– 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 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 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. Structure and genre Ransome argues that Wilde freed himself by abandoning the melodrama, the basic structure which underlies his earlier social comedies and basing the story entirely on the Earnest/Ernest verbal conceit. Freed from "living up to any drama more serious than conversation, " Wilde could now amuse himself to a fuller extent with quips, , epigrams, and repartee that really had little to do with the business at hand. The genre of the Importance of Being Earnest has been intensely debated by scholars and critics alike, who have placed the play within a wide variety of genres ranging from parody to satire. In his critique of Wilde, Foster argues that the play creates a world where "real values are inverted [and], reason and unreason are interchanged". Similarly, Wilde's use of dialogue mocks the upper classes of Victorian England lending the play a satirical tone. Reinhart further stipulates that the use of farcical humour to mock the upper classes "merits the play both as satire and as drama". Publication First edition Wilde's two final comedies, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were still on stage in London at the time of his prosecution, and they were soon closed as the details of his case became public. After two years in prison with hard labour, Wilde went into exile in Paris, sick and depressed, his reputation destroyed in England. In 1898, when no one else would, Leonard Smithers agreed with Wilde to publish the two final plays. Wilde proved to be a diligent reviser, sending detailed instructions on stage directions, character listings, and the book's presentation and insisting that a playbill from the first performance be reproduced inside. Ellmann argues that the proofs show a man "very