The Importance of Being Earnest

In brief

Jack Worthing has invented a wicked brother called Ernest so that he can escape to London and be him. Algernon Moncrieff has invented a sick friend called Bunbury so that he can escape from London. Both men fall in love with women who will marry only someone named Ernest, and both arrange to be christened on the same afternoon. The muddle is solved when a governess confesses she once left a baby in a hand-bag at Victoria Station, and the Army Lists show that Jack was Ernest all along.

Nothing in that plot matters and everything in the writing does. The play is a machine for producing sentences, and more of them have become proverbial than from almost any other play. Its subtitle is A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, and it is meant.

The argument

Wilde told Robert Ross that the theme was “That we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality”. On the stage that means that a character is passionately grave about muffins and light about death. It is a joke with a real position behind it. Victorian earnestness, the word and the moral style, claimed that sincerity was the highest virtue. The play proposes the reverse, in Gwendolen’s words: “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing” (Act 3).

The plot quietly proves it. Jack lies in every scene, and his lie turns out to be the truth. His horror at the discovery is the play’s best moral joke: “it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.” When Algernon says “The truth is rarely pure and never simple” (Act 1), he is the nearest thing the play has to a philosopher.

The title’s pun is Wilde’s whole method. Being earnest means being serious and also being called Ernest, and only the sound holds those together. Critics have read in this a code: the double life, the secret name, the invented friend who must be visited, all from a man with a secret. The claim that “earnest” itself was a known homosexual slang word is disputed, and John Gielgud dismissed it. The stronger reading needs no code. A man who lives two lives wrote a farce in which having two lives is both the fun and the condition of being a civilised person.

The shape of the play

Three acts, flat, garden and house, with W. S. Gilbert’s Engaged (1877) as the English model for its deadpan. Act 1 sets up the two deceptions and ends with Algernon writing Jack’s country address on his shirt-cuff. Act 2 is the great engine: Jack comes on in deep mourning for a brother who is, at that moment, in the house eating his food. Gwendolen and Cecily discover they are engaged to the same man, and wage war with sugar and cake at a tea table. Act 3 untangles everything by coincidence so gross that it counts as a parody of coincidence.

Wilde shows off the symmetries a farce usually hides: two men, two women, two false names, and at the end Gwendolen beating time while the pairs speak in unison. The last line closes the play like a lock: “On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.”

The voice

Everyone speaks like Wilde, and that is the point. Servants, governesses and clergymen all have the same polish. The method is inversion: take the expected Victorian moral, and turn it round so the grammar stays upright. Lady Bracknell: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Miss Prism on her novel: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Gwendolen: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

The actors must not know any of this is funny. The great trap of the play is to wink. George Alexander played Jack, as The Era said at the time, “with entire seriousness and no indication of purposed irony”, and that has remained the rule. Under the gloss lies real social detail, money especially. “Land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure”, says Lady Bracknell, in the voice of a class that knows it. She approves Cecily when she learns of “a hundred and thirty thousand pounds”, “in the Funds”.

The four-act version

Wilde wrote the play in four acts, at Worthing in the summer of 1894, filling four exercise books. George Alexander took it for the St James’s Theatre after Henry James’s Guy Domville failed there, and asked him to cut it to three, so the second and third acts were run together. The largest loss was a solicitor, Mr Gribsby, who arrives from London to serve a writ on Ernest Worthing for unpaid dining bills at the Savoy, and offers to take him to Holloway Prison. Algernon, who has been passing as Ernest, is the man they try to carry off for the debts of someone who does not exist, and Jack, whose bills they are, professes shock at such extravagance.

The scene is funny, and most critics agree the play is better without it. Wilde was not pleased, and said of the shortened play that he had once written one very like it, even more brilliant. The four-act text was published in a New York Public Library edition in 1956; the BBC first broadcast it in 1977; Samuel French sells the acting version today; and Oliver Parker’s film of 2002 restored Gribsby. The free editions linked here are the three-act play. The cut scene’s fascination is the shadow it now casts: a man being taken to Holloway for debts run up under a false name in the Savoy, written by someone who ran up bills at the Savoy and would be remanded in Holloway within the year.

The first night and the trials

The play opened at the St James’s on 14 February 1895, Valentine’s Day. Wilde wore a green carnation. Lord Alfred Douglas was away in Algeria. His father, the Marquess of Queensberry, planned to throw a bouquet of rotten vegetables at the author when he took his bow; Alexander had his ticket cancelled and the police kept him out. Wilde described the scene to Douglas: “He arrived with a prize fighter!! I had all Scotland Yard to guard the theatre.” Inside, Allan Aynesworth, who played Algernon, later recalled, “The audience rose in their seats and cheered and cheered again.”

Four days later Queensberry left his card at Wilde’s club, the Albemarle: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite”. Against the advice of his friends, and urged on by Douglas, Wilde sued him for libel. Edward Carson read his works back at him in the witness box and promised male prostitutes as witnesses; Wilde dropped the case and was arrested on 5 April. Alexander took the author’s name off the playbills. It did not help, and the production closed on 8 May, after barely three months. On 25 May Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour, the maximum.

Its last comic line, about a man forced to be what he pretended, was first heard by a public that within three months would hear Wilde’s private life read aloud. He never wrote another comedy. In 1898, an exile in France, he revised the proofs for Leonard Smithers with great care, insisted on a playbill from the original production, and saw it published without his name on the cover, as “By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan”. Reading it over, he wrote to Reginald Turner: “How I used to toy with that tiger Life!” He died in Paris in November 1900.

The people

Lady Bracknell

Lady Bracknell has often been played by men. She interviews Jack as a magistrate would, and discovers his origins in the famous sequence ending in the hand-bag: “The line is immaterial.” Edith Evans’s rising cry on the two words “A hand-bag” in Anthony Asquith’s film of 1952 is the one every later actress has to escape, as it is not written in the text. Her theory fits in a sentence: “Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn.”

Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff

Jack, a foundling with a country estate, is nervous and thinks he is the serious one. Algernon is pure appetite, the true Bunburyist, and he has most of the best lines: “I hate people who are not serious about meals.” Their row over muffins, at the height of the crisis, is the play at its most perfectly itself: “I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner.”

Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew

Gwendolen and Cecily are the two women who have decided everything in advance, one by the theory that “we live, as I hope you know, Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals”, and the other in a diary. They are far harder than the men. Cecily’s diary, where she has already been engaged to Ernest for three months before meeting him, shows how fiction runs things.

Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble

Miss Prism, the governess with her lost three-volume novel, and Canon Chasuble, the clergyman ready to baptise anyone, have a small, chaste comedy of their own, and Prism’s old absent-minded error makes the plot. Lady Bracknell’s “Prism! Where is that baby?” is the climax that the whole play exists to deliver.

Joyce in Zurich

James Joyce staged this play. In wartime Zurich he and the actor Claud Sykes set up a company, the English Players, with Joyce as business manager, and on 29 April 1918 they opened with The Importance of Being Earnest. Joyce had already written about Wilde, an Irish writer condemned in England, for a Trieste newspaper in 1909, on the occasion of Strauss’s Salome. Algernon was played by a young British consular employee and wounded veteran named Henry Carr.

The performance went well. Carr and Joyce fell out over money, including, by most accounts, the cost of a pair of trousers Carr had bought for the part. They sued each other; the cases ran into early 1919; Joyce won on the money and lost on the slander. His revenge was permanent. In the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, Private Carr is the drunken, foul-mouthed English soldier who knocks Stephen down in Nighttown, with Compton beside him and the name of the consul, Bennett, in his mouth: “Bennett? He’s my pal. I love old Bennett.”

A Wilde farce had ended in a real writ, the joke of the cut fourth act. Tom Stoppard saw the rest of the comedy in Travesties (1974), in which an old Carr remembers Zurich, Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara through the mangled plot of Wilde’s play.

Readers and critics

The first reviewers enjoyed it and were not sure they should. Bernard Shaw found it extremely funny and heartless, a view he kept all his life: “I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.” William Archer, Ibsen’s translator, asked what a poor critic could do with a play that “raises no principle, whether of art or morals”. H. G. Wells doubted how serious people would take this comedy “intended for their learning”, adding, “No doubt seriously.” W. H. Auden later called it “a pure verbal opera”, and Mary McCarthy “a ferocious idyll”. Queer readings from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others are at their best on the structure of the double life and weakest on individual puns.

Afterlives

John Gielgud’s productions of 1939 and after, with Edith Evans and Margaret Rutherford, set the modern style; Asquith’s film of 1952 preserves that cast, with Michael Redgrave as Jack. Judi Dench played Lady Bracknell for Peter Hall at the National in 1982 and for Parker’s film in 2002. The title’s pun survives translation best in German, where ernst and Ernst are the same word; French makes do with L’Importance d’être Constant. Its centenary in 1995 prompted Mark Lawson’s remark that it was the second most quoted play in English after Hamlet.

How to read it

Read it once as pure pleasure. It takes under two hours, and nothing rewards solemnity less.
Read it again with the dates beside it. The play changes with the spring of 1895 in mind.
Hear it played straight. A bad production winks.
Know what you have. The free editions here are the three-act text of 1899. For the four-act text you need the acting edition or a scholarly one such as Russell Jackson’s New Mermaids edition, which draws on the drafts.