Abstract: During his final years in exile, Oscar Wilde derived as much income as he could from selling the rights to his as-yet-unpublished writings. Although at that time he was as pragmatic in his approach to the business of authorship as he had been during the height of his dramatic career in the early 1890s, Wilde nonetheless resisted publishing one of his earliest plays, the 1883 blank-verse tragedy The Duchess of Padua . In an 1898 letter to Robert Ross, Wilde noted of the play (which was finally produced in 1891) that “ The Duchess is unfit for publication—the only one of my works that comes under that category. But there are some good lines in it.” Wilde had not always had such a dim view of his second completed play. Indeed, he once promoted it as “the masterpiece of all my literary work, the chef-d'oeuvre of my youth” and had worked hard to see it produced. Literary history, however, has tended to concur with Wilde's more mature assessment of the play's artistic merits. Katharine Worth, one of the few critics to assess the play in detail, suggests that it “is the one completed play of Wilde's which can scarcely be imagined in a modern performance.” Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small place the play among a group of early works by Wilde that “have been judged by modern critics to be failures.” According to their view, The Duchess “is seen as an embarrassment.” This essay instead regards The Duchess as an uneven experiment in both staging aestheticism and late Victorian theatrical “archaeology,” a practice that sought to mount historical dramas with as much accuracy and precision in costume and design as possible. In a letter to Mary Anderson, the American actress whom he hoped would star in the play, Wilde contextualized the spectacle to which he aspired in The Duchess: “ the essence of art is to produce the modern idea under an antique form .”
Gregory Mackie (Sat,) studied this question.