OF THE SO-CALLED 'dark' or 'problem' comedies two -- All's Well
That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida-- have a significant and
direct relevance to our present inquiry. Moreover, a considera-
tion of the positive and negative attitudes to romance manifested
in all three will help us considerably in the solution of several
outstanding problems raised by these plays.

Whatever its exact position in the sequence of Shakespeare's
plays, ¹ All's Well is certainly the nearest in spirit and dramatic
structure to the three comedy masterpieces. At the centre there is
once more a story, borrowed through Painter Palace of Pleasure
( 1566) from Boccaccio, of a youth and a maid; and this tale
has a large number of the usual romantic features. There are
adventures, journeys and pursuits, miraculous events, strange
coincidences, disguises and mistaken identities. In the last act,
out of all this tangle, the youth and the maid are united, and
all ends well -- at least by the superficial standards of romantic
justice.

Yet in spite of these characteristics the tale of Bertram and
Helena is the least romantic of all the serious love-stories we have
so far examined in the Comedies. To begin with, even in its
original Boccaccio form, the story is a singular one, since by
making the heroine the pursuer -- and an energetic and determined
one at that -- Boccaccio completely inverts one of the main
postulates of romantic love-narrative. If Shakespeare merely
followed this unromantic inversion, he at least followed it of his
own choice. At the same time, while the nature of the main
story precluded any scenes of courtship or any expression of the
romantic love-liturgy, which had been evolved for the male
wooer, there was certainly some scope, if Shakespeare had cared
to exploit it, for a display of romantic sentiments in Bertram's
attempt to win Diana. As it is, the play is as bare of romantic

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