About this title: 'A Trivial Comedy for Serious People': its subtitle is the best summary of a play that is the theatrical equivalent of a butterfly. The verbal brilliance of its highly self-conscious characters hides deep anxieties about social and personal identity: Jack Worthing, found as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station and named after a railway ticket, ...
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Longman
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780582077843ISBN:0582077842
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Dover Publications Inc
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780486264783ISBN:0486264785
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780140621723ISBN:0140621725
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780713630404ISBN:071363040X
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Heinemann
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780435233037ISBN:0435233033
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Heinemann
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780435233037ISBN:0435233033
Description: Good. Ex-library. Usual library markings inside cover. Paperback edition. All orders are dispatched from our UK warehouse within one working day. Established in 2004. No quibble refund if not completely satisfied. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Date Published: 1975
ISBN-13:9780413310002ISBN:0413310000
Description: Paperback, ex-library, with usual stamps and markings, in fair all round condition, suitable as a reading copy. Ships within 24 hours. pp., 150grams, ISBN: 0413310000. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780713630404ISBN:071363040X
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Avon Books
Date Published: 1973
ISBN-13:9780380012770ISBN:0380012774
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"I recently challenged myself to read some of the books and stories that I was supposed to read in high school. I think I read them in high school, but I don't remember anything about the stories. So, I started with this one (because it was fairly skinny). It was really good. Lots of sarcasm and irony. Cecily was an especially silly character. A young girl obsessed with writing in her journal and marrying a man named Ernest whom she has never met before. Two men who both pretended their names were Ernest to impress a girl. Two girls who thought they were engaged to the same man and go from best buddies to worst enemies and then back to best buddies again - all with the snap of a finger. A good read."
"When I was quite young - I guess, if you were of a mind to, you might say it was a generation ago - I was listening to a radio program and for some reason they decided to do the handbag scene from The Importance of Being Earnest. I'd heard of the play before, obviously, but only the name. I had thought it would be some terribly dreary thing, having no idea just how funny a man Wilde was. The guy on the radio gave it quite a build up - saying something to the effect that this scene is not just one of the funniest in what is a very funny play, but perhaps one of the funniest scenes in the whole of English drama. I waited fully expecting to be disappointed.
Naturally, I howled with laughter. It is very hard to explain just how funny it is hearing a woman (one of those English upper class aunts that Wodehouse also made a living out of depicting) can be saying the words, "A handbag?" Now, who would ever have thought that perhaps the funniest line in the whole of English drama could possibly be, "A handbag?" I say this without the least fear of spoiling the joke for you, by the way, if you've never read or seen the play. A mistake that must be remedied immediately if you never have seen it, by the way.
It would be all too easy to dismiss this play as a light romantic comedy. Although it is about a series of near thwarted romances - the stuff of a million 'chick-flicks' and romantic comedies going back as far as the eye can see in drama - this is also something much, much more. It is also a delightfully amusing commentary on human sexual relations, the English class system and (much more importantly) a perfect mirror on the amusing excesses of human selfishness. In fact, some of the best lines in the play, and the funniest lines in the play, highlight our near infinite capacity to love ourselves. To quote only a few and without hardly looking:
"If you are not too long, I will wait for you all my life."
"Oh! Not at all, Gwendolen. I am very fond of being looked at."
"If I am occasionally overdressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated."
"I don't play accurately - anyone can play accurately - but I play with wonderful expression."
"You see, it (her diary) is simply a very young girl's record of her thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication."
The other terribly interesting thing in this play is the role of family. Not only are the families quite dysfunctional, even when people know who their parents are, but the title character is about as confused about how he fits into the complex world of family relations as it is possible to make someone. The thing that makes the line about the handbag quite so funny is that this handbag is about the closest thing he has to family in the entire world. As Pascal once said, we laugh and cry about the same things.
I'm going to finish with my favourite exchange in the play, other than, obviously, the handbag scene which is incomparable:
"Lady Bracknell: Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education?
Chasuble: (Somewhat indignantly) She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability.
Lady Bracknell: It is obviously the same person."
Wilde is, it hardly needs to be said, the closest thing to a God we are likely to have visit us on this planet. There are, for example, even now, more than 100 years after his death, entire companies that produce desk calendars that would not be in business if not for the endless supply of quotes he provides for the foot of Monday the Ninth of February and so on.
If humour comes in a spectrum and slapstick is at one end of that spectrum, then this is the other end."
"When the frivolous Jack Worthing visits the country, he disguises himself as "Ernest" to escape from London Society. Unfortunately, he loves Gwendolyn, but she will never marry him if he is not truly Earnest. Her mother, Lady Bracknell, has parallel concerns. She wants her daughter to marry a man of good family. Unfortunately, not only is Jack not "Earnest", it also turns out that he is a foundling. He was found in a handbag in the left luggage department at Victoria Station, on the Worthing line.
Lady Bracknell is the main obstacle to Jack's plan. Her husband's title and lands, we assume, date back to the Conquest or Flood. She, however, had had no fortune of her own. Like other aristocratic wives, her position in Society is fragile, because second-hand. She must bolster her place in Society and choose rescue her daughter from a frivolous bachelor who was born into a lowly station.
Oscar Wilde resolves the play's dilemmas with an outsider's waspishness. Snobbery and the marriage market were major concerns in upper class London, but Wilde dismisses them unlikely coincidences and an easy laugh. He was homosexual and (which was worse) he was Irish. Also, he was scarcely a gentleman. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a Dublin surgeon, not a landowner. This made him almost in "trade". A jester at court, Oscar was in Society but not of it, admired for his frivolity but not much else.
Famously, he once remarked to a customs official, "I have nothing to declare but my genius", and therein lay his difficulty. Genius was not much prized in upper class England where a title and a large estate counted for more.
His patrons, thus satirised, finally got their revenge, and the jester ended up in gaol. Wilde died a Catholic, this being a radical step for an Irish Protestant. Thrown out of English Society and also from the Anglo Irish establishment which was his more natural home, perhaps he felt he had nowhere else to go. It is to the credit of the Church that they took him in."
""Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I didn't know anything about this play going in to it. After reading the first few pages it became evident pretty quickly that this was a comedy, and a pretty good one at that. There is a lot of witty banter and snide remarks throughout that make you laugh out loud. I imagine this is even funnier on the stage with the actors' body language, etc.
The play demonstrates how a couple of lies can culminate into a huge quandary. You can see the train wreck coming and the anticipation builds until the train finally comes off it's tracks at the satisfying collision ... I mean culmination.
The version of the book I read is full of footnotes that includes changes that have occured in the play over the years and other pertinent information to the play. There is one footnote that I found particularly interesting; it says, Franklin Dyall, who played Merriman (in the play) recalled the effect of one of his lines on the first night, "This (announcement) was received with the loudest and most sustained laugh that I have ever experienced, culminating in a round of applause; and as I came off Wilde said to me: 'I'm so glad you got that laugh. It shows they have followed the plot.'" Imagine watching your play being acted out for the first time. It must be nerve-wracking to sit there hoping that people will like it and appreciate it. It must also be extremely satisfying to see and hear the positive reactions.
My wife noticed what I was reading and told me she had seen the movie and that it starred Rupert Everett as Algernon. I can't think of a more apt actor for that role. I will have to check it out."
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