Morning, everyone, thanks for coming back. This is a series of lectures on Shakespeare plays which tries to take one question to think about a particular play from different angles. So there's going to be talking about all's well that ends well. I'm then to suggest that this play a second question already people as well, that ends well. Tell me if that's what this play is about. I'm to do that. I'm going to think about structure, tone and genre.
Maybe to try and think about a more ethical context to thinking about this troubling comedy. Like the other 28 lecture's so far on planes in this series. This is going to end up on our team team. So let's start with an outline of what happens in this play. Helen or Helena is the daughter of a doctor who recently died. She's in love with her social superior. Bertram, the count of Russi on his father has also just died, and that's made him a ward of the King Bertram's mother.
The contest is very keen that the pair should marry. But Bertram, crucially, is not. When Helen uses some of her dad's old prescriptions to cure the king's illness, she asks him for a reward to be so Bertram. Her husband, Bertram, is horrified. He leaves court for the wars and leaves behind the letter, saying he will not recognise his marriage to Helen until she can prove that she has the ring from his finger and is pregnant with his child.
Helen is undeterred under cover of going to Santiago de Compostela on pilgrimage. She follows Bertram and learns that he is about to seduce Diana. She arranges with Diana's mother, the widow that, unbeknown to Bertram, she will substitute herself for him. For her? No. For Diana. That's right. In the bedroom, it would be more interesting. Bedrick, perhaps, if you were going to somebody for butterfish isn't a substitute for Diana.
Diana arranges this assignation with Bertram and Halliburton step in a complicated series of pop Propp twists plot twists which rely heavily on the prop of a ring quite reminiscent of the end of Merchant of Venice and on the misinformation that Helen is dead, reminiscent of loathsome Bertram returns to court. His behaviour is revealed. He is under suspicion of having murdered Helen. But eventually she is brought in.
She explains all the tricks, and Bertram has to accept that since she has got his ring and says she is pregnant with his child, he must acknowledge her as his wife. So celebrations all round. Or is it? That's my question for today, is all's well that ends well. Let's just start with something a little bit of time on this apparently proverbial phrase. All's well that ends well. The historian Maurice Tili, in a reference work on Proverbs that you can find on line lists a number of similar phrases.
All is well. And the man shall have his Mayr again. All is well. And the old man down says all is well. When the mistress smiles. They seem to be to me to be more straightforwardly linear in their import. We know it's all okay now because X has happened. So there's that phrase which seemed to sort of had forwards rather than as in old. Well, that ends well, a kind of backwards causation. The status of prior events. That phrase suggests, is modified by something that comes later.
We look back at events which might have read one way because of what we know happens at the end. The ending modifies what's gone before, smooths it out, reassures us that, however uncertain it might have seemed at the time, it was for the best, because although we didn't know it at the time, all those things were part of moving to a happy conclusion to that kind of modification of the earlier parts of the text. By the end, particularly appropriate for plays as text which exist in time.
Most most of our reading, most of our military texts don't exist so much in time because they don't have a they didn't take up a certain amount of time that the amount of time that we've encountered them, it's elastic. It's up to us. But plays, certainly in performance, have a set amount of time. You can't go back to earlier events, but you can rethink them in your mind. Now, like many of Shakespeare's comic titles, the phrase all's well that ends well never quite emerges in its play.
The same is true of as through life kept pretty much true of measure for measure. True, as people said crossly about Twelfth Night Piech goes to see Twelfth Night says it's a terrible play and nothing to do with Twelfth Night. So comic titles tend not to emerge exactly in the in that phrase, in the play, but here in all's well that ends well. There are a number of occasions as the play begins to wind up that we get an attempt or a version of the title.
Helen herself reassures the widow, Diana's mother, that that plot will work out despite the hiccup. But the king isn't there to receive their petition in time. So Helen tells the widow. All's well that ends well. Yet, though, time seems so adverse and means unfit. All's well that ends well. Yet, though, time seems so adverse and means unfit. The second line that actually rather compromises the first, that half rhyme trying to lose the bit about rhyme.
Later in the lecture. But the half rhyme yet unfit seems to emphasise a kind of faltering confidence, even as she utters the same ten shy. All's well that ends well, yet is speculative rather than definitive. It can still work out. Don't lose hope. The King's couplet that ends to play two themes later is hardly more secure. Again, we've got this modifier. Yet all yet seems well, we know that seems as a real kind of red light word in Shakespeare.
Seems usually is not the same as is all yet it seems well. And if it ends so meet the bitter past more welcome. It's the sweet fall yet seems well, a dividend. So meet the bitter past more welcome. It's the sweet. So that combination of yet seems and if it all yet seems well and if it ends so meet is curiously inconclusive, tentative, unwilling to state quite categorically either that all is well or that the bitter past can be reconciled by current sweetness.
But what the King says here that a bitter past might be contrasted or juxtaposed with sweet conclusion suggests that we might think about all's well in that genre of tragicomedy that I discussed briefly in relation to symbolism last week. Bitterness followed by sweetness is in some ways the definition of tragicomedy. I'm going to talk a bit more about that parallel minute, but still with references to all's well in the play.
The epilogue, which follows The King's final speech, opens the phrase, the title phrase up again. It's like an H at the end of the play. Can't quite resist. The king's a beggar. Now the word sorry, the king's a beggar. Now the play is done. All is well ended. If this suit be one that you express contenders, all is well ended. If this suit be one that you express contempt. So now the question of whether all's well and has ended well is explicitly handed over to the audience.
They have to decide all's well. If you express consent. Well, at least that's the conceit. But it seems interesting to me that like other kinds of choice, this play proposes, the possibility to refuse turns out to be illusory. Like the characters in the play. That's to say we might think we have an option to express content or not. But actually, we don't. If we don't express content by clapping, we'll never, in a kind of perpetual existentialism, be able to escape the theatre.
So references to all's well, but not exact quotations of it proliferate as the plots come to that conclusion in the play. And thus, in certain ways, they enact its own premise. At the end of things, we review how it all has been. Now, that might be particularly appropriate for comedy structured around this kind of narrative. Broadly speaking, a comedy in this period is something where things are better at the end than they were at the beginning.
A tragedy is vice versa. As the playwright and apologists for theatre, Thomas Haywood put neatly in a tract on theatre dating from sixteen, twelve tragedies and comedies differ. Thus, in comedies Turbulent Uprima Tranquila. Ultimate in Tragedies. Tranquila. Premer Turbulent. Ultima comedies he translates. Begin in trouble and end in peace. Tragedies begin farms and end in Tempest.
So if comedies begin in trouble and end in peace, according to this logic, all's well that ends well is the very definition of comedy. So let's think for a few minutes about genre and how this might impact on our central question. Like somebody that I talked about last week, All's Well was first published in 16 twenty three in the First Folio, as I'll discuss in a minute. It stated composition is actually curiously flexible in Shakespearean criticism right now.
Most players we know broadly or if there's a consensus broadly about where they come off, not so much this one. And I'll talk about that in a minute. It appears amongst the comedies. And clearly, there are loads of ways in which it echoes comedies which are more central to that show in being structured around female romantic desires. It links the comedy roles of Rosalind in As You Like It or Viler in Twelfth Night with our determined protagonist, Helen.
By contrast, the Week Bertram is like earlier male lovers who waver in two gentlemen of Verona with overtalking environment couple of weeks or A Midsummer Night's Dream. Broadly speaking, this play is associated with marriage and particularly fertility. Fertility tends to be implied in it in so regular comedy rather than brought on stage. But pregnancy fertility is one of the obviously the key elements of the play's conclusion.
And as with other comedies, it gives us a plot managed by human ingenuity rather than cosmic determination. So comedies tend to be about how humans make their world or make robots. And that's that's an agency which tends to be broadly denied to tragic characters.
And we'll talk more about agency as we go forward. Like other of Shakespeare's comedies, Old-World dramatises the painful social necessity for young men in comic plots to separate themselves from male company and reengineer their emotional lives around women. This is a particularly obvious theme of much ado about nothing. The costs of getting together with Beatrice for Benedek is the instruction to kill his best friend Claude here.
But it's clear here in all's well that ends well. And part of the military plot and the character Parolees Parole's is Bertram cybercafes, is to offer male friendship or a kind of militarise bromance as the alternative to heterosexual marriage. The zeringue, the parole's with whom Bertram takes off in escape from his marriage is probably the same low and social status as the despised Helen. So that brings out the kind of parallel between them as different companions for Bertram.
So there are ways then in which all's well. It's quite clearly within the comedy genre, but on the other hand, to play Flip's a lot of expected trips of comedy in some clever and unsettling ways. Let's take for a moment. The older generation takes miss. Comedies, as we know, are about young people making their own decisions. Plots either forcibly separate them from their parents.
As with Rosalind or Viler, who are without the guidance and support of older confidants, or they make the parental figures ineffectual or irrelevant in some way or another. Think carefully and not. Perhaps the bemused father is much ado about nothing. Or insurgent who's the missing mother from that from that play character who written into the play during draughting but gets lost because there isn't a role for these parental figures in that kind of comedy.
So comedies tend to construct a present older generation as kind of blocking figures who have to be circumvented. Now the blocking figure is particularly common in place by other Renaissance dramatists where the mean father or uncle who won't let the young couple be together. It's a stop figure. Might think about Middleton's case made in Cheapside, for instance. To some extent, Baptista, who is the father to Katherine and Bianca and Vincent Yo, the father to Lou Sentier in Taming of the Shrew.
Fall into this type telling issue is partly about the struggle between parents and children, about how they can play more clearly. The dead father who sets up the casket test for Portia's Souters in the Merchant of Venice or even Shylock himself, locking up his daughter Jessica to prevent her going off with Christian boys. These are classic blocking figures now in all's well that ends well.
Something slightly different is afoot here. The parental figures, including the king, the countess of Russi on the widow who is Diana's mother, all neglect their traditional comic roles and show themselves to be great supporters of the couple. The older generation and not the block, in fact, that the most enthusiastic supporters, particularly of Helen. They all want to marry Bertram. I want to say two things about this.
Firstly, it was recognised. All's well, that's a play. That's my roundly concerned about the interaction between the older and the younger generation. And the sense of a generation gap. We might want to put it in some plays that have been traditionally thought to come later in Shakespeare's career with King Lear and with the late plays or romances with which Shakespeare finishes his writing career. Simply as we talked about last week with Winter's Tale and The Tempest.
In fact, recent criticism has begun to question whether all's well, which has no records of early performance and no print edition before 16 23 might actually be better dated to join that late group of compromise fairy tales that turn on the question of women's virtue and therefore be written more like around sixteen, seven eight rather than 16 three four. So sixteen, three four was the problem play designation as generated at the end of the 19th century.
A little group of players from the early 17th century. Initially these were Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida measure for measure and all. Well, we can see a way of thinking about the play as. As one of those problem plays, but with no absolute reason to date the play in that cluster. The sense of the play being about generations might be one reason to put it a bit later, to put it with the romance.
So you might think that reediting all's well that ends well is the most arcane and pointless scholarly activity. But it does help us to think that place can be limited by the groups with which we choose to associate them. Putting anything into context with anything else obviously flaps up certain kinds of similarities. And that problem play category with which all's well that's tended to be grouped may have limited the range of critical responses we might make.
So all's well that ends well. And measure for measure is a slightly cliched pairing, I think. All's well that ends well and apparently so symbol in A Winter's Tale might be a more interesting one. One. At one point then about the role of the pet parent figures. It is generic. It helps us to see how the company we make plays keep shapes, what we're able to say about this. The other point I want to make about the parents is broadly character. Logical is about the construction of character here.
The romantic couple are not bound to each other against a hostile environment. The environment is actually rather benign, despite the fact that there's a war that we've never seen seem to have much, much war going on. The editor of the Ardern latest in Much Ado about Nothing. Clare McGucken makes a really smart remark that Beatrice and Benedick. She says in much debate, nothing.
The first Shakespearian comic couple who can't get together for psychological reasons rather than for circumstantial or environmental ones. So she says it's not that the world is keeping them apart in some way or that one of them happens to be dressed as a boy as you are and companies be recognised. You there aren't these kind of factors going on. What happens is that they've got some kind of psychological block about being together.
We could build on that to say that Helen and Berchem have a similar impediment. What's stopping them from being together is not their environment, which is actually quite positive about it. The king himself has said they should marry. So the social environment is entirely prote their marriage. But what's stopping them is something to do with character.
We might do about that by saying that Helen and Bertram are characters who really should not get together, their central romantic characters who find themselves in a play that looks like a comedy but who really should not go forward into that happy ending coupledom factory. That is Shakespearean romantic comedy. There an antique comic couple trapped in a comedy.
The brilliant Structuralist Lithographer critic Northrop Frye tells us that, quote, The action of comedy is intensely Freudian in shape. The erotic pleasure principle explodes under the social anxiety sitting on top of it and blows them sky high in comedy. We see a victory of the pleasure principle that Freud warns us not to look for in ordinary life. It's a great idea that comedy is the ultimate kind of wish fulfilment.
This is where we get our desires satisfied in ways which we can't hope for in real life. But perhaps all's well that ends well is Freudian in a different and darker way. Perhaps that would give its title a more cautionary import. Be careful what you wish for. All could not be well, I think if Heaven and Bertram got together because Bertram really does not want to marry Helen. It's quite hard actually, in a kind of modern environment to think how much credence we should give to that.
And of course, we should, even though the reasons he doesn't want to marry are broadly snobbery. He doesn't think she's a suitable class position for him, but he keeps saying he doesn't want to marry her. And in some ways, this is a play. Interestingly, I think about consent, about the difficulty of consent. I know her well, he says of Helen to the king. She had her breeding at my father's charge, a poor physician's daughter, my wife. He vows I cannot love her nor will strive to do it.
I cannot let her know, will strive to do it. So it's a very queasy comedy that makes that happen. A kind of pincer movement of royal Fiete and female ingenuity that entraps Bertram. And although we might want to praise Helen's stubborn pursuit of her own desires, it's hard to know quite what to do with the authenticity of Bertram's own feelings. I thought about this. I wondered if Bertram has become slightly feminised by the plot here.
It's the position of women in Shakespeare's comedies often to say they do want to get married. Beatrice, who we've already heard about Catherine and the 10, is the Shrew Olivia in Twelfth Night. And what men do is break down or circumvent their opposition or demonstrate that it's in some way kind of buttoned up or frigid, emotionally frigid. It needs to be it needs to be broken down. Mostly, those women are against marriage in general.
That might be thought to be fair game for persuasive suitors. But rather than set against a specific individual as Bertram, it's so Bertram's not saying he doesn't want to get married. He's saying he does not want to marry Helen. Now, all Shakespearean comedy demands, of course, that we suspend to some extent our misgivings or incredulity about the central romantic couples are always going to be saying, well, will they really get on to the future?
Probably going to miss the point of the play when Sebastian quickly accepts Olivia's marriage proposal in topflight, although he's never seen her before. When Orlando, in his wrestling kit is so all conquering that it wasn't felt immediately in love with him. I'm not so Shakespeare means to be realistic, except perhaps to say that the reasons people get together are often happily quite mysterious to other people.
Whether the course of their relationship takes to the actual minutes or many real years of dating. While we they be encouraged to question the precise nature of or cenotes attraction to Viler in her voice clothing, or to worry a bit about the Sanyo the bounty hunter off to Belmonte Merchant of Venice. There are other elements of the plays which allow us to take pleasure in the fiction of these structuring and interrupted courtships.
So comedy tends broadly to make us feel what we want, what the characters want and when they get what they want. At the end, we feel satisfied with our fictional experience, knows precisely this that almost all readers of all as well have had difficulty with and criticism as well.
If you look through the history 20th century aurélio, who does history criticism of all's well criticism has been pretty evenhanded in finding both parties problematic coverage called Helen Shakespeare's loveliest character. But she's also been called a keen and unswerving huntress of man flushable. That's supposed be a good thing. No. Probably not. Not so much, Dr. Johnson felt that Bertram was a coward and a profligate.
Other critics have felt he should be pitied for being trapped in Helen's implacable pursuit. Certainly, as I've suggested, a modern political vocabulary of consent could be interestingly and provocatively applied to this plan, particularly in a way that difficult encounter between Bertram and Diana. It looks as if Diana, who's being kind of pimped really to Bertram, is is a figure who doesn't have much agency in this situation.
But there's a way in which Bertram also is trumped by other people's narratives. If Helen were a man stalking a woman who told him to get off. How would we think about the play's ending? But not as Bertram himself garner audience sympathy. At best, he is callow. Like much ado, Claudia, but at worst he is deeply selfish, incapable of empathy and resistant to the impulse towards education of men. That's at the heart of Shakespearean comedy.
Lots of Shakespearean comedies are showing men how to behave, how to behave better than they have done better. Never has a speech of affirmation and self reflection, which suggests he has reformed. He never shows that he has repented or accepted what's been placed on him. And so often a comparison with Shakespeare's source is useful here. Shakespeare takes the story of all's well from captures the Kameron.
It's the same source he uses for the play discussed last week. Kimberly, actually, you know, by the time might be a reason to think of them as being composed rather more closely together in time than we've conventionally done. This is the only time Shakespeare uses the catchier answer. You can look up sources just as a reminder in Jeffrey Bullock's great Bible of Shakespeare's reading narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, probably Access's captures Italian via the translation into English of William Painter. The story in Painter is identical, but as we'll see, the tone of the ending is quite different. According to Painter, when presented with a heroine who can answer all his preconditioning, Bertram graciously bangs himself to the situation. He agrees, quote, to accept her forever as his lawful wife.
Folding her in his arms and sweetly kissing her diversed times together, he paid her welcome to him as his virtuous, loyal and most loving wife. And so, for ever after. He would acknowledge her from that time forth. Painter concludes he loved and honoured her as his dear spouse and wife. So Bertram agrees to accept her forever as his lawful wife, sweetly kissing her diversed times together.
I've said before in these lectures that actually sometimes the most useful thing about looking at Shakespeare sources is what he leaves out, because the existence of something in the source which Shakespeare chooses not to use establishes it as a possibility, distinctly rejected rather than as something which was never part of the picture in the first place.
This is a really good example. I think Painter's final paragraph that I've just read works hard to confirm that the union of his Helen and Bertram, is, for all its twisted courtship, happy, and that it will continue to be so into the future. All's well that ends well in the sorts quite distinctly, but it's a very different ending from Shakespeare's in the play. Far from folding Helen into his arm, his arms or sweetly kissing her, Bertram accept just about that.
He's been outwitted. He acknowledges his wife, but with another significant caveat. This is something to think about in the light of those modified. All's well that ends well. Phrases that I'm talking about a few minutes ago. If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I love her dearly, ever, ever dearly. If if it's the weasel word here now how an actor delivers the repetitions of that line, which is Berkland last speech in the play seems right.
Good possibility would be a great thing to do an investigation of the performance tradition. But if we were to take it to our central question is all's well that ends well, we'd have to raise a question mark. Bertram puts his acceptance of Helen as well as his wife into some post plays future when he has heard the evidence to back up her, her audacious claim that he's pregnant, that she's pregnant with his child.
One way of reading that might be to say it's not over yet ends then becomes the term that's problematic because well as well. So if Bertram is a problematic and uncommitted group. Helen, too, is a difficult prospect. She takes the active female comic protagonist we've seen elsewhere and runs with it. And she also defines expectations from her very first lines in the play. She enters all's well sorrowful. All the characters in the opening scene are wearing black.
According to the stage direction, this makes a striking tableau mourning and gives a kind of atmosphere of death and mourning, particularly for Bertram's father, but also for Helens that pervades the whole play. But as soon as Helen is alone onstage, she confesses like a kind of photo negative Hamlet. She's actually not sad about her father at all, but about her unrequited love for Bertram. So the question marks over Helen's likeability in this play, a question marks about her,
our engagement with her quest and our engagement with character. If we don't really like her, is her getting what she wants. The equivalent of a happy ending? To return to the source for a minute in Painter's version of the of the heroine is repeatedly praised for her cleverness, and her husband recognises her strength of character and ingenuity.
In the end of the story, what Painter seems to bring out is the kind of moral of his version of all's well that ends well is that people can change their lives by their own energies. They don't need to bowed to the inevitable. Now, if that's the moral that Shakespeare inherited, he, it and its heroine underwent some tarnishing in his hands. One thing we could see Shakespeare doing here is taking a fairy tale and systematically darkening it.
Probably the play's most successful modern performance that at the National Theatre in 2009, directed by Marianne Elliott, this production stressed the play as a fairy tale with a set up of an illustrated, grim part children's book, part Gothic folk tale, ramparts, wolves, magic lanterns, silhouettes and an indeterminate ending with Helen and Burton caught momentarily in a freeze-Frame wedding photograph.
The wise cynic in the play, Leffew has a remark which is quite helpful for thinking about this place. Curious balance between romance and pragmatism or between fairy tale and modernity. They say miracles are passed, says Leffew, and we have our first philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. It's a great line actually, for thinking about the way ideas are changing during this period.
They say miracles are parts, the miracles that are associated with promises and with all kinds of different use of the world. We have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless, with great mind for thinking about the supernatural. And in fact, something that is typical of this place knowingness that it deploys an idealised folkloric structure in the shrewd service of human desires and selfishness hands magic,
healing of the king partakes of a fantasy world. The idea of a kind of magical healing but is a miracle sheets floats for her own agenda. Just as when she goes on pilgrimage, she's got distinctly earthy, earthly not to say sexual rather than religious aims. And this doctrine of pragmatism, Helen, will do what it takes to get what she wants brings the notion of all's well that ends well into a more ethical sphere.
Want to look at that by thinking about Helen's soliloquy at the end of Act One scene one left on stage for a moment. Helen speaks directly of her ambitions. Our remedies, often ourselves, do lie, which we ascribe to heaven. Fated sky gives us free scope. Only dive back would pull our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. What power is it which mounts my love so high makes me see and cannot feed my knife.
The mightiest space in fortune nature brings to join like likes and kiss like native themes. Impossible be strange attempts to those that way their pains incense and do suppose what have been cannot be who ever strove to show her much to show her merit that admit her love the king's disease. My project may deceive me, but my intents are fixed and will not leave me remedies often ourselves to lie,
which we ascribe to heaven to really striking speak. I think Helen is the only woman in Shakespeare who speaks like this. It's a soliloquy. She's alone onstage stage affiliates her with ambivalent characters in Shakespeare's plays, crucially, who have something to hide, who might think of Hamlet at a similar point in his play of Iago at a similar point in Othello.
Each stays behind early in the play to tell us of a separateness, an implacable separateness they feel from the community in which they find themselves and have a secret interior which is at odds with the public face they feel obliged to promote. Now we tend to think of the soliloquy as a definitive, privileged mode of the tragic era. I think that's actually really not correct.
In Shakespeare, soliloquies more often belong to those who cannot reconcile inner and outer a paradox that is often villainous character only later, really, that I think it's come to seem like the condition of being a person to have a secret life. You really want to try and voice. I think in Shakespeare more often this is a this is a problem. This is something which bad people encounter. We might think of it again of the algo.
I am not what I am. Now, these troubling associations are amplified in Helen's speech, where she echoes the radical agency of the argot or Kubilius, Edmund or Cassius urging Brutus to the assassination of Caesar. There are ways in which this UN superstitious autonomy is admirable as it is in these other figures, too. But she does share it. She shares this credo of self-sufficiency with some other characters who are not entirely happy role models for a comic female character.
If I were broadly to try to simplify a large philosophical shift that is beginning during the career of Shakespeare and will get its English codification in the work of Thomas Hobbs in the mid seventeenth century will be the idea of agency, the motor of events shifting from the providential to the human, shifting from an idea that things happen because of the will of God. To an understanding that things happen because of the behaviour of individuals.
This shift has profound consequences for narratives that causation such as the writing of history. And it's a question which is really pressing in cheques with history points, but also for morality and ethics and for our understanding of the human operating in the world.
It's a shift which I think Shakespeares really fascinating because he keeps giving us characters who believe that the world is up for human manipulation against characters who think that you ought to stay in your place or submit yourself to higher authorities. It's a shift that then which Shakespeare Shakespeare's fascinated with, but which he recognises I think is dangerous.
He associates it with men whose will to power places them beyond conventional systems of morality that dangerous figures be Helco and Cassius. So perhaps in this context, the essential question. All's well that ends well. Seems less the conclusion of a comic fable and more the morality of the Renaissance pragmatist Machiavelli. Machiavelli advocated ruthless self-interest at the heart of power politics.
We associate the phrase the end justifies the means which we might see as a gloss of all's well that ends well with Machiavelli and philosophers to probably say it comes from. Of it. But it's a pragmatic theory of human interaction, which has a lot of traction. In early 17th century England, manuscript translations of Machiavelli and the illicit print editions. Persuasive figures like the stage Machiavelli, Barabas in Malis du Malta all attest to the reach of this new philosophy.
The philosophy of human self-interest. Guiding events. And this is all in counter to a broadly providential XTS thrust of English historiography. So Helland own pragmatism gives the play a distinctly modern cast. That's to say set off by the players engagement with folkloric motifs. So all's well that ends well. Seems like a comedy. It looks like a comedy. Perhaps it doesn't quite quack like a comedy. Maybe that, too could be a good gloss for its title.
All's well. Ten to one. Part of what seems hollow to me about this phrase and the implications of all's well that ends well with it's repetition. Not only is an approximation of this phrase repeated as we've already seen, but piece itself a repetitive phrase, a kind of self identical self or identical rhyme that chimes or jar's rather than connects and builds. Rhyming things with themselves is a very particular kind of rather pathetic use of rhyme.
I want to think about that, to think about one of Oswald's formal properties, the prominence of rhyme. It's a notable and very audible feature of Elseworlds. It makes more frequent use of rhyme than most of Shakespeare's later plays. You know, of course, that the blank in blank first means on rhyming.
And although rhyming is relatively common in Shakespeare's early plays, in which the second prompts on Midsummer Night's Dream by later in his career, we tend to praise him for a more flexible form of unrivalled verse that uses on job long running over the line end to approach a more varied poetic pattern.
If you think of someone like Ross MacDonald writing on the language of the late place, for instance, one striking example of rhyme in the play is in Helen's interview with the sick king in Act two. I just read this you it's not particularly important, apart from the rhyme words that thoughts to help me in such science. I give us one near death to those that wish him live. But what a fool. I know there are no snow part. I know more my peril than no art.
This is hell. What I can do can do no harm to try. Since you set up your rest against remedy here, that of greatest works is finish the OFT does them by the weakest minutes death. So holy written babes have judgement shown when judges have been base. Great floods have flowed from simple sources and great seas have dried when miracles have by the grace, been denied. It's striking this use of rhyme because it juxtaposes formal courtesy and artificiality with a more cynical and material play world.
In Shakespeare's plays, as more widely in Renaissance culture, the trope of the sick king is usually in part, a political one. Sick kings have sick kingdoms. It's not always clear in which direction the cocoa's in effect goes, whether the king is sick, that kingdom is sick or vice versa. The some kind of analogy between this is a political thing to be a sick king and the king in all as well has a really demeaning, fatal illness.
A fistula, a fistula is an abscess or that tunnel made from a bodily organ out outwards through the outside of the skin most frequently in early modern medicine. Fistula is an anal fistula fistula in honour. There were special chairs made in the Renaissance with holes cut into the seat to alleviate the terrible pain of this condition. What are you saying about it is not a very fairytale illness to have an evil fistula. It's really kind of embarrassing, demeaning, literally low kind of illness.
Symbolically, its associations are all rather negative. So this decorous rhyming scheme is set against the rather shameful secret or dirty medical reality of the king's literal and metaphorical condition. So Ryan here becomes a microcosm of the formal structures with which the play surrounds and decorates less altered reality. It's part of a kind of total uncertainty, an early modern theatrical version of what in the modern cinema we would call sound track dissonance virulence.
We'll meet again in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or singing in the Rain in Clockwork Orange. You don't know these examples. They were music with light or positive or cheerful associations. It's juxtaposed with psychotic violence or nuclear Armageddon or some kind of visual art, which is quite different.
So artificiality and cynicism make believe and practise pragmatism are held together in the way that Ryan manages the surface of the play, a kind of dissonance, that's to say, between the owl of sound track characteristics of the play and its content or subject matter. One last point, and this is the last point I'm going to make in the lecture. It's to do with Ryan and relating it to authorship.
You'll know now that the old idea of Shakespeare is a proto romantic, poetic genius, working alone to pen perfect plays and perhaps rather resenting meddling players who changed or mangled this perfection. That's all gone. Not only do we now celebrate and analyse Shakespeare as a theatrical collaborator, working with theatrical spaces, actors and audiences to create commercially successful fine entertainment, we increasingly now think that he was involved.
Like most of those in the theatre industry, in collaborative writing, collaborative writing, these collaborations took different forms from working together with Middleton on time. And if Athens or Fletcher on Two Noble Kinsmen took quite a lot about collaboration, intellectual on time, perhaps picking up an unfinished or started play by someone else.
Titus Andronicus may be or paraphrase maybe working in a team as on the Henry the six phrase, which we now think half Nash and Marlowe in the writing team providing speeches all seem to play, such as the Book of Thomas Moore or the rebooted kids Spanish tragedy or the domestic tragedy. Often of Faversham. Recent scholarship has uncovered lots of different forms of collaboration, that's to say, and the most recent collected edition.
The new Oxford Shakespeare, published in 2016 and its accompanying authorship companion is the best place to look. One of their suggestions is that a group of plays that were originally by Shakespeare but probably overwritten for revivals before sixteen twenty three by Thomas Middleton includes All's Well That Ends Well. There are three plays Macbeth measure for measure and all's well that ends well. But the new Oxford Shakespeare suggests have some element of Middleton in them.
There are lots of markers of Middleton, lots of ways and ticks and clues to Middleton's writing. But then I won't go into. Now, the one I've just with mention is Ryan Middleton rhymes in his writing in this period a lot more than Shakespeare does. The Rhine may be a sign of Middleton's authorship, but the Middleton connexion could also give us a grittier play all round Shakespeare's particular brand of romantic comedy.
Those young people conquering obstacles in Mediterranean or rural contexts is very different from Middleton's urban economies at sex, self-interest and class ambition. Middleton's endings are usually compromises rather than fairy tales. Reading all as well as a partly middle Tony in play with a middle Tony. In view of the world, my hope is bring out some of its more cynical aspects rather than sentimentalising it as earlier criticism tended to do.
It also perhaps places ends in a different and more writerly context. When does this play end? Not if we believe the editors of the new Opta Shakespeare. When Shakespeare has finished, but when Middleton has said putting the play's own question, all's well that ends well. So much of our investigation helps us. Think about genre. About tone. About politics and about competing philosophies of human agency.
As with many questions in this series of lectures, we can see all's well that ends well is a question the play asks rather than answers. Part of that thoroughgoing interrogative critique that always makes us think Shakespeare was there for us. Next week I'm going to think about place, location and specificity in Shakespeare by asking about Mary Wines at Windsor. Why would you want to come back and play?