Laughing in earnest: The trying context of wilde's “trivial” comedy

Abstract

On Valentine's Day, 1895, Oscar Wilde's new comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened to raves at the St. James's Theatre in London's West End. Appearing barely a month after the premiere of his earlier play, An Ideal Husband, Earnest's immediate critical and financial success consolidated Wilde's reputation as one of the foremost dramatists of the day, ranking him in the contemporary critical pantheon along with such authors as Pinero, Ibsen, and Gilbert—not to mention far above the fledgling Henry James, the failure of whose play, Guy Domville, left the St. James vacant for the production. On February 17, three days after the London opening, I7K New York Times' front page featured the following assessment of Wilde's coup: Oscar Wilde may be said to have at last, and by a single stroke, put his enemies under his feet. Their name is legion, but the most inveterate of them may be defied to go to St. James's Theatre and keep a straight face through the performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. It is a pure farce of Gilbertian parentage, loaded with epigrams, impertinences, and bubbling that only an Irishman could have engrafted on that respectable . . . The thing is as slight in structure and as devoid of purpose as a paper but it is extraordinarily funny, and the universal assumption is that it will remain on the boards here for an indefinitely extended period.1 This laudatory description by drama critic Hamilton Fyfe astutely suggests the contradictions that Wilde's box office successes both engendered and attempted to resolve: as an Irishman who utilized drolleries, epigrams, impertinences, and bubbling comicalities to deride the respectability of the English middle and upper classes, Wilde interrupted a constellation of assumptions about gender, family, class, and nationality that (re)produced the imagined community which Fyfe succinctly calls Saxon stock. Hence, while Wilde's writings positioned him in opposition to those who identified with such assumptions—and, indeed, as Fyfe intimates, constituted many of them as his enemies—the force of his humor not only challenged the hegemony of these identifications, but simultaneously destabilized the seriousness of his critique. Devoid of purpose as a paper balloon, The Importance of Being Earnest seemed destined to become a West End hit and leave Wilde laughing all the way to the bank. Yet this was not to be the case: little more than two months after its opening, The Importance of Being Earnest was withdrawn from production and did not reappear in a major London theatre until well into the twentieth century.