SOURCE: “‘Adoption Strives with Nature’: The Slip of Patriarchal Signifiers in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State, Associated University Presses, 1995, pp. 127-48.

In the following essay, Hall investigates Helena's “upwardly mobile” desire in All's Well That Ends Well, contending that “her actions restore the very patriarchy which she seems to threaten.”

In this chapter I want to examine the way in which the romance narrative of All's Well That Ends Well (1599), together with the archaizing representation of the feudal court of France, in fact addresses the anxieties of the centralizing kingdom of England of Shakespeare's time, for this play is by no means a merely idealizing or escapist fantasy. The archaism itself is the locus of a contemporary breakdown, and the mobile heroine, Helena, emerges as the agent of an extremely precarious restoration.

The plot of All's Well That Ends Well...