Though All’s Well that Ends Well is, in Shakespeare’s First Folio, classified as a comedy, nowadays it’s better known as a ‘problem play’. But what exactly is the problem? Though broadly following the conventions of Shakespearean comedy–marriage, mistaken identity, conflict between genders, renewals of social harmony–All’s Well veers into dramatic satire by using the asymmetry of gender ideology to destabilize action of the play. In a classic chivalric tale, the hero is faced with trials and tribulations which, throughout the course of the story, he works to overcome, only to then be rewarded with the hand of a humble and compliant maiden. In Shakespeare’s problem play, the woman, Helen, is not the fairytale prize but the assertive, desiring protagonist. Introducing the Oxford edition of the play, Susan Snyder explains it best: “Conventional romances glide from heroic exploit to matrimonial reward without ever coming down to earth in realities of war and marriage. But in All’s Well actual social practices frequently intrude on the fairytale action” (Snyder, 11-12).
For those unfamiliar with the plot of All’s Well that Ends Well, a lesser known play within Shakespeare’s body of work, a brief synopsis: we open with the funeral of Bertram’s father. His mother, the Countess Rousillion, bids her son goodbye as he enters the wardship of the ailing King. Helen, an orphaned physician’s daughter under the care of the Countess, mourns Bertram’s departure. “...I think not of my father…What was he like? / I have forgot him. My imagination / Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s” (1.1.79-83).
Helen follows Bertram to court, hoping to use one of her late father’s medicines to cure the King. When she succeeds, the King allows her the very thing she has asked for: a choice of husband from among his wards. To no one’s surprise, she chooses Bertram, who declares, “I cannot love her, nor will strive to do’t” (2.3.145). Nevertheless, the King forces him into it, and along with his companion, Paroles, Bertram flees to war to avoid consummating the marriage.
To his mother, the Countess, he sends his new wife, along with a letter: “I have wedded her, not bedded her, and sworn to make the ‘not’ eternal” (3.2.20-22). The Countess, horrified, rushes to support Helen, who has, in her own turn, received correspondence from her husband: “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger…and show me a child / begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me / husband” (3.2.57-50).
Helen takes the challenge literally, and, disguised as a pilgrim, she travels to the front. Befriending the object of Bertram’s affection, a woman named Diana, alongside her widowed mother, Helen conspires to trick Bertram into consummating the marriage by luring him into a bed which he believes to be occupied by Diana. (This device, called a ‘bed trick’, was wildly popular in early modern drama.) In a disingenuous pledge to her, Bertram gives Diana his family ring, and she gives him one in return. Meanwhile, fellow soldiers kidnap Paroles, pretending to be the enemy, and terrorize him into admitting he is a coward. Paroles reveals confidential information about his military unit, alongside correspondence in which he undermines Bertram.
Due to her prolonged absence, Helen is presumed dead at court. Returning to France, Bertram learns that he is to be married again, this time to Lafeu’s daughter. As a token of his commitment, Bertram gives Lafeu the ring given to him by Diana, which turns out to be a token gifted to Helen by the King. Amidst the confusion, Diana, having followed Bertram back to court, accuses him of taking her virginity and then deserting her. She entreats the collaboration of a maligned Paroles as a witness to the unchaste events before stating, to everyone’s confusion,
“...But for this lord,
Who hath abused me as he knows himself,
Though yet he never harmed me…
He knows himself my bed he hath defiled,
And at that time he got his wife with child.
Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick.
So here’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick” (5.3.295-301).
Helen, heavily pregnant, appears to corroborate Diana’s story. Complete with child and the ring Bertram had sworn would never be hers, she possesses both of the requirements stipulated in Bertram’s letter, and, regardless of his consent, may now call him ‘husband’.
This “knotty” issue of consent within All’s Well was addressed at the Globe’s Knotty Comedies Study Day. In addition to three incredible lectures, the day concluded with a Q&A featuring assistant director Sofia Gallucci. She remarked on an air of timelessness that she and director Chelsea Walker were aiming for while creating their All’s Well. “One review placed [our production] in the 1950s,” she commented. Not quite right, but not wrong, either. Gallucci also spoke about the cuts that she and Walker had made, explaining that, though they hadn’t quite managed it, Walker had been driven by the idea of an hour-and-forty minute runtime, straight through and without interval.
Finding my seat in the candlelit Sam Wanamaker playhouse on Thursday night, these specific qualities sat at the forefront of my mind. Cuts to a script, especially a Shakespearean one, largely shape interpretation. Effective cuts serve as razor sharp weapons, slicing away fat to reveal (and emphasize) the lean meat of underlying themes and interpretations. In a multilayered and morally rich play like All’s Well, I felt curious and hopeful about what Walker and Gallucci’s selections would reveal.
Disappointingly, most of the cuts in the first half of the show, apart from the elimination of the Clown character, seemed to be at Helen’s expense. The believability of the action in the second half, (culminating in the notorious bed trick) relies on understanding that Helen is making a deliberate choice to place her love for Bertram above his autonomy. Likewise, we must be willing to overlook her obsessive qualities, as the older characters do, in light of her charisma. Because the first half of the show relies so heavily on Bertram’s queerness (see below) as justification for his objection to the marriage, a severely cut Helen spends most of the time stumbling towards tragic unsympathy, looking not deliberate in her persistence, but idiotic.
When I returned to my seat after the interval, I felt jarred by a scheming Helen, so much of a deviation from her characterization in the first half. Unique amongst Shakespeare’s heroines, she is the pursuer, rather than the pursued (even Midsummer’s Helena is initially pursued by the object of her affection). Helen, together with her feminine co-conspirators: the Countess, who supports Helen over her own son, Diana and her mother, accessories to the bed trick, serve as an atypical feminine center to this particular work. Tragically, I couldn’t help but feel like Walker’s cuts mainly served to weaken the women and re-center the men.
At the play’s beginning, the aesthetics of timelessness were also on my mind. I felt open minded about the prospect of a modernized staging, having recently seen two which I feel harnessed it to an enchanting degree: Lyndsey Turner’s Coriolanus and Ola Ince’s Othello. The latter, also staged at the Sam Wanamaker playhouse, set Othello in New Scotland Yard, even altering the script to describe Desdemona as a “Chelsea girl” and Iago as having attended Eton. The modernization is effective, not only in bringing themes of race and inequality to the forefront, but narrowing even further into a discussion of inequality within our systems of policing. In a poignant conclusion, both Othello and Iago are arrested and written about in the news, Othello’s headline reading, ‘Black Beast: The Nigerian Chief Inspector Goes Down’ where Iago’s reads, ‘Cops in Crisis: Police Struggle With Their Mental Health’. This conclusion points to an explicit rationale for the modernization–Othello is a case study on a conversation happening right now.
In Chelsea Walker’s All’s Well, though the trousers are crisp and the classic art hung on the doors beautiful, the modernization seemingly does not have a point. It doesn’t work with Shakespeare’s words to comment on contemporary issues. The timelessness felt added in perhaps because Walker, new to directing Shakespeare, felt afraid of committing to non-contemporary aesthetics.
The most notable frustration arose from the representation of queerness. In the first half of the show, Bertram’s queerness and relationship with Paroles are used as justification for his disinterest in Helen. In the second act, this source of tension is entirely abandoned. Bertram courts Diana and participates in the terrorization of Paroles, who is implied to have followed Bertram to war so they could be together. Bertram seems to be offended and deeply hurt by the discovery of Paroles’ letter, despite having participated in the terror prior to the insult. In the first half, the two are romantically entangled, and in the second, despite no discernible catalyst, they are at odds and we find Bertram indifferent. In a poignant scene after what was, quite frankly, a hate crime, Paroles wrestles with his neckerchief before declaring, “Simply the thing I am will make me live,” and deciding to keep it. I, as an audience member, took this to mean that he was not, like Bertram, making the choice to forswear his queerness, but instead use it to his advantage. The decision to make Paroles queer is genius, giving new insight into his fraught relationship with Bertram and actions throughout the play. William Robinson, the actor portraying Paroles, gives by far the strongest performance, heightening the quality of each scene he appears in. (At moments, the quality of his acting is so incredible, it feels like he is in an entirely different play from the rest of the cast.)
The queer depiction falls apart once Bertram enters the picture. Where Paroles is haunted by his queerness, Bertram is inconsistent, abruptly exorcised from it. It's one thing for a queer Bertram to be motivated by internalized homophobia, or by sexual ambiguity which must be teased out. However, there is a glaring issue–no stakes or consequences are established for Bertram’s queerness. This is where the ‘timeless’ nature of the play works to undermine it. Queer themes could have been used to justify modernization–even placing it in the 1950s, where homosexuality was illegal in the UK and chemical castration allowed until nearly the end of the decade, could have allowed for a wordless subtext with which to explore Bertram’s desire and sexuality as tormented and tormenting. The aesthetics of the production unfortunately don’t give us subtext, serving as a flat background for these queer themes to be heavily used and then dropped without thought of the further effect on the play. It’s okay for Bertram to be queer and unlikeable, and okay–remarkable, even–to depict a toxic queer relationship between Bertram and Paroles, but you need to commit to it. I sorely wish this production had.
The most important thing to be taken from Chelsea Walker’s All’s Well that Ends Well is the importance of committing to the job all the way. Her cuts squashed Helen in order to re-center Bertram, to give the audience a chance at sympathizing with him. But the lion’s share of his sympathy relies on a queerness which is dropped incredibly quickly. Walker saw the incredible moral ambiguity of All’s Well, but only went for it half way. Her production, instead of showcasing a groundbreaking and current interpretation, is half-baked. I left the theatre, stepping into the brisk London night, feeling nothing but frustrated about what might have been.
Shakespeare, William, and Susan Snyder. All’s Well That Ends Well. Oxford ; Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Picture taken by my amazing friend Bri (@beforeviolets on Instagram)
Share this post