'A Royal Divorce': Background, Summary and Commentary

• John Gordon ^[1]
  1. [1] Connecticut College

     Connecticut College

     Town of New London, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: James Joyce quarterly, ISSN 0021-4183, Vol. 59, Nº. 1, 2021, págs. 25-51
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Taking up where J. S. Atherton left off, this essay considers Finnegans Wake’s incorporation of W. G. Will’s A Royal Divorce, a popular play about Napoleon’s divorce from Josephine and marriage to Marie Louise of Austria. The first section, “Background,” reviews the history of the play’s productions, especially in Dublin. From its debut in 1893, for about thirty years A Royal Divorce was a perennial Dublin favorite, whose opening nights were often public festivities of the sort described at the beginning of FW I.2. It was most remembered for the special effects in its re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo, and for the final death scene of its central character, Josephine, the role which in Joyce’s time was most identified with the actress Edith Cole; she was married to William Wallace Kelly, as in “Mr Wallenstein Washington’s Semperkelly’s . . . command performance” (FW 32.29–30), the play’s producer and impresario. The second section, “Summary,” is a scene-by-scene plot summary based on a manuscript of the play deposited with the office of the Lord Chamberlain. Among other things, the study points out that Josephine’s death scene is (anachronistically) presented as coinciding, by way of telepathy, with Napoleon’s simultaneous death on St. Helena, and suggests that it is also staged as reciprocating an earlier sequence in which Napoleon, in disguise, visits and gazes down on the sleeping form of his divorced ex-wife and declares his undying love for her; in the sequel, she wakes up, having sensed his presence, correctly foresees an immediate threat on his life, and winds up being given credit for having—again, telepathically—saved him. The third section, “Commentary,” considers the one-man-two-women triangles of Finnegans Wake—“sosie sesthers” (FW 3.12), for instance—as they intersect with the play’s Napoleon-Josephine-Marie Louise triangle. Addressing, in particular, ALP’s concluding monologue, it supplements Atherton’s earlier demonstration of parallels with Josephine’s death scene, for example, suggesting that “[s]ave me from those therrble prongs!” (FW 628.05) involves the play’s (incorrect) assertion that Napoleon saved Josephine from the guillotine. Citing examples in Finnegans Wake and other Joyce works of uncanny, extrasensory communications across space and time, it proposes that the last pages encompass Josephine addressing Napoleon in, roughly, three manifestations—the one who saved her life, the one whose life she saved, and the one dying on St. Helena. They also show ALP, addressing the husband who, as a “Napoleon the Nth” (FW 30.02), was viewing her performance in FW I.2, Edith Cole, addressing her husband W. W. Kelly, also viewing her performance, and, probably, Nora, whose middle name was Joseph, addressing Joyce.