Romantic comedy

“ Conceded the utmost freedom, the romantic drama would yet remain inferior. The poetic drama must have an emotional unity, let the emotion be whatever you like. It must have a dominant tone; and if this be strong enough, the most heterogeneous emotions may be made to reinforce it. The romantic comedy is a skilful concoction of inconsistent emotion, a revue of emotion. A Very Woman is surpassingly well plotted. The debility of romantic drama does not depend upon extravagant setting, or preposterous events, or inconceivable coincidences; all these might be found in a serious tragedy or comedy. ”

“ All's Well That Ends Well.—When a beautiful and noble-minded young woman falls in love with a contemptible scoundrel, forgives his rebuffs, compromises her own dignity to win his affection, and finally persuades him to let her throw herself away on him,—is the result a romance or a tragedy? This is a nice question; and by the answer to it we must determine whether All's Well That Ends Well is a romantic comedy like Twelfth Night or a satirical comedy bitter as tragedy, like Troilus and Cressida. ”

“ The spirit of the old romantic comedy had long since fled; the graceful artificialities of the pastoral drama, even the light texture of the mask, ill suited the demands of an age which made no secret to itself of the grossness of its sensuality. With a few unimportant exceptions, such poetic elements as admitted of being combined with the poetic drama were absorbed by the opera and the ballet. No new species of the comic drama formed itself, though towards the close of the period may be noticed the beginnings of modern English farce. ”

“ The peculiar quality and charm of our comedy is that, deriving from sources not only distinct, but remote in literary habitat,—scriptural, allegorical, farcical, pastoral, romantic, classical, historical, or purely native and social,—it has not dissipated itself in a thousand streamlets, but has carried down deposits from each tributary at its best. In Love's Labor's Lost, Two Angry Women, As You Like It, Old Wives' Tale, Every Man in His Humour, we find, as in a miner's pan, 'colours' from vastly different soils. ”

“ Within a moral interlude of classical and mythological origin we discover a romantic comedy. The influence of the supernatural not merely envelops, but permeates the whole; the Acts present the destinies of the mortals of the inner play, the inter-acts the continued intervention of the immortals of the outer. ”

“ If, however, in these comedies of ancient domestic life we miss that romance of feeling which forms so important an element—if it may not rather be said to be of the very essence—of the modern drama, we escape altogether from one style of plot which was not only the reproach of our old English comedy-writers, but is still too common a resource with modern writers of fiction, romantic or dramatic. The sanctities of married life are not tampered with to create a morbid interest for audience or reader. ”

“ That the love-story is, however, of the kind which belongs essentially to Middle Comedy, and has nothing whatever in common with those of the later romantic comedy, will become abundantly clear when we come to deal with the points of difference between these two schools of art. ”

“ In his work, accordingly, we find narratives of single and independent interest, if not exactly plot, and an adaptation of that which is abstract to purposes of amusement. We find characters with motive, and sometimes personality, contemporary manners, witty dialogue, satire; and in at least the Play of Love, an adumbration of the sentimental, dare we say romantic, possibilities of comedy, to be realized when it should lxvii have thrown allegory and scholasticism to the winds. ”

“ Ward holds that the beginnings of romantic comedy were foreshadowed by the play. [87] It is, in fact, both dramatically and historically, one of the most important productions of its date. It was printed in 1589, but played, perhaps, as early as 1582. Mr. Fleay has assigned it to Kyd, but I do not see sufficient reason for the attribution; if we must find an author for it, Robert Wilson's claims might be urged. The Rare Triumphs affords an excellent instance of the fusion of moral and romance. ”

“ At first he is given two hours of serious enjoyment, then one hour of hilarious enjoyment, these, with the hour of entr' actes, which we do not include in the enjoyment make four hours What would the romantic drama do? It would mingle and blend artistically these two kinds of enjoyment. It would lead the audience constantly from sobriety to laughter, from mirthful excitement to heart breaking emotion, "from grave to gay, from pleasant to severe." For, as we have already proved, the drama is the grotesque in conjunction with the sublime, the soul within the body, it is tragedy beneath comedy. ”

“ Concentrated within a calm, untroubled form, its strength will irresistibly move. Styles that protest too much are not fit for serious, tragic use. They are by nature suited to comedy, whose essence is exaggeration. That is why good romantic art is so rare. ”

“ No less clear than the interest in tragic themes which attracted the London audiences for the half-a-dozen years following 1600, is the shifting of popular approval towards a new form of drama about 1608. This was the romantic tragi-comedy, a type of drama which puts a theme of sentimental interest into events and situations that come close to the tragic. Shakespeare's plays of this type are often called romances, since they tell a story of the same type found in romantic novels of the time. ”

“ Ibsen had grown up in a school which cultivated the romantic, piquant, picturesque in style; which ran riot in wit, in vivacious and brilliant imagery, in resonant rhythms and telling double rhymes. It must be owned that this was not the happiest school for a dramatist, nor can Love's Comedy be regarded, in the matter of style, as other than a risky experiment which nothing but the sheer dramatic force of an Ibsen could have carried through. ”

“ The synalœpha of the sexes—such as some extremists, political and pedagogical, project—would just as surely destroy comedy as in former days the inequality of the sexes dwarfed it. The sentimental and romantic give-and-take is as essential to society as the intellectual, and as essential to comedy as to society. ”

“ At every turn you see that wonderful symbol of romance, the white road that winds over the hill, flecked perhaps by a solitary traveller. But it is always the work of man, not the beauty of nature, that engrosses you. You would, if you could, alight at every point to witness the last act of comedy, which is just beginning. Men and women, to whom you are an episode or an obstruction, flash by. ”

“ To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art. No art produces illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre; and while we read a story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to take an active part in fancy with the characters. This last is the triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader consciously plays at being the hero, the scene is a good scene. ”

“ But a complete exhibition of passion, with its varieties and progress in the breast of man has, I believe, scarcely ever been attempted in comedy. Even love, though the chief subject of almost every play, has been pourtrayed in a loose, scattered, and imperfect manner. The story of the lovers is acted over before us, whilst the characteristicks of that passion by which they are actuated, and which is the great master-spring of the whole, are faintly to be discovered. ”

“ Now, it is precisely in these effects that the chief excellence of romance resides; it was the discovery of a world of these effects, insusceptible of treatment by the drama, neglected entirely by the character-novel, which constituted the Romantic revival of the end of last century. ‘The artistic result of a romance,’ says Stevenson, ‘what is left upon the memory by any powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet something as simple as nature. ”

“ The fun has gone out of Vanity Fair, and the House of the Seven Gables is an hotel with seven hundred beds.
Comfort, electric light, railway sleeping-cars, and equality are excellent things, but they are the death of romance. The essence of romance is variety, contrast, individuality, the eccentric, the unconventional. Level up society, put nineteen out of every twenty on fairly equal terms, popularise literature, and turn the Ten Commandments into a code of decorum, and you cut up by the roots all romantic types of life. ”

“ It is inevitable that a great majority of plays shall deal with that one great elemental emotion—love. Once, when I was very young indeed, I experimented in writing a comedy in which nobody was in love. ”

“ It is a play of two motives. The first, of course, is love—what else should be the theme of a youthful poet's first comedy?—but love without a trace of passion, almost without deep personal feeling, a love which is half make-believe, tricked out in word-plays. For the second theme of the comedy is language itself, poetic expression—for its own sake—a subject round which all the meditations of the young poet must necessarily have centred, as, in the midst of a cross-fire of new impressions, he set about the formation of a vocabulary and a style. ”

“ Every art is hers. Go to the theatre, and whether it be tragedy, or comedy, or opera, or dance, the attraction of woman is the very life of all that is transacted there. Shut yourself up at home with the poem or the novel, and lo! to love, and to be loved, by one fair creature, is all that the world has to dignify with the name of happiness. It is too much. The heart aches and sickens with an unclaimed affection, kindled to no purpose. Every where the eye, the ear, the imagination, is provoked, bewildered, haunted by the magic of this universal syren. ”

“ Love forms the foundation of the play, and therefore it must be discussed freely from its first principles. Now a play, however fine its dramatic composition may be, can have no other effect than to disgust refined minds and to ruin the reputations of its actors, unless the love on which it is based is represented delicately, and in a tenderly impassioned manner. And as few actors are capable of producing a perfect [161] representation of the most subtle and many-sided of passions, the general effect of our comedy is deteriorating. ”

“ In the days of romance there were personal perils to confront, and appalling dangers to be surmounted; but now it was a game of life, to be played, not merely with a stout heart and a ready hand, but with a cool head and a steady eye. Young as I was, I had seen a great deal. In that strange comedy of which my father's guests were the performers, there was great insight into character to be gained, and a marvellous knowledge of that skill by which they who live by their wits cultivate these same wits to live. ”

“ Instead of a combination of romance and comedy, they aim at a contrast of the tragic and idyllic. They oppose a story of sexual passion with one of idealized sentiment, and delight in a succession of thrills as by clever stagecraft they hurry us from one suspense into another surprise. Until the very end you can scarcely guess whether it will be tragic or happy. Their land of romance is somewhat artificial and theatrical ”

“ It must not, therefore, be imagined that it was without the knowledge and will of the poet that a heroic drama turns out a comedy in his hands, and ends in the manner of Comedy with a marriage of convenience. ”

“ The young wife, humiliated and heart-broken before the morning glow of romance had faded from her marriage, had their profoundest sympathy. Yet when the curtain rises on a human drama, however tragic its development, the little thrill that runs over the audience is not altogether unpleasant. ”

“ Men truly distinguished for their talents have attached themselves to the romantic drama, but in it they have generally adopted a latitude which is not really allowable, except in a romance, wholly disregarding the compression which the dramatic form necessarily requires. ”

“ The confidential relationship, the trim appearance, not without its suggestion of comic opera and the soubrette of the Comédie Française, the combined air of cheerfulness and respect which is demanded, mind you, on either side the bargain—all this is acutely and vivaciously observed in half a page by a writer who never missed a romantic opening in his days. The profession, indeed, has never lacked romance in real life. Strangeness has persistently followed beauty in and out of the kitchen. The number of old gentlemen who have married their cooks is really considerable. ”

“ The soft emotions, only producing tenderness, are of the nature of the agreeable, with which the fine arts are not concerned. They only caress the senses, while relaxing and creating languidness, and only relate to external nature, not at all to the inner nature of man. A good number of our romances and of our tragedies, particularly those that bear the name of dramas—a sort of compromise between tragedy and comedy—a good number also of those highly-appreciated family portraits, belong to this class. ”

“ A minor comedy gives her extreme pleasure, in fact she weeps during the whole third act, and “they were not tears of bitter anguish, but tears of tender emotion.” Her usual state of mind is, however, better expressed in another passage: “Everything I read bores me; history, because I am totally incurious; essays, because they are half platitude and half affected originality; novels, because the love-making seems sentimental and the study of passion makes me unhappy.” ”

“ It is therefore in science and statesmanship that the romantic quality of the future will be found. Romance is a maligned word, debased to fit any calf-love; romance is pinkish, or bluish, tender, feeble, and ends in orange blossom, or, as the case may be, tears by the side of mother's grave. That is the romance of the provincial touring company. True romance is virile, generous, and its voice is as that of the trumpet. Romance is the wage of the watcher, who with ever-open eyes scans the boundless air in eternal expectation that a thing unknown will appear. ”