The Importance of Being Earnest

Wilde’s last and most polished comedy sends two idle gentlemen chasing love under false names. Jack Worthing keeps a fictitious brother called Ernest so he can slip away to town, while his friend Algernon invents an invalid friend for much the same purpose. Both discover that the women they adore are set on marrying a man named Ernest, and the deceptions collapse into a tangle of mistaken identity, a lost handbag, and the formidable Lady Bracknell. Underneath the farce sits a glittering satire of Victorian respectability, in which every character says something clever and means something sharper. The dialogue still sparkles more than a century on. This free PDF and EPUB edition includes the full play.