Importance of Being Earnest (Norton Critical Edition) » (New Edition)

Michael Patrick Gillespie is Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University. He is the author of Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, The Aesthetics of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Inverted Volumes Improperly Arranged: James Joyce and His Trieste Library, among others. His edited works include the Norton Critical Edition of The Importance of Being Earnest and James Joyce and the Fabrication of an Irish Identity.

The text of this Norton Critical Edition of The Importance of Being Earnest is the established three-act version. Originally in four acts, Wilde shortened it to three at the urging of George Alexander, the owner of the St. James Theatre and first actor to play Jack Worthing. The play is accompanied by explanatory annotations and by an appendix of excised portions.