‘My name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country.’
‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is Oscar Wilde’s best and most performed play because in it he finally found a plotline which reflects his worldview. What I mean is that in the three previous plays (plus various essays) he had relentlessly promoted the value of the superficial over the ‘serious’, the trivial over the ‘important’, with a lead character (what I’ve called the Wilde avatar) spouting endless witticisms and one liners designed to invert and mock conventional Victorian values and expectations – about men and women, husbands and wives, sons and fathers, parliament and politics, art, morality, you name it.
The only problem was that, in his first three plays, the actual plots, the storylines, the heart of the actual dramas, were surprisingly conventional and relied entirely on traditional Victorian stereotypes of marriage, fidelity, trust and so on. In all three of them characters are so terrified of their partner’s infidelity or the risk of losing their reputations that they are reduced to moments of genuine anguish which are quite upsetting. And they all conclude with the thumpingly conventional moral message that we should all be more forgiving and compassionate to each other.
Thus the light attractive superstructure (all those witty paradoxes) was at odds with and undermined by storylines which contained moments of real tragedy and upset, producing a clash of tones.
In ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ Wilde devised a storyline which is itself as trivial, light and silly as his protagonists claimed to be. Form and content unite. The plot structure is perfectly attuned to the exquisite nonchalance of the characters. The whole thing feels light and charming from start to finish.
One aspect of this is the doubling of the lead characters. Previously there had been a distinct leading man and a distinct woman lead. Here the male leads are paired, and both engage in love affairs and proposals to two women leads who are also neatly paired.
Act 1. Algernon Moncrieff’s flat in Half Moon Street
The play opens to reveal idle young man-about-town Algernon Moncrieff (‘My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree’) playing the piano and then bantering with his superbly poised servant, Lane.
His best friend, Jack Worthing, drops in. In fact Algernon thinks his friend is named Ernest for reasons which become clear. Jack/Ernest has come up from his place in the country to propose to Algernon’s cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax.
Algernon playfully refuses to give his consent to the engagement because he has gotten hold of Ernest’s cigarette case (Jack left is behind by accident after his last visit) and noticed that it contains the inscription, ‘From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear uncle Jack.’ Is he having an affair with this Cecily?
Jack/Ernest is forced to admit 1) his true relationship with Cecily and 2) that he lives a double life or has two identities.
JACK: Well, my name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country, and the cigarette case was given to me in the country.
In the country, he assumes a serious attitude for the benefit of his young ward, the heiress Cecily Cardew, and goes by his given name of Jack (itself, of course, a familiar form of John). But he has invented an idle layabout younger brother named ‘Ernest’ in order to justify his regular trips up to London. When he arrives in London, Jack then assumes the identity of this libertine ‘Ernest.’
(Just to be clear, Jack explains that he was adopted as a boy by old Mr Thomas Cardew who, in his will, made Jack guardian to his grand-daughter, Miss Cecily Cardew. Which is why Cecily addresses him as ‘uncle’ although there is no blood relation between them.)
Algernon is surprised to learn that the amiable chap he has been calling Ernest all this time is in fact named Jack, and admits that he has devised a similar deception. He pretends to have an invalid friend named ‘Bunbury’ in the country who he tells everyone he has to visit whenever he wants to avoid an unwelcome social obligation. Also, now that Jack has explained who Cecily is and his avuncular relation to her, Algernon withdraws his objection to Jack proposing to Gwendolen.
Having established the ground rules of their two deceptions, there now arrive at Algernon’s flat his cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax (the one Jack-Ernest wants to marry) and her formidable mother, Algernon’s aunt, Lady Augusta Bracknell. Algernon does the decent thing and distracts Lady Bracknell into another room to discuss the music for her next dinner, thus giving Jack the opportunity to propose to Gwendolen. She accepts but confesses that a big part of the reasons she loves him is because she is enchanted by then name Ernest.
GWENDOLEN: For me you have always had an irresistible fascination. Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you. [Jack looks at her in amazement.] We live … in an age of ideals … and my ideal has always been to love some one of the name of Ernest. There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence. The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you.
Disconcerted by this, Jack secretly resolves to find a vicar and get himself rechristened ‘Ernest.’
Lady Bracknell re-enters the room to find Jack on his knees still proposing and, when she understands what is going on, insists on interviewing Jack as a prospective suitor for her daughter in one of the best scenes Wilde wrote. Lady Bracknell is horrified when Jack tells her that he was discovered as a baby, in a handbag at Victoria Station, and adopted by the man who found him, Thomas Cardew, inheriting his land and income when he died. Which explains why Lady Bracknell refuses Jack permission to marry Gwendolen and forbids further contact with her daughter.
Blithely ignoring all this, Gwendolen secretly promises him her undying love and Jack gives her his address in the country so she can pop down to see him. As he gives the address (‘The Manor House, Woolton, Hertfordshire’) Algernon, off to one side, secretly writes it down on the cuff of his sleeve. Jack’s description of his pretty young ward Cecile has motivated Algernon to meet her, despite the former’s protestations:
ALGERNON: I would rather like to see Cecily.
JACK: I will take very good care you never do. She is excessively pretty, and she is only just eighteen.
Act 2. The Garden of the Manor House, Woolton
Cut to the garden of the house Jack inherited from Mr Cardew, in which pretty young Cecily is rebelling against the orders of her governess, Miss Prism.
Out of nowhere Algernon arrives. He has devised the plan of introducing himself as the fictitious ‘Ernest’, Jack’s supposed wastrel brother from London, in order to give himself an entree into Cecil’s affections. She has long been fascinated by this legendary figure and so is delighted to meet him at long last. She takes Algernon back by being astonishingly self-assured. She, too, it seems, is particularly partial to the name ‘Ernest’
CECIL: You must not laugh at me, darling, but it had always been a girlish dream of mine to love some one whose name was Ernest. There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest.
She secretly dismays Algernon by saying she dislikes all other men’s names, particularly disliking ‘Algernon’. With the result that Algernon, exactly like Jack, now decides to formally change his name to ‘Ernest’ in order to win the lady’s hand, and therefore asks the local rector, Dr Chasuble – who happens to be very conveniently visiting – for an appointment to be christened later that afternoon.
However, these smooth plans are upturned when Jack himself arrives, for Jack has decided to abandon his double life and proclaim the fictional Ernest dead! Thus he arrives in full mourning and announces that his brother has just died in Paris of a severe chill – all of which is comically undermined by the fact that the supposedly ‘dead’ brother has just arrived and introduced himself to everyone, apparently in perfect good health.
When the others go off for a moment, Algernon is alone with Cecil again and he is flabbergasted to learn that she has been fantasising about having a relationship with him so intensely that he has become a kind of fictional character in an imaginary narrative writing: and that in her version of events, they are already engaged. They were engaged three months ago and, to prove it, she shows him her diary where she recorded it. And she bought a ring which she considers the one he proposed to her with. And she has a box in which she’s kept all the letters he’s written her.
ALGERNON: My letters! But, my own sweet Cecily, I have never written you any letters.
CECILY: You need hardly remind me of that, Ernest. I remember only too well that I was forced to write your letters for you. I wrote always three times a week, and sometimes oftener.
This is so inspired it has a tinge of Monty Python lunacy about it. The issue of his name recurs (Cecily affirming she loves the name Ernest and dislikes the name Algernon) that Algernon tells her he’s just got an errand to run to the rector (to see if he, like Jack, can get rechristened) and exists.
At which point, just to complicate things beautifully, Gwendolen arrives having run away from home and bossy Lady Bracknell. With the two men absent, the two young women, Cecily and Gwendolen get to know each other.
First of all they get to know and then love and then cherish each other with comic speed and superficiality. And then, when they discover that they’re both engaged to ‘Ernest’ (Cecily has just accepted the hand of Algernon posing as Ernest, while Gwendolen has only ever known Jack by his London name, Ernest), they just as quickly fall out with each other and become undying enemies. This is all done with the same light and airy comic touch as everything else in the play and rotates around the fact that, at this inopportune moment the servant (Merriman) appears with afternoon tea. With comic brilliance Wilde turns this ritual into a ballet of resentment, as Cecily glacially ignores Gwendolen’s request for no sugar, instead giving her four lumps, and then ignoring her request for bread and butter and instead giving her a big helping of (unwanted) cake, all of which leads up to the brilliant punchline:
GWENDOLEN: You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far.
At this point the two young men reappear. This is good because Gwendolen and Cecily run to ‘their’ Ernest and quickly allay the fear that they are both engaged to the same man. However, in doing, so Cecily reveals that Gwendolen’s ‘Ernest’ is her Uncle Jack Worthing while Gwendolen reveals that Cecily’s ‘Ernest’ is Algernon Moncrieff. In short, both women realise they have been lied to. So when Gwendolen and Cecily both ask Jack where his brother Ernest is, Jack is forced, very reluctantly, to admit the truth that he invented Ernest.
Thus the ladies realise that both men have been lying to them and furiously storm into the house, leaving the two young men to their recriminations. As I mentioned above, this is cast into a very pleasing parallelism, with each echoing the other’s complaints.
JACK: I wanted to be engaged to Gwendolen, that is all. I love her.
ALGERNON: Well, I simply wanted to be engaged to Cecily. I adore her.
JACK: There is certainly no chance of your marrying Miss Cardew.
ALGERNON: I don’t think there is much likelihood, Jack, of you and Miss Fairfax being united.
And so on. It’s elegant and it’s funny. They fall to squabbling about muffins (see ‘Food and triviality’ below) and then squabble about the fact that Jack has booked a slot with Dr Chasuble to be christened at 5.30 while Algernon has booked the same for 5.45, which they both, correctly, find absurd. The mere fact of their mirror image doubling up of so many aspects throughout the play make it comic.
Act 3. Morning-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
The last act cuts to the interior of Jack’s house, with the two young ladies looking out at their young men stuffing their faces with muffins and teacake. The food theme continues:
CECILY: They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.
The men go indoors and there is a comic reconciliation, both men announcing they are being christened Ernest which triggers comic overstatement:
CECILY: [To Algernon.] To please me you are ready to face this fearful ordeal?
ALGERNON: I am!
GWENDOLEN: How absurd to talk of the equality of the sexes! Where questions of self-sacrifice are concerned, men are infinitely beyond us.
JACK: We are. [Clasps hands with Algernon.]
CECIL: They have moments of physical courage of which we women know absolutely nothing.
The women have just accepted the men when Lady Bracknell storms in looking for her errant daughter (Gwendolen). At first she is resolutely against the engagement of her nephew (Algernon) to Cecily, until he tells her that she is worth £130,000 at which point her attitude magically changes. She suddenly approves of Cecily and examines her profile with a view to making it acceptable to High Society.
At which point everyone is surprised when Jack steps in and absolutely forbids the marriage, accusing Algernon of fraudulently impersonating his (imaginary) brother. After a moment or two of surprise, it turns out that this is all a ruse: he will consent only if Lady Bracknell agrees to his own marriage to Gwendolen (Lady Bracknell’s daughter), something she declines to do. Impasse!
Enter Dr Chasuble for some comic business as he announces that he is ready to perform the baptisms to which Lady Bracknell gives the comic responses: ‘The christenings, sir! Is not that somewhat premature?’
The impasse is broken by the return of Miss Prism who Lady Bracknell recognises as the person who, 28 years earlier as a family nursemaid, had taken a baby boy out in a perambulator and never returned. When interrogated, Miss Prism explains that she absent-mindedly put the manuscript of the novel she was writing in the perambulator and the baby in a handbag, which she had left at Victoria Station.
Jack goes running upstairs, rummages about (making a loud and theatrical racket) before rushing back downstairs clutching a battered handbag which Miss Prism promptly identifies as the very one. For a moment he thinks Miss Prism is his mother but she refers him to Lady Bracknell who informs him that he is the eldest brother of Lady Bracknell’s ‘poor sister, Mrs. Moncrieff, and consequently Algernon’s elder brother’!
For a start this explains why he’s always had the uncanny sense that he had a brother, hence his invention of a fictional one. But it also humorously fulfils Lady Bracknell’s apparently impossible stipulation from Act 1 that he set about acquiring some respectable relations. At a stroke, he has!
There’s just one last obstacle, his name for Gwendolen is holding out for Ernest. When he asks Lady Bracknell what his name as a baby was she says it was the same as her sister’s husband’s name which has slipped her memory. He was a General in the Army. It will be in the book of Army Lists. So Jack rushes over to his library shelves, finds the book, leafs through it furiously and discovers…that his father’s name was Ernest and so his must be too.
So…when he has spent half his adult life masquerading as a fictional character, Ernest, he was in fact telling the truth, which gives rise to wonderful repartee.
JACK: Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?
GWENDOLEN: I can. For I feel that you are sure to change.
As in all the best comedies the young couples embrace each other and, for good measure, are joined by Miss Prism and Dr Chasuble who have had a suppressed romance. It only remains to have a boom boom punchline which Wilde slickly delivers. Lady Bracknell remarks to her newfound relative: ‘My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality’ to which he replies:
JACK: On the contrary, Aunt Augusta: I’ve now realised for the first time in my life the vital importance of being Earnest.
Social history
Lady Bracknell submits Jack Worthing to a sustained interrogation and his answers build up an interesting socioeconomic profile of a male Wilde character. Jack is 29, single and smokes. His annual income is between £7,000 and 8,000, in investments rather than land. He owns a country house with about 1,500 acres and a town house in Belgrave Square. He is a Liberal Unionist i.e. a Liberal in all respects except granting home rule to Ireland (as indicated by ‘Unionist’). As Lady Bracknell points out, this more or less counts as a Tory. There is no mention of any interests or activities of any kind except enjoying himself.
Food and triviality
The importance of triviality in the dandy worldview is signalled right from the start, in the play’s title itself, and recurs at numerous moments, for example when fairly serious Jack loses his temper with Algernon’s preposterous and infuriating revelling in his silly ‘hobby’ of ‘Bunburying’, to which Bunbury replies:
ALGERNON: Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life. I happen to be serious about Bunburying. What on earth you are serious about I haven’t got the remotest idea. About everything, I should fancy. You have such an absolutely trivial nature.
A notable triumph of the trivial throughout the play is the excessive concern the characters pay to food. It opens with Algernon being concerned about the consumption of champagne at his last party and then making a big fuss about the preparation of sandwiches for the visit of Lady Bracknell.
JACK: Hallo! Why all these cups? Why cucumber sandwiches? Why such reckless extravagance in one so young? Who is coming to tea?
When Algernon presses Jack to dine with him that evening at Willis’s:
ALGERNON: Yes, but you must be serious about it. I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
And:
ALGERNON: I am greatly distressed, Aunt Augusta, about there being no cucumbers, not even for ready money.
LADY BRACKNELL: It really makes no matter, Algernon. I had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now.
ALGERNON: I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.
When Algernon first arrives in the country:
CECILY: How thoughtless of me. I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals. Won’t you come in?
ALGERNON: Thank you. Might I have a buttonhole first? I never have any appetite unless I have a buttonhole first.
It’s characteristic that, at the crisis of Act 2 when the young women realise they’ve been lied to and storm off in a huff, Algernon’s response is…to eat a muffin. More than that, it is to wax eloquent on the art of muffin eating:
JACK: How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.
ALGERNON: Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.
JACK: I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.
ALGERNON: When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.
JACK: [Rising.] Well, that is no reason why you should eat them all in that greedy way. [Takes muffins from Algernon.]
ALGERNON: [Offering tea-cake.] I wish you would have tea-cake instead. I don’t like tea-cake.
JACK: Good heavens! I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden.
ALGERNON: But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins.
JACK: I said it was perfectly heartless of you, under the circumstances. That is a very different thing.
ALGERNON: That may be. But the muffins are the same. [He seizes the muffin-dish from Jack.]
Witty one-liners and repartee
ALGERNON: Lane’s views on marriage seem somewhat lax. Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
ALGERNON: Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.
JACK: Some aunts are tall, some aunts are not tall. That is a matter that surely an aunt may be allowed to decide for herself.
AALGERNON: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
JACK: I haven’t asked you to dine with me anywhere to-night.
ALGERNON: I know. You are absurdly careless about sending out invitations. It is very foolish of you. Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.
ALGERNON: If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.
ALGERNON: My dear boy, I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
ALGERNON: The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.
MISS PRISM: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
CECILY: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
MISS PRISM: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
JACK: [Shaking his head.] Dead!
CHASUBLE: Your brother Ernest dead?
JACK: Quite dead.
MISS PRISM: What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it.
GWENDOLEN: I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
JACK: Gwendolen — Cecily — it is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind.
Lady Bracknell
Lady B was recognised at the time and ever since as a magnificent comic creation with a steady stream of peerless comic declamations:
LADY BRACKNELL: Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself!
LADY BRACKNELL: Do you smoke?
JACK: Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.
LADY BRACKNELL: I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is.
LADY BRACKNELL: I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.
LADY BRACKNELL: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
LADY BRACKNELL: Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution
LADY BRACKNELL: I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over.
LADY BRACKNELL: The two weak points in our age are its want of principle and its want of profile. The chin a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high, just at present.
LADY BRACKNELL: That does not seem to me to be a grave objection. Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now.
Books & Boots 