The King In Yellow : A New Translation

By Thomas De Castigne and Simon Bucher-Jones

The original French Text of the Play Le Roi en Jaune (1893) together with a new English translation, introduction and essays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326440701

Book preview

The King In Yellow : A New Translation

THE KING IN YELLOW

By Thomas De Castigne (1893 Text)

Annotated English version by Simon Bucher-Jones

Cover, detail from Petra Damino’s painting THE LAKE OF HALI:  1910. 

Contents:

Page 4Contents

Page 5:    An Introduction: Thomas de Castigne:  Baudelaire and the Ubiquitous Monarch.

Page 10:    Bibliography of works of interest.

Page 11:    Before the Play: The Green Room by Robert W. Chambers

Pages 12-13:   Dramatis Personae: from Thomas de Castigne’s letter of 7th April 1890 to

Barbey D’ Aurevilly.

Pages 14-130: The Play, French text.  (Thomas de Castigne 1893)

The Play English text (Simon Bucher-Jones except where indicated in notes, copyright 2014.)

Page 131:       Note on the construction of Act 2.

Pages 132-136:Essays on The King in Yellow

The King in Yellow in the Dark Chamber. De Castigne’s influence on Rabindranath Tagore, a speculation.  Reprinted from the Journal of Jaune Studies. August 2012. 

Who was Mme Therese du Chastaigny?  A possible reference to the latter annals of the Dynasty in the works of Jacques Futrelle, a speculation. Reprinted from the Journal of Jaune Studies. September 2012

Why In Yellow? Does the colour of the King originate in Scottish War Practice? New to this volume.

Who played Cassilda?  A brief history of the actress who originated the part. New to this volume.

Page : 137-141:  Behind the Scenes: The True and Secret History.

Page 142-144: Notes on the Play.

Page 141:  Notes on the 3rd Edition, acknowledgements.

THE KING IN YELLOW

An Introduction

Thomas de Castigne:  Baudelaire and the Ubiquitous Monarch.

It is tempting to view any great and powerful work as a thing existing in its own right - sub spacia aeternalis ‘under the light of eternity’ as much itself as Caliban is Caliban or Ariel, Ariel – to quote Mervyn Peake, a writer who -  if any - deserves such plaudits – for his Gormenghast trilogy - but writers and writings are products of their culture, and producers of the culture that comes after them, and to place a work in its own time and space can be a useful exercise in understanding its complexities.

Thomas de Castigne is an interesting author in as much as he produced only one work.

However when a single work is of sufficient ontological weight, as say, The Catcher in the Rye and, if we squint, almost as influential, it repays study.  That work is of course THE KING IN YELLOW.

For a long time this ‘cursed’ play which was only performed for a single week in August 1894 in its original form, has been known to students solely through a handful of contemporary references in the short stories of Robert W. Chambers, a purported text referred to in a short story by James Blish, (later rendered into blank verse by Lin Carter) and a 1999 revival that while vivid is far from the source material. 

It has now however achieved some modern interest due to references to its characters being made in a popular TV drama which I believe is called TRUE DETECTIVES[i].  For the avoidance of doubt this translation was begun in 2010, and I have as yet not seen any episodes of the above. I intend to watch it with interest once this translation is published.  

Irrespective of the quality of TRUE DETECTIVE, this upsurge of interest, together with the recent recovery of papers relating to the Castigne family, has made this combined French / English critical text edition possible, and for that alone we should be grateful.  While – it must be emphasised that the 1893 Ur text is not a full transcription of the 1894 performed work, it – together with the contemporary accounts and the historical chain of influenced and derivative works enables the most complete reconstruction to date.

The authorship problem. 

Until recently some people have doubted Thomas de Castigne’s authorship – and the ‘authorship question’ is as much a fringe part of Jaune Studies as it is of Shakespearean scholarship. I will touch on the main theories of alternative authorship to briefly dismiss them, as they have been dismissed by every serious literary critic.  Among the candidates are: 

Oscar Wilde. Like Marlowe (in the case of Shakespeare), Wilde is supposed to have faked his death in Paris (thereafter to die in New York in the 1920s). This theory fails because in 1894 when The King is Yellow is being performed for its single week in Paris, Oscar was still an honoured English writer whose play The Importance of Being Earnest would debut the following year, and whose work had no reason to be concealed.  He had yet to be tried, disgraced, imprisoned or exiled. He cannot have written a work predicting his own fall.

William Shakespeare, always popular as a theory, but this attribution (i) denies the clear primacy of the French text, and (ii) ignores the obvious fact that anyone with a manuscript play in 1894  which could be attributed to Shakespeare would obviously attribute it to Shakespeare, thereby gaining far greater interest than any newcomer’s work would muster.  In its favour is a line in Chambers about ‘translations of the play’ first appearing in Paris, but this is an aside, by a character whose mentality is shaken. That the play is in a form of Shakespearean verse, is a given – and its back attribution to Shakespeare is an attempt to explain why, but the form remained a venerated one in French drama, and it only appears unusual to us now because it was on the point of being swept away by the new wave, almost as if in revulsion. 

A criminal – Fantômas, to whom Castigne is supposed to stand as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Watson and Holmes.  This is a strange idea even for fringe theorists. Fantômas the famous and mysterious arch-criminal and amoral killer of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s novels first makes his appearance in February 1911. The (possibly) literally inhuman fiend thus depicted in the novel and its thirty one sequels, set Paris society on fire, but while immensely popular he was – firmly – fictional, and if he had been real also (possibly) too young (Fantômas’s true persona is a matter of conjecture in the books) to pen a play in the 1890s.  Scholars might almost as well assert that it was The King in Yellow that first released the evil child, Fantômas to grow into the world of fiction, as argue that a real play was authored by an adolescent fictional character.  However as there are romantics who pretend or purport to argue that Holmes really lived under some other name, so there are those who claim that a loathsome presence was at the heart of Parisain crime.  If Moriarty could have been a mathematics professor, they say, why not Fantômas a playwright.

Marquis de Sade.  The infamous Marquis ended his life in the asylum at Charenton in 1814 where he directed the inmates in theatrical performances and continued to write new works both in prose and play form. His son is said to have burned his unpublished manuscripts on his death, but supporters of this theory allege that the Marquis’ then lover, the 18 year old Madeleine LeClerc was entrusted with his ‘Final Play’.  This theory is superficially more convincing historically than the others but it leaves a substantial gap between LeClerc in 1814 and the production in 1894.  Furthermore for a work by de Sade, The King in Yellow is curiously asexual, although rumours of private ‘unexpurgated’ performances persisted in the mid to late 1890s.

Robert W. Chambers – whose stories reference the play in 1895 and independently verify our knowledge of it.  If he had written such a play would he not have made more use of it in his work?   

These wild accounts are fantasies.  The author’s life can now be documented, and with the recovery of the 1893 manuscript – his authorship can be reliably asserted. 

Thomas de Castigne’s Life.

Thomas was born almost nine months to the day (there is some slight confusion over the records) of the death of the poet Baudelaire. Baudelaire died on 31st August 1867, Thomas de Castigne was born either just before midnight on the 31st May, or just after, in the first minutes of the 1st June 1868.

Born in Rennes the first (later after the tragic death of his young brother, the only) child of Bernard de Casigne[ii] (Sergeant at Arms) and his wife Mimi de Sharny, Thomas was educated at the petit Lyceé and then the Lyceé proper in Rennes.  There in 1888-91, in