Drawing Non-planar Graphs with Crossing-free Subgraphs

We initiate the study of the following problem: Given a non-planar graph G and a planar subgraph S of G, does there exist a straight-line drawing Γ of G in the plane such that the edges of S are not crossed in Γ? We give positive and negative results for different kinds of spanning subgraphs S of G. Moreover, in order to enlarge the subset of instances that admit a solution, we consider the possibility of bending the edges of G ∖ S; in this setting different trade-offs between number of bends and drawing area are given.