BOOK’S REVIEW

“The importance of being earnest” is defined in the own book, I don’t know if by the own autor, Oscar Wilde, as a trivial comedy for serious people. Really, it is a funny play of theater that explains the story of two men that are fall in Love with two women and all the things and lies that they did and said to engage with them. The particularity of the story is that the two women want that their promises call Ernest and the autor plays with the sound of the name and the title of the book to do a critic of the importance of being earnest (sounds like “Ernest”) in the work of these men to get his goal to get married. On the other side, the play is also a critic to the wealthy social class and their habits in the final of nineteenth century in Britain.

The play is structured in three acts. The first one, locates the Reader in the situation of the two main characters, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrief and his suitors, Gwendolen Fairfax, the daughter of Algernon’s aunt, called Augusta or Lady Bracknell, and Cecily Cardew, the ward of Jack, who is intented by Algernon.

Moreover, there are some secundary characters who play diferents roles in the play: Miss Prism, the governess that tutores Cecily and a local vicar, Chausuble, who is fall in Love with her; Lane and Merriman, the servents of Algernon and Jack, respectively.

Basically, the first act runs in Algernon’s flat and prepares the Reader to know, in the second act at the Jack’s Manor House in the country, where lives Cecily, the development of the plans that both men had thought up to get married with the two women. In the third act, at the same place, the story ends well, getting engaged all the couples and discovering the truth name of Jack and which was his real family.

I have enjoyed a lot reading this book and I recommend it to everybody.

Jordi Pallàs Ariño