The Importance of Being Earnest
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. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest an very popular play.
For other uses, see The Importance of Being Earnest (disambiguation).The Importance of Being Earnest
1895
St. James's Theatre,
London, England
English
Comedy, farce
London, and an estate in Hertfordshire
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'. Wilde's 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.
The Importance of Being Earnest has been revived many times since its premiere. It has been adapted for the cinema on three occasions. In a 1952 film Edith Evans reprised her stage interpretation of Lady Bracknell; a 1992 version directed by Kurt Baker featured an all-black cast; and Oliver Parker's 2002 film incorporated some of Wilde's original material cut during the preparation of the first stage production.
Productions[edit]
Premiere[edit]
The play was first produced at the St James's Theatre on Valentine's Day 1895.[18] It was freezing cold, but Wilde arrived dressed in "florid sobriety", wearing a green carnation.[16] The audience, according to one report, "included many members of the great and good, former cabinet ministers and privy councillors, as well as actors, writers, academics, and enthusiasts".[19] 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".[20] Aynesworth was himself "debonair and stylish", and Alexander, who played Jack Worthing, "demure".[21]
The cast was:
Themes[edit]
Triviality[edit]
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", he wrote, "precisely because it is consistently trivial that it is not ugly."[71] 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.[12] While Salome, An Ideal Husband, and The Picture of Dorian Gray had dwelt on more serious wrongdoing, vice in Earnest is represented by Algy's craving for cucumber sandwiches.[i] 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."[12] 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 has to be serious about something if one is to have any amusement in life", but goes on to reproach Jack for 'being serious about everything'".[73] 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.[12] 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, for instance, Bernard Shaw, who used their characters to draw audiences to grander ideals.[26]
As a satire of society[edit]
The play repeatedly mocks Victorian traditions and social customs, marriage and the pursuit of love in particular.[74] In Victorian times earnestness was considered 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.[75] The play's very title, with its mocking paradox (serious people are so because they do not see trivial comedies), introduces the theme; it continues in the drawing 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," says Algernon in Act I; allusions are quick and come from multiple angles.[73]
Bunburying[edit]
Bunburying is a stratagem used by people who need an excuse to avoid social obligations in their daily lives. The word "bunburying" first appears in Act I when Algernon explains that he invented a fictional friend, a chronic invalid named "Bunbury", to have an excuse for getting out of events he does not wish to attend, particularly with his Aunt Augusta (Lady Bracknell). Algernon and Jack both use this method to secretly visit their lovers, Cecily and Gwendolen.[88][89]
Dramatic analysis[edit]
Use of language[edit]
While Wilde had long been famous for dialogue and his use of language, Raby (1988) argues that he achieved unity and mastery in Earnest that was unmatched in his other plays, except perhaps Salomé. While his earlier comedies suffer from an unevenness resulting from the thematic clash between the trivial and the serious, Earnest achieves a pitch-perfect style that allows these to dissolve.[90] There are three different registers detectable in the play. The dandyish insouciance of Jack and Algernon – established early with Algernon's exchange with his manservant – betrays 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".[90] Furthermore, the play is full of epigrams and paradoxes. Max Beerbohm described it as littered with "chiselled apophthegms – witticisms unrelated to action or character", of which he found half a dozen to be of the highest order.[42]
Lady Bracknell's line, "A handbag?", has been called one of the most malleable in English drama, lending itself to interpretations ranging from incredulous or scandalised to baffled. Edith Evans, both on stage and in the 1952 film, delivered the line loudly in a mixture of horror, incredulity, and condescension.[91] Stockard Channing, in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin in 2010, hushed the line, in a critic's words, "with a barely audible 'A handbag?', rapidly swallowed up with a sharp intake of breath. An understated take, to be sure, but with such a well-known play, packed full of witticisms and aphorisms with a life of their own, it's the little things that make a difference."[92]
Characterisation[edit]
Though Wilde deployed characters that were by now familiar – the dandy lord, the overbearing matriarch, the woman with a past, the puritan 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.[11] 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".[93] Dr. Chasuble and Miss Prism are 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.[93]
Structure and genre[edit]
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.[94]
The genre of the Importance of Being Earnest has been intensely debated by scholars and critics alike, who have placed the play within a wide variety of genres ranging from parody to satire. In his critique of Wilde, Foster argues that the play creates a world where "real values are inverted [and], reason and unreason are interchanged".[95] Similarly, Wilde's use of dialogue mocks the upper classes of Victorian England lending the play a satirical tone.[96] Reinhart further stipulates that the use of farcical humour to mock the upper classes "merits the play both as satire and as drama".[97]