The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

by Oscar Wilde

Richard Cave (Notes) and Richard Allen Cave (Notes)

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Book cover for The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

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Lady Windermere's Fan/Salomé/A Woman of No Importance/An Ideal Husband/A Florentine Tragedy/The Importance of Being Earnest

'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness'

The Importance of Being Earnest is a glorious comedy of mistaken identity, which ridicules codes of propriety and etiquette. Snobbery and hypocrisy are also laid bare in Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, while in Salomé and A Florentine Tragedy, Wilde uses historical settings to explore the complex relationship between sex and power. The range of these plays displays Wilde's delight in artifice, masks and disguises, and reveals the pretensions of the social world in which he himself played such a dazzling and precarious part.

Edited with Introduction, Commentaries and Notes by Richard Allen Cave

  • ISBN10 0140436065
  • ISBN13 9780140436068
  • Publish Date 25 May 2000 (first published December 1965)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Out of Print 10 March 2021
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
  • Imprint Penguin Classics