All's Well That Ends Well Essay | Critical Essay #3

All's Well That Ends Well Critical Essay #3

Source: "Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All's Well That Ends well and Measure for Measure," in Shakespeare's Personality, edited by Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 151-74.

[In the following excerpt, Adelman explores the male desire to sexually contaminate a pure woman (as played out in the characters if Bertram in All's Well That Ends Well and Angelo in Measure for Measure, and haw this is integral to the bed trick and the unsustainability if marriage based on trickery. She also examines the "incestuous potential if sexuality" and haw these two male characters are drawn to sexual relations outside the context of marriage (and, for Bertram, outside the context if "family," as he regards Helena almost as a Sister).]

In the midst of Hamlet's attack on deceptive female sexuality, he cries out to...
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