Programme extract for All's Well That Ends Well
Extract from 'Shakespeare and the Road to All's Well That Ends Well' by Charles Nicholl
All’s Well that Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic plays. It is part of that trio of early seventeenth-century works – the others are Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure – which are traditionally referred to as the ‘problem plays’ or the ‘dark comedies’. These are old-fashioned labels, coined back in the days of Shaw and Ibsen, but they serve well enough to describe these plays so full of unsettling ambiguities and ethical puzzles, and characters “at war ’twixt will and will not”. Nowadays we might call them ‘Shakespeare noir’. Their key quality is summed up by AP Rossiter as ‘shiftingness’ – they “throw opposed and contradictory views into the mind, only to leave the resulting equations without any settled or soothing solutions: they are all about ‘Xs’ that do not work out” [Angel with Horns, 1961, p.128]. Watching All’s Well we are often caught out, lulled by the folk-tale setting and the autumnal melancholy of the verse, then suddenly chilled by a darker mood, cynical and salacious. “Hence it is,” says the jaundiced Lafeu, “that we make trifles of our terrors, ensconsing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear” [II.iii.3-6].
For Shakespeare himself, always a commercial writer, these plays were exercises or experiments in the newly fashionable mode of ‘tragicomedy’. The genre goes back to Roman playwrights like Plautus – whom Shakespeare much admired – but the current models were Italian plays such as Gianbattista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (‘The Faithful Shepherd’). This was published in English in 1602, together with an eloquent essay by Guarini praising the subtleties of tragicomedy, with its blending of ‘contrary qualities’, and its characters who travail through dangers and perplexities – through what he calls the ‘feigned knot’ of the story – to happiness. This seems to describe All’s Well, whose very title is a rather sardonic definition of tragicomedy, though at the end we are still not quite sure if they have arrived at happiness. “All seems to be well” is the best the King can offer.
Copyright Charles Nicholl 2009
The rest of Charles Nicholl's article can be found in the programme for All's Well that Ends Well, on sale from the NT Bookshop from 19 May 2009, and the Olivier Bookstall and ushers at performance times, priced at £3.
Contents also include: an article by Marina Warner on fairy and folk tales, and their influence on Shakespeare's play; Rae Smith's illustrations for the show. PLUS Who's Who in the company, and photographs of them at work by Simon Annand.
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