Content area
Full text
The Importance of Being Earnest is the greatest of Oscar Wildes works, the one in which his trademark irreverences and inversions are deployed to most uncanny effect, succeeding and striking sparks off one another from first curtain to last and attaching themselves just plausibly enough to the characters who utter them to sustain a continuous theatrical vitality and to create the sense in generation after generation of appreciative audiences that they have participated in something subversive and marvelous. "I have put my genius into my life," Wilde declared; "I have only put my talent into my works." But in the case of The Importance of Being Earnest, in the comic drama that opened to acclaim on 14 February 1895 and in the equally theatrical life drama that surrounded and succeeded it in the months following, Wilde proved himself doubly wrong, producing his one work of genius, but mismanaging disastrously his encounter with the Marquess of Queensberry and the British legal and cultural establishment.
The story, awful in its retrospective inevitability, has been told and retold. A celebrity while still at Oxford, Wilde in 1895 had seen his fortunes rise and fall and rise again in the course of an already lengthy career as a lecturer, critic, novelist, and freelance apostle of aestheticism. Having courted both fame and infamy with the 1891 publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde had then found his widest audience and his least controversial success as the author of a series of society comedies, beginning with Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance. In late 1894, the year of his fortieth birthday, he had one hit play in production, An Ideal Husband, and was readying another for its opening.
At the same time, the married Wilde had conducted for several years a conflict-ridden and semipublic affair with the much younger Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father, the Marquess of Queensberry, objected to the connection. Always a violently unreasonable man, Queensberry was maddened to action by the death, probably by suicide, of another son who had reputedly been involved in his own homosexual affair. (It is one small branch on the great parent tree of ironies that this is the same Marquess of Queensberry who sponsored the gentlemanly code of...