The Importance of Being Earnest

For other uses, see The Importance of Being Earnest (disambiguation).

The Importance of Being Earnest
Original production, 1895 Allan Aynesworth as Algernon (left) and George Alexander as Jack
Written by	Oscar Wilde
Date premiered	1895
Place premiered	St James's Theatre, London, England
Genre	Comedy
Setting	Mayfair, London, and a country house in Hertfordshire

The Importance of Being Earnest, a Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage and the resulting satire of Victorian conformity. Some contemporary reviews praised the play's humour as the culmination of Wilde's artistic career, while others were cautious about its lack of social messages.

The successful opening night marked the climax of Wilde's career but also heralded his downfall. The Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Lord Alfred Douglas was Wilde's lover, planned to present the writer with a bouquet of rotten vegetables and disrupt the show. Wilde was tipped off, and Queensberry was refused admission. Their feud came to a climax in court in April 1895 when Wilde sued for libel. The proceedings provided enough evidence for Wilde's arrest, trial, and conviction on charges of gross indecency. His homosexuality was revealed to the Victorian public, and he was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour. Despite the play's early success, Wilde's notoriety caused it to be closed after 86 performances. After his release from prison, he published the play from exile in Paris, but he wrote no more comic or dramatic works.

Since the premiere, which featured George Alexander, Allan Aynesworth and Irene Vanbrugh among others, many actors have been associated with the play, including John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Margaret Rutherford, Martin Jarvis, Nigel Havers and Judi Dench. The Importance of Being Earnest has been filmed for the cinema on three occasions, directed by Anthony Asquith (1952), Kurt Baker (1992) and Oliver Parker (2002) and has been frequently adapted for radio from the 1920s onwards and for television since the 1930s.

Composition

Oscar Wilde in 1889

The play was written following the success of Wilde's earlier plays Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband and A Woman of No Importance. He spent the summer of 1894 with his family at Worthing, on the Sussex coast, where he began work on the new play. His lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, later claimed to have had a considerable hand in the composition of the piece. He told John Gielgud that he had written most of the best lines in it and that he had stood over Wilde when he was writing it. Gielgud was unimpressed. Douglas told James Agate that Wilde had originally conceived the play as set in the eighteenth century in costumes of the School for Scandal period, but brought it into the 1890s at Douglas's suggestion.

Wilde scholars generally agree that the most important influence on the play was W. S. Gilbert's 1877 farce Engaged, from which Wilde borrowed not only several incidents but also, in the words of Russell Jackson in his 1980 introduction to the play, "the gravity of tone demanded by Gilbert of his actors". Wilde continually revised the text over the summer months. The academic Sos Eltis describes Wilde's revisions as a refined art at work, and comments that the earliest and longest handwritten drafts of the play are full of "farcical accidents, broad puns and a number of familiar comic devices". In his revisions, "Wilde transformed standard nonsense into the more systematic and disconcerting illogicality which characterizes Earnest's dialogue". Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann argues that Wilde had reached his artistic maturity and wrote more surely and rapidly than earlier in his career.

Wilde wrote the part of John Worthing with the actor-manager Charles Wyndham in mind. Wilde shared Bernard Shaw's view that Wyndham was the ideal comedy actor and based the character on his stage persona. Wyndham accepted the play for production at his theatre, Wyndham's, but before rehearsals began, he changed his plans to help a colleague in a crisis. In early 1895, at the St James's Theatre, the actor-manager George Alexander's production of Henry James's Guy Domville had failed, and closed after 31 performances, leaving Alexander in urgent need of a new play to follow it. Wyndham waived his contractual rights and allowed Alexander to stage Wilde's play.

After working with Wilde on stage movements, using a toy theatre, Alexander asked the author to shorten the play from four acts to three. Wilde agreed and combined elements of the second and third acts. The largest cut was the removal of the character of Mr Gribsby, a solicitor who comes from London to serve a writ on the profligate "Ernest" (i.e., John Worthing) for unpaid dining bills. In Wilde's final version the characters hitherto called Lady Brancaster and Algernon Montford were renamed Lady Bracknell and Algernon Moncrieff. The four-act version was performed in a BBC radio production in 1977 and is still sometimes presented. The three-act structure is widely considered more effective and theatrically resonant than the published four-act edition.

Productions

Premiere

The play was first produced at the St James's Theatre, London, on Valentine's Day, 1895. Wilde arrived dressed in "florid sobriety", wearing a green carnation. Allan Aynesworth, who played Algernon Moncrieff, recalled to Hesketh Pearson that "In my fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than [that] first night". Aynesworth was himself "debonair and stylish", and Alexander, who played Jack Worthing, "demure".

According to the published text, the characters and cast comprised:

John Worthing, JP	of the Manor House, Woolton, Hertfordshire	George Alexander
Algernon Moncrieff	his friend	Allan Aynesworth
Rev Canon Chasuble, DD	Rector of Woolton	H. H. Vincent
Merriman	butler to Mr Worthing	Frank Dyall
Lane	Mr Moncrieff's manservant	F. Kinsey Peile
Lady Bracknell		Rose Leclercq
Hon Gwendolen Fairfax	her daughter	Irene Vanbrugh
Cecily Cardew	John Worthing's ward	Evelyn Millard (succeeded by Violet Lyster)
Miss Prism	her governess	Mrs George Canninge

Allan Aynesworth, Evelyn Millard, Irene Vanbrugh and George Alexander in the 1895 premiere

Mrs George Canninge as Miss Prism, and Evelyn Millard as Cecily Cardew in the premiere

Rose Leclercq as Lady Bracknell, from a sketch of the first production

During most of the month-long rehearsal period Wilde was on holiday in Algeria with Alfred Douglas, but returned in time for the dress-rehearsal on 12 February. Douglas remained in Algiers; his father, the Marquess of Queensberry, planned to disrupt the play by throwing a bouquet of rotten vegetables at the playwright when he took his bow at the end of the show. Wilde and Alexander learned of the plan, and the latter cancelled Queensberry's ticket and arranged for policemen to bar his entrance. Wilde wrote to Douglas, "He arrived with a prize fighter!! I had all Scotland Yard to guard the theatre. He prowled around for three hours, then left chattering like a monstrous ape". Queensberry continued harassing Wilde, who eventually launched a private prosecution against him for criminal libel, triggering a series of trials ending in Wilde's imprisonment for gross indecency. Alexander tried, unsuccessfully, to save the production by removing Wilde's name from the billing, but the play had to close after only 83 performances.

The play's original Broadway production opened at the Empire Theatre on 22 April 1895 but closed after sixteen performances. Its cast included William Faversham as Algernon, Henry Miller as Jack, Viola Allen as Gwendolen, and Ida Vernon as Lady Bracknell. The Australian premiere was in Melbourne on 10 August 1895, presented by Dion Boucicault Jr. and Robert Brough, and the play was an immediate success. Wilde's downfall in England did not affect the popularity of his plays in Australia.

Synopsis

Alexander in Act II (1909 revival)

The play is set in "The Present", which was 1895 at the time of the premiere.

Act I: Algernon Moncrieff's flat in Half Moon Street, West

The play opens with Algernon Moncrieff, a young man-about-town, receiving his friend, John Worthing, who is known to Algernon as "Ernest". Ernest has come from the country to propose to Algernon's cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax. Algernon refuses to consent until Ernest explains why his cigarette case bears the inscription, "From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack". Worthing is forced to admit to living a double life. In the country, he assumes a serious attitude for the benefit of his young ward, the heiress Cecily Cardew, and goes by the name of John or Jack, while pretending that he must worry about a wastrel younger brother in London, named Ernest. Meanwhile, he assumes the identity of the libertine Ernest when in town. Algernon confesses a similar deception: He pretends to have an invalid friend named Bunbury in the country, whom he can "visit" whenever he wishes to avoid an unwelcome social obligation. Jack refuses to tell Algernon the location of his country estate.

Gwendolen and her formidable mother, Lady Bracknell, now call on Algernon, who distracts Lady Bracknell in another room while Jack proposes to Gwendolen. She accepts but seems to love him in large part because of his name, Ernest. Jack accordingly resolves secretly to be rechristened, Discovering them in this intimate exchange, Lady Bracknell interviews Jack as a prospective suitor for her daughter. Horrified to learn that he was adopted after being discovered as a baby, in a handbag at Victoria Station, she refuses him and forbids further contact with her daughter. Gwendolen manages to covertly promise to him her undying love. As Jack gives her his address in the country, Algernon surreptitiously notes it on the cuff of his sleeve: Jack's revelation of his pretty young ward has motivated his friend to meet her.

Act II: The Garden of the Manor House, Woolton

Cecily is studying with her governess, Miss Prism, in the (fictitious) village of Woolton, Hertfordshire. Algernon arrives, pretending to be Ernest Worthing, and soon charms Cecily. Long fascinated by her uncle Jack's hitherto absent black sheep brother, she is predisposed to fall for Algernon in his role of Ernest (a name of which she is particularly fond). Algernon, too, plans for the rector, Dr  Chasuble, to rechristen him "Ernest". Jack has decided to abandon his double life. He arrives in full mourning and announces his brother's death in Paris with a severe chill, a story undermined by Algernon's presence in the guise of Ernest. Gwendolen now enters, having left the Bracknell's London house without her mother's knowledge. During the temporary absence of the two men she meets Cecily. They get along well at first, but they learn of the other's engagement, with each indignantly declaring that she is the one engaged to Ernest. When Jack and Algernon reappear together, Gwendolen and Cecily realise they have been deceived and they leave the men in the garden and withdraw to the house.

Act III: Morning-room at the Manor House, Woolton

Gwendolen and Cecily forgive the men's trickery. Arriving in pursuit of her daughter, Lady Bracknell is astonished to be told that Algernon and Cecily are engaged. The revelation of Cecily's wealth soon dispels Lady Bracknell's initial doubts over the young lady's suitability, but any engagement is forbidden by her guardian, Jack: he will consent only if Lady Bracknell agrees to his own union with Gwendolen – something she declines to do.

The impasse is broken by the return of Miss Prism, whom Lady Bracknell recognises as the person who, 28 years earlier as a family nursemaid, had taken a baby boy out in a perambulator and never returned. Challenged, Miss Prism explains that she had absent-mindedly put into the perambulator the manuscript of a novel she was writing, and put the baby in a handbag, which she later left at Victoria Station. Jack produces the same handbag, showing that he is the lost baby, the eldest son of Lady Bracknell's late sister, and thus Algernon's elder brother. Having acquired such respectable relations, he is acceptable as Gwendolen's suitor.

Gwendolen continues to insist that she can love only a man named Ernest. Lady Bracknell tells Jack that, as the firstborn, he would have been named after his father, General Moncrieff. Jack examines the army lists and discovers that his father's name – and hence his own original christening name – was, in fact, Ernest. As the happy couples embrace – Jack and Gwendolen, Algernon and Cecily, and even Dr Chasuble and Miss Prism – Lady Bracknell complains to her newfound relative: "My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality". He replies, "On the contrary, Aunt Augusta: I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest".

Critical reception

Reviewers of the premiere: clockwise from top left: William Archer, A. B. Walkley, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw

In contrast with much theatre of the time, the light plot of The Importance of Being Earnest does not tackle serious social and political issues, which troubled some contemporary reviewers. Though unsure of Wilde's seriousness as a dramatist, they recognised the play's cleverness, humour, and popularity with audiences. Shaw reviewed the play in the Saturday Review, arguing that comedy should touch as well as amuse: "I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it". Later in a letter, he said the play, though "extremely funny", was Wilde's "first really heartless [one]".

In The World, William Archer wrote that he had enjoyed watching the play but found it to be empty of meaning: "What can a poor critic do with a play which raises no principle, whether of art or morals, creates its own canons and conventions, and is nothing but an absolutely wilful expression of an irrepressibly witty personality?" In The Speaker, A. B. Walkley admired the play and was one of few to see it as the culmination of Wilde's dramatic career. He denied that the term "farce" was derogatory or even lacking in seriousness and said, "It is of nonsense all compact, and better nonsense, I think, our stage has not seen".

H. G. Wells, in an unsigned review for The Pall Mall Gazette, called the play one of the freshest comedies of the year, saying, "More humorous dealing with theatrical conventions it would be difficult to imagine". He also questioned whether people would fully see its message, "... how Serious People will take this Trivial Comedy intended for their learning remains to be seen. No doubt seriously". The play was so light-hearted that many reviewers compared it to comic opera rather than drama. W. H. Auden later (1963) called it "a pure verbal opera", and The Times commented, "The story is almost too preposterous to go without music". Mary McCarthy, in Sights and Spectacles (1959), despite thinking the play extremely funny, called it "a ferocious idyll"; "depravity is the hero and the only character".

As Wilde's works came to be read and performed again, it was The Importance of Being Earnest that received the most productions. Max Beerbohm called the play Wilde's "finest, most undeniably his own", saying that in his other comedies – Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband – the plot, following the manner of Victorien Sardou, is unrelated to the theme of the work, while in Earnest the story is "dissolved" into the form of the play. By the time of its centenary, the journalist Mark Lawson described the piece as "the second most known and quoted play in English after Hamlet".

Revivals

1895–1929

Lilian Braithwaite as Cecily, 1901

The Importance of Being Earnest and Wilde's three other society plays were performed in Britain during the author's imprisonment and exile by small touring companies. A. B. Tapping's production toured Earnest between October 1895 and March 1896, and Elsie Lanham's touring company presented the play, along with Lady Windermere's Fan, beginning in November 1899. The play was well received; one provincial critic described it as "sparkling with wit and epigrams", and another called it "a most entertaining comedy [with] some sparkling dialogue".

The play was not seen again in London until after Wilde's death in 1900. Alexander revived it in the small Coronet theatre in Notting Hill, outside the West End, in December the following year, after taking it on tour, starring as John Worthing, with a cast that included the young Lilian Braithwaite as Cecily. The Manchester Guardian called the piece "a brilliant play". The Importance of Being Earnest returned to the West End when Alexander presented a revival at the St James's in 1902. It was billed as "By the author of Lady Windermere's Fan", and few reviews mentioned Wilde's name, but his work was praised:

The trivial comedy revived at the St James’s is as witty an evening's entertainment as any worldling could desire. It is all as light as a good soufflé. The ladies talk like Mr W. S. Gilbert's fairies do, and are supernaturally clever; the men emit sparkles of wit even when their mouths are full of cucumber sandwiches or crumpets ... I can guarantee that the most blasé young man of twenty-two will have one chuckle a minute at the St James’s. You are tickled throughout with a feather, and is a very pleasant and comforting sensation.

The revival ran for 52 performances. Alexander presented the work again at the St James's in 1909, when he and Aynesworth reprised their original roles; that revival ran for 316 performances. Max Beerbohm said that the play was sure to become a classic of the English repertory and that its humour was as fresh then as when it had been written, adding that the actors had "worn as well as the play".

Leslie Faber (centre) as Jack, 1923 revival, with Louise Hampton as Miss Prism and H. O. Nicholson as Dr Chasuble.

The play was revived on Broadway in 1910 with a cast that included Hamilton Revelle, A. E. Matthews and Jane Oaker. The New York Times commented that the play "has lost nothing of its humor … no one with a sense of humor can afford to miss it". For a 1913 revival at the St James's, the young actors Gerald Ames and A. E. Matthews succeeded the creators as Jack and Algernon. Leslie Faber as Jack, John Deverell as Algernon and Margaret Scudamore as Lady Bracknell headed the cast in a 1923 production at the Haymarket Theatre. Many revivals in the first decades of the 20th century treated "the present" as the current year. It was not until the 1920s that the case for 1890s costumes was established; as a critic in The Manchester Guardian put it, "Thirty years on, one begins to feel that Wilde should be done in the costume of his period – that his wit today needs the backing of the atmosphere that gave it life and truth. … Wilde's glittering and complex verbal felicities go ill with the shingle and the short skirt".

1930–2000

In Nigel Playfair's 1930 production at the Lyric, Hammersmith, John Gielgud played Jack to the Lady Bracknell of his aunt, Mabel Terry-Lewis. An Old Vic production in February 1934 featured the husband-and-wife team of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester as Chasuble and Miss Prism; others in the cast were Roger Livesey (Jack), George Curzon (Algernon), Athene Seyler (Lady Bracknell), Flora Robson (Gwendolen) and Ursula Jeans (Cecily). On Broadway, Estelle Winwood co-starred with Clifton Webb and Hope Williams in a 1939 revival.

Gielgud produced and starred in a production at the Globe (now the Gielgud) Theatre in 1939, in a cast that included Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell, Joyce Carey as Gwendolen, Angela Baddeley as Cecily and Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism. The Times considered the production the best since the original and praised it for its fidelity to Wilde's conception and its "airy, responsive ball-playing quality". Later in the same year, Gielgud presented the work again, with Jack Hawkins as Algernon, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Gwendolen and Peggy Ashcroft as Cecily, with Evans and Rutherford in their previous roles. The production was presented in several seasons during and after the Second World War, with mostly the same principal players. During a 1946 season at the Haymarket, the King and Queen attended a performance, which, as the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft put it, gave the play "a final accolade of respectability". Gielgud's London production toured North America and was successfully staged on Broadway in 1947.

In 1975 Jonathan Miller, who had been prevented the previous year from staging the play at the National Theatre with an all-male cast, directed a production in which Lady Bracknell, played by Irene Handl, was given a German accent. For Peter Hall's 1982 production at the National Theatre the cast included Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell, Martin Jarvis as Jack, Nigel Havers as Algernon, Zoë Wanamaker as Gwendolen and Anna Massey as Miss Prism. In 1987 a version of the play was given at the Whitehall Theatre starring Hinge and Bracket as Miss Prism and Lady Bracknell respectively. Nicholas Hytner's 1993 production at the Aldwych Theatre, starring Maggie Smith, had occasional references to the supposed gay subtext.

21st century

The play was presented in Singapore in October 2004 by the British Theatre Playhouse, and the same company took the production to Greenwich Theatre, London, in April 2005. In 2007 Peter Gill directed the play at the Theatre Royal, Bath. The production went on a short UK tour before playing in the West End in 2008.

Since the 1987 Whitehall version, some other productions have cast a male actor in the role of Lady Bracknell. In 2005 the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, presented the play with an all-male cast; it also featured Wilde as a character – the play opened with him drinking in a Parisian café, dreaming of his play. The Melbourne Theatre Company staged a production in 2011 with Geoffrey Rush as Lady Bracknell. In the same year the Roundabout Theatre Company presented a Broadway revival based on the 2009 Stratford Shakespeare Festival production featuring its director, Brian Bedford, as Lady Bracknell. At the Vaudeville Theatre, London, in 2015, David Suchet took the role in a production by Adrian Noble.

In 2014 at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, Lucy Bailey directed a production that followed a trend to "age-blind" casting: the average age of the cast was nearly seventy, and Jarvis and Havers reprised the roles they had played at the National in 1982. At the Vaudeville in 2018 Michael Fentiman directed a revival in which Lady Bracknell was played by Sophie Thompson. In 2024 the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester presented an updated version, described by The Guardian as "a convincing stab at a 21st-century makeover".

Analysis

Triviality

Arthur Ransome described The Importance ... as the most trivial of Wilde's society plays, and the only one that produces "that peculiar exhilaration of the spirit by which we recognise the beautiful ... It is precisely because it is consistently trivial that it is not ugly". Ellmann says that The Importance of Being Earnest touched on many themes Wilde had been building since the 1880s: the languor of aesthetic poses was well established, and Wilde takes it as a starting point for the two protagonists. While Salome, An Ideal Husband, and The Picture of Dorian Gray had dwelt on more serious wrongdoing, vice in Earnest is represented by Algernon's craving for cucumber sandwiches. Wilde told Robert Ross that the play's theme was "That we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality". The theme is hinted at in the play's ironic title, and "earnestness" is repeatedly alluded to in the dialogue; Algernon says in Act II, "one must be serious about something if one is to have any amusement in life", but goes on to reproach Jack for "being serious about everything". Blackmail and corruption had haunted the double lives of Dorian Gray and Sir Robert Chiltern (in An Ideal Husband), but in Earnest the protagonists' duplicity (Algernon's "bunburying" and Worthing's double life as Jack and Ernest) is undertaken for more innocent purposes – largely to avoid unwelcome social obligations. While much theatre of the time tackled serious social and political issues, Earnest is superficially about nothing at all. It "refuses to play the game" of other period dramatists such as Shaw, who used their characters to draw audiences to grander ideals.

Satire of society

The play repeatedly mocks Victorian traditions and social customs, marriage and the pursuit of love in particular. In Victorian times earnestness was considered by some to be the overriding societal value; originating in religious attempts to reform the lower classes, it spread to the upper ones too throughout the century. The play's subtitle, with its mocking paradox (serious people are so because they do not see trivial comedies), introduces the theme; it continues in the morning-room discussion, "Yes, but you must be serious about it. I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them". allusions are quick and come from multiple angles.

Gwendolen (Irene Vanbrugh), Merriman (Frank Dyall) and Cecily (Evelyn Millard), in the original production, Act II

The men follow traditional matrimonial rites, whereby suitors admit their weaknesses to their prospective brides, but the foibles they excuse are ridiculous, and the farce is built on an absurd confusion of a book and a baby. When Jack apologises to Gwendolen it is for not being wicked:

JACK	Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?
GWENDOLEN	I can. For I feel that you are sure to change.

In turn, Gwendolen and Cecily have the idea of marrying a man named Ernest, a popular and respected name at the time. Gwendolen, quite unlike her mother's methodical analysis of Jack Worthing's suitability as a husband, places her entire faith in a Christian name, declaring in Act I, "The only really safe name is Ernest". This is an opinion shared by Cecily in Act II, "I pity any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest".

Wilde embodied society's rules and rituals in the figure of Lady Bracknell: minute attention to the details of her style created a comic effect of assertion by restraint, according to Raby. In contrast to her encyclopaedic knowledge of the social distinctions of London's street names, Jack's obscure parentage is subtly evoked. He defends himself against her, "A handbag?" with the clarification, "The Brighton Line". At the time, Victoria Station consisted of two separate but adjacent terminal stations sharing the same name. To the east was the ramshackle LC&D Railway, on the west the up-market LB&SCR – the Brighton Line, which went to Worthing, the fashionable, expensive town to which the gentleman who found baby Jack was travelling at the time (and after which Jack was named).

Conjectural homosexual subtext

Queer scholars have argued that the play's themes of duplicity and ambivalence are inextricably bound up with Wilde's homosexuality and that the play exhibits a "flickering presence-absence of ... homosexual desire". After his release from prison, Wilde wrote to Reginald Turner, "It was extraordinary reading the play over. How I used to toy with that tiger Life!"

It has been said that the use of the name Ernest may have been a homosexual in-joke. In 1892, three years before Wilde wrote the play, John Gambril Nicholson had published a book of pederastic poetry, Love in Earnest. The sonnet "Of Boys' Names" included the verse:

           Though Frank may ring like silver bell
           and Cecil softer music claim
           they cannot work the miracle
           – 'tis Ernest sets my heart a-flame.

In the 1980s there were suggestions that "earnest" may also have been a code-word for homosexual, as in: "Is he earnest?" in the same way that "Is he so?" and "Is he musical?" are known to have been used. However, Sir Donald Sinden, an actor who had met two of the play's original cast (Irene Vanbrugh and Allan Aynesworth) and Lord Alfred Douglas, wrote to The Times in 2001 to rebut suggestions that "earnest" held any sexual connotations:

Although they had ample opportunity, at no time did any of them even hint that "Earnest" was a synonym for homosexual. The first time I heard it mentioned was in the 1980s, and I immediately consulted Sir John Gielgud, whose own performance of Jack Worthing in the same play was legendary, and whose knowledge of theatrical lore was encyclopaedic. He replied in his ringing tones: "No-No! Nonsense, absolute nonsense: I would have known".

Bunbury

Bunbury is a village in Cheshire. Several theories have been advanced to explain Wilde's use of the name to imply a secretive double life. It may have derived from Henry Shirley Bunbury, a hypochondriacal acquaintance of Wilde's youth. Another theory is that Wilde spotted the names of a Captain Bunbury and a magistrate, Mr Bunbury, in The Worthing Gazette in August and September 1894, found the surname pleasing and borrowed it. A suggestion put forward by Aleister Crowley – who knew Wilde – was that Bunbury was a portmanteau word, coined after Wilde had taken a train to Banbury, met a boy there and arranged a second meeting at Sunbury. Carolyn Williams, in a 2010 study, writes that for the word "Bunburying", Wilde "braids the 'Belvawneying' evil eye from Gilbert's Engaged" with Bunthorne from Gilbert (and Sullivan)'s 1881 comic opera Patience.

Use of language

Although Wilde had for several years been famous for dialogue and his use of language, the Wilde scholar Peter Raby has argued that in this play the author achieved unity and mastery unmatched in his other plays, with the possible exception of Salomé. Although the earlier comedies suffer from an unevenness resulting from the thematic clash between the trivial and the serious, The Importance of Being Earnest achieves "a pitch-perfect style" that allows these clashes to dissolve. Raby identifies three different registers in the play: Algernon's exchange with his manservant betraying an underlying unity despite their differing attitudes. The formidable pronouncements of Lady Bracknell are as startling for her use of hyperbole and rhetorical extravagance as for her disconcerting opinions. In contrast, the speech of Dr Chasuble and Miss Prism is distinguished by "pedantic precept" and "idiosyncratic diversion". Furthermore, the play is full of epigrams and paradoxes. Max Beerbohm described it as abounding in "chiselled apothegms – witticisms unrelated to action or character but so good in themselves as to have the quality of dramatic surprise".

Characterisation

Though Wilde deployed characters that were by now familiar – the upper-class dandy, the overbearing matriarch, the woman with a past, the puritanical young lady – his treatment is subtler than in his earlier comedies. Lady Bracknell, for instance, embodies respectable, upper-class society, but Eltis notes how her development "from the familiar overbearing duchess into a quirkier and more disturbing character" can be traced through Wilde's revisions of the play. For the two young men, Wilde presents not stereotypical stage "dudes" but intelligent beings who, as Russell Jackson puts it, "speak like their creator in well-formed complete sentences and rarely use slang or vogue-words". Dr Chasuble and Miss Prism are, in Jackson's view, characterised by "a few light touches of detail", their old-fashioned enthusiasms and the Canon's fastidious pedantry pared down by Wilde during his many redrafts of the text.

Structure and genre

Ransome argues that Wilde freed himself by abandoning the melodrama, the basic structure which underlies his earlier social comedies and basing the story entirely on the Earnest/Ernest verbal conceit. Freed from "living up to any drama more serious than conversation," Wilde could now amuse himself to a fuller extent with quips, bons mots, epigrams, and repartee that really had little to do with the business at hand.

The genre of the Importance of Being Earnest has been debated by scholars and critics alike, who have placed the play within a wide variety of genres ranging from parody to satire. In a 1956 critique Richard Foster argues that the play creates "an 'as if' world in which 'real' values are inverted, reason and unreason are interchanged and the probable defined by improbability". Contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (1997) variously refer to the play as "high farce", "an ostensible farce", "farce with aggressive pranks, quick-paced action and evasion of moral responsibility", and "high comedy".

Publication

First edition

Title pages of the first edition, 1899, with Wilde's name omitted from the first page, and the dedication to Robbie Ross on the second

Wilde's two final comedies, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were still on stage in London at the time of his prosecution, and they were soon closed as the details of his case became public. After two years in prison with hard labour, Wilde went into exile in Paris, sick and depressed, his reputation destroyed in England. In 1898, when no one else would, Leonard Smithers agreed with Wilde to publish the two final plays. Wilde proved to be a diligent reviser, sending detailed instructions on stage directions, character listings, and the book's presentation and insisting that a playbill from the first performance be reproduced inside. Ellmann argues that the proofs show a man "very much in command of himself and of the play". Wilde's name did not appear on the cover, it was "By the Author of Lady Windermere's Fan". His return to work was brief though, as he refused to write anything else, "I can write, but have lost the joy of writing".

On 19 October 2007, a first edition (number 349 of 1,000) was discovered inside a handbag in an Oxfam shop in Nantwich, Cheshire. The staff were unable to trace the donor. It was sold for £650.

In translation

The Importance of Being Earnest's popularity has meant it has been translated into many languages, though the homophonous pun in the title ("Ernest", a masculine proper name, and "earnest", the virtue of steadfastness and seriousness) poses a special problem for translators. The easiest case of a suitable translation of the pun, perpetuating its sense and meaning, may have been its translation into German. Since English and German are closely related languages, German provides an equivalent adjective ("ernst") and also a matching masculine proper name ("Ernst"). The meaning and tenor of the wordplay are exactly the same. Yet there are many different possible titles in German, mostly concerning sentence structure. The two most common ones are "Bunbury oder ernst / Ernst sein ist alles" and "Bunbury oder wie wichtig es ist, ernst / Ernst zu sein". In a study of Italian translations, Adrian Pablé found thirteen different versions using eight titles. Since wordplay is often unique to the language in question, translators are faced with a choice of either staying faithful to the original – in this case, the English adjective and virtue earnest – or creating a similar pun in their own language.

Wilde, drawn in 1896 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Translators have used four main strategies. The first leaves all characters' names unchanged and in their original spelling: thus, the name is respected, and readers are reminded of the original cultural setting, but the liveliness of the pun is lost. Eva Malagoli varied this source-oriented approach by using both the English Christian names and the adjective earnest, thus preserving the pun and the English character of the play, but possibly straining an Italian reader. A third group of translators replaced Ernest with a name that also represents a virtue in the target language, favouring transparency for readers in translation over fidelity to the original. For instance, in Italian, these versions variously call the play L'importanza di essere Franco/Severo/Fedele, the given names being respectively the values of honesty, propriety, and loyalty. French offers a closer pun: "Constant" is both a first name and the quality of steadfastness, so the play is commonly known as De l'importance d'être Constant, although Jean Anouilh translated the play under the title: Il est important d'être Aimé ("Aimé" is a name which also means "beloved"). These translators differ in their attitude to the original English honorific titles, some change them all or none, but most leave a mix partially as a compensation for the added loss of Englishness. Lastly, one translation gave the name an Italianate touch by rendering it as Ernesto; this work liberally mixed proper nouns from both languages.

Adaptations

See also: Music based on the works of Oscar Wilde

Film

Main articles: The Importance of Being Earnest (1952 film), The Importance of Being Earnest (1992 film), and The Importance of Being Earnest (2002 film)

The Importance of Being Earnest has been adapted for the English-language cinema at least three times, first in 1952 by Anthony Asquith who adapted the screenplay and directed it. The cast included Michael Denison (Algernon), Michael Redgrave (Jack), Edith Evans (Lady Bracknell), Dorothy Tutin (Cecily), Joan Greenwood (Gwendolen), Margaret Rutherford (Miss Prism), and Miles Malleson (Dr Chasuble).

In 1992 Kurt Baker directed a version using an all-black cast with Daryl Keith Roach as Jack, Wren T. Brown as Algernon, Ann Weldon as Lady Bracknell, Lanei Chapman as Cecily, Chris Calloway as Gwendolen, CCH Pounder as Miss Prism, and Brock Peters as Dr Chasuble, set in the United States.

In 2002 Oliver Parker, a director who had previously adapted An Ideal Husband by Wilde, made another film. It stars Colin Firth (Jack), Rupert Everett (Algernon), Judi Dench (Lady Bracknell), Reese Witherspoon (Cecily), Frances O'Connor (Gwendolen), Anna Massey (Miss Prism), and Tom Wilkinson (Canon Chasuble). Parker interpolated about twenty lines of his own into the script and restored the episode cut by Wilde before the premiere, in which a solicitor attempts to serve a write on the supposed Ernest.

A 2008 Telugu language romantic comedy film, titled Ashta Chamma, is an adaptation of the play.

Operas and musicals

In 1963 Erik Chisholm composed an opera from the play, basing the libretto on Wilde's text. In 1964 Gerd Natschinski composed a musical, Mein Freund Bunbury, based on the play.

According to a study by Robert Tanitch, by 2002, there had been at least eight adaptations of the play as a musical, though "never with conspicuous success". The earliest such version was a 1927 American show entitled Oh Earnest. The journalist Mark Bostridge comments, "The libretto of a 1957 musical adaptation, Half in Earnest, deposited in the British Library, is scarcely more encouraging. The curtain rises on Algernon, strumming away at the piano, singing, 'I can play Chopsticks, Lane'. Other songs include 'A Bunburying I Must Go'". Since Bostridge wrote his article, at least one further musical version of the play had been staged: a show with a book by Douglas Livingstone and score by Adam McGuinness and Zia Moranne was staged in December 2011 at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith; the cast included Susie Blake, Gyles Brandreth and Edward Petherbridge.

Gerald Barry created the 2011 opera The Importance of Being Earnest, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Barbican Centre in London. It premiered in Los Angeles in 2011. The role of Lady Bracknell is sung by a bass. The stage premiere was given by the Opéra national de Lorraine in Nancy, France in 2013. A 2012 concert performance was recorded live at the Barbican by the BBC and released commercially in 2014.

In 2017 Odyssey Opera of Boston presented a fully staged production of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's opera The Importance of Being Earnest as part of their Wilde Opera Nights series, which was a season-long exploration of operatic works inspired by the writings and world of Oscar Wilde.

Stage pastiche

Tom Stoppard's 1974 stage comedy Travesties draws extensively on Wilde's play. Stoppard's central character, Henry Carr, was a real-life figure who played Algernon in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest produced by James Joyce in Zurich in 1917. Stoppard reimagines him as an old man, reminiscing about the production and his days as a young man. The other characters include Carr's sister Gwendolen and the local librarian, Cecily; the action of the play, under the erratic control of the old Carr's fallible memory, continually mirrors that in Wilde's original. Carr has an exchange with Tristan Tzara reminiscent of John Worthing's exchanges with Algernon, Tzara has a scene with Joyce that draws on Jack's interview with Lady Bracknell, and Gwendolen and Cecily have a falling out on the lines of that of their namesakes in Wilde's play (though to the tune of "Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean" rather than in prose).

In 2016 the Irish actor/writers Helen Norton and Jonathan White wrote the comic play To Hell in a Handbag which retells the story of The Importance from the point of view of the characters Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism, giving them their own back story and showing what happens to them when they are not on stage in Wilde's play.

Radio and television

There have been many radio versions of the play. In 1925 the BBC broadcast an adaptation with Hesketh Pearson as Jack Worthing. Further broadcasts of the play followed during the 1920s and 1930s, and in November 1937 the BBC broadcast the first television adaptation of the play, in an abridged version directed by Royston Morley. In 1942 BBC radio broadcast scenes from the play, featuring two members of the original cast: the programme was introduced by Allan Aynesworth and starred Irene Vanbrugh as Lady Bracknell. A 1951 broadcast of the complete play starred Gielgud, Evans and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies.

A 1964 commercial television adaptation starred Ian Carmichael, Patrick Macnee, Susannah York, Fenella Fielding, Pamela Brown and Irene Handl. A BBC television version in 1974 starred Coral Browne as Lady Bracknell. In 1977 BBC Radio 4 broadcast the four-act version of the play for the first time, with Fabia Drake as Lady Bracknell, Richard Pasco as Jack, Jeremy Clyde as Algy, Maurice Denham as Canon Chasuble, Sylvia Coleridge as Miss Prism, Barbara Leigh-Hunt as Gwendolen and Prunella Scales as Cecily. In 1988 a production of the four-act version was broadcast on BBC television, starring Joan Plowright, Paul McGann, Gemma Jones and Alec McCowen.

To mark the centenary of the first performance of the play, Radio 4 broadcast a new adaptation on 13 February 1995; directed by Glyn Dearman, it featured Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell, Michael Sheen as Jack, Martin Clunes as Algernon, John Moffatt as Dr Chasuble, Miriam Margolyes as Miss Prism, Samantha Bond as Gwendolen and Amanda Root as Cecily. In December 2000 BBC Radio 3 broadcast a new adaptation directed by Howard Davies starring Geraldine McEwan as Lady Bracknell, Simon Russell Beale as Jack Worthing, Julian Wadham as Algernon Moncrieff, Geoffrey Palmer as Canon Chasuble, Celia Imrie as Miss Prism, Victoria Hamilton as Gwendolen and Emma Fielding as Cecily.

Commercial recordings

Gielgud's performance is preserved on an EMI audio recording dating from 1952, which also captures Edith Evans's Lady Bracknell. The cast also includes Roland Culver (Algernon), Jean Cadell (Miss Prism), Pamela Brown (Gwendolen), and Celia Johnson (Cecily).

Other audio recordings include a "Theatre Masterworks" version from 1953, directed and narrated by Margaret Webster, with a cast including Maurice Evans, Lucile Watson and Mildred Natwick; a 1989 version by California Artists Radio Theatre, featuring Dan O'Herlihy, Jeanette Nolan, Les Tremayne and Richard Erdman; and one by L.A. Theatre Works issued in 2009, featuring Charles Busch, James Marsters and Andrea Bowen.

Notes, references and sources

Sources

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• Annan, Noel (1990). Our Age: Portrait of a Generation. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-81129-9.
• Anouilh, Jean (1955) [1953]. Il est important d'être Aimé (in French). Paris: L'Avant-scène. OCLC 491201775.
• Atkinson, Julia (July 2015). "An Author Not Just Now Familiar to Ears Polite". The Wildean, A Journal of the Oscar Wilde Society (47).(subscription required)
• Barry, Gerald (2013). The Importance of Being Earnest: Opera in Three Acts. Mainz: Schott. OCLC 828858722.
• Beckson, Karl E. (1970). Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7100-6929-0.
• Beerbohm, Max (1970). Last Theatres 1904–1910. London: Hart-Davis. OCLC 622626394.
• Bloom, Harold (2008). Oscar Wilde. Bloom's Literary Criticism. New York: Infobase. ISBN 978-1-60413-140-6.
• Bristow, Joseph (2008). Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture – The Making of a Legend. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. ISBN 978-0-8214-1838-3.
• Cave, Richard (1997). "Wilde's Plays". In Peter Raby (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52-147987-5.
• Craft, Christopher (Summer 1990). "Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest". Representations (31): 19–46. (subscription required)
• Croall, Jonathan (2000). Gielgud: A Theatrical Life, 1904–2000. London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0-41-374560-6.
• Danson, Lawrence (1997). "Wilde as Critic and Theorist". In Peter Raby (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52-147987-5.
• D'Arch Smith, Timothy (1998). Bunbury: Two Notes on Oscar Wilde. Bicary: The Winged Lion. OCLC 41155817.
• Denisoff, Dennis (2001). Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-02489-1.
• Dennis, Richard (2008). Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-46841-1.
• Ellmann, Richard (1988). Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-026501-9.
• Eltis, Sos (1996). Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-812183-1.
• Ekwall, Eilert (1960). Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-869103-7.
• Gielgud, John (1979). An Actor and His Time. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. ISBN 978-0-28-398573-7.
• Gielgud, John (2004). Richard Mangan (ed.). Gielgud's Letters. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-29-782989-8.
• Hall, Peter (1983). Diaries 1972–1980. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 978-0-241-11285-4.
• Hayman, Ronald (1971). Gielgud. London: Heinemann. ISBN 978-0-43-518400-1.
• Hischak, Thomas S. (2009). Broadway Plays and Musicals: Descriptions and Essential Facts of More Than 14,000 Shows Through 2007. Jefferson: McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-5309-2 – via Google books.
• Hudson, Lynton (1951). The English Stage, 1850–1950. London: Harrap. OCLC 1851518.
• Jackson, Russell (1997). "The Importance of Being Earnest". In Peter Raby (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47987-5.
• Jackson, Russell (2000) [1980]. "Introduction". The Importance of Being Earnest. London: A & C Black. ISBN 978-0-7136-3040-4.
• Koerble, Betty (1952). W. S. Gilbert and Oscar Wilde: A Comparative Study. Madison: University of Wisconsin. OCLC 55806177.
• Lyttelton, George; Rupert Hart-Davis (1981). Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.). The Lyttelton–Hart-Davis Letters, Volume Three. London: John Murray. ISBN 978-0-7195-3770-7.
• Mason, Stuart (1972) [1917]. Bibliography of Oscar Wilde. New York: Haskell House. ISBN 978-0-8383-1378-7.
• Minney, R. J. (1976). The Films of Anthony Asquith. South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes. ISBN 978-0-49-801558-8.
• Nicholson, John Gambril (1892). Love in Earnest – Sonnets, Ballades, and Lyrics. London: Elliot Stock. OCLC 8575205.
• Pablé, Adrian (2005). "The Importance of Renaming Ernest? Italian Translations of Oscar Wilde". Target. 17 (2). John Benjamins: 297–326.
• Pearson, Hesketh (1946). The Life of Oscar Wilde. London: Methuen and Co Ltd.
• Raby, Peter (1988). Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-26078-7.
• Raby, Peter (1995). The Importance of Being Earnest: A Reader's Companion. New York: Twayne. ISBN 978-0-8057-8588-3.
• Raby, Peter (1997). "Wilde's Comedies of Society". In Peter Raby (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52-147987-5.
• Ransome, Arthur (1912). Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study. New York: Mitchell Kennerly.
• Sandulescu, Constantin-George, ed. (1994). Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Gerrards Cross: C. Smythe. ISBN 978-0-86140-376-9.
• Stedman, Jane W. (1996). W. S. Gilbert, A Classic Victorian & his Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-816174-5.
• Stoppard, Tom (2017) [1975]. Travesties (third ed.). London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-33925-9.
• Thomson, Peter (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-54790-1.
• Wilde, Oscar (1962). Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.). The Letters of Oscar Wilde. London: Hart-Davis. OCLC 460734743.
• Wilde, Oscar (2000) [1980]. Russell Jackson (ed.). The Importance of Being Earnest. London: A & C Black. ISBN 978-0-7136-3040-4.
• Wilde, Oscar (2003). Merlin Holland (ed.). Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters. London and New York: Fourth Estate. ISBN 978-0-00-716103-4.
• Williams, Carolyn (2012) [2010]. Gilbert and Sullivan – Gender, Genre, Parody. New York & Chichester: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-14805-4.

External links

• The Importance of Being Earnest at Project Gutenberg — Kindle, EPUB, and txt files
• Importance of being Earnest. historical radio adaptation. Internet Archive (audio rec.). Theatre Guild on the Air. 1947.
• ​The Importance of Being Earnest​ at the Internet Broadway Database — performance history, cast lists, awards received
• "Importance of being Earnest". Tech Rigid (techrigid.com). Archived from the original on 24 August 2022.
• "The Importance of Being Earnest playscript" (PDF). Wikimedia commons (wikimedia.org). 12 October 2015. — printable PDF version, for paper size A4
• "The Importance of Being Earnest". British Library (bl.uk). Archived from the original on 7 September 2014. — early draft manuscript at the British Library
• The Importance of Being Earnest public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• "The Importance of Being Earnest". Victoria and Albert Museum (vam.ac.uk).