The Happy End of Comedy

The Happy End of Comedy is an analysis of the most necessary of all comic conventions -- the happy ending. The book begins by assuming that the study of the ways three major playwrights brought their works to a close will reveal much about their conception of the artifice of theater and comedy and about their sense of human experience, which informs this artifice. Happy End is thus both a study of the uses and variations on a convention and a definition of each playwright's comic ethos. -- from book jacket.