The Duchess of Padua

Guido Ferranti comes to Padua to avenge his real father's murder by Simone Gesso, the Duke of Padua. Guido enters the Duke's household, falls in love with Beatrice, the Duke's abused young wife, and comes to the Duke's chamber at night to kill him — only to find that Beatrice has already killed the Duke herself to free herself to marry Guido. Guido rejects her for the killing; Beatrice denounces him at trial; both die by poison in prison together. It is Wilde working inside the conventions of nineteenth-century verse tragedy about Renaissance Italy.

When Lawrence Barrett finally produced the play in New York in January 1891, eight years after Wilde had written it, he changed the title to Guido Ferranti so that the New York reviewers would judge it on its merits without knowing it was by the notorious Wilde. Wilde's name was kept off the playbill. The 1891 New York production is the play's only substantial nineteenth-century staging.

Mary Anderson (1859–1940) was the biggest American stage actress of the 1880s. Her agent Steele Mackaye commissioned The Duchess of Padua from Wilde in September 1882 with a $1,000 advance and a promise of $4,000 more on completion. Wilde delivered the manuscript in March 1883; Anderson rejected it in April, citing the difficulty of the central role and her doubt about the commercial appeal of blank-verse tragedy on the American stage. Wilde kept the $1,000.

Wilde is working entirely inside the conventions of nineteenth-century verse tragedy about Renaissance Italy — Shelley's The Cenci (1819) and Browning's Sordello (1840) are the closest precedents. The blank verse is competent but derivative, the plot follows Massinger's The Duke of Milan closely enough that the resemblance was noticed by contemporary critics, and Wilde had not yet found the dialogue-driven approach that would produce Lady Windermere's Fan nine years later. Wilde himself regarded the play as unpublishable and Robert Ross had to argue him into allowing it into the 1908 Methuen collected edition.

Not in Wilde's lifetime. The 1891 New York production ran under the changed title Guido Ferranti with Wilde's name kept off the playbill. The first English production under Wilde's name and the correct title waited until 1907, at Munich's Deutsches Volkstheater in German translation, and the first British stage production not until the twentieth century.

Vera (1880) and The Duchess of Padua (1883) are Wilde's two apprentice full-length plays — the melodrama about nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries and the blank-verse tragedy about Renaissance Italian revenge, both written before Wilde found the comedy of manners that would become his mature voice from 1892 onwards. Both plays flopped in commercial productions and Wilde later regarded both as unpublishable. They belong on the shelf together as a diptych of Wilde before Wilde.