The Importance of Being Earnest

Two young men about town have each invented a fictional friend named Ernest, a convenient second self to be summoned or buried whenever pleasure requires an alibi. Both fall in love; both women, by glorious coincidence, have resolved to marry only a man called Ernest; and the lie sets about correcting itself with the serene logic of farce. But nobody reads this play for its plot. You read it to hear the talk, where every line has been polished until it gleams like a verdict, where a baby is mislaid in a handbag at Victoria Station and a horrified woman demands to know which railway line. Wilde does not satirise Victorian seriousness from the outside; he climbs inside it and lets it convict itself, sentence by perfect sentence, so the sharpest indictment of an age arrives disguised as the funniest thing ever said over a plate of cucumber sandwiches. By the end you have understood the secret it tells with a straight face: earnestness was never a virtue, only a style, and Wilde simply wrote the better one.