The play was written following the success of Wilde's earlier plays Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband and A Woman of No Importance.[1] He spent the summer of 1894 with his family at Worthing, where he began work on the new play.[2] His fame now at its peak, he used the working title Lady Lancing to avoid preemptive speculation about its content (a "Lady Lancing" is glancingly referred to by Lady Bracknell).[3] Many names and ideas in the play were borrowed from people or places the author had known; Lady Queensberry, Lord Alfred Douglas's mother, for example, lived at Bracknell.[4][a] Wilde scholars agree that the most important influence on the play was W. S. Gilbert's 1877 farce Engaged,[7][8] from which Wilde borrowed not only several incidents but also "the gravity of tone demanded by Gilbert of his actors".[9]
Wilde continually revised the text over the next months. No line was left untouched, and the revision had significant consequences.[10] Sos Eltis describes Wilde's revisions as a refined art at work. The earliest and longest handwritten drafts of the play labour over farcical incidents, broad puns, nonsense dialogue, and conventional comic turns. In revising, "Wilde transformed standard nonsense into the more systemic and disconcerting illogicality which characterises Earnest's dialogue".[11] Richard Ellmann argues Wilde had reached his artistic maturity and wrote more surely and rapidly.[12]
Wilde wrote the part of Jack Worthing with the actor-manager Charles Wyndham in mind. Wilde shared Bernard Shaw's view that Wyndham was the ideal comedy actor and based the character on his stage persona.[1] Wyndham accepted the play for production at his theatre, Wyndham’s, but before rehearsals began, he changed his plans to help a colleague in a crisis. In early 1895, at the St James's Theatre, the actor-manager George Alexander's production of Henry James's Guy Domville had failed, and closed after 31 performances, leaving Alexander in urgent need of a new play to follow it.[13][14] Wyndham waived his contractual rights and allowed Alexander to stage Wilde's play.[14][15]
After working with Wilde on stage movements with a toy theatre, Alexander asked the author to shorten the play from four acts to three. Wilde agreed and combined elements of the second and third acts.[16] The largest cut was the removal of the character of Mr. Gribsby, a solicitor who comes from London to arrest the profligate "Ernest" (i.e., Jack) for unpaid dining bills.[10] The four-act version was first played on a BBC radio production and is still sometimes performed. Some consider the three-act structure more effective and theatrically resonant than the published four-act edition.[17]
