Conflict in All's Well That Ends WellOne of the themes that emerges from Shakespeare's comedy All's Well That Ends Well is the conflict between the old and the new , age and youth, wisdom and madness, reason and passion. As one critic points out, even a glance at the play's characters reveals an almost equally balanced cast of old and young. "In the representation it becomes clear that the youth of the main characters, Helene, Bertram, Diane and Parolles, is in each case precisely counterbalanced by the greater age of their counterparts, the Countess, the King of France, the Widow of Florence and the old councilor Lafeu. »1 Indeed, the dialectic between youth and age is established in the first act when the Countess sees a mirror of herself in the lovesick face of Hélène in the third scene when she exclaims, "Even so it was with me when I was young", and Bertram's dignity towards the ailing French king in the preceding scene seems to depend on his youthful resemblance to his deceased father . As the king explains: "Such a man could be a copy of those younger times,/What followed well would now demonstrate them/But the arrears" [I.2. literary figures of his time, Shakespeare went back to find his sources for All's Well and based the play on Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron. Boccaccio's early 16th century story revolves around Giletta of Narbonne, daughter of a wealthy and respected doctor. Giletta, like Hélène (the daughter of the deceased and indigent Gérard de Narbonne), falls in love with the young Count Beltramo, follows him to Paris where she cures the king's incurable illness and, because of her newly acquired royal title, favor, obtains the right to demand a husband: Beltramo. Despite the middle of the article......the confusing and difficult landscape of gender politics and postmodern deconstruction. And rather than accepting Helena's overconfident declaration that "All's well that ends well," we might more readily embrace the king's more ambiguous declaration: "All seems well for now." »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 ends well in The Riverside Shakespeare ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) 501.4 Ibid, 500.5 David McCandless, “Helena's Bed-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" Well, It Ends Well and "All Seems Well," Shakespeare Studies (1980): 131.7 McCandless, 450.