All's Well That Ends Well (Annotated ed)

All's Well that Ends Well receives, in this new edition, the full reconsideration for which it is overdue.

After a long theatrical and critical history marked by avoidance and simplification, the play's dislocations of desire and clashing ideologies of class and gender are made newly accessible to readers, performers, and audiences.

All's Well that Ends Well found little favor in the infrequent productions of earlier centuries, and was drastically reshaped by Garrick toward farce and by Kemble toward purity and pathos.

But artists of recent decades such as Guthrie, Moshinsky, and Nunn have used the very discords of style and genre once seen as defects as sources of theatrical power and complexity, just as critics from various perspectives--feminist, sociological, generic, psychological--have found new value and pertinence in a play that is itself a deconstructed fairy tale.

Susan Snyder's Introduction makes a distinguished contribution to criticism of the play, and the edition, offering freshly considered text, is fully and helpfully annotated.