A Florentine Tragedy

A Florentine Tragedy is an unfinished verse drama by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), written in the mid-1890s and published posthumously in 1908 with an opening scene supplied by the poet Thomas Sturge Moore. Set in Renaissance Florence, the one-act play shows a merchant, Simone, returning home to find his wife Bianca with Guido, a young Florentine prince; the action moves through an evening of charged courtesy and commercial bargaining to a duel in which the husband kills the prince, and the wife, seeing her dull merchant transfigured by violence, falls into his arms. The fragment shows Wilde working the vein of Renaissance blank-verse tragedy alongside Salomé. It was set as a one-act opera by Alexander Zemlinsky in 1917. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.