The City Between Genre and Authorship in All’s Well That Ends Well

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, I analyse the construction of the city as an ideological space in All’s Well that Ends Well which, I argue, generates the play’s genre ambiguity. Drawing on recent scholarly work that has identified Thomas Middleton as co-author of the play, I investigate how the interplay between Middleton and Shakespeare’s artistic temperaments concretizes in the mental space of the city, which infuses the entire play. In my research, I propose a further attribution to Middleton and show that Middleton’s contribution leads to the formation of an imbalanced landscape, situated between crisis and change, between comedy and tragedy.