All’s Well That Ends Well: Is It Really

Collection edited by W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. and Stephanie E. Chamberlain
Abstract due: November 1, 2024

This collection of essays seeks to explore the many new and cutting-edge directions surrounding the scholarship of All’s Well That Ends Well. Critics have long considered All’s Well That Ends Well a problematic play. Indeed, the play abounds with concerns that traverse our own time in many of the same ways as they did Shakespeare’s own. Ironically, in a reversal of early modern gender norms, a woman with medical expertise pursues a man, who is above her social class and uninterested in her advances. Broadly speaking, this collection of essays will address the intersection of female agency and female erotic desire. How does the King’s insistence that Bertram marry Helena after she has chosen him critique the patriarchal structure even as he is forced to marry a woman in whom he has no interest? In what way does the bed-trick which Helena deploys against Bertram function to undermine her own agency as a woman by ineluctably reducing female identity to a function of her sexuality? How does tricking Bertram into engaging with Helena undermine the concept of consent? Parolles, the miles gloriosus, is humiliated by being stripped to his underwear in a recent RSC production during the process of being interrogated. How does that accord with our contemporary notions of the appropriate treatment of prisoners of war or those incarcerated? All critical approaches are encouraged.

• Productions of All’s Well That Ends Well Past and Present on Stage
• Films, Adaptations, and Appropriations of All’s Well That Ends Well
• Issues of National Identity, Race, and Ethnicity in All’s Well That Ends Well
• The Problematics of Pedagogy, All’s Well That Ends Well, and the Undergraduate Classroom
• Homosociality and Queer Affiliations in All’s Well That Ends Well
• The Green World: All’s Well That Ends Well and Eco-criticism
• The Digital, Textual, and Editorial History of All’s Well That Ends Well

Please submit a 250 word abstract by November 1, 2024 to W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. at [email protected] and to Stephanie E. Chamberlain [email protected].