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General editor: Brian Gibbons Professor of English Literature, University of Münster Previous general editors have been Philip Brockbank Brian Morris Roma Gill New Mermaids

The Alchemist All for Love Arden of Faversham Bartholmew Fair The Beaux’ Stratagem The Changeling A Chaste Maid in Cheapside The Country Wife The Critic Dr Faustus The Duchess of Malfi The Dutch Courtesan Eastward Ho! Edward the Second Epicoene or The Silent Woman Every Man In His Humour Gammer Gurton’s Needle An Ideal Husband The Importance of Being Earnest The Jew of Malta The Knight of the Burning Pestle Lady Windermere’s Fan Love for Love The Malcontent The Man of Mode Marriage A-la-Mode A New Way to Pay Old Debts The Old Wife’s TaleThe Playboy of the Western Wo r l d The Provoked Wife The Recruiting Officer The Relapse The Revenger’s Tragedy The Rivals The Roaring Girl The Rover The School for Scandal She Stoops to Conquer The Shoemaker’s Holiday The Spanish Tragedy Tamburlaine Three Late Medieval Morality Plays Mankind Everyman Mundus et Infans ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Volpone The Way of the World The White Devil The Witch The Witch of Edmonton A Woman Killed with Kindness A Woman of No Importance Women Beware Women New Mermaids

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest A Trivial Comedy for Serious People Edited by Russell Jackson Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham New Mermaids A & C Black • London WWNorton  New York

Reprinted 1988, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1996, 19971999, 2000, 2001, 2004 with new cover A & C Black Publishers Limited 37 Soho Square, London W1D 3QZ ISBN 0–7136–7352–4 eISBN-13: 978-1-4081-0271-8 First New Mermaid edition 1980 by Ernest Benn Limited Introduction and text of notes © Ernest Benn Limited 1980 Appendices I, II and III and quotations from unpublished drafts in notes © the Estate of Vyvyan Holland 1957 Published in the United States of America by W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 ISBN 0–393–90045–2 Printed in Great Britain by Bookmarque Ltd,Croydon, Surrey

CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Introduction1 TheAuthor 1 ThePlay 8 Reactions to theFirstProduction 27 Note on theText 31 Further Reading 37 Abbreviations39 The Importance of Being Earnest41 Dedication42 The Persons of the Play43 The Scenes of the Play43 Te x t45 Appendix I The Gribsby Episode in the Manuscript Draft 148 Appendix II The Dictation Episode (Act II) in the Licensing Copy155 Appendix III The Conclusion of Act Two in the Licensing Copy157 Appendix IV Longer Textual Notes159

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Mr Merlin Holland, the author’s grandson, for permission to quote from manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs ofThe Importance of Being Earnest, and to the following institutions for access to materials in their possession: Birmingham Reference Library; the British Library; the British Theatre Museum; Harvard Theatre collection; the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas; the New York Public Library. I am also indebted to Sir Rupert Hart-Davis and Mrs Eva Reichmann for permission to quote from annotations in Max Beerbohm’s copy of the first edition of the play. I have received much help and encouragement from friends and col- leagues in Birmingham and elsewhere, particularly Linda Rosenberg, Tony Brown, and Ian Small. Joseph Donohue and Ruth Berggren have been gen- erous with suggestions, information, and commiseration. I have taken the opportunity of a fourth impression to add to the list of further reading. I have also revised the account of the play’s text to take notice of a letter by Wilde recently published for the first time in its entirety (see page 32). 1992R.J. [vi]

[1] 1André Gide, ‘In Memoriam’ from Oscar Wilde, translated Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1949): quoted from the extract in Richard Ellmann, ed.,Oscar Wilde: a Collection of Critical Essays(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,1969), pp.25–34. The principal sources for the present account of Wilde’s career are H. Montgomery Hyde,Oscar Wilde(1975) and Rupert Hart-Davis, ed.,The Letters of Oscar Wilde(revised ed.,1963). Subsequent references to Wilde’s Lettersare to this edition. 2Wilde,Letters,pp.490–1. This long letter was written in Reading Gaol in January–March 1897. An abridged version was published by Robert Ross in 1905as De Profundis:the most reli- able edition is that contained in Letters,pp.423–511. INTRODUCTION The Author André Gide describes Oscar Wilde as he appeared in 1891, when ‘his suc- cess was so certain that it seemed that it preceded [him] and that all he needed do was go forward and meet it’: ...He was rich; he was tall; he was handsome; laden with good fortune and honours. Some compared him to an Asiatic Bacchus; others to some Roman emperor; others to Apollo himself—and the fact is that he was radiant. 1 The melodramatic contrast between this triumphant figure and the pathetic convict serving two years’ hard labour was drawn by Wilde himself in De Profundis, the letter written from prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. He described his transfer in November 1895from Wandsworth to Reading Gaol, little care being taken for his privacy: From two o’clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform at Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at. I had been taken out of the Hospital Ward without a moment’s notice being given to me. Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement. That was of course before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed, they laughed still more. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. 2

Wilde insisted that his life was as much an artistic endeavour as his works— in De Profundishe claimed to have been ‘a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age’, and in conversation with Gide he remarked that the great drama of his life lay in his having put his talent into his works, and his genius into his life. 3For an author who returned as often as Wilde to the proposition that art transforms and is the superior of Nature, such claims were more than boasting—they were an affirmation of faith. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16October 1854, second son of Sir William and Lady Wilde. The father was an eminent surgeon, the mother a poetess and fervent Irish nationalist who wrote as ‘Speranza’. To medical distinction Sir William joined notoriety as a philanderer. 4Both parents were enthusiasts for the study of Irish legend, folk-lore, and history, an interest reflected in the first two of the names given to their son, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. He was educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he became a protégé of the classicist John Pentland Mahaffy. I n 1875he won a scholarship—a ‘Classical Demyship’—to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he subsequently took first-class honours in the final school ofLiterae Humaniores(Greek and Roman literature, history, and philosophy). He picked up a reputation for wit, charm, and conversational prowess. Most important, he came under the influence of two eminent writers on art and its relation to life, John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Ruskin, the most distinguished contemporary art critic, championed the moral and social dimensions of art, and its ability to influence men’s lives for the better. Under Ruskin’s supervision, Wilde and a few other undergraduates had begun the construction of a road near Hinksey, as a practical demonstra- tion of the aesthetic dignity of labour and the workmanlike qualities essential to the labours of the artist. From Pater, Wilde learned a conflicting inter- pretation of art as a means to the cultivation of the individual, an idea which received its most notorious statement in the ‘Conclusion’ to Pater’s book The Renaissance.There the fully-developed sensibility is claimed as the expression of a full existence: ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life’. 5These two theories of the relation between art and life were to dominate Wilde’s writing. The arguments of the painter James McNeill Whistler against the conservative critics’insistence on moral significance and pictorial verisimilitude in art also influenced [2] The Importance of Being Earnest 3Wilde,Letters,p.466; Gide, ‘In Memoriam’, ed. cit., p.34.4On Sir William and Lady Wilde see Terence de Vere White,Parents of Oscar Wilde(1967).5Walter Pater,The Renaissance(1873; Library ed.,1910), p.236. This ‘Conclusion’ was omit- ted in the second edition (1877) and restored, in a modified form, in the third edition (1888).

Wilde deeply. 6The close of his Oxford career was marked by two triumphs— his first-class degree and the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Ravenna’—and two failures. Wilde was not given the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize for his essay ‘The Rise of Historical Criticism’ and he was not offered a fellow- ship at Magdalen. Moving to London, Wilde set about making himself a name in the cap- ital’s fashionable artistic and literary worlds. He had enough poems to make a collected volume, published at his own expense in 1881, and he was seen at the right parties,first nights, and private views. Occasionally he wore the velvet coat and knee-breeches, soft-collared shirt and cravat, that became fixed in the popular imagination as ‘aesthetic’ dress (and which derived from a fancy-dress ball he had attended when an undergraduate). In December 1881he embarked on a lecture-tour of the United States organ- ized by the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte. This was a shrewd back-up to the tour of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Pat ie nce, but it was also a simple exploitation of the American appetite for being lectured to. Although Pat ie nce, which satirized the Aesthetic Movement, featured rival poets dressed in a costume closely resembling that adopted by Wilde, the lecturer was taken seriously as a prophet of the ‘new renaissance’ of art. In his lec- tures he insisted on comparing the new preoccupation with life-styles with the aspirations of the Italian Renaissance and the Romantic Movement— this was ‘a sort of new birth of the spirit of man’, like the earlier rebirth ‘in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments . . .’ 7The blend of aesthetic theory and enthusiasm for reform of design and colour- ing in dress and decorative art was derived from a variety of sources, not all successfully synthesized. In addition to Ruskin, Pater, and Whistler, Wilde had absorbed the ideas of William Morris and the architect E. W. Godwin. The lectures were exercises in haute vulgarisationand not all the sources were acknowledged. Japanese and other oriental art, eighteenth-century furniture, distempered walls in pastel colours, stylized floral motifs—all had made their appearance in English art before Wilde became their advocate. But the influence of his popularizing talents was, for all that, con- siderable. ‘In fact’, wrote Max Beerbohm in 1895, looking back on 1880as [3] introduction 6Whistler later quarrelled with Wilde, accusing him of plagiarism. Some of their exchanges appeared in Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies(1890) and in Wilde vs. Whistle,(1906). 7Wilde, ‘The English Renaissance of Art’, in Ross’s edition of his Essays and Lectures(1909), pp.111–55;pp.111f. The text was edited by Ross from four drafts of a lecture first given in New Yo r k o n 9January 1882.

[4] The Importance of Being Earnest though it were a remote historical period, ‘Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr Oscar Wilde who managed her début’. 8 As well as establishing him as a popular oracle on matters of art and taste, Wilde’s lecture-tour made him a great deal of badly-needed money— he had no prospect of inheriting a family fortune, and would have to make his own way. On his return the velvet suits were discarded, and his hair, worn long and flowing in his ‘Aesthetic’ period, was cut short in a style resembling the young Nero. The figure described by Gide was beginning to emerge. After a holiday in Paris, Wilde moved into rooms at 9Charles Street, Grosvenor Square. He returned briefly to New York for the first perform- ance of his melodrama Vera; or the Nihilistsand then prepared for an autumn lecture-tour of the United Kingdom. On 26November he became engaged to Constance Lloyd, and they married on 29May 1884. In January 1885they moved into a house designed by Godwin at 16Tite Street, Chelsea. Two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born in 1885and 1886respectively. In the early years of his marriage Wilde was working hard as a journalist. He contributed reviews to magazines (including the Pall Mall Gazetteand the Dramatic Wo r l d) and even for a while undertook the editorship of one,Woman’s Wo r l d, which he hoped to turn into ‘the recognized organ through which women of culture and position will express their views, and to which they will contribute’. 9By and by Constance came into a small inheritance, but money was never plentiful. The life of a professional journalist was labori- ous and demanded a high degree of craftsmanship, but it offered a training from which Wilde, like Shaw, Wells, and many others, profited immensely. Wilde became a fastidious and tireless reviser of his own work, and his reviews show him as an acute critic of others. In 1891four of Wilde’s books appeared, all consisting of earlier work, some of it in a revised form:Intentions, a collection of critical essays;Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime and Other Stories; The Picture of Dorian Gray,con- siderably altered from the version published in Lippincott’s Magazinein 1890; and a collection of children’s stories,A House of Pomegranates.In the same year a verse tragedy written in 1882,The Duchess of Padua, was pro- duced in New York by Lawrence Barrett under the title Guido Ferranti.Like Ve r a it was poorly received, but Wilde was already turning away from the pseudo-Elizabethan dramatic form that had preoccupied so many nine- teenth-century poets and contemplating a newer, more commercially acceptable mode. In the summer of1891he began work on the first of a series of successful plays for the fashionable theatres of the West End:Lady 8Max Beerbohm,Wo r k s(1896; ‘collected’ edition,1922,p.39).9Wilde,Letters,p.202(to Mrs Alfred Hunt, August 1887).

Windermere’s Fan(St James’s,20February 1892),A Woman of No Importance (Haymarket,19April 1893), and An Ideal Husband (Haymarket,3January 1895). The refusal of a performance licence to the exotic biblical tragedy Salomé (in 1892) proved a temporary setback: acclaim as a dramatic author confirmed Wilde’s career in what seemed an irresistible upward curve. The summer of1891was also remarkable for the beginning of an asso- ciation that was to be the direct cause of his downfall: the poet Lionel Johnson introduced him to ‘Bosie’, Lord Alfred Douglas, third son of the Marquis of Queensberry. Wilde appears to have been already a practising homosexual, and his marriage was under some strain. The affair with Douglas estranged him further from Constance, and the drain it caused on Wilde’s nervous and financial resources was formidable. Douglas was happy to let Wilde spend money on him after his father had stopped his allowance: more seriously, he made ceaseless demands on the time set aside for writ- ing. In De Profundis Wilde described his attempts to finish An Ideal Husband in an apartment in St James’s Place: I arrived ...every morning at 11.30, in order to have the opportunity of thinking and writing without the interruptions inseparable from my own household, quiet and peaceful as that household was. But the attempt was vain. At twelve o’clock you drove up, and stayed smoking cigarettes and chattering till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon at the Café Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurslasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White’s [Club]. At tea-time you appeared again, and stayed until it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis’s had to wind up the entrancing day. 10 This was in 1893. A year later Wilde was working on what was to prove his last play,The Importance of Being Earnest, the first draft of which had been composed during a family holiday (largely Douglas-free) at Worthing. In October, Constance had returned to London with the children. Wilde and Douglas stayed together in Brighton,first at the Metropole Hotel, then in private lodgings. Douglas developed influenza and Wilde nursed him through it. He in turn suffered an attack of the virus, and Douglas (by Wilde’s account) more or less neglected him. The result was what seemed like an irrevocable quarrel, with Douglas living at Wilde’s expense in a hotel but hardly bothering to visit him. In hindsight Wilde claimed that this cru- elty afforded him a moment of clear understanding: [5] introduction 10Wilde,Letters,p.426

Is it necessary for me to state that I saw clearly that it would be a dis- honour to myself to continue even an acquaintance with such a one as you had showed [sic] yourself to be? That I recognized that ultimate moment had come, and recognized it as being really a great relief? And that I knew that for the future my Art and Life would be freer and better and more beautiful in every possible way? Ill as I was, I felt at ease. 11 But reconciliation followed. On 3January 1895An Ideal Husbandwas given its first performance. Meanwhile George Alexander, actor-manager of the St James’s Theatre, had turned down the new comedy. It found a taker in Charles Wyndham, who intended to bring it out at the Criterion. Then Alexander found himself at a loss for a play to replace Henry James’s Guy Domville, which had failed spectacularly. Wyndham agreed to release The Importance of Being Earnest on the condition that he had the option on Wilde’s next play, and it was put into rehearsal at the St James’s. At first Wilde attended rehearsals, but his continual interruptions made Alexander suggest that he might leave the manager and his company to their own resources. He agreed with good grace and left with Douglas for a holiday in Algeria. There they encoun- tered André Gide, who was told by Wilde that he had a premonition of some disaster awaiting him on his return. 12Although his artistic reputation was beyond question, and he was shortly to have two plays running simultane- ously in the West End, Wilde was already worried by the activities of Douglas’s father. Queensberry was a violent, irrational man, who hated his son’s lover and was capable of hurting both parties. Bosie insisted on flaunting his relationship with Wilde to annoy his father and he was reck- less of the effect of this public display of unconventional behaviour. Homosexuality was no less a fact of life in 1895than it is now: moreover, the artistic and theatrical world accommodated it better than society at large. It had a flourishing and varied subculture and a number of sophis- ticated apologists. The double life that it entailed was by no means a simple matter of deceit and guilt for Wilde: it suited the cultivation of moral inde- pendence and detachment from society that he considered essential to art. None the less, if his affair with Douglas should ever come to be more pub- lic, and if the law were to be invoked, Wilde would be ruined. There had been scandals and trials involving homosexuals of the upper classes, which [6] The Importance of Being Earnest 11Wilde,Letters,p.438.12‘I am not claiming that Wilde clearly saw prison rising up before him; but I do assert that the dramatic turn which surprised and astounded London, abruptly turning Wilde from accuser to accused, did not, strictly speaking, cause him any surprises’ (Gide, ‘In Memoriam’, ed. cit., p.34).

had to a degree closed their ranks to protect their own. But Wilde had made powerful enemies in a country whose leaders, institutions, and press seemed devoted to Philistinism and where art itself was always suspect as consti- tuting a threat to the moral fibre of the nation.Dorian Gray in particular had aroused violent mistrust, especially in its original form, and a satirical novel by Robert Hichens,The Green Carnation(1894), had hinted at a homo- sexual relationship between two characters obviously based on Wilde and Douglas. Queensberry had made his feelings about his son’s private life well known in Clubland. On the first night ofThe Importance of Being Earnest, which opened on 14February 1895, he tried to cause a disturbance at the theatre, but was thwarted by the management. The play was a great suc- cess—according to one of the actors, ‘The audience rose in their seats and cheered and cheered again’. 13As it settled down to what promised to be a long run, Wilde’s career was at its height. A fortnight later, on 28February, Queensberry left a card at the Albemarle Club ‘For Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite’ [sic].The club porter put the card in an envelope, noting on the back the time and date, and Wilde was given it when he arrived at the club later that evening. The events that followed ruined him within a few months. Urged on by Douglas, but against the advice of most of his friends, Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel. The case went against Wilde, who found himself answering charges under the 1885Criminal Law Amendment Act, which made both private and pub- lic homosexual relations between men illegal. Significantly, the accusations against him did not include his affair with Douglas: he was alleged to have committed acts of gross indecency on a number of occasions and to have conspired to procure the committing of such acts. The men involved were ‘renters’, young, lower-class, male prostitutes, and there was a strong sense in the proceedings that Wilde was being tried for betraying his class’s social as well as sexual ethics. Much was made of the alleged immorality of his works, especially Dorian Gray.The jury at what was effectively the second trial of Wilde (after the hearings in his charge against Queensberry) failed to agree, and a retrial was ordered. Finally, on 25May 1895, Wilde was con- victed and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. In the autumn he was declared bankrupt and all his effects were auctioned, includ- ing drafts and manuscripts of published and unpublished works. On 19 May 1897he was released, and took up residence in France. During his imprisonment he had composed a long, bitter letter to Douglas, later published under the title De Profundis.Shortly after his release he com- pleted a narrative poem,The Ballad of Reading Gaol.These and a few letters [7] introduction 13Allen Aynesworth, quoted by Hesketh Pearson,The Life of Oscar Wilde(1946), p.257.

to the press on prison reform apart, Wilde published nothing new after his imprisonment. He did manage to arrange for the publication ofThe Importance of Being Earnest andAn Ideal Husband, which appeared in 1899. Projects for further plays came to nothing. The affair with Douglas was taken up again and continued sporadically. They led a nomadic life on the continent, Wilde often chronically in debt despite the good offices of his friends. His allowance from Constance was withdrawn when he resumed living with Bosie. His plays were not yet being revived in England and his published works brought in little by way of royalties. Wilde died on 30November 1900in Paris, from cerebral meningitis which set in after an operation on his ear. The day before he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. He was buried at Bagneux, but in 1909his remains were moved to the Père Lachaise cemetery, where they now rest under a monument by Jacob Epstein. The Play Reviewing the first production ofThe Importance of Being EarnestWilliam Archer asked what ‘a poor critic’ could do with a play that ‘raises no prin- ciples, whether of art or morals, creates its own canons and conventions, and is nothing but an absolutely wilful expression of an irrepressibly witty personality’. 14Another contemporary remarked that one might as well sit down gravely to discuss ‘the true inwardness of a soufflé’ and Max Beerbohm, in a notice of the 1902revival, skilfully avoided defining the comedy: ‘In kind the play always was unlike any other, and in its kind it still seems perfect’. 15Despite the forcefulness of these claims, it is possible to see that Wilde’s play does touch on principles of art and morals, and that it does have some relation to existing canons and conventions. Like a soufflé, it has its ingredients. The St James’s Theatre, where The Importance of Being Earnestwas pro- duced, was particularly associated with what was claimed to be a renaissance of dramatic art in England. Since November 1890it had been under the management of the actor George Alexander, who had built up its reputa- tion for stylish and accomplished productions of well-written plays. The St James’s was identified with Alexander in a way almost unknown today but natural in a period when leading actors and actresses aspired to the management of a theatre and its company, and were expected to take the [8] The Importance of Being Earnest 14William Archer,The Theatrical ‘World’ of1895 (1896), pp.56–60;p.57.15Anonymous review,Truth,21February 1895. Max Beerbohm.Around Theatres(1953), pp.188–91,p.189.

leading roles in the plays they produced. Alexander was unusually self- effacing in not insisting on this prerogative and in his readiness to accommodate as far as possible the author who wished to supervise the staging of his plays—although the ultimate authority lay with the manager in these days before the ascendancy of the independent director. He was disinclined to have plays altered to give undue prominence to the charac- ter he played, and treated his fellow-performers with the same courtesy he extended to authors, considering himself as a collaborator rather than a tyrant. Before 1895his most notable successes at the St James’s were R. C. Carton’s farce Liberty Hall(December 1892), Pinero’s drama The Second Mrs Tanqueray (May 1893) and Henry Arthur Jones’s The Masqueraders (April 1894). A command performance ofLiberty Hallbefore Queen Victoria consolidated the social standing of the theatre. In the words of Alexander’s biographer, the playwright A. E. W. Mason, . . . Alexander was gradually gathering a regular band of theatre-goers at his theatre, people who must see the new play at the St James’s whatever the newspapers said about it; people from the big houses in the suburbs as well as the artists, doctors, judges and dwellers in inner London who filled the stalls and dress-circle during the first performances. 16 This audience was fashionable but not raffish, reflecting the theatre’s loca- tion: near the West End without adjoining its less respectable areas; handy for Clubland in St James’s and Pall Mall and the expensive houses and apart- ments of Mayfair and Belgravia. Although he made successful forays into more romantic regions—includ- ing productions ofMuch Ado about Nothingand As You Like Itand an adaptation ofThe Prisoner of Zenda—Alexander’s repertoire was made up chiefly of plays domestic and upper-class (or upper-middle-class) in milieu, reflecting the status and tastes of his audience. He insisted on meticulously realistic settings that would serve rather than overshadow the author’s inten- tions, and his audiences expected that good manners, taste, and the values of polite society would prevail on both sides of the curtain. His acting was skilful and subtle. Wilde singled him out for mention in a review of Irving’s Hamlet published in 1885when Alexander was acting in the Lyceum [9] introduction 16A. E. W. Mason,Sir George Alexander and the St James’s Theatre(1935), p.97. See also Ray Mander and Joe Mitchenson,Lost Theatres of London(2nd ed.,1977); Paul C. Wadleigh, ‘Earnest at the St James’s Theatre’,Quarterly Journal of Speech,52(1966),58–62; Joseph Donohue, ‘The First Production ofThe Importance of Being Earnest: A Proposal for a Reconstructive Study’ in Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson, eds.,Nineteenth Century British Theatre(1971), pp.125–43.

company: in his Laertes, Wilde saw evidence of ‘a most effective presence . . . charming voice, and . . . capacity for wearing costumes with ease and ele- gance’. 17Alexander retained the qualities of an attractive jeune premierwell into middle age. His knighthood in 1911seemed the appropriate honour for an actor of gentlemen. Society Drama reflected the values of the stalls and dress-circles of the West End as accurately as Alexander’s acting reflected upper-class standards of politeness and ease of address. It was a modification of the serious drama and domestic comedy of the mid-century decades. Melodrama survived at the Adelphi and Drury Lane, and at many suburban and provincial the- atres, but its original preoccupations of kinship and personal guilt and innocence were increasingly overshadowed by ever more sophisticated rep- resentations of public events, famous sights, and natural or man-made disasters. Melodrama plots were progressing rapidly from the highly improb- able to the practically impossible and its settings were drawn more often from ‘high life’—however badly rendered—than from the middle- and lower-class background popular in earlier days. 18Society Drama may be seen as an attempt to revive the virtues associated with melodrama in its best manifestations—its ability to move audiences, simplicity and direct- ness of effect, combination of comic, didactic, and spectacular elements—and to produce a native drama that would be the rival, indeed superior, of French work. Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and a number of other dramatists were attempting to do without spectacle and avoid gross improbabilities while keeping the ‘strong’ situations and moral clarity of the older plays. In comic writing the break with stock character- ization associated with the plays of T. W. Robertson and the Bancrofts’ management at the Prince of Wales’s in the 1860s was now confirmed: but the setting of one class against (or beside) another, which provided the motive power of plays like Robertson’s Caste (1867), was superseded by con- cern with the dynamics of characters within a particular class. Society Drama, serious, comic, and mixed, deals with the ways in which the ruling class policed itself. The moral world of these plays is clearly defined. Between about 1885 and the Great War of1914–18there is a remarkable degree of agreement [10] The Importance of Being Earnest 17Wilde, ‘Hamletat the Lyceum’,Dramatic Review,9May 1885.18‘Society’ in this context, with a capital ‘S’, refers to the values and fashions of the ruling élite, as distinct from the community (‘society’) at large. On Society Drama, see J. C. Trewin, The Edwardian Theatre (Oxford, Blackwell,1976)—especially Chapter Two—and George Row- ell,The Victorian Theatre, 1792 –1914 (2nd ed., Cambridge,1978), which provides a useful bibliography. On the decline of melodrama, see Michael Booth,English Melodrama(1965), Chapters Six and Seven.

among playwrights in the commercial theatre as to what constitute the moral norms of Society, and what conflicts might arise between these and human weakness. The chief material responsibilities of their class and their country are borne by men, on whose strength of character all depends. The man who makes nothing of his life can command no respect, and it is one of the principal functions of women to determine who merits respect and to make their discrimination apparent in their choice of whom to marry. Women set the spiritual tone, and without a supply of good women, Society will crumble. Camilla, the title-character of Pinero’s Lady Bountiful(Garrick, 1891) makes this clear to her feckless cousin Dennis Heron: ...Dennis, it isn’t great men women love dearest, or even fortunate men; often, I tell you, their deepest love goes out to those who labour and fail. But for those who make no effort, who are neither great nor little, who are the nothings of the world . . . For those, a true woman has only one feeling—anger and contempt! 19 Such men might behave in a mean or unmanly way, and will need the sup- port of a good woman if they are to redeem themselves. In Jones’s The Triumph of the Philistines(which followed The Importance of Being Earnest at the St James’s in May 1895) Lady Beauboys pleads with Mrs Suleny to help such a reprobate: Do take pity on him! He’ll go to the dogs if you don’t. Remember what we women are sent into this world for—remember there is no reason for our existence except to save these poor wretches of men from following their natural bent of going to the dogs. Do save him. 20 Such is to be Cecily’s mission in helping the wicked Ernest to reform him- self. 21If a man meets a bad woman, her influence is likely to have the opposite effect. In Hubert Henry Davies’s comedy Mrs Gorringe’s Necklace (Wyndham’s,1903) David Cairns is desperately in need of his fiancée’s help—unbeknown to her he has stolen a necklace that belongs to a fellow house-guest. He suggests bitterly that he is not worthy of her, but she insists, ‘Suppose you loved a bad woman?’ [11] introduction 19A. W. Pinero,Lady Bountiful(1891), p.37.20Henry Arthur Jones,The Triumph of the Philistines(1899), p.93.21The Importance of Being Earnest, II,159–65. (This and all subsequent references are to the line-numbers of the present edition.)

How could I bear to see you dragged down by a bad woman, knowing that I might have saved you? (Goes to him with a sudden impulse, kneels beside him and puts her arms about him) David! David! You must try— try hard—for my sake. 22 She marries him, still unaware of his guilt, and a friend decides to take the blame for David’s crime in order to spare her the shame of his unmasking. David, however, pre-empts the friend’s chivalry by shooting himself. A less drastic means of reforming the man who has erred is emigration. Active service in the colonies, farming in New Zealand or Australia, and even mining and general pioneering in North America will clear a man’s mind and give him a fresh view of Society. This kind of experience is often used to establish character—as in the case of Gunning in Haddon Chambers’s The Tyranny of Tears(Criterion,1899), who has been adven- turing in Upper India, and has done ‘a rather fine thing . . . saved a lot of miserable lives—an ordinary, manly, commonplace, heroic, English sort of thing’. 23The colonies assume the pastoral virtues traditionally associated with the countryside and serve as a useful contrast with the city. In Alfred Sutro’s The Walls of Jericho(Garrick,1903), Jack Frobisher, having made his fortune sheep-farming in Queensland, has come back to marry a Society beauty in London. She falls in with a fast set of wives who play bridge for a shilling a point, run up debts, and flirt with other men (‘All the women we know’, she explains, ‘call the men by their Christian names’). Hankey Bannister, a friend newly arrived from Australia, puts the choice frankly before Frobisher: ‘Which will you be—the Man of Queensland or the Gentleman of Mayfair?’ 24Frobisher wavers, but the discovery of his wife in a compromising situation with a known philanderer decides him. He will take his child and go back to the sheep. At first defiant, his wife relents in the final moments of the play and agrees to accompany him to a new life. As well as possessing this figurative significance, the colonies are of great practical use to dramatists who want to get rid of characters or introduce them suddenly. The device had worked well for a long time, in melodrama and elsewhere, although the old business of the transported criminal’s return (exemplified by Magwitch in Great Expectations) no longer served. The kind of conduct that might necessitate a tour of duty abroad (or even permanent exile) is made clear by Pinero’s Aubrey Tanqueray in his angry denunciation of ‘a man’s life’. Hugh Ardale, suitor for the hand of Tanqueray’s [12] The Importance of Being Earnest 22Hubert Henry Davies,Mrs Gorringe’s Necklace(1910), p.49.23C. Haddon Chambers,The Tyranny of Tears, ed. Michael Booth,English Plays of the Nine- teenth Century, III: Comedies(Oxford,1973), pp.412–13. 24Alfred Sutro,The Walls of Jericho(1906), p.49.

daughter Ellean, led in younger days a dissolute life, went to India to recover his moral stamina, and acted valorously there. Ellean has heard Ardale’s con- fession of his past sins, and has forgiven him, but neither of them realize that Ellean’s stepmother, the ‘Second Mrs Tanqueray’ of the title, once had a liai- son with Ardale. Pinero makes it plain that even a good woman’s forgiveness cannot always put right the consequences of past evil or cut away the tangle of deceit for which both man and woman are equally responsible. Aubrey Tanqueray has himself acted recklessly in marrying a woman ‘with a past’ and recognizes Ardale’s behaviour as consistent with a pattern: He has only led ‘a man’s life’—just as I, how many of us, have done! The misery he has brought on me and mine it’s likely enough we, in our own time, have helped to bring on others by this leading ‘a man’s life’ . . . 25 The man who marries a woman whose reputation is not secure faces a life of social ostracism, possibly exile. Although his male friends will not openly shun him, they are not likely to allow his wife to meet their wives or daugh- ters—the very presence of a bad woman was offensive to the good. 26As for the man who marries a good woman without confessing his past, he is likely to find himself unmasked in the fifth act. In The ProfligatePinero sets up as target an outspoken defender of the double standard, Lord Dungars, who replies to an upright Scots lawyer’s insistence that the husband who does not admit all ‘wrongs his wife and fools himself ’: Why, my dear Mr Murray, you’re actually putting men on a level with ladies. Ladies, I admit, are like nations—to be happy they should have no histories. But don’t you know that Marriage is the tomb of the past, as far as a man is concerned? Later in the play a conversation between two of the women leaves no doubt as to the author’s sympathies: a man’s past is his wife’s ‘pride or her shame, [13] introduction 25A. W. Pinero,The Second Mrs Tanqueray, ed. George Rowell,Late Victorian Plays(1968), pp.1–79;p.79. The speech occurs in the final act, just before Ellean tells Tanqueray (and the audience) that Paula has killed herself—another victim of ‘a man’s life’. 26Readers ofManners and Rules of Good Society ...By a Member ofthe Aristocracy(32nd ed.,1910) are warned against the casual acquaintanceships that might be picked up without for- mal introduction by English people abroad, who might not be aware that they had encountered an exile ‘perhaps well bred and agreeable, although tabooed at home for some good and suffi- cient reason’. It was painful for kind-hearted travellers when they were ‘subsequently compelled to avoid and to relinquish the acquaintance of those with whom they [had] become pleasantly intimate’ (p.66).

the jewel she wears upon her brow or the mud which clings to her skirts! It is her light or her darkness: her life or her death!’ 27The attack on a man’s right to ‘sow his wild oats’ carried the implication not that men and women alike should be pardoned, but that both should be equally punished. This is the plea of Hester in A Woman of No Importance: ‘Set a mark, if you wish on each ...’ 28But this was a radical suggestion, and the wisdom of the world maintained that men could get away with adventures absolutely forbidden to women. In Jones’s The Case of Rebellious Susan(Criterion,1894) a woman decides to pay back in his own coin a husband who has been paying attention to other women. She gets no further than flirtation, and reconciliation is effected through the good offices of Sir Richard Kato, a raisonneur of the kind that the actor Charles Wyndham excelled in. In the first act Kato warns Susan: My dear Sue, believe me, what is sauce for the goose will never be sauce for the gander. In fact, there is no gander sauce, eh, Lady Derby? 29 Wyndham was concerned that the play might be judged flippant or inde- cent, and wrote Jones a long cautionary letter while he was working on it: The tendency of the drama should always, if possible, be elevating. If we depart from this ever, as in the case of Mrs Tanqueray, and such like, the subject has to be grappled with seriously. 30 The presence of a raisonneurlike Kato was a guarantee against this—he might even act as a detective in the police-force guarding Society, unearthing past indiscretions before they can cause harm (as Kato does) or even inter- rogating a suspect, as Sir Daniel Carteret interrogates Mrs Dane in Jones’s Mrs Dane’s Defence (Wyndham’s,1900) to find out whether she is indeed unfit for good Society. 31 [14] The Importance of Being Earnest 27A. W. Pinero,The Profligate(1891), pp.5;57.28A Woman of No Importance,p.72/CW,p.450. Wilde was himself the victim of a ‘double standard’ implicit in the Criminal Law Amendment Act,1885, which dealt exclusively with rela- tions between men. 29Henry Arthur Jones,The Case of Rebellious Susan(1897), p.8.30Charles Wyndham, letter to Jones quoted by Doris Arthur Jones,The Life and Letters of Henry Arthur Jones(1930), pp.166–7. Cf. the account of Pinero’s ambitions in M. C. Salaman’s ‘Introductory Note’ to The Profligate(1891): Pinero hopes to write ‘plays which should, by means of a simple and reasonable dramatic deduction, record actual experience flowing in the natu- ral irregular rhythm of life, which should at the same time embody lofty ideals of conduct and character.’ (p.v.) 31Mrs Dane’s Defenceis available in Michael Booth, ed.,The Magistrate and Other Plays (1974) and the second volume (1969) of the same editor’s English Plays of the Nineteenth Century.

A dramatic form in which so much depended upon discriminations and the concept of ‘Society’, and in which the settings and characters were almost exclusively upper-class might be expected to appeal to Wilde. But the empha- sis on moral judgements was less attractive to one who favoured the substitution of aesthetic for ethical values. The three Society plays reflect this, as well as a lack of sympathy with some of the practical conventions of the genre.Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband all deal with indiscretions that have been or must be con- cealed. In the first Mrs Erlynne, a woman with a ‘past’, is making her entry into Society with the help of Lord Windermere: her secret is that she is Lady Windermere’s mother. In A Woman of No Importance Mrs Arbuthnot urges her son not to accept the advancement in his career that Lord Illingworth offers him, but she cannot tell him her reason: he is illegitimate and Illingworth is his father. Sir Robert Chiltern, in An Ideal Husband, is a cab- inet minister whose career was launched on the proceeds of disclosing information to one Baron Arnheim, a sinister foreign profiteer. Chiltern cannot admit this to his wife and he is being blackmailed by an adventuress (with a selection of pasts) called Mrs Cheveley. In all three plays the back- ground is one of receptions, balls, and house parties, which give Wilde the chance to write witty dialogue appropriate to the kind of social occasion at which he himself shone, but the plots need serious confrontations to pro- pel the characters through the necessary moral dilemmas, and here he is less happy. The affinity he feels with a brilliant and dominating personal- ity makes him write tellingly for Lord Illingworth when nothing important is happening, and lapse into stiff, melodramatic mannerisms when a crisis has to be dealt with. As Ian Gregor has remarked, ‘The more Illingworth moves into the plot, the less Wilde cares about what he says’. 32Other drama- tists were happy to write the occasional impassioned, rhetorical, somewhat old-fashioned speech, but Wilde’s distrust of cant makes him give Hester, in A Woman of No Importance, an impressive harangue on the double stan- dard of morality, and then undercut it with the witty and blithely complacent reaction of the Englishwomen she is addressing: . . . And till you count what is a shame in a woman to be infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar offire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or not be seen at all, or if seen, not regarded. [15] introduction 32Ian Gregor, ‘Comedy and Oscar Wilde’,Sewanee Review,74(1966),501–21;p.508. See also Arthur Ganz, ‘The Divided Self in the Society Comedies of Oscar Wilde’,Modern Drama,3 (1960),16–23.

lady caroline Might I , my dear Miss Worsley, as you are standing up, ask you for my cotton that is just behind you? Thank you. 33 Nonchalance is more congenial to Wilde than enthusiasm. In An Ideal Husbandhe finds an integral function for his preferred attitude by making a dandy, Lord Goring, the raisonneur, in place of the usual lawyer, doctor, or avuncular ‘man of the world’. Goring finds the solution to Chiltern’s dilemma, but maintains his detachment. He is intolerant of the public’s regard for morality: ...in England a man who can’t talk morality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician. There would be nothing left for him as a profession except Botany or the Church. 34 By making Chiltern a manwith a past Wilde is able to invert the clichés associated with a moral situation without forfeiting its validity in the scheme of the play. He has Chiltern reproach his wife in terms familiar from dis- cussions of her own sex: ‘Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals?’ It was in this speech that Shaw recognized the ‘modern note’ of the play. 35 From the preliminary scheme for a serious drama that he sent Alexander in the summer of1894it is clear that Wilde was looking for new ways of handling the materials appropriate to success in the commercial theatre. Saloméhad been banned by the Lord Chamberlain in 1892, on the grounds that it represented Biblical characters: that kind of experiment was clearly not going to find a place in the West End and certainly would not make money. The new serious play was never written by Wilde, although Frank Harris later worked up a drama,Mr and Mrs Daventry, along the lines indi- cated in the proposals. It was to show a ‘man of rank and fashion’ married to ‘a simple sweet country girl—a lady—but simple and ignorant of fash- ionable life’. 36The man would become bored, and would invite ‘a lot of fashionable fin-de-sièclemen and women’ to stay. Among them would be Gerald Lancing, with whom the wife would be allowed to flirt. The hus- band would himselfflirt with a Lady X, and the wife would fall in love with [16] The Importance of Being Earnest 33Cf. note 28,above.34An Ideal Husband,p.86/CW,p.507.35An Ideal Husband,p.133/CW,p.521.36Wilde,Letters,pp.360–2. Harris’s play has been published with an introduction by H. Montgomery Hyde (1956).

Lancing. The final scene would depict the triumph of love: the husband would shoot himself, leaving Gerald and the wife ‘clinging to each other as if with a mad desire to make love eternal’. Wilde assured Alexander that he thought this was ‘extremely strong’. ...I want the sheer passion of love to dominate everything. No morbid self-sacrifice. No renunciation. A sheer flame of love between a man and a woman. This was to be a modern tragedy, and it is clear from Wilde’s outline that the love of Gerald and the wife was to be shown developing in the course of the play, rather than exist already as some secret to be unearthed in the conventional way. The contrast of simplicity and sophistication is there in the wife and her husband’s friends, and the passionate sexuality tentatively explored in Saloméis to be the dominating force. The summer of1894also produced a parallel comic scheme for devel- oping and transcending the conventions of the theatre:The Importance of Being Earnest.In this everything depends upon the rediscovery of the past, and the appropriate material exhibits are produced in evidence: a cigarette- case, a hand-bag, the Army Lists of the last forty years. The credentials of a prospective son-in-law are checked and the grounds of his admissibility to Society are investigated. A scapegrace is to be rescued by a good woman from the alternatives of the next world and Australia. Innocence is set against sophistication, the country against the town, in the persons of Cecily and Gwendolen (‘A girl with a simple, unspoiled nature’, who ‘could hardly be expected to reside in the country’; I,518–19). The audience is kept aware of the dictates of Divine justice (‘As a man sows so let him reap’; II,37) and its poetic equivalent (‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means’; II,54–5). The play ends with the promise of three weddings and the discovery of kinship between two of the bridegrooms. Wilde uses this material to create neither a straightforward dramatic parody—that would have been nothing new—nor a farcical comedy of the kind written by Brandon Thomas (Charley’s Aunt) or Pinero (Dandy Dick, The Magistrate, The Schoolmistress).His characters do not collide with the real world, but are endowed with an enviable control over it. Their rare moments of helplessness are enjoyed as though they had wished them upon themselves—‘The suspense is terrible’, says Gwendolen as Jack searches for the hand-bag, ‘I hope it will last’ (III,387). Parts of the play are written with a quasi-operatic formality that makes the characters appear as Wilde’s col- laborators. The tea-table scene between Cecily and Gwendolen, their joint confrontation of the two men, and the opening sequence of Act III are [17] introduction

composed in this manner. The speakers cap each other’s lines, rhythm for rhythm and word for word. When Gwendolen observes,‘meditatively’, If the poor fellow has been entrapped into any foolish promise I shall consider it my duty to rescue him at once, and with a firm hand, Cecily announces her own resolution,‘thoughtfully and sadly’, Whatever unfortunate entanglement my dear boy may have got into, I will never reproach him with it after we are married. (II,664–9) 37 In the earlier Society plays of Wilde the necessity of using such language was an embarrassing duty: here it has become a pleasure. Jack’s speech of for- giveness when he thinks Miss Prism is his mother is the most striking example: Unmarried! I do not deny that is a serious blow. But after all, who has the right to cast a stone against one who has suffered ? Cannot repen- tance wipe out an act of folly? Why should there be one law for men, and another for women? Mother, I forgive you. (III,406–10) It is appropriate that Jack should invoke Christ’s words on the woman taken in adultery, as Miss Prism herself has used a sterner judgement derived from St Paul—‘As a man sows, so let him reap’. For a moment we are reminded of the most pathetic of Victorian wronged women, Lady Isabel Vane in East Lynne, who returned disguised as a governess from an exile in which she was thought to have died, to watch over the death bed of a son who expired without having called her ‘mother’. 38Wilde uses this kind of e ffect spar- ingly, just as serious dramas of the new school avoided excessive reliance on techniques associated with melodrama. The Importance of Being Earnestalso observes a degree of decorum in characterization, keeping well away from the stock types. Neither Jack nor Algernon speaks with the ebullient raciness of the stage ‘swell’ or the slangy [18] The Importance of Being Earnest 37 W. H. Auden suggested that the play is ‘the only pure verbal opera in English’ (‘An Improba- ble Life’,New Yorker,9March 1963—reprinted by Ellmann,Oscar Wilde: a Collection of Critical Essays, pp.116–37). On the formal qualities of the play (especially the second act), cf. Otto Reinert, ‘The Courtship Dance in The Importance of Being Earnest’,Modern Drama,1(1959),256–7. 38Mrs Henry Wood’s novel East Lynne(published in book form in 1861) was dramatized a number of times: T. A. Palmer’s version (1874) is reprinted by Leonard R. N. Ashley,Nineteenth Century British Drama(Glenview, Ill.,1967). The most famous line occurs at the end of Act Three: ‘Oh, Willie, my child dead, dead, dead! and he never knew me, never called me mother’ (p.390).

drawl of the dim theatrical younger son. Aynesworth, who played Algernon, was well known for his ‘clever impersonations of masherdom’, 39and a com- parison of the lines Wilde gave him with a specimen from Pinero’s The Weaker Sex (Royal Court,1889) shows how little the new play owed to pop- ular comic cliché. In Pinero’s play Aynesworth appeared as the Hon. George Liptrott, idle, rich, and vacant. In this speech he is telling his mother about one of the other guests at an evening party: Why Ma , that’s Wade Green, the man who’s so awfully entertaining at the piano with those frightfully amusing songs—don’t you know. When he sings it’s as much as people can do to keep from laughing. (To GREEN ) H’are yah? 40 ‘Ma’, ‘awfully’, ‘frightfully’, ‘don’t you know’, and ‘H’are yah?’ would be incon- ceivable in the language of Wilde’s characters, who speak like their creator in well-formed complete sentences and rarely use slang or vogue-words. In the course of revision Wilde removed from the play a number of references to debts, traditional in the life-style of the man-about-town. The touches that identify Jack and Algernon as well-to-do bachelors are few: the con- sumption of champagne, the restaurant meals, the location of their apartments, and the list of alternative amusements at the end of Act I (ll. 682–92). The young women diverge from type in a similar way. Cecily is more knowing than the ingénues she is based on; Gwendolen is clever and independent-minded, but her fashionable elegance distinguishes her from the common image of the ‘modern’, intellectual woman as dowdy, straight- haired, and faddish—an image retailed in Pinero’s The Weaker Sexand Grundy’s The New Woman(Comedy Theatre,1894). Miss Prism and Dr Chasuble are characterized by a few carefully-selected details: their eccle- siastical and educational enthusiasms are suggestive of the mid-century years. Chasuble’s fussy precision of language is established in his first scene with Miss Prism and her pupil: even the commas are telling in ‘Miss Prism, you are, I trust, well?’ (II,63–4). Wilde’s revisions between the manuscript draft and the 1899edition show that he wanted to avoid farcical exaggera- tion: the greater number of references to their respective preoccupations in the original version gave Miss Prism and the rector an obsessive quality. By the same process Lady Bracknell (whose name was Lady Brancaster in texts before that used by Alexander) was deprived of several lines in which [19] introduction 39The Dramatic Peerage(1895).40A. W. Pinero,The Weaker Sex(1894), p.52.

[20] The Importance of Being Earnest Irene Vanbrugh and Evelyn Millard: studio photograph by Alfred Ellis of characters in the first production. (Reproduced from the Sketch,20March 1895)

the supine Lord Bracknell was mentioned. 41Moulton the gardener origi- nally appeared briefly in Act II (see note to ll.1–4), but this conventionally comic rustic disappeared in the licensing copy. The remaining servants at Woolton, Merriman and the footman, are practically silent, although their presence during the tea-table scene in Act II is valuable. Lane, Algernon’s butler, is anything but the confidential scheming servant of tradition—if he conforms to a type, it is a Wildean one, reminiscent of Phipps in An Ideal Husband: ‘a mask with a manner . . . He represents the dominance of form’. 42 Sparing and strategic use of parody, and the avoidance (or modification) of stock characterization are complemented by restraint in the physical action of the play. There is little of the violence associated with farce—no desperate concealments or rushing in and out of doors. The struggle for the cigarette-case, the sugar and cake forced on Gwendolen, the hunt (o ff- stage) for the hand-bag, and Jack’s search through the Army Lists are the most violent actions. The first two acts end with Jack impotently indignant and Algernon refusing to be flurried. In Act I he is complacently looking forward to a weekend’s Bunburying and in Act II he is finishing his tea. The sense of decorum in Wilde’s comedy suggests the control of polite behaviour over Society. The interdependence of art, etiquette, and insin- cerity had been proposed in Dorian Gray: For the c anons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. 43 In The Importance of Being Earnestthere are three major instances of eti- quette in action—two afternoon calls, with tea served to the visitors, and Jack’s mourning for Ernest. The manuals of etiquette devote much space to the formalities involved in the paying and receiving of calls, and death was the occasion of elaborate and carefully graduated alterations in dress and social behaviour. 44Each of these three sequences in the play combines the practice of social forms with some kind of deception. In Act I, Lane and [21] introduction 41See, for example, notes to II,295and III,192–3.42An Ideal Husband,p.137/CW,p.522.43Dorian Gray,ed.Murray,pp.142–3/CW,p.112. An interesting study of ‘form’ is Leonora Davidoff,The Best Circles: Society Etiquette and the Season(1973). 44On Victorian mourning see John Morley,Death, Heaven and the Victorians(1971), Chap- ter Six (‘Mourning Dress and Etiquette’).

Algernon jointly lie about the availability of cucumbers, Jack courts Gwendolen behind her mother’s back (at one point literally so), and Algernon invokes Bunbury to avoid a dinner with his aunt. Jack’s behav- iour, like Algernon’s, is part of a general lie concerning a mythical being, in his case Ernest. In the tea-table scene in Act II the formalities of hospital- ity are played o ffagainst the antagonism of Gwendolen and Cecily—an antagonism that is in any case based upon misinformation deriving from the greater deceit of Bunbury and Ernest. In this sequence the sense of artifice—which has already been mentioned—is enhanced by the progres- sion of Gwendolen from insincere and e ffusively pro ffered friendship (‘My first impressions of people are never wrong’; II,569–70) through naked hos- tility (‘This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners’; II,675–6) to genuine solidarity (‘You will call me sister, will you not?’; II,759)—all in fulfilment of Algernon’s prophetic remark that women only call each other sister ‘when they have called each other a lot of things first’ (I,675–6). As for Jack’s mourning attire, which provides the play’s most visually striking moment (especially if the audience sees him before the other characters do), it is a lie for which we have been well prepared without being told exactly what form it will take. 45Cecily’s indecorous exclamation—‘But what horrid clothes you have got on!’ (II,296–7)—does not (as the audience knows) break the rules concerning mourning, for Ernest is not in fact dead. It does break the rules of Jack’s game, and when he protests, ‘What non- sense! I haven’t got a brother’ (II,306), he is in the unusual position of speaking an untruth without meaning to. He means it literally, Cecily takes it figuratively (‘Oh don’t say that. However badly he may have behaved to you in the past he is still your brother’; II,307–8), and within his charade it could mean that Ernest is no longer alive. The virtuous brother mourn- ing the profligate and the unforgiving one denying his existence are figures out of some serious play, and so is the new role in which Jack is shortly to be cast—the brother forgiving a prodigal he had given up for dead. Personalities are being multiplied faster than Jack can cope with them. It would be possible to compile an etiquette book from precepts uttered by Wilde’s characters—it would include notes on the impropriety of read- ing a private cigarette-case and the vulgarity of arguments. A similar dossier might be provided on acceptable attitudes to political, social, and aesthetic matters, from French songs to bomb outrages. The comedy is addressed to those whose concern with life is as ‘serious’ as their taste in drama. Ideas that aroused enthusiasm and partisanship in the 1890s are treated not merely with flippancy but with an earnest, confident wrongness (in Gwendolen’s [22] The Importance of Being Earnest 45Wilde wisely deleted an anticipation of the effect in Act I : see note to ll.658–9.

announcement that we live in ‘an age of ideals’ and Lady Bracknell’s remarks on education, for example). The opening conversation between Algernon and Lane establishes the manner in which serious topics will be handled. Lane is honest but alarmingly matter-of-fact about his married life: ...I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misun- derstanding between myself and a young person. Algernon’s reaction is dismissive and is spoken ‘languidly’: I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane. Lane is not to be outdone in o ff-handedness: No, sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself. Lane clearly has the upper hand here, much as Algernon has it later in his conversations with Jack. After he has gone out, Algernon reflects: Lane ’s views on marriage seem somewhat lax. Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsi- bility. (I,33–6) The topics of marriage and class will be followed up later in the play and the comic inversion of priorities will recur. So will the appeal to morality. It would be wrong to infer from this that Wilde did not care about moral- ity or social problems: his ideas on both do not amount to a satisfyingly coherent or original philosophy, but they are indicative of a good deal more than egotistic scepticism. Wilde did try in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ to reconcile socialist utopianism with the cultivation of the individual. It is the style of moral and political life that he objects to, and its humbug. The references to philanthropy in The Importance of Being Earnestare significant in this respect, for doing good among the poor was at once the working-out of the conscience of the upper classes, the only outlet in prac- tical life available to many Victorian women, and an arena for the practice of cant. InAn Ideal Husband Mrs Cheveley observes that philanthropy has become ‘the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow-creatures’, and in Act II ofThe Importance of Being EarnestCecily assumes that Miss Fairfax must be ‘one of the many good elderly women who are associated with Uncle Jack in some of his philanthropic work in London’: [23] introduction

I don’t qu ite like women who are interested in philanthropic work. I think it is so forward of them. 46 We are also told that Miss Prism lectures the villagers (with no apparent influence on the rate of growth in the population), and that Mr Bunbury, if he was interested in social legislation, was well punished for his morbidity (II,256–9; III,103). The most suggestive reference is not directly concerned with poverty, but with health. Lady Bracknell, told of Bunbury’s illness, remarks that she does not share ‘the modern sympathy with invalids’, which she thinks ‘morbid’, that ‘Health is the primary duty of life’ and that she has often said as much to Lord Bracknell—without producing any improvement in his ail- ments (I,341–9). Wilde is echoing words he had used before in Dorian Gray andA Woman of No Importancewhere Lord Henry Wotton and Lord Illingworth take part in debates on the question of social justice. In Dorian GrayWotton proclaims himself unable to sympathize with su ffering: It is to o ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terri- bly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better. 47 In A Woman of No Importance the pompous politician Kelvil maintains that the House of Commons has always ‘shown great sympathy with the su fferings of the poor’. Illingworth counters: That is its special vice. That is the special vice of the age. One should sympathise with the joy, the beauty, the colour of life. The less said about life’s sores the better, Mr Kelvil. Kelvil persists—‘Still our East End is a very important problem’—and Illingworth replies with another echo of Wotton: Quite so. It is the problem of slavery. And we are trying to solve it by amusing the slaves. [24] The Importance of Being Earnest 46II,561–3. Cf. the Duchess of Berwick’s description in Lady Windermere’s Fanof the ‘Sav- ille girls’: ‘. . . they’re always at the window doing fancy work, and making ugly things for the poor, which I think so useful of them in these dreadful socialistic days’(p.25/CW,p.391). 47Dorian Gray,ed.Murray,pp.39–40/CW,p.44. Cf. Lord Henry’s first conversation with Dorian in Basil Hallward’s studio: ‘To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked’ (ed. Murray, p.17/CW,p.29).

Lady Hunstanton observes that ‘much good may be done by means of a magic lantern, or a missionary, or some popular amusement of that kind’, and Lady Caroline retorts: I am not at all in favour of amusements for the poor, Jane. Blankets and coals are sufficient. There is too much love of pleasure among the upper classes as it is. Health is what we want in modern life. The tone is not healthy, not healthy at all. 48 In ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ Wilde claims that up to now man has only cultivated sympathy with pain, and that this is not the highest form of sympathy: It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a cer- tain element of terror for our own safety ...It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and mal- adies merely, but with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. 49 In The Importance of Being Earnestthese ideas appear and some of the same words are used, but the context is not one of debate, as in Dorian Gray and A Woman of No Importance, or theoretical exposition, as in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’. Lady Bracknell is talking about two characters of almost equally fictional status, Bunbury and her husband, and illness rather than poverty is the subject of a couple of passing remarks. The notion of the lower classes setting the ‘tone’, implicit in Lady Hunstanton’s speech, is present in Algernon’s reaction to Lane’s views on marriage and Chasuble’s having preached for the Society for the Prevention of Discontent among the Upper Orders. Lady Bracknell is never anything less than authoritative in her remarks, but she feels no obligation to engage in any kind of debate or to justify herself in any way. One of Jack’s reasons for creating Ernest was to enable him to escape the guardian’s duty of maintaining ‘a very high moral tone on all subjects’—a duty which ‘can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness’ (I,205–9). One of Wilde’s purposes in writing The Importance of Being Earnest can be seen as something of the same kind: the [25] introduction 48A Woman of No Importance,pp.22–3/CW,p.437. Cf. the exchange in Dorian Grayimme- diately after the speech cited in note 47above: ‘“Still the East End is a very important problem”, remarked Sir Thomas, with a grave shake of the head. “Quite so”, answered the young lord. “It is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves” ’. 49‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’,Intentions,p.329/CW,p.1101.

author is able to shed his responsibilities by inventing characters who have perfect confidence in their own fulfilment of the demands of Society and the justice of their opinions. They are themselves literary inventors of consider- able accomplishment: their collected works amount to two complete human beings, a diary of events that have not yet occurred, a three-volume novel and several unpublished sermons. The combination of life and works is espe- cially appropriate to Wilde’s situation and state of mind at the time the play was written and performed—the double life with Douglas, the hindrances despite which he managed to continue working, the confession to Gide, and ultimately the questioning in court on the moral qualities of his books. This engagement with the author’s ways of living, thinking, and writing prevents the play from becoming a simple social satire, The author identifies himself closely with a group of characters whose appetites and attitudes are vindi- cated in a conventionally happy ending. Pinero’s farces for the Court Theatre in the 1880s (The Magistrate,Dandy Dick, and The Schoolmistress are the best known) showed respectable characters indulging a concealed or unsuspected capacity for self-expressive enjoyment and entering on a comic collision course with the dignity of their social and professional position. Gilbert in his libretti for Sullivan and his comedies shows a distrust of rhetoric and a sense of the absurd similar to Wilde’s. Some degree of influence seems likely, and it is probable that some of Gilbert’s jokes in Engaged (Haymarket,1877) are recalled in The Importance of Being Earnest. 50But Gilbert shows little sympathy for his characters and builds his play upon the contrast between their conventional and often extravagant professions of feeling and the mate- rial ambitions that in fact motivate them. Wilde’s comedy is more radical than Pinero’s and he has more in common with the characters he creates than Gilbert with his.The Importance of Being Earnest does not return its characters (as Pinero does his magistrate, dean, and schoolmistress) to the security of their accustomed life: it liberates them. It is especially fitting that Dr Chasuble and Miss Prism should share in this freedom: chasuble(Tomiss prism) Laetitia!Embraces her miss prism(Enthusiastically) Frederick! At last! (III,482–3) [26] The Importance of Being Earnest 50The possible influence ofEngagedcan be traced in the similarity of incidents in the older play and Wilde’s comedy (the greedy eating of jam tarts, Symperson’s mourning for a man who has changed his mind about suicide) and the gravity of tone demanded by Gilbert of his actors. Gilbert’s name was invoked by several reviewers ofThe Importance of Being Earnest. The rela- tionship of the two pieces is interestingly discussed by Lynton Hudson,The English Stage, 1850–1950 (1951), pp.101–5.

This is the comic counterpart of the ‘sheer flame of love’ that Wilde antic- ipated for his unwritten drama, and its benefits are enjoyed by the representatives of religion and learning—the traditional guardians of earnest- ness. It was a generous act on Wilde’s part and one that would not be reciprocated when he found himself in court. Reactions to the First Production Wilde was the first reviewer of his own work. In interviews given before the production of his new play he claimed that it was ‘exquisitely trivial, a del- icate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy’. The ‘philosophy’ was that ‘we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the seri- ous things of life with sincere and studied triviality’. 51He also suggested a suitable critical verdict: ‘the first act is ingenious, the second beautiful, the third abominably clever’. 52 Some of the notices ofThe Importance of Being Earnestsuggest that Wilde’s frequently-expressed dislike of newspaper critics was not unfounded, and that there was more than playful arrogance in his contention that it was the audience, not the play, that was tested at a first night. 53In a period when orig- inality—independence of French models in particular—was at a premium, it was not unusual for reviewers to spend many column-inches on a cata- logue of the alleged sources of a new piece. Marivaux, Sterne, Gilbert, Shaw, Meilhac, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and a handful of contemporary works were among the suggested originals or influences ofThe Importance of Being Earnest, which the Sketch claimed to be ‘as full of echoes as Prospero’s Isle’. 54The same paper o ffered a criticism repeated in many other reviews: Certainly it cannot be pretended that in such matters as construction, invention—or adaptation—of subject, contrivance of comic business or delineation of character, Mr Wilde has shown much ability. [27] introduction 51Hyde,Oscar Wilde,p.177.52Quoted in Black and White,16February 1895. In letters to Alexander during the composi- tion of the play Wilde described it as ‘sheer comedy, and the best I have ever written’, insisting that it was ‘in idea farcical’ and not really suitable for the repertoire of ‘serious and classical pieces’ that the actor intended to take to America (Letters,p.369). It was outside the ‘definite artistic line of progress’ adopted by Alexander (p.376). Perhaps Wilde was ‘angling’ for Alexander, but the fact that Wyndham took up the option on his play suggests that the misgivings were real (Wilde had suggested that it might be more in Wyndham’s line). When he first approached Alexander, Wilde wrote: ‘The real charm of the play, if it is to have a charm, must be in the dialogue. The plot is slight, but, I think, adequate . . . Well, I think an amusing thing with lots of fun might be made’ (p.359). 53Hyde,Oscar Wilde,p.177.54The Sketch,20February 1895.

The compensation—if the critic was well-disposed—lay in the author’s wit. For an ill-disposed critic Wilde’s wit was the final insult: an anonymous reporter in the Theatre dismissed the play as ‘a bid for popularity in the direc- tion of farce’ and observed that it showed ‘the advantage of being frivolous, which, in a pecuniary sense, is likely to accrue to an author who caters for the less intelligent section of the public’. Wilde’s wit was meretricious, but sufficient for an audience ‘unable or unwilling to distinguish between the tinsel glitter of sham epigram and the authentic sheen of true wit’. 55Truth, in a reasonably sympathetic review, described the author’s technique as ‘dressing up an old-fashioned screaming farce in the very latest and smartest verbal fashion’, whileBlack and White, intending a compliment, announced: ‘Its title is a pun, its story a conundrum, its characters are lunatics, its dia- logue is galamatias, and its termination is a “sell”. ’ 56Many of the witty sayings were reported, and the plot was narrated at a length no longer permitted to dramatic correspondents. The Graphic solemnly advised Wilde that he would do well ‘to discard a silly pun by changing “Earnest” in his title, which has no meaning, into “Ernest”, which is what is really meant’. 57 The most interesting notices are those by Archer in the Wo r l d,A.B. Walkley in the Speaker, and Shaw in the Saturday Review.Archer’s begins with the claim that dramatic critics have four categories within which plays can be classified: those which are good to see, those which are good to write about, those which are both, and those which are neither. Wilde’s comedy is placed without hesitation in the first category, but this leads to the pro- posal (quoted above, p.8) that it is impossible to write about. The material is such as in other hands would have made ‘a capital farce’, but ‘farce is too gross and commonplace a word to apply to such an iridescent filament of fantasy’. 58Wilde’s humour ‘transmutes’ hackneyed incidents of plot into ‘something new and individual’. To this positive version of an idea that figures in other reviews as a negative Archer adds praise for Wilde as a craftsman, especially in the incident of Jack’s entrance ‘in deep mourning (even down to his cane)’ in the second act: ‘In all his plays, and certainly not least in this one, the story is excellently told and illustrated with abundance of scenic detail’—Archer had been to see the play twice, and found that on second viewing some passages that seemed drawn-out on the first night no longer [28] The Importance of Being Earnest 55The Theatre,20February 1895. The editor of the Theatre, and probable author of this anonymous notice, was Clement Scott, an arch-conservative whose verdict on The Second Mrs Tanqueraywould have pleased Miss Prism: ‘That is the modern Play. Every vicious person seems to succeed, every virtuous person suffers horribly’ (Illustrated London News,22July 1893). 56Truth,21February 1895;Black and White,23February 1895.57Graphic,23February 1895.58William Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1895 (1896), pp.56–60.

worried him. His major reservation concerned a trick of dialogue that he identified as Gilbertian: Wilde was ‘least fortunate where he drops into Mr Gilbert’s Palace of Truth mannerism, as he is apt to do in the characters of Gwendolen and Cecily’. The reference was to Gilbert’s The Palace of Truth (1870) in which characters find themselves speaking the truth in spite of the rules of polite discourse that under normal circumstances enforce hypocrisy. For Walkley, as for Archer, the new comedy represents a breakthrough in Wilde’s dramatic writing: Belie ve me, it is with no ironic intention that I declare Mr Oscar Wilde to have ‘found himself ’ at last, as an artist in sheer nonsense. There has been good nonsense in his previous stage-work, but it failed to give unalloyed pleasure, either because it adopted serious postures or was out of harmony with an environment of seriousness. 59 Wilde is compared with Pinero and Gilbert, whose work contains an ele- ment of ‘realism’ that has the e ffect of mingling ‘a little contempt with the laughter’ (Engagedhad been ‘as grim as The Duchess of Malfi’).Wilde uses types in order to induce laughter ‘at their conduct for its sheer whimsical- ity, not as illustrating the foibles of their class’. Walkley sees in The Importance of Being Earnesta cunning use of the familiar ‘shaken up, as it were, and rearranged in a strange, unreal pattern’—‘a world that is real yet fantastic’. In an introductory essay to an edition of Wilde’s Wo r k s, published in New York in 1923, he referred to Jack’s entrance in Act II as ‘a supreme example of that rare thing, wit in action’, regarding this, as Archer had done, as evi- dence of the dramatist’s skill as a craftsman. 60The term ‘farce’ is defended on both occasions against disparagement by those (including Archer) who would use it as a pejorative. Archer and Walkley anticipate those more recent critics who have seen The Importance of Being Earnestin the light of Absurdism, and have pointed to Wilde’s witty use of logic as a weapon against its advocates. 61Shaw’s crit- icism is remarkable for its biographical basis, on which hindsight enabled [29] introduction 59A. B. Walkley, The Speaker,23February 1895—reprinted in Karl Beckson,Oscar Wilde: the Critical Heritage(1970), pp.196–9. 60A. B. Walkley, introduction to Volume VII,The Complete Works of Oscar wilde(New York, 1923)—reprinted in Beckson, pp.400 –2. 61Cf. D. J. Spininger, ‘Profiles and Principles: The Sense of the Absurd in The Importance of Being Earnest’, Papers on Language and Literature,12 (1976),49–72; G. Stone, ‘Serious Bun- buryism: the Logic ofThe Importance of Being Earnest’, Essays in Criticism,26(1976),28–41.On farce, cf. David Parker, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Great Farce:The Importance of Being Earnest’, Modern Language Quarterly,35(1974),173–86.

him to speculate more freely in his memoir of Wilde in Frank Harris’s Oscar Wilde: his Life and Confessions.In the review Shaw described the scene between Cecily and Gwendolen in Act II as ‘quite in the literary style of Mr Gilbert, and almost inhuman enough to have been conceived by him’. The humour was ‘adulterated by stock mechanized fun’ and the effect was that of ‘a farcical comedy dating from the seventies, unplayed during that period because it was too clever and decent, and brought up to date as far as pos- sible by Mr Wilde in his now completely formed style’. 62The suggestion of development (‘now completely formed’) and of the reworking of old mate- rial is at once qualified by a reservation: Shaw insists that he goes to the theatre to be moved to laughter, and that farcical comedy merely produces ‘miserable mechanical laughter’ in him. The new play has plenty of this ‘rib- tickling’—‘for instance the lies, the deceptions, the cross-purposes, the sham mourning, the christening of the two grown-up men, the muffin eating, and so forth’. These could only have been raised from the farcical plane by making them occur to characters who had, like Don Quixote, convinced us of their reality and obtained some hold on our sympathy. But that unfortunate moment of Gilbertism breaks our belief in the humanity of the play. Thus we are thrown back on the force and daintiness of its wit, brought home by an exquisitely grave, natural, and unconscious execution on the part of the actors. Alas! the latter is not forthcoming. The criticism of the performance is in itself unusual—it was generally agreed that the acting had for the most part been appropriately subdued in tone— but the sense of annoyance in Shaw’s account of the play is more so. The fact that Shaw’s own theatrical work had a similarly oblique relationship with the commercial drama must have had some influence on his opinion of Wilde’s comedy (he refers in his review toArms and the Man, performed in 1894), but the ‘Memories of Oscar Wilde’ printed with Harris’s biogra- phy suggests a more personal reason for Shaw’s hostility: Our sixth meeting . . . was the one at the Café Royal. On that occasion he was not too preoccupied with his danger to be disgusted with me because I, who had praised his first plays handsomely, had turned traitor over The Importance of Being Earnest.Clever as it was, it was his first really heartless play. In the others the chivalry of the eigh- teenth century Irishman and the romance of the disciple of Theophile [30] The Importance of Being Earnest 62George Bernard Shaw,Our Theatres in the Nineties(3vols.,1932), I,41–4.

Gautier (Oscar was really old-fashioned in the Irish way, except as a critic of morals) not only gave a certain kindness and gallantry to the serious passages and to the handling of women, but provided that proximity of emotion without which laughter, however irresistible, is destructive and sinister. InThe Importance of Being Earnestthis had vanished; and the play, though extremely funny, was essentially hate- ful. I had no idea that Oscar was going to the dogs, and that this represented a real degeneracy produced by his debaucheries. I thought he was still developing; and I hazarded the unhappy guess that The Importance of Being Earnestwas in idea a young work written or pro- jected under the influence of Gilbert and furbished up for Alexander as a potboiler. 63 Shaw’s critical reaction was evidently a function of his own romantic atti- tude to women—the mixture of gallantry and wistful idealization found in his letters to Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell—and his preoccu- pations as a dramatic author. His conviction that art must embody principles and show men and women how to change their lives is obviously challenged. The clash suggests the fundamental differences between Shaw’s and Wilde’s trivial comedies for serious people. Note on the Text This edition is based on the first edition ofThe Importance of Being Earnest, published in 1899by Leonard Smithers and limited to one thousand copies. Smithers sent Wilde a typed copy of a text owned by George Alexander, which Wilde marked with alterations and corrections and which served as copy for the printers. This typescript (WD) is in the Arents Tobacco Collection, New York Public Library: corrected page-proofs are in the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, Texas. Wilde added phrases and words, marked passages for omission, and struck out some stage directions present in the copy sent him, and his corrections in page-proof include, apart from literals, the removal of all but a few ital- icizations, a number of alterations bringing the Smithers edition in line with the extant copy owned by Alexander, and some innovations not pres- [31] introduction 63George Bernard Shaw, ‘My Memories of Oscar Wilde’, in Frank Harris,Oscar Wilde: his Life and Confessions(2nd ed.,2vols., New York,1918). Shaw’s contribution was printed with separate pagination at the end of the second volume (the quotation is from pp.13–14): it was reprinted in Pen Portraits and Reviews(1932) and by Richard Ellmann, in Oscar Wilde: a Col- lection of Critical Essays.

ent in any earlier text that is known to have survived. 64The omission of the detailed stage directions (mainly, it seems, those indicating the ‘blocking’— the positioning of characters on stage) is a feature of plays published in the late nineteenth century by authors who wished to avoid the clutter of tech- nical directions customary in French’s and Lacy’s acting editions. Unlike An Ideal Husband, which was published by Smithers in the same year,The Importance of Being Earnestdoes not carry descriptive stage directions designed to help the reader visualize the character. 65 Wilde appears to have offered the play to Alexander in the summer of 1894with a request for an advance of£150: the outline of a three-act com- edy is included in a letter only recently published in its entirety in an article by Peter Raby (‘The Making ofThe Importance of Being Earnest . . .’,The Times Literary Supplement,20December 1991; the previously published portion of the letter is quoted above, p.27, note 52). As Raby notes, frag- ments of dialogue—including Lady Bracknell finding Jack on his knees to Gwendolen and telling him to rise from his ‘semi-recumbent posture’— are found in some notebooks in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. The summary sent to Alexander in Wilde’s letter has most of the play’s incidents, including an episode (later discarded) in which Algernon is to be arrested for debt, but most of the characters do not bear the names later used: Lady Bracknell is the Duchess of Selby; John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieffare Lord Alfred Rufford and Bertram Ashton respec- tively. The crucial name is ‘George’, but by the time of the Clark notebook fragments, which include a list of other possible names, it has become ‘Ernest’ and the central pun has been born. Miss Prism ‘has designs on the guardian’, a point that survives more or less subtextually in the play as written. Wilde indicates the origins of Dr Chasuble, telling Alexander that ‘the local doc- tor, or clergyman, must be brought in, in the play, for Prism’. The letter anticipates that the comedy will be ready by October. As subsequently drafted in August 1894the play was in four acts: exer- cise books, containing a fair copy in Wilde’s autograph, have survived and are divided between the Arents Tobacco Collection, New York Public Library (Acts I and II) and the British Library (Acts III and IV). Typescripts of Acts I, III, and IV, with Wilde’s manuscript notes and alterations, are now in the Arents Collection: the typescript of Act I is dated November 1894and those of Acts III and IV are from September. A four-act typescript from 31October [32] The Importance of Being Earnest 64Correspondence relating to the edition will be found in Wilde’s Letters,pp.734–804passim.65In March 1899Wilde wrote asking Ross to help him with the ‘wills’ and ‘shalls’ in An Ideal Husband, and to advise him on the descriptive stage directions (Letters,p.789). Ross had already been asked to check ‘will’ and ‘shall’ and ‘should’ and ‘would’ in the text ofThe Importance of Being Earnest(Letters,pp.765–6).

1894is in the Frohman Collection, Nw York Public Library. Of the four stages of revision between the manuscript and the reduction of the play to three acts, these typescripts are the only evidence the editor can rely on. A German translation, published in Leipzig in 1903and based on material sent by Robert Ross, has been assumed to reflect the final four-act version, but there are signs that Ross or the translator may have introduced features of the 1899edition. Although a useful reconstruction of a four-act version of the play has been founded on this translation, its authority is too doubt- ful for it to be accepted as Wilde’s ‘preferred’ text. 66For the same reason it has not been included in the collations given in footnotes to the text of the present edition: Wilde’s manuscript draft of August 1894is cited from Sarah Augusta Dickson’s transcription (referred to as ‘MS draft’) and the three typescripts in the Arents Collection are cited as evidence of his revisions up to November 1894(referred to as ‘Arents I’, etc.). 67 The text submitted for licensing to the Lord Chamberlain’s office in January 1895is in three acts (this is designated ‘LC’ in the collations). Another revision is embodied in the typescript owned by George Alexander and marked by him with numerous alterations, additions and stage directions (in the collations ‘HTC’ indicates the readings of this copy; ‘HTC1’ the read- ings of the typescript where Alexander has made alterations). This is not the prompt-book of the first production—there are none of the calls and cues that would indicate its having been used by prompter or stage-man- ager—but the authority of its origin makes it the best available evidence of the performed text and its interpretation. 68 The first performance of the play took place on 14February 1895after about a month’s rehearsal—most of it in the author’s absence (he was in [33] introduction 66Vyvyan Holland’s phrase in the ‘Introduction’ to the Collins Complete Works(CW), which contains his four-act reconstruction,first published in 1957as ‘The Original Four-Act Version’, Freiherr Hermann von Teschenberg’s translation,Ernst Sein, Eine Triviale Komodie fur Seriöse Leute(Leipzig,1903), includes the full version of the piano-playing business at the opening of Act I (which first appears in full in 1899), the lines in which Algernon queries Lane’s statement concerning the lack of cucumbers (added by Wilde to WD); the pauses in 1.386of the same act (which are also added by Wilde in this typescript and do not appear before then); and the refer- ence to ‘the provincial pulpits’ (‘und ist schon bis zu den Kanzeln der Provinz gedrungen’—another of Wilde’s additions to his copy). These and similar features elsewhere in the text would appear to suggest that Teschenberg’s copy was altered in places to agree with 1899(or HTC). 67Sarah Augusta Dickson, ed.,The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Seri- ous People In Four Acts as Originally Written by Oscar Wilde(New York,2vols.,1956). 68Cf. Donohue’s article, cited in note 16above. There is some doubt as to the date of Alexan- der’s annotations, many of which appear to post-date the 1899edition: Joseph Donohue and Ruth Berggren suggest that HTC may have been prepared for a projected revival. But the direc- tions in HTC1and HTC still reflect Alexander’s treatment of the play and HTC1probably represents the text of the first production.

Algeria with Douglas). He returned in time for the dress-rehearsal on 12 February (Tuesday) and ‘staggered the company by telling Alexander that he supposed “we must start rehearsals on Monday”.’ 69After the scandal of Wilde’s prosecution Alexander tried to save matters by removing the author’s name from the theatre’s advertisements, but he was obliged to withdraw the play on 8May. Altogether there had been 83performances. 70The first American production of the play, presented by Charles Frohman at the Empire Theatre, New York, opened on 22April 1895and closed after a week. 71 The first London revival ofThe Importance of Being Earnestwas staged by Alexander at the St James’s on 7January 1902. It closed after a run of52 performances on 28February. Max Beerbohm’s notice in the Saturday Review refers to ‘several faults of textual omission’: ‘the line is immaterial’ was not spoken; Miss Prism described the Fall of the Rupee as somewhat too ‘excit- ing’ (rather than ‘sensational’); in her mention of the overturning of the Gower Street omnibus ‘in younger and happier days’, the phrase ‘and hap- pier’ was omitted. Beerbohm also complained of excessive speed and self-consciously farcical acting—a stricture from which even Alexander was not exempt. 72The first two of the omissions noticed by Beerbohm occur in the edition published by Samuel French. This edition is undated, but the date stamp in the British Library copy provides a terminus ad quemof23 February 1903. The French’s edition incorporates many features of the copy owned by Alexander (HTC), but its text is very heavily cut. A prompt-book based on the French’s edition restores a number of lines and some stage directions found in Alexander’s copy. 73This may be the working prompt- book of a tour or of the 1909revival, which opened on 30November and played for eleven months. Aynesworth and Alexander repeated their roles of Algernon and Jack, and Stella Patrick Campbell appeared as Gwendolen. Although the theatre was—if the French’s edition and the prompt-book based on it are to be taken as evidence—temporarily moving further away from Wilde’s text, Robert Ross’s edition of1908–09returned to the 1899 version, slightly emended. This text was reproduced in the Tauchnitz edition [34] The Importance of Being Earnest 69Hyde,Oscar Wilde,p.178.70Performance figures in J.P. Wearing,The London Stage, 1890 –1899 :a Calendar of Perfor- mances (2vols,1976). At some performances Mrs Edward Saker replaced Rose Leclercq as Lady Bracknell and Violet Lyster appered as Cecily in place of Evelyn Millard. The curtain-raiser,In the Seasonby Langdon Elwyn Mitchell, ran with Wilde’s play for 68performances. 71On Frohman’s production, see Dickson’s edition, I.xxiv, where a page from the programme and a photograph of the moment when Jack finds his father’s name are reproduced. 72Beerbohm,Around Theatres(1951), pp.188–191.73British Theatre Museum (library housed at Senate House, University of London), TM 5907–PR 5818.I.4.

of1910(for distribution on the continent). A special issue of Ross’s edition, and appropriate preface by the editor, was prepared to mark the twentieth anniversary of Alexander’s management ( February 1910). Ross’s edition was reprinted many times and became accepted as the standard text of the play. The 1899three-act edition has been adopted for the present edition because it has the clear authority of an edition prepared in accordance with Wilde’s wishes, and because it is the product of a series of revisions by two meticulous craftsmen, Wilde and Alexander. 74The notes show the princi- pal differences between this text and its predecessors and attempt to give an impression of the play’s effect in performance by drawing on Alexander’s stage directions. In the collations (which represent only major variations in the text) the revisions are listed in reverse chronological order, beginning with 1899and going back to the manuscript draft. Ross’s, French’s, and other posthumous editions are cited only where their readings shed light on the process by which the 1899text or Alexander’s was arrived at. Wilde’s punctuation in the first edition has been followed, with the silent correction of some minor errors and the substitution of a dash for the stops (‘...’) he sometimes used as marks of suspension. In the stage-directions quoted from Alexander’s copy (HTC) ‘right’ and ‘left’ indicate positions on stage as seen by the performers: they should be reversed to give the audi- ence’s view of the action. [35] introduction 74The following emendations have been made to the 1899text: ‘Shoreham’ for ‘Shoreman’, I,12; ‘Algernon’ for ‘Ernest’, I,151s.d.; ‘on’ for ‘an’, I,224; revision offirst sentences in I,539f. (see note); ‘reminds’ for ‘remind’, I,572; ‘Maréchal’ for ‘Maréchale’, II,174;‘stockbrokers’for ‘stock- broker’s’, II,825; ‘you can’ for ‘can you,’ II,827.



FURTHER READING Bibliography Joseph Donohue and Ruth Berggren, eds,Oscar Wilde’s‘The Importance of Being Earnest’:a Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the First Production(Gerrards Cross,1995). Ian Fletcher and John Stokes, ‘Oscar Wilde’ in Anglo-Irish Literature, A Review of Research, ed. R. J. Finneran (New York,1976). ‘Stuart Mason’ (C. S. Millard),Bibliography of Oscar Wilde(1908;rev.edi- tion, with an introduction by Timothy D’Arch Smith,1967). E. H. Mikhail,Oscar Wilde: an Annotated Bibliography of Criticism(1978). Ian Small,Oscar Wilde Revalued.An Essay on new Materials and Methods of Research(Greensboro, N.C.,1993). John Stokes,Oscar Wilde(Writers and their Work, no.264,1978). Biography Richard Ellmann,Oscar Wilde(1987). H. Montgomery Hyde,The Trials of Oscar Wilde(rev. edition,1963). ——Oscar Wilde (1975). E. H. Mikhail, ed., Oscar Wilde:Interviews and Recollections (2vols,1979). Hesketh Pearson,The Life of Oscar Wilde(1946). Richard Pine,Oscar Wilde(Dublin,1983) Gary Schmidgall,The Stranger Wilde. Interpreting Oscar(1994). Alan Sinfield,The Wilde Century. Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment(1994). Collections of Criticism K. Beckson,Oscar Wilde: the Critical Heritage(1970). Richard Ellman, ed.,Oscar Wilde: a Collection of Critical Essays(Englewood Cliffs, N. J.,1969). William Tydeman, ed.,Wilde: Comedies. A Casebook(1982). Criticism Karl Beckson,London in the 1890 s.A Cultural History(New York,1992). Alan Bird,The Plays of Oscar Wilde(1977). Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Different Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde and Gide’,Textual Practice,I (1987) 48–67. Joseph Donohue, ‘The First Production ofThe Importance of Being Earnest: A Proposal for a Reconstructive Study’, in Kenneth Richards and Peter Thomson, eds,Nineteenth Century British Theatre(1971). [37]

Richard Ellmann, ‘Romantic Pantomime in Oscar Wilde’,Partisan Review, 30(1963),342–55. Reginia Gagnier,Idylls of the Marketplace, Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public(1987). Arthur Ganz, ‘The Meaning ofThe Importance of Being Earnest’, Modern Drama,7(1963),42–52. Ian Gregor, ‘Comedy and Oscar Wilde’,Sewanee Review,74(1966),501–21. Jerusha McCormack, ‘Masks without Faces: the Personalities of Oscar Wilde’, English Literature in Transition,22(1979),253–69. E. B. Partridge, ‘The Importance of Not Being Earnest’,Bucknell Review,9 (1960),143–58. Charles B. Paul and Robert D. Pepper, ‘The Importance of Reading Alfred: Wilde’s Debt to De Musset’,Bulletin of New York Public Library,75(1971), 506–42. Ker r y Powell,Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890 s(1990). Peter Raby,The Importance of Being Earnest.A Reader’s Companion (Twayne’s Masterwork Studies, New York,1995). ——Oscar Wilde(Cambridge,1988). ——(ed.) Oscar Wilde,The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (Oxford,1995: includes note on the first scenario of the play). Epifanio San Juan, Jr,The Art of Oscar Wilde(Princeton,1967). Rodney Shewan,Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism(1977). Ian Small,Oscar Wilde Revalued. An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research(Greensboro, North Carolina,1993). H. E. Toliver, ‘Wilde and the Importance of Sincere and Studied Triviality’, Modern Drama,5(1963),389–99. J. A. Ware, ‘Algernon’s Appetite: Oscar Wilde’s Hero as a Restoration Dandy’, English Literature in Transition,13(1970),17–26. Katherine Worth,Oscar Wilde(1983). [38] The Importance of Being Earnest

ABBREVIATIONS References to The Importance of Being Earnestare to the line-numbers of the present edition. References to The Picture of Dorian Grayare to Isobel Murray’s edition in the Oxford English Novels series (1974). Other works by Wilde are referred to by the title of the volume in which they appear in Ross’s edition of the Wo r k s(14vols.,1908). I have followed Murray’s practice of giving addi- tional references to the page-numbers of the Collins Complete Works(1967), which is designated CW. The following abbreviations are used to designate texts ofThe Importance of Being Earnestcited in the collations: MS draft The manuscript drafts of the four acts (August 1894) as transcribed in Volume I of Sarah Augusta Dickson, ed., The Importance of Being Earnest ...In Four Acts as Orig- inally Written by Oscar Wilde(New York Public Library: publication number 6of the Arents Tobacco Collection, 2vols.,1956). Acts I and II are in the Arents Collection, New York Public Library: Acts III and IV in the British Library. Arents I, III, IV Typescripts of Acts I, III, and IV, now in the Arents Col- lection, reproduced in collotype facsimile in Volume II of Dickson’s edition. OCT Typescript of four-act version, dated 31October 1894: Burnside-Frohman Collection, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center (+NCOF 1894). LC Licensing Copy, British Library MS Add.53567(17) (Lady Lancing. A Serious Comedy for Trivial People by Oscar Wilde). HTC/HTC1Typescript owned by George Alexander: Harvard The- atre Collection. Where Alexander has made manuscript alterations, the original state of the typescript is referred to as HTC1. WD Typescript (typed by Winifred Dolan) revised by Wilde to provide copy for 1899: Arents Tobacco Collection, New York Public Library. PR Page-proofs of the 1899edition, with Wilde’s autograph alterations: manuscripts section of the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. [39]

1899The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People by the Author of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ (London, Leonard Smithers,1899). French’s 1903The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People in Three Acts by Oscar Wilde(London, Samuel French, n.d. [1903]): French’s Acting Edition, number 1036. Other Abbreviations om. omits s.d. stage direction(s) [40] The Importance of Being Earnest

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST A Trivial Comedy for Serious People By OSCAR WILDE [41]

To Robert Baldwin Ross In Appreciation In Affection DedicationRobert Ross (1869–1918) was one of Wilde’s closest and most loyal friends, and his literary executor. In his edition of the play the third line of this dedication is ‘And Affection’, but the version printed by Smithers in 1899is that given by Wilde in a letter of14December 1898(Letters,p.770). In the copy sent to Ross, Wilde wrote: ‘To the Mirror of Perfect Friendship: Robbie: whose name I have written on the portal of this little play. Oscar. February ’99’(Letters,p.783n). [42]

THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY [St James’s Theatre,14February 1895] john worthing,J.P.,of the Manor House, Woolton, Hertfordshire Mr George Alexander algernon moncrieff,his friend Mr Allen Aynesworth rev. canon chasuble,D.D.,Rector of Woolton Mr H.H.Vincent merriman,butler to Mr Worthing Mr Frank Dyall lane, Mr Moncrieff ’s manservant Mr F. Kinsey Peile lady bracknellMiss Rose Leclercq hon. gwendolen fairfax,her daughter Miss Irene Vanbrugh cecily cardew,John Worthing’s Ward Miss Evelyn Millard miss prism,her governess Mrs George Canninge THE SCENES OF THE PLAY Act IAlgernon Moncrieff ’s Flat in Half Moon Street, W. Act IIThe Garden at the Manor House, Woolton Act IIIMorning-Room at the Manor House, Woolton Time—The Present [43]

. . . . . .