the importance of being earnest annotated

Frankel properly cites in support of his approach Wilde’s later claim in De Profundis that he took “the Drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the Lyric or the Sonnet.” The question remains, however, what aspects of the personal get expressed in Wilde’s works. To begin, two observations about the thesis itself. I will focus my attention on this thesis since I believe it is the aspect of the volume that will most interest readers of ELT and conclude with brief remarks about Frankel’s annotations.

For Frankel, this new insight is not simply biographical, but clarifies Wilde’s achievement: “The greatness of The Importance of Being Earnest comes not from the play’s separateness from Wilde’s life and personality, from its perceived autonomy as a work of ‘art’ existing merely for the sake of art, but from its inseparability from these things.” This is an annotated edition with an explicit critical thesis. IN NICHOLAS FRANKEL’S INTRODUCTION to this annotated edition of the three-act The Importance of Being Earnest, he states that “it is difficult from our twenty-first-century perspective not to see the play as another coded expression of its author’s secret double life.” In his view, the play continues Wilde’s strategy in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, which he has also annotated (2011), of playing “a cat and mouse game of revealing and concealing his sexual identity.” We can grasp Wilde’s strategy because we now know the details of Wilde’s life in a way only a small circle of his contemporaries did.

The importance of being earnest annotated