Oscar Wilde’s First Tragedy

By Rob Marland

Oscar Wilde’s First Tragedy: The Composition, Production, and Reception of Vera; or, The Nihilists by Rob Marland is a book forthcoming from Little Eye. This biography will incorporate a new edition of Wilde’s first play.

Sign up to my quarterly newsletter to be alerted when the book is available for purchase: Subscribe

About Oscar Wilde’s First Tragedy

At the age of twenty-six Oscar Wilde wrote his first play. A melodramatic tragedy about a plot to assassinate the Russian tsar, Vera; or, The Nihilists is as far as could be imagined from his later hits, Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. A London matinee was cancelled, ostensibly for political reasons, and the final curtain fell on the New York production after only a week, the critics branding the script ‘long-drawn dramatic rot’.

Wilde tried to forget his first tragedy, and the disastrous premiere that he described as ‘the sharpest agony of my life’.

Vera is seldom revived. It has been virtually ignored by scholars of Wilde’s work, and the ill-fated New York production dismissed as little more than a biographical footnote. But only by closely examining the composition, production, and reception of Vera can the Wilde we know today – the confident, witty, master dramatist – be fully understood. This is the complete and fascinating story of Oscar Wilde’s first, worst, and perhaps most important play.

Why read Oscar Wilde’s First Tragedy?

Oscar Wilde’s First Tragedy is based on extensive new research into Vera, which has uncovered material never before seen by scholars. This includes:

• Over fifty reviews and other first-hand accounts of the premiere
• Interviews with Wilde and others involved in the first production
• Unpublished and uncollected letters by Wilde relating to the play
• Several manuscripts relating to the composition and revision of the play that have not been included in any previous edition
• The documentation of previously unnoticed allusions to works by other authors
• A contract between Wilde and Marie Prescott (the star, co-producer, and director of Vera) that postdates the oft-cited contract held at the Clark Library, Los Angeles
• Unpublished photographs of Prescott in costumes designed by Wilde
• A complete production history of the play, from 1883 to 2025

About Rob Marland

Rob Marland is the editor of Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews (2022) and the author of Oscar Wilde: The Season of Sorrow (2018). His research on Vera has been published in The Wildean, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society, and Notes and Queries.