Editing The Importance of Being Earnest (section)

===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.<ref name=Eltis177/> 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".<ref name=jxxix>Jackson (1980), p. xxix</ref> 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.<ref name=jxxix/>