Conan Doyle's Incorporation of Revenge Drama: "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge" and "The Adventure of the Red Circle"

Abstract

Conan Doyle's Incorporation of Revenge Drama: "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge" and "The Adventure of the Red Circle" Mary Frances Williams San Mateo, California TWO OF THE STORIES in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's His Last Bow (1917), "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge" and "The Adventure of the Red Circle," are very similar in structure and themes. Both were initially published in the Strand Magazine in two parts and both seem to break naturally in the middle into two nearly separate tales because of their narrative structure and the form of their first publication. Both stories also consist of two very different tales that are not quite joined together. This double style is deliberate on the part of the author since he used the technique similarly in both tales. If "Wisteria Lodge" begins with a very solid and respectable British citizen consulting Sherlock Holmes about a murder at an English manor house, it transforms itself from what appears to be a straightforward English country house murder mystery into a very strange tale of Latin American dictators, foreign cultures, brutality, conspiracy, and revenge killing. And if "The Red Circle" at first deludes the reader into thinking that it will be a Gothic horror story since it commences with a respectable landlady, Mrs. Warren , consulting Holmes about the strange pacing and secrecy of her invisible Bloomsbury lodger, it surprisingly and suddenly reveals itself instead to be a gruesome tale of Mafia (or Carbonari) criminality, flight, murder, and revenge. In both stories, Conan Doyle takes delight in pulling back a veneer of English respectability and normalcy and in revealing, lurking beneath, the passions and turmoil not only of southern Europeans and Central Americans, but also of English revenge drama. He draws upon the dramatic and literary conventions and the essential themes of English Renaissance and Jacobean revenge drama, and just as he changes the plots and atmospheres of each tale from the English to the exotic, so he 418 WILLIAMS : CONAN DOYLE transforms his genre from the mere detective tale to revenge drama. In the same way Webster is said to have used a "confusion of convention and realism" in his dramas, a mixture of "unrealistic conventions with psychological-realistic representation,"1 so Conan Doyle mixes together the many artificial topoi of revenge tragedy with a more traditional , ordinary Edwardian setting and the straightforward realism of the detective story. In this way, he accomplishes what some critics have never acknowledged: he does not write tales that are merely popular mystery stories but rather ones that are serious literature—skillfully constructed, intertextual prose dramas. It is possible that a renewed interest in the performance of revenge drama at the turn of the century prompted Conan Doyle to look at the genre when he was writing "Wisteria Lodge" (1908) and "The Red Circle " (1911). John Webster's The Duchess ofMalfi (1613) was revived in 1892 by William Poel and was performed a number of times thereafter.2 The Revenger's Tragedy (1607?) by an unknown playwright was revived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;3 and Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore was revived in Paris in 1894.4 In any case a traditional education in Shakespeare may have led Conan Doyle to consult published texts of revenge plays. "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge" "Wisteria Lodge" was first published in the Strand Magazine in two parts, September and October 1908, and in Collier's Weekly in August 1908, and republished in His Last Bow in 1917.6 It seems to be a straightforward mystery tale and the reader only gradually becomes aware (although forewarned at the very beginning by Sherlock Holmes 's remark that the story is '"grotesque"'6) that what seems to be an English manor house mystery is instead something much more sinister and violent. Conan Doyle draws upon the conventions of Jacobean and Renaissance revenge tragedy, and he signals this both by commenting that his tale has "'some underlying suggestion of the tragic and the terrible'"1 and by revealing that the country house at which the villain resides is "Jacobean"8—indications of the direction that his story will take. A number of references to revenge...