The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde ― Plays I: the Duchess of Padua, Salome: Drame En Un Acte, Salome: Tragedy in One Act

This volume of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde is the first volume of plays. It contains full-dress critical editions, at the high editorial standard of the familiar Oxford English Texts series, encompassing all surviving manuscript material and all other relevant documents, of three of Wilde's plays: The Duchess of Padua, the original French Salome, and the first English translation, by Lord Alfred Douglas. The edition contains comprehensive introductions and editorial introductions, as well as extensive annotations. The Duchess of Padua is one of two early plays by Wilde (the other being Vera; or, The Nihilists) that signify his youthful interest in making his mark on the contemporary theatre. They are imperfect works, but they show the real talent and definite promise that would be fulfilled, in the early 1890s, first with Lady Windermere's Fan (completed 1891, produced 1892) and then, almost simultaneously, with the next play in this volume, Wilde's French Salome, written also in 1891, completed in 1892, but not published until 1893: his only work written in French. Douglas's translation, which left the author of the French work disappointed by its 'schoolboy' quality, is also included here since it was issued over Wilde's name (and dedicated to Douglas, 'the translator of my play') and is indisputably part of Wilde's oeuvre.

Joseph Donohue is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught from 1971 to 2005. He is a theatre historian and editor and scholar of dramatic text, having divided his professional time equally between historical studies of the theatre and drama of the Romantic age and of the later period of Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries. Author and editor of books, articles, and reference works, he published a prize-winning annotated edition of the reconstructed first-production text of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.