 Wilde continually revised the text over the next months : no line was left <unk> , and " in a play so economical with its language and effects , [ the revisions ] had serious consequences " . <unk> <unk> describes Wilde 's revisions as a refined art at work : the earliest , longest handwritten drafts of the play labour over farcical incidents , broad puns , nonsense dialogue and conventional comic turns . In revising as he did , " Wilde transformed standard nonsense into the more systemic and disconcerting <unk> which <unk> Earnest 's dialogue " . Richard Ellmann argues that Wilde had reached his artistic maturity and wrote this work more surely and rapidly than before . 
