All’s Well That Ends Well

All’s Well is ostensibly a comedy, albeit with an ending focused upon death rather than marriage. However, scholars, since F.S. Boas’s 1896 book Shakespeare and His Predecessors, have come to classify it as Shakespeare’s final “problem play,” coming after Troilus and Cressida (1602) and Measure for Measure (1603). The main plot of the play has Helena, a poor doctor’s daughter, trying to convince the heavily unsympathetic Bertram to marry her. Readers of the play can be left wondering why she wants such a charmless man, although directors may address the issue by casting an actor of intense physical attraction, or trying to turn his spitefulness into naïveté.

The two wind up together, although in fairly acrimonious circumstances, with Helena blackmailing Bertram, leading some critics to suggest the play’s title has more than a whiff of irony.

George Bernard Shaw would compare the play to Henrik Ibsen’s famously modern one, A Doll’s House, contrasting Helen’s “sovereign charm” with “a perfectly ordinary young man, whose unimaginative prejudices and selfish conventionality make him cut a very mean figure.”

Bertram kisses Helena in a 2013 RSC production of the play. Image via RSC.

All’s Well That Ends Well editions:

The Arden Shakespeare
The Oxford Shakespeare
The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Signet Classics Shakespeare