ABSTRACT
The story of the chivalric quest, exemplified by George Wilkins' tale of the shipwrecked prince, combines a number of very ancient folk tale motifs. At first sight, All's Well That Ends Well has little in common with the type of story exemplified by Wilkins' tale. The plot of the play is derived from Boccaccio's Decameron mediated, in all probability, through William Painter's sixteenth-century anthology, The Palace of Pleasure. Though heavily reliant upon folk tale, Boccaccio's story clearly derives from a different tradition from that to which Wilkins' narrative belongs. The heroine's social position has also undergone a notable change between prose works and play. Where Wilkins' tale centers firmly upon the travels and experience of a prince, Shakespeare's alternative version of the chivalric story begins in the domestic, and thus implicitly female, sphere. The process of defamiliarization exemplified in the relationship between the two scenes that makes All's Well That Ends Well a key text for contemporary gender studies.
