ABSTRACT
In the last third of his career, Shakespeare carried out some extraordinary experiments with comedy. All’s Well, That Ends Well (?1604-5) is among the first of these ambitious plays, which culminate in The Winter’s Tale (?1610) and The Tempest (?1611). All’s Well is striking for its focus on sexual and gender politics; its heroine was termed by Shaw “too . . . modern” for early-twentieth-century audiences, and it was called a “radical” play even as recently as the 1990s. It is a play that has benefited from what Hugh Grady has termed “presentist” criticism, that is “shaped by the ideologies and discourses of our cultural present.”1 Indeed, perhaps only in the last twenty years has an adequate critical vocabulary been developed to appreciate, even to describe, All’s Well, and in recent years it has engendered both intense critical debate and diverse and often spectacularly successful productions. Theatrically, despite a few loose ends, and notwithstanding a highly flawed text, among the least trustworthy in the Folio, it is tightly constructed, and without Shakespeare’s occasional middle-act untidiness; it has a number of powerful long scenes and contains two bold theatrical devices, an exchange of sexual partners and a climactic revelatory scene with strong religious overtones. It is also one of Shakespeare’s theatrically most open-ended plays; at points, he only sketches crucial pieces of what conventionally would be most looked for in “realistic” plot and characterization, thus providing significant openings for directorial decision and interpretative debate. It is, overall, we are rediscovering, or discovering for the first time, an unjustly neglected play.
