Frankel and Earnest

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The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest

Nicholas Frankel’s scholarly edition

Nicholas Frankel’s edition of The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest¹ contains many new and scholarly annotations in a running commentary usefully laid out side-by-side with the text of the play.

The publisher, Harvard University Press, says Frankel’s annotation “ties the play closely to Wilde’s personal life and sexual identity, illuminating literary, biographical, and historical allusions.”

These allusions include not only insight into Wilde’s meaning, but also information about the chronology of Wilde’s textual changes, some of which were made four years after the play was first staged.

From all of this stems something revelatory.

The intrigue starts with Frankel’s reminder of the probable source of the Earnest/Ernest wordplay: namely the gay writer John Gambril Nicholson’s 1892 collection Love in Earnest: Sonnets, Ballades, and Lyrics (Elliot Stock, 1892).

Nicholson’s Love in Earnest is a hyperbolic, and eventually interminable, series of  homoerotic lovelorn verse. 

One particular ballad is titled Of Boys’ Names and is dedicated to “W.E.M.”, who is the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed William Ernest Mather (1877–99). This poem contains the refrain:

“And Ernest sets my heart a-flame”.

The relevance of the Ernest allusion is not new: reference to Mather as a major dedicatee in Nicholson’s Love In Earnest can be traced back through Edmonds, McKenna, and The Daily Telegraph, at least to Timothy d’Arch Smith’s study of Uranian love in 1970.²

The Other Names

But what none of these sources, nor indeed Frankel himself, happen to mention are the other names in Nicholson’s poem that also have Wildean parallels:

Among the boys’ names in this poem are Bernard (Shaw), Leonard (Smithers), Lionel (Johnson), Stephan-e (Mallarme), Frank (Harris), and Herbert (Beerbohm Tree).

While those are all commonplace names whose occurrence might easily be coincidental, and, moreover, they are not all homosexual men. So let us not get carried away just yet.

Neither let conspiracists think that Nicholson’s allusion to deathless wreaths of asphodel echoes Dorian Gray (ch. VIII) where Lord Henry said he had buried his romance in a bed the same yellowy perennial. All of these allusions can be planted by the grassy knoll where, perhaps, they belong.

TWO FURTHER NAMES

But what is beyond coincidence are two further names in the poem.

Not only are these two names less common, they are the names of Oscar’s own sons: Cyril and Vivian (which Wilde’s spelled Vyvyan).

Surely, their inclusion should give us pause to wonder how this might have come about. Either Wilde was around Nicholson and suggested them, which seems unlikely; or, more probably, Nicholson is directly referencing Wilde’s duologue The Decay of Lying in which Wilde himself gives the interlocutors his sons’ names, with the amended spelling used by Nicholson.

One of the reasons why this little curiosity has rarely, if ever, been cited is that Nicholson’s poem is never given in full. So, it’s worth digging it out for a closer look.

© John Cooper, 2015.

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Related:
More On Boys’ Names

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Footnotes:

1. The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest, Edited by Nicholas Frankel.
   Publication: February 2015. Trade paperback. ISBN 9780674048980. ↩︎
2. Love in Earnest: some notes on the lives and writings of English ‘Uranian’ poets from 1889 to 1930. Timothy D’Arch Smith, Routledge & K. Paul, 1970. ↩︎

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