Introduction

In 1894 Oscar Wilde began work on a new playa trivial comedy for serious
people, he called itunder the working title Lady Lancing. He usually referred
to it in his letters as Bunbury but its real title, he said, was The Importance of
Being Earnest. In October of that year the play was substantially finished and he
offered it to the actor-manager George Alexander of the St. James Theatre, who
had earlier produced and starred in Wildes Lady Windermeres Fan. Alexander
seems not to have liked the play because he felt that neither of the principal male
roles suited him. But in January of 1895 Wildes An Ideal Husband was a runaway
success at the Haymarket Theatre, and Alexanders own production, Henry
James Guy Domville, was being hissed off the stage at the St. James. Alexander
bought Earnest but insisted that it be cut from four acts to three to allow time
for a one-act curtain raiser and to make the play more suitable for himself, for
he would play the part of Jack. The roles of Gribsby and Moulton were cut out
entirely and severe cuts were made throughout the play, especially in those parts
that dealt with Algernon and Cecily and with Chasuble and Prism.
Earnest opened on February 14th, 1895. Six weeks later Wilde was in
prison and the play was taken off the stage. The original four act text appeared
to be lost and when, after his release from Reading Gaol in 1897, Wilde was
seeing the play through publication it was the shortened text that he had sent
to Alexander for production that was the basis for the published version. That is
the version that everyone knows.
The original has survived, however, in a number of fragmentary
and sometimes conflicting forms. There are autograph drafts, manuscripts,
typescriptsnone complete, all heavily revised, emended, and annotated by the
author. These were compiled, collated, and edited in 1956 in The Importance of
Being Earnest: a Trivial Comedy for Serious People in Four acts as originally written
by Oscar Wilde, a limited edition published by the New York Public Library. But
that edition cannot be regarded as a definitive text, as Wildes finished work.
Too much is preserved in it: there are alternate versions of certain passages
printed together;
there is one speech: Cecilys Women are not so clever as men
1
say they are that occurs in three different places in the 1956 edition. 2
A four-act version is published in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. That
edition does contain more material than the three-act version, notably the
Gribsby scene, but it does not include
some of the best stuff Wilde
wrote. The
3
4
jokes about the stables in Wiltshire and stamps with the baby, for5 instance, as
well as Jacks tour de force about the importance of unlimited credit, are missing.
Indeed, there are over two hundred speeches or sizable parts of speeches in the
present text that are not included in the Complete Works. Some of the forgotten

material 6has been printed in the form of appendixes to the play in some7
editions. At the other extreme, the edition published by Samuel French,
the script that is probably printed from Alexanders actual prompt-book and
is used for most non-professional productions, is a further cutting of the play
containing some hundred fewer speeches than the standard version.
Clearly, there is no single definitive version. My text is a
reconstruction, an attempt to edit the various fragments, manuscripts, and
versions into something like the play Wilde might have submitted to a
producer and might have seen through production had he been able to.
When Wilde cut the play he retained the brilliant lampoon of Victorian
society that has ornamented our theatres for over a century. But the uncut
play is something more, something very close to the absurd drama that was
not to come for another fifty years. The jokes go further. They go past the
punch line, past the incongruity and surprising juxtaposition of incompatible
elements that makes us laugh. They treat that incongruity as a matter of fact
and explore it in ways that move the characters into a kind of looking-glass
world somewhere between Lewis Carroll and Samuel Beckett.
And he flattened the characters. The four young lovers of the standard
version are pretty standard. They are marvelously witty, but pretty much
versions of the same person. In the longer text they are wonderfully
differentiated, much smarter in some cases, much dumber in others, and
much, much funnier.
This text was prepared as a production script for The Upstart Crow
Theatre Company of Boulder, Colorado, and was successfully staged, first in
1980 in a slightly different version, and again in 1987, and finally in 2003 in the
present version. Since it is a production script, the stage directions have been
largely omitted, except for the essential ones dealing with entrances, exits,
and major business not immediately inferable from the dialogue. But the
adverbial stage directionsairily, languidly, stifflyand the blocking
directions hands it to him, sits on sofahowever authorial and however
helpful to the lay reader, tend to be an irritant to the director and actor. They
are usually obvious from the dialogue (in which case they are redundant) or
they describe and demand a theatre, a set, a director, even an actor that have
all long vanished.
Richard Bell
Boulder, Colorado, 2003
1 P. 48 in the present edition.
2 Ed. J. B. Foreman [London: Collins, 1966].
3 P. 3 in the present edition.
4 P. 69.
5 P. 65.
6 E.g., The Bard Books edition [New York: Avon, 1965] and The Annotated Oscar Wilde, ed. H.
Montgomery Hyde [New York: Crown, 1982].
7 New York, n.d.