Some films:
The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)
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| Frame of The Importance of Being Earnest (2002) |
The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960)
Happy Prince, "La importancia de llamarse Oscar Wilde", (2018)
The importance... a radio play: BBC audio
The Importance of Being Earnest was a very successful play in London at the end of the 19th century, but
its performances stopped when Oscar Wilde became convicted for “gross indecency”
and sent to prison.
There are some versions of the same play. Ours has three acts.
In the first act, Algernon Moncrieff gets some
visitors at home. The first visitor is his friend Ernest Worthing; in his visit,
we discover that his real name isn’t Ernest, but Jack (a form of John). Algernon
also finds that Ernest is the tutor of a very beautiful young ward called
Cecily Cardew, and immediately he falls in love with her.
Next visitors are his aunt Augusta (Lady Bracknell)
and her daughter Gwendolen. While Aunt Augusta, with the help of Algernon, is
selecting some music for a party she’s going to have that evening, Ernest/Jack
proposes to Gwendolen, and she says yes. Aunt Augusta comes back suddenly, reproaches
the couple’s behaviour and attitude and, obviously, cancels the engagement. However,
she asks some questions to Ernest/Jack in order to discover if he is an
eligible man for her daughter; when she knows that he has no parents and has been
adopted, she discards him absolutely and forbids him to approach Gwendolen.
By chance (and listening attentively) Algernon gets to
know Cecily’s address in the country, and decides to visit her.
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and died in
Paris at the age of 46.
He was the son of an important poetess of the Irish Literary
Renaissance.
He went to Trinity College in Dublin and then to Oxford.
After that, he settled in London, where he got the reputation of a clever wit
for his writings and lectures. His epigrams and paradoxes are famous. He also
went to the USA to deliver lectures.
But he got his literary position thanks to his novel The
Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and to his play The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895). He also wrote some short stories, e.g. The Happy Prince,
and some poems, e.g. The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
At the age of 30, he got married and had two children.
Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry (Lord Alfred
Douglas’s father, his lover) for criminal libel and lost the trial. As a consequence
of the information appeared in the trial relative to his sexual behaviour (“the
love that dare not speak its name”), he was arrested and sentenced to two
years of hard labour. Once he got out of prison, he went to Paris, where he
spent his three last years of life, impoverished and abandoned from everybody.
His tomb is in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
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