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Sir Robert Chiltern is a rising politician with a perfect reputation and a wife who adores him for it. Then the elegant Mrs Cheveley arrives with a letter…
Sir Robert Chiltern is a rising politician with a perfect reputation and a wife who adores him for it. Then the elegant Mrs Cheveley arrives with a letter proving that he made his fortune by selling a state secret as a young man, and she demands his help with a fraudulent canal scheme. The only person who can save him is his friend Lord Goring, an idle dandy who turns out to be the wisest man in the play.
Context and significance
First staged in January 1895, the play mixes Wilde's famous wit with a serious question: should we love people for being perfect, or forgive them for not being? It pairs naturally with The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened a few weeks later.
About the author
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.