ABSTRACT
All’s Well, That Ends Well raises troubling questions about the nature of wellness – in body, spirit, and comedy itself – that the fairy tale ending does little to assuage. The play’s title and sly epilogue invite us to believe “all is well ended” yet the ending – Bertram’s declaration of love after his shifty denial about his affair with Diana just moments earlier – can come across as too sudden and strained to be believable or emotionally effective. The troubling ending seems at odds with the usual happy resolutions of comedy, and critics have responded to this jarring of generic convention by labeling All’s Well a “problem play.” Susan Synder remarks about the ending, “at the end of the play, all is well in only the first, more external sense: the plot has come right . . . what is still pending . . . is the complex of desire and frustration that Shakespeare could not resolve for his heroine.” Where Synder sees Helena as frustrated at the end of the play (she has achieved her desire, but at what price?), David Scott Kastan’s criticism locates the audience’s frustration in the nature of Shakespearean comedy itself: “We are forced to recognize that comic triumph is not innocent . . . that is, we are forced to contest the claim that ‘all’s well, that ends well.’” Like Kastan, Lisa Jardine disagrees that “all’s well,” and observes the state of being well only applies to a select masculine few; thus marriage is not an equitable ending in Rossillion: “All is well that ends well for the male world of the play in which Helena’s initial transgression is redeemed into chaste service.” These critics take issue with the play’s abrupt move toward moral, social, and sexual wellness through the marriage of Bertram and Helena, and as Sujata Iyengar wryly comments, “No where is the adverb ‘well’ made to work harder than in [this] play.”1
