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Dramatic Conventions in All's Well That Ends Well
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In All's Well That Ends Well Shakespeare adopted Elizabethan dramatic conventions more literally than in any play written after his apprenticeship in the early 1590's and, as a consequence, produced a comedy more of an age than for all time. At the time when the War of the Theaters was subsiding and the innovations of comical satire were dramatically fashionable, a rash of plays, in fact most of the plays between 1601 and 1604 which are designated roughly as romantic comedies, used the same plot. This story traces the career of a well-born young man who succumbs to lust and riotous living; usually, as the play opens, he is betrothed or married to a virtuous young lady whom he spurns for a courtesan. As the play progresses, the hero grows increasingly obstreperous in the face of the heroine's stalwart devotion to him; finally the hero's sins catch up with him, he is brought to trial in which either his life is threatened or his pride is deflated by the exposure of his follies. In this trial he is purged of his lust, sees the value of the virtuous heroine and, cleansed, rejoins her to live out his days in true love.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960
References
1 These dates are taken from Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975–1700 (Philadelphia, 1940).
2 Oscar J. Campbell discussed thoroughly Jonson's adaptation of satire to the comedy of humours. Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's “Troilus and Cressida” (San Marino, Calif., 1938). Eugene M. Waith made an interesting proposition that the mixture of satire and romance was the forerunner of the “middle tone” for Fletcher's tragicomedies. “Characterization in John Fletcher's Tragicomedies,” RES, xix (1943), 141–164. Later he explored the theoretical basis for the juncture in the satyr which to the renaissance mind not only belonged to satire but also to pastoral romance. The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, 1952), pp. 43–85. Murray Krieger arrived at a similar conclusion about Measure for Measure from a different approach. “Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Comedy,” PMLA, LXVI (Sept. 1951), 775–784.
3 Campbell, pp. 135–184.
4 Arthur Hobson Quinn classified as faithful wife plays a number of those discussed here as prodigal son plays. “Introduction,” The Faire Maide of Brislow (Philadelphia, 1902), pp. 25–28. H. S. Wilson made a similar list grouped by the theme of the wronged wife, “Dramatic Emphasis in All's Well That Ends Well,” HLQ, xiii (1949–50), 217.
5 The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ii (London, 1874), 55.
6 W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931), pp. 63–64. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto, 1949), p. 114.
7 William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, i (London: The Cresset Press, 1929), 144.
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