SOURCE: "Power and Status," in Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 40-86.

In the following excerpt, Zitner examines the contemporary social conventions that underscore the action of All's Well That Ends Well.

All's Well opens with a social thunderclap which has been muffled by the passage of social history. It is doubtful that historical reconstruction alone will enable a modern audience to feel at once, though it may help us to 'appreciate', the intensity that hovers about the speeches at the very beginning of the first scene of All's Well, a moment in any case subject to neglect because of the audience's yet unfocused attention. The Countess is losing her son, not because in the ordinary course of the life of a peer he must go off to the kind of civil finishing school constituted by court attendance, but because...