The Importance of Being Earnest Summary: Wilde's Comedy of Double Lives
What it is about
The Importance of Being Earnest, subtitled A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, is a farce in three acts by Oscar Wilde. It was first performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, and it was the last of his four drawing-room plays, following Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband. The setting is simply "the present", which at the premiere meant 1895: a bachelor flat in Half Moon Street, London, and a country manor house in the fictional Hertfordshire village of Woolton.
The engine of the plot is deception, practised by two young men who find Victorian social obligation tiresome. Jack Worthing lives in the country as a respectable guardian to his young ward, Cecily Cardew. To excuse his trips to town he has invented a disreputable younger brother called Ernest, whose identity he adopts the moment he reaches London. His friend Algernon Moncrieff runs a similar scheme in reverse. Algernon has invented a permanently ailing friend named Bunbury in the country, who can be visited whenever a dull dinner engagement needs dodging.
The trouble starts when Algernon notices an inscription in Jack's cigarette case: "From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack". Jack confesses the whole arrangement. He has come to London to propose to Algernon's cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax, who accepts him but declares she could never love a man not named Ernest. Her mother, Lady Bracknell, interviews Jack as a suitor and is appalled to learn he was found as a baby in a handbag left at Victoria Station. She refuses her consent. Algernon, meanwhile, has quietly copied down Jack's country address, because the mention of a pretty young ward has given him an idea.
In Act II, Algernon turns up at Woolton posing as the wicked brother Ernest and charms Cecily, who has been romantically fascinated by this absent black sheep for some time. Jack arrives in full mourning dress to announce that Ernest has died in Paris of a severe chill, only to be told that Ernest is in the garden. Both men separately arrange with the local rector, Dr Chasuble, to be rechristened Ernest. Gwendolen then arrives from London without her mother's knowledge, meets Cecily, and the two women discover they are apparently engaged to the same man.
The main characters
Jack Worthing is the more earnest of the two frauds, a guardian who takes his duties seriously in the country and abandons them in town. Algernon Moncrieff is the unrepentant one, a young man about town who treats appetite and epigram as a way of life. Gwendolen Fairfax is confident and metropolitan; Cecily Cardew, an heiress, is younger but every bit as decided about what she wants.
Above them all is Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen's mother and Algernon's aunt, one of the great comic roles in English theatre. She judges marriages as property transactions and has no patience with parentage that cannot be traced. Her disapproval melts quickly once Cecily's fortune is mentioned. Supporting them are Miss Prism, Cecily's fussy governess, and Dr Chasuble, the benign and scholarly rector.
The themes
Identity is the central joke and the central subject. Both men invent selves to suit the setting, and both women fall in love with a name rather than a man. Wilde makes the respectable self and the invented self equally artificial, which is a sharper point than it first appears.
Class and money run underneath. Lady Bracknell's interrogation of Jack is a satire on how Victorian society priced a person: income, address, politics, and above all family. Love in the play is sincere and absurd at once, obstructed less by feeling than by social machinery.
How it ends
Lady Bracknell recognises Miss Prism as the nursemaid who, 28 years earlier, wheeled a baby out of Lord Bracknell's house and never returned. Miss Prism admits she absent-mindedly placed her novel manuscript in the perambulator and the baby in a handbag, which she left at Victoria Station. Jack produces the handbag. He is the lost child, son of Lady Bracknell's late sister Mrs Moncrieff, and therefore Algernon's elder brother. Since firstborn sons took their father's name, Jack consults the Army Lists and finds that General Moncrieff was christened Ernest. He has been Ernest all along. Three couples pair off, including Chasuble and Miss Prism.
Why it still matters
The opening night was the high point of Wilde's career. Within weeks the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas, began the feud that led to the trials of March to May 1895 and Wilde's conviction and imprisonment. The play closed in May after 86 performances. Wilde published it from exile in Paris after his release in 1897 and wrote no further comic or dramatic work.
It has been revived constantly since the early twentieth century. John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Margaret Rutherford, Judi Dench and many others have been associated with it, and Lady Bracknell has sometimes been played by men. There have been radio versions from the 1920s, television versions from the 1930s, three cinema films (Anthony Asquith in 1952, Kurt Baker in 1992, Oliver Parker in 2002), plus operas and musicals. Some contemporary critics complained that the play carried no social message. Audiences have disagreed ever since.
