Jack Worthing and his friend Algernon Moncrieff are two young Victorian gentlemen with a shared talent for invention. Jack has fabricated a wicked younger brother named Ernest as an excuse to escape his country responsibilities and enjoy himself in town; Algernon has invented a permanently ailing friend named Bunbury for much the same purpose. Both deceptions collide when each man decides to court under the borrowed name "Ernest."
As Jack pursues the fashionable Gwendolen and Algernon sets his sights on Jack's young ward Cecily — both of whom are convinced they can only love a man named Ernest — the tangle of false identities spirals toward exposure, presided over by the magnificently formidable Lady Bracknell.
Oscar Wilde's most beloved play is a glittering farce and a razor-sharp satire of Victorian earnestness, marriage, and class. Fast, quotable, and endlessly witty, The Importance of Being Earnest skewers the hypocrisies of polite society while delivering some of the finest comic dialogue in the English language.