Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous is an English-language collection of Oscar Wilde's scattered literary remains. It brings together several unfinished plays and essay fragments that were assembled and published after his death by his literary executor, Robert Ross. The most frequently cited is the one-act dramatic fragment La Sainte Courtisane ("The Holy Courtesan"), written in 1894. The manuscript is said to have been left by the author in a hansom cab; it was never completed, never staged, and has long attracted little scholarly attention. The other is the fragment A Florentine Tragedy, set in sixteenth-century Florence. It tells of the wealthy merchant Simone, who discovers that his wife Bianca is having an affair with the local prince, Guido Bardi. After pretending to offer his guest hospitality, he duels with the intruder, wrests away his sword, and strangles him—an act that unexpectedly rekindles his wife's affection, and the two are reconciled. Editions have been issued by publishers including Shangwu Yinshuguan (the Commercial Press) and Throne Classics; collections bearing the same title vary slightly in format and in the pieces they include. The volume is brief and belongs to a relatively obscure corner of Wilde's oeuvre. It is best read after such major works as The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, as a way of understanding his late, unfinished experiments in drama and the limits of his aestheticist sensibilities.
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was born in Dublin, Ireland, and is a representative figure of the 19th-century British Aesthetic movement, known for his plays, poetry, fairy tales, and fiction. He advocated art for art's sake, and his language is witty and ironic, combining aesthetic sensibility with social critique. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray explores beauty, desire, and moral decay, while his comedies Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest satirize high society through exquisite dialogue. He also wrote aesthetic fairy tales such as The Nightingale and the Rose. In 1895 he was imprisoned on charges of homosexuality; after release he lived in France and died in Paris in 1900. His works remain widely read and are regarded as classics of foreign literature and world masterpieces.
