The Importance of Being Earnest (Great Classics #18)

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The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious person to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways.

The story is about Ernest. Ernest is a number of people: John Worthing, John Worthing's imaginary brother, and Algernon Montcrieff... in short, Ernest does not exist but is rather the creation of John's and Algernon's overactive and untruthful minds. As the pair create a web of lies in order to impress the women in their lives who absolutely adore the name Ernest, they become more and more tangled in their mess. When the two meet whilst playing their imaginary characters to different people, their lies start to unravel.

After the success of Wilde's plays Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance, Wilde's producers urged him to write further plays. In July 1894 he mooted his idea for The Importance of Being Earnest to George Alexander, the actor-manager of the St James's Theatre. Wilde spent the summer with his family at Worthing, where he wrote the play quickly in August.

Wilde continually revised the text over the next months: no line was left untouched, and "in a play so economical with its language and effects, the revisions] had serious consequences".Sos Eltis 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 illogicality which characterises Earnest's dialogue".

The play was first produced at the St James's Theatre on Valentine's Day 1895.It was freezing cold but Wilde arrived dressed in "florid sobriety", wearing a green carnation.The audience, according to one report, "included many members of the great and good, former cabinet ministers and privy councillors, as well as actors, writers, academics, and enthusiasts". 15] Allan Aynesworth, who played Algernon Moncrieff, recalled to Hesketh Pearson that "In my fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than that] first night".

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