Did Oscar Wilde Write a Burmese Play?

Did Oscar Wilde Write a Burmese Play? Illustrated by K. Wong

In the list of works attributed to Oscar Wilde, For Love of the King stands apart as an oddity. Labelled as "A Burmese Masque," the short play tells the tragic tale of a half-caste beauty (of Italian and Burmese blood), who fell in love with King Meng Beng, a fictional Burmese king. The text is introduced with the following note from the publisher Methuen & Co. Ltd.

The very interesting and richly coloured masque or pantomimic play which is here printed in book form for the first time, was invented some time in 1894 or possibly a little earlier. It was written, not for publication, but as a personal gift to the author's friend and friend of his family, Mrs. Chan Toon ... For a long while Mrs. Chan Toon, who after her husband's death became Mrs. Woodhouse-Pearse, refused to permit the masque to be printed ... An arrangement, however, having been completed, the play is now made public.

To explain how Wilde, who as far as records can verify had never set foot in Burma, conceived such a tale, the publisher included a letter allegedly signed by Wilde, presumably supplied by Mrs. Chan Toon:

November 27, 1894 

My dear Mrs. Chan Toon,
I'm greatly repentant being so long in acknowledging receipt of "Told on the Pagoda." I enjoyed reading the stories, and much admired their quaint and delicate charm. Burmah calls to me. Under the cover I'm sending you a fairy tale entitled "For Love of the King," just for your own amusement. It is the outcome of long and luminous talks with your distinguish husband in the Temple and on the river, in the days when I was meditating writing a novel as beautiful and as intricate as a Persian praying-rug ...

Oscar Wilde

Illustrations for For Love of the King in Century Illustrated Magazine, Vol 103 (1921-22)

Did Oscar Wilde Speak Burmese?

When I first read the play, I was struck by the forensic details that only someone with intimate knowledge of the county and culture could have written.

Act I, Scene I, is set in the Hall of a Hundred Doors in King Meng Beng's palace.

In the distance can be seen the moat, the waiting elephants, and the peacocks promenading proudly in the blinding sunshine of the afternoon ... By [the king's] side is a betel-nut box ... Round about are grouped the courtiers, the poonygees [Buddhist monks], and the kneeling servants ...(P. 2, London : Methuen, 1922)

The Burmah King's message to His Majesty of Ceylon is "inscribed on palm leaves."

In Act I, Scene II, the story moves to a pagoda. "Surrounded by Peepul-trees, the great Htee [the sacred parasol], with its crown of a myriad jewels, rises toward a violet, star-studded sky ..." (P. 6)

In Act I, Scene III, the setting is "a humble dhunni-thatched hut, set amidst the whispering grandeur of the jungle." (P. 10)

In the footnotes, the Burmese word htee ထီး, which refers to the sacred parasol that crowns a pagoda, is mislabeled as spire. It's a mistake educated native speakers like Mr. Chan Toon (whom Wilde was supposed to have spoken to for the play's background) wouldn't make, but foreigners learning the language, such as Mrs. Chan Toon, might. The word dhunni corresponds to the Burmese word ဓနိ, dried palm branches used as thatch roofs in many parts of the country.

The specific references to peepul tree, betel-nut box, and palm-leaf manuscripts are spot on for the story's Burmese setting. The frequent appearances of quintessential Burmese words and expressions also suggest the author has a passing knowledge of the language. As far as I know, Wilde did not speak or read Burmese. This was the first red flag for me.

The cover and inside page of For Love of the King

Where is Wilde's Hallmark Wit?

While captivating in and of themselves, the characters from For Love of the King curiously lack the sardonic wit and cutting humor of Wilde's other memorable characters. Algernon Moncrieff from The Importance of Being Ernest and Lord Goring from An Ideal Husband never miss an opportunity to make fun of the English upper class. In contrast, King Meng Beng, his lover Shah Mah Phru, and the supporting characters exhibit no such tendencies for social criticism.

Viewed side by side, the characters from For Love of the King seem to be members of a different literary family, better suited for stories by Rudyard Kipling or Maurice Collis than a play by Wilde. That was the second red flag.

Shady Provenance

The third warning was the manuscript's checkered history itself. In his book Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde's Extraordinary Afterlife,  Gregory Mackie traced the litigation history of For Love of the King. Four years after the play was published, it was denounced as a forgery by Christopher Millard, author of the first bibliography of Wilde's works. This led to the publisher Methuen filing a libel suit against Millard.

"Although Millard (unsurprisingly) welcomed the trial which took place in 1926 as an opportunity to expose Mr. Chan Toon in the most public of venues," wrote Mackie, "unfortunately for him the case did not turn on the authenticity of the play but instead on his maligning of the reputation of a respected publishing firm." (P. 170, Toronto University Press, 2019)

Millard lost the case, but the publicity of the trial seemed to have accomplished what he set out to do. On December 19, 1926, The New York Times reported, "Wilde MS a Mystery; 'For 'Love of the King' called a Forgery."

While some cautious editors have opted to exclude For Love of the King from Wilde's complete works, a good many publishers continue to release the text under Wilde's name.

For Love of the King is excluded from Complete Works of Oscar Wilde by Delphi Classics. It's also absent from Greystone Press's Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (1920s, New York).

On the other hand, Simon & Schuster's catalog lists the play as Wilde's work. Both Barnes & Nobel and Amazon.com currently carry digital and paperback versions of the play published under Wilde's name by various publishers.

Who is Mrs. Chan Toon?

The Sunday Morning edition of The Aspen Daily Times, January 28, 1894, mentioned a certain Mrs. Chan Toon as "the first European lady who ever married a Burmese husband." The piece identifies her as Miss Mabel Cosgrove, "almost 20 years of age, a native of Cork [Ireland]."

She "married Mr. Chan-Toon, some two months ago, and the incident is peculiarly interesting as Mr. Chan-Toon achieved a quite phenomenal success in 1885 by taking all the scholarships available to law students--a feat no Englishman has ever performed." Mrs. Chan Toon was "an amiable and accomplished young lady having written a novel and a number of short stories," according to the paper.

Mrs. Chan Toon would continue to write novels and stories under the names Mabel Cosgrove Woodhouse Pearse, Mabel Mary Agnes Cosgrove Chan-Toon, and Mimosa.

Who is Mr. Chan Toon?

In the introduction of the first edition of For Love of the King, the publisher described the author's husband as "nephew of the king of Burma,  a barrister of the Middle Temple."

In The Law Times: The Journal and Record of The Law and Lawyers, November 1903-April 1904, the death of Mr. Chan Toon is recorded on the page for February 20, 1904:

Mr. Chan-Toon, barrister-at-law, who died suddenly in Rangoon from heart failure on the 9th inst., in his thirty-seventh year, was perhaps the most remarkable native student who was ever called to the English Bar. He carried off during his studentship days every prize and scholarship for which it was possible for him to compete ... Mr. Chan-Toon married an English lady who, under the pseudonym "Mimosa," wrote a book of vivid impressions of Burmese life with the tittle of Under Eastern Skies. (P. 375, London: Office of The Law times, 1843-1965)

This seems to match the identity of one of the early Burmese scholars abroad listed in the Thamine blog by an American post-master’s student living in London. (Thamine သမိုင်း is the Burmese word for history.)

Who Wrote For Love of the King ?

If Wilde didn't write the play, then who did? Mrs. Chan Toon, who married a Burmese scholar with connections to the Burmese court, is an obvious suspect.

Her short story collection Told on the Pagoda and her semi-autobiographical novel A Marriage in Burmah feature the same Burmese setting. Like For Love of the King, these works are also peppered with Burmese terms, exhibiting the author's familiarity with the language and more-than-cursory cultural knowledge.

As authors, both Mrs. Chan Toon and whoever wrote For Love of The King have certain identifiable quirks. It has to do with how they Romanize Burmese words in their texts.

Because well-traveled cities like Mandalay or illustrious figures like King Mindon frequently appeared in colonial writings, their English spellings were standardized from very early on. On the other hand, words like ဓနိ for thatch seldom did, and were not standardized.

Because Burmese language features a number of consonants and vowels not commonly used in English, there are various possible ways to represent certain words in English, all more or less approximations. Personally, I would have spelled ဓနိ as dani, and I suspect others might propose a different spelling altogether.

Currently, I am, like many others around the world, living under a shelter-in-place order due to the Coronavirus outbreak. With fewer social obligations to distract me, I began thinking I just might be able to play literary sleuth and crack the mystery of the Burmese masque.

How does one conduct research under lockdown? Many of the city and university libraries are closed right now. It turns out, as a faculty member of UC Berkeley, I have full access to the digital archive of Hathi Trust Digital Library, where I found the full texts of For Love of the King and some known works attributed to Mrs. Chan Toon a.k.a. Mabel Cosgrove Woodhouse Pearse a.k.a. Mabel Mary Agnes Cosgrove Chan-Toon a.k.a. Mimosa.

If I can establish substantial similarities between how certain Burmese words are Romanized in For Love of the King and in Mrs. Chan Toon's own writings, then I can make a convincing argument that Mrs. Chan Toon is the one who penned the play.

The daunting task would require time. But time is what I currently have in abundance -- a gift of the lockdown.

Cover of Told on the Pagoda by Mimosa

The Investigation Begins

In Told on the Pagoda, in the story "The Woman, the Man," a woodcutter's home was described as "the hut, that was as bare as a hermit's hut, thatched with dunni leaves, and situated in one of the deepest recesses of the dense sylvan growth ..." (P. 10, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1895)

This is the same Burmese word rendered as dhunni in For Love of the King.  The two spelling variants are quite close, though not an exact match.

In A Marriage in Burmah, however, the exact same spelling dhunni appears in the scenery visible during a couple's carriage ride: "... a long low stone-building evidently a dwelling house, and a square structure of dhunni, that stood somewhat back ..." (P. 95, London, Greening, 1905).

Mysterious Shades of White 

In For Love of the King, the name of King Meng Beng's mix-raced lover is given as Shah Mah Phru. This is most probably Romanization of ရှားမဖြူ or သျှားမဖြူ, the last word ဖြူ being white.

In A Marriage in Burmah, as the protagonist Mrs. Moung Gyaw meets her husband's household, the following exchange occurs:

"Who is that charming child? She is just like a beautiful doll," Mrs. Moung Gyaw inquired of her brother-in-law, at the same time indicating whom she meant.
"A cousin," he answered, looking in the girl's direction. "She is called Shah Mah Phru, which means beautiful and fair or white." (PP. 127-128)

The Romanization of the word for white as phru with an r caught my attention. The Burmese-centric pronunciation for the word is phyu (sounds like the English word pew, as in church pews). The pronunciation variant with the r-sound is characteristic of the Rakhine or Arakan region.

Though labelled as a novel, the plot of A Marriage in Burmah closely mirrors Mrs. Chan Toon's life events. Like the author, the young English heroine of the novel married a wealthy Burmese gentleman by the name of Mr. Moung Gyaw, brought up in Europe. Becoming Mrs. Moung Gyaw, the bride then moved to Burma to start a new life.

Just before Christmas of that year they started for Akyab, the inducements being the races, the return tickets at single fares, and the possibility of extracting some money from the old man. It is a pleasant run to the province of Arakan in fine weather, and Mrs. Mong Gyaw enjoyed it very much. (P. 112)

Akyab is the colonial name for Sittwe, the capital of the Rakhine or Arakan region. The is where locals would pronounce the word ဖြူ (white) as phru, not phyu. If Mrs. Chan Toon had lived in Arakan even briefly, or had met an Arakanese girl with the word white in her name, it explains why she would Romanize the word as phru.

It's difficult to see how Wilde, who had never been to Arakan, would pick the Arakanese pronunciation variant for white in the name of the king's lover Shah Mah Phru. The uncanny appearance of the exact same name in the cast of A Marriage in Burmah is also a mystery. However, these coincidences are not so mysterious if the same author had penned both works.

So far, my research was merely confirming my suspicion -- that I can expect to find similarities in the Romanized Burmese words in For Love of the King and in Mrs. Chan Toon's novels and stories.

Then, when I turned my attention to the word for monk, I stumbled on something I didn't expect -- another book that shares the same quirks.

Title page of A Marriage in Burmah by Mrs. Chan Toon

The Monk Led me to a Princess

In Act I, Scene I, For Love of the King, in the royal audience at The Hall of a Hundred Doors, next to the courtiers are also seated poonygees, or monks (P. 2, London : Methuen, 1922). This is a somewhat unusual Romanization of the word ဘုန်းကြီး.

Colonial writer J. G. Scott, Romanizes the word as as pongyi: In The Burman, His Life and Notions, describing "The Noble Order of the Yellow Robe," he writes, "Finally, there is the pongyi, 'the Great Glory' who, by virtue of prolonged stay -- ten years is the minimum -- has proved his steadfastness and unflinching self-denial." (PP. 108-109, Scotland, Kiscadale, 1989).

Scott's Romanization is more consistent with the present day spelling phongyi widely used by Burmese writers writing in English. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary lists three spelling variations for the word: pongyi, phongyi, or poonghie.

When I did a search for the spelling poonygee in  Mrs. Chan Toon's Told on the Pagoda and A Marriage in Burmah, it yielded no matching result. Instead, I found a match in a completely different book, titled East and West: the Confessions of a Princess (London: Jarrolds, 1922), with no designated author. 

East and West is divided into three sections: Book I: Childhood; Book II: the Far East; and Book III: the Story of Saw Kay. In Book I, the young heroine Lola recounts her Irish childhood in poverty: "My earliest recollection is of a drab lodging at Shepherd's Bush, in a small house -- long since swept away -- that boasted a cat-walk at the back, called by courtesy a garden ..." (P. 11).

Of the fateful encounter that changed the course of her life, the heroine recalled, "They say that destiny sends words of warning. She sent me none that day! ... He was the nephew of the king [of Burma], unmarried, one of nine sons, while his father was reputed to be fabulously rich ..." (PP. 39-41)

The fictional prince in East and West is Mindoon, most likely a name derived from Mindon, a historical Burmese king. When the heroine asked Mindoon of his family, he replied, "They live in Arakan ... It is three and half days from here." (P. 118).

In East and West, the word poonygee appears twice. In the description of the preparations for a royal visit: "People began to pour in from the district. The head of the Buddhist religion, a very learned and stately poonygee, took up his position in one of the many mighty Zayats [living quarters]." (P. 148, London : Jarrolds, 1922)

Then in the description of the preparations for an execution in Book III: the Story of Saw Kay: "By the river, in the great enclosure was a crowd of specially invited guests from Mandalay and other centres: there was the head poonygee of the King's Kyoung [the King's Monastery]." (P. 279)

With a single-letter added, the spelling pooneygee also appears: "On the morrow, the funeral feast was laid, and the offering to the pooneygees placed on many bullock-carts, while, the hog, having been duly dispatched, Saw Kay gorged himself to repletion ..." (P. 251)

The similarities of Lola's life story and that of Mrs. Chan Toon, and the matching Romanization of poonygee in their works, open up the possibility I might have accidentally identified East and West's anonymous author -- Mrs. Chan Toon.

Once More Unto the Breach

For confirmation, I decided to put the newly discovered East and West through the same Romanization test. Then, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, more spelling matches started to emerge.

The spelling dhunni appears repeatedly in East and West:

"The Boh sat up on his mat in the shade of his dhunni thatch and twisted up his long hair." (P. 251).

"... some half-dozen Karen houses, like shallow boxes on piles, surmounted by low-pitched roofs of dhunni ..." (P. 256).

"Then Saw Kay, smiling to himself, set light to the hut, and aided by a faint warm breeze, the flames caught the straw and dhunni like tow." (P. 270).

The word phru, the Arakanese variant for white, also appears: "Then Monug Phru had a splendid Mandalay pasoh consealed in a box -- Saw Kay would have that pasoh himself." (P. 246).

The word Monug that precedes Phru is obviously a typo of the prefix Moung မောင် for Burmese masculine names. My guess is, the publishing house had no Burmese-reading copyeditor, thus missed the typo.

Curiously, the same typo also appears repeatedly in A Marriage in Burmah.

"... and they made their adieux, Mr. Monug Pay, insisting on re-escorting them down the creaking steps." (P. 100)

"Oh yes; Monug Pay is his name; terrible fellow for taking bribes, so they say." (P. 97)

"... and she held out her hand and placed it in  Monug Pay's warm, damp clasp." (P. 105)

In all these instances above, the word serves as the prefix to a man's name, thus should have been Romanized as Moung, like elsewhere. Yet, for some reason, the same typo Monug appears again and again.

Inside pages of Told on the Pagoda by Mimosa

What's in a Name? Or a Sarong?

While not as pronounced, the following Romanization similarities are also noteworthy. In both East and West and A Marriage in Burmah, the Burmese word for man's sarong ပုဆိုး is Romanized as pasoh. This word could have been Romanized alternatively as pasoe or paso. And the same garment is also called လုံချည်, commonly Romanized as longyi.

The prefix မ for Burmese female names is consistently rendered as Mah in For Love of the King, A Marriage in Burmah, Told on the Pagoda, and East and West. Burmese writers typically render the prefix as Ma (without the ending h).

The prefix မောင် for Burmese male names is rendered as Moung in both For Love of the King and A Marriage in Burmah. Burmese writers typically spell it as Maung (with a instead of o)

If I consider the possibility that Monug is just a typo of Moung, then this spelling variant is found across For Love of the King, A Marriage in Burmah, and East and West.

All Roads Lead to Mrs. Chan Toon

A Marriage in Burmah and the first two books of East and West share the same backbone plot -- a young girl's fateful encounter with a Burmese royalty, her move to the far east, and her eventual discovery that the prince is just as fallible as any other man. This is also Mrs. Chan Toon's life story, or a good portion of it.

In East and West, rather unexpectedly, the heroine Lola learned of her husband's demise in a cable:

I pull up the blinds, and standing by the window to get the extra light -- it was a foggy morning -- I tore open it. It was from Burmah and signed by my brother-in-law. Brutal in its curtness, it says: Mindoon dead. Heart failure. (P. 235)

Reading it, I wondered if this was how Mrs. Chan Toon learned of her own husband's death. Mr. Chan Toon, after all, also suddenly died of heart failure in Rangoon, as reported in The Law Times.

It's difficult to dismiss the thematic similarities between East and West and A Marriage in Burmah; and the similar treatment of Burmese words in East and West, A Marriage in Burmah, Told on the Pagoda, and For Love of the King as happenstance. A more logical explanation is, these are the literary creations of a single hand -- that of Mrs. Chan Toon.

A Forger and a Talent

I had set out to prove Oscar Wilde couldn't have written For Love of the King -- that, as a forgery, the play doesn't deserve to stand alongside Lady Windermere's Fan, Salome, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In the last several weeks, as I scrutinize Mrs. Chan Toon's writings line by line, my impression of her began to change. I know not how much of what she wrote was the truth, and how much fiction. But it's clear from her writings Burma, with all its sunlit splendors and blinding tragedies, remained sacred and special to her. The fact that she kept returning to it in her writings, suggests it haunted her long after she bid the country farewell.

I suspect many contemporary readers may dismiss her writings as overly romantic, as typical colonial fetishism of the east. But in that, her sin is no greater than that of the other writers of her own time, for whom the east was indeed a new world to be marveled at.

There's a certain honesty with which she treats her Burmese characters. They are not mere ornaments to swell the scene for the principle white characters. For Love of the King and Told on the Pagoda, in fact, feature Burmese protagonists, supported by a mostly Burmese cast.

Her Burmans are wicked and wise, cruel and kind. Her literary landscape is populated with Nats (animistic spirits), cheroot-smoking women, familiar figures from Buddhist parables, thatch-roofed huts, parasol-topped pagodas, peepul trees, and betel-nut boxes -- all the fine details that one wouldn't notice unless they were missing.

In other words, in uncovering a forgery, I may have also discovered a talent.

Mrs. Chan Toon's work doesn't deserve to be listed under Wilde's name; however, it deserves a place of its own.

Further Readings:

Forging Oscar Wilde in the 1920s, University College, Oxford.

The Curious Case of Mrs. Chan-Toon, Bear Alley, March 1, 2009

Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde's Extraordinary Afterlife, Gregory Mackie (Toronto University Press, 2019)

Burmese Students in Britain, Thamine Blog, May 14, 2019

For Love of the King,  London : Methuen, 1922, digital scan, Hathi Trust Digital Library

Told on the Pagoda, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1895, digital scan, Hathi Trust Digital Library

A Marriage in Burmah, London, Greening & Co., 1905.digital scan, Hathi Trust Digital Library

East and West: the Confessions of a Princess, London: Jarrolds, 1922, digital scan, Hathi Trust Digital Library