Shakespeare's Development and The Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter Turn. Richard P. Wheeler. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1981,  229 pp.

Although a large number of Shakespeare's plays have been called problem plays, few critics would deny that term to All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, the two plays that are the main subject of this book. Richard P. Wheeler also goes along with the main current of critical tradition, as well as with the response of most readers, in finding these plays unsatisfactory because their conclusions are unconvincing. In doing so, he is opposing some recent critical attempts to find a coherence in these plays based on a moral pattern that exists independently of the psychological development of the main character. The pattern that Wheeler finds is not so much in the plays as in the development of Shakespeare's entire work, his life-long attempt to resolve some basic psychological tensions: “The relative failure of the problem comedies to achieve … dramatic integration … can provide valuable perspectives on those disruptive psychological tensions that Shakespeare's art exists to shape and control and understand in the symbolic action of the drama.”

And Wheeler does succeed in giving us such perspectives. Making good use of psychoanalytic concepts such as fusion and separation (Margaret Mahler) basic trust (Erik Erikson) and the formation of the self (D. W. Winnicott), Wheeler shows how the failure of the leading characters in these plays to resolve their sexual conflicts can be understood by looking forward to heroes of the late romances, like Leontes and Prospero, who are successful in doing so. Whereas Bertram, in All's Well, resists submission to the need for fusion “until the very end and then does not embrace it very successfully,” and the Duke's proposal to Isabella, in Measure for Measure, “suggests more a denial of [his] isolation than a fully successful triumph over it,” Leontes, in The Winter's Tale, and Prospero, in The Tempest, are able to overcome man's fear of the destructive power of women, and regain a sense of trust. The use of psychoanalytic co