In 1985 the Raritan Review published a striking essay by Camille A. Paglia entitled “Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene.” In most essays in Raritan, as in other journals of a literary rather than scholarly stamp, no footnotes distract from the substance of what the author is saying; attempting a more wide-ranging pursuit of original, sometimes unorthodox or controversial ideas creates a context in which precise documentation is felt to be unnecessary. So it is with Paglia’s exploration of the notion of the epicene as it applies to Oscar Wilde, favoring a sexual persona she names the “Androgyne of Manners.” This entity inhabits a salon that comprises “an abstract circle in which male and female, like mathematical ciphers, are equal and interchangeable; personality becomes a sexually undifferentiated formal mask.”^[1]

Paglia begins with an exposition of the decadent 1890s, when Wilde was “moving towards an Art Nouveau aesthetics” historically analogous to Italian Mannerism. She quotes Kenneth Clark as describing the goddess of mannerism as “the eternal feminine of the fashion plate.” Closer to Wilde’s own creative works is the figure of Lord Henry Wotton (Paglia does not need to tell us of his prominence in The Picture of Dorian Gray), an ectomorph, “an undulating ribbon of Mannerist Art Nouveau.” “The ectomorphic line is a suave vertical,” she explains, “repudiating nature by its resistance to gravity, but the Mannerist figure, overcome by worldly fatigue, sinks back toward earth in languorous torsion.” Much of the essay has this sort of dense, reflective quality, sometimes raising more questions than are answered. As it is, Paglia brings these angular but carefully shaped clarifications to the task of reinterpreting The Importance of Being Earnest as an androgynous Wildean “transformation of content into form.”
In this special view, the subject of courtship, the traditional center of comedy, “loses its emotional color.” Jack and Algernon, idle men about town, and Gwendolen and Cecily, their objects of affection, are all Androgynes of Manners: “They have no sex because they have no real sexual feelings.” (One wonders if Paglia noticed the moment when Cecily runs her fingers through Algernon’s hair and subsequently remarks to herself, “I like his hair so much.”) In any case, in this play Form is essential, and its supreme enforcer is Lady Bracknell, who regrets that we live in an “age of surfaces” but proceeds to act accordingly. Paglia quotes Wilde’s stage directions from another play, describing Lord Goring’s butler Phipps, impassive, “a mask with a manner. Of his intellectual or emotional life, history knows nothing. He represents the dominance of form.” Paglia describes an optimal performance of Earnest as “a romance of surfaces, male and female alike wearing masks of superb impassivity.” As the reader is about to observe that two-and-a-half hours of “superb impassivity” might become wearing on a theatre audience, Paglia adds that in her view the Anthony Asquith film of 1952 comes close to achieving this quality. She instances Joan Greenwood’s “entranced and nearly somnambulistic performance as Gwendolen—slow, stately, and ceremonious” and identifies it as “the brilliant realization of the Wildean aesthetic.”^[2]

This trenchant observation turns Paglia’s discussion in the direction of production and enactment. Productions of Wilde’s play, she argues, are often “weakened by flights of Forest of Arden lyricism” that turn Wildean ambiguity into conventional heterosexuality. Paglia advances the alternative idea of casting all the female roles with female impersonators, creating a performance in which “Language, personality, and behaviour should be so hard that the play becomes a spectacle of visionary coldness.” She does not say how such alternative casting might affect the more conventional casting of men in the male roles, but she offers a clue in explaining that “The faces should be like glass, without gender or humanity.” Paglia’s argument seems to locate her in a kind of rhetorically uneasy never-land, somewhere between the concrete realities of actual performance and the mental tabula rasa of her own free-wheeling ideation. Her reader must consent to follow where she leads, for the sake of the insights and frequent epiphanies that she arranges to occur.

An example is readily to hand, as we have seen, in the character of Gwendolen, the first of the women in the play to “enact a drama of form.” She solicits Jack’s proposal of marriage while letting him know in advance that she will accept; she still insists on the ritual itself. Her thoughts never depart from the world of appearances. She adds, “I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present.” Paglia explains that the “other people” comprise a “voyeuristic series of observers” and that this sequence comprises a “psychosexual topos of decadent late Romanticism”: Gwendolen “imagines Jack looking at her while she looks at others looking at them.” We see Gwendolen as a worshiper of form; instead of craving emotion she longs for “display, the theatre of social life.”

Paglia proceeds to take us through a detailed transformational account of the play, identifying many opportunities for the kind of alternative thematic appraisal that gives life, interest, and coherence to her essay. At the same time, she explains how Wildean wit and epigram are not simply inserted into the action, but emerge from the deeper, architectonic reaches of androgynous form. In a telling amplification of her argument, she shows how simultaneously the play systematically excludes all pain and suffering. Lady Bracknell’s rebuke of Jack for being an orphan is a brilliant, relevant moment in Wilde’s play, as Paglia incisively explains:

“To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Matters of form are uppermost, in death as in life. The emotional intensities of Victorian bereavement are canceled. Nothing is of interest but the public impression. Once again there is the late romantic stress upon visual cognition: “may be regarded as a misfortune”; “looks like carelessness.” Every event occurs with naked visibility on a vast, flat expanse; life is a play scrutinized by a ring of appraising eyes. This illustrates one of Wilde’s central principles, as cited by Dorian Gray: “To become the spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.” Late Romantic spectatorship is an escape from suffering because all affect is transferred from the emotional and tangible into the visual: no wounds can pierce the glassy body of the Wildean androgyne. The self is without a biological or historical identity. Self-originating, it has no filial indebtedness. A parent is merely a detail of social heraldry. To lose both parents, therefore, is not tragedy but negligence, like tipping the tea service into the trash bin.^[3]

Paglia might have quoted Lady Bracknell’s transition to the question of parentage: “Now to minor matters.” And, surely, the genre of farce has never before been scrutinized in this light. In short, there is much concentrated thought, productive of much surprising discovery, in Paglia’s essay. Like few other pieces of its kind, it approaches Wilde and his play from an original and blithely idiosyncratic point of view that quickly justifies its demands on the reader and sustains attention throughout. Later in the essay, the analysis of the fantasy world of Lewis Carroll and its anticipatory relationship to the epicene world embodied in The Importance of Being Earnest is brilliant and enlightening. The essay does not take the place of any other, however insightful, approach, but stands on its own, testimony to the extent to which Wilde the man and Wilde the writer, in the years since his death, have together inspired a great range of criticism and critical theory. Among them, Paglia’s essay is one of the most singular, setting a precedent for considerably more open exploration. One is left with the feeling that criticism has at last arrived at its maturity.

In that newly available context, the adoption of an informal, playful tone as an appropriate counterpart for a critical piece on Wilde’s mock-serious play has seldom succeeded so well as in the case of Joseph Loewenstein’s delightful essay “Wilde and the Evasion of Principle.”^[4] Loewenstein pretends to adopt the self-pitying tone of William Archer’s review of the first production, but he promises a surprising note of seriousness at the end. “What is a poor critic to do?,” Archer had lamented. He proceeds to borrow Archer’s stratagem in describing this brilliantly unserious play, “which raises no principle, whether of art or morals,” and is “nothing but an absolutely willful expression of an impressively witty personality.” Loewenstein pursues this strategy in the service of his own blithe explanation of how the serious drama of the nineteenth century, championed by Archer, ranging from Scribe to Ibsen and featuring the contemporary French well-made play, whose roots extend all the way back to Sophocles and Oedipus Rex, comes in for a thorough demolishing at Wilde’s expert hands. The improbable comparison of Wilde’s play to Sophocles’s foundational tragedy yields a similarity of plot that is at once striking and ridiculous, considering the total opposition of dramatic tone and seriousness (or its lack). Yet there are many similarities, whose enumeration becomes increasingly risible. For instance, both plays center on the hero’s coming to knowledge of his own identity. At the end of Act I, Jack warns Algy that if he isn’t careful his Bunburying will get him into a serious scrape. Algy retorts that he loves scrapes, because they are never serious. The term is exactly right, Loewenstein explains, because “it trivializes those contortions of stratagem and coincidence which are at the centre of Sophoclean plotting.” As Loewenstein proceeds, the more things change, the more they turn out to be analogous. Wilde’s antagonistic attitude toward plotting is much at issue here, Loewenstein observes:

Wilde was shrewd enough to recognize finally that he didn’t really like plots, so when he sat down to write Earnest he took a few bits of the most famous plot in existence, crumpled them up, and then smothered them with mannerism: in effect, he adapts form to content by papering over the content. That he chooses what must be called the master-plot of Western drama is both characteristically sophomoric and characteristically self-aware: if one is uncomfortable with plotting, why not sabotage the model of plotting, so that plotting itself will look like a game not worth playing?

The truth is, Lowenstein confesses, that Wilde’s cavalier attitude sacrifices plot “to the surface sparkle of aphorism,” revealing himself as “one of the great English philosophers of the surface,” and also because he is in his own way—and here is Loewenstein’s promised surprise—”a moralist of the surface.”^[5] Wilde’s play does not pretend to Truth; it pretends to accuracy. At one point Loewenstein says he had thought about entitling this piece “Wilde as Moralist.” He did not, because it would have given the game away. Wilde the genuine moralist is finally revealed in his complete conventional absence. One discerns this character of Wilde’s in such aphoristic assertions as those found in his “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” whose initial statement reads as follows: “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.” One could take this as a suggestion for making a list of duties, and then discover that the assertion manifestly “fails to deliver on the promise.”

Loewenstein takes this as effectively a moral position. A moral position is also implicit in Wilde’s evident conviction that there are no satisfactory rules to assert, no matter what. We may finally derive from this clarification an understanding of the moral conviction under which Wilde lived his life. And one might add that Loewenstein’s brief piece, by comparison with entirely serious and much longer explications of Wilde’s life and thought (which may remain presently unnamed), captures a more convincing and satisfactory sense of the trivial and the serious. One discovers such satisfaction uncompromisingly displayed in the subtitle of the play as presented in the first draft of the four-act play, Lady Lancing, edited so as to be left unresolved:

A Serious / Trivial Play for Trivial / Serious People[.]^[6]

It may seem that partial collections of Wilde’s plays in paperback have obvious marketing targets and a predictably short shelf life, but the editors of these collections sometimes provide thoughtful introductory observations that survive the test of time. Sylvan Barnet’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays^[7] begins with an introduction that raises the question of the relationship between Earnest and the previous comedy-dramas, with which it shares a thematic concern of the concealment of shameful secrets. Barnet wonders if this motif may be read as “a veiled allusion to Wilde’s homosexuality” or even be seen as a sort of “ambiguous confession,” perhaps a challenge to society. And yet too much may be made of this approach. Is the play merely what the author said it was, something written “by a butterfly for butterflies”? One may reply that the play is filled with talk about important matters: love and marriage, divorce and illegitimacy, education, class relationships, appearance and reality, and even death. The question is, “How seriously does the play allow us to take these themes?.” We should perhaps conclude that the play is about what its title says it is about, the importance of being earnest. For all the laughter it engenders, we should perhaps invoke the “Conclusion” to Pater’s The Renaissance and view Wilde’s last play as a success in Paterian terms, for its ability to “burn with a gemlike flame.”
Barnet’s introduction serves the useful purpose of challenging the student of the three plays the book presents (Salome, Lady Windermere’s Fan, and The Importance of Being Earnest) to think freshly and meaningfully about the possibilities offered by three familiar classics. The general educational context into which the collection falls suggests that Wilde and his major plays by this time (1985) have become a familiar component of academic curricula while also reflecting the tastes of general readers. We will find that, over the coming years, additional publications of the sort, introduced by scholars and critics who know their Oscar Wilde very well, will add introductory observations aimed at challenging the student and general reader. At the same time they will echo developments and changes related to the larger issues taken up by serious scholarship and criticism.

Oscar Wilde and his writings together had already become a ripe prospect for the application of commodity theory to aesthetics when Regenia Gagnier published her ambitious book Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public, in 1986.^[8] She acknowledges the influence on her work of two contemporary French theorists, Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard, centrally prominent in studies of (among other subjects) consumer theory and its relationship to “spectacle,” a term used with special application to public consumption of art as a commodity. Gagnier cites the foundational interpret­ation, in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1977), of his analysis of “the spectacle as the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, the self-portrait of power.”^[9] Correspondingly, referring to Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production (1975), she calls attention to his critique of Marxism as “the mirror of production” and his shift of the search “for potential revolutionary activity from production to consumption and specifically to advanced capitalism’s consumption of the sign.”^[10] These two theorists cover immense ground in their writings; Gagnier’s ambition is to bring studies of Wilde into meaningful relationship with these widely influential approaches toward a revisionary Marxist understanding of performance as a public spectacle.

Gagnier’s interpretation of The Importance of Being Earnest is rather strictly governed by these prior theoretical exhortations, but the more particular focus of her book about the Victorian public lies on the audiences of the St. James’s and Haymarket theatres. In this case, her grasp of theatre history seems not as secure as her grounding in the varieties of Marxist consumer theory and the contrib­utions of its major adherents. For example, she is apparently not aware that the lower classes were present in abundance in the least expensive parts of these prime West End houses, for she refers to Wilde’s characters’ “witty disparagement of the lower classes (who were not present in the theatre),” and says that the dramatist “altogether eliminated representations of the lower classes”—despite the near-constant presence of servants in his plays.^[11] Her invocation of the theoretical revolutionary writings of Antonin Artaud in their application to Wilde’s aesthetics is interesting, but remains problematic because of Artaud’s anachronistic emergence in popularity only in the early twentieth century. Nor does her bibliography include such important theatre-historical references as A. E. W. Mason’s history. George Alexander and the St James’s Theatre, or Michael R. Booth’s Victorian Spectacular Theatre.^[12] On the other hand, Gagnier’s forceful application of commodity theory together with her object of opening a new vista on Wilde’s universally familiar play results in a radical reassessment of the play and its audience:

The Importance of Being Earnest operates on three levels: the superiority of author to audience, the mutuality of audience and stage image (mimesis, or mise-en-scène in Artaud’s sense), and the audience’s superiority to the farce. The material images on stage are a direct mimesis of the audience, its mirror image: an idle, luxuried community in an opulent environment of props and costumes. The play’s dialogue, however, includes the author’s trenchant criticisms of the audience; on this level, the author is greater than the audience. The lowest level consists of farcical action, an indication of the author’s lunacy, and this has the effect of canceling the author’s superior status as a critic. The absurdity of the action allows the audience to label it farce, implying that its marvelous triviality has the sole purpose of inciting laughter, while the audience simultaneously extricates itself from the charges leveled against it. If the author is critical of the audience, his play’s absurd action permits the audience to be superior to him. While the social criticism and farcical action effectively cancel each other out, the audience receives reinforcement from its own dominant and fetishized image on stage.^[13]

It remains unclear what Gagnier may mean by “the author’s lunacy” and how it might be related to the farcical action of his play. In any case, a re-reading of Wilde’s play against her dense, comprehensive description of the quality of the play and its author as a combined proto-Marxist spectacle, formulated on three separate levels, may result in an implicit feeling of being forbidden to laugh, or of feeling guilty for doing so. One trusts that this implicit warning is temporary, and in the long-term one may remember that Wilde himself was a covert revolutionary who, as he characteristically said, lived “in fear of not being misunderstood.”

One of the important changes occurring in the criticism of Wilde (and many other writers) as the century moved on was the compilation of collections of critical writings. As early as 1969 Richard Ellmann had brought out the first Wildean entry into the bourgeoning competition, Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays^[14], an assemblage ranging far and wide, biographically, critically, and even poetically, over recognizable yet novel terrain. Ellmann includes Eric Bentley’s brief essay in The Playwright as Thinker,^[15] Shaw’s memories of Wilde,^[16] St John Hankin’s review of the first collected edition of Wilde’s plays,^[17] and Auden’s “An Improbable Life,”^[18] among other varied and interesting pieces. (This collection anticipated by almost twenty years the publication of Ellmann’s biography of Wilde, in 1987, described below.) In 1982 William Tydeman edited a more academically oriented collection, one of a series of “Casebooks,” this one focusing on the three social comedies and The Importance of Being Earnest and gathering together an instructive, historically-oriented amalgam of letters, comments, biographical excerpts, reviews, and other documentation providing varied contextual information, along with several reprinted critical essays.^[19] Six years later the Yale critic, scholar, and anthologist Harold Bloom added to his long series, Modern Critical Interpretations, a volume treating Wilde’s last play exclusively. Identifying this grouping of nine essays, the last of which was newly composed for the volume, as “the best modern critical interpretations of Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece of stage comedy,”^[20] In his Introduction Bloom adopts a casual tone perhaps intended to speed the reader on to the essays he has brought together. These essays have all been reviewed in the present overview,^[21]

In this piece Susan Laity offers first a sustained analysis of Iolanthe, the comic opera with libretto by Gilbert, set to music by Arthur Sullivan, and placed here by Laity by way of comparison against Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. There is no doubt that Wilde is indebted to Gilbert, as numerous first-production reviewers were pleased to observe. And surely Laity is correct in debunking the stale idea that Wilde’s play is no more than "rehashed Gilbert." At the same time, her essay functions better as an argument to the effect that Iolanthe is "one of the supreme satires in English drama," operating from "a firmly entrenched position behind enemy lines"—those enemy lines being drawn by the very bourgeois audiences who flocked to Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas, making them among the longest-running theatrical works of the period. Her discussion of Wilde’s play is less original. Laity argues that it denies "any reality outside of the play or its author" and so "becomes an essay into the Absurd."^[22] It is an observation frequently made, as we have seen, in current criticism, and like other such observations offers little that is new or original.

In 1987 and 1988 the long-awaited biography by Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, appeared, to wide, sustained applause, in the United Kingdom and the USA.^[23] It would take a while for readers to assimilate the extent to which Ellmann’s magisterial work would change the biographical and critical climate of Wilde studies, yet many readers and reviewers believed that for the present time it represented the definitive account^[24] Ellmann’s great strengths and authoritativeness as a biographer derived from his ability to put a method based on slow-paced, exhaustive traversal of the terrain at the service of a distinctive critical vision, by turns sympathetic and skeptical. Writing in a sometimes eloquent prose style, Ellmann shapes and clarifies his subject while at the same time leaving abundant room for its own contradictory vitality to emerge. His account of Wilde’s formative Oxford days takes its early place in a grandly conceived, full-scale biographical narrative that dates Wilde’s real blossoming as an artist from his secret embrace of a homosexual life. In Ellmann’s view, it was in the risky pursuit of liaisons with young men, most notably Lord Alfred Douglas, younger son of the Marquess of Queensberry, that Wilde experienced an exhilaration that enlivened and gave moment and purpose to an already rapidly expanding career as poet, lecturer, and editor, and then as novelist, dramatist, and critic, but above all as formidable personality and social lion and, more privately, as lover and friend. "Feasting with Panthers" Wilde later called the sublimely dangerous activities that would eventually land him in prison and wreck his career. He had poured his genius into his life, Wilde told André Gide, putting merely his talent into his works. Ellmann appears to have taken Wilde at his word. It is Wilde’s life, much more than his works, that engrosses his biographer, and Ellmann is fully equal to the task of describing the course of that remarkable yet ultimately doomed career. Ellmann’s magnificent if sometimes erratic grasp of his material and its voluminous sources makes for great pleasure and instruction in the reading.

And yet, for readers with substantial interests in Wilde’s plays, in Wilde as a dramatist and man of the theatre, Ellmann’s biography comes up short of satisfying, in certain important ways. Ellmann unhesitatingly called Wilde "the greatest dramatist of the age," but in the context his book sets it is too cursory a judgment. There is little to be found about the nature and background of the contemporary theatre in Ellmann’s account of Wilde’s alleged false starts as the writer of the romantic dramas Vera, or the Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua and his subsequent tremendous success as author of three comedy-dramas, beginning in 1892 with Lady Windermere’s Fan, and his turning to farce in 1895 with The Importance of Being Earnest. Nor do we discover anything very specific or useful about the prevailing methods and predilections of the contemporary commercial theatre, or of the avant-garde Continental theatre of Maeterlinck, Lugné-Poë, and others, to which Wilde was much attracted and in whose light Wilde’s Salomé must be considered. Ellmann’s section on Salomé is thorough and brilliant, and among the best pages in the book. Yet one gathers that Ellmann doesn’t like the drama, or at least the theatre, of this period—or does not like it in ways calling for extended explanation. One senses that he feels much more at home in appreciating the stamp Wilde placed on his age as a critic, as the intellectual offspring of Arnold, Ruskin, and, most especially, Pater, or in describing the English and Continental traditions of fiction and fantasy tale that lie behind The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Granted, we must finally allow Ellmann the choice of taking only slender advantage, mostly by the way, of his considerable erudition in these matters of literary and critical context. For his subject is, first and last, the life. And yet, despite Ellmann’s restraint in contextual matters, one comes away from this massive yet shapely example of the biographer’s high art with a much better sense of the general artistic environment in which Wilde worked and played and, beyond that, of its wider cultural dimensions, than of the conditions and personalities of the contemporary theatre that also had so great an impact on him. A great range of theatrical practitioners, from George Alexander to Charles Wyndham, Elizabeth Robins to Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, William Archer to Bernard Shaw, and, to be sure, Ibsen to Zola, who together made the theatre of the 1890s what it was and influenced Wilde so profoundly, remain shadowy or non-existent characters in Ellmann’s treatment. Lillie Langtry is perhaps the sole exception. Ellmann’s critical comments on Lady Windermere’s Fan as a generically unorthodox drama are astute and helpful, but he spends no more than a brief paragraph on the preparations for the play at the St James’s and barely mentions Wilde’s disagreement with Alexander over the timing of the revelation of Mrs Erlynne’s identity, a quarrel whose details are so enlightening for understanding Wilde’s maturing art and skill as a playwright. It seems that Ellmann is not much interested in performance, nor is he much concerned with the distinctive creative habits of his multi-talented subject. We become aware of the remarkable achieve­ment of the man who, on the eve of his disastrous lawsuit against the "Scarlet" Marquess, had two great hits running simultaneously in the West End, but we discover little or nothing about the process of composition of An Ideal Husband or The Importance of Being Earnest, the rehearsals, their issue in performance, or their critical reception (beyond brief generalities). Shaw’s response to the play, quite untypical of the press overall, is mentioned, but not Archer’s, Clement Scott’s, A. B. Walkley’s, or H. G. Wells’s, let alone the dozens of less prominent critics whose reactions swelled the columns of the popular press, engaging the fervent interest of a large popular readership.

One result is that Ellmann’s readers gain only an inadequate sense of Wilde’s methods as a writer, of his phenomenal facility but also of his tireless perfec­tionism. Ellmann does credit Wilde for the unremitting labor and amazing psychic and physical energy that went into his work, as into his life, but the biographer’s relative neglect of the actual activity of writing and rewriting contributes to a disappointingly vague sense of Wilde’s creative processes. Despite the disastrous bankruptcy that forced the sale of many of Wilde’s manuscripts, some do survive, as in the cases of Earnest and An Ideal Husband, and they make for fascinating study. More important, for Ellmann’s purpose, what we gain from an understanding of how Wilde put a play together and revised it, before and after production, would have promoted greater insight into the character of the life itself. Ellmann’s bias becomes evident again in the last section of the book, where he portrays the post-incarceration Wilde as a fated exile, his health deteriorating, his personal and financial resources dwindling, his will destroyed; a man with left-over life to kill, a man who, as a writer, produced nothing new after The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Examination of the manuscripts of Earnest and An Ideal Husband in the British Library, New York Public Library, William Andrews Clark Library, and elsewhere (archives in which Ellmann surely spent many productive hours) would have shown how much effort of will and how much untarnished wit Wilde put into the revisions of these two plays for the first editions brought out by the London publisher Leonard Smithers in the last two years of Wilde’s life.

It would seem that Ellmann has left behind his thematic idea of contradictory vitality, exchanging it for a more uniform but here less convincing picture of a man whose creative forces, if unimpaired, lay unarousable. Lane’s withering retort to Algy’s "No cucumbers?"— "No, sir. Not even for ready money"—and Algy’s comment on Lady Bracknell’s arrival—"Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner"—are two of numerous brilliant improvements Wilde made in the text of Earnest in 1898 in preparing copy for Smithers. Ellmann either did not see his way clear to extend his coverage to the dramaturgical process itself or, perhaps more likely, found it extrinsic to his central purpose. In any case, despite its many strengths and felicities, one remains disappointed to have come away from the biography of an artist so passionately given to the delights and rewards of writing for live audiences feeling that his single greatest achievement was realized in what we are given to believe was so uninteresting and unrewarding a genre.^[25]

As Ellmann’s biography was garnering a large share of attention in academic circles, the popular press, and beyond, a much different kind of book on the same author had appeared under the same title.^[26] Raby assumes the presence of an intelligent, knowledgeable reader, familiar with the range and variety of Wilde’s writings while still in need of insight into the specific character of a given work. Having made one’s way through the eleven-page introductory essay, a concise and vivid opening into an extraordinary life in art, one feels the strong desire to read the rest of Raby’s book—no matter how familiar one may be with Wilde’s writings—confident of encountering what he promises as effect­ively a series of dialogues, "conducted within a variety of contexts, and in modulating and developing moods and tones."^[27]
In his chapter on The Importance of Being Earnest, Raby explains that the play is widely regarded as Wilde’s "supreme achievement in drama" and, indeed, his greatest accomplishment in any genre. And yet its subtitle, "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People," together with its author’s seemingly offhand comment, "written by a butterfly for butterflies," identifies its "essential fragility." Even allowing for the presence in the original four-act play of the delightful scene in which a solicitor, Gribsby, attaches Algernon, masquerading as Ernest Worthing, for debts incurred at the Savoy Restaurant, a scene which was cut in its entirety in the transformation of Lady Lancing into a three-act play (the resulting work being short enough to allow the introduction of a curtain-raiser), Raby argues that the resulting play as performed by George Alexander and his St James’s company was "infinitely more effective." Indeed, Raby identifies the final three-act version published as the first edition in 1899 as a work intended by Wilde to be read, and so views the text as presented in the first production of 1895 as "dramatically superior."^[28]

And so Raby’s view of the dramatic structure of Wilde’s farce differentiates between plays to be read and scripts to be performed. His emphasis in the book is squarely on the latter. Raby proceeds to link the produced play of Earnest with the three previous comedy-dramas, explaining that the tension hitherto found there between dandies and Philistines, "between form and content, between the trivial and the serious," is resolved in Earnest by creating a self-sufficient, "sophisticated comic world": "We enter a kind of Arcadia or Illyria, and never leave it." Gribsby and his writ, representing a kind of threatening element, are gone. There are no Puritans. Jack and Algy are as witty as Lord Goring, but they are spared the necessity of functioning as philosophers. Gwendolen and Cecily, innocent though they seem, turn all conventions upside down and manipulate all circumstances to their own advantage. Lady Bracknell "looms darkly," but largely as a function of plot, and by Act III has been transformed from a conventional blocking character into a tyrannical goddess, "like some comic distillation of the Red Queen and Queen Victoria."^[29] And so what Wilde achieved was "an exceptional elegance and symmetry of form" while "imposing an economy of setting and character."

Taking his reader through the three acts of the play, Raby offers a selective close reading of important scenes and sequences, revealing the presence of a comic symmetry in which parody reduces the serious to the trivial and then re-balances it with seriousness. A good example is the tea ceremony of Act I, parodied in advance by Algernon’s eating an entire plate of cucumber sandwiches before his guests arrive. The tea ceremony of Act II parodies itself with outsize quantities of sugar and cake, and then is in turn parodied by the muffin scene between Jack and Algy at the close of Act II. Raby points to John Gielgud’s realization only at the end of his career that the muffin-eating scene should be played slowly, "with real solemnity." Jack, outraged, wonders how Algy can possibly sit there eating muffins when the two of them are in such great trouble; it is perfectly heartless of him. Algy’s reply is devastatingly commonsensical: he cannot possibly eat muffins "in an agitated manner." The butter would surely get on his cuffs. "One should always eat muffins quite calmly," he explains. "It is the only way to eat them." (Thus the textual documentation for Gielgud’s realization.) At the beginning of the next act, the women bring the serious and the trivial together from their own dominant perspective, looking at the men in the garden from inside the house: "They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance."

Raby proceeds to take the exact artistic temperature of the ongoing action. The overall external politeness fails to mask "a pronounced ruthlessness" in the case of each character in pursuit of his or her deep desires. Desire sends Jack to London, ostensibly to rein in his younger brother Ernest, but actually to propose to Gwendolen; desire sends Algernon to the Hertfordshire countryside and Cecily, only pretending to be drawn by the invalid Bunbury; a determined Gwendolen, minus her servant and unbeknownst to her mother, sets off on an unchaperoned visit to her fiancé’s country house to satisfy an irresistible attraction; Cecily herself, though closely governed by her governess, Miss Prism, through flights of epistolary fantasy contrives to engage herself to the unsuspecting "Ernest" well in advance of meeting him and to create a detailed record of it in her diary; even Chasuble and Prism put aside their respective priestly or tutorial obligations out of desire for the much more romantic pursuit of each other. It is desire, after all, that drives the action, and the unlikely central image of that carefully contrived plot is Miss Prism’s handbag. It is the handbag, after all, in which the unfortunate baby who turns out to be John Worthing is found, by a seemingly mistaken but ultimately benevolent, providential person, who dutifully saves the bag out of sight in a box room, for posterity. It is the farcical preeminence of the material thing, the handbag itself, Raby explains, which symbolizes the missing baby, and thus emerges as an inanimate yet symbolic object, delightfully central to the meaning of the play. Given the farcical nature of Wilde’s play, it is only natural that, when her handbag is restored to her, Miss Prism’s thought is not for the baby that had been mistakenly placed in it but simply for the bag itself, returned to her possession at last: "It has been a great inconvenience being without it all these years," she blissfully cries out.

The tone of the end result, Raby explains, the warmth and generosity of the ending, even while the dramatist has achieved an extraordinary thematic clarity, are impressive and telling: "the cumulative effect of language and action is to function as a subversive critique of Victorian attitudes and institutions, all the more telling for being so lightly elegant in expression." Intermittently through the play "disconcerting glimpses of Victorian reality" necessarily intrude. In the first scene of the play Algy comments disparagingly on Lane’s views of marriage for lacking any sense of moral responsibility. Later in the act, Lady Bracknell comments disapprovingly on the "radically unsound" theory of modern education. To her, being born, or bred, in a handbag comprises no mere isolated instance of disorder but, rather, displays on a larger scale "a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life" that reminds her "of the worst excesses of the French Revolution." And in the last act, when Algy, unmindful of his aunt’s sensitivity to such matters, dismisses Bunbury by explaining that he was "exploded," he is shocked by her reaction: "Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage?"

Raby does not conclude from these nicely phrased references that Wilde’s purpose is a "systematic, satirical exposé of society." Rather, they provide "an almost subliminal reminder of the central lies on which Victorian and most other societies are founded, wholly in tune with the subversive impact of the play’s action." Raby has enlarged the meaning of Wilde’s play to a kind of classic depth of significance. The heartlessness Shaw said he perceived in it is, truth to tell, "the heartlessness Wilde saw in the modern world," Raby concludes: "a sense of void expressed in other plays as diverse in method as those of Beckett and Stoppard."^[30]

Perceptions like these of spiritual or thematic ties between Wilde’s play and modern, twentieth-century texts for performance reveal connections that link foundational realizations about separate but partly common cultures. If overstated, as we have sometimes seen, they betray misguided, anachronistic attempts to draw the historical culture into too close a connection with our own time, to read it opportunistically and too preferentially in our own subjective terms. But if identified as precursors of our own beliefs and fears, under­standings or biases, they allow us to achieve greater insights into important commonalities while at the same time realizing that Wilde’s period is inescapably an age that has come and gone, allowing us to make of it what wide study and careful differentiation may accomplish, while situating ourselves on the other side of what is finally a great divide. In this way Raby’s book offers wise, comprehensive insight into Wilde’s multifarious oeuvre, even while it precisely situates our own irrecoverable distance from it.

While Wilde was spending a pleasant but in some ways fraught time at Worthing in August and September 1894, writing Lady Lancing while on holiday with his family, one of the plays on show in London was a farce by W. Lestocq and E. M. Robson called The Foundling.^[31] Kerry Powell’s remarkable study Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, which appeared in 1990^[32] and immediately drew attention for its unprecedentedly detailed location of Wilde’s plays in the dense yet lively context of the contemporary West End theatre, argues convincingly that Lestocq and Robson’s play had a major influence on what would become The Importance of Being Earnest.^[33] Powell’s argument in favor of the remarkably broad and specific influence on Wilde of current and prior farcical and comic plays, precisely at the time when he was composing the four-act play Lady Lancing, adds an important new dimension to our understanding of Wilde’s play.

Powell’s book is an extraordinarily thorough, well-researched, and broadly engaged work offering a clear-eyed vista into the practical theatre of London and, for that matter, of Paris as well, and elsewhere. Powell’s general theme is that of Wilde as playwright in the workaday context of English popular theatre, which he swiftly came to dominate with the production of his first comedy-drama, Lady Windermere’s Fan, opening early in 1892, and continued to dominate until his sudden fall from grace in May 1895. Devoting a chapter to each of Wilde’s major comedies, along with an additional chapter on Salome and a separate study of the influence of Ibsen on Wilde, as well as a fifteen-page biographical appendix of working dramatists of the 1890s, Powell sets out the basis for a much better and wider understanding of Wilde’s working relationship with heretofore relatively shadowy figures (to some students of Wilde, at least) such as Pinero, Jones, Grundy, and others, all of them successful playwrights, as well as prominent but not well-known working figures of the French avant-garde theatre, together with several of the foremost English actor-managers—George Alexander, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, John Hare, Charles Wyndham, and Lewis Waller, all of whom produced or at some point intended to produce one or more of the successful plays that came with shining confidence from Wilde’s pen.

Speculation on the possible influences on The Importance of Being Earnest had been rife ever since the days of the first production. For years it had been a subject sorely in need of critical treatment. If Powell had not bravely taken it on, there were certainly other qualified scholars, theatre historians and others, who might, perhaps reluctantly, have acceded to the challenge. While in some ways it would have been a most promising opportunity, the necessary topics for research involved in some cases out-of-the-way sources in two or more languages, the devotion of long hours of research in far-flung archives on several continents, and the notorious pitfalls connected with proving beyond reasonable doubt the influence of highly conventional subject matter upon one of the most notably unconventional or subversive dramatists the world has known. Daunting, to say the least.

As it was, Powell produced a book that is almost too comprehensive in its attributions of influence on The Importance of Being Earnest, perceptible though such influence arguably is in so many quarters. If critical comment may be offered on a work whose identification of extraordinary similarities between dozens of contemporary and recent farces and Wilde’s play is striking and persuasive, that comment should fall into the difficult, grey area between where convention does hardly more than identify the genre itself of a given work and where departure from or undermining of that same convention on Wilde’s part attains the level of brilliant dramaturgical insight. One may perhaps entertain the opinion that Powell does something less than justice to the Wildean inversions and subversions that arguably make the play stand out in memorable ways. All the same, high praise for this much-needed, comprehensive, even game-changing study is no more than just, and Wilde scholarship must record its thanks.