Cicero's Importance Of Being Earnest As Tragedies

Tufan Mısır
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Take Home Mid-Term
Option B- Question 6 : Cicero defined comedy as ‘an imitation of life, a mirror of customs, and an image of truth’. How helpful is this definition in thinking about The Importance of Being Earnest as comedies?

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Marcus Tullius Cicero is known a great verse writer, lawyer and a philosopher. He has many speech about comedy, art, politics, philosophy, and war. He is not interested in war though in a short time he involves and in a short time he is sent to exile. Whether it is because or not just after he returns he starts writing both rhetoric and philosophy. In his one work he says “ comedy as ‘an imitation of life, a mirror of customs, and an image of truth”.(Banhan,234) He does

His writing style is very different from other English writers in terms of considering the public sense. He is a great advocator of “aesthetics movement” and he does not care about other writers’ life style. In a sense he is also a lawless man, he has some forbidden relationship deliberately he is going to the jail. He cannot stand his instincts if he acts adversely, because it is the same what he writes in his plays. For instance, he uses “dandy” characters in many of his works, and the real life, he lives like a “dandy”. Even their dressing style is almost the same. So, there are a lot of similarities between Oscar Wilde’s works ,especially in The Importance of Being Earnest and his life. At the same time , people can laugh, be entertained and think and it is the necessity of comedy. If there is no message for the society, the play may not face this affection, but entertaining people by the writer’s wit is more important than saying thing directly without any aesthetic way. Wilde uses “absurdity many times in this work and believe or not, absurdity has a faultless logic. All the conspiracy in this play are absurd and at the end of the First Act, the absurdity reveals automatically. He criticizes 19.th

On the other hand, there are many striking and funny moments in this play. For instance when Gwendolen tells her mother that, she is engaged to Mr. Worthing, her mother replies “Pardon me, you are not engaged to anyone. When you do become engaged to someone,I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact that.An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be.” (Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest Act I, P 16) That may be funny at the first sight, but though the mother seems very reasonable she dares to make her daughter engaged to someone without asking the daughter’s decision. And then the mother starts questioning Jack’s social and economical status in behalf of the husband’s masculine figure. Besides, the mother is very interested in her daughter, but she becomes happy when she learns that Jack has no parents. His income, his wealth, his occupations are more important than his educational background or his relatives according to Lady Bracknell. Another example is about Algernon and Earnest about the cigarette case. By joking themselves, they give us information about