Some Things to Know About the Play

Some things to know about the play:

 Written somewhere between 1603-1605, All’s Well comes after the great comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing, which means that Shakespeare had already mastered the comic form and did indeed know how to write a happy ending to leave an audience thoroughly satisfied with romantic love that triumphs over all obstacles. So we have to assume that Shakespeare was aiming at a different kind of experience in All’s Well, something more like real life, perhaps, where complexity and compromise, pragmatism and reality more often determine the ending, and nothing is as tidy and resolved as we wish it were. The “bed trick” in which one woman is substituted for another in the dark to trick a man into consummating the “correct” relationship rather than the inappropriate one was common enough on the early modern stage. Both Measure for Measure and All’s Well (written at about the same time) use this plot device, and both plays seem uncomfortable with the traditional happy ending, leaving unresolved questions and expectations where smiles and laughter (and dancing) might have sufficed in the earlier comedies.

 Although clearly built on a comic structure, following the struggles of a young couple to achieve wedded bliss, All’s Well That Ends Well has been grouped with other plays like Measure for Measure as a “problem play” because it refuses to conform to the expectations (like the hope for a happy ending) it encourages in its audience. In addition, the play dramatizes some of the crucial social problems of Shakespeare’s time, including the tensions between older and younger generations, between men and women, and between different social classes, making it a play more about unresolved problems than about the smooth working out of a romantic love plot.

 Many critics have remarked that the play asks more questions than it answers, and in so doing, it allows us to continue asking them ourselves, questions like how human beings learn to conform to gender roles, how we use each other in forging identity, how storytelling affects us, and whether there is such a thing as a perfectly happy, unforced ending.

 Magical Realism is a 20th Century movement in literature where a realistic narrative is invaded by magical elements or events, so that the everyday and the miraculous are unexpectedly intertwined. All’s Well That Ends Well seems to predict such a movement, providing its audience with a powerful but destabilizing experience much like that of magical realism. Some critics have felt an “unresolved tension between the play’s romantic and realistic modes…” as the play juxtaposes a fairy-tale plot (Helena, a low-born but clever woman has to perform a series of miracles in order to win herself a prince) with the gritty realism of the mundane world (the Queen’s “fistula” or oozing sore is surprisingly specific, and Parolles describes Helena’s virginity as “a commodity will lose the gloss with lying; the longer kept, the less worth. Off with ‘t while ‘tis vendible”). This clash between the ideal world of romance and magic, and the real world of mundane details and unpleasant realities is part of what makes the play a compelling experience for modern audiences.

 If we are uncomfortable with the sort of compromise position we get in the final moments of this darker comedy, it may be because, as one critic says: “In life we, like Helena and her society, cannot make all end well, although we want to. All’s Well makes us experience the longing and sadness which cause us to idealize [our loved ones]—and which often result from our attempt to do so.” In this view, the play looks at romantic love in a realistic way, asking us to see that when we idealize another human being (as young lovers inevitably do), we are setting ourselves up for disappointment and conflict. One of the beauties of a complex play like All’s Well, then, is its honesty. By refusing to give us a happy ending free of human frailty, the play “imitate[s] life as we know it. The longing for goodness remains, along with the awareness that we long, and that we can be only partly satisfied. To admit the sadness, and that the wish for goodness is just that, a wish, can make us realize that there are no perfect solutions” where all’s well no matter how we get there. Instead, there is always a price to be paid for a resolution, however compromised, and an audience is not allowed to forget that. (Quotes are from Joel Westlund, “Longing and Sadness in All’s Well”).

 The earliest printed version of the play is in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected works published in 1623, seven years after his death. The first performance of All’s Well still on record was in London in 1741, about a hundred and forty years after it was written. According to reports, Parolles was the main attraction in that performance, and many of the early productions followed suit by cutting away much of the play to focus only on Parolles’ comic downfall. Although stage productions were often popular with audiences and critics, throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries most directors significantly adapted the play to emphasize either the comic sub-plot of Parolles, or, less often, by cutting Parolles to create a more sentimental drama focusing on the love story of Helena and Bertram. Not until 1920 and the success of the suffragette movement did a notable production (directed by William Poel) exploit the gender politics of the play “emphasizing Helena as a woman free from society’s conventions.” This production was seen as as a tribute to feminists during their moment of triumph.

 Feminism is another 20th Century phenomenon that makes All’s Well seem oddly prescient. Helena, the play’s heroine, reverses the typical fairytale plot such as we find with Portia in The Merchant of Venice, where a lady richly left waits in her fairy tale castle for a prince to come along and win her hand by solving a riddle. In All’s Well Helena is an active heroine who embarks on a quest, performs a miracle, wins the hand of her beloved, and when rejected by him, continues on a pilgrimage that takes her far beyond her home to a place where she must arrange to lose her virginity without losing her honor, and solve the riddle of getting a ring and a child from a man who has sworn never to give her either. Helena’s active, heroic role puts Bertram in the position of the passive object, waiting to be chosen, and he does not like it. Most productions will have to come to terms with this upside down quality in the gender dynamics of the play; we set the play in a time of great social upheaval and freedom for women in particular, the 1960’s. We hope you enjoy the play!