeare, and nowhere more passionate than in the lines: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the iconic TV show created by the British comedy group Monty Python, that aired on BBC from late 1969 played around the Wildean stealing in one of its sketches. On episode 39 of season three we are in 1895 and inside Oscar Wilde’s drawing room in a gathering of the whos-who of London that includes King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, George Bernard Shaw and the painter James McNeill Whistler, who was at one time a friend of the writer before their relationship soured.
About the deterioration of Wilde-Whistler friendship there are many rumours. Some believe Whistler had started envying his friend’s rise; there’s another story of Whistler accusing Wilde of stealing his famous phrases. Although there are various versions of this incident, it is believed that in 1888 in one of their meetings when Wilde in appreciation of one of Whistler’s witticisms said, “I wish I had said that”, the latter responded with “You will, Oscar, you will.”
George Bernard Shaw, on occasions, has claimed to inspire the writer’s works like the famous essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”.
The sketch begins with Wilde going “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” and splitting the hall to applause and laughter. Not to be left behind Whistler responds with “there is only one thing in the world worse than being witty, and that is not being witty.” And what was supposed to be a battle of wits to impress the Prince is soon reduced to abuses as things go like this:
WILDE: Your Majesty is like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top.
PRINCE: I beg your pardon?
WILDE: Um…It was one of Whistler’s.
WHISTLER: I never said that.
WILDE: You did, James, you did.
WHISTLER: Well, Your Highness, what I meant was that, like a doughnut, um, your arrival gives us pleasure…and your departure only makes us hungry for more. [The prince laughs and nods his head.] Your Highness, you are also like a stream of bat’s piss.
PRINCE: What?
WHISTLER: It was one of Wilde’s. One of Wilde’s.
WILDE: It sodding was not! It was Shaw!
SHAW: I…I merely meant, Your Majesty, that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
PRINCE: Oh.
WILDE: Right. Your Majesty is like a dose of clap–
WHISTLER: –Before you arrive is pleasure, and after is a pain in the dong.
PRINCE: What??
WHISTLER AND WILDE: One of Shaw’s, one of Shaw’s.
SHAW: You bastards.
(Thanks to Open Culture for their post on the same.)