The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
ISBN: 9780140436068
Publication Date: 1 July 2000

Oscar Wilde's complex identity, as family man and homosexual outsider, socialite, socialist and Irish nationalist, underpins his unique insight into role-playing and the masks we all wear. A Woman of No Importance, for all its charm and wit, exposes an aristocratic world as smug, snobbish and morally bankrupt. An Ideal Husband portrays a glittering diplomatic gathering which is revealed as a masquerade to cover up the shady past of a prominent establishment figure. Lady Windermere's Fan is a brilliant critique of conventional morality. In The Importance of Being Earnest every character is revealed as leading a hypocritical double life, while Salome and A Florentine Tragedy deploy historical settings to explore the politics of sex and gender in contemporary society. Wilde was undoubtedly a brilliant and witty wordsmith. Yet, as Richard Cave shows in his Introduction, Wilde's innovative use of colour and design and spatial relationships on stage also made his plays 'revolutionary in the theatre of their time'.

About The Author Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of an eminent eye-surgeon and a nationalist poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Speranza'. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or 'Art for Art's Sake') Movement.

Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. He published a largely unsuccessful volume of poems in 1881 and in the next year undertook a lecture-tour of the United States in order to promote the D'Oyle Carte production of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera, Patience.

After h...