About this title: Oscar Wilde was already one of the best known literary figures in Britain when he was persuaded to turn his extraordinary talents to the theatre. Between 1891 and 1895 he produced a sequence of distinctive plays which spearheaded the dramatic renaissance of the 1890s and retain their power today. The social comedies, Lady Windermere's Fan, A ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1986
ISBN-13:9780140482096ISBN:0140482091
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Softcover, small, covers lightly 'rubbed', w/slight edge-wear, some creasing, pp lightly 'tanned'. NO stains, tears, writing, in tight book. Glued binding. 352 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics, E Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780451525055ISBN:0451525051
Description: Very Good. 0451525051 Mass market paperback, previously read used book in very good condition, may have slight worn corners and varying degre..._ read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
"Laughed my way through this wonderfully well-written play. Wilde wrote such fun characters and I loved the hidden meanings and play on words. I look forward to reading more of his works."
"I recently challenged myself to read some of the books and stories that I was supposed to read in high school. I think I read them in high school, but I don't remember anything about the stories. So, I started with this one (because it was fairly skinny). It was really good. Lots of sarcasm and irony. Cecily was an especially silly character. A young girl obsessed with writing in her journal and marrying a man named Ernest whom she has never met before. Two men who both pretended their names were Ernest to impress a girl. Two girls who thought they were engaged to the same man and go from best buddies to worst enemies and then back to best buddies again - all with the snap of a finger. A good read."
"When I was quite young - I guess, if you were of a mind to, you might say it was a generation ago - I was listening to a radio program and for some reason they decided to do the handbag scene from The Importance of Being Earnest. I'd heard of the play before, obviously, but only the name. I had thought it would be some terribly dreary thing, having no idea just how funny a man Wilde was. The guy on the radio gave it quite a build up - saying something to the effect that this scene is not just one of the funniest in what is a very funny play, but perhaps one of the funniest scenes in the whole of English drama. I waited fully expecting to be disappointed.
Naturally, I howled with laughter. It is very hard to explain just how funny it is hearing a woman (one of those English upper class aunts that Wodehouse also made a living out of depicting) can be saying the words, "A handbag?" Now, who would ever have thought that perhaps the funniest line in the whole of English drama could possibly be, "A handbag?" I say this without the least fear of spoiling the joke for you, by the way, if you've never read or seen the play. A mistake that must be remedied immediately if you never have seen it, by the way.
It would be all too easy to dismiss this play as a light romantic comedy. Although it is about a series of near thwarted romances - the stuff of a million 'chick-flicks' and romantic comedies going back as far as the eye can see in drama - this is also something much, much more. It is also a delightfully amusing commentary on human sexual relations, the English class system and (much more importantly) a perfect mirror on the amusing excesses of human selfishness. In fact, some of the best lines in the play, and the funniest lines in the play, highlight our near infinite capacity to love ourselves. To quote only a few and without hardly looking:
"If you are not too long, I will wait for you all my life."
"Oh! Not at all, Gwendolen. I am very fond of being looked at."
"If I am occasionally overdressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated."
"I don't play accurately - anyone can play accurately - but I play with wonderful expression."
"You see, it (her diary) is simply a very young girl's record of her thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication."
The other terribly interesting thing in this play is the role of family. Not only are the families quite dysfunctional, even when people know who their parents are, but the title character is about as confused about how he fits into the complex world of family relations as it is possible to make someone. The thing that makes the line about the handbag quite so funny is that this handbag is about the closest thing he has to family in the entire world. As Pascal once said, we laugh and cry about the same things.
I'm going to finish with my favourite exchange in the play, other than, obviously, the handbag scene which is incomparable:
"Lady Bracknell: Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education?
Chasuble: (Somewhat indignantly) She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability.
Lady Bracknell: It is obviously the same person."
Wilde is, it hardly needs to be said, the closest thing to a God we are likely to have visit us on this planet. There are, for example, even now, more than 100 years after his death, entire companies that produce desk calendars that would not be in business if not for the endless supply of quotes he provides for the foot of Monday the Ninth of February and so on.
If humour comes in a spectrum and slapstick is at one end of that spectrum, then this is the other end."
"When the frivolous Jack Worthing visits the country, he disguises himself as "Ernest" to escape from London Society. Unfortunately, he loves Gwendolyn, but she will never marry him if he is not truly Earnest. Her mother, Lady Bracknell, has parallel concerns. She wants her daughter to marry a man of good family. Unfortunately, not only is Jack not "Earnest", it also turns out that he is a foundling. He was found in a handbag in the left luggage department at Victoria Station, on the Worthing line.
Lady Bracknell is the main obstacle to Jack's plan. Her husband's title and lands, we assume, date back to the Conquest or Flood. She, however, had had no fortune of her own. Like other aristocratic wives, her position in Society is fragile, because second-hand. She must bolster her place in Society and choose rescue her daughter from a frivolous bachelor who was born into a lowly station.
Oscar Wilde resolves the play's dilemmas with an outsider's waspishness. Snobbery and the marriage market were major concerns in upper class London, but Wilde dismisses them unlikely coincidences and an easy laugh. He was homosexual and (which was worse) he was Irish. Also, he was scarcely a gentleman. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a Dublin surgeon, not a landowner. This made him almost in "trade". A jester at court, Oscar was in Society but not of it, admired for his frivolity but not much else.
Famously, he once remarked to a customs official, "I have nothing to declare but my genius", and therein lay his difficulty. Genius was not much prized in upper class England where a title and a large estate counted for more.
His patrons, thus satirised, finally got their revenge, and the jester ended up in gaol. Wilde died a Catholic, this being a radical step for an Irish Protestant. Thrown out of English Society and also from the Anglo Irish establishment which was his more natural home, perhaps he felt he had nowhere else to go. It is to the credit of the Church that they took him in."
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