It is often said that pretending to be someone or thing other than who you truly are can have disastrous consequences. In William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, main characters learn this important social lesson, as their attempts to deceive others about their true identities or mental states ultimately come back to haunt them. Indeed, both Shakespeare and Wilde use their plays to teach audiences an extremely important lesson, namely the dangers of presenting a false front to others. However, though both plays contain this moral, their approach to the social lesson do not necessarily follow the same course.
In Hamlet, Shakespeare uses the character of Hamlet himself to explore the dangers of presenting a false front. Devastated both by his father's suspicious death and his mother's subsequent marriage to Claudius, his father's brother, Hamlet decides to feign madness in order to prove that Claudius is in fact responsible for his father's death. However, by pretending to be insane, Hamlet inadvertently sets a course of events into motion that not only brings great misfortune upon himself, but those close to him as well. Indeed, one might argue that because he chose to feign madness, Hamlet is responsible, either directly or indirectly, for the deaths of Ophelia, Polonius, his mother Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet himself.
Wilde's characters impart the same moral to readers as Shakespeare's, but the situation described in The Importance of Being Earnest is far less grave than that portrayed in Hamlet. Both Jack and Algernon assume the identity of Jack's invented brother, Ernest, for their own selfish purposes. Jack invents Earnest to serve as alter ego that allows him to disappear for days at a time and engage in unseemly behavior. When Algernon discovers the truth about Ernest, he assumes the identity in order to woo Jack's ward, Cecily. However, both men soon real...