All's Well That Ends Well (Vol. 63) - Susan Bassnett-McGuire (essay date 1984)
Susan Bassnett-McGuire (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: “An Ill Marriage in an Ill Government: Patterns of Unresolved Conflict in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, Vol. 120, 1984, pp. 97-102.
[In the following essay, Bassnett-McGuire suggests that All's Well That Ends Well reflects post-Reformation views of the marriage contract and also comments on the individual's relationship to the state.]
All's Well That Ends Well occupies one of the minor positions in the Shakespeare canon, and the map of its critical history reveals a text often held to be problematic, described variously as incomplete or inadequate, and perhaps dismissed most tellingly by Logan Pearsall Smith who declared that “it reads like hack-work.”2 Overall, critical opinions of the play have tended to see it as a flawed text in which disparate element sit uneasily together.
In the eighteenth century a resolution was...
[The entire page is 3436 words long]
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