In the ten years beginning in 1947, a world at relative peace once again presented an energizing opportunity for a variety of publications relating to Oscar Wilde, his plays, and especially The Importance of Being Earnest. At the same time, there was evidence that a partly hostile reexamination was occurring of Wilde’s much-improved reputation. In particular, in 1947 a book of criticism by Edouard Roditi and an article by James Agate on the plays (published in the year of Agate’s death), followed in 1951 by a wholly negative assessment by St John Ervine, evinced an uncompromisingly derogatory attitude toward the dramatist and his writings.

In a book called simply Oscar Wilde, over the space of more than one hundred pages Roditi offers a series of chapters on the poetry, the prose poems, criticism, and fiction. He appears to have read all of Wilde’s works with care and studied widely in the great collection of Wilde in the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles.^[1]  He makes discriminating distinctions, contributes considered judgments, and appears to be well on his way pursuing the aim of his study, which he says is “to indicate the central position that Wilde’s works and ideas occupy in the thought and art of his age, and in the shift of English and American literature from established and aging Romanticism to what we now call modernism.” He adds that, amid the confusion of late Victorian criticism, he hopes to show that Wilde’s “ingenious, imaginative and vigorous dialectical thought appears monumental.” Carrying the reader along, he arrives at his chapter on the plays, specifically the comedies—and introduces an entirely new and suddenly hostile tone.

We find ourselves in a public arena that, according to Roditi, draws out an entirely different and contrary aspect of Wilde’s talent. The English world this critic sees as the background within which the dramatist wrote his comedies and other plays was a decadent, restless period marked by craven capitulation to French influences, to which Wilde also broadly succumbed. His plays seem the work of two authors, Oscar Wilde providing dialogue similar to conversations in The Picture of Dorian Gray while some hack supplied Wilde “with the plots and all the emotional scenes and tirades where the action progressed.” In fact, Roditi explains, the hack was Wilde himself, harried by creditors, desperate to realize commercial success, and eager to market the epigrams he had been squandering so unprofitably on social conversation.^[2] This acerbic tone of condemnation pervades the entire chapter, appropriately entitled “Comedy as Self-Degradation.” There can be nothing good or redeeming about Wilde’s dramatic art. The epigrams that appear there routinely reappear more than once, as in the case of Cecil Graham’s remark in Lady Windermere’s Fan about “Experience,” that it is “the name that men give to their mistakes,” a remark originally made by the Russian prime minister in Vera and then again in Dorian Gray. They are all part of a ruinously divided sensibility at work, which makes the achievement of a coherent art quite impossible.

As for The Importance of Being Earnest, Roditi classifies it as, first, comedy, then satire, then farce, then more specifically comedy of manners, whichever suits his purpose at the moment. Up to this point, he has shown a clear eye for generic qualities and their differences, but now genre to his eye fluctuates unpredictably, and so predictably fails to succeed. In the process of conducting this recondite argument, Roditi reveals that he is exceptionally well-read but that he also lacks a sense of humor, as in this description of Wilde’s play:

Though the characters of Wilde’s farce are all of the same species, its plot is at times too heavily contrived, especially in the last act: the sudden revelation of Miss Prism’s past solves too conveniently the problem of the hero’s origin, and too many of the embarrassing lies of the play are too neatly resolved into truth. Such reliance on the whimsies of chance weakens the satire of a comedy of manners; its plot should seem to grow more directly out of the follies of its characters, mirroring the irrationality of an absurd society of human beings responsible for their own predicaments rather than the irresponsible tricks of a contemptibly frivolous destiny.^[3]

The words “contemptible” or “contemptibly” occur twice more on the next page, signaling the overall attitude implicit in Roditi’s approach to his present subject. He cannot leave certain things alone, and so returns more than once to the recognition scene in A Woman of No Importance, in which Gerald Arbuthnot suddenly finds out that Lord Illingworth is his father. Roditi takes the scene as ultimately definitive of the long decline of Western drama: “In over twenty centuries of artistic decline and fall, the great recognition-scenes of ancient tragedy, where angry gods of destiny and retribution vengefully displayed their flouted powers, had degenerated into petty coincidences in the ambiguous lives of fallen women and illegitimate children.”^[4]

After such carefully thought out and well-written criticism about so much of Wilde’s oeuvre, it is disappointing to encounter an analysis of his dramatic art so very wide of the mark. Writing from a vantage point at the far side of the long conflagration of the second world war, Roditi appears to have transferred a deep disaffection to that much different pre-Edwardian epoch in which Wilde lived, flourished, and came to grief. Perhaps in an attempt to set Wilde’s world in clearer perspective, he offers several appendices. A biographical appendix offers a dispassionate account of Wilde’s rise and fall. Another appendix, labelled “Philological,” attempts to treat with fairness Wilde’s “ambiguous” reputation as a homosexual, relating an anecdote in which Wilde’s name was used cynically (someone being labelled “an Oscar Wilde” as a byword for a term inadmissible in print), but concluding that his name “still means more than that of almost any other writer.”^[5] In a third appendix, bibliographical and brief, Roditi praises the catalog of the Clark Library, along with a selection of noteworthy biographical studies such as Frances Winwar’s well-documented Oscar Wilde and the Yellow ‘Nineties. In short, Roditi attempts to place Wilde in his world and himself in his own, and to estimate the extent of the gap that divides them. Roditi’s vantage point seems, however, to be that of the idealized artist and poet (his subsequent publications would be almost all poetry, or about poetry). All else, to his eyes, appears to be Philistine, including the art of the stage itself.

In the same year of publication as Roditi’s book, 1947, and shortly before he died in June of that year, James Agate, long-time theatre reviewer for the Sunday Times and other journals, sent to the editors of The Masque an essay entitled “Oscar Wilde and the Theatre” (eventually published as a stand-alone offprint). The piece displayed Agate’s well known insider’s manner but lacked his usual flamboyant style, and it bore an aspect of tired finality. It would be Agate’s last assessment of the dramatist he had followed from his earliest days as a critic: a dramatist who had taken the West End by storm in 1892 with Lady Windermere’s Fan; who in 1893 had published simultaneously in Paris and London a shocking tragedy on a biblical theme, his only French-language play, Salomé; and who, having written three more plays and seen all of them produced in sumptuous mountings by early 1895, had become at least for a brief moment the premier playwright in London, a dazzling success and the unconventional darling of high society. And one other thing of importance: he was vastly overrated—in Agate’s own confirmed and settled opinion. The time had come to set matters in clear perspective, and The Masque provided the opportunity for a final reckoning.

In a prologue and preface, “J. C. R.-R.” (possibly the editor), claimed that playgoers and readers of the present time could consider themselves far enough removed from the end of the previous century to judge Wilde’s work “without prejudice”. Speaking for them, the writer began by fixing Wilde’s exact place in the history of dramatic art. Wilde could justifiably be ranked among the greatest of English playwrights simply by reason of the greatness of The Importance of Being Earnest, but the rest of his dramatic output was to be dismissed as “melodramatic and elaborate.” In a few more sentences, the writer recounted the sad story of the dramatist’s ill-fated lawsuit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the closing of his two then currently running plays, his trials for offenses under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, his imprisonment for two years with hard labor, and his death as an outcast in Paris on 30 November 1900.

Following this ominous introduction, Agate proceeded in measured but relentlessly hostile words to condemn, not Wilde’s dramatic output alone, but almost all of his writing, even to some extent The Importance itself. After fifty years, he said, aside from that wittiest comedy in the language, all that was left in Wilde’s oeuvre of interest to the theatregoer is the intermittent wit of the comedy-dramas and the costumes of their female characters. (Apparently in response to this latter interest, this issue of The Masque provides several full-page color illustrations of women’s costumes for Wilde’s plays.) There is “more knowledge of life in six pages of Dickens or Kipling,” Agate contends, than in “the whole of Wilde’s scented output.” The world he knew was no more than what Pinero’s Cayley Drummle, the canny observer of other men’s follies in The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), called “our little parish of St. James’s.” Far from making good on his boast of being “a lord of language,” Wilde was something very much different: “the fine lady of the purple passage.”^[6]

Early in the essay, Agate levels a charge even more serious:

If it were true that Wilde altered the mentality of his age then that could have been written of him which was written of Swinburne: ‘He was to young men everywhere an intoxication and a passion, awakening half-formed desires, hidden longings and impulses, and secret enthusiasms, and wielding sway more imperiously over heart and sense and soul than any other man of his time did over the intellect or the reason of his disciples.’ Would one have written that of Wilde? Perhaps. But in the sense that the young men to whom he was an intoxication were of the oddest kind.^[7]

Looking back from a twenty-first century vantage point at the remarkable impress Wilde made on the audience of his own day, his meteoric success as a dramatist, his bold assertions about his symbolic place in the culture of his time, his sudden fall from grace, and his untimely death at the age of forty-six as an outcast in a Parisian hotel, we find the most eminent English theatre critic of the early twentieth century, who from time to time had written positively of Wilde’s accomplishments, now dismissing him altogether, and in undisguised vituperative terms. Over the years Agate had had much of value to say about his own contemporary theatre, engaging with a wide readership who held him in high esteem; and yet this same cohort of readers was now being presented with a wholesale condemnation of the man and his work. Was there some elusive explanation for it, or how might we account for this unprecedented assault?

It seems only fair to set what Agate has to say in the theatrical and social context in which he wrote, a context he himself helped to establish over something like forty years of covering the London theatre for the Manchester Guardian, the Saturday Review, the Sunday Times, and the BBC. Let us review what Agate had to say about two extraordinary London productions of Wilde’s plays mounted a scant few years before he wrote this damning final assessment.

An Ideal Husband, first produced at the Haymarket Theatre on 3 January 1895, opened in revival at the Westminster Theatre during wartime, on 16 November 1943, with scene and costume designs by the brilliant young artist Rex Whistler (who would die an untimely death in the still ongoing war). Despite Britain’s continuing engagement in that horrific struggle and the tendency of most West End and other theatres during wartime to favor light comedy and other forms of distracting or solacing entertainment, Wilde’s comedy-drama, its serious themes deftly counter-balanced by sparkling language, witty repartee, and a bitter-sweet happy ending, played for some two hundred sixty-three performances.^[8] Then, in the last few months of the war, on 21 August 1945, a revival at the Haymarket of Wilde’s first such play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, originally presented at the St James’s Theatre on 20 February 1892, began an astonishing run of some six hundred and two performances, closing finally on 8 February 1947.^[9] The first postwar London production of any play by Oscar Wilde, this phenomenal success very likely benefited from the example set by that remarkable mid-war production of An Ideal Husband. In any case, this near-miraculous Haymarket run reinforced the already well-recovered reputation of the dramatist who had died under painful circumstances nearly fifty years before.

The dismissive diatribe about the author of these two plays, published by the editors of The Masque a few months after Agate’s death in the early summer of 1947, prompts a curious question: was Agate’s voice a lone hold-out raised in opposition to the stunning popularity of Wilde’s two plays among the wartime and post-war West End audience, or was there a broader ground of adverse opinion reflected in Agate’s own strictures? Criticism was generally favorable in the case of the mid-war production of An Ideal Husband, but as for the post-war mounting of Lady Windermere’s Fan, directed by John Gielgud, critical response was divided. The Times and the Spectator “panned many aspects of the latter production—the directorial approach, the pace, the acting, and the play itself,” but the New Statesman was “much more favorably disposed toward both the play and the production.”^[10] In his reviews of those two productions for the Sunday Times, in 1943 and 1945 respectively, Agate had conveyed unequivocally his low opinion of Wilde’s dramatic art. In connection with his review of the 1943 Ideal Husband, he went out of his way to bring adverse opinion to bear, editorially recruiting reviewers of the original 1895 production to conduct his critique for him. Excerpts from original reviews by Bernard Shaw, William Archer, and A. B. Walkley were pasted into Agate’s own piece, enabling those critics to repeat their strictures about melodramatic action and their backhanded compliments about brilliant Wildean wit unconnected with the character of the speaker. Another witness of the premieres of these two plays, the Manchester critic Charles E. Montague, was also excerpted so as to remind the reader of “the idleness of Wilde’s thinking” and to compare the dramatist’s allegedly problematic ethics with Ibsen’s.

In the case of Agate’s notice of the 1945 revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan, the critic for the Sunday Times was even more absolute in his condemnation. Beginning by describing the naïve pleasure the original opening night audience took in its production, in 1892, he remarked that they were seemingly unaware that “the serious part of this epatifying comedy was a mass of filchings.” The post-war common playgoer, superior in Agate’s view to those simple beings of fifty years before, “has come to realise that Wilde’s thinking was both unoriginal and shoddy.” In the spirit of lofty mitigation, Agate explains how benighted Wilde’s position was, “groping in the theatrical dark which preceded the dawn of the problem play.” That awakening occurred only the very next year, in 1893, when Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray ushered in a new era, Agate believed, in which “the serious drama was deemed a subject for the dinner-table.”^[11]

“Epatifying”? Agate’s own coinage, it would appear, presumably from the French épater.^[12] Agate, an ardent Francophile, prided himself on his linguistic acumen and his ability to take his admiring audience uncritically along with him. He might have said “amazing,” or, perhaps, “shocking” (as in the phrase “épater les bourgeoisie”), or “stupefying.” We get a full taste here of the Sunday Times reviewer’s easy, informal manner, his endorsement of his readers’ pretensions to knowledge not their own, his over-simplified flattening of the real contours of a complex period of historical and cultural transition as it applies to the drama, and his evident misunderstanding of Wilde’s clandestine dramaturgical strategy of borrowing from a great range of dramatic and other writing for his own subversive and ironic purposes. Agate thought well enough of his review of the 1943 Ideal Husband to import almost half of it four years later into this final sally in The Masque, against a dramatist whose plays, aside from their wit, he had consistently found to be “the purest fudge, put together without any kind of artistic conscience, and using all the stalest devices of the theatre.” If there were counter-instances of Agate’s praise for Wilde—and there were—he had conveniently forgotten them. There was, for example, his warmly appreciative review of the Guthrie Old Vic production of 1934, a complete turnabout from his unremittingly negative assessment of the 1930 Lyric, Hammersmith production, the so-called “black and white” production, of 1930.^[13] Possibly the most severe of all his strictures is imbedded in the dense paragraph in which the long-lived reviewer for the Sunday Times describes what he views as the most flagrant example of Wilde’s failure, a paragraph ending with the uncompromising dismissal of the comedy-drama that directly followed Lady Windermere’s Fan: “No, not all the wit in Mayfair can sweeten that little tract called A Woman of No Importance.”^[14]

There are signs in Agate’s farewell onslaught that an additional issue may be at stake. Certain words and phrases in the writing just surveyed—”the fine lady of the purple passage,” or “the whole of Wilde’s scented output”—suggest that sexual orientation was of particular concern to him. These phrases appear to allude to Wilde’s homosexuality by mocking what Agate seems to view as his effeminacy. Coming from a man of his own sexual orientation, as we know from a reputable latter-day biography of Agate, these words manage to discriminate simultaneously against the writer and the man.^[15] At the same time, we may perceive that these phrases, uttered in a tone of disavowal and scorn, enable Agate to distance himself behind an impersonal screen where, ostensibly safe and unengaged, he may enjoy a more protected vantage point, allowing him to take his readers into his confidence and counting on their understanding of what he really means but is reluctant to say in so many words. By way of glossing Agate’s reticence, his biographer adduces a telling comment by Agate himself that reveals what may have been a constant tension underlying his efforts to maintain a safety net of apparent disinterest. In this comment Agate describes what he perceives as “the peculiar tragedy of the homosexual, which is that of the tight-rope walker preserving his balance by prodigies of skill and poise and knowing that the rope may snap at any moment.”^[16]

Agate appears to be describing himself here, indirectly. For all the broad acceptance he enjoyed as the most distinguished theatrical journalist of his day, the precarious nature of his self-acknowledged position is striking. He could, he ingenuously admits, like any tight-rope walker who commits a mis-step, fall and perish. Why, then, we might ask, does he spare no commiseration, no apparent sense of fellow-feeling, for the dramatist who, nearly a half-century before, took a kind of perverse pride in being the gaze and show of the time, but who lived, as did Agate (as his biographer suggests), in fear of tottering on the high rope, unable to preserve his balance and plunging to his ruin? A full-scale history of the Sunday Times makes no secret of Agate’s sexual orientation. His sexual interests, known around the newspaper’s offices, caused occasional embarrass­ment but did not prevent him from keeping his job until he died. In conversation Agate might indicate once in a while that he was not ashamed to be what he was. Yet only once, and in a veiled way, did he attempt to broach the subject in print, in a Sunday Times article in which he leveled a bitter attack against British hypocrisy, “at the same time withholding from the reader the reason for the outburst,” as the Sunday Times historian explains. The article was replaced at the last minute by the announcement that Mr Agate was on holiday.^[17]

Knowing what he must have known about Wilde, his companions, and his personal life, why did Agate advance such an egregious departure from straightforward adverse criticism? A taut, sustained diatribe of seven pages—accompanying a lavish five-page array of illustrations, including costume designs for Wilde’s fashionable ladies—was all that Agate required in order to accomplish the thorough debunking he achieves in this conclusive terminal assessment. All the while, his encouragement of an unfriendly or even hostile response in his readership ends up linking the very wittiness he is so ready to praise in Wilde’s plays with a nearly unlimited range of dramaturgical faults: “He wrote the wittiest light comedy in the language; the other pieces are stilted, wholly insincere society melodramas redeemed by their wit.”^[18] In Agate’s comprehensive overview, these faults turn out to be at one and the same time professional and personal, artistic and human. Was Wilde’s increasing tendency toward risk-taking, toward what he called “feasting with panthers,” something that put Agate and everyone else concerned at unnecessary risk? Agate would have known about the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, and in particular its Section 11, the so-called Labouchere Amendment, under which Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years with hard labor. It continued to remain on the books until the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967, twenty years after Agate last wrote, and died. Meanwhile, things had not changed much in the fifty-two intervening years since Wilde had been convicted; some things, not at all.

A pertinent example arises. John Osborne’s play A Patriot for Me (1965), about an Austrian military officer who commits suicide out of shame over his homosexuality, was denied a license from the Lord Chamberlain on account of its open, frank treatment of the subject. The English Stage Company, in residence at the Royal Court Theatre, responded by defying the censor, forming a private club, selling memberships at a nominal fee, and going ahead with the production, to much publicity and fanfare. The comptroller in the Lord Chamberlain’s office, one of several unacknowledged “spies” from that quarter, paid a visit to the Royal Court on 11 August and filed a report, praising the production overall but objecting to one scene in particular that he thought was “really unpleasant.” He concluded: “I do not think that the tolerance of homosexuality in this country has yet reached the point where this play, in its present form, is suitable for public performance”^[19] This was the dominant atmosphere at the time when Agate wrote his scathing denunciation of that “fine lady of the purple passage.” The Sunday Times critic appears to have known exactly where he stood. He took no chances, and wrote accordingly. The fragility of his predicament is clear enough, all the same. Revisiting Agate’s Oscar Wilde and the Theatre in this larger context, is the reader justified in perceiving there an emergent tone of aggrieved, fearful defensiveness?

Agate‘s successor as theatre critic on the Sunday Times, Harold Hobson, who took over in 1947 on Agate’s death, published a book five years later surveying over half a century of theatre reviewing since the coming of Ibsen. Verdict at Midnight: Sixty Years of Dramatic Criticism^[20] shows its author to be frequently mindful of the lingering presence of his predecessor, yet unafraid to espouse consistently contrary opinions. In a pertinent example, Hobson remarked, “It is curious to observe how long it took the genius of Mr Gielgud to get adequate recognition. Even his best performances were misjudged.”^[21] The author of one such misjudgment was James Agate, and the Gielgud character in question was John Worthing in the 1930 Lyric, Hammersmith production of The Importance of Being Earnest, a misjudgment Hobson quotes at great length.^[22] One wonders if Gielgud’s homosexuality could somehow have weighed in the balance with Agate’s hostile judgment.^[23]

Over the next half-century, more than one school of acknowledged gay criticism would grow up, the historians among whom would build upon, reject, or merely ignore Agate’s high-profile attack, finding new or newly available grounds, greater insight, and stronger opinions for analyses of topics connected with Wilde the man and Wilde the dramatist. In any case, Wilde’s increasingly robust reputation was by this time, if not before, able to withstand the attacks of Roditi and Agate, just as it would the unprecedented book-length reappraisal by St John Ervine, published four years later, just after the mid-century point, in 1951.

Ervine, born in a working-class suburb of Belfast in 1883, brought to this critical biography written in old age an aggregation of strong, unyielding views formed over a lifetime of articulate, highly opinionated observation. As a young man Ervine worked for the Abbey Theatre and, in the historically and critically eventful year of 1916, managed it—for less than a year; his harsh disciplinary measures and uncompromising Ulster Unionist and nationalist views soon forced his resignation. As a professional dramatist and novelist, he developed habits of deep, fearless research into his subject, a commanding prose style, and, in the case of Oscar Wilde: A Present Time Appraisal,^[24]a constantly condemnatory attitude toward both man and writer.

As an astute analyst of dramatic action Ervine could capture the perhaps reluctant yet fascinated attention of his readers over long stretches of discourse. His description of the ending of A Woman of No Importance is typical in the way he combines an elegant account of the closing action with a largely prejudiced judgment against its author. A wilful and perverse author, he explains, can malign and falsify a character, especially when he spends his life in writing for artificial effect. Describing Lord Illingworth’s supercilious comments and eventual departure, Ervine sums up the scene. Gerald and Hester come in from the garden, and Gerald asks who that man was. His mother replies, “Oh, no one. No one in particular. A man of no importance.” Ervine continues:

There the play ends. It has no veracity in it from start to finish. There is not a single person in the play who bears a recognisable resemblance to a human being. It is a common play, written by a man who has submerged his genius in the gutter. Even the small strokes of character with which Wilde invests his people are fakes—verbal tricks, not characteristics at all.^[25]

Ervine provides comparable commentary for An Ideal Husband. Arriving at The Importance of Being Earnest, he cites Bernard Shaw’s disappointed review of the play in its original production and proceeds to justify what Shaw mistakenly says about the play being no less than ten years old at the time of production (a mistake for which Shaw subsequently apologized). Shaw was reasonable enough in this, Ervine maintains, wilfully distorting Shaw’s strictures, “for he perceived the fact that Wilde’s mind lacked originality, that it was a hackneyed mind, brilliantly decorated and lit by powerful lights, but essentially an old-fashioned, melodramatic and routine mind.”^[26]> It is a play quite impossible to describe and analyze, Ervine decides, and he abandons the task, resigning himself to commentary on a play without a plot:

An air of spontaneity is created by the fact that Wilde, as he wrote his dialogue, clearly had not the slightest idea of what his characters would say next. He put down the first things that came into their heads, careless whether it led anywhere or nowhere; and when he had filled a fair number of pages with irrelevant remarks, he concluded an act. The fact that he produced an uncommonly entertaining farce by this means does not alter the fact that he permitted his pen to write what it liked, exactly as Sterne did in the Sentimental Journey.^[27]

Ervine’s motive for declining to analyze the action of the play—by asserting that it has none—may be that he simply cannot bring himself to say something, anything, positive about the writing of an author for whom he feels such disgust and contempt.

Cyril Connolly, reviewing Ervine’s book for the Sunday Times, captured the quality of his prose and the malign purpose that lay behind it when he quoted Ervine’s intention, stated at the outset, of forming an opinion of Wilde and his work “without prejudice”— “after which,” says Connolly, “with a rapid gear-change, he reaches the cruising speed of bumbling vituperation which is kept up for the rest of the book.” Ervine provides some interesting dramatic criticism, Connolly allows, but there is “something almost mechanical about his virulence, as if he feels real to himself only in moral indignation.” While in prison, Connolly continues, Wilde wrote that “hate is a form of atrophy and kills everything but itself.” But in Ervine’s book hate leads “to distortion and misrepresentation.” If there was one fact that everyone agreed on about Wilde, it was “his total absence of malice,” a quality almost unique among wits.

Connelly’s observations about Wilde, pointedly countermanding Ervine’s, are a welcome respite after three hundred and more pages of poisonous contumely. Ervine’s “present time appraisal” proves to be all the more cruel because this critic brought to his self-appointed task a genuine talent for dramatic analysis and an even larger capacity for brisk, memorable prose. Connolly leaves his own memorable comment, all the same, by way of the very title of his review. He adapts the words of Wilde’s pathetic cry to the sentencing judge, cruelly left unanswered, at the end of his last trial in 1895, condemning him to two years in prison with hard labor—a cry effectively repeated by the ghost of Oscar Wilde to St John Ervine in his book. Connolly’s title: “And I, my Lord? May I say nothing?”.^[28]

It would lend an incomplete perspective to the state of Wildean dramatic criticism at mid-century to identify only what has so far seemed largely a negative critical view of Wilde’s accomplishments at this distance from his passing. For much change and development was in the offing and, in fact, had already begun. In particular, a ground-breaking book had been published just two years before Ervine’s uncompromising put-down. Francis Fergusson’s transformative study The Idea of a Theater had appeared in 1949,^[29] and over time Fergusson’s comprehensive, deeply grounded book, organized as a study of ten plays, from Sophocles to T. S. Eliot, was serving to enlarge modern understanding of the relationships between dramatic literature, theatrical production, and theoretical and philosophical perceptions as viewed in the larger historical contexts of art and culture. Fergusson augmented the work with an appendix concerned with “technical concepts”—in fact, basic Aristotelian terminological matters that call for precise theoretical analysis but that reward the persistent reader with enlightened understanding of the entire range of dramatic literature, regardless of period. Even though all the plays that Fergusson studies are tragedies, the larger point he makes is that it is the dramatic form as embodied in action that itself creates meaning.

As familiarity with Fergusson’s book spread, it seemed not only to encourage criticism of specific works but to exert widespread influence on varying critical and analytical perceptions of the performed play and its impact on an audience. There was a kind of fearless quality to Fergusson’s method, which expertly bridged theoretical concerns and concrete theatrical issues. Although Fergusson did not include Oscar Wilde among the dramatists whose plays he studied so intensely, his example served as general encouragement, resulting in an increasing number of essays, book chapters, and occasionally entire books, beginning around mid-century and continuing on for decades, on Wilde’s plays and especially on The Importance of Being Earnest.

A caveat is called for here. One would not want to appear to argue that Fergusson’s book, however brilliant in the boldness and depth of its analysis and the sweep of its coverage, was by itself responsible for the thriving catholicity of criticism of a single farcical play, let alone of an entire oeuvre, for over half a century and more. Art and culture are too multifarious and complex to support any such claim. At the same time, it is difficult to leave out Fergusson’s perceivable influence and still account for the mounting bibliography that comes to play such a remarkable role in humanities scholarship (and theatrical production as well) when it comes to Oscar Wilde, and particularly to The Importance of Being Earnest. This play nearly died a premature death as Wilde’s star fell, but it was rescued by the combined efforts of its author’s literary executor, Robert Ross, and Leonard Smithers, that eccentric, fearless publisher with surprisingly exquisite taste, who together brought it back to life, in a text seen through the press by Wilde himself in the year before he died. That authoritative text, carried into the twentieth century in a largely intact state, as we have seen, in Ross’s 1908 edition of the collected works, organized as a study of ten plays from Sophocles to T. S. Eliot,^[30] was available for general perusal ever since. By mid-century it evidently had begun to lure critically minded readers with increasing frequency to plumb the depths of its extraordinary vitality.

We may also identify a remarkable critical work that emerges just after mid-century, exerting on its own a powerful influence on subsequent critical writing. Eric Bentley, the Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University, brought out his brilliant study of the modern theatre, The Playwright as Thinker, in 1955. Surely one of the classics of dramatic criticism of its time, it follows the example of Fergusson’s The Idea of a Theater in studying a series of major plays, but is much different in style and approach. Covering modern drama from Ibsen to Brecht, but including forays into traditional European theatre back to ancient times, Bentley’s extraordinary range of comparative and illustrative reference takes in the Greeks, Shakespeare, Büchner, Wagner, Shaw, and many others, theoreticians as well as dramatists; and, among them, Wilde as well. Bentley sees Wilde as primarily a satirist, particularly in his “best play,” The Importance of Being Earnest. Satire is a running accompaniment to the play, he argues, and as such makes for a new sort of comedy in which “[w]hat begins as a prank ends as a criticism of life,” as “intellectual sharp-shooting.” A reader’s marginal comments, he conjectures, would identify such topics as “death; money and marriage; the nature of style; ideology and economics; beauty and truth; the psychology of philanthropy; the decline of aristocracy; nineteenth-century morals; the class system.” Bentley reprints the first page of the play to demonstrate how Wilde attaches “a serious and satirical allusion to every remark.” The writing may seem shallow when what we want is truth, Bentley allows, but we must remember Wilde’s assertion that “A Truth in Art is that whose contradictory is also true. The Truths of metaphysics are the Truths of masks.”^[31] Bentley pairs Wilde with Shaw as writers of “first-rate drawing-room comedies,” unequaled since they wrote.^[32] The great attraction of Bentley’s book is its combination of incisive criticism of a large range of plays and its overall embrace of active, penetrating thought on the part of the playwright: hence, his title.

* * *

As we are observing, an abundance of criticism on Wilde and The Importance of Being Earnest begins to emerge around the middle of the twentieth century. It proceeds to move in various directions over some fifty years of constantly growing activity, both in book chapters or sections and in separate articles, published in journals or, increasingly as the century moves on, in thematically oriented edited collections. Included here as well is a smaller selection of theatrical reviews that identify and describe important productions, especially where they meaningfully echo or contrast with significant contemporary critical themes or trends.

One such piece, memorable alike for its radical insights and the maverick posture assumed by its author, is a review by the American critic Mary McCarthy. Writing for the Partisan Review at the threshold of this latter-day period, in 1947, McCarthy without mentioning any of its details makes sure no one will soon forget the production of The Importance of Being Earnest by John Gielgud and his English company at the Royale Theatre, New York, in that year.^[33] Mounting a colossal put-down of the author and his work, McCarthy declares herself deeply offended, not by Wilde’s homosexuality, the “blotter charge” for which English society punished him, but for the less forgivable social crime of “making himself too much at home.” Everywhere, he became “overly familiar with his subjects.” He presumes on the acquaintance of his audience, inviting himself and his “fast opinions” into the spectator’s world. He “ensconces himself with intolerable freedom and always outstays his sufferance.”^[34]

As for the play itself, after McCarthy’s introductory denigration of the author one is not surprised by her determined laying waste of his play. There is nothing good to say about it—and yet, what may be said, impossible as it is, one must grudgingly allow has a point, if it could just be puzzled out. Despite the intolerable triviality of the second act, Wilde’s most original play has “the character of a ferocious idyll.” McCarthy drives her reader into the difficult position of attempting to discern useful truth lurking within a formidable jungle of vituperation. We must strain to recognize the play we know from McCarthy’s description of a detective story conducted in an “infernal Arcadia”:

Like the detective story, like the paradox, this play is a shocker. It is pure sport of the mind, and hence very nearly “English.” The clergyman is the fox; the governess the vixen; and the young bloods are out for the kill. Humanitarian considerations are out of place here; they belong to the middle class. Insensibility is the comic “vice” of the characters; it is also their charm and badge of prestige. Selfishness and servility are the moral alternatives presented; the sinister impression made by the governess and the rector comes partly from their rectitude and partly from their menial demeanor. Algernon Moncrieff and Cecily Cardew are, taken by themselves, unendurable; the meeching Doctor Chasuble, however, justifies their way of life by affording a comparison—it is better to be cruel than craven.^[35]

It may help to understand that McCarthy sees the play as “Wilde’s true De Profundis.” Its scene is hell, and if much of it proves tiresome, eternity, as Sartre would say, is “a bore.” The famous play is all false sentiment. Teased beyond endurance by McCarthy’s provoking insights, one wants an hour’s interview with the author of this review in which she is invited to respond to a previously submitted roster of questions. Her description of the first and third acts as offering a kind of salvation, in the person of that “great lumbering dowager,” Lady Bracknell, yields a certain hope. A splendid creation, she is “so insensitive that the spoken word reaches her slowly, from an immeasurable distance, as if she were deaf.” She embodies, as McCarthy views her, “all the feelings of admiration and despair” aroused in the author “by Respectability.”
There is even more to be said about the unconscious “goddess” residing in this Arcadian garden. McCarthy may perhaps have in mind the classical topos of the presence of death in Arcadia (“Et in Arcadia ego”). In any case, no survey aiming at representativeness can afford to omit McCarthy’s outrageous opinions of the author and his work. In a later review (also published in the Partisan Review) of a biography of Wilde by George Woodcock, W. H. Auden referred to McCarthy’s review as “excellent, though I thought a bit governessy.”^[36] Outrageous in its own way, perhaps. One would wish to have overheard McCarthy’s reaction.

As the second half of the twentieth century commenced, it seems appropriate to continue tracking critical responses to Wilde as a dramatist and, most especially, to his play The Importance of Being Earnest by reviewing an article intended to mark the centenary of his birth. Alan Harris’s “Oscar Wilde as Playwright: A Centenary Review,”^[37] is remarkable in its combination of careful judgment, breadth, and clear-sightedness, along with its handling of crucial detail. Harris covers the early life of this young Irish man and his Oxford student days with appropriate brevity, while intimating the greater success that lay in store for him as a dramatist, as well as a writer and journalist. Harris sets out the emergent particulars of the early plays, Vera and The Duchess of Padua, which proved to be disappointments to his audiences and to Wilde himself. False starts though they were, still they offered important hints of the remarkable dramatic works yet to come. Harris moves quickly on to a point beginning in 1891, when Wilde’s writings were earning increasing acclaim. Before he produced another play, he had published no fewer than four other books: Dorian Gray, Intentions, The House of Pomegranates, and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Tales, along with the article “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” He was now ready to round the corner to a time when he would become the foremost playwright in the West End and beyond.

As both a biographer and critic Harris reveals a masterful ability to marry detail, balance, and clarity in his treatment of the four major plays that appeared between 1892 and 1895. He offers dense but perspicacious accounts, describing how Wilde became more and more adept at crafting plays that boasted a familiar, entertaining generic grounding while simultaneously revealing new and discriminating insights into human nature, qualities that stand out all the more clearly for being departures from more straightforward, conventional renderings. The principle feature of Lady Windermere’s Fan, the first and perhaps the best of what Hesketh Pearson called Wilde’s “seriocomic” plays, was its “witty, mondaine conversation,” taken over from Congreve and remodeled in Wilde’s own image. Harris does not shy away from describing the weaknesses of his subject. The play has flaws—an absurd plot, hackneyed emotions, and a structure visibly made up of “a combination of two disparate elements which for the most part jar with each other rather than set each other off,” reflecting a complex Wildean duality of its own. We arrive at a kind of dispiriting climax when Mrs Erlynne pursues Lady Windermere to Lord Darlington’s rooms and persuades her to return home:

These passages give the impression of coming straight from something in Wilde which resisted all sophistication and went on responding to stock situations with the heart-felt clichés that make the whole world kin. In the fourth act, where he skillfully steers the play back to comedy, the two elements are for once really effectively combined as Mrs Erlynne self-sacrificingly resumes her role of the cynical adventuress, becoming in the process truly alive and even, as Wilde clearly intended her to be, moving.^[38]

Harris finds that A Woman of No Importance represents overall a step backwards in Wilde’s dramaturgy, and even with An Ideal Husband Wilde is content to offer “another tiresome high-minded wife who is confronted at her own party by the adventuress with a mysterious hold on her husband and emerges from the subsequent ordeal with a somewhat broadened outlook.<note:Harris, ‘Oscar Wilde as Playwright’, 232.> The questionable Mrs Cheveley lacks the redeeming features of the earlier Mrs Erlynne, but the real hero of the play, Lord Goring, a ‘flawless dandy’ and also a tower of strength, saves the situation ‘first by his presence of mind and then by his wisdom and eloquence’, returning then to his normal role of ‘studied levity‘. There is much of Goring in Oscar Wilde, Harris concludes, in this sophisticated, unidealized portrait of Wilde’s most memorable dandy.^[39]

Harris’s overview of the major plays calls for greater than summary treatment here because he folds his analysis into his argument for Wilde’s high status as a dramatist in his own time and his continued standing in a larger context after his death. The history of irritating disharmony that characterized the three comedies was abruptly and wonderfully cut off, Harris explains, in the case of the fourth and last play, The Importance of Being Earnest, by the total absence, as A. B. Walkley had put it, of any “discordant note of seriousness.” Everything now went up in “a bubble of inspired nonsense.” There may be occasional suggestions of satire or parody, as in Lady Bracknell’s brilliant interview with her prospective son-in-law. As for the ending of the play, it seems not too fanciful, given Wilde’s classical background, to see Miss Prism’s long-lost bag as a modern-day reference to the “tokens,” so-called, that function in recognition scenes in ancient Greek drama. And it is not so much a fantasy to detect in the events that occur in Wilde’s life, as winter moved into spring, the “ideal pattern” of Greek tragedy beginning to emerge. Harris’s seamless narrative captures the polar opposition of life at this crucial point: while two astonishingly successful comedies are drawing full houses in the West End, we are led in the second half of a comprehensive paragraph to confront Wilde’s precipitous fall from grace. Harris’s carefully crafted, telling phrases memorably capture the termination of Wilde’s life as playwright-in-ordinary to the London public theatre.^[40]

Harris is not ready to conclude his essay, however, for he has more to say about the “exaltation” of this last play above all other Wildean works, a status that appears from his latter-day point of view to have solidified into a “verdict of posterity.” He proceeds to combine this artistic distinction and its popular mirroring with a larger, final estimate of the writer. No matter how imperfect the serious side of the artist had shown itself, Harris asserts, it

testifies not only to a remarkable diversity of talents but also to a much greater moral and intellectual range than he is sometimes given credit for. There is a risk of its being forgotten that he impressed more than one of his contemporaries, not merely (in the words of one who only met him casually in his last years) as “a man of wide information and commanding intelligence,” but as having, in spite of everything, the indefinable mark of personal greatness, to which the reluctant half-tribute of so hostile a critic as [W. E.] Henley—”He is the sketch of a great man”—bears notable witness. If this quality is seldom conveyed by his writing, that was, in part at least, the penalty he paid for letting his intensely sociable, pleasure-loving nature make him put life before work.^[41]

Let us now turn to a pair of articles on Wilde’s play published in 1956 in the same issue of College English, a journal already in its eighteenth annual volume. This double event set a noteworthy precedent for the emergent vitality of Wildean studies in American and British academic criticism.

Otto Reinert begins his article “Satiric Strategy in The Importance of Being Earnest” by calling into question Edouard Roditi’s approach to the play in his earlier book Oscar Wilde.^[42] As we have seen, Roditi asserts that the play has a satiric tone but lacks a moral point of view. Believing that the play draws attention as both satire and drama, Reinert accuses Roditi of exercising “a curious form of critical blindness.” The play is meaningful farce, Reinert insists, because “tone and plot have been successfully integrated.” Wilde’s strategy in order to bring satire out of farce is to employ “a pattern of ironic inversion,” a strategy he first attempted in An Ideal Husband. The true hero of that play is Lord Goring, who is no mere irresponsible dandy; “his flippant paradoxes emphasize the irony of his moral position” in relation to Lord Chiltern, “the pretended pillar of society.” And so it is Lord Goring’s wit, expressive of an ironic attitude toward life, “that guarantees moral salvation in Wilde’s world.” In this way the author “puts the fine art of epigram to serious purposes,” allowing it to participate in the full meaning of the play.

How does this strategy work in The Importance of Being Earnest? Reinert asks. It has no character that corresponds to Lord Goring. Instead, the only ironist is Wilde himself; his characters never desist from their flippancy. And so he arranges for what Francis Fergusson calls “a limited perspective, shared with the audience,” as the basis of the fun, and thus shows human life as comic.^[43] The truth is that Wilde respects his paradoxes, making them an integral part of a play that is all farce and yet allows them to become “a lucid image of the non-farcical reality” that the author keeps outside the play. Unlike the two earlier social plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance, in which paradoxes are merely “bright spots” in a “sentimental thesis play,” Reinert draws out a series of examples from The Importance in the course of a compelling exposition to illustrate Fergusson’s “limited perspective.” Together they comprise the working out of Wilde’s “basic formula for satire,” assuming “a code of behavior that represents the reality that Victorian convention pretends to ignore.” From the very beginning of the play, as in the discussion between Algy and Lane over the inferior quality of champagne in married households, Reinert shows how Wilde invites us to share his view of “the ludicrous and sinister realities behind the fashionable façade of an over-civilized society where nothing serious is considered serious and nothing trivial trivial.”

Reinert now turns to his second and final point: that it is important to recognize Wilde’s play as a play and not merely a collection of witticisms. In doing so he draws once again, if only implicitly, on The Idea of a Theater, specifically on Fergusson’s analysis of the Aristotelian notion of a play as an “imitation of an action.” Reinert insists that Wilde’s play is, before anything else, a play, “an imitation of action.” No discussion of tone succeeds except in the context of accounting for “the extraordinary impact” of the play as a play. Even a critic as rare as Eric Bentley, in The Playwright as Thinker, who, Reinert observes, argues for the presence of serious satiric implications in Wilde’s play, misunderstood the plot as negligible, as “inspired nonsense.” Reinert’s view is otherwise: the action has a far more important function, for it “informs the satiric dialogue with coherent meaning.” In a surprising but convincing turn, Reinert pursues the moral issues raised in the play and shows them to be encapsulated in the aspects of Bunburying that move the action forward but must then finally be abandoned in order to achieve the conclusion adumbrated in the title of the play.
Benefiting from the efficient conduct of Reinert’s argument, we perceive in his article the emergence of a concrete example of the influence of Fergusson’s book, along with the influence of Bentley’s study as well.

Following directly on Reinert’s article, in the same issue of College English appeared another on the same play, Richard Foster’s “Wilde as Parodist: A Second Look at The Importance of Being Earnest.”^[44] Foster also engages with Roditi’s misunderstanding of Wilde’s play as a way of situating his own argument. A reader of the journal coming upon two critical articles on the same play might find it irresistible to compare their points of view. Both writers see Wilde’s play as essentially both farce and satire, not drawing room comedy. But where Reinert follows Fergusson in relating dialogue, especially epigram and paradox, to a holistic understanding of the action of the play, Foster offers a less profound yet more flexible and insightful generic approach. Whereas audiences seldom if ever concern themselves with whether the play is a farce or comedy of manners or something else altogether, critics become anxious, Foster believes, if they cannot name the type of play with certainty. Yet they seldom manage to make the important distinction between the representation of the world outside the theatre in the comedy of manners and satire’s ability to essentialize it by reducing it to absurdity. Wilde, he argues, accomplishes an essentialization of folly “by creating an ‘as if’ world in which ‘real’ values are inverted, reason and unreason interchanged, and the probable defined by improbability.”

Foster goes on to explain what happens after Jack confesses, in Act I, the story of his origin to Algy, labeling it “the whole truth, pure and simple,” and Algy, more clever and wise, has responded by retorting, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.” From this point forward, Foster shows, the entire play is to prove “a satiric demonstration of how art can lie romantically about human beings and distort the simple laws of real life with melodramatic complications and improbably easy escapes from them.” Wilde accomplishes this goal

by purloining from the hallowed edifice of romantic literature certain standard characters, themes, and plot situations in order to build out of them a comedy that fuses contemporary social satire with a straightfaced taking-off of the usages of the popular fiction and drama of Wilde’s time, and, inevitably, of other times as well.^[45]

Foster proceeds to delight his readers by taking them selectively through the rest of the play, revealing how Wilde’s parodic intent manifests itself in a variety of situations, epigrammatical and plot-centered. For example, he finds an elaborate literary lampoon hiding in the circumstances of the relationship between Algy and Cecily—essentially that of Rochester and Jane Eyre, or of Mr B. and Pamela—namely, “the situation of the jaded, world-weary, cynical, and preferably dissolute male being reformed, regenerated, and resentimentalized by the fresh, innocent, and feeling girl reared in isolation from the ‘world’, preferably in the country.”^[46] Algy’s constant hunger is a sign of his dissoluteness, although unlike Algy’s Restoration comedy forbears his character as a roué is reduced by Wilde to ravenous but harmless physical hunger. Before Algy is through being reformed, he will be engaged to be married, his Bunburying days will be over, and his mastery of the witticism will have been taken over by Cecily. Foster sums up the moral of Wilde’s parody: “the rake is a fake, girlish innocence is the bait of a monstrous mantrap, the wages of sin is matrimony.”^[47]

Foster has elegantly explained how Wilde has managed to create a kind of triple-genre play compounded of comedy, farce, and parody. His essay, especially when read directly after Reinert’s, leads the reader to appreciate the richness and complexity of Wilde’s invention in new, analytical ways more sophisticated than have emerged in criticism to date, except perhaps for the very best criticism present in theatrical reviews (as we have seen), which have the great advantage of immediate response to live performance but the potential disadvantage of being composed under the shadow of a looming deadline. After the fact, it is the combination of these two critical “genres” that together benefit the wide-ranging reader with a wealth of insights and greater leisure in which to acquire them.

And so, by this point in the 1950s, the grounding has been set for even more incisive, penetrating, and broadly based criticism centered on Wilde’s last, perennially attractive play.

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