All's Well That Ends Well (Vol. 26) | Sheldon P. Zitner (essay date 1989)
Sheldon P. Zitner (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Making it Theatre," in Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 161-80.
[In the following essay, Zitner explores the ways in which Shakespeare's structuring of the text and language of All's Well That Ends Well is suited for presentation on the stage.]
In the reading of a play, its language comes to the attention large and distorted like a face in a convex mirror. The contexts of words become peripheral, the words themselves more completely abstractions that have lost much of the referentiality of speech. It is easy for a reader to entertain interpretations that are unactable or untheatrical: Bertram as a heroic victim, Helena as a relentless bitch, Lavatch as a foul dullard. Brief phrases repeated adventitiously across the breadth of five acts can be marched side by side as evidence of highly calculated thought, and...
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