All's Well That Ends Well

by William Shakespeare

  Fried: I can't say that I ever thought about this while 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, and the similarities between that play and Love's Labour's Lost, and particularly between Berowne and Rosaline and Benedick and Beatrice, always gave this theory a little more plausibility for me.

  Helen's often seen as a problematic heroine; many have questioned why someone so clever and lively falls for and then has the bad taste to foist herself on an unattractive spoiled brat, using the morally dubious bed trick. How did you reconcile the different aspects of her character?

  Doran: I think she has a certainty about her: she knows this is right. The bed trick is seen from her perspective as a sort of corrective for Bertram's bad behavior. Bertram is immature; he doesn't want to be shackled by marriage or by the society of the French court. Going off and becoming General of the Horse is liberating for him; he wants to sow his wild oats and play the field. Diana realizes how attractive this young man is and although she resists him he has a kind of charisma that is irresistible to somebody like Helen. She firmly believes she is the one who can solve his problems; she will make him fall in love with her. His mother, the Countess, sees that this love is there, does not object to it on class grounds because she sees the virtue and integrity in Helen and therefore allows the depth of her love to prosper.

  Fried: As I was working on All's Well That Ends Well, I frequently found myself defending the play against critics who took issue with Helen's love for the seemingly undeserving Bertram. Without question, Helen's flight from Rossillion at the end of Act 3 Scene 2, and her continued pursuit of Bertram in Florence even after he has so harshly rejected her, pose a problem for any postfeminist reading of the play. Yet I feel quite strongly that to look at the play as the story of a "clever and lively heroine who falls for an unattractive spoiled brat" denies the possibility that both Helen and Bertram must change and mature over the course of the play. I think it's very important to recognize--as I strove to make clear through my production--that Helen begins the play as a fairly sheltered and somewhat naive girl who confuses childlike obsession and idol worship with mature love. It is only after her idol rejects her that she must then confront reality and mature into the woman who, presented with Bertram at the end of the play, is able to define the terms by which she is to be wed rather than simply giving herself over unquestioningly.

  This doesn't completely solve the problem of why Helen continues to pursue Bertram even after he rejects her. Yet I think it's unfair to expect that Helen should behave rationally when it comes to Bertram. How often is love rational? And how frequently has each of us fallen head over heels for someone completely undeserving of that love? Is Helen's love for Bertram easy to watch? Certainly not. But does it reveal a deeply honest truth about the irrational and inexplicable actions of the human heart? Without a doubt. In my production, when Helen mused in Act 4 Scene 4, "But, O strange men, / That can such sweet use make of what they hate," she seemed to recognize both the irrationality and also the inevitability of her love. Fully aware of Bertram's disdain for her, she was nonetheless filled with wonder over the sweetness of their night together.

  Regarding the bed trick, by the time it appears in the play we've seen Helen put through so much abuse that I think most audience members are willing to forgive the moral questions that this tactic raises. More importantly, this shockingly cynical and pragmatic approach to winning a husband represents an important stage of Helen's maturation--gone are her more noble fantasies of how a man ought to be won, and she is now willing to face the world with all of its ugliness, to roll up her sleeves, and to do whatever she needs to do to get what she wants. In her bold disregard for the conventional morality that would stop such actions, there is, ironically, a unique sort of feminism. She doesn't particularly care about the morality behind what she's doing; for better or for worse, she's out to win Bertram, and understands that she must beat him at his own game in order to do so.

  Bertram seems to have no redeeming qualities as a character and when cornered performs a one-line volte-face; how did you handle him and his sudden change of heart?

  Doran: I think he is young, and I know that is often an excuse, but I think his youth and his hot temper make him behave impulsively. Such is the strength of Helen's love that I think that Bertram is moved in the final moments to realize that here is a good woman who loves him, and could he really ask for more than that? But there is still at the end a question of whether or not the marriage is going to be happy. Has she tamed him? Is that morally acceptable? That ambiguity is at the heart of the play and is what makes it one of the "problem plays," as they used to be called, of that middle period.

  Fried: As unpleasantly pragmatic as it sounds, the first advice that I would give to any director of All's Well That Ends Well is to be sure when casting Bertram to find a dazzlingly charismatic young man whose charm and allure radiate even when he has nothing to say, and even in spite of the many unpleasant things that Shakespeare has given him to say. Without this, the audience will have a very hard time understanding and sympathizing with Helen's obsession with him, and in order for the play to "work," I think that we must be able to sympathize with Helen.

  I also think that it's crucial that, like Helen, Bertram be allowed to mature and develop over the course of the production, and not be played as fully formed at the beginning. We must meet him not as a confirmed cad, but as a young man who still has a huge amount to learn, whose head is filled with misconceptions as to what "honour" and "nobility" really mean, and who is heading out into the world seeking these ideals having put all of his trust in the hands of a rascal named Parolles. It is easy for a production to dismiss Parolles as simply a clownish jokester, but I think that Bertram's ultimate redemption (and thus, the play's resolution and our ability to believe in Helen) is only possible if we understand that Bertram starts the play misguidedly trusting Parolles with his life. For this reason, I pushed Parolles away from a clownish fool and toward a more believably cynical and self-serving young man with great charisma, huge ambitions, and few, if any, scruples. In this way, Bertram's admiration and trust in him becomes more real and, as a result, Parolles' betrayal becomes a crushing event for Bertram. It forces him to reassess his estimation of the people around him, and ultimately to transform into a man that we can tolerate Helen ending up with. When Bertram enters into Act 4 Scene 3, since the last time we have seen him he has received news of both Helen's supposed death and his mother's approbation, he has slept with a woman he believed to be Diana, and he has also been informed that his best friend has offered to betray the secrets of the camp, so the man who enters into this scene is a very different Bertram than the man we last saw wooing Diana. It was important to me that his speech, "I have tonight dispatched sixteen businesses, a month's length apiece ...," be filled with a sort of distracted wonder, as if the sheer volume of life experience he has acquired in the last several hours has forced him to reconsider the life choices he has made thus far in the play. By the end of this scene, his dearest friend will be revealed to him as even more insidious than he previously thought possible, so Bertram leaves Florence a shaken man, eager to create himself anew upon his return to Rossillion.

  Bertram's lies and harsh lines toward Diana in the play's final scene do seem to problematize his redemption, but in the context of Act 5 Scene 3, these flagrant displays of his still deeply fault-ridden character function as the final purging of his moral recklessness. Here, at the end of the play, Bertram reveals just how repugnant he is capable of being. His ugly display crests in its finale of calling Diana "that which any inferior might / At market-price have bought." And yet, as heinous as his behavior is, it is now out in the open. He no longer has Parolles to blame his sins on, and must now take full responsibility for his actions and suffer the disdain of every other character onstage (as well as of the audience) in a way that he hasn't been forced to until now. The young man who le
ft home five acts ago in pursuit of honor and nobility must now feel what it means to be publicly stripped of both. From this moment in which his lies are revealed and he confesses to having slept with Diana (as he believes himself to have done), Bertram then remains mysteriously silent until the moment when Helen reappears. This silence, I believe, bespeaks his recognition of his own moral failure, so that when Helen reappears, and he is presented, after suffering such public shame, with the woman he believes himself to have killed, his only recourse is to beg the pardon of Helen and everyone else around him. We must believe that his "O, pardon!" comes from the very depths of his soul, as he has now achieved full recognition of his sins and is prepared to reform.

  6. Stephen Fried's 2010 production for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey with Clifton Duncan as Bertram, "not ... a confirmed cad, but ... a young man who still has a huge amount to learn," and Ellen Adair as Helen, "a somewhat naive girl" who has to "confront reality" in order to "mature into the woman."

  George Bernard Shaw famously thought the Countess "the most beautiful old woman's part ever written"; is that what you found?

  Doran: I told Judi Dench that, although I think I left out the "old" part! It is a beautiful part; the Countess is the moral heart of the play. I think Trevor Nunn knew that when he cast Peggy Ashcroft. That production was meant to open the Swan Theatre, although the opening was delayed so it ended up playing in the main house. Judi Dench was attracted to the role partly to come back to Stratford and to the Swan, but the Countess is the still center of the play and of Rossillion, which makes her a deeply attractive character. She found expression even in the silences of the Countess; there was one moment when Helen is revealed at the end to have come back and Judi simply opened her hands, giving a gesture of acceptance, relief, and acknowledgment, which was very, very beautiful. But she also conveyed the rage of the Countess, the sense of fun in the Countess's relationship with Lavatch, and the depth of her own loss when she loses her son to Court.

  Fried: I would agree wholeheartedly. At some point during rehearsals we realized that she might be the only example (or at least one of the few) of a truly good parent in all of Shakespeare. Shakespeare's parental figures generally tend to have some major flaw. Capulet has a violent temper. Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Constance all seem out for political gain. Henry IV is somewhat ineffective. Volumnia (while fabulous) seems a bit manipulative. Even Prospero can seem a little overly protective of Miranda. But the Countess seems to be motivated simply by pure love for both her son and for Helen. And it's for this reason that it is so incredibly heartbreaking when her son disappoints her. When she laments, in Act 3 Scene 4, that "My heart is heavy and mine age is weak. / Grief would have tears, and sorrow bids me speak," we are forced to consider every wound that we have ever inflicted upon our own parents.

  7. Gregory Doran's 2003 RSC production in the Swan Theatre with Judi Dench as the Countess of Rossillion and Claudie Blakley as Helena: "The Countess is the still center of the play and of Rossillion, which makes her a deeply attractive character. She [Judi] found expression even in the silences of the Countess."

  All's Well That Ends Well is a comforting thought, but how well does the play end and what does it mean by "end" anyway?

  Doran: We always felt that it should be called All's Well That Ends Well? with a question mark, because the ending is so ambiguous. There's a chill to the play. It is perhaps not Shakespeare's most congenial play. It fits into that middle period; it doesn't have the snarl of Troilus and Cressida or the decadence of Measure for Measure, but it does have this ache in it, which fits very much in that period. "All's well that ends well" is an aspiration that rather than a certainty.

  Fried: I see the title as a somewhat open question that the play asks of its audience: if we find our way toward ultimate redemption, can we forgive the sins committed along the way? Helen seems quite resolute that "all's well that ends well," as she twice argues to the Widow and Diana, but I think that Shakespeare intended to leave the question of whether the end really does justify the means somewhat ambiguous.

  In a more abstract sense, the notion that "all's well that ends well" also gets at the possibility of salvation. It's what we're asked to consider when assessing both Bertram's and Parolles' characters; these two young men both commit gross acts of misjudgment causing great pain to those around them, and yet they each (Bertram through Helen and Parolles through Lafew) find their way toward self-recognition and reformation. They both, in essence, "end well." So can we forgive them for everything they did along the way? The play forces us to consider how much we believe that a human being is actually capable of change, and how much we are willing to forgive in other people.

  GUY HENRY ON PLAYING PAROLLES

  Guy Henry was born in 1960 and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In 1982 he played the title role in ITV's Young Sherlock Holmes series. He has since enjoyed wide success as an actor on stage, in radio, film, and television. He first joined the RSC in 1991 and has played many well-known Shakespearean roles, including Sir Andrew Aguecheek (1996), Dr. Caius (The Merry Wives of Windsor 1997), Malvolio (2001), and the title role in King John (2001), the same year in which he won the TMA/Barclays Best Supporting Actor award for his Mosca in Volpone (1999), directed by Lindsay Posner. Guy is probably most widely known for his film role as Pius Thicknesse in the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He has also worked with Cheek by Jowl and at the National Theatre as Turgenev in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia (2002). He is here discussing his much lauded performance as Parolles in the 2003 All's Well That Ends Well directed by Gregory Doran.

  Why do you think Parolles is such a large part in the play, second only to Helen in terms of lines? Is it something to do with the play's emphasis on language: the high incidence of rhyming couplets, proverbs, and sayings, "telling" rather than "showing," apart from a character actually called Parolles ("words")?

  I think Shakespeare probably knew when he was on to a good thing. He invented a character that is full of warmth and eccentricity, foibles and failings, and has an extraordinary range of humanity; he must have wanted to put him into all sorts of situations. I think he knew that he'd created a character that was going to be very watchable and very interesting. He is also very different; he's not like anyone else in the play, indeed I suspect he's not like many other characters who have ever been written. He was an invented character and doesn't appear in the source material, so there must have been an element of creating this firework character, who is a catalyst in the play. He loves words. He's a liar and a braggart, a fantasist who lives in his own world. So he can go any which way: he can say or do almost anything that Shakespeare wants him to. Once that character has come to a writer, it must be rather a gift.

  "Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live." A fantastic line-how did you deliver it? And what "thing" do you think Parolles is or was and does he change?

  8. Guy Henry in Gregory Doran's 2003 production in the Swan Theatre in his "fantastic costume of rags and tatters." His Parolles "was obsessed with his scarves: that was all part of the pretence--anything to take the eye away from what's really going on. He loved anything flashy, he was like a magpie."

  At the time Greg Doran asked me to do it I was working with Trevor Nunn at the National on The Coast of Utopia. I told Trevor and he said that if anyone ever doubted that Shakespeare was a great humanitarian and the great understander of human behavior, then he'd only have to point at the character of Parolles to show how Shakespeare believes humans are capable of change and redemption and generosity of spirit. I think that's right. That line comes after he's been beaten and tormented, and his mask has been ripped away. I was on my knees, sat back on my haunches, alone on the stage. Greg Doran quite rightly kept emphasizing the need to make it as simple as possible, because all the lying is gone. He sees a way to be much happier if he no longer piles layers of lies upon what he is and just tells the truth. It's a lovely thing to be able to play a character that h
as what some people call a journey, a change. He does. He goes very simply back to the court and I think all his lies and nonsense are forgiven. I remember thinking what a relief it must be not to have to bother to pretend anymore. That's one of the great moments in the play. It's interesting that a supposed upstanding and honorable gentleman like Bertram is in fact revealed as less generous-spirited than Parolles turns out to be.

  How does Parolles compare with other Shakespearean parts you've played?

  He is unique. He's not as stupid as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and he's not as wise as Feste. He reminds me more of Mosca in Volpone, in that he's a chancer and liar. He's nowhere near as clever as Mosca, but in terms of flashiness and extraordinary braggadocio behavior they are similar.

  There's a lot of discussion in the text of his clothes--how was that realized in production?

  I had a fantastic costume of rags and tatters. He was obsessed with his scarves: that was all part of the pretense--anything to take the eye away from what's really going on. He loved anything flashy: he was like a magpie. The first scene he has, with Helen, has a lot of rather dense, jokey stuff about virginity. I'm quite neurotic and I can get quite inhibited in rehearsal, which is not particularly helpful to the director or anyone else! That's a very naked scene to do, to come on and launch into all that stuff. So Greg Doran gave me something to do. He gave me a great big trunk with scarves hanging out of it. Parolles was going away with the soldiers so he was taking everything he could from his wardrobe. I would pull this trunk onstage and be packing a few things into it and then sit on it. Having something to tie the scene to and then having somewhere to sit naturally on a bare stage gave the scene, and the rehearsal of the scene, an anchor. And I think visually it told quite a bit about Parolles that out of everybody he had the biggest trunk!