Question

Match the following literary devices to the quotes from the play that demonstrate their usage.

Question 5 options:

Satire


Dramatic Irony


Verbal Irony


Hyperbole


Stage Directions


Pun


Victorian Societal Norms

1.
CHASUBLE: Your brother Ernest dead?
JACK: Quite dead.

2.
LADY BRACKNELL: I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance…The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.

Answer 1

3.
[LANE presents several letters on a salver to ALGERNON. It is to be surmised that they are bills, as ALGERNON, after looking at the envelopes, tears them up.]

4.
ALGERNON: Tomorrow, Lane, I’m going Bunburying.

5.
JACK: On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

6.
LADY BRACKNELL: The line is immaterial. Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it has handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life…As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion…but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognized position in good society.

7.
JACK: Of course it’s mine. [Moving to him.] You have seen me with it a hundred times, and you have no right whatsoever to read what is written inside. It is a very ungentlemanly thing to read a private cigarette case.