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Sent from Greece
Description
Specifications
“The Very Serious Mr. Ernest” is perhaps the most well-known, certainly the wittiest and definitely the last play by Wilde. Bernard Shaw remarked that this particular comedy amused him, but failed to move him, as it was “a work lacking in emotion.” Shaw was both right and wrong, as is often the case with accurate assessments.
Already with the opening of the curtain, when the unfazed servant Lane explains that he once performed a wedding, Algernon Moncrieff begins to ponder the “usefulness of the lower classes” and their role in the moral guidance of society! At the same time, the play begins to reveal its intentions. Yes, it is a work that, instead of emotional fluctuations, prefers intelligent irony; instead of passion (even though Gwendolyn claims she loves the hero “passionately”), it prefers arguments (which “always have something vulgar and very often persuasive,” according to Lady Bracknell); and instead of passionate loves, it prefers paradoxes.
But Wilde's representative paradoxes are not merely games of logical inconsistencies. The farcical episodes strip the characters of their social masks, elevate their eloquence as a means of covering a hidden life, and expose the codes of every phony aristocratic decorum. Even from that incorruptible judge and draconian guardian of unimpeachable morality, unshakeable order, and infallibly good taste - Lady Bracknell - it escapes, just before the end, that she is a newly rich person who did everything to marry the lord, while she had not a penny until then.
In other words, the play functions as a torrential collapse of pretexts, at the end of which all the characters prove to be ruthless hypocrites.
Manufacturer
- Author
- Oscar Wilde
- Publisher
- Ypsilon
- Language
- Greek
- Subtitle
- A trite comedy for serious people
- Cover
- Soft
- Number of Pages
- 103
- Release Date
- 2/2007
- Publication Date
- 2007
- Award
- -
- Dimensions
- 15x24 cm
- Art Movement
- Modernism
- Art Albums
- Yes
- Subjects
- Movie, theater
- ISBN-13
- 9789601702070
Important information
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