All's Well

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 realism.

Miranda’s attachment to the play, however, is both professional and personal. She was performing as Helen when Paul, her ex-husband, fell in love with her. To her, the play represents a time in her life when she still believed in her potential and happiness. By insisting on staging and directing it, she is attempting to reclaim her sense of self and some control over her life, which she feels is spiraling away from her. She also identifies with Helen’s efforts to control her fate, even through questionable means. At the same time, Miranda is surrounded by students and colleagues who prefer Macbeth and who view All’s Well That Ends Well as uninspiring. This emphasizes the tension between Miranda’s need for healing and acceptance and the world’s preference for tragic stories of power and ambition.

In Macbeth, the titular character is a Scottish general who receives a prophecy from three witches that he will become king. Driven by this vision, he murders the reigning monarch, begins a violent descent into tyranny, and loses his grip on reality. While the witches never instruct him to kill, their influence shapes his destiny. The play is structured around supernatural influence as well as psychological and moral collapse.

These themes surface in All’s Well through Miranda’s encounter with three mysterious men who appear when her pain reaches a breaking point. Their presence coincides with a dramatic shift in her circumstances. Her physical pain disappears, and those who dismissed or harmed her begin to deteriorate. This reversal mirrors the arc of Macbeth’s rise, though Miranda did not consciously initiate it. Rather, even here, Miranda’s powerlessness over the events of her life remains in focus: She navigates a world where outcomes seem shaped by forces beyond her control and understanding, whether physiological, psychological, or supernatural. As the novel progresses, Miranda’s perception of time, language, and space becomes unstable, mimicking Macbeth’s disorientation in the later acts.

Although Shakespeare’s The Tempest does not feature prominently in the novel’s plot, Miranda’s name is also significant. In The Tempest, Miranda is the sorcerer Prospero’s daughter and lives on an island governed by illusion, enchantment, and theatrical control. This allusion reinforces All’s Well’s interest in manipulation, performance, and the instability of perceived reality. This reference is echoed through Miranda’s dean, who boasts about playing Caliban once in a community theater production of The Tempest. While he frames this as a sign of empathy and theatrical common ground, Miranda sees through the performance, likening him to a disguised monster who uses false allyship to undermine her. This aligns her academic environment with the performative and coercive dynamics of The Tempest.

Though these references, Awad plays with The Blurring Lines Between Performance and Reality throughout the novel, in which characters seem to adopt scripted roles and performances bleed into daily life. She also positions her novel in conversation with Shakespeare’s interest in agency, transformation, and fate.