Thesis for 10-page paper on Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest"

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Its important to start off with a general introducion and background to the bookand the author. Include the use of the book in movies. In the introduction please do not forget to state the aims of the research paper and what it seeks to address. Below is some of the information you may wish to include:
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<br>INTRODUCTION & BACKGROUND
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<br>Wilde began writing The Importance of Being Earnest in August 1894, and it premiered six months later on St. Valentine's Day, as Wilde was facing increasingly angry verbal attacks from his lover's father, the Marquess of Queensbury. (Had it not been for Wilde and the public accusations of sodomy made against him, the Marquess would be known today solely for his standardization of boxing rules.) Two weeks later, Wilde unwisely pressed criminal libel charges against the Marquess. Improbably, Wilde actually attended the March 7 performance of The Importance of Being Earnest with his lover (Lord Alfred Douglas) and his wife together. (Wilde's biographer, Richard Ellmann, reports that Wilde's wife "had tears in her eyes.")
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<br>On April 5, after the libel charges were dismissed (on the grounds that Queensbury's accusations were true), Wilde was arrested and charged with committing sodomy and indecent acts, the evidence for which had been brought out by Queenbury's legal defense. A month later, Wilde was found guilty of all charges but one, and he was sentenced to the maximum two years of hard labor. He died three years after his release, an exile in Paris, at the age of forty-six.
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<br>That The Importance of Being Earnest's effortless composition and critically acclaimed premiere coincided with Wilde's public downfall is striking, to say the least, and it's hard not to note at least in passing the ironically polarized parallels between Wilde's life and the play. According to Wilde, the play's philosophy was "That we should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality." Wilde's well-being would doubtless have been better served by taking the play's philosophy to heart: tear up Queensbury's offending notes, shrug off his slurs and spend a little time abroad while the scandal died down. But under Douglas's influence, Wilde pressed on with the charges, and it wasn't until the case had advanced too far to turn back that he realized how serious the repercussions against him might be, given how easily the Marquess's claims could be proven true.
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<br>Flight, though it was adamantly suggested (and arranged) by many friends, seems never to have been a real consideration for Wilde once he faced his own criminal trials, and at least some of his contemporaries admired him for it. "He was an unfinished sketch of a great man," Yeats said of him, "and showed great courage and manhood amid the collapse of his fortunes." Courageous as his unflinching stance may have been once he faced criminal charges, the notion that he was unfinished seems particularly apt for describing Wilde's inability to understand the seemingly obvious drawbacks to his pressing the initial libel suit. It was a singularly damning failing that suggests an intriguing mix of hubris and naivete. While The Importance of Being Earnest's Jack and Algernon eventually learn to play cunning political games in the adult world to fulfill their hedonistic desires, Wilde himself failed utterly to learn the lesson.
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<br>Ironically, the prospect of imprisonment arises in an early draft of The Importance of Being Earnest. In an act that Wilde eventually cut (and which found its way in abbreviated form into this year's film adaptation), Algernon is threatened with arrest for unpaid restaurant bills. Unlike Wilde, Algernon is able to scoff at the prospect of imprisonment-and avoid it. ...