The Princess Bride

Overview

The Princess Bride is William Goldman's 1973 novel that pretends to be something else: an abridgment of a long-winded classic by the Florinese writer S. Morgenstern, cut down by Goldman to "the good parts" — the fencing, fighting, true love, giants, revenge and miracles his father supposedly read aloud to him when he was sick as a boy. Morgenstern and his book do not exist, and neither does the gruff, immigrant father of the frame story, nor the unhappy marriage and indifferent son Goldman describes in his introductions. The frame is itself part of the fiction.

The result is a book that parodies the fairy tale and loves it at the same time. It is one of the landmarks of comic fantasy, and through Rob Reiner's 1987 film, one of the most quoted fantasy stories ever told.

Origins

Goldman, a novelist who had become one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters, began the book as a bedtime story for his two young daughters, who asked for a story about a princess and a bride. He found the tale worked best as a story being read aloud and argued over, and so invented Morgenstern and the frame of a boy listening to his father. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published it in 1973.

The story

In the kingdom of Florin, the beautiful Buttercup falls in love with Westley, the farm boy who answers every request with "As you wish." Westley leaves to seek his fortune and is reported killed by the Dread Pirate Roberts. Years later Buttercup, heartbroken, agrees to marry the cruel Prince Humperdinck. She is kidnapped by three hired men — the Sicilian schemer Vizzini, the gentle giant Fezzik and the Spanish swordsman Inigo Montoya, who has spent his life hunting the six-fingered man who killed his father — and pursued by a masked man in black.

What follows is a sequence of set pieces now famous in their own right: a sword duel atop the Cliffs of Insanity, a battle of wits over poisoned wine, the Fire Swamp with its Rodents of Unusual Size, torture in a machine that sucks away years of life, and a resurrection by the grumbling Miracle Max. Throughout, Goldman interrupts to comment on what he has "cut," and to insist that life is not fair — the book's melancholy counterweight to its jokes.

Reception & impact

The novel won a loyal readership, and for years Goldman struggled to get it filmed. Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights in 1973 for $500,000; the project stalled, Goldman bought the rights back, and directors including François Truffaut and Robert Redford circled it. Rob Reiner finally made the film, with financing from Norman Lear, and Goldman wrote the screenplay himself. Released by Fox on 25 September 1987, with Cary Elwes as Westley, Robin Wright as Buttercup, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo, André the Giant as Fezzik, Wallace Shawn as Vizzini, Chris Sarandon as Humperdinck, Christopher Guest as the six-fingered Count Rugen, Billy Crystal as Miracle Max and Peter Falk and Fred Savage in a new grandfather-and-grandson frame, it earned a modest $30.9 million. Home video made it a phenomenon. Lines such as Vizzini's "Inconceivable!" and Inigo's vow to the man who killed his father became part of everyday speech, and in 2016 the film was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.

Legacy

The Princess Bride belongs to a wave of 1980s fantasy films alongside Labyrinth (1986) and Willow (1988), but it has outlasted most of them because of its self-awareness. Its knowing, affectionate relationship with genre conventions — heroes who comment on the plot, villains who explain their schemes, a narrator who argues with the reader — became a model for later comic fantasy and for the genre-savvy humor that fills modern roleplaying tables and computer RPGs alike. Goldman's 25th-anniversary edition in 1998 added "Buttercup's Baby," a sample chapter of a sequel, and further teasing appeared in later editions; the sequel was never finished before his death in 2018.