The Wife of Bath and All's Well That Ends Well

Summary

ALTHOUGH there has been much qualification of the “problem play” category for Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well (and sometimes Hamlet), critics have found the designation “too useful to abandon in approaching the untraditional, disturbing nature of these plays.” For All's Well, the problematic elements are legion and include “the counterpoint—or clash—between romance and prosaic reality,” its “unsatisfying ending,” its “generic anomaly,” and “its deep-seated pessimism about human worth and power.” The contemplation of these and other matters has led critics to suggest, in addition to the play's undisputed primary source (Boccaccio's Decameron, day 3, story 9, as translated by William Painter in The Palace of Pleasure, novel 38), a number of other sources, analogues, and parallels. In seeking to explain how the play “attempts to unite both the physical and the spiritual elements of human existence within a single structure of the imagination,” Peggy M. Simonds, for example, examines several motifs relating to sexuality and the sacred represented in five different texts that were “part of a common cultural context” for “Shakespeare and other creative artists of the period.” Maurice Hunt, in his detailed discussion of Helena and merit, foregrounds and elaborates on stories (also mentioned by Simonds) about bed tricks from Genesis. Given the high likelihood that Shakespeare drew on the Chaucerian oeuvre for Troilus and Cressida, one of All's Well 's companion problem plays, it is possible, even likely, that he returned to another part of the same source for material and stimulus when he found himself writing a drama about a range of issues relating to marriage, sexuality, merit, social class, and age—matters treated in complex and suggestive ways in the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale.

It seems clear that at the time he was working on All's Well, Shakespeare had been reading Speght's newly published folio edition of Chaucer (1598) to acquire materials for Troilus and Cressida. Troilus and Criseyde seems to have contributed a number of details to All's Well, including Helena's reference to the precious receipt, by which she cures the King and which her father “bade me store up, as a triple eye, / Safer than mine own two, more dear” (2.1.105–6).