Romantic Comedy

'The course of true love never did run smooth'. For more than 2000 years the problems faced by young men and women fighting to find and keep an appropriate sexual partner in the face of external opposition, or internal contradictions, has been a staple of the theatre in the form of romantic comedy. This book explores and analyses the shapes that romantic comedy has assumed in the theatre from Greek New Comedy via Shakespeare to the present.

Organized chronologically to allow readers to trace the development of the form against changing societal norms, the book features a range of case studies of key works from the British tradition - including A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife and Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, and from the 20th-century Stanley Houghton's Hindle Wakes (1912), Noel Coward's Private Lives (1930), Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958) and Ayub Khan-Din's East is East (1996) - while containing reference to many other plays.

In romantic comedy, sexual attraction is potentially disruptive of patriarchal order, since it pits individual desires against social norms and must be channelled appropriately if that order is to be maintained. At the same time, in romantic comedy the contradictions contingent on the exercise of patriarchal power must in some way accommodate the desires and needs of the lovers. Traditionally romantic comedy has been hetero-normative, however, changing social values and legal developments, particularly the wider acceptance of divorce and of homosexual attraction and marriage, have helped to redefine the forms of romantic comedy. Similarly, a recent trend towards more fluid forms of casting in which the race and gender of a character are no longer regarded as fixed has opened up many Romantic Comedies to radical reinterpretations that are be explored in this book.