The Triumph of Age: All’s Well that Ends Well

Nina Taunton

Brunel University, England

In the early modern period, a hoary head and wrinkled visage were prime signifiers of conflicting messages; they were simultaneously markers of the enduring virtues of wisdom and experience needed for a healthy politics of family and state, and of the inevitable physical and mental decay caused by loss of heat and what Bacon termed ‘radicall moisture’ in the body. This paper will show how Helena and the King of France in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well occupy two contradictory but cross-fertilising positions which thrive simultaneously in the prescriptive literature on old age. In pushing the relationship of old to young away from normative youth/age binaries into more inclusive and complementary areas, I argue that the play utilises a process that was perfectly acceptable to early modern writers on old age, who perceived that the moral, intellectual and spiritual strengths of the old could occasionally be present in the young, just as they believed that it was possible for the old to retain the physical vigour which was the hallmark of youth.