As we have seen, the publication of facsimiles of Wilde’s manuscripts of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1956 ushered in a new era of Wildean scholarship. And in 1980 Russell Jackson, in the first scholarly edition of the play, took note of the presence and availability of those manuscripts and others located in the Arents Collection and the Performing Arts Library of the New York Public Library. Yet it was not until 1996 that the first full-length study of these various manuscripts and typescripts finally saw the light of day. In that year Sos Eltis’s revision of her doctoral dissertation was published as Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde,[1] a patient, careful, and systematic examination of surviving manuscripts and typescripts of one early play (Vera; or, The Nihilists) and the entire corpus of the major social comedies: Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Eltis explains in her introduction that her purpose is not only to contradict the widespread impression fostered by Wilde himself that his plays were quickly and easily written, but to reveal that he labored long and hard over successive drafts in order to disguise beneath a charming, polished surface the real nature of the work. It is a revolutionary author that Eltis proposes to recover: “the Wilde who challenged social, sexual, and moral conventions, satirizing and subverting the orthodox values on which Victorian society was based.”[2]
An overview of the Oscar Wilde that Eltis identifies as anarchist, socialist, and feminist is followed by chapter-long treatments of each play (frankly omitting any treatment of the early Duchess of Padua and Salome). When she comes to Earnest she takes advantage of manuscripts and typescripts in the British Library, and the Arents Collection and the Burnside-Frohman Collection of the New York Public Library. Although she was apparently unable to examine the proof pages of the play, now in the Ransom Collection at the University of Texas Austin, she came as close as she needed by examining the Winifred Dolan typescript in the Arents Collection, heavily annotated by Wilde, which served as copy-text for the first edition, which she also cites and compares with the Dolan typescript.[3] Allowing for this one omission, deftly compensated for, we observe a canny, conscientious scholar at work, moving through each successive draft and finding that Wilde gradually transformed the play from “a highly plotted, frequently absurd, but essentially harmless and familiar comedy into an insidiously subversive, satirical, and undeniably unique drama, a psychological farce.” Moreover, Eltis is well aware that in acquiring the play for production George Alexander “requested” that Wilde cut the play from four acts to three. As shown in the Oxford critical edition of the play, Alexander gave the author no choice, and in fact sent him away from rehearsals at an early point, while continuing to reduce the length of the play and to smooth out any rough transitions that remained.[4] All the same, Eltis correctly points out that much material had already been cut by Wilde from his four-act play, and that the only major excision from what remained was the entire Gribsby episode.[5] And so Eltis gets this complex series of redactions essentially right, although she seems not to be aware that the 1 November 1894 typescript in the Arents Collection is the first act of the final typescript of Lady Lancing that Wilde took into rehearsal with him.
Eltis offers many examples of the substantive changes Wilde effected through repeated revision, of which those pertaining to Lady Bracknell are, she explains, perhaps the most telling. Formerly the familiar overbearing grande dame called Lady Brancaster, Lady Bracknell becomes transformed into “a quirkier and more disturbing character.” Her methods are “far more subtle than her predecessor’s”:
The absurd convolutions of Lady Bracknell’s speech hide the brute force behind it; Lady Bracknell, unlike Lady Brancaster, conceals her will beneath a polite veneer of maternal, wifely, and social duty, while, without addressing Jack directly, she reduces her daughter’s suitor to a social impossibility.[6]
And Eltis’s analysis of the Act I interview with Jack, which she calls “the centre-piece of Wilde’s satire of fashionable social values,” emphasizes the extent to which it was “painstakingly honed and sharpened.” She sees Wilde’s revisions here as treading a narrow line of acceptability. And so the sequence in which Jack’s political sympathies are identified, and he defends himself as not wanting to “put the asses against the classes,” but then, in a later typescript, adds that “the difficulty is to find out on which side the asses are,” was later apparently judged as going too far and was completely cut, leaving to survive only the bland fact of Jack’s being a Liberal Unionist, along with Lady Bracknell’s approving dismissal of the point by explaining that “they count as Tories” and are accepted as dinner or after-dinner guests.[7]
There is much more of interest in Eltis’s persistent textual inquiry, as in the case of Jack and Algy’s initial characterization of cynical superiority to the young women of the play, later softened to “humorous awe,” but her conclusion is well-founded. Wilde presented the London audience with a farce that embodied in comic form “all these subversive ideas propounded in his anarchist essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’.” The young lovers of Wilde’s play are frankly “wilful, childish, and greedy” but are nevertheless the “unlikely embodiments” of the Wildean philosophy of perfect individualism:
Concerned with nobody’s wishes but their own, reducing everything important to delightful nonsense and never taking life seriously, they are the comic realization of Wilde’s vision.[8]
Close on the heels of Eltis’s book, Cambridge University Press brought out its Companion to Oscar Wilde, edited by Peter Raby.[9] Among its many interesting essays, reflecting the achievements of the broad, varied understandings now represented in Wildean criticism, Russell Jackson’s assessment of what we know about The Importance of Being Earnest, along with his lively sense of what we may still discover, captures our attention.[10] Jackson’s approach is basically a theatrical one, beginning with the first production, at the St James’s Theatre, delving into the contextual interest of its lessee and manager George Alexander and the fashionable social elegance represented on and off stage by Alexander’s wife Florence, and summing up the story of how Wilde’s play came to be a three-act farce performed at this theatre in a surprisingly short time after the failure of Henry James’s play Guy Domville—the discussion functions in itself as a short course on the public appearance of Wilde’s play and the private events and circumstances that lay behind it. Reflecting some of his own abiding interests as a scholarly editor, Jackson’s next step is to trace the changes in the original four-act play demanded by Alexander. Simultaneously he reviews changes that Wilde himself had been making in “every sequence, most speeches and almost every sentence over the past six months.”
Jackson now asks his readers to step into the shoes of Wildean West End audiences, who having seen his three previous social comedies were now about to experience his latest play. This new work, a farce, quite distinct from the three works that preceded it, would surely strike them as remarkable for the numerous omissions and deviations from what they might have expected. One of the most obvious differences is the lack of “a woman with a past”—until the play arrives at the scene in which Miss Prism emerges as a delightful comic variation on that type. Another quality represented by Wilde and his plays was the pervasive, self-conscious sense of “decadence” that he and they exhibited, creating a certain striking, overt “vein” that Wilde himself admittedly found good reason for toning down in An Ideal Husband, and which is entirely absent from The Importance of Being Earnest. The title character of the former play, Sir Robert Chiltern, has a concealed history that he also shields from his wife, and who is nearly brought down by a sort of non-sexual blackmail. Wilde’s last play proves to be entirely different, bringing about “an altogether less ominous transformation of guilt, secrecy and the double life.” The two young men at its center merely “get into scrapes.” Confession and forgiveness are effortless. At the end, all that Jack has to beg indulgence for from Gwendolen is that he has been telling the truth all his life. “Can you forgive me?” he pleads. “Yes,” she replies, “for I feel that you are sure to change.”[11]
What Wilde does here—and it is one of the great reasons for the continuing appeal of the play—is simultaneously to engage with and to mock “the forms and rules of Society.” Wilde has done this before, of course, but the single most effective, and funniest, realization of it emerges in this play, in the character of Lady Bracknell. A small example of her embodiment of the “spirit of Society’s authoritative exclusiveness” is her encyclopedic knowledge of street and house numbers, resulting in her disparagement of the situation of Jack’s house in Belgrave Square: its number, 149, falls on the unfashionable side. “I knew there was something,” she comments. As she gradually takes in the catastrophic details of Jack’s obscure parentage, Wilde constructs a definitive adverse response in the course of her carefully tempered homily, beginning “Mr Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. . . “. She is troubled, she patiently explains, by such obvious departures from “the ordinary decencies of family life”; the lack of a “recognized position in good society”; the unsettling perceived analogy of these events (preposterous though it seems to us) to “the worst excesses of the French Revolution”; the chilling likelihood that the connection of Jack’s origin with “a cloak-room at a railway station” might conceal “a social indiscretion”—all of these damaging particulars combine to force her rejection of Jack’s hopeful suit for the hand of her daughter, and in the most definitive way.[12]
In a larger social and theatrical context, Wilde writing for the first time in the genre of farce—containing what Kerry Powell describes as “aggressive pranks, quick-paced action and evasion of moral responsibility”—Jackson observes that Wilde found himself “abdicating what many . . . saw as the responsibility of a dramatist.” It is not surprising that Shaw was repelled by an entire play full of people talking nonsense. Wilde himself had announced in an interview shortly before his play opened that his new work was “exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy,” but at the same time had a philosophy—that “we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” It is this paradoxical quality, Jackson maintains, that tends to frustrate attempts to link to the play various meanings of a biographical kind, even while it remains open to whatever sort of significance a commentator might wish to attach to it. One result, as Alan Sinfield has remarked, is that the naïve co-opting of Wilde “as an ally of gay men a century later” turns out to be an anachronism. “As a conscious contribution to the establishment of a distinctively homosexual literary and theatrical tradition,” Jackson comments, “it seems unconvincing, but seen as a play written by an author whose status as a sexual and social being was precarious, it has a peculiar pathos and dignity.” That Wilde was writing out of his background as an Irishman in creating the double selves of his two protagonists seems more convincing than arguing for The Importance of Being Earnest as specifically a gay play.[13] One of the most wide-ranging and consistently engaging critical articles on Wilde’s play, well grounded in the specifics of the first production and yet branching out dramaturgically and historically in informative and satisfying ways, Jackson’s essay qualifies as one of the most generally useful and insightful pieces to appear in the second half of the century.
In this same volume of the Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, Joseph Bristow contributes a differently oriented, comprehensive approach to the full question of Wilde’s identity as the “homosexual” author of his entire oeuvre and particularly as the author of Earnest. In “‘A complex multiform creature’: Wilde’s Sexual Identities,” Bristow offers a masterly account of the upsurge of Wilde-related criticism that has emerged “in the light of burgeoning lesbian and gay studies since the mid-1980s.”[14] He makes crucial distinctions between the contemporary understandings of male-male relationships in Wilde’s own time and the words that were used to name and describe them, and the quite different perceptions now articulated in late twentieth-century critical writing, identifying the pitfalls awaiting modern critics who naïvely fail to recognize the much different yet rapidly evolving views of the 1890s; at the same time, he documents the particulars of both Wildean era and modern writing so fully that his notes read like a compressed bibliographical essay on this exceedingly important subject.
Anne Varty’s A Preface to Oscar Wilde makes a distinguished contribution to the Longman’s series of book-length scholarly and critical studies.[15] By the time she has commenced a fifty-page chapter on the four major comedies, she has spent ten pages on Wilde’s Salome and an equal amount of space on a preliminary chapter called “Theatre Practice and Innovation.”[16] There, Varty sets an exemplary context for her later critical approach to the plays themselves by identifying the benefits Wilde drew from the ideas and the example itself of Edward William Godwin, a designer and theorist of remarkable range and insight, whose archaeological approach to design and whose knowledge of the history of theatrical production from Shakespeare on became a valuable, telling influence on Wilde’s own writings on the subject. In his long article “Shakespeare and Stage Costume” (1885), eventually included in Intentions under the revised title “The Truth of Masks. A Note on Illusion,” Wilde avoids literary considerations in favor of practical matters of production, particularly the achievement of illusion, partly in contrast to Godwin’s emphasis on realism. Varty includes in this useful discussion details concerning Wilde’s clashes with the producers of his plays, George Alexander (Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest), Herbert Beerbohm Tree (A Woman of No Importance), and Lewis Waller (An Ideal Husband)—inevitable differences, in view of his tenaciously held vision of how his plays should be realized on stage, along with the broad extent of his understanding of the practice of mounting a play. It is no accident that Varty includes in her list of further reading John Stokes’s indispensable studies of theatrical composition and production set in the large, multivalent context of artistic culture in this rapidly developing age.[17] Wilde too fits into this context, in ways still not properly appreciated in Wildean criticism.
Varty’s approach to The Importance of Being Earnest, the final section of a well-sustained scrutinizing of the four major plays, is to explain how Wilde adopted the perennially popular genre of farce in order to achieve theatrical expression “for the subversive philosophy previously stated in the critical dialogues.” Indeed, Varty encourages the reader to make connections from this final play of Wilde’s with various writings of his which may be seen to inform this last dramatic work in ingenious and sometimes ironic ways. Departing from what a conventional master like Pinero had done in constructing farces around the subject of upright middle-class citizens who suffer a temporary indignity but are eventually restored to propriety,[18] Wilde presents an aristocratic society but neither begins nor ends “with respectability or obvious order.” Inverting the common values of “serious” and “trivial,” Wilde transforms farce into “an instrument for political subversion.” Varty perceives what few other critics have noticed about farce in this period, namely, that official censorship was much more lax in responding to plays written in this genre than to other, more serious forms; as Wilde had noted in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” he could therefore avail himself of the much greater freedom that working in this genre allowed, and did so.[19]
A combination of welcome depth of detail and clear continuity makes Varty’s discussion and its many fresh insights a pleasure to read. She manages to provide a useful “preface” for the beginning student of the subject and simultaneously a sophisticated inquiry useful to the more advanced scholar, introducing sometimes unfamiliar sources that add depth and richness. For example, among the many sources for The Importance of Being Earnest, from Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors to the contemporary The Foundling (1894) (first identified by Kerry Powell), Varty includes one hitherto ignored, discovered in Wilde’s own Woman’s World: “A Christmas Comedy,” by Miles Bradford, published in that journal in January 1887, a piece that Wilde as editor would have read. The story concerns two brothers, one of whom disappears and later returns on cue, as if making an entrance on stage. Varty comments, with the resolution of Wilde’s last play in mind, that in Bradford’s story “fiction anticipates fact and life resembles art.” She goes on to observe that the “major and compelling source” for this, Wilde’s last play, is “the collective body of Wilde’s previous work,” which extends even to his activity as an editor.[20]
Varty’s analysis of the character of Lady Bracknell is perhaps the most enlightening of all her commentary. She emphasizes Wilde’s inflexible purpose to expose “the preposterous aspect of Lady Bracknell’s ideology of inertia.” Her hostility toward change is forged by her iron determination, along with her admitted status as a parvenue, to tolerate absolutely nothing in the way of social change. Her rejection of the “theory of modern education” as “radically unsound,” together with her groundless connection of Jack’s undignified lack of parentage with “the worst excesses of the French Revolution,” ends up referring, in a backhanded way, to Wilde’s own revolutionary sympathies, which in fact are scattered throughout the play. Jack’s horrified response to the experience of being interviewed by her—”She is a monster, without being a myth”—evokes Varty’s tart summary of her character: Jack’s observation “underlines the lively danger to civilisation represented by her politics while heralding her as an emblem of a failing system.” [21]
In her conclusion, quoting to his own disadvantage William Archer’s review of the opening production of 1895 (“What can a poor critic do . . . “),[22] Varty observes that subsequent critics have rejected Archer’s view, even while admitting that the play is “difficult to classify and unique in kind.” Finally, what makes Wilde’s farce “an astonishing achievement” is his “consummate ability to combine intellectual play with theatrical play.” Down to its final paragraph, Varty’s book constitutes a rare triumph in the crowded field of publishers’ series and the comparably dense array of late twentieth-century monographs attempting to bring together in a single volume a coherent, knowledgeable overview of an extraordinary revolutionary writer.
* * *
In 1970 Thomas S. Kuhn had published the influential second edition of his epoch-making study in the history of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[23] In it Kuhn drew attention to the concept of the paradigm as the foundational, governing contextual structure within which compatible groups of scientists straightforwardly carry on their work. When in the course of time the paradigm comes to be questioned and proves problematic, alternative understandings of the basic rules and assumptions that underlie productive scientific progress emerge, and a revolution is perceived to be occurring, discrediting or at least departing from former and now inapplicable paradigmatic understandings in favor of a new and more satisfactory paradigm which a majority of working scientists can accept and depend on as the basis for their research. The wide figurative application of Kuhn’s notion in the social sciences and humanities over succeeding decades brought about sometimes phenomenal advances, although occasionally leading to misunderstanding or overdependence, but on balance forging productive insights into the predominant characteristics of a given society, community, professional or cultural group, especially in areas having to do with art, artist, and spectators.
Even a generation later, Kuhn’s influence may be easily seen in Thomas R. Whitaker’s Mirrors of Our Playing: Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama.[24] Whitaker’s title captures the premise that guides his book: “a play in performance is a manifold mirror of the playing that constitutes our lives, shaped through the interaction of received paradigms and living presences.”[25] The fundamental insight Whitaker offers his readers is based upon the traditional understanding of art as holding a mirror up to nature, but, as he explains, the present time has fallen under the sway of a new, problematic departure from that classical view. The performance of a play now invokes a sort of double-mirroring effect, in which playing itself “holds the mirror up to playing,” reflecting “not only the histrionic behavior and its stage world, its performed action, but also its own modes of histrionic behavior.”[26] Although he does not mention it, Whitaker might have cited the oft-quoted lines of Jaques from As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” Whitaker argues that the experience of seeing the play now includes audiences themselves adopting masks of a kind that condition and qualify what is presented to them on stage. The result is that we may now be able to discover “paradigms within paradigms”—that is, we are able to perceive commonalities within larger or smaller systems of assumptions and expectations, which allow us to recognize analogical connections that enrich immeasurably the breadth and depth of our understanding.
Whitaker moves quickly from the explanation of theoretical ideas in his introduction to the two parts of his book, Paradigms and Presences. In Part I, the chapter most relevant to Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is entitled “The Music of Serious Farce: Wilde, Shaw, Orton, and Stoppard.” In addition to Earnest, the plays in question are You Never Can Tell, What the Butler Saw, and Travesties. Audiences of these plays end up finding that they have been wearing masks, sometimes ironic or brittle. Whitaker deftly carries these four superficially different yet deeply analogous plays along, confidently teasing out the qualities of characterization and action that create what he calls a farcical “music.” Generically what these plays have in common is, if we have the wit to recognize it, that they are “serious farce”; our wearing of “outrageous masks” results in a distancing effect, creating a “sprightly intellectual engagement.” Both the mask and the distanced engagement become incorporated into a characteristic “music” that “sweeps our playful community toward a transpersonal end.”[27]
Whitaker’s is a sophisticated argument, replete with carefully qualified insights and referential undercurrents that test the reader’s ability to match it fully with actual experience in the theatre. For example, in his introduction he explains that in Part II, concerning what he calls ‘Presences’, the reader will find an examination of “the continuing presence” of Lord Byron, whom he considers a nineteenth-century precursor of “the modern European sensibility.” Whitaker assures us that “the spirit of that histrionic poet-playwright” has “directly or indirectly shaped much of the work surveyed in Part I,”[28] but the reader will be pardoned for not having initially been aware of Byron’s formative influence on that long section of the book, not having yet arrived at Part II, where Byron’s influence comes in for extended treatment. And yet, Whitaker has thought long and productively about the way in which the concept of the paradigm brings so many implicit aspects of superficially disparate plays into meaningful conjunction. What he has to say about farce in the modern theatre resonates with this broad awareness of connection:
These plays belong to a modern tangle of traditions that has raised farce to a master genre, able to subsume not only burlesque, satire, comedy of manners, and romantic comedy but also the didactic, the pathetic, and even—as in Dürrenmatt’s The Visit—the tragic. Although earlier playwrights could mix up the genres, there may never have been such a various flood of mingled levity and gravity as that which includes Jarry’s King Ubu, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Ionesco‘s The Chairs, Pinter’s The Birthday Party, and the satirical commedia dell’arte of Dario Fo.
What is also engaging about Whitaker’s approach is that he views the community of artistic creation within a paradigm that includes actors and audiences, even while the “mingled liberty and gravity” generated by the performance links the play to other plays that exist within a larger continuum of plays and participating audiences. It must be granted that audiences do not go to the theatre to see a range of farcical comedies, any more than they go to the theatre to see The Collected Works of William Shakespeare; they go to see The Importance of Being Earnest, or As You Like It, some other individual play. Theoretical considerations, Whitaker implies, must originate and derive from the performed play. Like the others addressed in this chapter, Wilde’s play “finds our social and intellectual life to be a construct of masks.” But Whitaker is less interested in the dramaturgical and thematic specifics of the play than he is in its historical connections (with Congreve’s Way of the World and Gilbert’s Engaged, in this case) and its links with the workings of other farces. This is not to say that he neglects Wilde’s brilliant approach to his subject. He explains how Wilde’s “game of masks leads us dancing through patterned oppositions and complementarities toward a hidden consanguinity and a triple marriage.”[29] The fact is that Whitaker’s multivalent discourse succeeds in carrying an extraordinary number of ideas and issues forward or in suspension at once, to the enriched understanding of his significantly challenged but determined readership. Indeed, the ideal reader of this book is one who is willing to read it twice: once in order to grasp the complex lay of the land, and once again to savor the multiplicity of connections and the dynamic interplay of ideas, concepts, and concrete particularities that together make this book the important, engrossing work it is.
Masks continue to be a significiant topos in other criticism of this time. Andrew McCullough’s article “The Truth of Masks: Oscar Wilde and The Importance of Being Earnest” offers a brief but interesting and substantive overview of Wilde’s play and the way it manipulates masks in order to bring out the truth.[30] In an essay called “The truth of Masks” Wilde discussed his fascination with the truthfulness emergent from apparent contradiction. The idea applies directly, McCullough says, to Wilde’s last play and its central character, who is John Worthing, or “Jack,” in the country and “Ernest” in town. What is interesting about the fictional persona that John Worthing adopts in London is that he appears to go on being the upright, conscientious, respectable embodiment of a responsible landowner that he is in the country. Wilde contrasts him with his friend Algernon, a supposedly devil-may-care fellow who pursues his own double life through the imagined existence of Bunbury, a perpetual invalid, and advances a critique of Jack’s persistent four-square nature whenever he comes up to town.
Different as they manifestly are, the similarities between the two men are striking. Both of them lead secret double lives which take them in the direction of romance. They both lie about their Christian names to the objects of their affection, resulting in their determination to be rechristened. And they both find their plans for marriage temporarily blocked—Jack’s by Lady Bracknell, and Algy’s by Jack himself. The eventual revelation that they are brothers is at once a genuine surprise and a natural outcome. It is difficult not to realize the extent to which Wilde’s play corresponds with Wilde’s life at this point. In the play Wilde is able to resolve artistically the tensions between Jack’s secret life and his real one by finding they are ultimately the same, like a wish come true. Meanwhile, the same tensions were tearing his own life apart. In the play, Jack’s mask ultimately tells the truth, but the truth that came out in the trials that began not long after Wilde’s play opened in the West End found the opposite of a happy resolution.
It may be the case, McCullough concludes, that we owe our true understanding of Wilde’s work “largely to the trials which publicized all he stood for even more effectively than his writing.” In the realm of art, Wilde had learned “to turn an uncompromising philosophical onslaught into an essentially entertaining play of ideas,” making an opaque mask out of the play itself. It appears, in retrospect, that Wilde’s first audiences, who found his play one of the funniest they had ever encountered, had to have his “immorality” brought to their attention in the most public of ways before they began to see evidence of it in his writings. Or so McCullough believes. McCullough brings his analysis—itself a charming and accurate critique of what Wilde wrote—to a curious end. He sets the word “immorality” within quotation marks, meaning that we should take it in a special sense, but still it seems an odd term to use in order to account for Wilde’s “iconoclasm,” for his “provocative and subversive assertions,” as in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray and in “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.” In a longer, more thoughtful conclusion, McCullough might have been able to identify a more precise, less problematic omnibus term to account for Wilde’s original, heterodox opinions and beliefs, which set him so far apart from those audiences whom he wished well but who he also wished would happily misunderstand him.
Just at the century’s end a fine book on a fresh subject came to wide attention. Nicholas Frankel’s Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books[31] approached Wilde’s published writings from an unprecedented point of view and embraced assumptions about the full nature of the book that either had not been known about or were wholly disregarded, at least in so far as Wilde studies were concerned. Frankel’s approach exemplifies a new application of insights long available from bibliographical and formal studies of the book as an object of independent interest, at the University of Virginia and at other American and European universities, where philological studies together with emerging new theoretical interests began to issue in extensive textual and paratextual concerns. Eventually these interests grew broad and deep enough to become a rigorous scientific concern, blending aesthetic interests with quantitative measures to create remarkable new syntheses of scholarly interest. Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books presents the work of an expert textual scholar writing for a much broader, more general scholarly readership, offering a nicely synthesized and clearly written account of more complex technical excursions into areas that were evidently becoming ever more interesting to general literary scholars and critics. With an awareness that the majority of his readers would be making their first entrance into a field heretofore populated largely by more specialized scholars akin to bibliographers, librarians, and philologists, Frankel advances an explanation of the salient facts and theories that give structure, purpose, and clarification to what Wilde himself made a point of real concern. Remarkably sophisticated about the physical properties of the book, and supported by the technical and design knowledge of his friends Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, Wilde understood the bibliographical and technical issues and exigencies involved in the publication of literary first editions, and he found himself advocating strongly in favor of the proper publication of his own books. Frankel’s purpose is to trace the outcomes of Wilde’s efforts over a number of fascinating exemplars.
In his introductory chapter, “From Truth to Mask: The Literary Text as a Decorative Artifact,” Frankel mounts a careful argument intended to restore the balance of emphasis between first production of the play and the first edition of its text, with The Importance of Being Earnest as the initial major example. He identifies Henry Arthur Jones, one of the most successful dramatists of Wilde’s time, and his views of the importance of publication of a dramatist’s plays as raising a crucially relevant matter. Jones’s collection of essays and other materials gathered together under the title The Renascence of the English Drama,[32] brought out in 1895—at the same time as Wilde’s downfall—includes a forceful assertion to the effect that the best way to avoid “the success of all kinds of bunkum and clap-trap on the English stage is the custom of publishing our plays.” The fact that publication makes possible the reading as well as the seeing of plays tends towards “cultivation of a literary form,” Jones believes.[33] Frankel observes that it is striking to see a popular and successful playwright arguing for the implicit but authentic literary status of a successful play. What Jones wanted to achieve, Frankel explains, was the notion of performativity as the “paramount criterion in judgments about what constituted the literary drama.”[34] He points out that Wilde’s insistence that his publisher Leonard Smithers take care to make the publication of The Importance of Being Earnest, and for that matter of An Ideal Husband as well, conform in every possible detail to the design and execution of his two earlier comedies, Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance, came out of the same Jonesean value of intrinsic literary worth.
At the same time, Frankel argues that Wilde, in insisting that the physical presentation of his plays achieve a notable physical beauty and that they carefully adhere to a superior standard of decoration, was undoubtedly aiming to beat Jones at his own game. The first edition of Earnest (1899) reveals “a larger, more theoretical significance too.” Its appearance in such a beautifully decorated form moves us to rethink what is generally meant by a play in ways that encourage seeing the event of performance as “simply one of many possible modes of transmission.” The graphic appearance of the book is crucial to realizing this end. The book in this elaborately cultivated form takes on a carefully cultivated textual life of its own. It implicitly insists on being read, entirely apart from its life in stage performance. Frankel believes that the “decorative book of the play” may represent the author’s “last-ditch effort” to save it from a doubtful literary fate. It asserts his prerogatives as author. One may even see in it an effort to resuscitate his work, taking it beyond the disgraceful events in May 1895 when, first, his name was removed from programs and hoardings, and then when the play itself, along with its unfortunate fellow, An Ideal Husband, was banished from West End theatres.[35]
One might appropriately add that Wilde’s careful and inspired revisions of the typescript of the three-act play sent to Wilde in Paris from the St James’s Theatre in May 1898 provide additional evidence in support of Frankel’s comprehensive argument. For Frankel’s discussion encompasses not only the superior decorative beauty of the first edition of The Importance of Being Earnest, but the secure correlation it demonstrates with the full context of the play’s premiere performance at the St James’s in February 1895 and its premature debacle inside of three months later. In achieving this remarkable result, Frankel not only brings to bear the insights of an entire field of the humanities on the work of a singular presence in the writing of the late Victorian age, but implicitly calls for a fresh biographical and critical evaluation of Wilde’s influence on the culture of that time. He also sets a compelling example for critics and scholars already affected by recent advances toward a more sophisticated understanding of textual scholarship to adopt higher, more comprehensive and pragmatic methods for literary and theatrical study of texts as such—whatever that deceptively simple term may gradually be understood to mean.
As the century reached its end, Richard Allen Cave brought out an updated and expanded Penguin Classics collection of plays by Wilde,[36] a meaningful updating of Penguin’s first publication of Wilde’s plays beginning as early as the 1940s. Included in this edition are not only the three social comedies and The Importance of Being Earnest, but Salome and A Florentine Tragedy, presented in chronological order of composition and preceded by a substantive introduction that brings a fresh, coherent, and inventive point of view to bear on Wilde as a radical dramatist. Many people see Wilde as a “golden wordsmith,” Cave says, whose effortless wit produced plays of enduring appeal. The more comprehensive understanding should be of Wilde as a “consummate dramatist,” an author who commanded “a profound insight into the range of the arts that together constitute theatre in performance.” The plays that make up this volume reveal Wilde’s finest achievements in this genre, but even his earliest plays show him to be reaching toward “a concept of total theatre, where colour and design, the spatial relations of actors within the playing space, music and movement, all contribute to shaping the thematic life of the drama.”[37]
Cave sustains this point of view through description and analysis of each play in the volume, prefacing this account with fresh, innovative commentaries on Wilde’s two earliest plays, Vera or the Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua, which under his description of inventive color symbolism and imaginative uses of spatial relations can be seen as reflecting Wilde’s intention of teaching audiences “new ways of interpreting their perceptions of performance.” It is exciting to realize that, despite the frequently cited shortcomings in these two plays, Cave convinces the reader that Wilde’s far-reaching innovations in these early attempts created conditions in which a new kind of design practice might come into existence.[38]
Under Cave’s expert guidance the reader gains important new understanding of each of the plays under consideration. When he comes to the last play, The Importance of Being Earnest, Cave presents Wilde’s creation of movement approximating dance as perhaps the most surprising among his many facilitations of effective theatrical space. It is perhaps an arbitrary point whether Wilde or the director, George Alexander, was primarily responsible for certain specific business, dance -like and repetitious measures, but in any event they add noticeably to the farcical effect of Wilde’s play. And the audience must certainly have enjoyed the spectacle of Alexander in the character of John Worthing, a role quite remote from his usual serious, romantic stage persona. It would seem almost the case that Wilde had effectively offered the lessee and manager of the St. James’s Theatre the unique opportunity of self-parody—which Alexander himself evidently enjoyed.
What Cave gives us, finally, is a thorough revaluation of Wilde as a dramatist:
His interrogation of what was currently fashionable in the way of dramatic conventions was deeply subversive. His manipulation of the traditional generic and stylistic boundaries between high comedy, melodrama and farce to destabilize audience expectation was for original spectators highly disconcerting. The effortless brio with which he exploited theatricality as a means to define a searching social criticism was the mark of a most sophisticated satirist with a clear political and moral agenda. . . . At every level Wilde’s plays were revolutionary in the theatre of their time.[39]
Cave concludes his introduction by laying down a daunting challenge to stage directors of our own time who aspire to go beyond the simplistic goal of mounting entertaining plays by this demanding, challenging dramatist. It is critically important, Cave insists, not to lose sight of the revolutionary nature of these works, and to “allow the darker resonances that permeate Wilde’s representations of moneyed leisure their full expression.” It seems somehow especially fitting that, at the turn of the twentieth century, an edition of some of Wilde’s most interesting and enduring plays be published, set in the best surviving texts and accompanied by what is surely one of the most thoughtful, engaging, and penetrating studies to emerge in the course of the century. If criticism of The Importance of Being Earnest could be said to have a genuine coming-of-age, Richard Cave’s comprehensive introduction, every bit as much as Nicholas Frankel’s brilliantly original treatment of Wilde’s decorative books, along with Anne Varty’s virtually peerless overview, may be said to have marked its arrival.
- Eltis, Revising Wilde. ↵
- Eltis, Revising Wilde, 5. ↵
- She also took advantage of Russell Jackson’s selected citations of the Texas Austin page proofs in his 1980 edition of the play. ↵
- See Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume X, Plays 3, ed. Donohue, 659-67, 691-700. ↵
- Eltis, Revising Wilde, 175–6. ↵
- Eltis, Revising Wilde, 179–80. ↵
- Eltis, Revising Wilde, 180. ↵
- Eltis, Revising Wilde, 199–200. ↵
- Cambridge Companion to Wilde. ↵
- Jackson, "The Importance of Being Earnest"," in Cambridge Companion to Wilde, 161–77. ↵
- Jackson, "The Importance of Being Earnest," in Cambridge Companion to Wilde, 166–9. ↵
- Jackson, "The Importance of Being Earnest," in Cambridge Companion to Wilde, 170. ↵
- Jackson, "The Importance of Being Earnest," in Cambridge Companion to Wilde, 173. As for Wilde’s tendency to write "out of his background as an Irishman," as Jackson suggests, "in creating the double selves of his two protagonists," Declan Kibird, in a penetrating article recommended by Jackson, "Wilde and the English Question" (Times Literary Supplement, 16 December 1994, 13–15) applies the heuristic notion of the "double," with its long European history, to gloss Wilde’s two protagonists in The Importance of Being Earnest as reflecting the long-term national and cultural tensions that make their way willy-nilly into Wilde’s multivalent text. ↵
- Cambridge Companion to Wilde, 195–218. ↵
- Varty, Preface to Wilde. ↵
- Varty, Preface to Wilde, 63–72. ↵
- See Stokes, Resistible Theatres; In the Nineties; and Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations. ↵
- See Dawick, Pinero, 128–49. ↵
- Wilde, "The Soul of Man," Complete Works (1994), cited in Varty, Preface to Wilde, 192–3. ↵
- Varty, Preface to Wilde, 195–6. ↵
- Varty, Preface to Wilde, 203. ↵
- For a discussion of Archer’s response, see above. ↵
- Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions. ↵
- Whitaker, Mirrors of Our Playing. ↵
- Whitaker, Mirrors of Our Playing, Introduction, 1. ↵
- Whitaker, Mirrors of Our Playing, Introduction, 10. ↵
- Whitaker, Mirrors of Our Playing, 42. ↵
- Whitaker, Mirrors of Our Playing, 6. ↵
- Whitaker, Mirrors of Our Playing, 43–51. ↵
- The English Review, 9, no. 3 (1999), 14–16. ↵
- Frankel, Wilde’s Illustrated Books. ↵
- Jones, The Renascence of the English Drama. ↵
- Jones, Renascence, 110, quoted in Frankel, Wilde’s Decorated Books, 14. ↵
- Frankel, Wilde’s Decorated Books, 14–15. ↵
- Frankel, Wilde’s Decorated Books, 15–16. ↵
- The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Cave. ↵
- Introduction, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Cave, viii. ↵
- Introduction, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Cave, viii–ix. ↵
- Introduction, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Cave. xxv. ↵