Oscar Wilde · 1895
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is the masterpiece of the late-Victorian comedy of manners and the most quotable play in English. Subtitled "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People," it was first performed at the St James's Theatre on 14 February 1895 — three months before the trials that would destroy Wilde's life and end his career. The play is at once a perfect example of its genre and a sustained quiet attack on the moral seriousness of its audience.
Two young Victorian gentlemen, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, each maintain a fictional alter ego they can "become" when they wish to escape social obligations. Jack, who lives in the country as a responsible guardian, has invented a wicked younger brother "Ernest" who lives in London and requires occasional supervisory visits. Algernon, who lives in London, has invented an invalid friend "Bunbury" who lives in the country and requires periodic care.
Both young women in the play — Gwendolen and Cecily — have, independently, declared that they could only marry a man named Ernest. The plot is the unfolding of the men's lies and the women's improbable matching attachment to the name.
The play is the late-period perfection of the comedy of manners — a genre dating back to Restoration England (Congreve, Wycherley) that satirises the conventions of upper-class social life. The genre's conventions:
Wilde mastered every convention and tilted each into something slightly more extreme. The verbal precision is greater; the characters are more obviously preposterous; the moral satire is less hidden.
The play's dialogue is built almost entirely of epigrams and paradoxes. The density is unusual:
Each is a polished antithesis or paradox. The structural joke: the moral substance of late-Victorian respectability has been replaced, in this society, by the polished surface of how things are said. The play is criticising the substitution while exploiting it.
Lady Bracknell — Gwendolen's formidable mother and the play's great comic monster — is one of the most performed character roles in English drama. Her interrogation of Jack about his suitability to marry her daughter is the play's most quoted scene: Jack reveals that he was found in a handbag at Victoria Station, and Lady Bracknell delivers her famous line: "A handbag?"
The character is the play's portrait of the late-Victorian upper class's reduction of all human qualities to marketable assets. She approves of Jack's smoking ("a man should always have an occupation of some kind"); she approves of his ignorance ("ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit — touch it and the bloom is gone"); she disapproves of his mysterious parentage. The character is funny because she is internally consistent; her values are perfectly clear and perfectly horrible.
Act 2's most famous comic scene — Jack and Algernon arguing about who has the moral right to eat the muffins — is the play's signature high-low collision. Two grown men are sincerely arguing over teacakes while their entire romantic prospects are collapsing offstage. The collision of trivial subject and theatrical seriousness is the play's central comic device, miniaturised.
The subtitle — "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People" — is the play's quiet manifesto. The trivial is the comedy's surface (cucumber sandwiches, the lost handbag, the muffin fight); the serious are the audience members who are meant to recognise themselves in the satire. The play claims to be trivial; the claim is itself the play's deepest self-protection.
Wilde was famously suspicious of moral seriousness as a literary virtue. His preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray says it directly: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book." The play's subtitle is the dramatic version of the same claim.
The play's central pun depends on "earnest" being both a name and an adjective. The women claim to love only a man named Ernest. The play's title puts the trait — earnestness, moral seriousness, sincerity — in italicised opposition to the trivial comedy that follows. The pun is the play's entire thesis: that in this society, the name matters more than the trait, and the trait itself has become a kind of public performance.
This is itself the same critique Wilde made in Dorian Gray — surfaces have replaced substance — but delivered as comedy rather than horror.
The play opened on 14 February 1895. The Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas, attempted to disrupt the opening night with a bouquet of rotten vegetables; he was prevented. Within three months, Queensberry's libel suit against Wilde, and Wilde's subsequent prosecution for "gross indecency," had destroyed Wilde's career. The play was withdrawn after eighty-three performances. It was Wilde's last major work; he died in 1900 in exile in Paris.
The biographical frame is unavoidable for modern readers. The play that mocks the moral seriousness of its audience was, within months, used by that audience to destroy its author. There is no extra-textual meaning the play didn't contain — the play was always making the case — but historical context changes the texture of how it reads now.
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