Oscar Wilde's Game of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde's Game of Being Earnest TIRTHANKAR BOSE • WRITING TO A FRIEND in 1895, Wilde dismissed The Importance of Being Earnest as a play "written by a butterfly for butterflies,"l and for many years this has been the usual response of playgoers and critics alike. Wilde's linguistic virtuosity is so complete and so consciously flaunted that the play exists for most people as a dazzling, if insubstantial tissue of pun and paradox. In producing the play, the director usually makes it his chief purpose to project the wit, creating primarily a verbal style that highlights the flashing repartee and plays down the intellectual content (a notable example of the style being the Olivier-Thorndike recording of the play). However successful this kind of production may be as entertainment, it stops short of revealing other, broader dimensions of meaning in the play, such as the sociological concern noted by Eric Bentley,2 or the ethical framework explored by Nassaar.3 But even these sensitive studies tend not to approach these levels of meaning through the design of the play's theatrical presence. Earnest offers a powerful view of society precisely because it is a subtly planned formal structure, and more thought needs to be given to the elements of design in the play to understand it as a stage-event. The action of Earnest is established in the first act through a series of matched situations. Jack's trip to London parallels Algernon's Bunburying , while his attempt to prevent Algernon from getting close to Cecily is matched by Lady Bracknell's endeavour to keep Gwendolen away from Jack. The impasse is resolved in both cases identically, that 81 82 TIRTHANKAR BOSE is, by sending the principals away on a journey to the country. In the second act we find a much more obvious and theatrically effective use of matched action in the elaborate, masque-like "courtship-dance" of the four young lovers who form and re-form into sets of alliances.4 When, as the logical extension of the action in Act I, Algernon comes to Cecily, they at once form a pair, thus lending concrete form to the suggestion implicit in Act I of a supporting pair balancing the JackGwendolen relationship and stressing the vital matching device of both girls claiming lovers with the same name. The irrationality and frivolity of this key motive guarantees the subversion of the conventional value-structure of sentimental drama. This irrational whim can destroy both relationships at this stage and is thus a complication added to the obstruction met with in Act I. More matched action follows when both men react to their identical crises by rushing to be re-christened. From this point on, the action tends to become organized more and more in terms of set-relationships. Besides the two sets of lovers, there is yet another important set of relationships formed by Cecily and Gwendolen, first as friends, then as rivals, and finally as friends again. The men too form a distinct set as contenders (for the name "Ernest"), as companions in distress, and finally-ironically-as true brothers. The relationships between the men and the girls form one more set, as the characters go through alternating movements of acceptance and rejection.5 The crisis deepens in the third act, where we find that as a result of the action in Act II, the men and the girls again form separate pairs, the men on one side and the girls on the other. The set changes when the men announce their intention to be re-christened, the new set being that of contracted lovers. This elaborate ritual has two structural functions. First, it puts the lovers through their paces in the preliminaries of the love-game and strengthens them from within as consenting couples. Second, it presents an ironic view of the girls as sisters and the men as brothers-as indeed they turn out to be. A serious defect of design is that Cecily does not get her Ernest. But we are made to oVyrlook this by the adroit pairing off of Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble, which is used as much for this cover-up...