Fabien Dei Franchi

Oscar Wilde's Fabien Dei Franchi

Oscar Wilde’s sonnet Fabien Dei Franchi is at once a literary homage, a philosophical reflection on art and identity, and a dramatic meditation on the role of the actor in relation to the great tragedies of literature. Wilde wrote the sonnet in 1887, a period of extraordinary creative ferment in his career and a time when the idea of aestheticism—art for art’s sake—was at the centre of his philosophical and artistic preoccupations. In this context, the sonnet stands as a sophisticated literary artefact that invites us to contemplate the power of performance, the allure of melodrama, and the inheritance of Shakespearean grandeur. Beneath its elegant form and evocative imagery lies Wilde’s signature interweaving of past and present, spectacle and substance, the ephemeral and the eternal.

Historical and Literary Context

The poem takes its title from a character in Alexandre Dumas père’s Les Frères Corses (The Corsican Brothers), a popular 19th-century novella that tells the story of identical twins, Louis and Fabien dei Franchi, who are supernaturally linked. Fabien, the more impassioned and heroic of the two, avenges his brother’s death in a dramatic duel, ultimately sacrificing himself in the process. This story was widely known in Wilde’s day, not only through the novella but also through theatrical adaptations and films, particularly the version by Dion Boucicault, which had cemented Fabien’s image as a romantic, brooding figure of Gothic heroism.

Wilde, ever attuned to cultural touchstones and the interplay between high and popular art, appears to invoke Fabien not simply as a character but as an archetype—a figure made not merely for the melodrama of the Corsican tale but for the grandest stage of all: Shakespeare’s. The poem thus performs a shift in aesthetic value, from sensationalist gothic narrative to canonical tragedy. Wilde seems to say that the raw emotionality and dramatic force of Fabien deserve a greater stage, a nobler architecture of passion, such as only Shakespeare can provide.

Structure and Sonnet Form

While Wilde adopts the traditional sonnet form—fourteen lines of iambic pentameter—the rhyme scheme and volta (or turn) are subordinated to the unity of thought and image. The poem's movement is architectural: it begins in the shadowy interior of a melodrama and ascends toward a vision of Shakespearean sublimity. Wilde deliberately employs the sonnet form as a miniature theatre, a proscenium through which the actor, Fabien, walks from one dramatic world into another.

The volta is implicit rather than explicit: we move from a listing of ghostly tropes in the opening octave to a celebration of Shakespearean magnitude in the sestet. This transition—subtle but powerful—marks the real thematic pivot of the poem: not merely an enumeration of dramatic devices, but a claim about the purpose and destiny of the artist or the actor himself.

Imagery and Atmosphere: The Gothic Stage

The poem opens in medias res, evoking the trappings of Gothic drama:

The silent room, the heavy creeping shade,
The dead that travel fast, the opening door,
The murdered brother rising through the floor,
The ghost’s white fingers on thy shoulders laid...

Here Wilde uses a series of cinematic, almost tableaux-like images. The “silent room” and “creeping shade” call to mind a suspenseful, shadow-filled mise en scène. The sequence unfolds with the swiftness of a dream—or nightmare: the dead travel fast, a brother rises from the floor, ghostly fingers touch the living. Wilde’s language is saturated with dramatic convention and haunting symbolism: the transgression of natural boundaries, the return of the dead, the insistence of memory and vengeance.

The piling up of these gothic elements is not merely descriptive; it is metatextual. Wilde is acknowledging the familiar machinery of sensation drama, the kind that thrilled Victorian audiences. Yet, in doing so, he is also subtly deflating it. The anaphoric “The… the… the…” of these lines reads almost like a litany, an incantation of theatrical tropes that risk becoming clichés through repetition. Wilde does not dismiss their power, but he gestures toward their limitations.

Heroism and Tragedy: The Sestet’s Ascension

In the poem’s second half, the imagery shifts upward—both metaphorically and literarily:

These things are well enough,—but thou wert made
For more august creation!

This line marks the fulcrum of Wilde’s argument. “These things”—the ghostly effects and lurid vengeance of the Corsican melodrama—are “well enough.” They suffice for the ordinary stage, for ordinary tales. But Fabien, or rather the kind of passionate, expressive actor Fabien represents, is destined for something greater: “august creation,” a term that suggests both noble authorship and lofty artistic purpose.

Wilde proceeds to name three of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters: King Lear, Romeo, and Richard III. Each of these figures is emblematic of a particular emotional register and thematic concern: Lear’s madness and loss, Romeo’s impetuous love and doom, Richard’s ambition and moral collapse. Wilde’s genius here lies in the casting. Fabien, the actor, could play all these parts. He is capacious, versatile, electric. Wilde writes:

...frenzied Lear
Should at thy bidding wander on the heath
With the shrill fool to mock him...

The phrase “at thy bidding” is arresting. It reverses the normal relationship between actor and character. Fabien does not merely play Lear; he commands Lear. There is, in Wilde’s view, a kind of conjuring power in the performer—an ability not simply to embody tragedy but to summon it into being. Likewise, Romeo should “lure his love” for Fabien’s sake, and Richard’s dagger—symbol of betrayal and tyranny—should be drawn in fear. Wilde casts Fabien not merely as an interpreter of Shakespearean tragedy but as its very cause, its animating force.

The Final Line: Art and Apotheosis

The closing line of the poem is triumphal and trumpet-like in itself:

Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare’s lips to blow!

Here Wilde offers one of his most enduring metaphors for the actor’s role in relation to the dramatist. Fabien is not merely a vessel or a player—he is the instrument through which Shakespeare’s voice resounds. The image of the trumpet suggests not only sound and power but also an ancient heralding device, a means of proclamation. The actor is thus the poet’s herald, the breath of life that brings words into the realm of the seen and felt.

This final image also plays on the notion of the breath of art: Shakespeare’s lips, the wind of his vision, find expression only through the trumpet—the actor. Wilde, ever aware of aesthetic lineage and artistic inheritance, is situating Fabien in a lineage that transcends his own melodramatic origins. He becomes an archetype of performative potential, a symbol of what great acting (or great art more generally) can become when it is in service to equally great language.

Themes: Identity, Performance, and Transcendence

At its heart, the sonnet is concerned with the interplay between identity and performance. Wilde, who throughout his life wrestled with the performative nature of selfhood, offers here an artistic analogue: the actor as a figure caught between roles, between realities, between stories. Fabien is a character who transcends his own narrative, who deserves a nobler frame. In this, we see Wilde’s enduring belief in the mutability and mystery of personality.

The poem also subtly engages with the Victorian obsession with appearance and authenticity. Is Fabien “real” only within the boundaries of his original tale, or does Wilde’s poetic elevation render him anew? Wilde’s answer seems to be that fiction, far from limiting the real, expands its possibilities. The poem, in other words, enacts what it describes: it stages a transfiguration.

Aestheticism and Wilde’s Philosophy of Art

Wilde was a central figure in the Aesthetic Movement, which championed beauty and form over didacticism or moral instruction. Yet this poem, for all its lush surface and theatrical imagery, is not simply a pretty artefact. It enacts a serious aesthetic philosophy: the idea that art elevates, that form transforms content, and that beauty can be a vehicle for profundity.

In praising Fabien as a “trumpet,” Wilde is implicitly praising the transformative power of the artist—not merely as an imitator of life, but as its interpreter and amplifier. The sonnet’s subtle irony, of course, is that Wilde’s language is doing to Fabien what he claims Fabien could do for Shakespeare. Wilde, too, is a trumpet—his own poetic breath resounding through a fictional figure and a literary history.

Comparative Readings and Influence

Wilde’s Fabien Dei Franchi can profitably be read alongside other 19th-century works that reflect on Shakespearean performance, such as Browning’s My Last Duchess or Tennyson’s Ulysses—poems in which dramatic persona and poetic voice are blurred, and in which art becomes a stage for self-expression. It also aligns with Wilde’s own later writings on the theatre, particularly in his essays like The Truth of Masks (1891), where he reflects on the artifice of the stage as a medium for profound truth.

In contemporary terms, Wilde’s sonnet resonates with modern debates about adaptation, pastiche, and the role of genre fiction in high culture. By raising a melodramatic figure into the realm of Shakespearean tragedy, Wilde anticipates later critical movements that question the hierarchy of genres and the distinction between "high" and "low" art.

Conclusion: Wilde’s Enduring Gift

Fabien Dei Franchi is a poem of metamorphosis—of a character, of a genre, and of art itself. In its fourteen lines, Wilde stages not just a literary appraisal, but a philosophical argument about the purpose and power of art. Fabien, who begins as a ghost-haunted avenger in a gothic tale, emerges by the poem’s end as a symbol of theatrical transcendence, the very mouthpiece through which Shakespeare’s genius may once again speak.

The poem’s beauty lies not only in its formal elegance but in its enthusiasm for performance, its reverence for literature, and its insistence that art elevates those who partake in it. Wilde does not merely describe Fabien Dei Franchi—he redeems him. And in doing so, he reminds us that poetry, like theatre, has the power to resurrect, reimagine, and re-enchant.