Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St. James’s Theatre in King Street, London, on Thursday, February 14, 1895. An overflow audience had braved the rigors of an extended frost to attend this eagerly anticipated play by a dramatist who, in a few short years, had become the most highly acclaimed writer for the London stage and the darling of West End audiences.

The coverage of the event by the popular press was nearly total. Over the next several weeks, some fifty reviews would be published in a variety of journals and periodicals, the majority of them warm and positive, many of them openly enthusiastic. A few went so far as to record the audience’s response at the closing curtain: they rose from their seats and cheered and cheered. Uncharacter­istically, the author in taking his bow before the house said very little, and then withdrew. The audience lingered, hoping he would reappear and entertain them with brilliant, witty remarks, as he had done in the case of previous productions, but to no avail. They had to remain content with having witnessed one of the most extraordinary opening nights in the history of the theatre.

The record of that night as set down by reviewers of the production forms an unusually full and thorough documentation, detailed and particular, informative and well-informed. It sets a standard that has lasted for over a century. For it is true that this last play of Oscar Wilde’s has hardly ever been absent from the stage since the night of its debut. What is often remarked about Gilbert and Sullivan’s immortal opera The Mikado may also be said of The Importance of Being Earnest: the sun has never set on a production of it, somewhere around the world, from that day to this. As a consequence, there exists an extraordinarily broad and interesting record of criticism, in the form of newspaper and periodical reviews and of academic and popular articles and books as well. Editors of paperback collections of Wilde’s plays invariably include The Importance of Being Earnest, and almost as frequently they add an introduction that includes sometimes original observations and fresh insights into this most irresistibly quotable of plays. Whether these introductions are addressed to a specific audience, such as students or fellow scholars, or to a more general readership, they are sure to make contact with readers who have already seen a production of Wilde’s play or are planning to see one in the near future. This is a way of saying that the interplay between readers and theatre audiences of this wonderful, supremely actable farce has remained a remarkable constant over the century and more of its existence.

Given this widespread cultural commerce, it is easy for an intended reader to lay hands on a text of Wilde’s play, in a library, a bookstore, or on line. What’s more, chances are that this text will be of high quality, reflecting the words of the play as spoken in the first production at the St. James’s Theatre and then revised and amplified by the author himself a year or two before his death—or as presented in a nearly identical text published in 1908, less than a decade after, by Wilde’s faithful friend and executor of his estate, Robert Ross, as part of a complete edition of Wilde’s works. It has not been nearly so easy for anyone curious about critical responses to the play to find a collection of notices or reviews, or a critical essay or chapter in a book, that may lead to under­standing or enlightenment. Compared to finding authoritative texts of the play, it is more accurate to say that criticism is hard or even unacceptably difficult to find.

The present volume proposes to remedy this great lack of access. Criticism of Wilde’s play abounds, but for the most part it lies out of the way, a challenge to track down, requiring research among a multitude of potential sources, or hours spent combing through files of newspapers, or consultation of biblio­graphies of secondary writings followed by trips to libraries or, more recently, investigation of on-line sources.

My own experience as a scholar pursuing the range of critical response to the play led me in those same typical directions. Some years ago, in researching sources for a critical edition of Wilde’s play, I spent many days at what was then the Colindale Newspaper Library, in north London, perusing bound collections of newspapers, dailies and weeklies, journals and periodicals, hoping to track down the widest possible selection of reviews of that magical first production. This is how I came to know there were at least fifty reviews and notices of it. Of course, I took detailed notes on every one, unless I was able to obtain a photo­copy for later reference. As a devoted student of the subject, able and willing to spend the kind of time and effort required to draw together a coherent amalgam­ation of critical opinion from a multiplicity of sources, I proceeded to digest and blend these reviews into an extensive, representative account, augmented by means of additional time spent in libraries closer to home and, in latter days, searching through digital resources found on the Internet.

By rights, I thought, every reader or playgoer who loves The Importance of Being Earnest should be able to share the views and opinions of critics who have thought carefully about the work and come to insightful conclusions about it. Having at last completed my edition of the play itself,^[1] I returned to my gathered sources, expanded the coverage to encompass an entire century’s worth of critical response, and created from them an historical narrative of critical opinion on this timeless dramatic work, opinion emergent over a century and more of playgoing and writing. I am pleased to be able to share the results of these efforts with readers and theatregoers familiar with Wilde’s comic masterpiece. It is my hope that the availability of this collection of criticism and commentary may enable them to enlarge their understanding or increase their delight by putting them­selves in touch with what has become a long, coherent, and compelling tradition of critical response.

The reader of this account will find a truly extraordinary range of critical approaches to this distinguished work of theatrical and dramatic art. Its singularity as a play for both the stage and the study is repeatedly emphasized, as in the examples of Arthur Ganz, who observes, ‘It stands alone among English comedies,’ and W. H. Auden, who describes it as ‘the only pure verbal opera in English’. In the estimation of critics beginning early in the twentieth century it quickly emerges as a classic of high, permanent status and, not incidentally, as a great gift to posterity from its author. A distinguished academy of well-known critics emerges in the account, including W. H. Auden, Eric Bentley, Bernard Shaw, Camille Paglia, Rodney Shewan, Christopher Innes, Karl Beckson, John Stokes, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Russell Jackson, Thomas Whitaker, Nicholas Frankel, and Richard Allen Cave, among others.

Readers approaching this comprehensive account of criticism will find it can be read as a straightforward chronological narrative, conveniently divided into chapters of moderate length, allowing time for some reflection along the way. It can also be used as a basis for identification and description of insightful criticism that can be located and explored independently; outstanding critical approaches to Wilde’s play can be located by employing the Works Cited as a convenient handlist for exploration. For readers whose memory of the play in performance or reading may be fragmentary or less than full, a summary of the action and an indication of the time scheme of The Importance of Being Earnest will be found at the end of the book, as Appendix 1. References are gathered in footnotes, with short citations keyed to the list of Works Cited at the end.