#OSCAR WILDE PLAYS MEANT TO BE READ FULL#

It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn’t Ernest.” The fact that Jack eventually discovers that his birth name is Ernest is hardly the point: after all, when he finds out, he exclaims, “it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.” The important thing-the thing that brings him together with Gwendolen-is the fact that he is performing the fact that he is Ernest that he looks like Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. Or, in Algernon’s words: “You look as if your name was Ernest. What is crucial is that he has been keeping up appearances, as an Ernest. This is why, even though Gwendolen only wants to marry an Ernest, she does not discount Jack even when she discovers that he had hitherto been lying about his name.

#OSCAR WILDE PLAYS MEANT TO BE READ FULL#

Which is why “the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined, girl.” Whether one believes what one is told is also beside the point: it “does not affect the wonderful beauty of his answer.” After all, there is nothing more beautiful than a ritual in which the parties involved are insincere-even more so when they partake of it in full knowledge of its artifice. In breaking the appearance that we care for our fellow man we potentially rupture the entire relationship. For, it is not the content of the response that matters (one can reply to how’s it going? with the exact same question and all would be fine), it is the fact that there is a response at all. What is even worse is if the one receiving the greeting does not respond. We see this in our daily rituals: it is irrelevant whether we mean a good morning to another failure to proclaim it would cause an actual rift in the relationship. It is not that peeling back the layers of illusion reveals a reality it is that illusions are crucial to reality.

One could read this as a warning about the superficiality of humankind-that one cannot see beyond surfaces, names, brands-but that would be missing the point. For, even as both Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing are perfectly fine men (or good rascals, depending on your leanings), Cecily Cardew and Gwendolen Fairfax will have nothing to do with them unless they were appropriately named. Regardless of your characteristics, what you can do, etc., your name supersedes everything.

What annoys us is when a colleague gets ahead not due to the fact that (s)he is better, nor even if (s)he has simulated doing more, but when she actually does more.Īnd this is precisely the lesson of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: it is all in a name, and nothing more. Except perhaps the colleague who is actually doing so.įor, unless we are completely self-absorbed, we accept that there will always be someone else better than us at whatever it is we do. There is nothing more annoying than a colleague demonstrating that (s)he is trying hard. W!ld Rice Singapore’s 2013 staging of Oscar Wilde’s classic play got the Singapore Review of Book ‘s Jeremy Fernando thinking about being nice to colleagues.

Oscar wilde plays meant to be read