SOURCE: “All's Well That Ends Well: The Testing of Romance,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1, March, 1971, pp. 21-41.

In the following essay, Leggatt explores the tension between elements of romance and elements of realism in All's Well That Ends Well, noting that this tension is never resolved and therefore lends an experimental quality to the play.

It has been commonly observed that romance and realism are in conflict in All's Well That Ends Well.¹ But, to a surprising extent, critics have been content to state the fact and then drop it, while they pursue issues relating to the play's ideas, its characterization, its source material, or what have you. Perhaps this is because we are so much in the habit of searching Shakespeare's plays for abstract ideas or for characterization which is psychologically explicable. The idea that the play's form may in itself be the controlling factor...