The Importance of Being Earnest

The subtractive test, put to the plot, finds almost nothing loose. Every invention of the first act is spent by the third: Bunbury is exploded; Ernest is killed, mourned and then found to be real; the cigarette case inscribed from little Cecily opens the whole country plot; the handbag scorned in the first act is the recognition token of the last. The cucumber sandwiches and the muffins are one joke placed twice, so that appetite replaces feeling at the two worst moments. The cut from four acts to three removed a whole scene and tightened the play. The charge is the epigram, detachable by nature: many single lines could go without the structure noticing, and some of the wit is permitted by the form rather than compelled by it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

What the play brings into the open can be stated, and it holds: in the society it shows, identity is a name, a manner and a property qualification; earnestness, the cardinal Victorian virtue, is itself a costume; and every respectable life keeps a second one. Lady Bracknell’s interview of Jack lays bare marriage as a transaction in land, income and politics by asking it with total candour, item by item. “I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance” (Act I) is a class’s educational policy in a sentence. Held below the top on one charge, which is also the play’s choice: the disclosure is made entirely by inversion, never by exposure of cost. No one suffers, and the condition is shown as a pattern, not as a weight on lives.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation in comedy is transport by delight, and the play gives it often. Lady Bracknell’s “A handbag?” (Act I) is one of the great comic heights of the English stage; the tea-table war between Gwendolen and Cecily, fought in sugar and cake under perfect civility, rises steadily to a pitch; Jack’s entrance in full mourning for a brother whom Algernon is at that moment impersonating in the house is a coup of the same order. But the axis asks for height, and the play’s height is always the height of wit: no grandeur, no terror, no beauty beyond the beauty of the sentence, by design. The register never lifts out of the drawing-room and does not mean to. The transport is frequent and real, and of one kind.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The play is built on the oldest plot of comedy: the foundling of New Comedy, lost in infancy, raised under another name, recognised by a token and restored to his family and his true name in time to marry. Menander, Plautus and Tom Jones stand behind it, and the pattern bears load, since the resolution depends on it: the Army Lists give the General’s name as Ernest John. The myth of the name as fate is built in too: both women love only the name Ernest, and the plot compels it to be true. Held below the bar because the archetype is built in order to be parodied: the recognition is rigged, the token is luggage, and Lady Bracknell is the gorgon mother as a type. Built, and built hollow on purpose.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is the comedy of manners from Congreve through Sheridan, the French well-made play, and the farce of the 1870s and 1880s, Gilbert’s Engaged (1877) above all, which had already played heartless calculation in a sentimental idiom. Wilde’s own three society comedies before it kept a melodramatic plot of a woman with a past under the epigrams. The swerve is to remove the sentiment entirely: no moral crisis, no wronged woman, no pathos, and every value of the theatre’s serious plot turned inside out and played straight-faced. The subtitle states the wager, and the completeness of the turn is what is new. The stake was modest: a three-act farce for a fashionable actor-manager, risking nothing in form, perfecting a line more than breaking one.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and the play stops knowing what it knows. Its argument is that style governs and sincerity follows, “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing” (Act III), and the form is that argument enacted: a farce whose every turn is made by a sentence, whose persons are their manners, and whose plot obeys the law of the epigram at the scale of action, so that the lie of the name comes true. The symmetry of two couples, two inventions and two proposals says that persons in this world are interchangeable forms. As a realist play the same matter becomes an exposure of hypocrisy; as prose fiction it loses the speed by which it argues. Held short of the top because farce is a form Wilde perfected rather than made.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The evidence is a hundred and thirty years of return without exhaustion: continuous revival, constant quotation, and a critical literature that keeps finding new ground in it, from the formal, a play about language that runs on language alone, to readings of Bunburying as the double life of a man who was in the dock months later, and of the whole system of names and secrets as a coded account of that life. The formal depth is real: the more often the play is seen, the more its symmetries show, and the plot’s logic rewards rereading. The charge is that the yield is of one kind. The play says that the surface is the depth, and whoever returns finds more perfection rather than more meaning; the biographical readings are partly brought to it.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is the English and European stage from the 1890s on. The intrinsic force is that of the purest statement in English of a comic mode in which language is the action and seriousness the butt, fixed as a model; it does not reorganise what drama can do, as Ibsen and Chekhov did in the same decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the dialogue comedy of Noël Coward, Private Lives among it, and the comic prose of P. G. Wodehouse descend from it; Joe Orton’s Loot and What the Butler Saw work its inversion of decorum into darker farce; Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1974) is built on an amateur production of the play in Zurich; and Bunburying entered the language. Held below the bar because the redirection stayed within comedy and within an inherited line.

Score: 8.4 / 10

A text whole and unproblematic, a hundred and thirty-one years from its first performance. Presence is very wide: in continuous revival in the professional and amateur theatre since its return to the stage in the first decade of the twentieth century, taught in schools and universities, translated widely, filmed by Anthony Asquith in 1952, and quoted daily by people who have never seen it. The one charge is on its first years: the first run was cut short and the author’s name suppressed on the playbills in 1895, so that its survival began interrupted; that is long past and costs nothing now. The widest figure for its span is kept for books of wider human reach, which holds the axis a tenth below it.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Command of the medium at the highest level English prose drama reaches. The sentence: each epigram is balanced to a hair and turned on its last word, “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness” (Act I). The structure: three acts each closing on a reversal; the double arrival of the second act, Algernon as Ernest and Jack in mourning for Ernest, timed to the line; the third act’s chain of recognitions, Prism, the handbag, the Brighton line, the Army Lists, run at a speed that makes the absurdity feel like proof. Nine speaking parts are handled with economy, the servants given their own idiom. Held below the very top by the narrow range of instruments: one register, wit, played perfectly.

Score: 9.2 / 10

One physics governs everything, and the play states it: trivial things are treated seriously and serious things trivially. Take the most distant elements: Lady Bracknell’s catechism of income and politics and Miss Prism’s lost three-volume novel; Canon Chasuble’s sermon on the manna in the wilderness, adaptable to any occasion, and Cecily’s diary, in which her engagement, its breaking off and its renewal are already recorded. All obey one law: form precedes and produces the fact. The resolution obeys it too, since the name precedes the man and proves to be his. No scene breaks tone, and no sentiment stands unmocked, the lovers’ last embraces included. Held where it is because the range is narrow, one class, one season, two houses, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on what a three-act drawing-room comedy can hold, and the figure describes the form. What it holds is held, not listed: the family as inheritance and genealogy; marriage as property and as a market; class, land, income and politics, down to the Liberal Unionists and the side of Belgrave Square; religion as social form, in the christening and in Chasuble; literature and fiction, in Prism’s novel, the diaries and “That is what Fiction means”; and the self as a role, all joined by the single law. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that every order is present as manner only: labour appears in Lane and Merriman as wit, the state and history not at all, the natural order only as the country garden, consciousness only as performance.

Score: 6.8 / 10