For Love of the King: A Burmese Masque

Oscar Wilde's forgotten masque transports us to ancient Burma, where a young king must choose between his heart and his crown. King Meng Beng, sensitive and naive, abandons his throne to live openly with Shah Mah Phrun, a woman of Italian and Burmese descent who has sought his protection. For two years they build an idyll in the jungle, far from courtly expectation. But the jungle cannot last forever. Summoned home to fulfill his duty to his people through an arranged marriage to a Ceylonese princess, Meng Beng faces an impossible choice between love and responsibility. Wilde's lush, exotic verse-play crackles with the tension between desire and obligation, passion and duty. Though less celebrated than his society comedies, this 1893 work reveals Wilde experimenting with Eastern aesthetics and testing the boundaries of tragic romance. It is a fever dream of a play, more poem than drama, where love is always already doomed and every joy carries the shadow of its ending. For readers who crave Wilde at his most raw and unexpected.