SOURCE: Halio, Jay. “All's Well That Ends Well.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15, no. 1 (winter 1964): 33-43.

In the following essay, Halio examines the sources, dramatic structure, and characters of All's Well That Ends Well, and contends that although fascinating and complex, the play is a failure.

Certainly W. W. Lawrence's complaint about the criticism of Shakespeare's problem comedies—or the lack of it¹—has steadily been remedied. Not only do we have Lawrence's own extensive research, but the plays have elsewhere won treatment, notably in E. M. W. Tillyard's book² and many times in articles and whole chapters of works on Shakespeare. This new interest parallels a rather considerable revision in our critical approach to Shakespeare and to literature in general, and one might speculate with good cause on how much this new approach is, in fact, responsible for the attention the problem comedies have recently attracted. But such speculation is...