Conflict in Alls Well That Ends Well Essay -- Alls Well That Ends We

Conflict in eithers Well That Ends Well One of the themes that emerges from Shakespeares comedy Alls Well That Ends Well is the conflict between disused and new, epoch and youth, wisdom and folly, reason and passion. As one critic points out, a simple glance at the characters of the unravel reveals an almost equally balanced cast of old and novel. In performance it is apparent that the youth of the leading characters, Helena, Bertram, Diana and Parolles, is in each case precisely balanced by the greater age of their counterparts, the Countess, the King of France, the widow of Florence and the old counselor Lafeu.1 Indeed, the dialectic between youth and age is established in the first act as the Countess sees a mirror of her fountain self in Helenas love sick countenance in scene three when she exclaims Even so it was with me when I was young, and Bertrams worthiness to the ailing King of France in the previous scene appears to hang upon his youthful resemblance to his decea sed father. As the King explains, Such a man might be a replica to these younger times,/Which followed well would demonstrate them now/But goers-backward I.2. 49-51.Like so many literary youths of his day, Shakespeare went backward for his source material for Alls Well and based the play on Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron. Boccaccios early sixteenth-century story revolves around Giletta of Narbona, the daughter of a wealthy and respected physician. Giletta, like Helena (the daughter of the deceased--and indigent--Gerard de Narbonne), falls in love with young count Beltramo, follows him to Paris where she remedies the Kings incurable disease, and, because of her newly-acquired royal favor, is granted the right to demand a husband Beltramo. Despite ... ...ng the confusing and difficult landscape of gender regime and postmodern deconstruction. And rather than accept Helenas all too confident statement that Alls well that ends well, we might more willingly embrace the Kings more ambigu ous statement, All yet seems well.1 J.L. Styan, Alls Well That Ends Well (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1984) 15.2 W.W. Lawrence, Shakespeares Problem Comedies, 1931 rpt (New York Ungar, 1960).3 Anne Barton, Introduction, Alls Well That Ends Well in The Riverside Shakespeare ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1974) 501.4 Ibid, 500.5 David McCandless, Helenas Bed-trick Gender and action in Alls Well That Ends Well Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994) 455.6 Richard A. Levin, Alls Well That Ends Well, and All Seems Well, Shakespeare Studies (1980) 131.7 McCandless, 450.