Coward, Noel (Vol. 1) - Coward, Noel 1899–

Coward, Noel 1899–

English playwright, actor, and composer, best known for Private Lives and Blithe Spirit. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 17-18.)

Though for a while Noel Coward seemed to take a cynical delight in his parade of 'hags who've never surrendered to Anno Domini', he was as conscious a moralist as those medieval writers who paraded the Seven Deadly Sins. Yet, in the manner of his day, he snapped his fingers in the faces of the moralists and tweaked their noses in derision. The immediate popularity of his early plays was due to the 'smartness' of the dialogue (an echo of the conversation that many listeners liked to imagine themselves conducting all day and every day) and to the opportunity that these plays gave for the vicarious satisfaction of anti-social impulses. Until he wrote the first-rate comedy, Hay Fever (1925), his plays were mainly significant as a symptom of the deadly amorality of a section...

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