SOURCE: Review of Guido Ferranti. Critic 15, no. 371 (7 February 1891): 73.

In the following review of Guido Ferranti, the unnamed critic finds inconsistencies in the dialogue and acting.

The degree of popular favor that has attended the performances of Oscar Wilde's five-act tragedy Guido Ferranti at the Broadway Theatre must be attributed to the effective theatrical quality of certain scenes, rather than to the poetic charm or power or dramatic interest of the work as a whole. Apart from the fact that it is written in smooth blank-verse, and contains isolated passages of indisputable imagination and vigor, it is nothing but an old-fashioned ‘blood-and-thunder’ melodrama, put together in a very unworkmanlike manner, and with a curious disregard for anything in the nature of probability. Guido Ferranti, the hero, is a youthful gallant who has been reared in luxury and instructed in all the accomplishments of his age (the sixteenth century), but...