THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER--EVEN AHAB

By MICHAEL QUINN

HESTER PRYNNE LIVED down her scarlet letter. The same can hardly be said of the makers of the latest screen adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, who are taking heat for the happy ending tacked on to Nathaniel Hawthorne's immortal bummer--only the latest misadventure in a centuries-old tradition of slapping a smiley face on downbeat classics.

SHAKESPEARE: Today audiences like their Shakespeare straight up. But theatergoers centuries earlier preferred "improved" versions, including Romeo and Juliet with a non-Kervorkian resolution. Among Shakespeare's self-appointed co-writers was the now forgotten Nahum Tate (1652-1715), who cut and pasted his way through Coriolanus, Richard II and, most notoriously, King Lear, to whom Tate restored sanity, crown and daughter Cordelia before the curtain fell. Among Lear's last Tate speeches: "Cordelia shall be a queen./ Winds catch the sound/ And bear it on your rosy wings to heaven./ Cordelia is a queen."

DON CARLOS: If any art form would seem at home with tragedy, it would be opera--yet even Verdi wasn't above the altered ending. In his 1867 opera, Don Carlos, a full-throated tale of royal intrigue, the titular tenor is saved from doom by heavenly intervention. In the 1787 Schiller play on which the opera is based, Don Carlos is handed over to the Spanish inquisition--by his own father.

THE SEA BEAST: This 1926 silent-movie version of Moby Dick changed more than just the title. As "Ahab Ceeley," high-profile John Barrymore survives his duel with the Great White Whale--and gets a love interest. Critical reactions? The New York Times blubbered with praise, while allowing that "it would have been preferable ... to forgo the use of a property moon in one setting, as it is by no means realistic."

LOVE: Greta Garbo's 1935 turn as Anna Karenina was faithful to Leo Tolstoy: Anna indeed ends her life under the wheels of a passing passenger train. But in 1927 she appeared in a silent-movie adaptation, which, in one version, concluded with Anna reunited with her lover Vronsky after the convenient death of her husband.

MY FAIR LADY: Playwright George Bernard Shaw's clearheaded comedy Pygmalion (1913) ends with Eliza Doolittle leaving her mentor Henry Higgins to pursue a life of her own. To stymie efforts to tag on a happy ending, Shaw went so far as to write an afterword in which he married off Eliza to the foppish Freddy Hill. But Shaw's efforts were in vain: the wildly popular musical version, staged in 1956, six years after his death, ends with the unmistakably romantic reconciliation that audiences had secretly been hoping for for half a century.

THE LITTLE MERMAID: Hans Christian Andersen gave his poignant tale of a mermaid who gives up her voice in order to walk on land a tragic denouement: unable to express her love to a handsome prince, she loses him and dies heartbroken. But Disney being Disney, the animated 1989 version of the tale ends with ... well, what do you think?