'The course of true love never did run smooth' - so says Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and for more than 2000 years the problems faced by young men and women fighting to find and keep an appropriate sexual partner have been a theatrical staple. This book explores the shapes that Romantic Comedy has assumed from Greek New Comedy via Shakespeare to the present. Changing social values have helped to redefine the genre's traditional hetero-normativity, while the recent trend towards more fluid casting has opened up many romantic comedies to radical reinterpretations. Organized chronologically to allow readers to trace the development of the form against changing societal norms, the book features a range of case studies of key works from the British tradition, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife, Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, Stanley Houghton's Hindle Wakes, Noël Coward's Private Lives, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, Ayub Khan-Din's East is East and David Eldridge's Beginning. Romantic Comedy reveals the complexity and nuance of a genre that we think we know and easily understand. Exploring examples drawn from 2,500 years of theatre history, the work both outlines the history of Romantic Comedy and shows how more recent plays challenge the conventions of the genre. The book is particularly strong in its attention to the plays as acts of performance as well as scripts. Griffiths considers how contemporary productions can shed new light on classic romantic comedies and how 21st-century dramatists rework mainstays of the Romantic Comedy repertoire, thereby offering new insights into gender, race, and class.