The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

A little about the story

Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff have each discovered the convenience of an invented person. A fictional brother or an obligingly troublesome friend can make it easier to escape duties that would otherwise interfere with pleasure. The arrangement becomes much less convenient when romance depends on identities that neither man has been entirely honest about, and when the women involved possess definite ideas about the sort of husband they intend to accept.

Wilde turns these deceptions into a brisk contest of manners, appetite, and beautifully expressed nonsense. City and country provide different stages for the same effort to make a socially useful story look like a respectable truth. Lady Bracknell’s scrutiny raises family background to an almost administrative obsession, while apparently trivial objects acquire surprising importance. The comedy depends less on teaching its characters to behave sensibly than on exposing how absurd the rules of respectable behavior already are, especially when everyone can defend a contradiction with complete confidence and impeccable grammar.

Things You May Not Know About The Importance of Being Earnest

• A pointed subtitle. A Trivial Comedy for Serious People announces Wilde’s habit of treating social certainties lightly while giving supposed trivialities extraordinary attention.
• The published play has three acts. Its settings move from Algernon’s London flat to the garden and drawing room of Jack’s country house.
• A Valentine’s Day premiere. The original cast list in this edition records the opening at London’s St. James’s Theatre on 14 February 1895.
• The manager also played Jack. George Alexander, the theatre’s lessee and manager, is listed as the first performer of John Worthing in the original production.
• An invented activity gets a name. Algernon calls his escape from unwanted obligations Bunburying, turning a fabricated friend into the source of a memorable comic vocabulary.