SOURCE: “All's Well That Ends Well and the Limits of Comedy,” in ELH, Vol. 52, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 575-89.

[In the following essay, Kastan explores the problematic view of comedy presented in All's Well That Ends Well.]

Renaissance theories of comedy generally stress its moral function: “Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life,” says Sidney, which the comic poet “represents in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.”¹ Comedy, then, is at once critical and corrective, holding the mirror up to degenerate nature so that the viewer may see and repudiate its images of human folly.

Thomas Heywood similarly conceives comedy's function:

either in the shape of a clown to shew others their slovenly and unhandsome behaviour, that they may reforme that simplicity in themselves which others make their sport, lest they happen to become the like subject of generall scorne to an auditory; else intreates of love, deriding foolish inamorates, who spend their ages, their spirits, nay themselves, in the servile and ridiculous employments of their mistresses.

But Heywood knows that Sidney's moral claims for comedy will not fully account for its strategies and structure. Comedy does provide examples of behavior to be shunned, but, Heywood continues,

these are mingled with sportfull accidents, to recreate such as of themselves are wholly devoted to melancholly which corrupts the bloud, or to refresh such weary spirits as are tired with labour or study, to moderate the cares and heavinesse of the minde, that they may returne to their trades and faculties with more zeal and earnestnesse after some small, soft and pleasant retirement.²

Here comedy both reforms and refreshes, as Heywood grafts onto Sidney's exemplary notion a recreative conception. Reluctantly he acknowledges that comedy is not merely a glass of moral behavior, but lest its “harmless mirth” seem frivolous he carefully subordinates its pleasure to social utility: comedy's “sportfull accidents” become a scheme for increasing worker productivity, sending its audience back “to their trades and faculties with more zeal and earnestnesse.”

Interestingly, neither Sidney nor Heywood mentions comedy's most obvious formal characteristic—its happy ending. Medieval definitions, derived from the fourth-century grammarians, insist that comedy enacts the triumph of joy over sorrow,³ but both Sidney and Heywood ignore this formal fact, as if any such acknowledgment would detract from their moral claims. Sidney's mimetic conception of comic character and incident, and Heywood's added notion of an invigorative comic effect both imply an easy transaction between the play world and the real world of the audience. Happy endings, however, threaten to deny or at very least restrict this transaction, reminding us by their too ready compliance with our wishes that comedy is more fully responsive to human desire and design than life is.

This willingness to gratify human desires in the face of the evidence of human experience discomforts those who demand moral utility from art. Bacon complains that “the Stage is more beholding to Love than the Life of Man,”⁴ but comedy, in spite of the claims its moral defenders make for it, is not a representation of life. If comedy serves human need it does so precisely by its refusal to represent life, by its self-conscious repudiation of life's imperfection. According to the generic definitions derived from the late classical commentaries on Terence, comic action—unlike tragic—is to be feigned rather than drawn from history, testifying to comedy's freedom to shape its fiction into comforting patterns of wish fulfillment.⁵

Shakespeare's comedies at once enjoy and explore this freedom, and in the process seek to break free from the withering dialectic of comedy that has “truth” and “falsehood” as its polar terms. Shakespeare flaunts his willingness to gratify our hopes and desires, flaunts the comedies' subordination of reality to the pleasure principle. “Comedy,” according to the induction of Mucedorus, “is mild, gentle, willing for to please,”⁶ and Shakespearean comedy is “as you like it” or “what you will”; it offers not an image of a perfect world—comedy portrays Ardens, not Edens—but images of a world whose imperfections, however improbably, yield to the comic logic: “Tempests are kind and salt waves fresh in love.”⁷ The laws of comic form conveniently triumph over the hostile laws of cities like Ephesus or Athens, presenting us not with “an imitation of the common errors of our life” (as Sidney understood comedy) but with examples of our common hopes for harmony and happiness, common dreams of a reality responsive to the manipulation of the will.⁸

Yet we are never completely released to the appeal of our hopes and dreams; we are made to recognize that they become articulate only as we willfully and insistently deny reality. The cost of our dreams, then, is the inescapable reminder that they are only dreams. Twelfth Night ends with the marvelous triumph of rearrangement and revelation, but what determines its propriety and effectiveness is a logic of comedy rather than of character. We are prepared for a happy end; the characters are not.

To call attention to the formal rather than the psychological justifications of its conclusion, however, is not to engage in the critical activity Richard Levin has called “refuting the ending.”⁹ It is not to find the ending either inadequate or ironic, but only to see it as it is: as a self-consciously improbable—though thoroughly desirable—resolution of loyalties and affections. But we can hardly deny that it lacks credibility.¹⁰ Olivia marries Sebastian unaware that he is not Cesario, unaware that Sebastian even exists, and Orsino proposes to Viola within seconds of learning that she is not Cesario, while she is still dressed as a man:

                                        Give me thy hand,
And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds.

(5.1.264-65)

Certainly if Shakespeare were trying to convince us that these are marriages of true minds other tactics would be employed, but at the end of Twelfth Night the resolution is formal rather than emotional, as the reunion of the twins makes clear. Twins separated for only three months would hardly need to test their identities in order to reestablish their relationship; Viola and Sebastian, however, enact a scene of discovery out of Heliodorus or Cox and Box:

Viola: My father had a mole
upon his brow.
Sebastian: And so had mine.

(5.1.234-35)

It is difficult for any ending to avoid seeming forced and artificial. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” Henry James reminds us in the preface to Roderick Hudson, “and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so.”¹¹ In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare happily draws the circle of formal completion, but the arbitrariness of his design calls attention to the geometry of his fiction rather than to the inevitability of the form. Shakespeare, not time, untangles the knots of frustration and confusion that have inhibited the comic triumph. The action ends well, but manifestly because the playwright has decreed that it will.

The satisfactions that the ending yields are the satisfactions of form. The play asserts not the ability of reality so conveniently to shape itself to our desires but only of art to do so. Comedy triumphs here, extravagantly demonstrating its willingness to please, as Feste reminds us:

A great while ago the world begun,
                    With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that’s all one, our play is done,
                    And we’ll strive to please you every day.

(5.1.394-97)

Shakespeare's comedy, then, is neither a mirror of life nor merely a diversion from it. It is neither curative nor anodyne. Rather it is palliative. No doubt we must say that comedy is too good to be true but not, as the moral critics fear, too good to be good. Its action and our response to it attest powerfully to the need for—and the possibility of—the experience of harmony, to the appeal of “beauty,” as we once might have termed it, rather than to the authority of “truth.” But if this is a victory for comedy, the triumph is limited by the reminder, “Our play is done.” Though the actors promise that they will strive to please us every day, even their willing exertions cannot turn London into Illyria, except during “the two hours' traffic of our stage.”

In the so-called problem comedies,¹² however, the exertions of the actors cannot turn even Illyria into Illyria; the comic resolution does not release comic celebration. “All is well ended,” says the King in the epilogue of All's Well That Ends Well, “if this suit be won, / That you express content”; yet “content” is not what we feel. Usually comedy gratifies what tragedy frustrates—“the fictive aspirations,” in Paul Hernadi's phrase, that “Shakespeare has led us to endorse.”¹³ But the problem of the problem comedies is that although fictive aspirations have been gratified (thus the plays are not tragedies), we have not been led to endorse these aspirations; indeed we have been made suspicious of them (thus the plays are not precisely comedies). They are generic mixtures, or generic mutations, that lead us to withhold our endorsement by making the gratification of desire appear so willfully manipulated and contrived. Precisely what makes the plays comedies, then, is what leads us to deny them that status.

The contrivance of the romantic comedies, as we have seen, establishes them literally as play worlds, worlds of make-believe, witnessing to Shakespeare's manipulation and control, and freeing us to delight in them. In the problem comedies the contrivance is the characters' own and is throughout too self-regarding, too unresponsive to the needs and desires of others, to permit our delight. We are forced to recognize that comic triumph is not innocent, that event usually will not yield to desire without some other desire yielding to event; that is, we are forced to contest the claim that “all's well that ends well.”

The epigrammatic title of Shakespeare's play may virtually serve as a definition of comedy, and appropriately the play is Shakespeare's most insistent exploration of the nature of the comic assertion—indeed of the idea of comedy itself. Nonetheless, its own “most lame and impotent conclusion” has won it few admirers. (Critics apparently prefer to do their own refuting of Shakespeare's endings rather than attend to the ones Shakespeare refutes for them.) Jack has his Jill—or, more properly, Jill her Jack—but we remain unpersuaded that all has ended well. Bertram, to whom Dr. Johnson was unable to “reconcile” his heart, is, in Johnson's phrase, “dismissed to happiness”¹⁴; and though Helena finally does earn Bertram's love, she succeeds through a tenacity too nearly predatory to be completely attractive or satisfying. If they stand together at the play's end, it is with the knowledge that the process that has brought them there has humiliated each.

The ending is thus appropriately couched in qualifications and conditionals:

All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,
The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.

(5.3.329-30)

Tortuously, the comedy has achieved a realignment and reintegration of its society, as comedy must, but the stability of even the subdued and sober resolution that is achieved is called into question by the King's offer to Diana: “choose thou thy husband, and I’ll pay the dower” (5.3.324). The King, of course, had made the same offer to Helena, and now the possibility of a second imposed marriage shows how little has been learned, and threatens to reinitiate the action of the play.

In spite of its title, the play refuses to end well, indeed virtually refuses to end at all; but, pointedly, it is the desire for comic endings that has informed—and deformed—the action throughout.¹⁵ Helena carefully plots a New Comedy. Her conversation with Parolles has rescued her from passivity, animating her previously “slow designs” (1.1.211), and she commits herself to overcoming the barrier she sees to love's fulfillment. “Who ever strove / To show her merit that did miss her love” (1.1.218-19), she asks, then confidently sets off for Paris in order to display her merit and gain her love.

Her plot—on the level of plot—is successful. She cures the King's fistula, is given freedom to choose a husband, selects and marries Bertram. But here she is made to see the limitations of formal control. Bertram can be compelled to marry but he cannot be compelled to love; and when it is clear he will not, Helena is content to withdraw her claim:

That you are well restored, my lord, I’m glad.
Let the rest go.

(2.3.146-47)

The King, however, will not “let the rest go.” His “honor's at the stake” (2.3.148); if her comic powers have proven inadequate, his, he feels, are able to enforce Bertram's submission to the comic design:

                                        Here, take her hand,
Proud, scornful boy, unworthy this good gift,
That dost in vile misprision shackle up
My love and her desert.

(2.3.149-52)

But it is Bertram's love that is at issue here—not the King's—and that love can neither be deserved nor compelled. The barrier to the fulfillment of Helena's New Comic plot is revealed to be not Helena's social class or even Bertram's intractable snobbery, but an inadequate conception of love—or, put differently, an inadequate conception of comedy, a conception that would exclusively formalize comic action, shaping comic characters and events to our desires.

Of course, this describes almost exactly the procedure of Shakespeare's romantic comedy, but All's Well That Ends Well raises doubts about both the aesthetics and the ethics of this kind of comedy. It is not so much tragicomic as anticomic. Bertram is “crushed” with Helena's plot. The healing of the King has no logical relation to Helena's marital hopes, nor can an appeal to the folktale origins of the story remove the unpleasantness.¹⁶ Bertram's ungenerous response reminds us that this is not a folktale. “Why then, young Bertram, take her; she’s thy wife,” the King instructs, and Bertram hesitates: “my wife, my liege?” Irritated by Bertram's resistance, the King tries to justify the match:

                                        Know’st thou not, Bertram,
What she has done for me?

And Bertram's reply testifies to the play's distance from the comic paradigm that underlies it:

                                        Yes, my good lord,
But never hope to know why I should marry her.

(2.3.104-5, 107-9)

Bertram has become one of those refuters of the ending, refusing to bow gracefully before the logic of the form. He insists upon his psychological integrity rather than accepting his role within the comic design. When he does submit, he bows grudgingly to necessity rather than to love, to the King rather than to Helena: “I submit / My fancy to your eyes” (2.3.166-67). And if he is forced to take Helena's hand, he drops it at the first opportunity: “Tomorrow / I’ll to the wars, she to her single sorrow” (2.3.289-90). At the end of Helena's New Comedy, no “golden time convents” like that which the Duke promises at the end of Twelfth Night (5.1.371). Here Bertram rejects and perverts comedy's promise of permanence and stability: “I have wedded her, not bedded her, and sworn to make the ‘not’ eternal” (3.2.20-22).

Bertram's unintended pun, of course, alerts us that, though the play's first example of comic designing has failed, others must follow. In act 5, scene 3, believing Helena dead, the King, with the aid of the Countess, again attempts his comic artistry. The play is now not Plautine but Christian, not New Comedy but a prodigal-son play.¹⁷ The Countess urges the King to forgive her erring son:

                                        ’Tis past, my liege,
And I beseech your majesty to make it
Natural rebellion done i’th’blade of youth.

(5.3.4-6)

“Make it” most obviously means “consider it” but it also suggests that such a consideration is a willful imposition upon disagreeable and recalcitrant facts. Again comedy will occur when character and event are shaped by desire. “I have forgiven and forgotten all” (5.3.9), the King assures the Countess. “We are reconciled,” he says, and to Bertram he promises: “the time is fair again” (5.3.21, 36). The erring son has returned home, and the King celebrates the reformation of Bertram and the re-formation of the comic society:

                                        All is whole
Not one word more of the consumèd time.

(5.3.37-38)

Clearly, however, the wholeness that comedy would effect is merely asserted here, not achieved. The King would banish memories of the disturbing past, but the “consumèd time” will not easily be forgotten, a fact the King's language betrays even as he denies it:

                                        Let him not ask our pardon;
The nature of his great offense is dead,
And deeper than oblivion do we bury
Th’incensing relics of it.

(5.3.22-25)

Though the King claims to have “forgiven and forgotten all,” Bertram's “offense” is still “great” and the “relics” still “incensing.” The fragility of this comic plot is obvious, and with the discovery of Helena's ring this effort happily to end the action with the marriage of Bertram and fair Maudlin must itself be abandoned. “I am wrapped in dismal thinkings” (5.3.128), the King reluctantly admits.

If the King temporarily resigns his role as comic manipulator, Helena has not completely abandoned her comic aspirations. Bertram's letter declaring his intention never to live with Helena contains in its only apparently impossible conditions the means by which he may be forced to do so. In Florence when Helena discovers Bertram's pursuit of Diana,¹⁸ she realizes that she may even now “rough-hew” the ending she desires: “Doubt not,” she says to the widow,

                                        but heaven
Hath brought me up to be your daughter's dower,
As it hath fated her to be my motive
And helper to a husband.

(4.4.18-21)

The notorious device of the bed trick permits Helena to get from Bertram both the ring and the child that he believes she never will. It is a disturbing episode raising complex moral issues, but for the moment what is important to notice is that once again Helena succeeds, only to discover that her success is merely formal. The revelation at court is brilliantly structured. Diana's riddles create the demand for, and the expectation of, a triumphant reversal of the events which heretofore have resisted all efforts to shape them into comedy. Diana accuses Bertram:

He knows himself my bed he hath defiled,
And at that time he got his wife with child.
Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick.
So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick—
And now behold the meaning.

5.3.297-301)

She sets the scene and prepares the triumph, and predictably the King is delighted by the show:

                                        Is there no exorcist
Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?
Is it real I see?

(5.3.301-3)

But Helena, as Michael Shapiro has shrewdly observed,¹⁹ denies her victory:

                                        No, my good lord,
’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see,
The name and not the thing.

(5.3.303-5)

She is forced to admit once again that her notion of love as something that can be earned—either by healing the King or by satisfying the conditions—is inadequate. Love must be freely given, not compelled. She is forced to see that happy endings so obviously manipulated will not satisfy—not even the successful manipulator.

But rather than relinquishing her claim as she does in act 2, Helena presses it, aware that she holds a winning hand. The potential comedy of forgiveness emerges as a Terentian comedy of intrigue:²⁰

                                        There’s your ring,
And, look you, here's your letter. This it says:
“When from my finger you can get this ring
And are by me with child, etc.” This is done.
Will you be mine now you are doubly won?

(5.3.307-11)

If the ending fails to satisfy it is because it is so willful, so desperate to claim what may be “won,” which is always less, as even Helena knows, than what may be given.

As if to acknowledge how fragile and tentative the conclusion is, the play ends with its well-known litany of conditionals. Touchstone says in As You Like It that there is “much virtue in if” (5.4.103), but “if,” in All's Well That Ends Well, rather than releasing possibilities as in the Forest of Arden, restricts them. Conditions here exist to be satisfied, to fix rather than to free, to exploit rather than to explore, emotional possibilities and attitudes.

Bertram: If she, my liege,
can make me know this clearly,
I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.
Helena: If it appear not plain and
prove untrue,
Deadly divorce step between me and you.

(5.3.312-15)

The confident assertion that “all's well that ends well” (4.4.35) has to be reformulated less optimistically, “all yet seems well” (5.3.329), and the doubts are raised precisely by what should allay them: the ratification of the marriage bond. Instead of Helena and Bertram standing together in mutual need and trust, each hides behind the conditional—one nervously looking for the way out, the other smugly certain it is unavailable. Yet the play does not abandon its efforts to find some convincing term of comic triumph, and extends its search into the epilogue. If the characters are unable to make the play a comedy, perhaps their audience can:

The King's a beggar, now the play is done.
All is well ended if this suit be won,
That you express content; which we will pay
With strife to please you, day exceeding day.
Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts;
Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts.

Another “if” qualifies the claim that “all is well ended.”²¹ Now we must “express content,” though only three lines earlier the King was unable himself to do so unequivocally: “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet …” (5.3.329). But lest his doubts deter us, he is willing to purchase our pleasure to bring about the happy ending the completed action has been unable to effect: “we will pay / With strife to please you, day exceeding day.” Alone among Shakespeare's epilogues, this one offers to buy our good will, as Helena offers to buy the widow's:

                    Take this purse of gold
And let me buy your friendly help thus far,
Which I will over-pay, and pay again
When I have found it.

(3.7.14-17)

In this problem comedy what should be freely given must be bought. Even Helena's gracious “cure” has a price: “if I help you what do you promise me?” (2.1.190). Florence is much like France, no regenerative green world but another place where commitments must be purchased or won. The King's offer to “pay” us for our “content,” even in the currency of art, would establish a relationship between the play and its audience much like the relationships between characters within the play, relationships that have proven inadequate. One last time, in the epilogue, the King tries to ensure that all will end well, and to the extent that we do applaud and our applause tacitly expresses “content,” the King's suit is “won” and “all is well ended.” But the King has won only in the limited sense that Helena has “won” (5.3.311). His too is a victory of form, an assertion of desire. We applaud, but we do so in response to the convention of the epilogue rather than to its literal appeal.

But that is what we have been doing all along—responding to a convention. The play is a comedy—all's well that ends well—if we attend to the conventions of the genre, at least insofar as the genre may be defined by actions ending well. The play, however, makes us recognize the inadequacy of a conception either of comedy or of ethical behavior that focuses exclusively on ends. Helena may hold that “whate’er the course, the end is the renown” (4.4.36), but we have discovered that “the course” matters, that ends achieved by refusing to take full account of the ends of others (that is, by turning them into means) are neither comic nor moral.²² We have learned too much about the limitations of human desire and design to accept the comic assertion that would ignore the means used to achieve it. Helena would reassure herself and us:

All's well that ends well yet,
Though time seems so adverse and means unfit.

(5.1.25-26)

But even if the action “ends well,” the “means unfit,” which have trampled on the ends of others, disrupt the comic claim. If All's Well That Ends Well is a problem comedy, then, it is so because it sees so clearly that comedy is a problem. All is not necessarily well that ends well, and actions that end well are not necessarily comedies.

The harmony of comedy is achieved, in Bacon's phrase, “by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”²³ and its perfected form is thus at once a denial of and a consolation for the imperfections of the world in which we live. All's Well That Ends Well, however, makes us suspicious of “the desires of the mind,” because they are revealed to be usually unable or unwilling to acknowledge fully the integrity and autonomy of other minds' desires. Helena's desire for Bertram, the King's for wholeness, and even our own for comic satisfaction can be fulfilled only by assuming that “the shows of things” exist primarily for our own pleasure and purpose. The play, on the other hand, makes manifest and urgent its concern that desire be civilized, be humanized, in its refusal to end well, that is, in its refusal to allow the desires of the mind the victory comedy claims for them.

In an odd sense, then, Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well marks a return to Sidney's notion that “comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life,” for the play enacts, and forces us to enact, the “common error” (attested to by the insistent claims of scientific, civil and social engineering) of supposing that reality should yield to human desire. The play's reiterated, if continually reformulated, contention that “all's well that ends well” testifies to that supposition, but precisely what necessitates the reiteration and reformulation—the play's stubborn resistance to ending well—testifies that the aphorism is not necessarily either good or true.

The melancholy clown, Lavatch, who has learned of the impossibility of “an answer [that] will serve all men” (2.2.13), points to the inadequacy of applying the aphorism to all situations as he reveals the difficulties of ending well. To Helena's query about the Countess, Lavatch replies:

She is not well, but yet she has her health; she’s very merry, but yet she is not well. But thanks be given, she’s very well and wants nothing i’th’world. But yet she is not well.

(2.4.2-5)

When Helena demands some further sense from Lavatch's equivocation, he replies, “Truly she is very well indeed, but for two things”:

One, that she’s not in heaven, whither God send her quickly; the other that she’s in earth, from whence God send her quickly.

(2.4.10-12)

Lavatch insists that none can be completely “well” while alive in the fallen world. Perfect endings must wait for some better place where grace purifies desire. In this imperfect world, as the King says, “laboring art / Can never ransom nature from her inaidable estate” (2.1.118-19). The “laboring art” of All's Well That Ends Well does not pretend to ransom fallen nature; pointedly, it does not submit the shows of things to the desires of our mind, but it does explore and extend the limits of comedy.²⁴

Notes

1. The Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965), 117.

2. An Apology for Actors (London: Shakespeare Society, 1814), 54.

3. Vincent of Beauvais, for example, defines comedy as “poetry reversing a sad beginning by a glad end” (quoted in C. S. Baldwin's Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic [1928. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959], 176); and Dante writes that “comedy begins with sundry adverse conditions but ends happily” (Epistolae, trans. Page Toynbee [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966], 200). In the sixteenth century, Webbe echoes these commonplaces. “Comedies,” he says, “beginning doubtfully, drewe to some trouble or turmoyle, and by some lucky chance alwayes ended to the ioy and appeasement of all parties” (Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith [1904. Reprint. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967], 1:249).

4. “Of Love,” in Francis Bacon: A Selection of his Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (New York: Odyssey, 1965), 68.

5. New editions of the important fourth-century commentaries on Terence are needed since they exist primarily in the conflated and occasionally garbled form in which they appeared in sixteenth-century editions of the plays. Nonetheless the insistence upon the fictive nature of comedy is clear. Servius writes of comedy that “the matter consists of fictitious materials … for never does actuality (res gesta) have a place in comedy” (quoted in T. W. Baldwin, Shakespere's Five-Act Structure [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1947], 66). See also Marvin Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1964) for an extended account of the influence of Servius, Evanthius, and Donatus upon sixteenth-century critical theory and artistic practice.

6. A Most Pleasant Comedie of Mucedorus (London, 1598), A2^v.

7. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general editor, Alfred Harbage (1969. Reprint. New York: Viking, 1977).

8. See Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965); and Anatomy of Criticism (1957. Reprint. New York: Atheneum, 1965), esp. 163-87.

9. New Readings vs. Old Plays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), 102-25.

10. Dr. Johnson writes of the ending of Twelfth Night: “The marriage of Olivia, and the succeeding perplexity, though well enough contrived to divert on the stage, wants credibility, and fails to produce the proper instruction required in the drama, as it exhibits no just picture of life” (Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, vol. 7 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson [New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968], 326).

11. Roderick Hudson (New York: Scribner's, 1907), vii.

12. In Shakespere and His Predecessors (London: John Murray, 1896), F. S. Boas first applied the term “problem play” to All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, seeing them as plays whose endings produce neither “simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome …” (345).

13. “The Scope and Mood of Literary Works: Towards a Poetics Beyond Genre,” Language, Logic, and Genre, ed. Wallace Martin (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1974), 50.

14. Johnson on Shakespeare, 404.

15. See Ian Donaldson's excellent essay “All's Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare's Play of Endings,” Essays in Criticism 27 (1977): 34-55; see also Roger Warren, “Why Does It End Well?: Helena, Bertram, and The Sonnets,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 79-92; Gerald J. Cross, “The Conclusion to All's Well That Ends Well,” Studies in English Literature 23 (1983): 257-76; and Thomas Cartelli, “Shakespeare's ‘Rough Magic’: Ending as Artifice in All's Well That Ends Well,” Centennial Review 27 (1983): 117-34. For a more general account of the problems of ending in Shakespeare's comedies, see Anne Barton's admirable account, “As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending,” in Shakespearian Comedy, ed. David Palmer and Malcolm Bradbury (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 160-80.

16. W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 48-61. See also Northrop Frye, The Myth of Deliverance (Toronto Univ. Press, 1983), 46.

17. See Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), esp. 103-31, for a reading of the entire play in the context of the Christian “belief in the reality of the descent of grace upon a sinning human” (131).

18. Helena's convenient arrival in Florence has troubled many critics who have observed with Dr. Johnson that Florence is “somewhat out of the road from Rousillon to Compostella.” St. Jaques le Grand (3.5.32) seems certainly to refer to the famous pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostella in northwest Spain. Shakespeare, however, does not raise questions about her route; indeed the widow observes that “There’s four or five, to great Saint Jaques bound, / Already at my house” (3.5.91-92).

19. “‘The Web of our Life’: Human Frailty and Mutual Redemption in All's Well That Ends Well,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 71 (1972): 521-22.

20. J. M. Silverman, in “Two Types of Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well,” (Shakespeare Quarterly 24 [1973], 25-34), sees the play moving from a “naive and ‘miraculous’ form of comedy” to “one … filled with intrigue” (25).

21. Thomas Cartelli, in his suggestive essay in Centennial Review, argues, on the contrary, that the “subtle displacement of the King's ‘seems’ by the epilogue's ‘is’” helps confirm “the felt closure carefully cultivated by Shakespeare” (132, 133).

22. See section 2 of Kant's The Moral Law, or Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), where the logic of ends and means is subjected to the fullest ethical scrutiny.

23. The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: Dent, 1915), 85.

24. I am grateful for the opportunity to have delivered and discussed versions of this essay at the post-graduate seminar at The University of London and at a session at the 1983 MLA arranged by the Shakespeare division. I would like to extend my thanks in particular to David Daniell, Charles Forker, David Trotter and René Weis.