Drama of Marriage

In drama of the past century and a half, marriage has been presented as an ideal, an impossibility, and the measure of the morality and limitations of the parties involved. Do marriages fail because couples fail or because marriage itself is impossible? Is true understanding between two people possible? Is monogamy unrealistic? Queering Marriage is a study of performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama. Paradoxically, at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men (some of whom had a very different understanding of the word "gay"). Many of these playwrights tried in their private lives to negotiate some sort of same-sex partnership in a period when legal sanctions against homosexuality were Draconian. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, the writers have become as much a part of gay history as theatre history: Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, and Emlyn Williams in England; Clyde Fitch, George Kelly, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee in the United States. The relationship between the ways these men tried to find ways to live and love outside the law and the plays they wrote about heterosexual marriage continues to impact contemporary gay playwrights and the depiction of marriage.