As the decade of the 1970s progressed, articles brief and extended on Wilde’s play begin to appear more frequently, while books on Wilde’s writings including chapters on his last play begin to figure as well. It was during this decade that the first book devoted entirely to Wilde’s plays would appear, as we shall see. Latter-day critics of the 1960s and 1970s find themselves taking up the same question pursued by reviewers of the first production, renewing an inconclusive debate about the genre of Wilde’s play. Robert J. Jordan claims that recent criticism has concentrated mainly on two approaches: epigrammatic wit has been elevated to “seriousness as social satire,” and fantasy, part of the author’s aesthetic creed, has been allowed the “dignity of a philosophy.^[1] Jordan proceeds to examine what he sees as these two central strands of Wildean concern, satire and fantasy, while giving primary place to fantasy.
Satire is introduced primarily in the play through the mechanism of the witty inversion, but enlarged into seriousness, and so becomes the overall normative form of the play. Lady Bracknell’s comment in Act I on Lady Harbury’s transformation since her husband’s death—”She looks quite twenty years younger”—sets the standard. Parallel to such turnabouts, inversions of character, male and female, emerge everywhere in the play, as in Gwendolen’s comment to Cecily that the domestic sphere is man’s proper place, whereas in public he tends to become effeminate. In Gwendolen’s presence Jack reacts accordingly, meekly giving in to her authoritative directions for making a marriage proposal; Algy, masquerading as the “profligate” Ernest, immediately falls under Cecily’s commanding spell and acquiesces sheepishly to her strident prior arrangement of a fantasy engagement destined to prove true. As for competing claims of farce and satire as the generic organizing form in this play, the most important “level” is fantasy itself, a form in which “unattainable human ideals are allowed to realize themselves.”^[2]

Overriding the presence of satire, which in Jordan’s view has “no great power,” is the pervasive presence of fantasy, expressed in various ways, and most obviously as a “dream of elegance,” of “effortless grace and formal perfection.” Such elegance makes its way deeply into the language of paradox, where style is consistently elevated above content, and is also realized dramatically in the

delicate symmetry of the plot, with its balanced characters and situations, and in the polish of the dialogue and the elegant chiselling of the epigrams. Many of these epigrams may use social comment as their material but it can be argued that in such cases the brilliance of the effect is ultimately more striking than the pungency of the criticism.^[3]

The presence of innocence, another prime aspect of fantasy, eliminates a moral sense, effectively banishing sin and degradation. The closest we come to fallen women is the fall of the Rupee. Jack rejects Algy’s idea of “trotting round” to the Empire after dinner, with its suggestion of debauchery with prostitutes. And Algy’s Bunburying jaunt to Jack’s country estate, suggestive of a sexual adventure, turns out to be no more—and no less—than an engagement to marry a wealthy heiress. Algy’s constant hunger, from cucumber sandwiches in Act I to muffins and two luncheons in Act II, is only nominally a representation of lust, reduced harmlessly to a ravenous appetite for food. Such is the representation of innocence in the play, with its penchant for childlike behavior, leaving the audience with a comical sense of “terribly elegant, exquisitely sophisticated adults” who reflect behavior and attitudes “redolent of the world of the child.”

Jordan concludes by connecting the pervasive world of the child-like in the play to Wilde’s own great interest in the world of children and experiments with the fairy tale as a literary form. It is presumably outside the intended scope of Jordan’s perception to observe real-life connections of a more sobering, even shocking kind that ultimately would immediately return Wilde to court, after his charge of criminal libel against the Marquess of Queensberry had to be withdrawn, where he was charged with offenses that would send him to prison and ruin his career. Some readers might object to a seemingly arbitrary connection of formative episodes of Wilde’s life with the qualities of his art and the pleasure it brought to audiences. Criticism has variously contributed to what has become a constant controversy over how to think and write about such connections between art and life. As years go by it becomes ever more urgent, at least in the view of some, to acknowledge that making strict, exclusive divisions between matter associated with the man or with the artist results in a perception of denial or a feeling of irrelevance. This urgency gradually but inevitably appears to increase in a central way over the issue of Wilde’s homosexuality. As the century nears its end, it becomes a major issue, approached from a variety of vantage points.

Meanwhile, in 1972 a brief but notable essay by Kevin Sullivan, published in the series “Columbia Essays on Modern Writers” and entitled simply Oscar Wilde, offered a thoughtful commentary on the range and variety of Wilde’s writing, concisely integrated with the life.^[4] Aside from a curiously insensitive reading of Salomé based evidently on the Douglas English translation, Sullivan’s approach sustains an intelligent, precise series of observations that tend to focus on Wilde’s mastery of style and figurative language in ways that do justice both to the genre of the work in question and the ingenuity of its author. Mindful of the limitations of the pamphlet-length form of the Columbia series, Sullivan happily restricts himself to concise yet appropriately detailed summaries intended to capture the elusive essence of his subject. And so, when it comes to The Importance of Being Earnest, he observes that “A common form of insanity among many people is a predisposition to take themselves so seriously that they attach to the trivialities of their existence an importance all out of proportion to the reality of things.” Wilde’s play “corrects the imbalance and restores man to sanity for an hour or so, . . . a bright and happy and joyous state of being.” The play comprises “the complete reversal” of tragedy, an inherently imperfect form, “out-of-joint,” an “incompletely developed negative of human existence.” And so it provides

an answer, the only kind of answer possible, to the Voice from the Whirlwind. For life is too important to talk seriously about it, and if, contrary to Wilde’s favourite dictum, art is to be taken seriously as an imitation of life, then Gwendolen Fairfax is quite right in saying: “In matters of grave importance style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”^[5]

Sullivan’s essay found a useful place in its time and rewards a latter-day revisiting. As the decades of Wildean criticism move on beyond the 1950s and 1960s, and the bibliography of critical works enlarges, critics publishing in learned journals, if not always in literary journals, also appear to feel an increasing necessity to recognize and take into account the work of predecessors in some organized way. Such a critic, L. A. Poague, who cites a good half-dozen recent contributors including Bentley, Reinert, Foster, Tolliver, Ganz, and Gregor^[6] and says they all agree Wilde’s play is a comedy, takes a categorical and enumerative approach to the neglected subject of Wilde’s irony. Finding some four hundred examples of ironic inversion in the play, on the basis of this density Poague argues that the play is indeed a comedy, not a farce, but does not pause long enough to define the characteristics of farce, comedy, or, for that matter, irony itself.^[7]

Other critics manage to respond in a more substantive way. A general article on Wilde’s “Great Farce,” though not presuming to integrate it into “the general scheme of Wilde’s ideas,” attempts more modestly to show how it fits with ideas about farce, about the drama of the absurd, and existentialist notions of identity, all of these being “fashionable” topics in recent times. David Parker’s essay creates some interest for its comparison of Wilde’s pair of protagonists with selfish Restoration aristocrats. Their roguish pursuit of freedom gets them into trouble but has notable symbolic value both in that earlier period and in Wilde‘s own, Parker insists. He suggests that Jack and Algy reflect a Wildean adaptation of Restoration libertine characters who can “see the truth” and yet “maintain a fundamental decency,” partly by substituting a more restrained late Victorian affect of simple physical hunger in place of uninhibited sexual inclinations. Hunger, Parker argues, is Wilde’s adaptive symbol “for sensual vitality and obedience to impulse.”^[8] He sees the structure of farce as a distancing device, yet at the same time Wilde’s presentation of the hero draws admiration because “he has the courage to obey his impulses and because his tricks render him protean—free from imposed identity.” Yet it would seem that it is Algernon that Parker has in mind as the counterpart to the licentious Restoration rake, more so than Jack, even though early in Act I Jack stands convicted of the same “confirmed and secret” strategy of Bunburying practiced by Algernon. Jack’s impulsiveness and self-indulgence, ostensibly much more tepid than Algy’s, appear to be held exclusively to his desire to marry Gwendolen.

As for the way the play arguably looks forward to twentieth-century absurdism, as Parker contends, the number of times the word “absurd” itself occurs in the play in the alleged service of evoking “a sense of imminent Nothingness” does not convince. Even Jack’s plaintive request to Lady Bracknell—”I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?”—does not, as Parker believes, re-situate Wilde’s play in some absurd, shadowy twentieth-century rendezvous. It does something much more limited and palpable, by explaining that his name, fortunately discovered among the Army Lists at hand, merely serves to provide the requisite social connections with his younger brother, Algernon, his first cousin, Gwendolen, and polite society at large. Parker’s argument for the more modern suggestive potentialities of such key words as paradox, nonsense, truth, and lies is amusing to follow but, finally, does not succeed in unmooring the play from its familiar, classic locale.

Dennis J. Spininger pursues the issue of the absurd in greater depth. In “Profiles and Principles: The Sense of the Absurd in The Importance of Being Earnest,”^[9] Spininger invokes a current book on the theory of comedy by Walter Sorell to argue that “the recognition of the absurdity in man’s existence is not peculiar to our era only.”^[10] He also identifies Martin Esslin’s popular and influential book The Theatre of the Absurd^[11] as establishing a compelling critical context for his discussion. Sorell instances the passage toward the end of Wilde’s Act I, in which Jack and Algy contemplate what they might do after dinner and ultimately decide to do nothing whatever, comparing it to a passage from Pinter’s The Birthday Party in order to show that an undifferentiated absurdity clings to Victorian and modern plays alike. Insightful as Spininger’s essay is, he does not fully grasp the significance of the problem he addresses. Absurdity may admittedly be nominally as much a Victorian perception as a modern one, but the error made by some modern readers is to leap to the conclusion that the discovery of qualities of absurdity in a late Victorian play serves to re-locate the work to a welcome place in the modern repertory, opening new yet seemingly familiar vistas seen from the late perspective of modern, or even postmodern, culture. One may perceive this faulty, perhaps anachronistic, critical maneuver as linked with certain fallacies in twentieth-century hagiography that see Oscar Wilde and the personal dilemma he faced as transforming him effectively into “one of us.” Spininger depends much upon Sorell for his argument that a comedy may have secreted within it a tragic dimension. The “safest measure of the comic is its sensitivity to its tragic reflection,” Sorell observes:

We think we laugh about what we see on the surface, but, while laughing, we are consciously or unconsciously aware of the tremendous and tragic power lying in the submerged part of its threatening potentialities.^[12]

Spininger’s continuing argument pursues this postmodern transmutation of Wilde’s play, offering a precise, well-sustained analysis of the “special tragic potential” embedded in the strategic uses of “the instruments of the satirist and the caricaturist,” and without any intention of the kind espoused by Bernard Shaw to “cure the follies he castigates.” By the same token, Wilde’s use of epigrams constitutes wit “detached from its potential service for social reform.”^[13] Spininger invokes W. H. Auden’s delightful description of the play—”the only pure verbal Opera in English”^[14]—in support of his view that Wilde “reduces or eliminates the moral impact of his satirical mode and frees wit to constitute its own universe, a verbal universe, which translates life into an aesthetic phenomenon.” Style, not sincerity, is the vital thing, as Gwendolen insists.

Spininger’s conclusion is clear, and unsettling. This wonderful “release of style from sincerity” and from meaning itself creates an effectively absurd proto-Wildean world “at once hilariously dizzy and more than a little terrifying.” At this point Spininger’s postmodern bias becomes unmistakable. He persists in his argument that the verbal acrobatics of the play have a cumulative “bewildering effect” on the audience, more so than on the characters themselves. As the play proceeds, the experience becomes a “continuous reduction to the absurd.”

Fortunately, one can enjoy and benefit from Spininger’s astute explanations of numerous reductions of seriousness to triviality without having to embrace the unstable superstructure of his argument, which claims unconvincingly that these processes lead to a terrorizing meaninglessness. One begins to think this critic may never have actually seen a production of the play—never experienced the near-constant laughter generated by the rhetorical phenomena he so well identifies. To be sure, he clearly understands Wilde’s dramaturgical genius. At the beginning of Act III, he observes, Cecily remarks

on the resemblance between gorging muffins and repentance. The muffins, in the course of a rather short scene, serve as the source of discussion for standards of propriety, consolation, selfishness, greed, hospitality, and then repentance. The connections are verbal ones, but these are wholly adequate, indeed supreme, in a world where style surpasses sincerity.^[15]

One may well agree that the play constitutes high camp, as readers and audiences commonly attest, while still begging to differ with Spininger in his presumptuous application of existentialist insights to Wilde’s play when straightforward thoughtful description captures so much of its complex reality.

It is a pleasure to experience the growing sophistication and knowledge exhibited by criticism of Wilde’s play as time moves on. Geoffrey Stone’s telling application of quasi-formal logic to what he reveals as an exceedingly complex dramatic and linguistic construction swiftly takes on a knowing parodic quality of its own, in “Serious Bunburyism: The Logic of The Importance of Being Earnest.”^[16] That’s to say, Stone’s explanation of the necessity of approaching the play as a metalinguistic structure has its own metalinguistic character—a charmingly suitable vehicle for a sparkling, on-target approach to the function of language in Wilde’s piece. Analysis of the metalinguistic quality of Wilde’s writing gives Stone’s inquiry access to several levels of logical verbal operation, helpfully organized on thematic grounds. Conflict and pretense within a social class afford bountiful thematic material for comedy. In the broadest of Stone’s examples, “Lady Bracknell, ruthlessly accurate about the real world in every way, with almost every word exists fully, indeed irresistibly, at both meta- and object-level.” In Jack’s beautifully exact terminology, she is “a monster without being a myth, which is rather unfair.” A play so fully constructed achieves an added elegance by virtue of the “smaller structures” present within it; owing to their “formal quality or reversal of expectations or both,” they function “as a kind of model of the play itself,” on a higher level, or meta-level, above the primary one. An example is Algy’s prophecy in Act I regarding a potential meeting of Gwendolen and Cecily—”Half an hour after they’ve met, they will be calling each other sister,” Jack predicts, to which Algy counters, “Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first”—a prophecy humorously fulfilled when the women do exactly that, later in the play. Perhaps the most complex of all these substructures is the circular sequence late in Act I about the “clever people” and the fools, which, Stone explains, is

funny at the simplest level (“What fools”), funnier when one realizes Jack has been defined as one of the fools whose non-existence he has been lamenting, and funniest when one realizes that the fool’s cap also fits the audience and oneself—any critic of the play, in fact—since its characters are eminently “clever people,” and the whole audience has come to the theatre solely to meet and talk about them. So—for a second—the level-above-level structure has reached out and pulled, not this listener and that, or this common pretender and that, but the—any—audience, purely qua audience, inside the play—a very metalinguistic effect indeed.^[17]

The serious, even passionate concern with food in the play leads Stone to what is perhaps his most successful thematic exposition of Wildean action and linguistic effectiveness. To take just one example of Wilde’s dealing simultan­eously with metalanguage and facts, he points to Algy’s frankly self-revealing assertion “When I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy.” Food in the play is always employed “as a weapon of domination,” Stone observes. One may easily perceive a pattern in the characters’ frequent engagement with food and “unashamed, overt, on-stage eating—cucumber sandwiches and bread and butter in town, cake, bread and butter, tea, sugar, muffins and tea-cake in the country.” When they are not actually eating they are planning a dinner, or a supper at Willis’s, emphasizing the importance of being serious about meals, the real necessity of “regular and wholesome meals” when one is beginning a new life, or the social impossibility of ever going without one’s dinner. Food confers substantial power on the person who claims it. Algy is entitled to eat cucumber sandwiches because they are intended for his aunt. Because Jack aims to marry his beloved Gwendolen, he is entitled to eat some of the bread-and-butter intended for her, but certainly not all of it. He is not married to her yet. The theme of Appearance and Reality has its own series of delightful exemplifications, from the private cigarette case and its revealing inscription to perhaps the highest instances of all these metalinguistic truths and object-level deceptions, the double masquerade of Algy and Jack as each the non-existent younger brother Ernest. Indeed, Wilde’s play so greatly overflows the scope of pleasurable example that report must be content with this relatively brief account. Failure on the part of criticism to grasp the fundamental metalinguistic structure of the play and its characters will inevitably result, Stone warns in mock-serious fashion, in no more than a useless flurry “of embarrassed and misdirected compliments.”^[18] One may hardly venture to disagree.

Increasing numbers of critical essays on Wilde’s plays, and particularly on The Importance of Being Earnest, were establishing a partial foundation for what would be the first critical book giving attention to the full range of Wilde’s dramatic creativity. Despite a burgeoning series of particular views and deeper insights, there remained a chronic absence of a large, general overview that might pull together into helpful coherence a critical summary indicating where confident understanding might lie and new directions might be tending. Alan Bird’s The Plays of Oscar Wilde responded to this felt need by offering a full-length, generous yet responsible assessment of the dramatist’s output, beginning with the earliest plays, Vera; or, The Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua, and continuing through to The Importance of Being Earnest.^[19] For good measure, Bird would add a final chapter containing an authoritative discussion of the various plays Wilde started but did not finish (or finished but did not begin, as he said jokingly of A Florentine Tragedy, which survives missing its opening scene^[20]

Bird’s research on a range of aspects of The Importance of Being Earnest proves to be quite thorough, aimed at informing an intelligent general readership but maintaining substantial interest for the specialist as well. He avails himself of the admirable first edition of the letters edited by Rupert Hart-Davis (1962), the two-volume edition from the New York Public Library presenting facsimiles and textual information about the four-act first version of the play, edited in 1956 by the curator of the Arents Collection, Sarah Augusta Dickson, and the ingenious presentation of the four-act play back-translated from a German edition by Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland. Bird’s travels took him to the British Museum, where he evaluated the Lord Chamberlain’s licensing copy of George Alexander’s three-act play, and to Harvard University and its theatre collection, where he studied Alexander’s signed and personally annotated copy of the play, in which Holland traced Alexander’s brilliant staging of the Act II mourning sequence. And he identified other texts, including the Leipzig 1903 Ernst Sein!, the Samuel French’s 1903 acting edition, and even the later Allan Aynesworth promptbook bequeathed by Aynesworth to the then British Theatre Museum (used for Aynesworth’s 1923 Haymarket production, although Bird did not know it for that^[21]). Bird’s account constitutes the first occasion of an attempt to make a coherent critical comparison of the four-act and three-act versions of Wilde’s play and to single out the sparkling comic success in the former version, nicely excerpted in Bird’s account, of the so-called “Gribsby episode,” in which Algy Bunburying as Jack’s fictional younger brother Ernest is attached for debt for a Savoy restaurant bill of nearly eight hundred pounds.

Bird’s commentary on the theatrical qualities of the two versions of Wilde’s play is astute, helpful, and sometimes usefully critical. He finds a certain “clumsiness in the balance of events in the first act and those of the next two” of the three-act play, occasioned he believes by the delayed arrival of Algy’s Aunt Augusta, adding that the even longer text of the four-act version would have emphasized this clumsiness. And yet the greatest strength of the play, Bird asserts, emerges in what W. H. Auden praises as its being the “only pure verbal opera in English”—and, as an opera, its characters and flagrantly implausible plot link Wilde’s play charmingly and even more closely to the unbelievable or even preposterous action of many an operatic masterpiece.

Bird is very good nonetheless in describing the construction of the play as resting solidly on a series of secrets. After all, deception and misunderstanding are commonly the wellspring of farcical and comic action. Bird takes his reader along on a whirlwind journey in which what happens in the play falls easily and almost endlessly into the mysterious twists and turns of events. Gwendolen suddenly vanishes from her parents’ home, but her resourceful mother bribes her maid to reveal where she has gone, goes there, and bursts in on the newly affianced couples. For that matter, Lady Bracknell’s own life has been “touched by scandal and mystery” from a very early point, twenty-eight years before the present time, when her infant nephew disappeared, along with his nursemaid and perambulator, undiscoverable even through the most concerted efforts of the Metropolitan Police, until the perambulator is found in a remote corner of Bayswater (or, variously, Hyde Park) but leaving no one the wiser about the missing persons. And so on, and on. Narration of the entire action of the play by explaining these deceptive, mysterious, or otherwise startling and absorbing connections captures Wilde’s brilliant dramaturgy in a sustained cascade of events, leaving the reader, and a virtual audience as well, breathless with admiration over Wilde’s brilliance.

Bird’s further observations maintain an easy hold on the reader’s attention, as he describes the required standards of character portrayal (characters must “be elegantly dressed, carry themselves well, and speak graciously”), costume design (“above all, they must wear authentic clothes” and forbear being “dressed like circus clowns”), and properties (“the tea-table should be an altar dedicated to the ritual of tea”).^[22] After a brief survey of reviews of the first production, he concludes his chapter on the play with a concise but telling description of Lady Bracknell as no genuine aristocrat but, rather, a parvenue in the manner portrayed by Edith Evans. Wilde is able “to laugh confidently at the beauty and grotesqueness of life which he sees as the same thing.” In this play the dramatist touches on a great range of social topics, money, property, and all the rest, with “the lightest but sharpest flashes of humour,” leaving us in no doubt whatever of his own sympathies.^[23] A long chapter on the comedy of manners finds much to say about the author and his dandiacal propensities, linking him to the incipient dandy of Restoration comedy, the more self-contained flâneur of English watering places and the French boulevard, and finally to the late nineteenth-century ostensible man of leisure and impeccable taste whose secret life if revealed identifies a remarkably productive writer. Finally, his most readily identifiable home is the quick-silver domicile implicit yet fully present in the wit and humor of the social comedies and the farcical brilliance of The Importance of Being Earnest. This last work, Shewan remarks, "contains elements of comic autobiography and parody confessional," but it is "primarily a highly original fusion of Wilde’s idiosyncratic redemptive comedy and his basically anarchic assumptions."^[24] Shewan sees the play as Wilde’s own recapitulatory vade mecum, in which the author undertakes a parodic second tour of his previous works for the sheer pleasure of the journey—but also because by temperament and inclination he is a poor fit for the culture of his age:

Algernon, the confirmed Bunburyist, and Jack, the reluctant guardian, are finally confronted with their alter egos only to see them dissolve hilariously into their actual selves. The author scours the realm of his "infernal Arcadia"^[25] like a benevolent maenad, dismembering his various literary aliases and tossing their limbs to anyone who can laugh. From this intoxicating, self-regenerating, self-fulfilling laughter only Lady Bracknell is excluded . . .

. . . and suddenly Shewan takes us off on a seemingly unprepared diversion to scrutinize this humorless "monster without being a myth"; but the complex logic of Shewan’s discourse turns out to be aimed at pursuing and critiquing Mary McCarthy’s unorthodox, aggressive analysis of Wilde’s unlovely Aunt Augusta, about which Shewan also has much to say:

Lady Bracknell makes too many mistakes to be the bulky "goddess" of Mary McCarthy’s vision. Once, perhaps, she might have filled the role of goddess—possibly of all-knowing Athena . . . mistress and arbiter of the steep heights of London society. But no one can believe in a divinity who is forced to pay for information, obliged to travel by a luggage train, and who seems as much at the mercy of the deus ex machina as the merest mortal. Equally clearly, she makes too few mistakes to be really human. Pretending not to be a person, earnestly saving face, she alone grows no wiser and gets no fun.^[26]

Shewan’s unorthodox writing itself calls for a sustained commitment on the part of his reader, as in this highly allusive but persuasive description of a modern gorgon. His observations on the subject of genre are equally arresting. Farce, he suggests, "is thus the ultimate refinement of pastoral" (his analysis is still trailing intimations of Mary McCarthy here), "the new idyll of self, the egotist’s Nirvana." In this garden of late-blooming childhood, the child-philosopher found in Wilde’s early fairy tales morphs into its "adult equivalent, the fearless ingénue," Cecily. "In that garden where romance buds and learning withers," Shewan goes on, "where she had first rejected fact for fiction, Cecily falls from art into life; tames the rake; unites town and country, 'science' and 'sentiment'; reconciles the demure spinster of Hebraism with the reluctant bachelor of Hellenism . . . "; and so on, tirelessly. Applying Matthew Arnold’s culture-redefining, eyebrow-raising contraries (and blithely assuming we know what they are without having to explain,^[27] Shewan continues this near-breathless pursuit of allusive but delightful and enlightening insights leading to the happy harmony of a "newly completed family."

There is much else in Shewan’s persistent, highly discursive analysis of the plays, including the French Salomé, along with the rest of Wilde’s works, to profitably engage and challenge the reader.^[28] Surely, it is one of the best, most engaging books on Oscar Wilde yet published at this advanced point.

The lengthy biographical and critical bibliography appended to John Stokes’s concise, fifty-page study, Oscar Wilde, published by the British Council in 1978,^[29] simultaneously speaks of the availability of a broad, mature body of studies of an indisputably major author and implicitly urges the reader of Stokes’s intro­ductory overview to take his work as a first, viable beginning. Stokes had already established substantial credentials, not only as a bibliographer of criticism but as the author of a book containing four related essays exploring newly important or under-appreciated subjects in the history of the late nineteenth-century theatre.^[30] Artfully accommodating the constraints on space of the "Writers and their Work" series, Stokes goes straight to the central issues raised by each of the works he treats, moving quickly to drama. In the 1890s, he explains, Wilde found that the theatre afforded him a "daring means of self-projection"; immediate involvement allowed him a direct confrontation with a public audience and at the same time a "limitless opportunity for disguise."^[31] His first play for this audience, Lady Windermere’s Fan, opened at the St. James’s Theatre early in 1892, even as he was pursuing a much different kind of play, Salome (published first in French, but which would not reach performance at the time). Stokes sets Lady Windermere in the context of the fashionable "problem play" addressed by Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), concerning itself with the sexual morality of women. The originality of Wilde’s play consists of the way in which "wit is seen as a part of the moral problem," a view that links Wilde with Restoration comedy.^[32] Focusing on the Dandy in the next two plays, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, Stokes urges us to realize that Lord Illingworth and Lord Goring follow the earlier exemplar, Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere, in being surrogates for Wilde himself. Goring is ironically a kind of ideal character for his small scale, "wise and honourable," but he retains only a limited claim on our admiration. Secure in his rank and wealth, he "passes into the land of dreams, a smile of sweet insouciance upon his face."^[33]

These characterological and ethical factors allow Wilde to maintain his personal disguise, but allow him also to move into another sub-genre of comedy, and perhaps another sphere as well, Stokes continues. In contrast to the "vestigial blemishes of moralism and sentimentality" that marred the three previous plays, The Importance of Being Earnest achieves perfection of comic form, making commentary almost superfluous. It is apparently not even necessary to state that wit, uncoupled from any moral issues at all, seeks only its own justification. We see many of the traditional marks of comedy here—a lost heir miraculously found, pairings of cousins and brothers, a lengthy pastoral interlude, continual misidentification, and so on. Comic optimism has the special feature of embracing a dream in which duplicity goes unpunished, everyone’s best interests finally coincide, and "reconciliation is the natural order of things." Readers love to perceive secret meanings in the play, as if it were written as a parallel to Wilde’s own secret life; yet this quality has never interfered with its timeless popularity in reading and performance. It remains "absurd in the classic fashion," namely, that it turns the real world "upside down."^[34]

As a consequence the play does justice to a particular English fantasy: "it proffers an aristocratic style which successfully derides the pressing worries of the bourgeois life, demoting them to vulgar irritants." Under this fantasy debts are painlessly paid, relatives pacified, solicitors insulted, and women appeased. On sunny Hertfordshire lawns, "male eccentricity is the norm, elegance an ultimate and effective defense." And yet it remains true that these characters are finally not likable, but instead are "childish, greedy, often insulting," as expert interpreters such as John Gielgud have realized. It is "an inhumane world of fantasy, after all," Stokes concludes, "and the only person who might really wish to live in it is a callous snob."^[35]

In this way the author of this refreshing, discrete overview of Wilde’s entire oeuvre captures and holds the attention of virtually all students of a writer who, by this time, had long since justified the attraction of a broad and various audience, sometimes critical, sometimes simply out to enjoy the opportunities it provides for sheer, uncomplicated fun.