All's Well That Ends Well Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,

  Dee Anna Phares, Heloise Senechal

  All's Well That Ends Well

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen

  Introduction and Shakespeare's Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Eleanor Lowe and Heloise Senechal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Jan Sewell

  In Performance: Maria Jones (RSC stagings) and Jan Sewell (overview)

  The Director's Cut (interviews by Jan Sewell and Kevin Wright):

  Gregory Doran and Stephen Fried

  Guy Henry on Playing Parolles

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

  Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

  Universite de Geneve, Switzerland

  Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

  Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

  2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright (c) 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  "Royal Shakespeare Company," "RSC," and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  The version of All's Well That Ends Well and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836884-3

  www.modernlibrary.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: (c) Margie Hurwich/Arcangel Images

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  "He Wears His Honour in a Box Unseen"

  The New Code of the Self

  The Critics Debate

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  All's Well That Ends Well

  Act 1

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Act 2

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Act 3

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Act 4

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Act 5

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Textual Notes

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  All's Well That Ends Well in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of All's Well: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director's Cut: Interviews with Gregory Doran and Stephen Fried

  Guy Henry on Playing Parolles

  Shakespeare's Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King's Man

  Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  "HE WEARS HIS HONOUR IN A BOX UNSEEN"

  All's Well That Ends Well is one of Shakespeare's least performed and least loved comedies. It is also one of his most fascinating and intriguingly modern works. The play presents a battlefield of opposing value systems: abstract codes jostle against material commodities, words are undermined by actions, generation argues with generation, and a sex war rages.

  The language of sexual relations is persistently intermingled with that of warfare. The key word, deployed with equal force in conversations about the bedroom, the court, and the battlefield, is "honour." The atmosphere feels very different from that of Shakespeare's comic green world. All's Well shares the darker view of human nature and the more troubling preoccupations of three other plays written at the end of Queen Elizabeth I's reign and the beginning of James I's: Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and Measure for Measure.

  In the very first scene, virginity is described by Parolles as woman's weapon of resistance. But man will besiege it, "undermine" it, and "blow up" his foe--make her pregnant. Like honor, virginity may variously be seen as a mystical treasure, a mark of integrity, a marketable commodity, and a kind of nothing. Traditional wisdom suggests that it is something a girl must preserve with care. But the play is full of proverbs and moral maxims that are found wanting, "undermined" by the demands of the body. Lavatch, Shakespeare's most cynical and lascivious fool, is on hand to remind us of this. "I am driven on by the flesh," he remarks, suggesting that the story of the sexes boils down to "Tib's rush for Tom's forefinger." "Tib" was a generic name for a whore; the "rush" is a rudimentary wedding ring fashioned from reeds, but a woman's "ring" is also the place where she is penetrated by a man's nether finger.

  "War," says Bertram, "is no strife / To the dark house and the detested wife." For a young man in search of action, a wife is but a "clog," a block of wood tied to an animal to prevent it from escaping. Parolles voices the same sentiment in the tumble of language that is his hallmark:

  ... To th'wars, my boy, to th'wars!

  He wears his honour in a box unseen

  That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home,

  Spending his manly marrow in her arms,

  Which should sustain the bound and high curvet

  Of Mars' fiery steed. To other regions,

  France is a stable, we that dwell in't jades:

  Therefore, to th'war!

  "Kicky-wicky" is an abusive term for a wife, the "box unseen" is the vagina, and "marrow" is the essence of manliness (according to ancient physiology, semen was distilled from the marrow in the backbone). A proper man, Parolles suggests, should be off riding a "fiery steed" into battle, in the spirit of Mars, god of war; those who stay at home are no better than female horses, good only for breeding and sexual indulgence ("jade" was another slang term for whore).

  All's Well is in the mainstream of comedy insofar as it is about young people and the process of growing up. Bertram is like most young men of every era: he wants to be one of the boys, to prove his manhood. Enlistment in the army provides the ideal opportunity. He wants to sow some wild oats along the way, but is not ready for marriage. Critics hate him for not loving the lovely humble Helen from the start. "I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram," wrote Dr. Johnson with characteristic candor and forthrightness, "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 dismissed to happiness."1 Of course there is something obnoxious in the snobbery with which Bertram first dismisses Helen on the grounds of her low status, but when he goes on to say that he is simply not in love with her, he reveals a kind of integrity. He bows to the King's will and marries her, but since his heart does not belong to her he refuses to give her his body. If a woman were forced to marry in this way, we would rather admire her for withholding sexual favors from her husband.

  THE NEW CODE OF THE SELF

  Bertram represents modernity in that he acts according to an existential principle: he follows his own self, not some preexistent code of duty, service to his monarch, or obligation to the older generation. One word for this code is indeed integrity. Another is selfishness. It is the prerogative of the old, especially mothers, to know, to suffer, and still to forgive the selfishness of their young. Bertram's mother, the widowed Countess of Rossillion, who treats the orphaned Helen like a daughter and is only too happy to accept her as a daughter-in-law, regardless of her lowly background, was described by George Bernard Shaw as "the most beautiful old woman's part ever written" (though she could perfectly well be in her forties). Since female parts were written for young male actors, strong maternal roles such as this are exceptional in Shakespeare. The only analogous parts are the more overbearing figures of Queen Margaret in the Henry VI plays, Tamora in Titus Andronicus, and Volumnia in Coriolanus. The serenity of the Countess has meant that the principal reason for modern revivals of All's Well has been the opportunity to showcase actresses such as Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, and Judi Dench in their later years.

  One of the key debates in the play is that between nature and nurture. The Countess of Rossillion believes that her son is a fundamentally good boy who has fallen into bad company, as embodied by the worthless Parolles. Helen, meanwhile, has strong natural qualities (the "dispositions she inherits") reinforced by a loving and responsible upbringing (the "education" she has received first from her doctor father, then in the household of the Countess).

  Parallel to the question of nature and nurture is that of divine providence and individual responsibility. Helen believes that "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven": like Bertram, she is a voice of modernity in her belief that individuals can carve their own destiny. She does so by means of disguise and bold solo travel: from Rossillion in southwest France to Paris, where she gains access to the King, then to Florence in the dress of a pilgrim en route to Compostela. Like Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Viola in Twelfth Night, she uses her disguised self as an opportunity to talk about her true feelings. The part is the longest in the play and it gives an actor great opportunities for the portrayal of an isolated young woman's self-exploration through both soliloquy and dialogue in lucid and serpentine verse, not to mention passages of prose banter and some piercing asides.

  As Dr. Johnson dryly noted, the geography seems somewhat awry when Helen undertakes her pilgrimage: in going from France to Spain via Italy, she is "somewhat out of the road." Such details did not matter to Shakespeare. For him, the pilgrim motif--taken over from the story in Boccaccio that was his source for the main plot of the play--had symbolic importance in that it associated Helen with an older value structure of reverence and self-sacrifice even as she asserts her own will. Pilgrims are people who believe in miracles, so Helen's adoption of the role allies her with the worldview voiced by the old courtier Lafew after she has cured the King: "They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear."

  Yet Helen is only a pretended pilgrim and the King has been cured not by a miracle but by the medical knowledge she has inherited from her father. Again and again the play takes a fairy-tale motif and turns it into something tougher, more earthly and open to philosophical debate. Lafew's generalization sets up the key scene in which Bertram rejects Helen. The idea of unquestioning obedience to the King's will is itself a thing "supernatural and causeless." It depends upon an "unknown fear," the mystique of monarchy, the idea that the King is God's representative on earth and that to challenge him will cause the entire fabric of the natural order to collapse. In a crucial rhyming couplet near the end of the play--often editorially reassigned to the Countess of Rossillion for no good textual reason--the King says that, since he has failed in his management of Bertram's first marriage, the second had better be a success, otherwise "nature" may as well "cesse" (cease).

  Shakespeare's instinctive conservatism tips the balance in favor of the old order. The King, the Countess, and the old courtier are generous and ethically admirable, much more obviously sympathetic than Bertram, Parolles, and Lavatch. Bertram has to be tricked out of his sexual selfishness and Parolles out of his vainglory, but still Shakespeare the role-player and wordsmith invests huge dramatic energy in the darker characters. He uses them to open cracks in the established order. The King tells Bertram that Helen should be viewed for what she is within, not by way of the superficial trappings of wealth and rank: "The property by what it is should go, Not by the title." Yet his own authority depends on his title, and the "go by what it is" argument might be turned to say that if Bertram does not love Helen he should not marry her. The King moves swiftly from reasoning to the assertion of raw authority: "My honour's at the stake, which to defeat, I must produce my power." Shakespeare's intensely compacted writing style makes the point. By "which to defeat," the King means "in order to defeat the threat to my honour," but ironically the very need to produce his "power" itself defeats the code of honor. As so often in Shakespeare's darker plays, the figure of Niccolo Machiavelli lurks in the shadows, whispering that fine old codes such as honor and duty can only be underwritten by raw power.

  He who asserts the new code of the self must live by that code. Both Bertram and Parolles are found out. The two lords Dumaine are not only mechanics in the double plot of ambush and bed trick, but also commentators upon how their victims are brought to self-knowledge: "As we are ourselves, what things are we! / Merely our own traitors." The Dumaines too are young and modern in their recognition that we cannot simply sort our kind into sheep and goats in the manner of authoritarian religious dispensations. They propose instead that human life is shaded gray: "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues." This could be the epigraph for Shakespeare's dramatically mingled yarn of tragicomedy.

  Parolles comes to acknowledge his boastful tongue. "Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live," he vows. What, though, can this mean, given that--as his name indicates--he is made of nothing but words? Bertram, meanwhile, only comes to realize how much Helen is to be valued when she has been lost. The fiction of comedy gives him a second chance to love her. But in the modern world where there are no miracles, "all's well that ends well" is a fiction. Along the way we have been promised on more than one occasion that all will end well, but when it comes to the climax the King says that "all yet seems well" and that "if it end so meet" then all bitterness will be past. Those little conditional qualifiers leave open the door to the tragic world.

  THE CRITICS DEBATE

  Early critics regarded All's Well as a farce, then as a romance, then largely as a failure in psychological realism. In the nineteenth century, commentators highlighted a lack of poetry in the drama: "The style of the whole is more sententious than imaginative: the glowing colours of fancy could not with propriety have been employed on such a subject."2

  At the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, George Bernard Shaw suggested that the problem of the
play was its modernity: a part such as that of Helen was "too genuine and beautiful and modern for the public."3 In Shaw's view, Helen's independence of mind made her into a proto-feminist heroine, an anticipation of the female characters in the plays of Henrik Ibsen who sought to escape the doll's house. Shaw was reacting to the very mixed reception that had long been accorded to Helen, the fact that some had idealized her and others demonized her. Samuel Taylor Coleridge did both: on one occasion he described her as Shakespeare's "loveliest character,"4 while on another he suggested that "Bertram had surely good reason to look upon the King's forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakespeare's consummate skill to interest us for her."5

  For Anna Jameson, writing in the 1830s as the first female critic to reflect at length upon Shakespeare's women, Helen exemplified the virtue of patience in the face of adversity and male infidelity: "There never was, perhaps, a more beautiful picture of a woman's love, cherished in secret, not self-consuming in silent languishment ... but patient and hopeful, strong in its own intensity, and sustained by its own fond faith."6 A couple of generations later, the great actress Ellen Terry begged to disagree, describing Helen as belonging to the "doormat" type: "They bear any amount of humiliation from the men they love, seem almost to enjoy being maltreated and scorned by them, and hunt them down in the most undignified way when they are trying to escape. The fraud with which Helena captures Bertram, who has left his home and country to get away from her, is really despicable."7

  Bertram, by contrast to Helen, has always been roundly condemned by the great majority of critics. As already noted, Dr. Johnson set the tone of the debate with his remark that he could not reconcile his heart to Bertram. Coleridge tried to mount a defense, but resorted to special pleading on the grounds of status and alleged partial knowledge:

  I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram ... He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth, and appetite for pleasure and liberty, natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course, he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependant in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other respects, Bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant.8