SOURCE: "The Conclusion to All's Well That Ends Weir in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 257-76.

In the following essay, Gross analyzes the ending of All's Well That Ends Well, and addresses the debate abut whether the audience should receive the convention of a "happy ending" with regard to this play.

The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together: Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipt them not, and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherish'd by our virtues.

First Lord

The title of All's Well That Ends Well, a title which epitomizes comic or romantic endings, invites us to pay special attention to the ending of this play, to examine it against the norm of comic ending. Some critics take the sense of the title at face value, and believe with Hazelton Spencer that...