ABSTRACT
The preoccupation with stepparents in the passage recurs throughout the texts of early modern England. Surrogate parents of many types also recur throughout Shakespeare’s own canon, where, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, literally realized stepmothers and -fathers often figure other types of proxy. All’s Well That Ends Well, a play in which both the king and the Countess of Rossillion replace dead parents, achieves its comedic closure through other forms of substitution. Generalizations about the prevalence of surrogate parents must be bracketed with cautions, thus providing an exemplary instance of the potentialities and dangers of practicing cultural history. Moreover, though the contrast between cultural myths about unscrupulous surrogate parents and the more positive behavior of some of them was no doubt sometimes a source of relief, it could again erode categories, spinning judgments and perceptions until they whirled as dizzyingly as a Van Gogh cypress.
