Play: The Romantic Age

Overview
A. A. Milne’s The Romantic Age (1920) is a light, witty comedy in three acts that explores the gap between storybook ideals and the everyday realities of affection, adulthood, and social convention. Written just after the First World War, it channels Milne’s characteristic blend of urbane dialogue, gentle satire, and tender humanity. The play turns the lens on a household enlivened, and occasionally exasperated, by a young heroine’s insistence on living by the codes of chivalric romance, while the older generation and more practical suitors try to coax her back toward common sense. Rather than scolding youthful idealism, Milne affectionately teases it, asking whether “romance” is a destination, a disguise, or a quality that can be discovered within ordinary life.

Plot Summary
The action unfolds in a comfortable English home where a spirited young woman, steeped in poets and fairy-tale adventure, longs for gestures of gallantry and peril that the world no longer seems to offer. Her family and friends, amused but concerned, fear that her expectations will wreck any sensible match. A well-meaning plan is hatched to “cure” her: if real life appears too dull, then it will be made theatrically romantic until the contrivance shows its seams. Into this drawing-room comes a figure who seems to fit the heroine’s dream, an elegant, self-advertised man of action and mystery, or else a poet who talks like one. For a while, the charade works: by moonlight, with hints of danger and gallant vows, the heroine is intoxicated by the tableau she has always imagined. But the more elaborate the staging becomes, the clearer its absurdities and risks. In the end, the heroine recognizes that the most reliable devotion often arrives without trumpets: the steadfast, unshowy lover who refuses to perform a part is the one who truly sees her. The household’s plot thus backfires in the best way, by letting the heroine choose maturity on her own terms, conserving her taste for beauty while swapping melodrama for mutual respect.

Characters and Dynamics
At the center stands the romantic idealist, whose hunger for chivalry catalyzes the action. Opposite her is a sensible suitor, awkward only in his refusal to counterfeit passion; instead, he offers constancy and humor. Older guardians and friends supply Milne’s trademark chorus of bons mots: worldly but kind, they engineer the teaching moment and then learn from it themselves. The interloper, part poet, part peacock, gives the play its carnival mirror, embodying the theatricality of romance as pose. Servants and onlookers, practical and observant, puncture pretension while advancing the comedy.

Themes
Milne contrasts romance as spectacle with romance as temperament: is love a string of gestures or a daily habit of attention? He plays with performance and self-invention, how easily people mistake heightened language for depth and confuse risk with value. The play also nudges at class and gender scripts, showing how “romantic” behavior can become a costume enforced by expectation. Yet Milne refuses cynicism. He suggests we needn’t abandon ideals; we can relocate them, finding bravery in honesty, chivalry in consideration, and adventure in the work of partnership.

Style and Significance
The Romantic Age showcases Milne’s elegant construction: crisp scenes, bright epigrams, and a gentle shift from farce to feeling. While it pokes fun at moonlit melodrama, its ending is disarmingly warm, inviting audiences to keep their taste for poetry without letting it rule their choices. Positioned among Milne’s successful early comedies, the play endures as a charming argument for grown-up romance, less theatrical, more durable, and no less magical.