The Happy End of Comedy: Jonson, Molière, and Shakespeare

From the They lived happily ever after of the fairy tale to the careful accounting of fates and disposing of fortunes at the end of a Victorian novel, obvious formal devices signal the approaching conclusion of the work of art. When the work is comic, one in which anything can happen, the nature of the conclusion is governed by one overriding convention: there must be a happy ending. Zvi Jagendorf's theoretical study observes the ways in which the author of the comic drama meets this requirement and molds the conventional necessity of ending to fit the work as it has developed.