As we have seen, the publication of facsimiles of Wilde’s manuscripts of The Imp
As we have seen, the publication of facsimiles of Wilde’s manuscripts of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1956 ushered in a new era of Wildean scholarship. And in 1980 Russell Jackson, in the first scholarly edition of the play, took note of the presence and availability of those manuscripts and others located in the Arents Collection and the Performing Arts Library of the New York Public Library. Yet it was not until 1996 that the first full-length study of these various manuscripts and typescripts finally saw the light of day. In that year Sos Eltis’s revision of her doctoral dissertation was published as Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde,[1] a patient, careful, and systematic examination of surviving manuscripts and typescripts of one early play (Vera; or, The Nihilists) and the entire corpus of the major social comedies: Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Eltis explains in her introduction that her purpose is not only to contradict the widespread impression fostered by Wilde himself that his plays were quickly and easily written, but to reveal that he labored long and hard over successive drafts in order to disguise beneath a charming, polished surface the real nature of the work. It is a revolutionary author that Eltis proposes to recover: “the Wilde who challenged social, sexual, and moral conventions, satirizing and subverting the orthodox values on which Victorian society was based.”[2]
An overview of the Oscar Wilde that Eltis identifies as anarchist, socialist, and feminist is followed by chapter-long treatments of each play (frankly omitting any treatment of the early Duchess of Padua and Salome). When she comes to Earnest she takes advantage of manuscripts and typescripts in the British Library, and the Arents Collection and the Burnside-Frohman Collection of the New York Public Library. Although she was apparently unable to examine the proof pages of the play, now in the Ransom Collection at the University of Texas Austin, she came as close as she needed by examining the Winifred Dolan typescript in the Arents Collection, heavily annotated by Wilde, which served as copy-text for the first edition, which she also cites and compares with the Dolan typescript.[3] Allowing for this one omission, deftly compensated for, we observe a canny, conscientious scholar at work, moving through each successive draft and finding that Wilde gradually transformed the play from “a highly plotted, frequently absurd, but essentially harmless and familiar comedy into an insidiously subversive, satirical, and undeniably unique drama, a psychological farce.” Moreover, Eltis is well aware that in acquiring the play for production George Alexander “requested” that Wilde cut the play from four acts to three. As shown in the Oxford critical edition of the play, Alexander gave the author no choice, and in fact sent him away from rehearsals at an early point, w