Conflict in All's Well That Ends WellOne of the themes that emerge from Shakespeare's comedy All's Well That Ends Well is the conflict between old and new, age and youth, wisdom and madness, reason and passion. As one critic points out, a simple look at the play's characters reveals an almost equally balanced cast of old and young. "In the representation it is evident that the youth of the main characters, Helena, Bertram, Diana and Parolles, is in each case exactly balanced by the greater age of their counterparts, the Countess, the King of France, the Dowager of Florence and the old councilor Lafeu . was young", and Bertram's dignity towards the ailing king of France in the previous scene seems to depend on his youthful resemblance to his deceased father. As the King explains, "Such a man might be a copy of these younger times, / Which followed well, would show them now / But they go back in time" [I.2. 49-51]. Like many young men of letters of his time, Shakespeare went back in search of the source material for All's Well and based the work on Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Boccaccio's story from the early sixteenth century revolves around Giletta di Narbona, daughter of a rich and respected doctor. Giletta, like Elena (the daughter of the deceased - and destitute - Gerard de Narbonne), falls in love with the young Count Beltramo, follows him to Paris where he treats the king's incurable illness and, due to her newly acquired royal favor, is granted the right to demand a husband: Beltramo. Despite… middle of paper… in the confusing and difficult landscape of gender politics and postmodern deconstruction. And instead of accepting Helena's all-too-confident statement that “All's well that ends well,” we might more willingly embrace the King's more ambiguous statement: “All's well again.”1 JL Styan, All's Well That Ends Well (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) 15.2 WW Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, 1931 rpt (New York: Ungar, 1960).3 Anne Barton, "Introduction," All's Well That Ends Well in The Riverside Shakespeare ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) 501.4 Ibid, 500.5 David McCandless, "Helena's Trick: Gender and Performance in All's Well That Ends Well" Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 455.6 Richard A. Levin, "All's Well, That Ends Well, and 'All Seems Well'", Shakespeare Studies (1980): 131.7 McCandless, 450.