The Design of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’

Summary

All’s Well that Ends Well is not an entirely successful work. Its problems have been discussed at length and its shortcomings pointed out, sometimes with little compassion. From Dr Johnson, who could not reconcile his heart to Bertram, to the late Poet Laureate, who found Helena ‘a woman who practises a borrowed art, not for art’s sake, nor for charity, but, woman fashion, for a selfish end’, its principal characters have seemed to critics inadequate or disturbing. Even the first editor of this journal found that the ‘kindest thing’ he could do with All’s Well that Ends Well was to suggest that it was ‘penned by Shakespeare in a time of illness or mental disturbance’. And yet its two most recent Stratford productions have been surprisingly well received, and it contains, in Helena, what Coleridge called Shakespeare’s ‘loveliest character’, and, in the Countess, Bernard Shaw’s idea of ‘the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written’. This mixture of undoubted success and apparent failure is familiar, of course, in that play with which All’s Well that Ends Well is often linked, Measure for Measure. But while the problems of Measure for Measure seem, to some extent at least, to be imposed by Shakespeare himself – he it is who makes Isabella a novice, adds Mariana to the characters he inherited from Whetstone, and imports the bed-trick – those which remain in All’s Well that Ends Well are fundamental to the story Shakespeare has chosen to dramatise.