THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST - (COMENTARIU)

"The Importance of Being Eernest" was an Oscar Wilde's early experiment in Victorian melodrama. Part satire, part comedy of manners and part intellectual force, this play seems to have nothing at stake because the world it represents is so blatantly and ostentatiously artificial. Below the surface of the light, brittle comedy, however, is a serious subtext that takes aim at self-righteous moralism and hypocrisy, the very aspect of Victorian society that would, in part, bring about Wilde's downfall.
John Worthing, known as Jack, the play's protagonist , is a pillar of the community, in Hertfordshire, where he is guardian to the pretty Cecily, the eighteen-year-old grandaughter of the late Thomas Cardew, who found and adopted him when he was a baby. In Hertfordshire, Jack has responsabilities: he is a major landowner, and justice of peace, with tendants, farmers, and a number of servants and other employees all dependent on him. For years he has also pretended to have an irresponsable black-sheep brother named Ernest who leads a scandalous life in pursuit of plasure and is allways getting into trouble of a sort , that requiers Jack to rush grimly off to his assistance. In fact, Ernest is merely Jack's aliby, a phantom that alows him to disappear for days at a time, and do as he likes. No one but Jack knows that he himself is Ernest. This is the name Jack goes by , to London, which is where he really goes on these occasions, probably to pursue the very sort of behavoir he pretends to disaprove of his brother.
The double life is the central methaphor in the play, epitomized in the notion of "Bunbury" . As defined by Algernon, Bunburying is a practice of creating an elaborate deception that alows jack to apear far more moral and responsable than he actually is. Similary, Algernon's imaginary inalid frien, Bunbury allows Algernon to escape to the country, where he presumably imposes