SOURCE: "Though Many of the Rich are Damn'd: Dark Comedy and Social Class in All's Well that Ends Well," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, Winter, 1977, pp. 517-27.

In the following essay, Love contends that All's Well That Ends Well is a dark comedy associated with the corrupting power of class.

However distinctive their separate approaches to the play, twentieth-century critics have largely agreed that the suspicions of Johnson, Dowden, and most Augustan and Victorian critics that All's Well that Ends Well is a "dark" comedy were ill-founded, and that an audience might safely take its cue from the King's final words, "The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet."

In 1922, W. W. Lawrence argued that the Elizabethan audience would have recognized the Clever Wench of folk tales in Helena, and the motifs of the Healing of the King and the Fulfillment of Tasks...