61 pages • 2 hours read
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Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death, sexual content, and emotional abuse.
All’s Well draws heavily from two Shakespearean plays—All’s Well That Ends Well and Macbeth—to shape its structure, themes, and tone. These two plays offer contrasting frameworks: While All’s Well That Ends Well features a miraculous cure and a happy ending, Macbeth is centered on dark ambition, supernatural influence, and tragedy. Both plays feature ambiguous moral logic and unstable realities, and Awad uses them to reflect the shifting psychological and physical states of the novel’s protagonist.
Miranda, a college drama teacher, is determined to stage All’s Well That Ends Well, though her students find the plot to be “kind of lame” (17). The play is about a woman named Helen who cures a dying king and, in exchange, demands to marry Bertram, a nobleman who does not love her. To escape her, Bertram goes to war, but Helen eventually wins him back by substituting herself for another woman in a sexual encounter and becoming pregnant with his child. The play ends with a sudden reconciliation between the two that many critics—and Miranda’s students— find forced and unbelievable. The play is considered one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” since it cannot be neatly categorized as either a comedy or tragedy, and it has a mix of fairytale logic and cynical