The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest: Review of The Importance of Being Earnest


Of a play representing actual life there can be, I think, no test more severe than its revival after seven or eight years of abeyance. For that period is enough to make it untrue to the surface of the present, yet not enough to enable us to unswitch it from the present. How seldom is the test passed! There is a better chance, naturally, for plays that weave life into fantastic forms; but even for them not a very good chance; for the fashion in fantasy itself changes. Fashions form a cycle, and we, steadily moving in that cycle, are farther from whatever fashion we have just passed than...

(The entire page is 1364 words.)

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