All's Well That Ends Well
All's Well That Ends Well is a play by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1604 and 1605,[1] and was originally published in the First Folio in 1623.
Though originally the play was classified as a comedy, the play is now considered by some critics to be one of his problem plays, so named because they cannot be neatly classified as tragedy or comedy.
Characters
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Synopsis
Helena, the orphan daughter of a famous physician, is the ward of the Countess of Rousillon, and hopelessly in love with the son of the Countess, Count Bertram, who has been sent to the court of the King of France. Despite her beauty and worth, Helena has no hope of attracting Bertram, since she is of low birth and he is a nobleman. However, when word comes that the King is ill, she goes to Paris and, using her father's arts, cures the illness. In return, she is given the hand of any man in the realm; she chooses Bertram. Her new husband is appalled at the match, however, and shortly after their marriage flees France, accompanied only by a scoundrel named Parolles, to fight in the army of the Duke of Florence.
Helena is sent home to the Countess, and receives a letter from Bertram informing her that he will never be her true spouse unless she can get his family ring from his finger, and become pregnant with his child—neither of which, he declares, will ever come to pass. The Countess, who loves Helena and approves of the match, tries to comfort her, but the distraught young woman departs Rousillon, planning to make a religious pilgrimage.
Meanwhile, in Florence, Bertram has become a general in the Duke's army. Helena comes to the city, and discovers that her husband is trying to seduce the virginal daughter of a kindly Widow. With the connivance of the daughter, named Diana, she contrives to trick Bertram: he gives Diana his ring as a token of his love, and when he comes to her room at night, Helena is in the bed, and they make love without his realizing that it is Helena. At the same time, two lords in the army expose Parolles as a coward and a villain, and he falls out of Bertram's favor. Meanwhile, false messengers have come to the camp bearing word that Helena is dead, and with the war drawing to a close, Bertram decides to return to France. Unknown to him, Helena follows, accompanied by Diana and the Widow.
In Rousillon, everyone is mourning Helena as dead. The King is visiting, and consents to a marriage between Bertram and the daughter of an old, faithful lord, named Lafew. However, he notices a ring on Bertram's finger that formerly belonged to Helena—it was a gift from the King after she saved his life. (Helena gave the ring to Diana in Florence, and she in turn gave it to her would-be lover.) Bertram is at a loss to explain where it came from, but just then Diana and her mother appear to explain matters—followed by Helena, who informs her husband that both his conditions have been fulfilled. Chastened, Bertram consents to be a good husband to her, and there is general rejoicing.
Sources
The play is based on a tale (3.9) of Boccaccio's The Decameron. Shakespeare may have read an English translation of the tale in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure.[2]
The name of the play comes from the proverb All's well that ends well, which means that problems do not matter so long as the outcome is good.[3]
Performance history
There are no recorded performances before the Restoration; the earliest occurred in 1741 at Goodman's Fields, with another the following year at Drury Lane where it acquired its reputation of being an unlucky play. The actress playing Helena, Peg Woffington fainted and had to be replaced, while the actor playing the King of France subsequently died. Henry Woodward popularised the part of Parolles in the Garrick era. Sporadic performances followed in the ensuing decades, with an operatic version at Covent Garden in 1832. George Bernard Shaw greatly admired Helena's character, comparing her with the New Woman figures such as Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House.[4]
Victorian objections centred on the character of Helena, who was variously deemed predatory, immodest and both "really despicable" and a "doormat" by Ellen Terry, who also – and rather contradictorily – accused her of "hunt[ing] men down in the most undignified way". In 1896 Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem play" to include the unpopular work, grouping it with Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure.[5]
Critical comment
There is no evidence that All's Well was popular in Shakespeare's own lifetime, and it has remained one of his lesser-known plays ever since, in part due to its odd mixture of fairy tale logic and cynical realism. Helena's love for the seemingly unlovable Bertram is difficult to explain on the page, but in performance it can be made acceptable by casting an actor of obvious physical attraction as Bertram, or by playing him as a naive and innocent figure not yet ready for love although, as both Helena and the audience can see, capable of emotional growth.[6] This latter interpretation also assists at the point in the final scene in which Bertram suddenly switches from hatred to love in just one line. This is considered a particular problem for actors trained to admire psychological realism. However, some alternative readings emphasise the "if" in his equivocal promise: "If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly." Here, there has been no change of heart at all.[4] Productions like the National Theatre's 2009 run, have Bertram make his promise seemingly normally, but then end the play hand-in-hand with Helena, staring out at the audience with an evidently fake, or indeed panicked, grin on his face, indicating he only relented to save face in front of the King.
Many critics consider that the truncated ending is a drawback, with Bertram's conversion so sudden. Various explanations have been given for this. There is (as always) possibly missing text. Some suggest that Bertram's conversion is meant to be sudden and magical in keeping with the 'clever wench performing tasks to win an unwilling higher born husband' theme of the play ( W W Lawrence, 'Shakespeare's Problem Comedies' 1931). Some consider that Bertram is not meant to be contemptible, merely a callow youth learning valuable lessons about values (J G Styan 'Shakespeare in Performance' 1984 and Francis G Schoff 'Claudio, Bertam and a Note on Inerpretation'1959)
Many directors have taken the view that when Shakespeare wrote a comedy, he did intend there to be a happy ending, and accordingly that is the way the concluding scene should be staged. Jonathan Miller in his acclaimed BBC version in 1981 had his Betram (Ian Charleson)give Helena a tender kiss and speak wonderingly. It could be argued that the conditional phrasing of Betram's surrender is possibly a comic reference to the earlier seemingly impossible tasks that he set Helena. Now he is promising to love her 'ever, ever dearly' if she fulfills the much simpler one of explaining how all this came about.
Despite his outrageous actions, Bertram can come across as beguiling; sadly, the filming of the 1967 RCS performance with Ian Richardson as Bertam has been lost, but by various accounts (The New Cambridge Shakespeare, 2003 etc )he managed to make Bertam sympathetic. even charming. Ian Charleson's Bertram was cold and egotistical but still attractive. Richard Monette's 1992 Bertam, David Snellgrove, was young and unformed.
One character that has been admired is that of the old Countess, which Shaw thought "the most beautiful old woman's part ever written".[4] Modern productions are often promoted as vehicles for great mature actresses; recent examples have starred Judi Dench and Peggy Ashcroft, who delivered a performance of "entranc[ing]...worldly wisdom and compassion" in Trevor Nunn's sympathetic, "Chekhovian" staging at Stratford in 1982.[4][7][8] In the BBC Television Shakespeare production she was played by Celia Johnson, dressed and posed as Rembrandt's portrait of Margaretha de Geer.
References
- ^ Snyder, Susan (1993). "Introduction". The Oxford Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 20–24. ISBN 9780192836045.
- ^ F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; p. 29.
- ^ The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3rd ed., 2002. Cited at Bartleby.com
- ^ a b c d Dickson, Andrew (2008). "All's Well That Ends Well". The Rough Guide to Shakespeare. London: Penguin. pp. 3–11. ISBN 978-1-85828-443-9.
- ^ Neely, Carol Thomas (1983). "Power and Virginity in the Problem Comedies: All's Well That Ends Well". Broken nuptials in Shakespeare's plays. New Haven, CT: University of Yale Press. p. 58. ISBN 9780300033410.
- ^ McCandless, David (1997). "All's Well That Ends Well". Gender and performance in Shakespeare's problem comedies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 57–59. ISBN 0-253-33306-7.
- ^ Kellaway, Kate (14 December 2003). "Judi...and the beast". The Observer. Retrieved 5 July 2009.
- ^ Billington, Michael (2001). One Night Stands: a Critic's View of Modern British Theatre (2 ed.). London: Nick Hern Books. pp. 174–176. ISBN 1-854-59660-8.
External links
- MaximumEdge.com Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well – searchable scene-indexed version of the play.
