All's Well That Ends Well

by William Shakespeare

  The following year the play acquired a reputation as "the unfortunate comedy" when it was put on at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, for the first time. Milward playing the King caught cold and died shortly after, while Peg Woffington as Helen was taken ill and fainted onstage. Theophilus Cibber played Parolles to great acclaim, although the part had originally been assigned to Charles Macklin which caused further ill-feeling in the company. Henry Woodward, who took over as Parolles in Giffard's Covent Garden production of 1746, was so successful that he continued to play the part for the next thirty years. He reprised the role in David Garrick's 1756 adaptation, which was built around his performance and emphasized the play's farcical elements. John Bannister's 1785 revival at the Haymarket went even further, virtually eliminating Helen and the first three acts. Neither were well received, though, and John Philip Kemble's 1793 adaptation shifted the focus back to Helen, played by Dorothy Jordan, with himself as Bertram and Bannister again playing Parolles.

  Charles Kemble mounted a spectacular production in 1811 at Covent Garden, using his brother's text, which received good reviews but, despite this and an excellent cast, it was revived for only one further performance. Kemble's script had emphasized the play's romantic elements; the next adaptation, Frederick Reynolds's operatic version for Covent Garden in 1832, attempted to excise those aspects of the play considered tasteless and to replace them with musical extracts from more popular Shakespeare plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, but to little avail as both public and critics still found the play unacceptable.

  Samuel Phelps played Parolles himself in his 1852 Sadler's Wells production to general acclaim, despite continued critical carping about the "rude nature of its plot" and "exceedingly gross" manners.25 Henry Irving's amateur production at St. George's Hall in 1895 likewise failed to please, despite his efforts to render the play fit for Victorian audiences by extensive cuts: "The text had been so carefully bowdlerised for the Irving Club that the story would scarcely have been comprehensible to any one who did not know it beforehand."26 George Bernard Shaw, similarly exercised about the textual cuts, was equally scathing about the leading performances:

  The cool young woman, with a superior understanding, excellent manners, and a habit of reciting Shakespear, [sic] presented before us by Miss Olive Kennett, could not conceivably have been even Helena's thirty-second cousin. Miss Lena Heinekey, with the most beautiful old woman's part ever written in her hands, discovered none of its wonderfully pleasant good sense, humanity, and originality ... Mr Lewin-Mannering did not for any instant make it possible to believe that Parolles was a real person to him.27

  The actor-manager Frank Benson finally produced All's Well for the Shakespeare Theatre in 1916--after thirty-five years this and Titus Andronicus were the only two plays which had never been produced at Stratford. Benson himself played Parolles with his wife as Helen but the production was overshadowed by the celebrations of his recent knighthood:

  The play was held up for some minutes by the unrestrained applause which greeted the appearance of the Bensons on stage. And Lady Benson noted that the audience joined with the cast in singing "Auld Lang Syne" at the end of the play. Understandably, All's Well could not compete with its celebrated cast.28

  Theater historian Joseph G. Price argues that productions of the play underwent a fundamental transformation in the twentieth century with the advent of the director, anxious to impose a coherent interpretation on the play as a whole: "The stage history of All's Well in the twentieth century is, with a few exceptions, a record of attempts of directors to thread the brilliant parts with a unifying, appealing theme."29 The problem was that "theatrical tradition offered only remnants as guides, and scholarly analysis had failed to fashion a coherent pattern. The threading was difficult, and early experiments did little to change the general distaste for the play."30

  William Poel's 1920 production at the Ethical Church, Bayswater, was certainly driven by a strong directorial line. Poel had founded the Elizabethan Stage Society which attempted to reproduce original stagings as far as possible for the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In All's Well though he saw a play with a contemporary social message:

  He saw a plea for the removal of class barriers where the affections between men and women were in question ... For Poel the play had an ethical significance which gave it a place in the history of women's emancipation; in 1919 this freedom had at last been won and the exploits of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst were a recent memory.31

  However, Poel's decision to emphasize the play's serious elements and to use low lighting gave the production a somber tone that prompted the critic of the Athenaeum to comment that "Helena has her counterpart in Hamlet."32

  Robert Atkins's production for the Old Vic in 1921 was judged "both interesting and disappointing."33 The set and lighting were praised but something was missing: "It is passionate power that Mr. Atkins fails habitually to get from his actors; he has, too, a sort of statuesque convention which he imposes on every play, as though Shakespeare could be played in talking tableaux."34 The pace of the production dragged; Jane Bacon's Helen was too solemn and the comedy was underplayed: "Parolles discussing virginity with Helena, for example ... Mr Ernest Milton got through this scene without once provoking a laugh; he played it like someone skating on very thin ice, as though he were trying to spare Helena's blushes instead of provoking them."35

  Tastes were changing slowly, and the second Stratford production directed by William Bridges-Adams in 1922 proved no more successful than the first. Birmingham Repertory Theatre staged the first modern-dress production in 1927 with "the Countess swathed in the crepe so loved by Gallic widows, and Helena beside her in the simplest of dresses to show a dependant's humility."36 Bernard Shaw noted the "buoyant sense of humour" of Parolles, described by the 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

  In 1935 Ben Iden Payne directed the third Stratford production which again failed to please. Robert Atkins was fortunate that in 1940 at the time of his third production it was the only play in London's war-torn West End. Audience and critics were duly grateful but not bowled over. Catherine Lacey, who had played the Countess in the previous Stratford production, now played Helen to general acclaim, as "a creature from a fantastic story-book. You need not believe in her, but love her you must--and love her you will."38 Doubts were still expressed about the play itself though: "The plot proves untrue to the title by going from bad to worse; but the poetry, intermittently, goes from good to better."39 Needless to say, this view did not go unchallenged: "Mr. Robert Atkins should be praised and encouraged for his direction. But the play may now be put by for another twenty years without great loss. Anybody heard defending its poetry should be asked point-blank to quote two consecutive lines."40

  It was Tyrone Guthrie in 1953 at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, who finally succeeded in capturing the play's divergent elements to create a coherent whole and establish its place in the modern repertoire:

  The first [Stratford, Ontario] season's Richard III provided the most exciting night in the history of Canadian theatre but the second night's All's Well That Ends Well topped it, and every other performance at Stratford since, in sheer theatrical magic, in its discovery of breathless beauty in a dark old Shakespearean comedy.41

  Guthrie recognized its essential modernity and saw how he might translate this insight to the stage: "Helena might be the heroine of an Existentialist drama. She refuses to be passive; she will not resign herself to be what Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, calls 'the prisoner of immanence.' She takes a firm line with her fate."42 The production's modern dress "did a great deal to explain Helena to the audience."43 Joseph G. Price expands on the point:

  The fantastic turns of the plot, of Helena's traps, became much more acceptable in modern dress to a contemporary audience which had been saturate
d with aggressive heroines, often "career women" who had won reluctant males in innumerable romantic comedy films during the 1930s and 1940s.44

  Its staging suggests another "modern" aspect of the production. As film has largely superseded the theater in presenting "realism," theater has returned to its roots, capitalizing on the immediacy of the actors' presence to the audience. The aim of the set designer, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, was "to offer the facilities of an Elizabethan stage, but not to attempt an Elizabethan pseudo-antique style."45 All the performances were praised, but Irene Worth's Helen was singled out:

  In his skilful placing of emphasis Dr. Guthrie was immeasurably aided by some superb playing, particularly by Irene Worth as Helena. From her first silent entrance, gazing so longingly after Bertram, Miss Worth had power to move us to tears. She convinced us of her passion before ever she spoke, and we were committed to support her in every device she found to win her love.46

  In the same year the Old Vic mounted a less successful production directed by Michael Benthall, who was accused by one critic of turning the play into "a cross between rollicking pantomime and fairytale."47 Benthall, who had set himself the task of performing all of Shakespeare's plays in his five-year tenure at the Old Vic, did not much care for the play, and in order to make it palatable for modern audiences, aimed "to remove some of the bitter taste from the play and to give it instead a fairytale unreality."48 With this end in mind, he invited Osbert Lancaster (best known as a cartoonist) to design costumes and sets: "The backdrops, clear and bright like cut-outs from a child's picture book, and the fresh colours of the costumes, admirably succeeded in creating a fairytale atmosphere."49 The undoubted prettiness was unconvincing though:

  The result of this approach was to divorce the play from any semblance of reality and turn it into a quick-moving farce. In this guise it won many laughs and one could hardly take seriously the match-making activities of such a high-comedy King. Yet had the more serious scenes been played with more belief the real comedy might have increased in stature ...50

  The honors, such as they were, went to "Mr. Michael Hordern's horribly real and truly pointed performance as the boastful cowardly militarist, Parolles, and Miss Fay Compton's Countess of Roussillon."51

  Two years later in 1955 Noel Willman directed the play at Stratford "as a dark comedy," but

  complicated his approach by his sets, his stage business, and his interpretations of Bertram and Parolles. He placed the play in the late seventeenth century against ponderous scenery and sumptuous costumes. The heavy representative sets robbed the stage of a starkness better suited to the mood; the prettiness of the costumes conflicted with the darkness of the theme.52

  Joyce Redman's Helen "dominated the stage, not with her vivacity, nor indeed emotional variety, but by a moral earnestness which prompted frequent appeals to heaven ... she behaved 'like some ghastly Shavian woman ... [demonstrating] a pertinacity worthy of the North-West Mounted Police.' "53 The lightweight Bertram "could not be taken seriously as a partner in the 'dark comedy' " and the "sinister potentialities of Parolles were ignored as well."54

  In 1959 Tyrone Guthrie's successful Canadian production was revived at the Stratford Memorial Theatre with Zoe Caldwell as Helen, Robert Hardy as the King, and Dame Edith Evans as the Countess. The majority of critics were enthusiastic, concurring with the judgment of the Times's critic:

  His [Guthrie's] production wears Edwardian dress, but it has a real Elizabethan vitality and its vindication of Helena is undertaken with as much care as the uproariously funny "debunking" of Parolles.55

  A. Alvarez thought that "Mr Tyrone Guthrie's Stratford production of All's Well That Ends Well is about as perfect as we are likely to see."56 One piece of business noted by many was Helen's curing of the King:

  Miss Caldwell makes a quick and unexpected move, stands behind the King's chair, and places her hands on his brow. He makes an impatient gesture as if to brush aside her insolent presumption--their timing throughout this passage was perfection--stops at her invocation of "the great'st grace" [2.1.171], relaxes, closes his eyes and listens, while with a subtle, barely perceptible rise in tone into what is practically recitative, she speaks the couplets, with their fanciful, stilted phrasing, as an incantation, a charm; and carried beyond herself, rises to the crucial answer upon which her life and fortune depend, and wrings from the so-called fustian rhymes a moment of pure theater magic and spell-binding. It is quite breath-taking, and completely right, startling and convincing us simultaneously.57

  There were dissenters. The critic of the New York Times argued that "it is apparent that Mr. Guthrie's intentions are frivolous rather than serious, and that his aim is less to reveal hidden depths in this play than to extract all possible fun."58 While Muriel St. Clare Byrne declared Edith Evans's performance "flawless,"59 Alan Brien characterized it thus: "Edith Evans is Edith Evans--an exiled queen locked away in a madhouse who still bestows her autumnal wisdom on the deaf zanies around her," concluding that "the play itself remains a ragbag of revue sketches."60 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.

  1. Tyrone Guthrie's "watershed" production of 1959 with Zoe Caldwell as Helen and Robert Hardy as the King: "Miss Caldwell makes a quick and unexpected move, stands behind the King's chair, and places her hands upon his brow ... It is quite breath-taking, and completely right, startling and convincing us simultaneously."

  The stage history of the play in America is "astonishingly brief."61 There was a production in 1799 at the Federal Street Theatre, Boston, in which Elizabeth Kemble-Whitlock (a sister of the Kembles) played Helen, although no reviews of the production have survived. In the nineteenth century Augustin Daly seems to have been interested in putting it on and commissioned an acting text from William Winter, but in the event he never staged it. Guthrie's was thus the first significant North American production. Price does, however, mention the "amusing fact" of its "popularity as a burlesque in American vaudeville."62

  In 1959, the same year as the revival of Guthrie's production, John Houseman directed the play for the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut. Whereas Guthrie had emphasized its comic elements, Houseman produced a dark tragicomedy: "Surprisingly, the reception by critics and audiences was almost as enthusiastic as that won by the Guthrie revival."63 Nancy Wickwire as Helen "played the heroine with intensity," making her "the centre of the play to the exclusion of all other characters":

  The force of her character assumed a tragic intensity with Bertram's rejection of her. Her horror at the thought that she was responsible for Bertram's flight to war and at the potential danger that was threatened to him suggested that the "dark comedy" was in fact a very dark tragedy.64

  The character of Bertram, meanwhile, was softened with stage business such as a kiss and wave to Helen in the first scene:

  This kind of stage business was even more effective after the marriage when Bertram sent his bride back to Rousillon. He was not unkind to her. Somewhat overwhelmed by the force of her passion, he turned to say something to her, some kind word, but she had already begun her exit. He checked himself, showed dismay at hurting her, then recovered quickly and shouted his youthful boast.65

  Price concluded, however, that Houseman had

  paid a heavy price for his tragicomedy. The infusion of passion changed Parolles from a braggart soldier to a coward-villain who failed to draw his first real laugh from the audience until his capture. Even then, the turnabout of his exposure was pathetic as he was knocked about by each of the departing lords in what became a repugnant scene.66

  Nevertheless, the production was a popular success and the majority of critics agreed with Henry Hewes of the Saturday Review that "Houseman had 'made this unpopular play work by filling it with genuine passion.' "67

  Since then the play has been revived at regular intervals and become, if not popular, at least a
standard part of the Shakespearean repertoire. The five notable RSC productions at Stratford are discussed in more detail below.

  Elijah Moshinsky's 1980 BBC television production was widely praised for the way it transferred the play to the small screen: "it seems to accept the inevitable diminution in theatrical power that the translation involves, and tries to invent new relationships which will (to some degree) compensate for that loss."68 Jeremy Treglown describes how

  Moshinsky has framed the scenes as a series of calm seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, using mirrors to give depth to his surface and filling the small screen with the interplay of grouping and of light and shade, rather than with elaborate action or tricky camerawork. It works beautifully and gives a rich visual context to the unexpectedly plausible action itself, from Helena's falling (on the rebound from her father's death) for her shifty childhood friend Bertram, to his miserably trapped duplicities in the arranged marriage which follows.69

  Angela Down's "serenely unstoppable" Helen was praised, as was Ian Charleson's "sulkily handsome" Bertram, with Celia Johnson as his "understandably anxious old mother" and Michael Hordern as the "melancholy-wise, genial old Lafeu."70 Donald Sinden's rather "fruity" representation of the King caused several critics concern: "one of the lapses in a usually cool and contained production."71 The production's successful translation to television was nowhere more apparent than the televisual technique employed to handle the final reveal as Diana is being taken to prison, as described by G. K. Hunter: