The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde(1895)
PlayEnglish
“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde(1895)
Two gentlemen invent fictional identities to escape their social obligations, and when those fictions collide in a country garden the result is the most perfect comedy in English. Oscar Wilde premiered this play in 1895, weeks before the trials that would destroy him, and its surface is so polished that every line reflects the absurdity of the society it adorns. Cucumber sandwiches vanish, handbags conceal foundlings, and the name Ernest proves both a lie and the truth. Wilde builds a world where sincerity is the only vice and style the only salvation. Beneath the laughter runs a serious proposition: that all identity is performance, all earnestness a mask. The play glitters because it knows how thin the ice is beneath its dancers' feet.
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Pride and PrejudiceJane Austen
Austen plays the same game of manners and masks, but beneath the wit there's a beating heart Wilde would never permit.
The MisanthropeMolière
Molière staged the same war between sincerity and society two centuries earlier, and Alceste is the anti-Algernon.
Tristram ShandyLaurence Sterne
Sterne matches Wilde's delight in language that exists for its own sake, and the digressions are the point.