WILDE, Oscar - AMERY, Leopold; Francis Wrigley Hirst; Henry Alford Antony Cruso.

£2,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Aristophanes at Oxford. O.W. by Y.T.O. First edition, one of 750 copies of this Oxford play satirizing Oscar Wilde. The authors of this anonymous parody, an entertaining imitation of the classical Greek comedy of Aristophanes, were three Oxford undergraduates.Leopold Amery (1873-1955), later a prominent journalist and conservative politician. Francis Wrigley Hirst (1873-1953), later a successful journalist, editor of The Economist and biographer of Thomas Jefferson. Little is known about Henry Alford Antony Cruso, besides that he published another drama in 1907. The initialism Y.T.O. comprises the last letter of their surnames.The student-authors were motivated by "an honest dislike for Dorian Gray, Salome, The Yellow Book, and the whole of the erotic, lack-a-daisical, opium-cigarette literature of the day". The play was published in 1894, just before Wilde's arrest and trial, when he was at the height of his fame.

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