ABSTRACT
In the final scene of All's Well That Ends Well, the king of France is faced with the baffling restoration of the play's heroine reported dead. Registering his perplexity along with no small degree of consternation, he exclaims: "Is there no exorcist/ Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?/ Is't real that I see?" (5.3.305-7).l The king's confusion over how to read Helen's only apparent revivification by an "exorcist" (she has simply set forth the rumor of her death) identifies the play as one of Shakespeare's explorations of the early seventeenth-century controversy swirling around the practice of dispossession rituals so witheringly rejected by Samuel Harsnett in A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) and examined just a few years later by the playwright in King Lear. Such an interest in exorcism is also necessarily framed by a related awareness of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century paradigms of hysterical disease, though this interconnectedness is seldom acknowledged in the many discussions about King Lear.2 Far more scrutiny has been trained on Samuel Harsnett's vigorous prosecution of exorcisms as false theatrical spectacles and on Shakespeare's representation of Harsnett's material in Lear rather than on apprehending the complex layers of the social controversy well beyond the matter of Shakespeare's interest in determining whether demonic possession and exorcisms were elaborately staged hoaxes.
