In the same year of 1970 that John Stokes’s discriminating study appeared, Philip K. Cohen published The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde,^[1] a work at once biographical and critical. Cohen constructs what he terms “a single, unified record of onto­genesis,” creating a way of understanding Wilde that takes his works, singly and collectively, as providing “the best means for understanding his biography.” In a footnote Cohen lists a near-dozen recent critical views of Wilde’s “most appealing and enduring” play, The Importance of Being Earnest, and explains that he has no desire to repeat their insights.^[2] Instead, he sets himself the formidable task of showing how the play embodies a self-defeating return to the world of fairy tale and the license it bestows for engaging in unbridled fantasy, giving “free rein to wish fulfillment.” The play, in Cohen’s view, “issues a witty, humorous refusal to grow up,” based upon the philosophy of Lord Goring, in An Ideal Husband, his “prototypical perpetual youth.”^[3] And so, following his principle of ontogenetic analysis, Cohen explains that in this play the author “trivializes not only specific sources of anxiety in his personal life, but also his own literary embodiments of his moral preoccupations.” Cohen continues to explain how almost every event, situation, and turn in this play negates or parodies a corresponding item in one of the previous plays, stories, or fairy tales. At the same time, these reversals and inversions have a much larger frame of reference, for Wilde “includes in his attack against seriousness not just situations in his own life and works, but the human condition itself.”^[4]

In his introduction Cohen has rejected what he calls the biographical “legend” that passes for biography in almost all cases, and instead devotes his entire book to the discovery of a more particular and reliable truth, as he perceives it: the ontogenetic veracity of the Wildean self as embodied in his writings, early and late. Indeed, there is, inescapably, much external factual knowledge upon which Cohen must and does rely, and it proves to be increasingly difficult to draw the line between the limits of outside knowledge and understanding, on the one hand, and the elusive ontogenetic profile of the man himself, deducible only, as Cohen is intent on showing, from his writings. If Cohen seems to be unaware of what many scholars identify as the so-called “biographical fallacy,” in which sustained but misguided efforts are made to find parallels in a writer’s works to persons and events in his life, it is because he does not see such efforts as fallacious. On the contrary, Cohen’s method consists precisely in this very approach, leaving his reader to judge of its veracity or usefulness.

Consequently, in 1894, a crucial year that found Wilde “struggling desperately with mounting internal and external conflicts,” this ongoing difficulty “left its mark upon his art,” Cohen explains:

The relatively systematic questioning of self, society, and values, the careful framing and evaluation of hypothetical solutions that had characterized his art, gave way to a chaos of conflicting positions.

There appears to be no primary scholarly ground in this morass of indivisible production of art and living of life. Subjective and objective aspects of artistry seem to collide in directionless confusion. As a man and as an artist, “Wilde was falling apart.”^[5] Cohen is apparently too close to his subject to see that his method both organizes his analysis and, at the same time, brings to it a kind of a priori mirror image of what he wants to see. There appears to be, in short, a logical fallacy that Cohen seems unable to perceive. This leaves his book lacking in the influence it might have commanded if, alternatively, he had developed an analysis of Wilde’s moral views and concerns, of which he had many, deeply held, while avoiding the treacherous theoretical pathways of a double argument.

That is not to say that perceptive connections between the life and the works are so fraught with critical danger as to be scrupulously avoided. The point appears to be one on which critics appear to agree to differ. Various retrospective views of Wilde’s last play disagree, for example, as to whether Rodney Shewan is correct in asserting that “hindsight” allows us to see it as “prophetic of the downfall to come.” Recognizing the biographical aura that surrounds the play and its continuity through two years of incarceration and beyond makes some readers labor to elevate The Importance of Being Earnest to the status of an unattached, uncompromised classic. Writing a few years later, Katharine Worth showed herself not to be one of them. Unflinchingly, she pronounced the play Wilde’s funniest but “also the most poignant, if we have in mind—as how can we not?—the disaster that struck its author only a few weeks after its glittering first night when Queensberry instigated the process that led to Reading Gaol.”^[6] Yet others have no difficulty in accepting the self-contained unity of the theatrical experience, or its reading equivalent, embodied in Wilde’s last work for the stage as an ungrudging gift to posterity by a brilliant author.

By this point in the history of critical commentary on Wilde’s play, it has become so familiar and reliable a text that the possibilities for using it as a basis for philosophical, linguistic, or other wide-ranging discourse and speculation are beginning to multiply. For example, Joel Fineman’s essay “The Significance of Literature: The Importance of Being Earnest”^[7] frankly forgoes discussion of the play itself in favor of a deep, complex exploration of what its connection with literature, in the exemplary instance of Miss Prism’s three-volume novel, allows us to discover about the relationship between the “self” and writing—part of Fineman’s ongoing “long philosophical meditation on names.”^[8]

Further exploration of various kinds, along with fresh ideas about how to produce the play, continued to flourish as the 1970s advanced. Then, in 1980, a German scholar, Norbert Kohl, published a comprehensive study of Wilde’s works, translated into English and published in 1989 as Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Non-conformist Rebel.^[9] Kohl’s intention was to depart from studies of Wilde which focused primarily (if unreliably) on his biography or on some mix of biography and criticism in order to stand in the vanguard of studies devoted principally to concentrated critical analysis of his works. His method was to remedy the general lack, as he perceived it, of a coherent, organized point of view towards Wilde’s artistic contributions by explaining how his entire oeuvre might be productively understood as the writings of a complex artist who deeply rebelled against conventional society while outwardly conforming to its forms, strictures, and governing ideas and values.

Late in the book, Kohl brings to his detailed study of The Importance of Being Earnest the same organizational principles that supported his analysis of the previous comedies and, in fact, all the rest of Wilde’s writings that preceded this, his last play. He focuses on the play, its composition, its early four-act version and its reduction to three acts under the insistence of George Alexander—but does it so single-mindedly that the intrusion into Wilde’s life of the Marquess of Queensberry, the leaving of his visiting card at Wilde’s club inscribed with obscene language, Wilde’s lawsuit against Queensberry for criminal libel, and the life-changing consequences that followed, are all by-passed by Kohl and left for a brief, anti-climactic summary at the end of the chapter. The reader does not immediately learn why there were only eighty-six performances of The Importance of Being Earnest between opening night, 14 February, and 8 May for this tremendously successful production, or why the play had to be closed on that early date, or what happened afterwards. Kohl chooses not to divulge any of the details of the three trials, the events leading up to them, and the resulting sentencing of Wilde to two years of imprisonment with hard labor, along with the enormous broader consequences for his wife and family and the resulting changes that occurred in society itself. It reads almost like suppression, on Kohl’s part, this failure to provide necessary context in place, leaving the play itself in a curious sort of vacuum. Kohl’s apparently exclusive concern to proceed with his analysis of the play itself and the history of its composition and performance draws the reader’s interest, to be sure, but at the price of having to suspend concern with the larger context of Wilde’s life. Kohl’s readership meanwhile may hope they will discover how the play and the life finally fit together, and yet fear from their experience of the previous more than two hundred fifty pages concentrating almost entirely on the works that the life will in any case continue to get short shrift.

One finds that Kohl has ultimately set aside any sense that the author of the critical book to which his readers have devoted sustained attention owes them more than a deferral of some detailed, conclusive information about what suddenly happened, in the midst of the production of Wilde’s last and greatest play, that succeeded in bringing down his life in ruination around him. Those facts might indeed have been briefly and summarily stated, but surely the reader is entitled to some account of them, at the point in the narrative when they actually occurred. Clearly, Kohl wants to be judged on what he has to say about Wilde the poet, the novelist, the journalist, the dramatist, the man of letters, who left an indelible stamp on the writing and the very character of his time, without acknowledging the extent to which Wilde’s life—into which he insisted he had put his genius, leaving his writings to benefit as best they might from his talent—was ultimately inseparable from his art.

Kohl’s critical commentary, his astute analyses based upon some of the most extensive reading and research to be found among twentieth-century scholarly writers, English-speaking or otherwise, and his long experience with a challenging subject, all serve to recommend his book to a wide, discerning readership. And yet there is a regrettable feeling of rigidity and disjunction that obtrudes. Kohl’s central thesis, that Wilde was, ironically, a “conformist”—not a “non-conformist”—rebel ends up limiting this writer’s true, however conflicted, inclinations, revealing him as an artist who ultimately could not stand up against a bourgeois world or a higher society in which class difference was so deeply ingrained that he could finally only conform to its ways. Kohl’s description of Wilde’s works consequently has the feeling, ultimately, of a fait accompli.

The result of this curiously disjunctive feeling is that when, by way of summary, Kohl explains his view of how one is to discern the meaning of The Importance of Being Earnest, he finds the play to be a uniformly serious failure. He takes the play as “a massive social satire on the Victorian mentality, and above all on the attitudes of the aristocracy and the middle classes.” Wilde’s critique of the pressure of society on the individual is achieved, however, only “by reducing the importance of being earnest to the level of a name,” for all that seems to matter is “outward form, which might collectively be called propriety.” It is reduced to no more than “a series of inconsequential aphorisms,” which aim at “external effect rather than internal substance.” Life is thus brought down to the level of a game, and the rules of that game are the “norms which the Victorian spectator would have followed in all earnestness during his everyday life.”^[10] And so we may see how Kohl’s prior conclusion almost perversely ignores the farcical genre of the play and the paradoxical nature of its ending, and takes its meaning instead to indicate Wilde’s lock-step conformity to the rules and requirements of conventional social life. Earnestness, Kohl concludes, for Wilde, “degenerated into mere outward form, because he was not concerned with solving existential problems.” It is only at this point, at the very end of the chapter, that Kohl adds a paragraph of information and comment about Queensberry’s intrusive actions and their catastrophic consequences.^[11]

* * *

Several noteworthy productions of Wilde’s play in this time of the 1970s and early 1980s had the not-so-incidental effect of putting the question of its classic status to a series of practical tests, as observed at length by the theatre historian and textual scholar Russell Jackson. Jackson had recently published an expertly well-edited edition of The Importance of Being Earnest, the first critical edition of the play, which rapidly achieved status as the most reliable, authoritative edition available; other critics and editors quickly began to regard it as indispensable.^[12] The “classic status” of The Importance of Being Earnest, taken almost for granted by many critics, was revisited by Jackson as a spectator and commentator who believes that the idea calls for fresh re-examination. The status of a classic might initially depend on “encapsulating an ideal of social principle and behaviour,” he observes, but if this is so then what are we to make, for example, of Wilde’s treatment of Lady Bracknell, who is transformed from the familiar type from which she derives “by making her social and moral pronouncements shockingly illogical and selfish”: “She goes beyond cynicism, seeming possessed with the love of the imperative mood for its own sake.”^[13]

In pursuit of the varying and sometimes extreme presentation of the character, Jackson explains that Jonathan Miller’s 1975 Greenwich Theatre production cast Irene Handl as a Lady Bracknell with a heavy German accent. At least one reviewer believed she was intended to be Jewish and was convinced it was a good choice: “Shoulder shrugging, hand semaphoring, this is a Lady Bracknell who has acquired a knowledge of the world’s ways rather than inherited it.”^[14] In the previous year, Miller had presented the directors of the National Theatre with a proposal to mount an all-male Importance of Being Earnest. Peter Hall noted in his diary that he hoped Miller would not feel the necessity of producing the play with an all-male cast, “but that if he decided he must, I and everybody else would back his right to do so.” ^[15] A later production of the four-act version offered a Lady Bracknell played by a male actor, “absolutely straight.”^[16]

Jackson observes that the apparent need for innovation indicated by the surprising choices of the four-act text and the male actor in the role of Gwendolen’s mother may be viewed as an ironic indication of the “classic” status of the play: that is, there would seem to be a felt need to approach the all-too-familiar work “with suspicion” and to protect the audience from complacency. The high profile of such prominent characters as Gwendolen and Cecily requires them to steer a narrow course, much like opera singers, between the “mere rendition of a stock character” and an alternative, inappropriate manner. But this negative approach includes a potential for “being rendered harmless” and settling for the limitations imposed on interpretation by the period itself. Even the textual history of Wilde’s play has a material bearing on its subsequent status. Jackson points out the importance of Wilde’s repeated revision of drafts of the four-act play and its reduction to three acts in January 1895, along with his later revision of the typescript for publication in 1899. All the while, the dramatist’s academic training in Greek and Latin instilled a “regard for formal values” so strong that The Importance of Being Earnest may be seen to exemplify “a comic supplement to Aristotle’s Poetics”: the title and subtitle suggest an Aristotelian “seriousness of subject”; the play exhibits a “classic” discovery and reversal; the action is fully encompassed within twenty-four hours; and a “messenger” (in the form of Miss Prism) delivers the life-changing news of the hero’s true identity.

Add to these factors the status of the play in relation to others of its time. It embodies the familiar characteristics of farce and extrava­ganza, but apart from Shaw’s early public theatre plays and Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt, it is the only play of the period to enjoy frequent revival into our own time. It has become, Jackson asserts, “the representative Victorian play.” There is a “classic” performance of it on film: Anthony Asquith’s direction of the play (1952) starring Edith Evans as the formidable Lady Bracknell, whose memorable delivery of one line—”A hand-bag?”—has set the permanent standard by which all subsequent performers of the role are judged.^[17] Critics lie in wait for it, notebook in hand.

The play has even enjoyed the distinct privilege of production by the National Theatre. Peter Hall’s production in 1982 presented a new opportunity for testing the classic status of the play. In many respects, as Jackson reports, Hall’s mounting is faithful to the author’s stage directions, and he follows the three act text of the first edition without variants or deletions. His emphasis on formal qualities resulted in critical comments on “operatic” and “dance -like” techniques. It is a conservative approach, Jackson concludes, offering a “degree of security” within which the characters may develop with safety, but “it does not make for an especially stimulating evening.” Wilde’s play “combines classical poise and farcical energy,” but Hall favors the former rather than the latter. Jackson implies that Wilde’s formal farce contains its own evening-long contradictions: characters who conventionally represent “order, wisdom and stability” turn out to be in fact “selfish and assertive,” whereas those characters conventionally perceived as rebellious (Algernon, Gwendolen, and Cecily) speak “with confidence and appalling authority.” The dynamism, then, in Hall’s production, comes from the Lady Bracknell, played by Judi Dench, and Martin Jarvis’s Jack. The cumulative effect of Dench’s Lady Bracknell is to capture a highly original interpretation that departs completely from the Edith Evans approach. When Jack declines the seat offered to him for their interview, she regards him with contempt, looking him up and down witheringly. Satisfactory answers to important questions of financial and social standing lead her to close her notebook, but when the minor matter of his parentage is broached, she repeats the signal word “Found?” in silent horror^[18]and then proceeds to rip the relevant pages out of her notebook and carefully tear them in half.

Jackson records much more detail about Hall’s meticulous, judicially managed staging, seamlessly integrated within the “symmetrical patterns” required by the text. To take one more notable example, Hall directs Paul Rogers’ Canon Chasuble to adopt an “ineffectively suppressed joie de vivre,” so that when he reflects on the various joyful times when his sermon on the manna in the wilderness has been successfully delivered, “[h]is foot raises itself in a vestigial dance-step while his hand twirls in the air.” It is something of a pity that all of this fresh, ingenious innovation does not, in Jackson’s strict comparative view, amount to the achievement of “gaiety, deftness, and sense of rediscovery” found in another, somewhat earlier production, at the Shaw Festival (Niagara on the Lake, Ontario) in 1978, which captured an “unexpectedly robust life” embraced by “a company of brisk, acquisitive characters very much on the make.”^[19] He is entitled to his view that Hall’s great sense of producing a timeless classic somehow became in the end inimical to genuine liveliness. In any case, overall, Jackson’s combination of fine distinctions among particulars and larger, more definitive and partly historical inquiries regarding the perennial issue of what constitutes a classic make his article one of the most interesting and rewarding essays of its time.

* * *

We have seen certain critics anxious to differentiate between the allegedly superior understanding and insight of the twentieth-century audience and the supposedly more rudimentary grasp of contemporary drama that characterized the audience of Wilde’s time. We have also encountered criticism that perceives certain plays of his period as incipiently “modern,” to the extent that what they call or judge to be “absurd” may, to our superior insight, be seen cloaked in the true colors of the “existential.” In keeping with the title of the series in which her book, Oscar Wilde, appears, in the introductory chapter of her bold study of all seven of Wilde’s plays Katharine Worth adopts “A Modern Perspective on Wilde as Man of Theatre.”^[20] Offering a sustained close reading of the three-act play, with much incisive and often original or iconoclastic commentary on Wilde’s farce, Worth arrives at the revelation scene in Act III in which Miss Prism relates the ludicrous but life-changing story of her near-catastrophic mistake and experiences Jack’s shocking misidentification of her as his “Mother!.” Worth reveals the true significance of the moment, authorially speaking:

Laughing at himself, as well as at the mores of his time, Wilde in this scene breaks quite free of his century and becomes the “modern” playwright he wished to be. It is a modern moment for an audience brought up on Pirandello and Beckett when Jack, turning from one character to another in search of the truth about himself, is directed by Miss Prism to Lady Bracknell—”There is the lady who can tell you who you really are”—and asks her the question that has been causing existential tremors throughout the play: ” . . . Would you kindly inform me who I am?”^[21]

It is clear to the reader, in retrospect if not from the first, that Worth’s purpose in this uncompromising, strongly opinionated book (a determined departure from such straightforward overviews as Alan Bird’s^[22]) is to welcome Oscar Wilde, a manifest alien in his own time, to the more hospitable, discerning company of the present moment. To be sure, she does not in the least undervalue the precise historical contours of Wilde’s keen social and political observations or the expert dramaturgy that enfolds them in a coherent, ongoing action. On the point of Jack’s politics, for example, Lady Bracknell explains, as Worth puts it, “Liberal Unionists are acceptable . . .” when Jack admits to being one: “They count as Tories. They dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate.” “The fine shades of her condescension,” Worth goes on, “are droll, but a telling reminder of a real-life Byzantine grading system which ensures that politics are controlled by the right people.”^[23] And yet there is no troubling inconsistency between real Wildean historical insight, as in The Soul of Man under Socialism, where he explains Louis XIV’s error in believing in the permanence of human nature and, in contrast, the inevitability of change,^[24] and his placing at the center of the play a character, Jack, who “has to construct himself from virtually nothing,” like ‘a Vladimir or a Winnie in Beckett’s empty spaces.” To Worth’s way of under­standing the play, the moment in Act II when Jack, reacting in amazement when Cecily tells him that the brother whose demise he came to announce is alive and well “in the dining-room,” cries out, “I think it is perfectly absurd” should be understood as “absurd” in a “Pinteresque vein.”^[25] For that matter, the character of Lady Bracknell was something of a waste on audiences of her own period. “Wilde planted a time bomb in this character,” Worth asserts, “seemingly set for our time, when there would be a better chance of audiences picking up the serious points the jokes are making.”^[26] Evidently, there is an identifiable affinity of Wilde’s for a later, more congenial time, discernible by those with sufficient insight.

Worth is persuaded, then, that the only correct way to read Wilde’s play is to link it with the absurdist, existential views that made their way into critical interpretation over the course of the later twentieth century. This becomes a conviction that entirely governs her perspective. Her reading of the Act II tea scene, which some earlier critics assigned to a satirical Gilbertian source, in Wilde’s hands acquires a “strangeness from the dream-like gap Wilde contrives between the solid, decorous surface . . . and the increasingly uninhibited argument about someone who doesn’t exist.” As the dialogue runs ever more at cross-purposes (“It is his brother—his elder brother”), Worth concludes that “the audience has almost certainly lost its own grip on who is who, a confusion Wilde surely intends.” Surely not! A veteran stage director of effective mounting of plays, Worth would seem to have been carried away by misconstruing how comic dramatic irony, in which the audience is enabled to maintain a clear view of the characters’ own fallible, confused understanding of the ongoing dramatic situation, really works; instead, she attributes this response to intentionally absurdist dramaturgy on Wilde’s part, way ahead of its time.

Katharine Worth has written important studies of the modern theatre, including The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett^[27] and the present high-profile book on Wilde’s plays, which offers some intriguing insights and should not be neglected. The persistent, enthusiastic argument advanced in Worth’s book for Wilde as a clandestine modernist should nevertheless be placed in the larger context of other, similar studies, including biographical approaches, which invite contemporary students to adopt a perspective that regrettably ends up telling us more about who we ourselves may be than about the ostensible subject of the study. Perhaps this is the perennial risk taken by certain forward-looking criticism, discontent with less courageous writing reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which the world has changed.

Taking a retrospective look at critical writing on Wilde’s play that had emerged up to his own time, Keith Brown, in an article entitled “Art for Ernest’s Sake,”^[28] acknowledged that The Importance of Being Earnest for all the distinction it had earned had generally been poorly and inadequately treated. Brown cites Geoffrey Stone’s article “Serious Bunburyism” (1976) and Russell Jackson’s New Mermaid edition (1980) as solitary exceptions, along with the much earlier but neglected study by Arthur Ransome (1912).^[29] Adopting an impatient yet playful tone, Brown enumerates various reasons why criticism to date had proved so inadequate to the task. The distinctive quality of the play “eludes adequate description”; it aspires to a Paterian condition of music and is as Auden said “the only pure verbal opera in English.” Attempts to find the secret of the play in its construction prove unhelpful, and paying too much attention to alleged notes of social protest likewise proves misguided, as are attempts to see the play in too realistic a way.

As Brown reads them, Stone and Jackson manage to depart from these inadequacies in fruitful ways—both by explaining how the “roots” of the play lie in the “rich manure” of the commercial drama and the reality of the 1890s. Jackson, especially, enhances our understanding of the theatrical context of the play, showing how Wilde worked within the “established conventions and expectations” of the contemporary theatre and yet managed to invert or even transcend them.^[30] Stone’s article complements Jackson’s edition and its well-grounded critical comments by presenting a “metalinguistic” analysis of Wilde’s play (as we have seen). Brown’s thoughtful comments on Stone’s argument are worth some attention. One strength of Stone’s approach is that it takes account of elements in the play that encourage reading it as “a document of veiled social protest,” Brown points out, while still pursuing more straightforward linguistic concerns. And so the vitality inherent in Stone’s reading emerges out of “the continuous resonance set up between the light-hearted verbal acrobatics of its overt action and the actualities of the age, and society, for which it was written.”

Brown builds on this potentially productive basis to advance his own original perception, founded as he acknowledges on a fresh understanding of “the characters themselves,” inspired by an observation coined long before by Arthur Ransome. Ransome had praised The Importance of Being Earnest for its capacity to induce “that peculiar exhilaration of spirit by which we recognize the beautiful.”^[31] What is the source of this exhilaration? Brown asks. It derives partly from “the pleasure of a successful temporary escape, in perfect safety, from the normal world of moral judgement.” But there is more to it than this; further clarification must come from the complex character of Wilde’s own life in combination with his “unusual intellectual history.” Brown traces a pattern in the author’s life and ways of thinking that sees him emerging into what he himself called a “second period.” When he came to write The Importance of Being Earnest he was deep in a life of paradox, “a man aesthetically excited by the idea of evil.” This was the author who wrote a play creating a stage world of complete innocence. These two complementary yet paradoxical elements, a play of ostensibly sealed-off innocence and an author who understood how fragile and dangerous it truly was, produced a work capable of generating a peculiar, unique kind of laughter: in Ransome’s words, the laughter of complicity.^[32]

Brown manages to convince the reader of this real and extraordinary insight through developing a fascinating, delightful description of the world of the play as a kind of “bright bird-sanctuary,” a sphere of charm and absurdity in which his characters determinedly make their lives. It is like a space completely surrounded by mirrors, “a complete artificial universe . . . [e]xtending to infinity whichever way we look.” It has much in common with the world of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, a fully self-contained space excluded from the workaday world and its accidents until it is broken in upon by Marcade, the messenger of death. The audience is fully complicit in their knowledge that the seemingly irrefragable world of Wilde’s play can be penetrated and reduced to shards of glass by hostile forces in the world outside—although it never, in practice, has happened during a performance of the play.^[33] Still, the fact that they are aware of the possibility puts them in a special situation, in common with the characters of the play themselves. Thus, as Brown conclusively explains, the special exhilaration generated by a performance of Wilde’s play derives from the “multiple self-awareness of the persons of the play,” serious and yet not serious, a phenomenon “continuous with the audience’s own multiple perception of them.” This perception goes beyond the more direct “metalinguistic dialogue” whose effect is so well traced by Geoffrey Stone.^[34] Finally, according to Brown, immersion in the world of the play yields ground-breaking insight (metaphors seem at times inadequate) into the special, apparently unique forces and conditions that contribute to the ostensible universality of effect that a performance of Wilde’s farcical comedy creates: the charming, safe, and pleasant circumstances, all too fragile yet never broken, that pervade stage and audience during the theatrical realization of Wilde’s last play.

In these ways, as the 1980s progressed, over three-quarters of a century beyond the first emergence of criticism of Wilde’s unprecedentedly sturdy farce, late twentieth-century readers and audiences found themselves simultaneously entertained and freshly challenged. It was almost as if what William Gillette, the early twentieth-century American dramatist and actor, called “the illusion of the first time in acting,” had passed beyond the footlights of play production with its authentic spontaneity of performance, permeating the experience of audiences and capturing the spirit of contemp­orary criticism as well.^[35] Sustained originality of approach, extensively on view in criticism of such high caliber, would continue to manifest itself as the century moved ever nearer its close.