S.Y.B.A. (ENGLISH)
SEM : 3
CCE : 5
v ROMANTIC COMEDY.
“His tragedy seems
to be skill, his comedy to be instinct” – Dr. Johnson on William Shakespeare.
Romantic Comedy is a general term
for comedies that deal mainly with the follies and misunderstandings of young
lovers, in a lighthearted, and happily concluded manner which usually avoids
serious satire. A Romantic comedy is a type of comedy that includes the love
story between the hero and the heroine amidst perfect romantic and festive
setting, develops through some difficulties, hazards, misunderstandings but
ends in happy note.
Romantic comedy was developed by Elizabethan dramatists on the model of
contemporary prose romances such as Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), the source
of Shakespeare’s As you like it (1590).
Shakespeare's romantic comedies are all set in a fantastical universe far removed from the dull and dark world of everyday existence. Their characters are likewise distinct from our own in that they live in their own fictional, vibrant world rather than ours. Such comedy represents a love affair that involves a beautiful and engaging heroine (sometimes disguised as a man); the course of this love does not run smooth, yet overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union.
The best known examples
are Shakespeare’s comedies of the late 1590s, A Midsummer Nights’s Dream,
Twelfth Nights, and As you like it being the most purely romantic.
Linda Bamber’s Comic Women, Tragic
Men: A study of gender and genre in Shakespeare (1982) undertakes to account
for the fact that in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, the women are often
superior to the men, while in his tragedies he “creates such nightmare female
figures as Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth, and Volumnia.”
Characteristics of Romantic Comedy.
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