Book Cover of A Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane

A Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane

by Oscar Wilde

Two short fragments: an unfinished and a lost play. A Florentine Tragedy, left in a taxi (not a handbag), is Wilde’s most successful attempt at tragedy – intense and domestic, with surprising depth of characterisation. It was adapted into an opera by the Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky in 1917. La Sainte Courtisane, or The Woman Covered in Jewels explores one of Wilde’s great idées fixes: the paradox of religious hedonism, pagan piety. Both plays, Wildean to their core, revel in the profound sadness that is the fruit of the conflict between fidelity and forbidden love. Written towards the end of his tragic life, these fragments give us a glimpse of a genius at his best: visceral, passionate, personal, poetic.

Book Details

Language

English

Original Language

English

Published In

1998

Author

Oscar Wilde image

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become...

More on Oscar Wilde

Listen/Download Audiobook

Read by:
00:00
Playback Speed 1.0
00:00
  • Select Speed

Related books

The Noble Heart Cover image

The Noble Heart by George Henry Lewes

This Victorian melodrama, written by G.H. Lewes, common law husband of novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans), featured a scandalous love triangle. The...

Iphigenia Cover image

Iphigenia by Jean Racine

Racine's version of the time-honored story of Iphigenia was acted for the first time in 1674. The model upon which it is shaped is the "Iphigenia in A...

Ghosts  Cover image

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

Ghosts is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was written in 1881 and first staged in 1882 in Chicago, Illinois, in a production by a...

The Spanish Tragedy  Cover image

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd

The Spanish Tragedy is often considered to be the first mature Elizabethan drama, a claim disputed with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and was par...

Psyche Cover image

Psyche by Moliere

In the realm of French literature, Molière stands as a towering figure, renowned for his witty comedies that satirized the follies and foibles of huma...

The Bacchae Cover image

The Bacchae by Euripides

The Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy, written by the Athenian playwright Euripides during his final years in Macedonia, at the court of Archelaus I...

Iphigenia in Aulis Cover image

Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides

Iphigenia in Aulis or Iphigenia at Aulis is the last of the extant works by the playwright Euripides. Written between 408, after Orestes, and 406 BC,...

The White Devil  Cover image

The White Devil by John Webster

John Webster's The White Devil (1612) is a Jacobean revenge tragedy, replete with adultery, murder, ghosts, and violence. The Duke of Brachiano and Vi...

Berenice Cover image

Berenice by Jean Racine

Titus, emperor of Rome, wants to marry Berenice, queen of Palestine, but decides that Rome will not be able to handle having him marry a foreign queen...

The Two Noble Kinsmen  Cover image

The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare

The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean tragicomedy and attributed jointly to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Its plot derives from "The Knight's T...

Reviews for A Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane

No reviews posted or approved, yet...