Tennessee Williams's “‘Homage to Ophelia’ (A Pretentious Foreword)” with Commentary

Abstract

In January 1944, Tennessee Williams wrote “Homage to Ophelia,” the foreword to his and Donald Windham’s play, You Touched Me! Although the version published here was arguably Williams’s final version, and it does bear a specific date, a brief look into the earlier versions of the draft tell a more complex story, not just about how Williams revised the foreword over several weeks, but also how he revised the play and, to a certain extent, himself. Comparing the earlier and later versions of the foreword demonstrates that the changes he made from the first to the final draft were influenced by certain professional and personal trials that Williams was experiencing at the time. Due to complications from the play’s two imminent premieres and the deaths of his two beloved Roses (one symbolic, the other very real), the weeks closing 1943 and the days opening 1944 were traumatic enough for Williams to have him rethink entirely the content and tone of the foreword from earlier drafts, a reshaping that extended to the play itself and, with the current revisions of The Glass Menagerie, to his career in the theatre.