Introduction
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 living 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 of his plays, 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, setting 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. As a consequence, an extraordinarily broad and
interesting record of criticism has survived, in newspaper and periodical reviews
along with academic and popular articles and books as well. Editors of
collections of Wilde’s plays invariably include The Importance of Being Earnest;
almost as frequently they provide an introduction offering original observations
and fresh insights into this most irresistibly quotable of plays, whether addressed
to an audience of students or fellow scholars or to a more general readership.
Consequently, potential readers of Wilde’s play find themselves in a fortunate position. It is easy to lay hands on a text of The Importance in a library,
in a bookstore, or on line. What is more, this text will almost surely 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 they may come upon a nearly identical text first
published in 1908 by Wilde’s faithful friend and executor of his estate, Robert
Ross, as part of Ross’s complete edition of Wilde’s works.
It has not been nearly so easy for anyone interested in 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, criticism is much harder or even unacceptably
difficult to turn up. Much criticism of Wilde’s play exists, but for the most part it
lies out of the way, a challenge to lay hands on. It requires 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 investigation of on-line sources.
The present volume is intended to remedy this unfortunate lack of access.
My own experience as a scholar pursuing the range of critical response to the
play has led me in those same typical directions. I have spent many days at what
was formerly the Colindale Newspaper Library, in north London, perusing
bound collections of newspapers, dailies and weeklies, journals and periodicals,
aiming to track down the widest possible selection of reviews of that magical first
production. My goal was to assemble a coherent collection of critical opinion
from a multiplicity of sources, augmented by research in libraries closer to home
and by investigating digital resources found on the Internet, and then to digest
and blend it into an extensive, authoritative account.
In conducting this research I have been guided by my conviction that, by
rights, 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 completed
my critical edition of the play,1 I have returned to my gathered sources,
expanding the coverage to encompass an entire century’s worth of critical
response and so creating a comprehensive historical narrative of critical opinion
on this timeless dramatic work, emergent over a century and more of playgoing
and writing. I hope that the availability of this collection of criticism and
commentary may enable readers and playgoers to enlarge their understanding
and increase their delight by putting themselves in touch with what has proved
to be 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 by a
distinguished academy of well-known critics. They include 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. In their
collective view Wilde’s play emerges as a classic of permanent status and its
author’s great gift to posterity.
Readers will discover here a straightforward chronological narrative,
conveniently divided into chapters of moderate length, allowing time for some
reflection along the way. It may also be used as a finding guide for insightful
criticism that can be independently pursued. Additional promising critical
approaches to Wilde’s play can be located by employing the Works Cited as a
convenient handlist. 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 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.
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1See The Complete Works of Wilde, Vols. IX and X, Plays 2 and Plays 3, ed. Donohue
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
