Impact: The Importance of Being Earnest

The Man Who Invented Himself

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of a celebrated surgeon and a poet-nationalist mother who published under the name Speranza and held literary salons so grand she reportedly kept the curtains drawn in the afternoon to create a more dramatic atmosphere. He inherited her flair for performance. By the time he arrived at Oxford, he was already constructing the persona that would make him famous: the aesthete who found a room badly decorated a form of moral failure.

He moved to London, lectured across America on the principles of beauty, wrote a novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), several society comedies, and became the most quoted man in England — a celebrity in the modern sense, famous partly for being famous. He was also, carefully and necessarily secretly, gay in an era when homosexuality was a criminal offense. The double life Wilde led is not incidental to The Importance of Being Earnest. It is, in a very real sense, what the play is about.

A Triumphant Opening Night

The premiere was a genuine sensation. George Alexander, the actor-manager who produced it and played Jack Worthing, had originally asked Wilde for a four-act play and received one — Wilde trimmed it to three at Alexander's insistence, which turned out to be one of the better editorial decisions in theatrical history. The cuts tightened everything. The result was a play that moved like a watch: precise, elegant, and wound impossibly tight.

The reviews were enthusiastic, though a few critics found the whole thing too frivolous, too artificial, too in love with its own glittering surface. They were not entirely wrong about the surface. They were entirely wrong about what lay beneath it. The play sold out. Wilde was at the height of his fame. Then, on the night of the premiere, the Marquess of Queensberry — father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred Douglas — left a calling card at Wilde's club with a note accusing him of being a sodomite. Wilde sued for libel. He lost. He was arrested. And on May 25, 1895, he was convicted and sentenced. The play closed six days later.

What the Play Is Actually About

On the surface, The Importance of Being Earnest is a farcical comedy about two men — Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff — who have invented fictional alter egos to escape social obligations. Jack, a respectable guardian in the country, has invented a dissolute younger brother named Ernest who requires his urgent attention in London. Algernon has invented an invalid friend called Bunbury whose poor health demands visits whenever a dinner becomes inconvenient. Both men use their invented identities to live double lives. Both fall in love with women who are specifically, inexplicably attached to the name Ernest. Complications accumulate. A handbag is involved.

But look at the first scene in the play. Within sixty seconds of the curtain rising, a butler is deflecting questions about drinking champagne by suggesting that married households stock inferior wine. Algernon responds: 'Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?' This is not a throwaway joke. Wilde is doing what he always does — smuggling genuine social critique inside a line so perfectly delivered that the audience laughs before they can think. Every institution in the play — marriage, property, moral education, class, the Church — gets the same treatment: attacked obliquely, through laughter, so that the attack arrives before the audience has raised its defenses.

And underneath all of it is identity. Both heroes have literally invented themselves. Jack was found in a handbag at Victoria Station — he has no family, no lineage, no verifiable name. In Victorian England, where who you were was almost entirely a function of who your parents were, this is not a comic inconvenience. It is an existential condition. Wilde, who had built 'Oscar Wilde' as a performance from the ground up, understood this better than most.

The Language Machine

Whatever else you say about the play, the writing is extraordinary. Wilde constructs epigrams the way other writers construct arguments — with weight, balance, and a pivot at the center. 'The very essence of romance is uncertainty,' says Algernon, early in Act One. 'I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted.' The logic is impeccable. The conclusion is absurd. That's the trick.

What separates Wilde's wit from mere cleverness is that the jokes keep revealing something true the more you think about them. Lady Bracknell is the funniest character in the play and also its most precise satirical instrument — a woman so completely defined by social hierarchy that she evaluates a potential son-in-law the way a livestock judge evaluates a heifer, and finds him wanting primarily on the grounds of geography. ('The line is immaterial. Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life.') She is ridiculous. She is also absolutely real — a type who exists in every social world that has ever organized itself by birth.

After the Fall

Wilde was released from prison in 1897, broken in health and finances. He left England, never returned, and died in Paris in 1900 at the age of forty-six. His last years were spent in poverty, living under an assumed name — Sebastian Melmoth — with bitter irony, given what his plays had said about the performance of identity. He reportedly quipped on his deathbed, gesturing at the wallpaper: 'Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.' Whether or not he actually said it, it sounds exactly right.

Within a decade of his death, The Importance of Being Earnest was back on the London stage and recognized as a masterpiece. The play had survived everything — the scandal, the prison sentence, the pulled run, the dead author — because it was simply too good to stay buried. By the mid-twentieth century it had become a benchmark: the play against which all English comedies of manners were measured.

Cultural Footprint

The play has never really left the stage. It is one of the most frequently performed works in the English-speaking theatrical repertoire, revived so often in the West End and on Broadway that listing major productions would take a separate essay. The 2002 film adaptation starred Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Judi Dench, and Reese Witherspoon — a cast that tells you something about how seriously the play is still taken. Dame Judi Dench, playing Lady Bracknell, managed to be both funnier and more frightening than almost every previous interpretation of the role.

The play's influence on comedy is harder to measure because it is everywhere. The structure of characters maintaining elaborate fictions that collide catastrophically is the backbone of farce from Fawlty Towers to Arrested Development. The figure of the dandy wit who says outrageous things with perfect composure — that's Wilde's invention, and it runs through Noël Coward, through P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, through virtually every quick-talking antiestablishment comic protagonist of the twentieth century. Even the title has entered the language: 'the importance of being earnest' is used in headlines, essays, and speeches by people who may never have read the play but are borrowing its ironic structure.

Why It Still Matters

There is a version of this essay that argues The Importance of Being Earnest matters because it is a coded queer text, a document of survival and subversion by a man writing under impossible social constraints. That argument is real and worth taking seriously. Wilde was encoding something about doubled lives and performed identities that his audiences could not fully see and that he could not safely say directly.

But the play also just works as a play, which is rarer than it sounds. Most comedies from 1895 are unreadable. This one makes people laugh out loud in the twenty-first century, in productions staged everywhere from the National Theatre to university drama departments to high school auditoriums. The jokes land. The characters are alive. The structure is so clean it almost feels unfair.

Read it in an afternoon. It moves fast. And somewhere in the laughter — at the cucumber sandwiches, at Lady Bracknell's interrogations, at the magnificent absurdity of two men both claiming to be Ernest — you will find something genuinely strange and genuinely moving: a man who understood that identity is a performance, that society is a game with arbitrary rules, and that the only dignified response to an absurd world is to be as witty as possible for as long as you can.

Further Reading & Resources

Related Works in Our Library