ABSTRACT
Aptly for a “problem play,” All’s Well That Ends Well begins with two problems: the King is deathly ill, and Helena is in unrequited love with her social superior and childhood playmate Bertram. As Bridget Escolme argues, “for early modern medicine, excessive passion was madness and was caused by the same humoral imbalances as passions”. The King’s fury also reflects the complex relationship between his disease and his identity as king. As Bianca Frohne and Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen show in their analyses of early modern life writing, even a private individual’s “infirmity” would become a communal experience in early modern era, as disabled person’s community attempted to help them. The negative term “haggish” also suggests that King was already aging in a way that frustrated him before he grew sick. The idea of continuing to live might also be unappealing because it is sometimes difficult to imagine oneself feeling differently on a physical level than one does right now.
