Sacred and Sexual Motifs in All's Well That Ends Well
W ~hatever scholars may think of its value as a work of poetic literature, Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well is remarkably entertaining in the theater. Perhaps this is so because it fulfills the fundamental generic responsibility of comedy; it overcomes the death of the fathers through a bawdy emphasis on youthful sexuality and love, and it manipulates mythical plot elements that are subconsciously familiar to any audience in Western civilization. The play skillfully diverts our attention from death and burial to the "little death" of sexual orgasm, from age, illness, and the destruction of war to marriage and thejoy of new life. Above all, it is not so much a "problem play" in the Shavian sense as it is a typical work of Renaissance comic art that attempts to unite both the physical and the spiritual elements of human existence within a single structure of the imagination. In this essay, I shall examine certain intertextual relations concerned with the subject of matrimony that may help to shed some light on the play's meaning or meanings to a Renaissance audience. Specifically, I shall compare certain aspects of All's Well with: (I) the so-called "Greek Epithalamium" by Catullus; (2) the colloquy "Proci et Puellae" by Erasmus; (3) the text of the I 5 59 marriage liturgy we may presume was used in the offstage wedding of Helena and Bertram; (4) an important scriptural use of the bed-trick to fulfill the obligations of the marriage contract; and (5) a sermon by a leading Anglican divine of the period. Of course, I am not concerned here with proving that any of these texts was a direct source for the comedy. All of them were familiar to literate men and women of the English Renaissance; they all formed part of a common cultural context for thework of William Shakespeare and other creative artists of the period.