The Night Wilde Refused to Bow
Oscar Wilde—“The Importance of Being Earnest”
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ondon. 14 February, 1895. Snow was falling outside the St. James’s Theatre. Inside, the best-dressed crowd in London settled into their seats. They had come to see a new comedy by the most talked-about writer in England. |
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet, novelist, and playwright, living in London. By 1895 he had already written three hit plays in three years. The Importance of Being Earnest was meant to be his biggest yet, a farce about two men who invent fake identities to escape their responsibilities.
The gamble paid off instantly. Allan Aynesworth, who played the role of Algernon, later called it the finest opening night of his fifty-three years on stage. The audience rose in their seats and cheered and cheered again.
This is Wilde thirteen years earlier, already the most photographed writer of his generation.
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| Napoleon Sarony, “Oscar Wilde,” 1882. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. |
Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896) ran the most famous celebrity photo studio in New York. He shot this during Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour of America, styling him as a velvet-clad aesthete before Wilde had written a single play. Sarony later sued a lithography company for copying this exact photograph without paying him, and won, in a case that decided, for the first time in American law, that a photograph could be copyrighted at all.
Back to opening night. In the audience that Valentine’s evening sat a man Wilde badly wanted kept out: the Marquess of Queensberry (1844–1900), father of Wilde’s companion Lord Alfred Douglas. Queensberry planned to disrupt the show with a bouquet of rotten vegetables. Wilde got wind of it, had Queensberry’s ticket cancelled, and posted police at every door. Furious, the Marquess left his bouquet at the stage door instead.
I first saw this play as a teenager, laughing hardest at Lady Bracknell’s two-word reaction to a baby found in a handbag: “A handbag?” I had no idea, watching it, that the man who wrote those lines would be in a prison cell within the year.
Queensberry kept pushing. A card he left at Wilde’s club accused him, in writing, of a crime under Victorian law. Wilde sued him for libel. The case collapsed within days, and the evidence gathered for Wilde’s defense was handed straight to the police. He was arrested for gross indecency on 5 April, seven weeks after his triumphant opening night.
The theater tried to save the production without saving its author. Starting 6 April, Wilde’s name was removed, with no announcement, from the programme and the posters outside. It made no difference. The play closed on 8 May, after eighty-three performances, the same week Wilde’s own trial resumed.
Wilde served two years of hard labor. In prison, he wrote a long, unsparing letter that was later published as De Profundis. He died in Paris in 1900, at forty-six, with barely any money left. The Importance of Being Earnest has never once left the stage since.
One bouquet of rotten vegetables… delivered to a stage door instead of a stage.
Wilde dodged that insult on opening night. The one that followed, he could not.
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