SOURCE: Simpson, Lynne M. “The Failure to Mourn in All's Well That Ends Well.” Shakespeare Studies 22 (1994): 172-88.

In the following essay, Simpson probes the psychological and thematic function of loss, grief, and mourning in All's Well That Ends Well.

Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he regards it as self-evident. But to the psychologists mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back.

—Sigmund Freud, “On Transience”

For Coppélia Kahn, Shakespearean romantic comedies examine the issue of grief; however, she places this concern in terms of Blos's outline of adolescent development as biphasal and characterized by mourning:

Confronted with the great imperative of finding someone to love, the adolescent must give up the strongest love he has known thus far...