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.

Stephen Sondheim is arguably the most important writer for the American musical stage today, the equivalent in his field of Miller, Albee, O'Neill, and Williams. Yet he has rarely been treated seriously within the academy. Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays is an attempt to remedy that situation. Bringing together scholars and critics from a wide variety of literary and theoretical perspectives, this book undertakes to examine all of Sondheim's major productions and themes.