Noël Coward

Although dubbed ‘The Master’ by his admirers, Noël Coward was seen by his detractors as a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’, giving rise to a hermeneutic problem in categorizing the character and meaning of his output. Genre becomes a fallible tool in the exegesis of Coward’s musicals. He flitted deftly from revue to operetta, from original comedy to adaptation, from British to American models. Yet just as genre is often retrospectively extrapolated from key works to provide a framework for the scholar rather than a tangible taxonomy from the point of view of the artist, for Coward it might be argued that genre was a loose mode of reference rather than the essence of his musicals. This chapter proposes alternative strategies for analysing Coward’s work, referring to his life and overall output to argue that Coward’s musicals shaped his identity as much as his identity shaped his musicals.