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Characterisation

Though Wilde deployed characters that were by now familiar – the upper-class dandy, the overbearing matriarch, the woman with a past, the puritanical young lady – his treatment is subtler than in his earlier comedies. Lady Bracknell, for instance, embodies respectable, upper-class society, but Eltis notes how her development "from the familiar overbearing duchess into a quirkier and more disturbing character" can be traced through Wilde's revisions of the play. For the two young men, Wilde presents not stereotypical stage "dudes" but intelligent beings who, as Russell Jackson puts it, "speak like their creator in well-formed complete sentences and rarely use slang or vogue-words". Dr Chasuble and Miss Prism are, in Jackson's view, characterised by "a few light touches of detail", their old-fashioned enthusiasms and the Canon's fastidious pedantry pared down by Wilde during his many redrafts of the text.