La Sainte Courtisane Or The Woman Covered With Jewels

By Oscar Wilde

Intent on seducing a Christian man, Honorius, who lives in seclusion in the desert, Myrrhina, a noblewoman and famed temptress, travels to Honorius’s retreat in pursuit of him.

La Sainte Courtisane was nearly completed by Oscar Wilde before he was imprisoned, but the author mistakenly left his only copy of the manuscript in a taxicab, and was never able to recover it. The current version of the play is an incomplete fragment of that lost manuscript.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781443442572

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was a Dublin-born poet and playwright who studied at the Portora Royal School, before attending Trinity College and Magdalen College, Oxford. The son of two writers, Wilde grew up in an intellectual environment. As a young man, his poetry appeared in various periodicals including Dublin University Magazine. In 1881, he published his first book Poems, an expansive collection of his earlier works. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was released in 1890 followed by the acclaimed plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

Book preview

LA SAINTE COURTISANE, OR THE WOMAN COVERED WITH JEWELS

Oscar Wilde

HarperPerennial Classics

CONTENTS

La Sainte Courtisane, or the Woman Covered with Jewels

About the Author

About the Series

Copyright

About the Publisher

LA SAINTE COURTISANE

or

The Woman Covered With Jewels

The scene represents a corner of a valley in the Thebaid. On the right hand of the stage is a cavern. In front of the cavern stands a great crucifix.

On the left, sand dunes.

The sky is blue like the inside of a cup of lapis lazuli. The hills are of red sand. Here and there on the hills there are clumps of thorns.

FIRST MAN: Who is she? She makes me afraid. She has a purple