There it sits in the New York Public Library, undisturbed by time--but in actuality, until times recent. The item in question has a secretive history of being shipped across the Atlantic, stored, forgotten, hidden, and ultimately saved from destruction by being shelved in a somewhat mislabeled collection. No one knows its disguise.
Upon its discovery, no one is to have the satisfaction of opening the first page and proclaiming, "Here! Here's the missing four-act version of the Importance of Being Earnest everybody's been looking for." Because, as Oscar Wilde says in the very same text, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple." No one has made the guess that a final draft is in existence.
Those familiar with Earnest might remember that it is a three-act comedy featuring the exploits of one John Worthing, to be exact (exactness counts in this story), along with his gadfly antagonist, Algeron Moncrieff. Those even more familiar with Wilde's writings know that, while he originally intended it to be four acts, the play's first producer (and first leading man) had the play cut and restructured to be presented in three acts on February 14, 1895. Wilde experts acquaint themselves further with the fact that four-act "versions" of Earnest occasionally do present themselves and know what a seedy bunch they are. A very rough handwritten first draft found its way to a publisher in 1956, and any playwright will tell you an initial draft straight from the pen is a far cry from a final one. Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, then surfaced with four acts he had complied from bits and pieces he had collected, but scholarly acclaim never greeted him. It just wasn't a real Wilde masterwork.
Hailing Oscar Wilde as a subject for a doctoral dissertation, Ruth Berggren appeared and became the young woman who came closest to finding meaning in the line, "One must be serious about something, if one wants to have nay amusement in life" (to quote Wilde, of course). To trace her own textual transversing, Dr. Berggren set out with the idea of reconstructing the 1895 three-act Earnest with Dr. Joseph Donohue, since no prompt book remains of this version first done by the producer/actor Sir George Alexander. And she was well-armed, knowing the amazing facts for Wilde's life and many revealing bits of information.
Wilde wrote the Importance of Being Earnest over a summer's vacation in Worthing, a seaside resort, and indeed, the foundling Jack Worthing admits as much in the play: "My guardian gave me the name because he had a first-class ticket to Worthing in his pocket." And by using the name of a publisher he disliked, Wilde was able to christen the reserved, distant butler as "Lane," appellatively. "Bracknell" is the name of Lord Alfred Douglas' estate--"Lady Bracknell" being the famous character of social and moral upstanding in the play. Lord Alfred Douglas was Wilde's lover from whom, as letters point out, a retreat to Worthing became necessary in the summer of 1894.
With documented evidence and Dr. Berggren's accompanying literary detection abilities, we discover as the story unfolds that Wilde employs a typing service to type out the acts as he composes them adopting what was a revolutionary idea at the time, Wilde finds it much easier to write when he can have fresh copies on which to make changes and revisions. By October, he finished and asks the typist for two copies of all four acts. One is sent to a New York producer named Charles
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