SOURCE: Silverman, J. M. “Two Types of Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well.” Shakespeare Quarterly 24, no. 1 (winter 1973): 25-34.

In the following essay, Silverman examines the dual nature of the play's structure, demonstrating the way the comedic action of All's Well That Ends Well moves from simple and naïve to a more complex and insidious form.

The willful refusal of certain characters to participate in the final comic harmony, and the manifold paradoxes which inform the “mature” comedies of Shakespeare, confront us with dramatic designs which threaten our usual assurance that disparate elements will ultimately knit together into a single structure. Occasionally, moreover, we find plays which are so obviously bifurcated that to reduce the importance of this structural break and replace it with some broad scheme of unification is to do serious damage. The Winter's Tale is an obvious example, with its hiatus of sixteen years...