Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane

Two fragments from the twilight of a brilliant career, these plays show Oscar Wilde attempting something rare for him: tragedy. A Florentine Tragedy, discovered lost in a taxi cab in 1905, is a visceral domestic drama set in Renaissance Florence, where a prince discovers his wife's infidelity with a merchant. The jealousy that unfolds is as ancient as Othello and as intimate as a knife fight. La Sainte Courtisane takes the paradox that haunted Wilde: the saint and the sinner, the body and the spirit, religious devotion married to sensual pleasure. Both plays are unfinished, torn away from Wilde by imprisonment, poverty, and exile. What remains is electric with the conflict he knew best: love that destroys, faith that torments, desire that damns. These are not the comedies that made him famous. They are the work of a man who had looked into the abyss and found it beautiful.