Yes, I’ve read it. Although it was much easier to read when I was in college and had access to those books in the library that have one line of a Shakespeare play across the top of the page and then the whole rest of the page is footnotes explaining what everyone who ever wrote about the play said that line really meant. I don’t remember what those were called but they were awfully fun to read. If I had a robber baron’s enormous library space, I would own a complete set of those.

I’m not going to summarize the works in their entirety. (Too much for one post, unless I had the talent to write a Gilbert-and-Sullivan type song that rattled them off like Modern-Major-General.) Instead, I’m going to focus on one of my favorites:

All’s Well That Ends Well

That title sounds like a play you should know but chances are that you’ve never actually seen it performed. You rarely see it at Shakespeare in the Park¹; they didn’t turn it into a teen movie like 10 Things I Hate about You; Jacoby didn’t make it into a big overblown movie; I will bet your high school English teacher didn’t waste time on it.

It’s kind of a problem, for reasons that will become clear below.

The play opens in the palace of the Countess of Rousillon, in southern France. The countess is sending her son, Bertram, off to king’s court in Paris. I see Bertram as a young Benedict, footloose and fancy-free, just out from under his mother’s watch and looking forward to enjoying his dashing bachelor days, drinking, fighting, and womanizing. He’s handsome and charming and prone to dressing just a little too well. He tells his mother he is looking forward to taking his father’s place at court – and he and the king spend a lot of time in later scenes, talking about his father’s role – but Bertram seems cut from a different cloth.

The Countess’ protegee, Helena, is just as unhappy to see Bertram go to Paris, for she has a powerful crush on him. She begs leave from the Countess to go also to the king’s court. The king has been ill and his doctors and advisors are unable to cure him. Helena’s father who recently died, was a doctor of renown and left her his notes and medical books and, it sounds like, often bounced ideas off her. The countess, hoping Helena can cure the king who had been good friends with Bertram’s father, and hoping that proximity will lead Bertram to love Helena, allows her to go.

Arriving in Paris, Helena introduces herself to the king and offers her medical assistance. Helena is a bit of a bluestocking – I picture her plainly dressed, in dark colors since her father died, perhaps a little out-of-date since she came up from the country and because she doesn’t have any money and so she cannot afford the latest fashions. The king is justifiably skeptical: although he has heard of her father, she is just a young woman – how does she expect to succeed where his own physicians have failed? She persuades him by pledging her reputation, her future, and even her life. If she succeeds, however, she asks that he grant her a noble husband of her choosing. The king, impressed, agrees to give it a shot.

And it works.

The king calls all the eligible young men of his court together, lines them up, and invites Helena to choose. After putting up a show of weighing the options, she quickly selects Bertram.

Bertram, furious but trapped by the king who does not take his reluctance well, goes through with the marriage but refuses to take Helena as his wife. To avoid consummating his marriage with her, Bertram invents an urgent errand elsewhere, sends her back to Rousillon, and takes off for Florence with a battalion of noble youths who have gone to serve in the army of the French king’s ally, the King of Florence. He sends letters to his mother and Helena letting him know that he does not accept Helena as his wife and only will when she proves consummation of his marriage with her – a thing he is determined will happen never. Until then, he says, he has nothing in France.

His mother, aghast that her son could be so heartless, disowns him and makes Helena her heir. Helena is angry, embarrassed, bereft, and heart-broken. She also feels like a thief, having stolen Bertram’s future from him. She leaves the court in secret, and sets forth on a barefoot pilgrimage to Spain in penitence.

But a funny thing happens on the way. When she reaches Florence², she stumbles across a young gentlewoman whom Bertram has been courting. Diana is a virgin of noble birth, not a prostitute, but it seems Bertram is taking his revenge on womanhood by deflowering and abandoning virgins. Diana and her mother are worried – this man of arms is stalking her and pressing his attentions and she wants none of it. Helena proposes a deception: Helena will pay the mother enough to serve as a generous dowry for Diana; Diana will request Bertram’s heirloom signet ring as proof of his honorable intentions, and agree to meet him in a pitch dark room. As you can guess, Helena takes Diana’s place in the dark. And, in the dark, places on his finger a ring of her own.

Cut forward in time, oh, possibly (if I were staging it) around seven or eight months later. The Florentine war has ended, rumor has reported that Helena died on her pilgrimage, and so Bertram has returned to the French court, made amends with his mother and the king, and returned to favor. He’s even rumored to be engaged to an eligible young woman of the aristocracy. Everyone has gathered at the Rousillon palace, where they mourn Helena’s loss. Even Bertram tells the king, when prompted, that he didn’t appreciate her enough and loves her now that she’s dead.³

But then Diana appears and lays claim to Bertram. Her story is simple: he promised marriage and provided his signet ring, and got her pregnant. Bertram, thrashing about like a fish on a line, lies and says that she was a camp follower who stole his ring. At which, she points to the ring that is on his own finger and claims that she gave it to him. The king, who actually gave that ring to Helena, now notices it and demands to know how Bertram got it. There is some suspicion that Bertram killed Helena and took the ring. Bertram relents, admits that he slept with Diana, and says that she put it on his finger in the dark. The king, still furious and smelling something funny, demands to know how Diana got the ring but her answers – all riddles – just infuriate him more. He orders Diana tossed into prison and Diana calls for the jeweler who gave her the ring.

Helena, visibly pregnant, appears.

In less than a page, she explains that she tricked Bertram into sleeping with her, put her ring on his finger and – lo! – she has his heirloom ring on her finger.

Everyone celebrates. The king awards Diana her choice of a noble husband.⁴ Bertram declares that he will love Helena “dearly, ever, ever dearly.”

And all’s well that end’s well.

Or does it.

For here’s the problem: Up until this page, Bertram didn’t love Helena. He’s a womanizing jerk, who went about deflowering Italian virgins of noble birth and, when caught, lying about it. Why should we believe that he is truthfully going to be happily married to her now?

In fact, that line about loving her ever, ever dearly actually reads, “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.”

And the “this” that Helena has to make Bertram know clearly? Her previous line,

“O, my good lord, when I was like this maid;
I found you wondrous kind. There is your ring.
And look you, here’s your letter. This it says,
When from my finger, you can get this ring,
and are by me with this child, etc. – This is done;
will you be mine, now you are doubly won?”

So what is it Bertram is asking Helena to prove? That she has his ring is proven – so it must be that she must prove that she is pregnant with his child.

Helena’s response: “If it appear not plain, and prove untrue, Deadly divorce step between me and you.”

She may be pregnant but how will he know if this child is his? There was no DNA sequencing in those days.

And what exactly was the king sick with in the start of the play? Shakespeare tells us frankly, a fistula. Which, when you look it up on WebMD, is a nasty sort of abscess which is sometimes caused by… VD⁵. And one of the treatments for VD in Shakespeare’s time? Sleeping with a virgin.⁶ So what did Helena do to win a chance at Bertram’s hand in marriage to begin with? And why was Bertram so determined not to marry her, even though it meant incurring the King’s wrath and his mother’s displeasure? Why did he take off for Florence rather than celebrate the marriage bed? And why did he then become serially committed to deflowering the virgins of Florence? And why does he want her to prove that she is pregnant with his child?

Let’s look again at what Helena tells the king, when he is reluctant to allow her to attempt to cure him:

King: Upon thy certainty and confidence, what dars’t thou venture?

Helena: Tax of impudence, –
A strumpet’s boldness, a divulged shame, –
Traduc’d by odious ballads; my maiden’s name,
Sear’d otherwise; ne worse of worst extended,
With vilest torture let my life be ended.

Read that and tell me I’m wrong about her proposed cure.

A problem play indeed.

With an ending just as frustrating as Kate’s place my hand beneath my husband’s foot that requires careful staging to avoid confounding the audience.

When I was still acting, my favorite monologue came from this play, and I love plays that cause the actors and the director to think, how the heck am I going to get this to work?

If you read the play, you will find that the title of the play does not come at the end of the play, as you would expect, oh no, no one in the last scene claims that all’s well that ends well. Instead Helena says it over and over throughout course of the play, to justify her actions, as if she is reminding herself again and again, the ends justify the means.

But when you read Helena’s first monologue, you understand why she is willing to risk it all:

… my imagination
Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.
I am undone: there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star,
And think to wed it, he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
The ambition in my love thus plagues itself:
The hind that would be mated by the lion
Must die for love. ‘Twas pretty, though a plague,
To see him every hour; to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls
In our heart’s table – heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet favour:
But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics.

And this is why we love Shakespeare: even here, in this poor neglected play that never gets produced because it is so problematic – don’t even get me started on the subplot, which some say explains why Bertram avoided marriage – even here, Shakespeare speaks well.

All’s Well That Ends Well: give it a shot. Tell me if I’m wrong.

1. Last performed 2011. Yet they have time to put Much Ado About Nothing so often that I’m sick of it and would like Beatrice to smite Benedict rather than marry him. Ashland performed AWTEW in 2019 – I’m sorry I missed it. ↩︎
2. Wait a minute, what is she doing in Florence, if she’s on a pilgrimage to Spain? I am confused or perhaps Shakespeare was… ↩︎
3. Well, that’s easy to say, isn’t it? ↩︎
4. Because that worked so well the last time he did that. ↩︎
5. And now that’s in my search history. Great. ↩︎
6. Which worked about as well as you think it did. Which is, not at all. ↩︎