But no: the question is asking whether she is receiving visitors at this moment. And if you're seeing a play that was written in another time for a different culture, that might be too quick to catch.įor example, the first line of Lady Windermere's Fan is from a butler stepping up to the lady of the house and asking "Is your ladyship at home this afternoon?" Our modern minds would probably surmise from such a question that the butler is asking whether the lady was going out later. The action and dialog on stage can be pretty quick. I used to be an inveterate playgoer (one year, 1989 I think, I saw 52 plays). This edition includes the excised 'Gribsby' scene from The Importance of Being Earnest. Richard Allen Cave's introduction and notes discuss the themes of the plays and Wilde's innovative methods of staging. The range of these plays displays Wilde's delight in artifice, masks and disguises, and reveals the pretentions of the social world in which he himself played such a dazzling and precarious part. In Salomé and A Florentine Tragedy, Wilde makes powerful use of historical settings to explore the complex relationship between sex and power. Manners and morality are also victims of Wilde's sharp wit in Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, in which snobbery and hypocrisy are laid bare. The Importance of Being Earnest is a glorious comedy of mistaken identity, which ridicules codes of propriety and etiquette.
'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune to lose both looks like carelessness' Combining epigrammatic brilliance and shrewd social observation, the works collected in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays are edited with an introduction, commentaries and notes by Richard Allen Cave in Penguin Classics.
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