Possible Pregnancy and All’s Well’s Uncertain Ends

Abstract:In All’s Well That Ends Well, Helen announces a possible pregnancy: it proliferates interpretations and cannot be confirmed or disproven. Recognizing Helen’s pregnancy as possible makes retroactively evident the play’s fracturing patriarchal power structure, impotent model of cultural reproduction, and recursive temporality. Helen and Bertram face an excess of parental figures, biological and surrogate, who trouble familial roles and interrupt the patrilineal inheritance they advocate. Lineal descent and linear time intertwine and preclude them from copying their elders or inaugurating a new generation to produce stability. Shakespeare dangles biological reproduction as a panacea but permanently defers it.