The Importance of Being Earnest

Play By: Oscar Wilde

“Earnest: resulting from or showing sincere and intense conviction;” This definition is what first popped into my head when I started reading one of Oscar Wilde’s famous plays. However, the further I got into the story, the more I realized that ‘Earnest’ holds the symbolism of a two-sided coin. In The Importance of Being Earnest, the main characters of Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing struggle with the broad themes honesty and focus, as they proudly state their devotions but never follow through on them. The story’s progression teaches a valuable lesson: if you want to lie successfully, it is crucial to tie up all loose ends. 

Apart from that, my surface level analysis of the play just highlights the extreme comedic wit Wilde repeatedly includes. There is no build up of setting or descriptions of characters because everything is expressed in the form of dialogue (something pretty customary to written plays). The plot grew increasingly outrageous with every turn of events, especially surrounding romance or Lady Bracknell (she was quite an enjoyable character). Cecily, Algernon, Miss Prism, Jack, and even Bunbury were such fascinating people to read about, and the time period the story was set in allowed me to understand how certain actions were related to historical societal norms. If you are interested in a short read with an odd storyline, I recommend just reading this play as written. Still, there is a ‘tails’ side of this book that requires a bit of a history lesson for better comprehension.

Oscar Wilde, the author of both The Importance and The Picture of Dorian Gray, was a gay man living in late nineteenth century England. At the time, he was famous for his genius plays and involvement in various social circles. He also had a lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, who was the son of the Marquess of Queensbury. At the time, homosexuality was very much illegal, so the release of Wilde’s personal business was put him in danger. Eventually, the Marquess found out about his son’s relationship with the playwright, and the latter showed up to the theater on the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde—being warned of this stunt quite a bit earlier—decided to make a scene by kicking the Marquess out of his full theater, gaining approval from the audience and simultaneously embarrassing the nobleman. To make a long story short, the Marquess spread rumors of Wilde being a sodomite, Wilde filed a libel suit, the case revealed some of Wilde’s past male lovers, and the Marquess upped the stakes by taking the writer to court for being gay; spoiler alert, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to prison and then exiled from London. This timeline was very sad, considering how Wilde was at the height of his career, and in a blink of an eye, he was impoverished on the streets of Paris. The Importance of Being Earnest lost all of its fame, but somehow, Wilde was able to adapt and revise it one last time before his death. I am very lucky to have picked up an annotated copy of this play, as it has revealed to me all the minute changes and additions made by Wilde in 1889, years after he was outed and living in France. Knowing what occurred in England was necessary background information to make the impact of the author’s words harder. Wilde’s remarks about the press and nobility practically come across as raised ink, with how obvious he wanted to display his feelings. This jigsaw piece broadens the reader’s view on the whole puzzle, as they realize that The Importance of Being Earnest is an amalgamation of personal truth and flamboyant exaggeration. 

To keep this as a review and not an essay, I want to stress the phrase “life imitates art,” and how it is something to keep in mind when reading this specific play; the characters are fictitious in print, yet they hold some pieces of their author’s personalities and relationships. Oscar Wilde’s dedication to creating such a cult-classic story reveals the real Earnest in more ways than one.