PENGUIN CLASSICS : THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST PB B FORMAT

Lady Windermere s Fan/Salome/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 Salome 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