The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest is the final play of Oscar Wilde, and it is considered his masterpiece. The play is a farcical comedy with the theme of switched identities: the play's two protagonists engage in 'bunburying' (the maintenance of alternative personas in the town and country) which allows them to escape Victorian social mores. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major motives are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways.        

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish writer, poet and dramatist. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays and poetry, and the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death. Wilde is a central figure in aesthetic writing. His controversial, open lifestyle was the reason he was charged and eventually convicted for the crime of sodomy.