Il Re in Giallo
Literary invention
Robert W. Chambers, 1895 · da Ambrose Bierce, 1886-1891
Il Re in Giallo — in Lovecraft's cycle, the cursed play that drives mad whoever reads it.
- First appearance
- Collection The King in Yellow, F. Tennyson Neely, 1895. Carcosa and Hastur come from Bierce.
- What is told
- A cursed play that drives mad whoever reads it. The first four stories in Chambers's collection revolve around it without ever showing it in full.
- In the corpus
- It serves to dismantle the commonest attribution: The King in Yellow is not Lovecraft's. The correct sequence is Bierce (1886-91) → Chambers (1895) → Lovecraft (ornamental citation, 1931) → Derleth (systematisation, from 1937).
- Publication data
- Chambers takes Carcosa and Hastur from An Inhabitant of Carcosa (1886) and Hali from Haïta the Shepherd (1891) by Ambrose Bierce, changing their use: in Bierce Hastur is a benevolent pastoral god, in Chambers it is a place.
- Caution
- Lovecraft read Chambers at the beginning of 1927, thirty years after publication and after he had already written The Call of Cthulhu, and inserted courtesy references in 1931 without developing them. The transformation of Hastur into «a Great Old One and brother of Cthulhu» is the work of Derleth.
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