(1985)* Questions for Close ReadingĪfter completing the entire reading of The Importance of Being Earnest, observe your teacher’s directions for answering the following questions. The print version used is The Importance of Being Earnest.

edition eBook version of the entire play online at Project Gutenberg. Students may access the David Price, 1915 Methuen and Co. Links are given to a few additional resources that offer the option to extend your study of Wilde, uncovering more about the play’s themes, as well as relevant aspects of Victorian society. In this Launchpad, you will have the opportunity to analyze the language, characters, and structure of The Importance of Being Earnest. This irreverence takes its most perfect form in the dozens of epigrams and witticisms that make up so much of the play’s dialogue. The play constantly pokes fun at conventionally serious topics like love, death, and religion, while simultaneously handling trivialities (e.g., which teatime snacks are trendy this season) with the utmost seriousness. Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest derives much of its comedic and thematic heft from the way in which it inverts the values of everyday life. Oscar Wilde, from a January 1895 interview with Robbie Ross, published in the St. “ is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy…That we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”

The importance of being earnest