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A review by mitchellhb
The Importance of Being Earnest: And Other Plays by Oscar Wilde
4.0
It breaks down like this:
Lady Windermere's Fan: 3 stars
An Ideal Husband: 4 stars
The Importance of Being Earnest: 5 stars
That's the chronological order in which Wilde wrote them and the order in which I recommend reading them. It actually made me kind of giddy to read all three in just over a week and see how Wilde's playwriting improved by an order of magnitude with each play. Lady Windermere is a rather silly melodrama with some of Wilde's funniest lines lightly sprinkled throughout; An Ideal Husband, a much sharper and funnier play, still has a tendency to spell out Wilde's themes through long, dramatic monologues. Wilde had a serious axe to grind against the perils of rigid Victorian morality, and his convictions get the best of him in these often heavy-handed plays.
But then, at last, we come to the funniest thing ever written for the stage. The Importance of Being Earnest is just pure, light, gleeful farce from start to finish. The plot is clever but completely inconsequential—something about marriage schemes, mistaken identities, and snooty relatives—which allows Wilde's characters to focus on the really important things in life, like eating cucumber sandwiches and saying witty lines like this:
"The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean laundry in public."
Or bizarre ones like this:
"One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."
This is one of the only great works of literature ever to be built entirely around good jokes and surface charm. I don't know of any other author, with the possible exception of P.G. Wodehouse, who can write so elegantly about nothing in particular.
Lady Windermere's Fan: 3 stars
An Ideal Husband: 4 stars
The Importance of Being Earnest: 5 stars
That's the chronological order in which Wilde wrote them and the order in which I recommend reading them. It actually made me kind of giddy to read all three in just over a week and see how Wilde's playwriting improved by an order of magnitude with each play. Lady Windermere is a rather silly melodrama with some of Wilde's funniest lines lightly sprinkled throughout; An Ideal Husband, a much sharper and funnier play, still has a tendency to spell out Wilde's themes through long, dramatic monologues. Wilde had a serious axe to grind against the perils of rigid Victorian morality, and his convictions get the best of him in these often heavy-handed plays.
But then, at last, we come to the funniest thing ever written for the stage. The Importance of Being Earnest is just pure, light, gleeful farce from start to finish. The plot is clever but completely inconsequential—something about marriage schemes, mistaken identities, and snooty relatives—which allows Wilde's characters to focus on the really important things in life, like eating cucumber sandwiches and saying witty lines like this:
"The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean laundry in public."
Or bizarre ones like this:
"One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."
This is one of the only great works of literature ever to be built entirely around good jokes and surface charm. I don't know of any other author, with the possible exception of P.G. Wodehouse, who can write so elegantly about nothing in particular.