The Importance of Being Earnest, on the home
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DramaAs You Like It, all the world’s a stageWilliam Shakespeare, published 1599Jaques calls the world a stage and gets as far as the infant, the schoolboy, and the lover.medium447 characters
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ProseEmma, the view from Donwell AbbeyJane Austen, published 1815A summer view of English fields and gardens from the grounds of Donwell Abbey.hard340 characters
The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St James’s Theatre in London on February 14, 1895. Wilde called it a trivial comedy for serious people. The play was cut from four acts to three before the first night at the manager’s request. Project Gutenberg carries the published text.
Where this text comes fromThis is stage dialogue and it is built to be spoken at speed. Six sentences in three hundred characters, each one landing a complete idea before the next begins, because an actor needs somewhere to put emphasis and an audience needs time to laugh. The play was written in four acts and cut to three before it opened, which tightened exactly this kind of exchange. Nothing here is description; every line is a person saying something they think is clever.
What you might not noticeWilde builds the joke by inverting an assumption twice in six short sentences: the family is what one escapes, and being unknown outside it is presented as a credit rather than a failing. Source
What it trainsFive full stops and one question mark in six sentences means you are hitting a sentence ending roughly every eleven words, which is a completely different rhythm from the verse and the narrative prose around it. Four commas is all the internal punctuation there is, and none of them nests a clause inside another. Eight capitals, only two of them inside sentences. Nothing is hyphenated and only one apostrophe appears, inside the contracted don’t rather than marking a possessive. Because the sentences are short and the vocabulary is ordinary, this is one of the cleanest passages available for reading your plain rate on dialogue without a trap distorting the number.
From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits
Public domain status: published in 1895, more than 125 years ago. public domain, Project Gutenberg
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