The play presents a world where even serious problems are dealt with with extreme lightness and no dramatic aspects whatsoever. In this play, we really have the image of the theatre as a convention, and an extremely pleasant convention at that.
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde is showing the comic and ridiculous side of the clichés he had made use of in his previous plays, with pretended seriousness. His tendency to create types becomes even more evident here. The main characters are more numerous than in the other plays, and the author uses the game of counterpoint, above all with the two young couples. It is this game that guarantees one of the comic effects of the play.

PLOT

The plot is based on a series of confusions that have to be resolved, mysteries that have to be explained and cases of mistaken identity that have to be connected.
Jack, who divides his life between his country house and his house in town (London), has invented the existence of a false brother, Ernest, in order to have a reason to escape every now and again to London. When he is in London, he pretends to be this invented character, Ernest Worthing, so that his London friends do not find out about his other life in the country, where he is known as Jack.
(In the picture, a frame of the 1953 film version of this play)
In town he falls in love with Gwendolen Fairfax, the cousin of his friend Algernon. Gwendolen accepts his love, but Lady Bracknell (Gwendolen’s mother) does not agree with their relationship, because even though Jack is rich, his family origins are mysterious: he was adopted by Sir Thomas Cardew after being found in a handbag in Victoria Station, London.
His friend Algernon Moncrieff meanwhile discovers Jack’s pretence of ‘brother Ernest’ and decides to go to Jack’s Country house pretending to be that brother. When he is there he falls in love with Cecily Cardew, Jack’s young ward, and is forced to keep up the pretence of being Ernest because Cecily is in love with this ‘character’.
The story becomes very amusing as the two girls try to discover the true identities of the men they love.
The end reveals that Jack, the orphan found in the handbag, is the elder brother of Algernon, and that his real name is not Jack at all but is really Ernest. Both Jack and Algemon, by the end of the play, understand how important it is to be honest and sincere, particularly when love is concerned, so they have understood the importance of being earnest.

CHARACTERS

Jack
an honest, well-off young man, with a mystery in his life.

Algernon
an aristocratic, detached but pennyless young man, overcurious about his friend’s mysterious life in the country.

Gwendolen
a mixture of obedience and disobedience, congruity and incongruity, funny and serious at the same time. Presumably in love with Ernest/Jack, without being too romantic about it, she considers the name Ernest a prerequisite for marriage. She would not hesitate to leave her fiancee on discovering that Ernest was not Jack’s real name.

Cecily
a sensible young girl, daughter of the man who had adopted Jack. She falls in love with Algernon, whose name she believes to be Ernest.

Lady Bracknell
a stiff, self-conscious, gorgon-like aristocrat, mother of Gwendolen. She is the unconscious source of some of the most comic situations in the play.

Miss Prism
an absent-minded nurse, who is now Cecily’s tutor; she suddenly appears, rather inconsistently with her real self, as “a woman with a past”.

Dr Chasuble
as a clergyman, he almost gives a moral tone to the play, but of course that is just a device to create new comic situations.

: The Cigarette Case