Stephen Fry Is Wilde at Heart

When “The Importance of Being Earnest,” by Oscar Wilde, opened, on February 14, 1895, in London, the date was well chosen. It was the Victorians, after all, who decisively turned the feast of St. Valentine into a mass commercial celebration, with would-be lovers concealing their identities behind an anonymous exchange of greeting cards and other tokens of desire. “Earnest,” the fourth drawing-room comedy that Wilde had produced within three years, centered on the courtship of two young women, Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, by two young men, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff. Both suitors repeatedly resort to subterfuge in order to maintain double lives in which the satisfactions of social respectability are counterbalanced by the pursuit of pleasure and personal freedom.