Shakespeare's Happy Endings

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

William Shakespeare's romantic comedies, plays including Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, follow the same basic shape New Comedy had established two thousand years earlier: young couples separated by disguise, deception, family opposition or simple misunderstanding, reunited in a closing scene of marriage that restores social order rather than overturning it. Shakespeare added his own recurring devices to that inherited structure, most distinctively cross-dressed heroines whose disguise drives the plot's confusions, and a pastoral or otherwise displaced setting, a forest or an island, where ordinary social rules are suspended long enough for the comedy's misunderstandings to be worked out before the characters return to normal life changed.