ABSTRACT
The complete edition of the works of Oscar Wilde, which Messrs. Methuen are now issuing under the editorship of Mr. Robert Ross, has a special interest for the student of the English drama of the latter part of the nineteenth century. For the first six volumes of it are devoted tothe plays, and by their appearance one is now enabled for the first time to consider their author’s dramatic work as a whole. Hitherto this has been impossible, since the early plays, Vera, or The Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua, and also the fragment of A Florentine Tragedy-which belongs in style to the early period though it was actually written comparatively late in his career-have never hitherto been either published or publicly performed in this country. The Duchess of Padua was originally produced in the United States, and has also been played, in a prose translation, in Germany, and both it and Vera have been printed in pirated editions in America and elsewhere. But seeing that the pirated edition of Vera was a careless and inaccurate reprint from a prompt copy, and that of The Duchess of Padua a prose translation of the German version-Wilde’s play is in blank verse-it will be understood that not much help could be got from them by anyone who desired to form a critical estimate of the plays, even if he were prepared to go to the trouble and expense of smuggling them.
