All's Well That Ends Well

by William Shakespeare

Lavatch, Shakespeare’s most cynical and lascivious fool,

Like It, and Viola in Twelfth Night, she uses her disguised self as an opportunity to talk about her true feelings.

As so often in Shakespeare’s darker plays, the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli lurks in the shadows,

Shakespeare perennially pitted old values and structures against new,

There is a progression from Helen’s miraculous cure of the King to her own “resurrection” and the (apparent?) moral regeneration of Bertram.

Helena rejuvenates the family, the king, and may even rejuvenate Bertram’s fixated notions of family honour and tradition.

All’s Well That Ends Well exists only in a Folio text that is problematic in some aspects and suggests a rather difficult-to-read manuscript was used as printer’s copy (see “Key Facts”).

First Folio of 1623 is only early printed text.

the manuscript was not neatly prepared and that it caused confusion to the printers.

Share with thy birthright.58 Love all, trust a few,

Countess’ speech sounds like Polonius’ advice to Laertes, only Countess is much wiser.

bright particular star

he’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker,

PAROLLES I love not many words.

Very ironic, since all Parolles does is talk and brag.

PAROLLES What the devil should move me to undertake the recovery of this drum, being not ignorant of the impossibility,

FIRST LORD Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?

PAROLLES O, let me live, And all the secrets of our camp I’ll show,

All’s well that ends well,

All’s well that ends well yet,

This ring was mine, and when I gave it Helen,

Than I have in this ring. ’Twas mine, ’twas Helen’s,

All yet seems well,

All is well ended if this suit be won,

as though he were trying to spare Helena’s blushes instead of provoking them.”35

critic J. C. Trewin as “an amiable, too smart young man, a sommelier’s scourge,” played by “a youth of nineteen, virile, heavy-eyebrowed, darkly handsome … His name was Laurence Olivier.”37

Anybody heard defending its poetry should be asked point-blank to quote two consecutive lines.”40

“Mr. Michael Hordern’s

as the boastful cowardly militarist, Parolles,

Helen’s curing of the King:

she speaks the couplets, with their fanciful, stilted phrasing, as an incantation, a charm;

Nevertheless, Guthrie’s is generally regarded as the watershed production for All’s Well, demonstrating that the play was now acceptable and could be made to work for wider audiences.

Michelle Terry’s “fine performance” as Helen “holding the evening together”:

Harriet Walter as Helen,

when Helen cures the King, has an incantatory quality. In performance there is a sense that the rhymes themselves are curing the King.

That said, the play’s emphasis on “telling” rather than “showing” is certainly one of the great challenges that it presents to a director.

Yet I also felt that the play’s emphasis on telling rather than showing was somewhat by design,

It’s a Blackfriars play rather than a Globe play.

Love’s Labour’s Won is, I am absolutely certain of it: it’s Much Ado About Nothing.

working on All’s Well That Ends Well. I had heard a theory that Much Ado About Nothing was actually the lost Love’s Labour’s Won,

she might be the only example (or at least one of the few) of a truly good parent in all of Shakespeare.