WILDE AT HEART

Stephen Fry's lifelong bond with the wittiest—and the most tortured—of writers.

- BY REBECCA MEAD

When “The Importance of Being Earnest,” by Oscar Wilde, opened, on February 14, 1895, in London, the date was well chosen. It was the Victorians, after all, who decisively turned the feast of St. Valentine into a mass commercial celebration, with would-be lovers concealing their identities behind an anonymous exchange of greeting cards and other tokens of desire. “Earnest,” the fourth drawing-room comedy that Wilde had produced within three years, centered on the courtship of two young women, Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, by two young men, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff. Both suitors repeatedly resort to subterfuge in order to maintain double lives in which the satisfactions of social respectability are counterbalanced by the pursuit of pleasure and personal freedom. The play, which Wilde gave a paradoxical subtitle, “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” harnessed Shakespearean conventions of mistaken identity and romantic disguise—at different moments, each man pretends to be named Ernest. The skittering plot is anchored by Lady Bracknell, the mother of Gwendolen and the aunt of Algernon. An overbearing elder who often thwarts the lovers’ intentions, she is the voice of Victorian probity in Wilde’s deranged scenario.