ABSTRACT
Critical debate has long surrounded the question of the precise genre of Shakespeare’s enigmatically titled “comedy” All’s Well, That Ends Well. Building on the work of Edward Dowden and Frederick Boas, W. W. Lawrence joined the dispute over the genre of All’s Well in the sections devoted to it in his suggestively titled study Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies. An august group of critics and scholars have subsequently drawn connections between the plot and characters of All’s Well and those of medieval morality plays. W. L. Godshalk helpfully summarizes their various positions in an essay which suggests that the play might be an anti-morality, since by act five “Deceptive means have led to the union of two deceivers.” Contemporaneously with Godshalk, J. M. Silverman maintained that the play failed to satisfy because it contained two different strains of nonsymbiotic comedy (“a deliberately naïve and ‘miraculous’ form of comedy” and “one more devious and filled with intrigue”), battling each other for control until the bitter end. Suggesting that the play has affinities with a sixteenth-century offshoot of the morality genre, Paula Neuss connects All’s Well (along with Measure for Measure) to proverb plays, such as William Wager’s Enough is as Good as a Feast (circa 1571). Robert S. Miola traces Shakespeare’s project to New Comedy, particularly his early habits of drawing upon Plautus and Terence, as in The Comedy of Errors’ reliance on Plautus’s Menaechmi. However, Miola does not pursue the local, contemporary significance of his own observation that “All’s Well bears interesting similarities to Shakespeare’s Merry Wives, his earlier exploration of the miles gloriosus. Both plays blend Roman comedy and folk tale.” Miola notes that in both plays, “the women control the male libido, transforming 1
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 611 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1
Tracing the play’s roots to a different, continental source, Louise George Clubbe links the nymphs and naiads of sixteenth-century Italian comedy to Shakespeare’s exploration of similar material in green world comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Clubbe’s estimation, Shakespeare makes innovative use of “the principles of nova comedia, not by borrowing plots from source, but by contaminatio of structures, recombining in novel ways theatergrams that had become part of a large common repertory.”2
