“The Duchess of Padua”
The first of all Wilde’s plays was “The Duchess of Padua.” It was written at the time when he was living at the Hotel Voltaire in Paris and taking Balzac as his model. The title of the play was doubtless inspired by Webster’s gloomy tragedy of another Italian duchess; and the play itself is in five acts. Although many students of his works consider that it is worthy to rank with the masterpieces of the Elizabethan drama, it must be confessed that the work, though full of promise, is immature and too obviously indebted in certain scenes to some of Shakespeare’s most obvious stage tricks. He had written the play with a view to its being played by Miss Mary Anderson, but to his great disappointment she declined his offer of it.
His biographer’s description of his reception of her refusal is worth quoting:
“I was with him at the Hotel Voltaire on the day when he heard from Mary Anderson, to whom he had sent a copy of the drama which was written for her. He telegraphed in the morning for her decision, and whilst we were talking together after lunch her answer came. It was unfavourable; yet, though he had founded great hopes on the production of this play, he gave no sign of his disappointment. I can remember his tearing a little piece off the blue telegraph-form and rolling it up into a pellet and putting it into his mouth, as, by a curious habit, he did with every paper or book that came into his hands. And all he said, as he passed the telegram over to me, was, ‘This, Robert, is rather tedious.’”
The scene of the play is laid in Padua, the period being the sixteenth century, and the characters are as follows:—