By Gavin Witt, Production Dramaturg

The theater of the 1890s consisted chiefly of fashionable Society dramas, farces, and romantic melodramas—with variety shows, music halls, and vaudevilles further along the popular spectrum. London flocked to offshoots of the French drama epitomized by Eugéne Scribe and Victorien Sardou; they had developed the much-imitated model of the “well-made play,” which emphasized craftsmanship over content, formula over originality.

These plays used a set of stock characters and situations to present conventional themes emphasizing bourgeois morality. Sentimental heroines, ingenuous young bachelors, scheming servants, harsh parents, foolish aristocrats, and women with a past were the familiar characters. These archetypal figures would struggle in endless variations against such common obstacles as jealous misunderstandings, mistaken identities, compromising letters, hopeless love, and betrayal of affections.

Audiences could count on the well-made play to offer familiar figures in familiar situations. They expected surprising complications and crises to build to a climactic resolution that reaffirmed social and moral values (including the double standard that punished adultery by women but allowed dalliance by men—a bête noir as much for Wilde as it was for Shaw.)

For those who mastered it, the theater of the Nineties offered financial rewards, social prominence, even a means for intellectual expression. These factors made playwriting particularly attractive to Wilde. By outwardly imitating the pieces that formed the staple of the period’s stages, he lulled his audience into a feeling of comfortable recognition—which he then overturned with paradoxes, epigrams, and inversions of expectations. In part through reversal and in part by inflating social forms and pretence (his own signature stock in trade) to logical and laughable extremes, Wilde managed to wring a laugh from some of the favorite themes of his time: loyalty, sacrifice, undying love, manners, and social respectability.

In this, Wilde acted partly in concert with other theatrical innovators of his day, notably Shaw and Ibsen. Less obviously, less didactically, less aggressively than these revolutionary titans, Wilde nevertheless made use of traditions to help forge a new direction. Into the overstuffed, mannered decorum of Victorian drawing rooms, Wilde infused—like a tempest in a perfect china pot—the farcical elements of Plautus, Shakespeare, and Feydeau, from lost babies and ill-timed arrivals to yearning lovers and glaring guardians, and of course miraculous family reunions. He stirs in some Midsummer Night's Dream, with multiplying pairs of lovers and the requisite retreat from city to country that confuses only to restore. With circumstances worthy of an Ibsen psychodrama, we laugh instead as wit never falters and paradoxical inversion somehow lands everyone on their feet. As much as Wilde may mock marriage and serious social institutions, he also emerges as their ardent defender. The deliberate, artful use of melodramatic structures and revelations works to arouse our support for the conventional romantic structure, employing all the features of the well-made play to surprise and delight—and even evoke sympathy—even as Wilde the social critic exposes hypocrisy, cant, and sham.

Taken together, Wilde’s comedies echo the plays of his time, but increasingly lampoon conventional moral dilemmas with a unique combination of puns, paradoxes, and playful anticlimax. The Importance of Being Earnest marked the boldest stride in this direction, a departure from even his own prior ventures. It might well have launched him yet further into experimentation, for Wilde’s commercial success and public acclaim gave him unprecedented influence as a playwright. However, even that stature was not enough to protect him when society turned on him a few months later.

“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.”—Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism