The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays Book

"Prism, where is that baby?" demands the damndest dowager in theatre history in OWs farcical masterpiece. Feeling blue ? Reread this comedic milestone for the most preposterous merriment outside of Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit," with a bow to WS Gilbert and Sheridan. Wilde found his playwrighting voice just before The Fall. He turned unreal drawing-room nonsense into Art. Muffins, cucumber sandwiches, a handbag left at Victoria Station and a grande dame who burbles about train schedules : "We have already missed five if not six trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform." Well--it's uproarious.

Basically, OW was a prude, hence he went to court to clear his name. "Earnest," w the central male using a double name (one for London society, another for private weekends), has even been called his true "De Profundis" -- without the sentiment. By contrast, his 3 earlier "comedies" with creaking plots involving blackmail, scandal and duplicity loom as shoddy Victorian mellerdramas redeemed by the brilliance of his epigrams. Wilde uses mellerdrama as an escape, to take him out of himself into a misplaced reality.

In "Lady Windermere's Fan," the cynical repartee covers the sticky sentimentalism in which the "bad" woman turns out to be the heroine's Mum. He capably linked his escritoire to the box office. In "An Ideal Husband," it's the hero who has a shady past. High-flying chatter relieves the moralizing. "A Woman of No Importance" shows off his worst writing and finest wit : "The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden; it ends with Revelations." His plot turns on smother love when the Mum who erred cries out to her son, "How could I repent of my sin when you, my love, were its fruit." O, Oscar.

All in all, OW was surely a good-natured gent without malice or spite. At the time of His Fall he was the reigning Playwright and Personality in London. A worldly superstar, he toyed with a deep fear of scandal in 3 plays while the characters seek to protect their social position and careers. After "Earnest," which tossed a concern for provincial virtue into the dustbin, we can only guess at the OW comedies that never got written.