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One of the most important plot conventions of romantic comedy is what Stanley Cavell has dubbed the comedy of remarriage. In this sort of plot, a husband or wife or both entertain prospects of marriage with another but are eventually reconciled with their original spouse. For Cavell, this plot is particularly associated with screwball comedy, although he identifies general precedents for it in Shakespearean romantic comedy. Cavell notes that a distinguishing feature of screwball as opposed to older theatrical forms is that 'the drive of its plot is not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together, together again. Hence the fact of marriage in it is subjected to the fact or the threat of divorce.'1 More recently, Charles Musser has raised the question of the historical origin of the remarriage plot. He discusses three films by Cecil B. DeMille, Old Wives for New (1918), Don't Change Your Husband (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920), all of which deal with divorce. Musser points out that the first, Old Wives for New, should not properly be considered a comedy of remarriage because it is not consistently comic in tone - it is a dramatic film about remarriage with comic elements - and because the divorcing couple remarry to new and different mates.2 It does represent a starting point for this plot, however, since it manifests an interest in divorce and 'sex psychology' and sets up a pronounced intertexual play with the other two films. Both Don't Change Your Husband and Why Change Your Wife? seem to follow Cavell's prototype: divorce is followed by marriage to another for one of the spouses and the films conclude with the reconciliation and remarriage of the original couple. Musser appeals to the social context of the late 191 Os, when divorce was becoming more acceptable and a `new morality' was beginning to take shape, to explain the emergence of DeMille's films: 'DeMille's comedies of remarriage play with larger social anxieties in ways that offered release and refuge from some of the uncertainties and even dread of this new order, in which fulfillment always seemed just out of reach ... They made fun of-divorce even as they made it fun, they made fun of consumption even...