SOURCE: “New Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 23-43.

In the following essay, Miola studies Shakespeare's adaptation of Latin New Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well.

We are all familiar with the traditional understanding of sources: a source is a previous text that shapes a present one through authorial reminiscence and manifests itself in verbal iteration. As the seminal works of Baldwin, Muir, and Bullough amply demonstrate, this definition has served us long and well, but every element in it has undergone intense scrutiny and reevaluation. Scholars now recognize the potential limitations of a linear, author-centered, and largely verbal approach and have become attuned to the likelihood of intermediation, the encodings implicit in genre and language, the more oblique and more satisfying evidence of configuration—both rhetorical and dramatic. Within the spacious perspectives provided by scholars like Leo Salingar...