SOURCE: Review of Lady Windermere's Fan. Critic 19, no. 573 (11 February 1893): 84.

In the following mixed review of Lady Windermere's Fan, the critic discusses Wilde's dialogue as well written, but chides the production values.

The faults and merits of Mr. Oscar Wilde's four-act comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan, just produced in Palmer's Theatre after successful careers in London and Boston, may be summed up briefly in the statement that the piece is smartly written and constantly amusing, but very badly made. Not only is the construction extraordinarily clumsy, when Mr. Wilde's long experience in theatrical matters is taken into account, but the whole plot is founded upon suppositions wholly at variance with human experience and commonsense. The story, as pretty nearly everybody knows by this time, deals with the adventure of a young wife and mother, of a devotional tendency and exquisite natural purity of character (these qualities being insisted on with...