The Importance of Being Earnest

Jack Worthing is a respectable guardian in the country, but in London he calls himself Ernest and blames his escapades on an imaginary wicked brother of that name; his friend Algernon Moncrieff escapes boring duties by visiting an imaginary invalid friend called Bunbury. Jack wants to marry Algernon's cousin Gwendolen, who loves him chiefly because his name is Ernest, but her formidable mother, Lady Bracknell, is horrified to learn that he was found as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station. When Algernon turns up in the country pretending to be Ernest, the lies begin to multiply.

Oscar Wilde subtitled the play 'A Trivial Comedy for Serious People', and it opened in London on Valentine's Day 1895, only weeks before his arrest and ruin. Its title is a pun on 'earnest' and 'Ernest', and lines such as 'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness' are quoted everywhere. His earlier comedy is Lady Windermere's Fan.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was born in Dublin, studied classics at Trinity College and Oxford, and became the most quotable man in London, the leading voice of the movement that preached art for art's sake. Between 1892 and 1895 his comedies filled the theatres, and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, caused a sensation.

At the height of his fame he was convicted for his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and sentenced to two years of hard labour, an experience he wrote about in De Profundis. He died in exile in Paris, poor and broken, at forty-six. The Importance of Being Earnest remains one of the funniest plays in English.