欧美文学影视类小论文：The Importance of Being Earnest' Review

'The Importance of Being Earnest' Review重要的是认真的审查

The Importance of Being Earnestis Oscar Wilde's most well-known and best loved play, as well as being an enormous success in his lifetime. For many people it is the apogee of the playwright's work. Like Wilde, the play is the very embodiment of fin de sieclé British dandyism.
However, this seemingly frivolous play has a much darker side. Its critique of Victorian society--though delivered in a velvet glove--is every inch a clunking-iron fist. The play is a satire both of the hypocrisies of the society in which Wilde lived, and the damaging effect that these hypocrisies can have on the souls of those live under their rule. Wilde was to become one of those souls shortly after the first performance of the play when he initiated a libel trial that was to lead to his imprisonment for being a homosexual.
Earnestis奥斯卡·王尔德的最知名和最喜爱的艺术家，本文介绍了在他的一生中一个巨大的成功的重要性。对于许多人来说是剧作家的工作的最高点。像王尔德一样，玩的就是非常的实施例世纪末英国的纨绔。然而，这个看似轻浮的发挥有一个更黑暗的一面。英国文学影视小论文维多利亚时代的社会批判 - 尽管交付在一个丝绒手套 - 是一个地地道道的clunking铁拳。该剧本是一部讽刺王尔德生活于其中的社会的伪善，两者的破坏性影响，这些虚伪的活的灵魂，在他们的统治下。王尔德是成为那些灵魂不久后的第一个性能的发挥时，他发起了诽谤罪的审判是一个同性恋，导致他的监禁。
 

Overview: The Importance of Being Earnest概述：认真的重要性
 

The play is based around two young men, one is an upright young man called Jack who lives in the country. However, in order to escape the drudgery of his highly conservative lifestyle he has created an alter-ego, Ernest, who has all kinds of reprobate fun in London. Jack says he often has to visit his poor brother Ernest, which gives him his opportunity to escape his boring life and have fun with his good friend, Algernon.该剧围绕两个年轻人，一个是正直的年轻人叫杰克住在国。然而，为了逃避他的高度保守的生活方式的苦差事，他创造了一个改变自我，欧内斯特，谁拥有各种堕落的乐趣在伦敦。杰克说，他经常去看望他的可怜的兄弟欧内斯特，这给他机会逃脱他的枯燥的生活带来的无限乐趣与他的好朋友，阿尔杰农。

However, Algernon comes to suspect that Jack is leading a double life when he finds a personal message in one of Jack’s cigarette cases. Jack makes a clean breast of his life, including the fact that he has a young and attractive guardian by the name of Cecily Cardew back on his estate in Gloucestershire. This peeks Algenon's interest and, uninvited, he turns up on the estate pretending to be Jack’s brother--the reprobate Ernest--in order to woo Cecily.
In the meantime, Jack's fiancée, (and Algernon's cousin) Gwendolen has also arrived, and Jack admits to her that he is, in fact, not called Ernest, but is called Jack. Algernon, despite his better judgment, also confesses to Cecily that his name is not Ernest either. This causes a good deal of trouble in our heroes' love lives, as both women have a rather strange attachment to the name Ernest, and cannot consider marrying anyone who does not go by that name. There is another impediment to the marriages. Gwendolen's mother, Lady Bracknell, will not countenance her daughter marrying someone of Jack's social status (he was an orphan who was found by his adoptive parents in a handbag at King's Cross Station).

As Jack is Cecily's guardian, he will not allow her to marry Algernon unless his aunt, Lady Bracknell changes her mind. This seemingly irresolvable conundrum becomes brilliantly solved when, on inspection of the handbag, Lady Bracknell reveals that Algernon's brother had become lost in just such a handbag, and that Jack must, in actuality, be that lost child. What’s more the child had been christened Ernest. The play ends with a prospect of two very happy marriages.
The Importance of Being Earnestcombines a labyrinthine plot, the seemingly irresolvable narrative of a farce, and some of the most comic and wittiest lines ever written. It is, as can probably be surmised from its extraordinary to-ings and fro-ings and its incredibly unlikely resolution, is not to be taken as a serious drama. Indeed, the characters and the setting lack any real depth; they are, first and foremost, vessels for Wilde’s witticisms lampooning the shallow and roots obsessed society of which he had become a part.

However, this is not to the play's detriment – the audience are treated to some of the most sparkling verbal wit ever seen. Whether luxuriating in paradox or simply in the ridiculousness created by the plot that Wilde has set in motion, the play is at its best when it is portraying supposedly serious things in an extremely trivial matter.

However, this seeming piece of fluff is enormously influential, and is actually a destructive critique of the social mores of the times. The emphasis that is put on the play on surfaces--names, where and how people were brought up, the way that they dress--belies a yearning for something which is more substantial. Wilde can be credited, by producing a piece of polished decadence, with contributing to the destruction of a class-based, surface-obsessed society. Wilde's play seems to say, look beneath the surface, try and find the real people stifled beneath social norms.
Brilliant, inventive, witty and--when performed--absolutely hilarious, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, is a landmark in the history of Western theatre, and probably that writer’s greatest achievement.