Oscar Wilde’s unparalleled wit outweighs the stature of any of his individual works. His entirely deserved reputation for perfectly pitched comic utterance precedes him, and can, paradoxically, cast a shadow on a reader’s pleasure. Not so with The Importance of Being Earnest, the sparkling play that asks for nothing but a willing suspension of disbelief—the plot piles absurdity upon absurdity as the characters trade names and identities with imaginary offstage figures—and greets it with a fusillade of epigrammatic humor that blends farce, parody, and comedy of manners into a sprightly attack on the poses that prop up social conventions. The plot careens through its perplexities toward a happy resolution, but not before Wilde has, with almost geometrical clarity, plotted an uproariously accurate graph of the lies of convenience and connivance that describe Victorian ideas of propriety, romance, gender, identity, and—not least—earnestness.
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