The Importance of Being Earnest
Extras
The author - about Wilde
Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Will Wilde was born in 1856 in Dublin, the son of a surgeon. He went to Trinity College, Dublin, to Magdalen College, Oxford, where in the late 1870's he began the cult of 'Aestheticism' for which he became quickly famous on both sides of the Atlantic. The movement was to make an 'Art of Life', with an unflagging resolution. Unfortunately his ideals had grown wearisome to the public by the mid eighties, and Wilde, unsupported either financially or as a prophet by any considerable literary achievement, was reduced in 1887 to accepting the editorship of The Woman's World. At that time he was coming more and more under French influence and in the early nineties published arguably his best work. In 1891 Wilde revealed Intentions, A House of Pomegranetes and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The following year George Alexander produced Wilde's first stage success: Lady Windermere's Fan. In 1892 A Woman of No Importance was produced and in 1895 An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest were running at the same time in London.
Wilde became more interested in his material success; blatantly flouting conventional morality. He was arrested and imprisoned for two years after suing Lord Queensbury for criminal libel when he was unsuccessful in conducting his own defence. During his prison sentence he wrote his most famous poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He lived in Berneral, a small village near Dieppe for a while under the name of Sebastian Melmoth, travelled around Europe, and finally settled in Paris. His mother died in 1896, his wife in 1898 and though some friends remained loyal and visited him in France, he drank more and more heavily and was often unwell. In November 1900 he died in poverty, after being received in to the Church of Rome: in terrible pain, of cerebral meningitis.
Wilde was a man of many talents: a great writer in the medium of comedy and a near-great writer in others. He was a master; of the ironic comic story; the fairytale and was an outstanding critic.
'The Importance of Being Earnest' - Background
The major influence on Wilde and his writing style was not that of his contemporaries, George Bernard Shaw being one, but rather the inheritance of Restoration comedy. Wycherley and Congreve were masters in the use of word-play, puns and affectations, the epigram, innuendos and the whole farce situation: all styles that can be traced through the work of Wilde. The late Victorian period is hardly comparable with the Restoration period, and changes in dramatic and literary taste inevitably reflect the changes in morality. Wilde's work may be both 'Aesthetic' & 'Decadent', but half a century of repression had resulted in the society he pictured having its own areas of corruption. The nature of his comedy involves verbal wit, deception and the image of a society watching itself being recreated on stage. Wilde took pleasure in ridiculing both himself and his contemporaries: confronting an essentially civilised and superficial society with its own attitudes, false values and corruptions.
It has been argued that Wilde's plays are not so much about people as about words. The characters live through their speech, merely conveying the role they are playing, rather than their psychology. They reflect the superficial responses of a society which, considering itself by birth and inheritance superior, imagines itself to be 'on show' always conscious of status and what is expected of the social elite with no hint of political unrest in their idyllic world. Wilde is rarely concerned with realism or with reality; nothing crude or coarse enters in to The Importance of Being Earnest. He enjoyed reversing the real with the imaginary; the expected and the unconventional. The escapist idea behind the play relies on human nature; the part that seeks to make the dull present liveable by indulging in an imaginary, more attractive life. Wilde balances this idea with a parody of himself and of others: Realism against the imagination.
