Ambivalent and autumnal in mood, All’s Well That Ends Well clearly belongs to the period of the *problem comedies (of which it is perhaps the most accomplished and the most elusive), although its precise date, in the absence of any external evidence or clear topical references, is harder to fix. In vocabulary it is closely linked to Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello, and it is most likely to have been written just after them, probably around 1604–5.
Text: The play’s only substantive text is that printed in the First Folio, apparently (to judge from its inconsistent speech prefixes, idiosyncratic punctuation, and *mute characters) from Shakespeare’s own *foul papers. This was probably the first play the Folio’s compositors set from such copy, which may help to explain its high percentage of misprints, errors, and cruces. Some details—such as the play’s division into five acts, its specification of *cornets in stage directions, and its use of the initials ‘G’ and ‘E’ in speech prefixes for the respective Dumaine brothers (possibly indications that these roles once belonged to King’s Company actors Gough and Ecclestone)—suggest that this authorial manuscript may have been used as a *Promptbook for a conjectural revival around 1610–11.
Source: The main plot of the play is from *Boccaccio, the novella of Beltramo de Rossiglione and Giglietta de Narbone recounted on the third day of the Decameron, which Shakespeare probably read in English in William *Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566–7). Shakespeare’s additions are, principally, the comic roles of Paroles and Lavatch.
Synopsis: 1.1 The widowed Countess of Roussillon takes leave of her son Bertram, who has been summoned to court by the terminally ill King of France, of whom he is a ward: with him goes the Countess’s old friend Lord Lafeu. The Countess’s own ward, Helen, weeping orphaned daughter of the physician Gérard de Narbonne, confesses in soliloquy that her tears are inspired not by her father’s death but by Bertram’s departure, lamenting that the difference between their ranks renders her secret desire for him hopeless. She is interrupted by the self-styled captain Paroles, Bertram’s companion, who engages in a bantering dialogue about virginity before following the Count: alone again, Helen hints that she may use the King’s illness as a means towards furthering her pursuit of Bertram.
1.2 The King, declining to aid Florence in its campaign against Siena, nevertheless agrees that French noblemen may volunteer on either side. Presented with Bertram by Lafeu, he waxes nostalgic about the Count’s late father, laments his own sickness, and asks wistfully after the dead Gérard de Narbonne.
1.3 The Countess is asked for permission to marry by her misogynistic servant Lavatch, whom she sends to fetch Helen, reported to have been overheard sighing for Bertram. Alone with Helen, the Countess exacts a confession of love from her, and gives her approval for Helen’s plan to visit Paris in the hopes of curing the King by means of one of her late father’s prescriptions.
2.1 The King bids farewell to the two Lords Dumaine, off to the Italian wars, as does Bertram, who longs to follow them despite the King’s commands to the contrary. Lafeu introduces Helen to the King, and she succeeds in persuading him to try her father’s remedy: he agrees that if it succeeds he will grant her any husband in his power.
2.2 The Countess sends Lavatch to court with a letter for Helen.
2.3 The fully restored King calls together all his lords for Helen to make her choice of bridegroom: she picks Bertram, who indignantly resists the idea of marrying a poor physician’s daughter. The King compels him, however, to go through an immediate wedding ceremony: meanwhile Lafeu scoffs at Paroles’s pretensions to courage and social status. Returning from his enforced wedding, Bertram tells Paroles he means to send Helen back to Roussillon without consummating the marriage and run away to the wars.
2.4 Paroles tells a grieved but compliant Helen that Bertram must depart at once on unspecified business and wishes her to return home.
2.5 Lafeu warns Bertram, in vain, against placing any faith in Paroles. Bertram takes a cold farewell from Helen, before he and Paroles leave for Italy.
3.1 The Lords Dumaine are welcomed to the battlefront by the Duke of Florence.
3.2 The Countess, delighted by the news of Bertram’s marriage to Helen, is shocked to learn that he has run off, never intending to consummate it. Helen arrives with the Lords Dumaine, who confirm that Bertram has joined the Duke of Florence’s army: in a letter he vows that he will never be Helen’s husband until she can show him the ring from his finger (which he never means to take off) and a child of hers to which he is father (which he never means to beget). Alone, Helen resolves to steal away, so that Bertram may be willing to return home from the perils of combat.
3.3 The Duke of Florence makes Bertram general of his cavalry.
3.4 The Countess receives a letter from Helen explaining that she has gone away on a pilgrimage so that Bertram may come home: she dispatches this news towards Bertram, hoping that both he and Helen may return to Roussillon.
3.5 A Florentine widow, her daughter Diana, and their neighbour Mariana are looking out for the army: Mariana warns Diana against Paroles, who has been soliciting on Bertram’s behalf, before an incognito Helen arrives as a pilgrim, and, accepting a lodging at the Widow’s guesthouse, learns of Bertram’s pursuit of Diana. They watch the troops pass—and see Paroles’s affected vexation about the capture of a drum—and agree, at Helen’s insistence, to speak further.
3.6 The Lords Dumaine persuade Bertram to expose Paroles’s cowardice by encouraging his boasted solo attempt to recapture the drum, offering to capture Paroles disguised as enemy soldiers and allow Bertram to overhear his interrogation.
3.7 Helen, her identity revealed, persuades the Widow to allow Diana to pretend to accept Bertram’s advances so that she can be replaced at a clandestine rendezvous by Helen.
4.1 The Lords Dumaine and others lie in wait for a frightened Paroles: simulating an absurd foreign language, they ambush him and lead him off to be questioned.
4.2 Bertram ardently woos Diana, who, following Helen’s instructions, persuades him to give her his ring before inviting him to her darkened chamber, for an hour only, at midnight.
4.3 The Lords Dumaine reflect on Bertram’s vices and virtues, on his reported seduction of Diana, and on the reported death of Helen: an exhilarated and unrepentant Bertram arrives to witness Paroles’s interrogation before setting off for France, the wars being over. The blindfolded Paroles, questioned through a supposed interpreter, invents scandalous gossip about the Lords Dumaine as well as revealing military secrets, and denounces Bertram as an immature seducer. Finally unmuffled and confronted by his comrades, who leave in contempt, Paroles resolves henceforth to make a shameless living as a laughing stock.
4.4 Helen, the Widow, and Diana set off for Marseille to see the King on their way to Roussillon.
4.5 Awaiting Bertram’s arrival, Lafeu and the Countess plan that the forgiven Bertram should marry Lafeu’s daughter, a scheme the King has already approved.
5.1 Hearing that the King has left Marseille for Roussillon, Helen and her two companions proceed thither.
5.2 Paroles begs to be received by Lafeu, who has already heard of his exposure and agrees to employ him as a fool.
5.3 The Countess, Lafeu, and the King, though lamenting the supposedly dead Helen, receive a pardoned Bertram, who claims that he disdained Helen only because already in love with Lafeu’s daughter, for whom, with the King’s approval, he produces an engagement ring. The ring, however, is one given him in the dark by Helen in Florence, and is recognized by the King as one he himself gave her. Bertram’s denials that he took it from Helen are in vain, and he is arrested under suspicion of having killed her. A letter arrives from Diana, revealing that Bertram promised to marry her on Helen’s death: she and the Widow are admitted and confront Bertram, confounding his insistence that Diana was a common prostitute by producing the ancestral ring he gave her. Diana’s claim that it was she who gave Bertram Helen’s ring, though, brings her evidence into question, and Paroles’s comically equivocal testimony clarifies nothing. Finally, a riddling Diana sends the Widow to fetch the pregnant Helen, whom Bertram, the conditions of his earlier letter now conclusively fulfilled, has to accept as his wife. The King, after promising to reward Diana with any husband she chooses, speaks an epilogue.
Artistic features: The play highlights the folk-tale origins of its story by casting dialogue in rhyme at crucial points of the narrative: these include Helen’s last soliloquy in 1.1, her interview with the King in 2.1, her choice of husband in 2.3, and the epistolary sonnet in 3.4 by which she announces her departure as a pilgrim, as well as Diana’s riddles and Bertram’s final capitulation in 5.3. Since this folk tale, however, is depicted as taking place in a realistic world (in which even the clown Lavatch is a bitter and unhappy cynic), the play is most remarkable for its irony, holding us at a reflective distance from its driven and unconfiding heroine and its caddish hero alike. Shakespeare multiplies the story’s ironies and parallelisms by his pointed juxtaposition of the gulling of Paroles (who believes himself to be committing treason when he is merely destroying his credit with his comrades) with the bed-trick used against Bertram (who believes himself to be committing adultery when he is really condemning himself to his arranged marriage).
Critical history: Before the mid-20th century, All’s Well That Ends Well characteristically received only qualified or grudging praise from literary critics, when it enjoyed their attention at all. Throughout its critical history the play’s inversions of the normal patterns of romantic comedy—its sympathy with an older generation who are usually right to circumscribe the freedom of the younger, the relentless pursuit by the play’s heroine of a love she knows to be unrequited, and the general atmosphere of disenchantment, loss, and mourning within which her plot unfolds—have made readers happier with Shakespeare’s more festive comedies uncomfortable, while the play’s closeness to a single narrative source has allowed some to dismiss it as a hasty piece of professional scriptwriting, some of whose faults (such as the indelicacy or improbability of the bed-trick) can be blamed on Boccaccio. Charlotte *Lennox was among the first to make the comparison between play and source, in 1753, generally to the play’s disadvantage, and her dislike of Bertram in particular was memorably seconded by Samuel *Johnson (1765): ‘a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dimissed to happiness.’ *Coleridge, more sympathetic to Bertram’s plight, defended him by attacking Helen instead (‘it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakespeare’s consummate skill to interest us for her’, Table Talk, 1835, although elsewhere he describes her as ‘Shakespeare’s loveliest character’), and for most of the next century discussions of the play continued to centre on whether its hero (hapless victim or bounder) or its heroine (virtuous exemplar of self-help or rapist upstart) was less objectionable. George Bernard *Shaw, for example, who praised the play as a prefiguration of Ibsen, sided with Helen, Frank *Harris with Bertram. Only since the 1930s have what once seemed the play’s moral failures or equivocations been revalued as successful dramatizations of an ethically complex world, its interest in expiation, pilgrimage, and forgiveness (particularly its plays on the word ‘grace’) often linked with the (similarly revalued) late romances. Enthusiastic supporters have included George Wilson *Knight and E. M. W. *Tillyard, although it is notable that the first monograph devoted solely to this play (by J. G. Price) only appeared in 1968, and is called The Unfortunate Comedy. Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith have recently suggested that the text of the play, first preserved in the 1623 Folio, bears features of linguistic adaptation by Thomas *Middleton.
Stage history: Price’s book is largely concerned with the fortunes of the play on the English stage down to the 1960s, which had amply earned it this title. No performances are recorded before a revival at Goodman’s Fields in 1741: over the next 60 years it had only 51 London performances and for the whole of the 19th century only seventeen. Early comment on the play is largely confined to the much loved role of Paroles, played successively by Theophilus *Cibber, Charles *Macklin, and, especially, Henry *Woodward: the nature of the play’s 18th-century appeal is suggested by Frederick Pilon’s unpublished adaptation of 1785, which concentrated almost entirely on Paroles’s gulling, cutting most of the first three acts. In 1794 John Philip *Kemble became the first major actor to bother with the role of Bertram, in an adaptation of his own which offered an idealized Helen, played by Mrs *Jordan, as its sentimental focus: this achieved only one performance, and when revived by Samuel *Phelps in 1852 (in a cut form which politely eliminated the bed-trick) it proved equally unpopular. Meanwhile a musical version by Frederick *Reynolds (1832) had equally failed to reconcile playgoers to what now seemed an unacceptably indecent plot-line, and the play was not performed professionally again until Frank *Benson cast himself as Paroles in a Stratford revival in 1916.
The play’s unfamiliarity and unpopularity freed 20th-century directors to take unusual liberties with its text, and even purists sought to justify their revivals by highlighting topical parallels. William *Poel’s production in 1920, taking a hint from Shaw, presented Helen as a proto-suffragette, while Barry *Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre production seven years later was in modern dress, with Laurence *Olivier as a would-be sophisticated jazz-age Paroles. Robert *Atkins produced the play three times (1921, 1932, 1940), to little avail, and it was only when Tyrone *Guthrie turned his attentions to it during the opening season of the Stratford, Ontario, festival in 1953 that All’s Well That Ends Well began to receive good notices again. Guthrie’s production (of a heavily cut and altered text which omitted Lavatch altogether), repeated in Stratford in 1959 (with Edith *Evans as the Countess), was given an Edwardian setting, except for the comically elaborated war scenes, which were set as if among General Montgomery’s Desert Rats. Michael *Benthall’s 1953 production for the Old Vic was if anything even more drastically cut and pasted, adding music and comic business in the interests of light-heartedness, so that Paroles, played by Michael *Hordern, once more became the centre of the play.
A return to Shakespeare’s text was marked in John Houseman’s production at Stratford, Connecticut, in 1959, and emulated in John *Barton’s successful 1967 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company (with Ian *Richardson as a redeemable Bertram). The play was at last fully vindicated by two widely praised revivals a decade later, David Jones’s at Stratford, Ontario, in 1977 (with Margaret Tyzack as the Countess), and, especially, Trevor *Nunn’s for the RSC in 1981 (with Peggy *Ashcroft as the Countess, Harriet Walter as Helen, and Robert Eddison as Lafeu), a production which followed Guthrie in setting the play in Edwardian dress but which played it more consistently as a moving Chekhovian tragicomedy. Gregory *Doran’s successful RSC production of 2003, with Judi *Dench as the Countess, achieved a similarly autumnal tone but returned the play to Jacobean dress. In 2009 Marianne Elliott directed an equally sumptuous but more stylized production at the *National Theatre, praised by critics as ‘a fairytale for adults’, and Nancy Meckler pursued a similarly storybook style in her 2013 production for the RSC.
Michael Dobson, rev. Will Sharpe
On the screen: Four television films have been based on the play between 1968 and 1985, three adapted from stage productions. Only Elija Moshinsky’s BBC TV version (1980) was initially designed for television.
Anthony Davies