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By Root 5247 0

pretty little ward, Cecily, who lives quietly in the country, and at once hurries down to make her acquaintance, passing himself off as jack's fictitious brother `Ernest: The predictable result is that both young couples are soon hopelessly in love (although, typically implausibly, the two heroines each wish to marry their man only because they are under the false impression that he is called Ernest). Lady Bracknell is forbidding Gwendolen to marry Jack, because he does not know who his parents were (he had been found as a baby abandoned in a handbag). Jack, in revenge, therefore assumes the role of `unrelenting parent' in turn, by forbidding his ward's proposed marriage to Algernon. This double impasse is finally resolved thanks to the arrival of Cecily's governess Miss Prism, who inadvertently reveals jack's true identity. He is in fact Algernon's elder brother, who had been lost as a baby when Miss Prism, as his nanny, had confused him with the manuscript of a three-volume novel and left him in the parcels office of a mainline London railway station. His true name, it then emerges from a reference book, has been Ernest all along. In this not even symbolically plausible fashion, all obstacles in the way of the two couples being united have been removed (except that Cecily never explains why she is prepared to overlook her previous insistence that she could only marry a man called Ernest).

The twentieth-century divide

If the core of seriousness had already begun to drop out of Comedy, what happened in the twentieth century - when the plot continued to enjoy enormous popularity in many different forms - was that Comedy tended to develop almost into two different types of story. On one hand were those expressions of the plot where the love interest took precedence, often without particular humour. On the other were those which concentrated on the humour, or as we say the `comic' element, with the love interest either relegated to a subordinate place, or eliminated altogether.

Stories of the first kind, where the love interest predominates, became particularly popular in that home of sentimentality, Hollywood. An early example, featuring the leading hearthrob of the silent screen Rudolph Valentino, was The Sheikh (1921), based on a novel published in England two years earlier by Edith Hull, the wife of a Derbyshire pig farmer. The English heroine is shown falling into an `inferior realm' when she visits an Arab festival in disguise and is captured by an Arab sheikh (played by Valentino). She secretly begins to fall in love with her captor, but is then captured by a genuinely `dark' figure, a villainous bandit chief. She is rescued by her gallant sheikh and all is resolved when he turns out to be really a European nobleman in disguise, adopted by Arabs when his parents had been killed in the desert. His true identity revealed, showing him not be racially `inferior' after all, the loving couple can happily return to the `upper world' of Europe to be married.

The love aspect of Comedy also came to the fore in that twentieth-century successor to the tradition of `light opera, the American stage and film musical. Rogers and Hammerstein's South Pacific (1949), for instance, was an almost entirely straight and sentimental love story. The heroine, an American naval nurse, arrives during the Second World War on a Pacific island, where she falls in love with a French planter. But he has had two children by a Polynesian woman, now dead; and because of this supposedly `inferior' racial link, the heroine is reluctant to marry him. But thanks to his intimate knowledge of the islands, the planter is now recruited by the US Army to play a key part in a military operation. When he is smuggled onto a Japanese-occupied island to spy on enemy military movements, he is revealed to be a brave hero. The heroine at last sees him in his true light as a real man, no longer `inferior, and the story ends with her assuming the role of mother to his half-Polynesian children as the couple look forward to their marriage.2

We see a rather more obviously