Anticipating a memorable evening in the theatre, the London press sent a full complement of reviewers to the first night of what promised to be the crowning work of Oscar Wilde’s career as a dramatist. Many of them attended the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest, at the St James’s Theatre in King Street, St James’s, on 14 February 1895, while others attended subsequent performances. The lessee and manager of the St. James’s, George Alexander, now in his fourth year of professional management, had set a very high standard of production at this gem of a venue, a short walk away from its chief competitor, the Haymarket Theatre, long a fixture on the eastern side of that thoroughfare. Its clientele included the cream of society, and occasionally even Edward, Prince of Wales and his entourage, in boxes and stalls, as well as a prosperous middle class and a lower class as well, swelling the pit at the back of the stalls—comfortable, armed seats upholstered in red velvet—and the gallery above, where even the benches had demarcations that allowed proper space for sitting, avoiding overcrowding. Many of these critics were seasoned journalists, veterans of a thriving scene that in the last few decades had witnessed the gradual return of an aristocratic, moneyed class of patrons to the theatres of the West End and a consequent rise in the level of sophisticated subject matter, along with a greater influx of upper-class characters onto the stage as well.
Critics and audience alike all thought they knew what to expect. After all, many of them had been among the patrons of the previous play by Wilde produced by Alexander at this theatre, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in 1892, and had joined the crowd that peopled the Haymarket, twice—in 1893 for Wilde’s second comedy-drama, A Woman of No Importance, and, just over a month before this night, in early January 1895, for An Ideal Husband. That most recent play had been the third instance of this celebrated dramatist’s successful venture into semi-serious comedy. Most of these patrons would have been regular theatregoers, for it was almost a social rule, born of long experience, that those who attend the theatre at all do so often; others, seldom or not at all. Representatives of the press would have blended well into this group of constant playgoers—and were in fact an essential component of that group themselves.
Journalists who made up the majority of these writers were joined by persons whose claim to literary or other notice did not depend exclusively on a workaday occupation as reviewer. Some were as well known as William Archer, the critic for The World and a major observer and chronicler of the contemporary theatrical scene. Writing almost a week after opening night, Archer responded on a note of genuine enthusiasm, throwing up his hands in mock despair and exclaiming, ‘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 wonderful expression of an irrepressibly witty personality?’ He went on in this same lighthearted vein, describing Wilde’s play as a work that ‘imitates nothing, represents nothing, means nothing, is nothing, except a sort of rondo capriccio, in which the artist’s fingers run with crisp irresponsibility up and down the keyboard of life’.[1]
Comments about the quality of the production were almost invariably complimentary, even where the writer felt free to criticize and qualify. George Alexander’s was a management that could mount Wilde’s play ‘as though it were a masterpiece’ and could bring to it acting that constituted ‘the very best of interpretation‘, said the critic for the Era. The result was ‘as bright and merry a piece of clever folly as ever was put on our stage’. Alexander’s performance as John Worthing was played exactly as it should be, ‘with entire seriousness and no indication of purposed irony‘, another reviewer explained. The consequent laughter was intermittent from the rise of the curtain to its fall.[2] In fact, it could be said that Alexander’s hero manifested ‘an air of conviction and sincerity . . . almost plaintive‘, confident he had the constant support of an audience that ‘never ceases to laugh at his extravagances’.[3]
A number of reviewers offered detailed comments about the tone of the production. The writer for The Observer emphasized how fanciful Wilde’s characters were, although clothed ‘in the irreproachable frock-coats of contemporary civilization’. His lady-like heroines were unmistakably ‘creatures of burlesque‘, despite their ‘garb of fairy queens’. Among this delightful assembly, bearing the unmistakable marks of Gilbertian extravaganza, only two seemed related to comedy, namely, the ‘cynical dowager’ Lady Bracknell and the ‘cynical man-servant Lane‘, whose characteristic language nevertheless remained in the same key.[4]
Observations about the play as the offspring of a complex ‘man of many moods’ sometimes became personal observations that hinted at unplumbed depths, as in the untypical perception of the acerbic critic for the Lady’s Pictorial, who called Wilde ‘a fin de siècle Figaro‘, a figure ‘making haste to laugh lest he should be compelled to weep’. Alluding to Wilde’s fashionable London address, the writer observed that he was no more than ‘a Tite Street Joe Miller . . . stuffed to the lips with jokes, ancient and modern‘, ranging as far as ‘the airiest persiflage of contemporary drawing rooms.‘ The play is ‘absolutely devoid of human interest‘, the writer concluded, paradoxically allowing him to fashion characters who can ‘give off his verbal flashes’ without laying him open to the charge of ‘outraging his production for the sake of verbal effect’. And so he has succeeded in ‘hiding the bare bones of the dramatic skeleton’ under ‘a multicoloured garment of intellectual shreds and patches’. Ringing echoes of Hamlet and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado intrude into these petulant observations, though they can be compared with other, less extreme or even more positive comments about the author and his status as a celebrity.
Other reviewers also focussed on the intrusive presence of the author. The writer for Truth, noting that certain critics attribute Wilde’s success ‘to the savour of well-bred insolence’ that he sends across the footlights, reveals his own conviction that the reason the play is so amusing is that ‘it is so completely dominated by its author’. Instead of exhibiting individual characterizations, all the dramatis personae, from heroes to butlers, ‘talk pure and undiluted Wildese’.[5]
Some critics, however, including H. G. Wells, were more directly interested in gauging the impact of Wilde’s farcical comedy on the St James’s audience. Writing in the Pall Mall Gazette the day after opening night, Wells took as his theme the paradoxical subtitle of the play, as printed in the program: ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’. Thomas Carlyle, Wells points out, has advanced the idea that the majority of the population are Serious People, but how such persons are to take a trivial comedy ‘written for their learning’ remains to be seen. ‘No doubt seriously‘, he ventured. He had overheard comments from the audience that put him in doubt of the possibilities of enlightenment:
One last night thought that the bag incident was a ‘little far-fetched’. Moreover, he could not see how the bag and the baby got to Victoria Station (L. B. and S. C. R. Station) while the manuscript and perambulator turned up ‘at the summit of Primrose Hill’. Why the summit? Such difficulties, said the serious person, rob a play of ‘convincingness’.
“That is one serious person disposed of, at any rate‘, Wells concluded.[6]
A. B. Walkley, seasoned reviewer for two metropolitan journals, saw right to the centre of Wilde’s play. The delight of it, he explained, is caused by the presentation of people seemingly engaged in the business of life and yet behaving as if their responsibilities did not exist. They dwell in a world that takes ‘the sting out of life’ and substitutes the ‘joy of living’ for the ‘will to live’. The result is a pervasive sense of gaiety as the ‘one great necessity of existence’. The personages of the play act precisely like children, and yet the nonsense they exhibit is not childlike, not something they may outgrow, but ‘something inherent, the very fibre of their beings’. It amounts to ‘their settled view of the cosmos’.[7] Meanwhile, the reviewer for the Sunday Times was content simply to revel in the pleasure of the setting for Act II, citing ‘the red-walled garden, with its creamy Marshall Niels and gay pink rosebuds’, the handsome house overlooking the flower gardens, and the landscape stretching out in the distance, the village church tower rising in its midst, ‘dominant, oblong, established’.[8]
A number of reviews emphasized a varying perception of the dramatic genre into which The Importance of Being Earnest might be said to fall, effectively conducting a virtual running debate. Not a few writers acknowledged the play to be a farce, often a ‘classic’ farce, but almost as many observed that the third act degenerated into something else. The reviewer for The Graphic, for instance, describing what he had seen as an ‘incursion into the domain of pure farce‘, found that the spirit of this genre achieved ‘a certain high tide of movement’, but only as far as the end of the second act.[9] Some writers chose to describe this generic progression as a turn toward burlesque or extravaganza. The latter term would fall out of fashion in later times, but in the day of Wilde and Shaw, and of W. S. Gilbert too, for that matter, as well as the earlier day of James Robinson Planché (the first English dramatist to explore the extensive possibilities of the extravaganza), it was alive and well, and frequently linked to the notion of burlesque. Martin Meisel, whose book on Shaw and the theatre of his time sets an authoritative standard for inquiry into the various dramatic genres that populated the stage of that period, explains that extravaganza ‘was rooted in burlesque, that is, in the light and irreverent treatment of a heroic subject’.[10] He goes on to cite William Archer’s review of Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1894), in which Archer distinguishes between a straightforward farce such as Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt and Shaw’s play, in which the spectator should perceive ‘a fantastic, psychological extravaganza, in which drama, farce, and Gilbertian irony keep flashing past the bewildered eye’. The second and third acts of Arms and the Man, Archer explains, are ‘bright, clever, superficially cynical extravaganza’.[11] Useful as the term was to describe the dramatic operation of a light-hearted, whimsical treatment of inherently more serious subject matter, it was, as Meisel points out, ‘difficult to keep within the bounds of a definition’. The critic for The Realm pointed out that there is not one single word provided by the ‘nomenclature’ of dramatic kinds that is suitable to describe Wilde’s play. Not a conventional comedy, nor in practical terms a farce, it borrows from both of those types, and so may be accurately described ‘as an extravaganza’.[12]
What critics of the first production of The Importance of Being Earnest would seem to indicate by describing the third act of the play as descending into extravaganza was a perception that the progression served to muddy the waters of generic clarity. Some critics used the term ‘burlesque’ to indicate essentially the same thing. Somehow, the clear farcical profile of the first two acts had been compromised, they thought, by subsequent efforts on the dramatist’s part to make fun of plays that depict the revelation of upper-class ancestry and to overturn Jack’s long pretense of being someone other than who he was by revealing that he had been telling the truth all the while. That’s to say, the consequences of Wilde’s eleventh-hour witty inversion of the standard devices of melodramatic plotting, along with the additional identification of a mere handbag as the material proof of Jack’s paternity, caused intermittent confusion for critics long accustomed to a playwright’s adherence to what they may have felt was rigorous if not ironclad convention. The play is amusing but put together badly, said the writer for the Weekly Times & Echo, and so it strikes the audience as ‘an incongruous mixture of comedy, farce and burlesque’. It ‘falls to pieces’ in the course of the second act, and so the third act emerges as no more than a ‘close imitation’ of W. S. Gilbert.[13]
Dramatic genre was evidently a primary issue. The writer for The Realm was at great pains to tease out the generic implications of his disappointment. It was not just that the third act fell off, descending to the level of ‘the old Strand farce’. The opening of the play had an excellence that was not maintained; it seemed that the action had been ‘wound up in a hurry’—and yet it was good in itself. Part of the problem was that the character of John Worthing is ‘too melodramatic’: his violent excitement ran contrary to the genius of the play, whose essential character seemed to be more like ‘phlegmatic indifference’ and entailed a ‘continuous suppression of the emotions’ out of obedience to social decorum. Finally, what caused the stalls and the pit to unite in ‘a continuous ebullition of merriment’ through the first two acts was unfortunately not sustained in the third. No one is moved by it, the reviewer concluded, still at a loss to define his own unhappiness.[14]
The critic for the Illustrated London News noted the difficulty, even while admitting that the dramatist had triumphed over it:
The author has very adroitly provided fun for people who laugh easily and for people who are more fastidious. It is not everybody who, having been told that the hero was found when a baby in a black bag in a cloak-room at a railway-station, is eager to see the bag. On the other hand, there are humorists who do not fully grasp this entertaining idea till the bag is presented to their gaze.[15]
One of the more astute of writers who covered this first production, A. B. Walkley, commented in ways that reflected his perception of how crucial an audience’s response is to our understanding of the genre of farce (or any other, for that matter). The quality of laughter has improved over the course of civilization, Walkley asserted. Molière’s Tartuffe and Shakespeare’s Shylock were originally comic creatures, he argues, and it is only we moderns who have made them into ‘serious personages’. All the same, our laughter is of higher quality, now that we have abandoned realism for fantasy. Recent years have seen great improvement in the art of writing farce. Pinero, author of The Magistrate and other such works, and Gilbert too, were pioneers of the movement, although realistic side-references to life occasionally occurred, mingling ‘a little contempt with the laughter’. Pinero’s farces, all of which present ‘the infliction of indignities on a dignitary‘, cannot be considered ‘wholly joyous’. And as for Gilbert, Walkley observes, he makes us laugh out of the wrong side of our mouths; his Engaged is ‘as grim as The Duchess of Malfi’. But now we have a play whose merit is that ‘the laughter it excites is absolutely free from bitter afterthought’. Wilde gives us ridiculous personages, but—an important distinction—‘he does not ridicule them’. We laugh at their conduct ‘for its sheer whimsicality’. In this real yet fantastic world, Walkley concludes, the difference is that what has been taken out is common sense: we have ‘fallen among amiable, gay, and witty lunatics’.[16]
The task of assessing the nature of dramatic genre by gauging its effect on the audience drew the interest of another critic also, the writer for Woman: A Paper for Gentlewomen. The author calls his play a comedy, the writer said, but it is neither a comedy, nor a farce, nor a burlesque, but ‘a delicate compound of these three‘, now one, now another. Throughout, the action creates an atmosphere of ‘superb nonsense‘, often reflecting a deliberate intention to ‘burlesque the Pinero-Jones-Wilde school of drama’. The scene in the last act between Jack and Miss Prism, whom he first imagines to be his erring mother, is ‘pure burlesque of a very high order’:
‘Why‘, says John, running over with virtue and forgiveness for a disgraced parent, ‘Why should there be one law for a man and another for a woman?’ This, and the indescribable look on Miss Prism’s face, very properly brought the house down.[17]
The critic for the National Observer congratulated Oscar Wilde on having at last ‘found himself‘, forsaking the pose of a social philosopher in favor of the character of a ‘conscious and deliberate farceur’. What sort of play does the author of a trivial comedy, much more trivial than comic, produce? A work whose ingredients amount to ‘undisguised and intentional burlesque’.<note:National Observer, 23 February 1895, 398.> Generally agreeing that the play fell into the category of farce, the writer for the Sunday Times nevertheless took a more idiosyncratic view toward the generic identity of the play. There was ‘an exquisite eighteenth-century lightness and unreality’ about it that drew him to identify it as ‘a farce in pointlace’. Alan Aynesworth, as Algy, was a suitable character in this context, an ‘admirable anachronism’ who moved through the play like some eighteenth century ‘Sir Fopling Flutter’.[18]
While a number of them advanced opinions on the genre of the play, many critics also made sure to identify what they believed were the most memorable scenes. The Act II entrance of John Worthing, dressed in the depths of mourning, down even to his cane, took an unofficial prize as the single most successful moment of the play. As planned in conversation with Algy in Act I, Jack has arrived in order to announce the demise of his imaginary brother Ernest, even while the audience is well aware that a false but undeniable Ernest, impersonated by the Bunburying Algy, is at this very moment in the house making love to Cecily. Archer describes the gradual but sure response to Jack’s entrance:
The audience does not instantly awaken to the meaning of his inky suit, but even as he marches solemnly down the stage, and before a word is spoken, you can feel the idea kindling from row to row, until a ‘sudden glory’ of laughter fills the theatre.[19]
Archer’s reference is to the theory of laughter propounded by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, where he explains that “Sudden Glory, is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves” [20]
A ‘murmur of merriment’ is heard in the sequence that directly follows the entrance, when Cecily, having greeted her uncle Jack with some surprise at his somber costume, returns to the house and brings out the irrepressible Algy, who maintains the ruse with colossal sangfroid— at which point the murmur ‘grows into a roar of laughter’ as Jack is confronted by an Ernest ‘whom he dares not denounce as an imposter, lest his own imposition should be proclaimed’.[21] The writer for The Graphic describes the encounter as ‘a capital piece of farcical drollery‘.[22] The critic for the National Observer said that the scene illustrates Wilde’s ‘natural aptitude for farce’.[23]
Other scenes were singled out for their farcical excellence as well. Toward the end of Act I, when the post arrives, Alan Aynesworth’s Algy looks at each envelope in turn ‘and throws them, torn in half, in the waste-paper basket’. No amount of words could have more decisively expressed his ‘reckless indifference‘, so well understood by the audience. In this instance, as in others, Aynesworth’s ‘lightness of touch’ was beyond praise.[24] The overall effect, said the critic for the Times, of the plot of the author’s latest play, which is ‘almost too preposterous’ not to be accompanied by music, nevertheless sets a ‘keynote of extravagance’, immediately grasped by the house and resulting in ‘a harmonious whole’. In fact, to be precise, he explained, the tone of the acting was ‘in the right vein of grave extravagance’, to which the audience maintained a constant accompaniment of laughter.[25]
A number of writers were astute enough to describe the ethos of the acting that distinguished the work of George Alexander and Alan Aynesworth but extended to the expert playing of the other actors as well. The critic for the Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News explained that what brings out the form of the piece so admirably is ‘the perfectly serious and sincere embodiment of the two young men’.[26] In contrast, H. G. Wells believed that it was the proper business of the actors to make fun of conventional play-acting, just as the author’s business was to mock conventional playwriting. Wells took Alexander to task for not playing the role of John Worthing ‘with the infinite seriousness of common comedy’. It would have been irresistible, he explained, to have seen Alexander making ‘frowns and starts at his guilty secret, brow-clasping remorse, and crescendo emotion’.[27] Evidently, Alexander’s approach was entirely different, evincing ‘a fund of sly, quaint humor’ in the style of Charles Wyndham himself. In a consistent and similar way, Rose LeClercq’s Lady Bracknell depicted a ‘pungent worldly mother’ with ‘her wonted aristocratic style and presence’. Mrs. Canninge as Miss Prism offered in effective contrast an embodiment of an ‘ultra-pious Puritan old maid’. H. H. Vincent acted the village rector in a ‘plausible’ way, with ‘smug sanctimony’. And Frank Dyall presented a butler acted ‘with dry quaintness’.[28] The critic for The Sketch praised George Alexander for so cleverly playing ‘a Charles Hawtrey part’, adding that with the exception of Rose Leclercq the rest of the actors were a bit too heavy: their style is presently ‘not sufficiently crisp and light’.[29]
All the same, reviewers appreciated the ‘superexcellent’ performances of the two male leads, commending Aynesworth’s ‘lightness of touch’ and Alexander’s complete freedom from exaggeration. It was unusual, the writer for The Realm added, to see the two men ‘at once engaged in a conversation of apparently unconscious flippancy’.[30] In fact, all the actors brought to these extravagant characterizations ‘an effective touch of sincerity’. More than one writer described Alexander’s acting as ‘demure‘, the reviewer for the Sunday Times explaining that it amounted to ‘a perfect and exhaustive definition of the word’.[31] It was highly diverting to observe the ‘admirable burlesque sincerity’ of Irene Vanbrugh and Evelyn Millard, as well as the effective contrast between Alexander’s ‘drolly grim earnestness’ and Aynesworth’s ‘agreeable lightness of touch’. And H. H. Vincent deserved praise for struggling bravely with the role of ‘a more than usually imbecile stage clergy-man’.[32]
Reviewer after reviewer took pains to compliment the cast for capturing just the right style of acting. Alexander’s ‘mock heroics’ and ‘serious acceptance of wildly farcical situations’ identify him as a comedian ‘of almost the first rank’ (one wonders about this reviewer’s chariness of praise), while Aynesworth’s ‘delightfully debonair’ Algy says innumerable funny things ‘with an air of absolute unconsciousness’. Evelyn Millard looks like an eighteenth-century painterly masterpiece, while Irene Vanbrugh fully captures the ‘Gilbertian, topsy-turvy fun of Gwendolyn Fairfax’. Alongside them, Mrs. Canninge’s Miss Prism, the ‘emotional and sentimental middle-aged governess’, registers in ‘the true vein of burlesque’.[33]
The resulting success of the play was widely noted, even by critics who chose to cavil over some one defect or other. It was clear that the author had caught ‘the taste of the pit and gallery‘, as well as ‘the approval of the stalls and boxes’. There seemed to be something to treasure or enjoy for every part of the audience:
The people in the humbler parts of the house evidently keenly enjoyed the graphic glimpses which the dramatist gave them of the inner life of those ‘higher ranks‘, with which, as he told an interviewer the other day, he was ‘best acquainted’. They were deeply interested to note that ladies of title specially affect cucumber sandwiches at five o’clock teas, that to take sugar is now considered in smart society quite unfashionable, and that a cake is never seen on the tea-tables of really stylish families. Most thoroughly, too, did they enjoy the prolonged tussle over a plate of muffins, in which the two heroes of the piece bring the second act to so aristocratic an end. Nay, there was even something in the striking modernity of Mr. Allan Aynesworth’s cuffs and the effusive loveliness of Mr. George Alexander’s neckties, which could scarcely fail to be attractive.[34]
If the applause on the first night came predominantly from the gallery, another writer speculated, it was perhaps because the author, instead of following the usual mode of farce and selecting his characters from among the lower classes, ‘places them in the world of fashion’. This was what ‘tickles the fancy of the gallery’ even more so than the ‘brilliant repartee’.[35] In much the same vein, the critic for the Sunday Times asked rhetorically why ‘the lower middle class have all the farces’, since aristocrats are ‘infinitely more absurd, and much nicer to look at’, as in the case of the present piece.[36]
Apart from the pressing question of generic identity, an even more compelling issue for experienced reviewers was the relationship of The Importance of Being Earnest to other, similar plays, canonical or not. What else was it like? What else did it make one think of? The critic for Truth was convinced that the pronounced resonant quality he perceived resulted from the author’s extraordinary memory for other plays he had seen. This St James’s farce ‘is as full of echoes as Prospero’s isle’, he said. He was pleased to tally up the list: echoes of Marivaux, of Meilhac, of Maddison Morton, of W. S. Gilbert, of George Bernard Shaw, and extending even to the humor on the back page of the Family Herald. Clearly, the author had proved himself strong enough a farceur to eschew actual burlesque and the repetitiousness of farce. What he should give us next time should be pure ‘marivauderie’, flavoured with Celtic charm and Wildean extravagance.[37] Another reviewer caught uncomplimentary echoes of the two Dromios who come face to face in The Comedy of Errors.[38] Still another found similarity between the Bunbury device and corresponding devices in earlier plays, notably in James Albery’s Pink Dominos, where the condition of the cotton market in Manchester ‘compelled a flighty gentleman’ to pretend to leave town if he received a telegram that read ‘Keep your eye on Surats’.[39] At the end of the play the discovery by the foundling who had turned up in a black bag that he is really the brother of his friend can be described as ‘à la Box’—that is, in the same way that the dramatic outcome of John Maddison Morton’s mid-century farce Box and Cox brings two long-lost brothers together at last.[40] This same sort of thing is the stuff of ‘many a French vaudeville and English adaptation‘, Archer commented, but the difference is that behind all the whimsical, even perverse tone of the proceedings lurks Wilde’s ‘very genuine science‘, or, more exactly, ‘instinct’ for the theatrical.[41]
The impudent spirit of Bernard Shaw was observed to hover close by, as more than one critic felt it, particularly in the dialogue. The reviewer for The Referee believed that Wilde was actually trying to write ‘in the manner of Arms and the Man’ (an offering that premiered in London less than a year before, in April 1894), though he found Shaw to be superior in ‘sense of character’ and ‘depth of thought’.[42] Similarly, the writer for The Morning found the Act II scene between Cecily and Algy, masquerading as Ernest, to be ‘strongly reminiscent of the mock sentimentalism and heroism’ of Shaw’s comedy, and concluded that Wilde was indebted ‘in no small measure’ to Shaw’s ‘burlesque’ for the idea of this, ‘his best play’.[43]
And yet the dramatist whose works in the context of a loudly echoing play supervene over plays by Shaw and Shakespeare and other playwrights was, without a doubt, W. S. Gilbert, as a dozen or more reviewers concluded. William Archer, perceptive in this case as in others, observed that a certain dramaturgical phenomenon that he describes as Gilbert’s ‘Palace-of-Truth mannerism‘, as seen in the behavior of Gwendolen and Cecily, proves to hold a strange fascination for the comic playwright. Pinero, Shaw, and now Wilde have ‘all dabbled in it‘, and never once to their advantage.[44] Reviewers saw virtually a straight line of descent down to Wilde’s play from its identifiable predecessor, Engaged, Gilbert’s farcical comedy of 1877, a play with a clearly describable tone and affect and a character unmistakably ‘Gilbertian’. A review of that production explained that there was a strong resemblance between Engaged and Gilbert’s earlier plays, such as The Palace of Truth (1870), in ‘form, treatment, and whimsically inverted sentiment and dialogue‘, notwithstanding the fact that
the sarcasm is more cutting; the irony and cynicism more bitter, and the unconscious self-exposure by all the characters of their individual selfishness, greed, or worldliness, is more complete.[45]
The critic for the National Observer found it certainly the case that Wilde had studied ‘in the school of the brilliant author of Engaged‘, even though it was just as clear that he was unable to match that master in ‘the handling of mock-heroics and scenes of parodied sentiment’.[46] The reviewer for the Morning Leader, who agreed with this point, took the position that Wilde had made far too much of a good thing. Comparison with Pinero’s farcical comedy Dandy Dick would go only so far; Wilde’s second act was too overtly redolent of Gilbert. It was Gilbertian in its wit, its paradox, even in its situations, and his Cecily is an ‘innocent, out-of-Eden, absolutely Gilbertian young lady‘, possessing a ‘Gilbertian mincing manner‘, a ‘Gilbertian archness‘, and a requisite ‘Gilbertian piquancy’.[47] The Wildean style, now in the full bloom of fashion, falls in with the ‘comic tradition of late nineteenth-century English theatre‘, said the critic for the theatrical trade journal the Era, but it is precariously situated and should be enjoyed before it goes out of date.[48] Another, more particular ‘tradition‘, so to call it, was represented by the type of play discoverable in Gilbert’s series of pieces culminating in that ‘Haymarket extravaganza‘, Engaged, observed the writer for Black and White. Uncompromisingly severe and very much not in the vein, he condemned the title of Wilde’s play as a pun, its story a ‘condundrum‘, its characters ‘lunatics‘, and its dialogue gibberish. In all this the author has outdistanced his predecessor, creating a piece that never deviates into sense or sanity.[49] Much less stringent, while still keeping Gilbert’s apparently undeniable influence in mind, the critic for Reynold’s Newspaper summed it up in a placid phrase: ‘Nothing could be happier than the vein of humour which Mr Wilde has struck in his piece‘, adding that ‘it is Gilbert at his best, flavoured with Mr Wilde’s brilliant flippancy’.[50]
The liberty that many reviewers took in criticizing Wilde’s play may have been fostered simply by their common assumption that they could say what they liked, secure in the knowledge that the full houses accommodated by the St James’s theatre on opening night and after would welcome Wilde’s play with open arms, regardless of what the critics might be moved to say. True enough, the audience on opening night were on their feet at the end, ringing down the curtain with incessant applause and shouts. Allan Aynesworth, the Algy, later told Wilde’s biographer Hesketh Pearson that he could never remember ‘a greater triumph’ than that first night. ‘The audience‘, he recalled, ‘rose in their seats and cheered and cheered again’.[51]
Bernard Shaw’s response, as the current critic for the Saturday Review, came after seeing a later performance, several days beyond the opening night, in which another actress stepped in for the ailing Rose Leclercq. By this time he had had opportunity to read other reviewers’ opinions and to note that some critics had declared Wilde’s play to have followed ‘new paths in drama’ opened up by his own Arms and the Man, an allegation he found amusing. No matter. He described his standard for legitimate amusement by a comedy: unless it ‘touches me as well as amuses me‘, he asserted, it leaves him with a sense of having wasted his time. The result in this case was that he found himself reacting with ‘miserable, mechanical laughter‘, having been put completely out of patience by a play that failed to ‘move’ him to laughter but instead ‘tickled or bustled’ him into it.
Shaw brings to this review (as to others) a persistent, ill-humored severity, much different from the tone of any other critic’s response, along with a perceptive, deeper penetration into the farcical underpinnings of the play. An important dimension of his critical dislike was his conviction that The Importance of Being Earnest was not less than ten years old, a relic of an earlier time when the light-hearted comedies of H. J. Byron, author of the long-running farcical comedy Our Boys (dating from 1875) and dozens of other, similar pieces, held sway over the laughter of West End audiences. Shaw later acknowledged his error, but his larger point remains. His insistence that the play conforms to a kind of heartless, ‘inhuman’ Gilbertian dramaturgy drives his overall evaluation of Wilde’s compositional strategies and even the dramatist’s ethical presuppositions. That is, he finds that Wilde’s ‘rib-tickling’ approach to farcical plotting—‘the lies, the deceptions, the cross purposes, the sham mourning, the christening of the two grown-up men, the muffin eating, and so forth’—has the effect of breaking ‘our belief in the humanity of the play’. What Cervantes achieves in creating the character of Don Quixote as convincingly real and entitled to our sympathy is entirely missing in Wilde’s approach, Shaw concludes.[52]
The farcical acting on view at the St James’s supports his largely negative reaction to the performance, Shaw goes on to explain. George Alexander and Allan Aynesworth achieve the right contrast between Algy’s ‘easy-going Our Boys style of play’ and Jack’s ‘graver and more refined manner‘, but generally speaking the players were hampered by a ‘devastating consciousness’ of Wilde’s reputation. It was almost the case that they could do nothing right, as a result. Evelyn Millard as Cecily, being essentially a romantic actress, ‘rebuked’ the Gilbertian quarrel scene between her and Irene Vanbrugh’s Gwendolen ‘instead of enhancing it’. And the two elder ladies, Shaw excused himself for saying, were ‘quite maddening’:
The violence of their affectation, the insufferable low comedy soars and swoops of the voice, the rigid shivers of elbow, shoulder, and neck, which are supposed on the stage to characterize the behaviour of ladies after the age of forty, played havoc with the piece.
Rose Leclercq would have done better at such mannerisms, but unfortunately she was indisposed.[53]
By the time Shaw published his notice of Wilde’s play in the Saturday Review, he had been the critic for this journal for something under two months, having begun with his opinion on Slaves of the Ring, by Sydney Grundy, on 5 January 1895. His treatment of Grundy’s adaptation of the Wagnerian saga of Tristan and Isolde, which had opened at the Garrick Theatre on 29 December 1894, was so incisive and uncompromisingly dismissive that he must have put the readership of The Saturday, along with any dramatist who might have the temerity to offer a play to London audiences, on notice as to the kind of criticism they might likely encounter in the future. And so when Shaw published his critique of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, a week after its opening at the Haymarket Theatre on 5 January 1895, he provided a clear foretaste of what St James’s audiences and Oscar Wilde himself might be in for at his hands. In a sense, Shaw asserted, Mr Wilde is ‘our only thorough playwright’: ‘He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre’. An artist creates art to avoid having to work. Wilde, ‘an arch-artist‘, is so ‘colossally lazy’ that he even trifles with his means of escape, distilling its very essence and so producing a play so ‘unapproachably playful’ that it delights every playgoer. But this is a play that aspires to some kind of governing seriousness. As an acutely Irish man Wilde pretends to laugh at English seriousness, portraying its impersonator (presumably Shaw means the title character, the supposedly ideal but troubled husband and statesman Sir Robert Chiltern) as shocked at the danger to society’s foundations that occurs when seriousness ‘is publicly laughed at’. And so, Shaw concludes, in identifying something he himself actually reverences Wilde is ‘absolutely the most sentimental dramatist of the day’.[54]
And so it is hardly a surprise to find that Shaw goes on, a few weeks later, as we have seen, to find irremediable fault with The Importance of Being Earnest. By this time, however, the readership of The Saturday, as it was widely known, would have come to know their man in advance. To accuse Shaw of arrogance or intemperance would simply play into his hands. Put his reviews up against those of such seasoned professional journalists as A. B. Walkley and it would immediately become clear that he relished outraging his audience and delighted in transgressing the generic boundaries of dramatic criticism as few if any previous reviewers had dared, or even been inclined, to do. He did so, finally, it was clear, with a definite agenda in mind: he wrote in the service of achieving superior insight into the truth of the matter, at whatever cost it might entail. By following this line of approach he gained a series of highly personal, idiosyncratic insights, but telling ones as well.
We may regret that Shaw did not find it convenient to continue for long as a regular reviewer, but his critical instincts were irrepressible and consequently were aired in print repeatedly over an extraordinarily long lifetime. Initially, in his critical pieces for The Saturday, what he did stands out as a singular, definitive view of what he would later refer to, in collecting his reviews, as ‘our theatres in the nineties’. We may be grateful for that, whether we consistently agree with him or not, and whether our focus is on Oscar Wilde as a dramatist or on some other, equally compelling subject.
- The World, 20 February 1895. ↵
- Era, 16 February 1895, 11. ↵
- Black and White, 23 February 1895, 240. ↵
- The Observer, 17 February 1895. ↵
- Truth, 21 February 1895, 464-5. ↵
- [H. G. Wells], Pall Mall Gazette, 15 February 1895, 4. ↵
- Walkley, The Album, 4 March 1895. ↵
- Sunday Times, 17 February 1895. ↵
- The Graphic, 23 February 1895, 214. ↵
- Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theater, 379. ↵
- Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1894, quoted in Meisel, Shaw, 382. ↵
- The Realm, 22 February 1895, 578-9. ↵
- Weekly Times & Echo, 17 February 1895. ↵
- The Realm, 22 February 1895, 578-9. ↵
- "A.," Illustrated London News, 23 February 1895, 227. ↵
- "A. B. W.” [i.e. A. B. Walkley], “The Importance of Being Earnest,” The Speaker, 23 February 1895, 212-13. ↵
- Woman: A Paper for Gentlewomen, 20 February 1895. ↵
- Sunday Times, 17 February 1895. George Etherege’s comedy The Man of Mode, or, Sir Fopling Flutter was in fact a seventeenth-century play, licensed in 1676. ↵
- "W. A.," The World, 20 February 1895. ↵
- Hobbes, Leviathan: or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651), ed. Michael Oakeshott ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, n.d.), 36). ↵
- Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News, 23 February 1895, 876-7. ↵
- The Graphic, 23 February 1895, 214. ↵
- National Observer 23 February 1895, 398. ↵
- The Realm, 22 February 1895, 578-9. ↵
- The Times, 15 February 1895. ↵
- Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News, 23 February 1895, 876-7. ↵
- [Wells], Pall Mall Gazette, 15 February 1895, 4. ↵
- The People, 17 February 1895. ↵
- The Sketch, 20 February 1895, 168. ↵
- The Realm, 22 February 1895, 578-9. ↵
- Sunday Times, 17 February 1895. ↵
- National Observer, 23 February 1895, 398. ↵
- Lady’s Pictorial, 23 February 1895, 267. ↵
- Truth, 21 February 1895, 464-5. ↵
- The Man of the World, 20 February 1895. ↵
- Sunday Times, 17 February 1895. ↵
- Truth, 21 February 1895, 464-5. ↵
- The People, 17 February 1895. ↵
- Illustrated London News, 23 February 1895, 227. ↵
- The Whitehall Review, 23 February 1895, 8. ↵
- "W. A.," The World, 20 February 1895. ↵
- The Referee, 17 February 1895. ↵
- The Morning, 15 February 1895. ↵
- The World, 20 February 1895. ↵
- Unidentified clipping, “Haymarket Theatre,” Lily Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. ↵
- National Observer, 23 February 1895, 398. ↵
- Morning Leader, 15 February 1895. ↵
- Era, 16 February 1895, 11. ↵
- Black and White, 23 February 1895, 240. ↵
- Reynold’s Newspaper, 17 February 1895. ↵
- Quoted in Pearson, Life of Wilde, 257. ↵
- Shaw, ”An Old Play and a New One,” Saturday Review, 23 February 1895, Our Theatres in the Nineties, I, 41-4. ↵
- ”An Old Play and a New One,” 43-4. ↵
- Shaw, “Two New Plays,” Saturday Review, 12 January 1895, Our Theatres in the Nineties, I, 9-10. ↵