The Texts of O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon

Abstract

Beyond the Horizon appeared in two editions within four and a half years. The first, published March 1920, printed a text that O’Neill probably completed in 1918 but may have tweaked for publication. It has not been reprinted since 1922, has never been edited, and was only recently reissued online.1 The second edition incorporated collaborative cuts made during a boozy span in mid-January 1920, prior to the play’s February 3 premiere. That edition debuted in O’Neill’s 1924 Complete Works and has been the basis of all subsequent editions. These are different texts, written at different times and representing different assumptions about authorship. Both are essential to our understanding of O’Neill. But I am aware of no study of the play or of O’Neill that engages the first-edition text. My purpose is threefold. First, I will consolidate and clarify the textual history of Beyond the Horizon. Second, I will enumerate significant differences between the two editions, with special attention to the generosity that O’Neill initially accorded to Ruth Mayo, the depressive wife of the poet manque Robert Mayo. Finally, I will argue that in the first edition O’Neill ponders the challenge of melding art and marriage in a gender-savvy manner reflective of his relationship with Agnes Boulton and characteristic of his fellow Provincetown playwrights Neith Boyce and Rita Wellman. The argument attempts to restore to Ruth a measure of dignity that O’Neill briefly allowed her, then withdrew. Judith E. Barlow discerns in the 1924 text “the venerable myth that domesticity, even when freely chosen, kills the male of the species” and “annihilat[es]” his “artistic soul.”2 But the first edition Ruth Mayo, agnes Boulton,