Happy ending

The presence of a happy ending is one of the key points that distinguish melodrama from tragedy. In certain periods, the endings of traditional tragedies such as Macbeth or Oedipus Rex, in which most of the major characters end up dead, disfigured, or discountenanced, have been actively disliked. In the seventeenth century, the Irish author Nahum Tate sought to improve William Shakespeare's King Lear in his own heavily modified version in which Lear survives and Cordelia marries Edgar. Tate's version dominated performances for a century and a half and Shakespeare's original was nearly forgotten. Both David Garrick and John Philip Kemble, while taking up some of Shakespeare's original text, kept Tate's happy ending. Edmund Kean played King Lear with its tragic ending in 1823, but failed and reverted to Tate's crowd-pleaser after only three performances. Only in 1838 did William Macready at Covent Garden successfully restore Shakespeare's original tragic end – Helen Faucit's final appearance as Cordelia, dead in her father's arms, became one of the most iconic of Victorian images and the play's tragic end was finally accepted by the general public. Most subsequent critics have not found Tate's amendments an improvement, and welcomed the restoration of Shakespeare's original. Happy endings have also been fastened – equally, with no lasting success – to Romeo and Juliet and Othello.

There is no universally accepted definition of what a happy ending is; such definitions can considerably vary with time and cultural differences. An interpretation of The Merchant of Venice's forced conversion of Shylock to Christianity is that it was intended as a happy ending. As a Christian, Shylock could no longer impose interest, undoing his schemes in the play and ending the rivalry between him and Antonio, but more important, contemporary audiences would see becoming a Christian as a means to save his soul (cf. Romans 11:15). In later times, Jews (and non-Jewish opponents of anti-Semitism) strongly objected to that ending, regarding it as depicting a victory for injustice and oppression and as pandering to the audience's prejudices.

Similarly, for Sixteenth Century audiences, the ending of The Taming of the Shrew - a formerly independent and assertive woman being broken and becoming totally submissive to her husband - might have counted as a happy ending, which it would not under present-day standards of women's place in society (see The Taming of the Shrew#Sexism controversy).

Most interpretations of the legend of Don Juan end with the protagonist rake being dragged off to Hell, in just retribution for his many sins (for example, the ending of Mozart's Don Giovanni). However, José Zorrilla - whose 1844 play Don Juan Tenorio is the version most well-known in the Spanish-speaking world - believed that a story should never end sadly, and must always have a happy ending. In Zorrilla's depiction, Don Juan is saved at the last moment from the flames of Hell by the selfless pure love of Doña Inés, a woman whom he wronged but who forgave him; she had made a deal with God to offer her own blameless soul on behalf of Don Juan's – thus redeeming Don Juan and taking him with her to Paradise.

The Octoroon, a 1859 anti-slavery play by Dion Boucicault, focuses on the tragic love between the white George Peyton and the Octoroon girl Zoe. Her one-eighth Black ancestry is enough to prevent their marrying. In the American society of the time, it would have been unacceptable to present a play ending with a mixed-race couple consummating their love. Rather, the play ends with Zoe taking poison and dying, the grief-stricken George at her side. However, when the play was performed in England, where prejudice was less strong, it was given a happy ending, culminating with the young lovers happily getting together against all odds.[2]

In 17th Century Italy, Francesco Cavalli wrote the opera Didone, based on Virgil's Aeneid (Book 4 in particular) and set to a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello. However, Busenello's libretto changed the tragic ending provided by Virgil, in which Dido commits suicide after Aeneas abandons her. In Busenello's version Iarbas, King of the Getuli, shows up in the nick of time to save Dido from herself, and she ends up happily marrying him.

Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, as originally presented in 1895, ends tragically with the lovers Odette and Siegfried dying together, vowing fidelity unto death to each other. However, under the Soviet regime, in 1950 Konstantin Sergeyev, who staged a new Swan Lake for the Mariinsky Ballet (then the Kirov), replaced the tragic ending with a happy one, letting the lovers survive and live happily ever after. Similar changes to the ending of Swan Lake were also made in various other times and places where it was presented (see Swan Lake#Alternative endings).

A Times review of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold strongly criticized John le Carré for failing to provide a happy ending, and gave unequivocal reasons why in the reviewer's opinion (shared by many others) such an ending is needed: "The hero must triumph over his enemies, as surely as Jack must kill the giant in the nursery tale. If the giant kills Jack, we have missed the whole point of the story."[3]

George Bernard Shaw had to wage an uphill struggle against audiences, as well as some critics, persistently demanding that his "Pygmalion" have a happy ending, i.e. that Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolitle would ultimately marry.[4][5] To Shaw's great chagrin, Herbert Beerbohm Tree who presented the play in London's West End in 1914 had sweetened the ending and told Shaw: "My ending makes money; you ought to be grateful. Your ending is damnable; you ought to be shot."[6] The irritated Shaw added a postscript essay, "'What Happened Afterwards",[7] to the 1916 print edition, for inclusion with subsequent editions, in which he explained precisely why in his view it was impossible for the story to end with Higgins and Eliza marrying. Nevertheless, audiences continued wanting a happy ending also for later adaptations such as the musical and film "My Fair Lady".

Science Fiction writer Robert Heinlein published the Future History, a series of stories attempting to depict the future of humanity (particularly, of the United States). Heinlein's plan included the writing of two interlinked novellas set in the Twenty-First Century (then a distant future time). The first would have depicted a charismatic preacher named Nehemiah Scudder getting himself elected President of The United States, seizing dictatorial power and establishing a tyrannical theocracy which would last to the end of his life and several generations after; the second - depicting the successful revolution which finally brings down the theocracy and restores democracy. In fact, as Heinlein explained to his readers, he found himself unable to write in full the first part - which would have been "too depressing", ending as it had to with the villain's total victory. Rather, Heinlein contented himself with a brief summary describing Scudder's rise, prefacing the novella If This Goes On— which ends happily with the overthrow of the theocracy and the restoration of a democratic regime.

In numerous cases, Hollywood studios adapting literary works into film added a happy ending which did not appear in the original.

• Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, ended with the deaths of Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza. In the 1931 film adaption they survive and marry.
• C. S. Forester's 1935 novel The African Queen has a British couple, stranded in Africa during the First World War, hatch a plot to sink a German gunboat; they make an enormous, dedicated struggle, with boundless effort and sacrifice, but at the last moment their quest ends with failure and futility. In the 1951 film adaptation they succeed, and get to see the German boat sink (just in time to save them from being hanged by the Germans).
• Truman Capote's 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany's ended with the main character, Holly Golightly, going her own solitary way and disappearing from the male protagonist's life. In the 1961 film made on its base she finally accepts the love he offers her and the film ends with their warmly embracing, oblivious of a pouring rain.
• Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Little Mermaid ends with the protagonist mermaid making a noble sacrifice, resigned to seeing her beloved prince marrying another woman. She is, however, unexpectedly, rewarding for the sacrifice by the chance to earn herself an immortal soul by further good deeds in air-spirit form (acquiring an immortal soul being her main objective from the start, with the prince chiefly a means to this end). While this was intended by the author to be a happy ending, the 1989 Disney adaptation replaced it by a less subtle one: the mermaid does get to happily marry her prince. Disney later added a sequel, obviously impossible for the Andersen original, focused on the child born of that marriage.
• Herman Wouk's novel Marjorie Morningstar ends with the formerly vibrant protagonist giving up her dreams of an artistic career, marrying a mediocre middle-class man approved by her parents and becoming totally reconciled to the commonplace life of a suburban housewife and mother. In her review for Slate Magazine, Alana Newhouse wrote that "most female readers cry when they reach the end of this book, and for good reason. Marjorie Morningstar, as they came to know her, has become another woman entirely"; Newhouse expressed the opinion that an adaptation to a film or a stage play which would keep the book's ending "would not run for a week". But the makers of the film version did change the ending, letting Marjorie end up in the loving arms of a talented, sensitive and warm-hearted playwright – whom she unwisely rejected in the book, and who in the film version can be expected to encourage and support her in launching her own artistic career.