Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

All's Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare Project Lecture) (Patreon)

Published:
2024-07-05 20:08:13
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:
haven't archived this post yet. have a subscription? use the importer!

Downloads

  • AllsWellThatEndsWell.mp3

Missing 2 full-res photos, 1 file, as this post has not yet been imported.

Content

'The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.'

Our thrilling adventure through the works of William Shakespeare continues with All's Well That Ends Well.

We’re discussing long lost plays, multiple authors, problem plays, subverting comic conventions, corrupted fairy tales, mythic skeleton keys, biographical readings, bed tricks, and much more.

Timestamps:

0:00 my personal feelings about this play

2:00 arriving here after the tragic procession

3:00 Shakespeare as influence upon himself

5:00 returning to those earlier comedies

7:00 did Shakespeare actually write this play?

8:00 alternative title for Love’s Labour’s Won?

10:00 irony in the titles of Shakespeare’s plays

11:00 the influence of Boccaccio’s Decameron

12:00 the melancholy atmosphere of the comedy

14:00 Helen’s expressed love for Count Bertram

17:00 is this play a corrupted fairy tale?

19:00 Doctor She rewarded for curing the King

21:00 Count Bertram’s refusal of Helen’s hand

23:00 male homosocial bonds vs true love

25:00 responses to the character of Bertram

26:00 Shakespeare’s mythic skeleton key

28:00 Ted Hughes’ biographical reading

31:00 Bertram as the bard’s self-purgation?

32:00 can we understand Bertram at all?

34:00 wars vs dark house & detested wife

35:00 ‘I have wedded her, not bedded her’

37:00 Bertram’s challenge to Helen

40:00 the age-old trope of the bed trick

42:00 the main tragedy in Shakespeare’s world

44:00 layered pathos in the bed trick

45:00 the symbolism of roses with thorns

47:00 appreciating my personal one passage

49:00 the reappearance of the pregnant Helen

51:00 does this play really have a happy ending?

54:00 what are your thoughts about this play?

Recommended Resources:

  • Recommended Edition: The Arden edition continues to make a superb choice as the introduction and footnotes are often incredibly illuminating. This notes are particularly good for this play, thanks to editors Suzanne Gossett and Helen Wilcox.

  • Audio Dramatisation: The BBC put together a very good audio dramatisation of this play in 2003 starring Emma Fielding, Richard Griffiths, Carl Prekopp, and Simon Russell Beale.

  • Playwright Follow-up: There are many who see Thomas Middleton's hand alongside Shakespeare's in this play. If you're interested to see what Will's contemporaries were producing, you might use this as an opportunity to investigate some of his plays. This edition collects five of them together, including The Revenger's Tragedy and The Changeling.

  • Source Material: You may also like to leverage your reading of Shakespeare into further important works of literature by exploring his source material. For this play, that means enjoyably rifling through Boccaccio's Decameron.

  • Mythic Framework: Ted Hughes proposed the idea that Shakespeare used a mythic skeleton key throughout his writing career in a book called Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being that is fascinating, provocative, and thought-provoking.

  • Our Journey Thus Far: If you want to jump into any specific play, you can check out the works we've enjoyed thus far as part of our read-through here.

Questions for You:

1) Do you enjoy Shakespeare's subversion of comedy?

2) What do you make of the main characters in this play?

3) What line, passage, idea, or character most resonated with you? And what is your personal grading for All's Well That Ends Well?

Happy reading, Bardolators!

Files

Previews only

Comments

John Ward

I'm one of those who love this play. My view of it was transformed when I watched the BBC production from the 1980's with the great Celia Johnstone as the Countess and and an excellent Helen - two of my favourite female characters in the whole of Shakespeare. Parolles is a marvellous comic character who really lives up to his name in French, (paroles, paroles paroles) , whom I feel free to laugh at because he is such an awful person unlike say Malvolio who I always feel somewhat sorry for. Bertram is like so many young immature men who are all too easily led astray by their mischosen friends such as Parolles. But he obviously has many attributes that Helen has recognised in him. I finish the play wondering if one day he might grow up and transform himself like Prince Hal did. I think it is most important with later Shakespeare plays to forget about the, for me, artificial categorisation of plays into Comedies and Tragedies.

Charles S.

Two HLBCers posted a few hours ago about the BBC version, and I’ll be a third. I approached the performance in the spirit of having a nice afternoon at the theatre. Impressionistically speaking, I thought it was a quite nice experience (yes, I’m damning with faint praise), but not one that drew me toward deep thought. Both Benjamin and Mike used the word “absurd” about one or another aspect of the play. That’s the word that came to me as I watched—is this an absurdist drama, I asked myself. I could imagine Will and a few others sitting around a table in the writers’ room, batting ideas back and forth. And finally, how to end after the bed trick? “Well,” I imagine Will saying, “let’s just end it and not worry about any more complications!” Or, as Hamlet said, “they do but poison in jest.” Many more complications ensue for Hamlet, but for Helena and Bertram? Who cares, maybe it’s all in jest, let’s go enjoy some ale in the tavern. This absolutely doesn’t do justice to the play or the actors, but it was the feeling I had while watching it, and at the time it was the only way I could think of to make (non)sense of the whole thing.

Anne M

I am currently in the middle of reading this play. I really enjoyed the lecture, Benjamin! I have no final opinion yet but I agree it is not measuring up to the last four plays. I am just barely keeping up with the Shakespeare project but getting so much enjoyment from it. I really was slowed down by MacBeth and Anthony and Cleopatra. They were both wonderful but I felt like I barely scratched the surface. I will be going back to spend more time with them. I was already familiar with Lear so that one didn’t take so much time. I have been listening to The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judy Dench when I am driving and love how this compliments and expands my understanding of the plays. Anyway, I just wanted to say I am loving this project.

Phil

Ben I watched the Michael Fassbender Macbeth film and was blown away with this adaptation. Wow! I also watched the Ralph Fiennes film Coriolanus and was also very impressed. Will we be reading this play in the Shakespeare project? There are some great lines in it and parts of the film towards the end had me in tears and goosebumps.

Cliff Sowers

While reading All's Well That Ends Well, I was thinking to myself that the plot feels more like a story from The Canterbury Tales rather than a Shakespearean play - and then Benjamin mentioned this exact thought in the lecture. I am glad that I am not alone in this feeling. All’s Well That Ends Well is certainly full of sexual inuendo; some blatant and some subtle. The more blatant being Helena’s comments about defending her virginity from men. Also blatant was Bertram’s heated courtship of Diana. More on the subtle end of the spectrum, there seems to be hinting of a sexual relationship between Bertram and Parolles; as if fleeing Paris was as much about the two men being together as it was Bertram escaping marriage duties. Clown also seems to have knowledge of this homosexual relationship, as he ruthlessly teases Parolles in Act V Scene II. Shakespeare being British perhaps had a bitter view of French royalty, as he makes many references to the male anus in All’s Well That Ends Well, most boldly making a joke of the French king by inflicting him with an embarrassing and mortal wound - anal fistula. I think the reason that so many people feel that this play is Shakespeare’s worst is because of one key deviation: character development. Despite being a play consisting of only dialog, All’s Well That Ends Well lacks the character development of Shakespeare’s other plays; truly, the play lacks any clear protagonist, antagonist, hero, or villain. In my opinion, All’s Well That Ends Well was meant to be a clever social commentary rather than a serious play. Or perhaps a commentary about how marriage is even worse than war – that it is better to inflict physical pain upon one’s own face than to bed your own wife. The true main characters are intangible: marriage, betrayal, love, blackmail, settling for less. Shakespeare knew that overly-developed, strong characters would have stolen the spotlight from his social commentary. For example, I believe that Shakespeare the character of Clown to be metaphor for truth, because comedy is a place where truth can be laid bare with brutal honesty. To fully flesh the character of Clown would have been to minimize his importance as an ironic voice of reason and truth. As Benjamin states in the lecture, “Shakespeare is the ultimate Rorschach test.” I certainly did feel my fear of marriage when reading this play, but I probably wouldn’t have recognized it without Benjamin’s lecture. This is a shining example of the added value that Benjamin’s lectures bring to the reading assignments. The mention of Ted Hughes and his research about Shakespeare was an interesting aside. As Benjamin says, it does appear that Ted Hughes is projecting his own frustrations with his marriage to Sylvia Plath onto Shakespeare’s play. I’m sure it wasn’t easy to be married to Sylvia Plath, but I have also read accusations that Ted Hughes was abusive. Surely her suicide was at least somewhat influenced by her husband, although she was no stranger to suicide attempts even before she met Ted. An equivalence could be drawn between the fake suicide and deception of the women in All’s Well That Ends Well and Ted Hughes marriage, but I’m probably reaching for meaning where there is none. This play also reminds me of the Old Testament stories of Abraham where, upon entering cities, he would lie about his wife by calling her his sister to protect himself, even with the consequence of kings sleeping with his wife. But it was always the king who was punished by God, not Abraham, despite being a selfish liar. Of course, Abraham was infamously childless until he slept with his wife’s slave, and his wife only became pregnant in her old age by divine intervention. Again, we see a complicated view of marriage as deceptive and manipulative, and perhaps the French king is even Shakespeare’s stand-in for God. It is a happy ending that actually isn’t happy at all, because the rift, competition, and war between Ishmael and Isaac is alive and well even today. Perhaps in the same way, marriage is just the beginning of a war between Bertram and Helena. It is a complicated and depressing view of marriage, and I can’t help but wonder if Shakespeare drew inspiration for All’s Well That Ends Well from Abraham’s domestic life. I really enjoyed the character Clown, and I found myself laughing out loud at many of his lines, but my favorite stanza from the play came when Helena was bartering with the king: If I break time, or flinch in property Of what I spoke, unpitied let me die, And well deserved: not helping, death's my fee; But, if I help, what do you promise me?

John Ward

I was feeling quite alone in loving this play until I read in The Sovereign Flower by G Wilson Knight that it was a particular favourite of George Bernard Shaw and that Coleridge called Helena Shakespeares 'loveliest character'. One difficulty with this play is that it is very different from those we have previously read. It is about the miraculous like Pericles and the Winters Tale and GWK suggests it might have been written at the same time. He also suggests it has strong affinities with the Sonnets and seems to have 'some peculiar personal element'. Something I shall now look out for as we continue this marvellous journey through the works of the Bard.

Pati

Actually I quite like this "comedy" and liked it more than other comedies, not that I've read much comedies to be honest, but for now that's what I felt. true that it lake character development and it's a bit different that Shakespeare usual plays but I liked it as a way of social critic of sorts, a statement of a social problem; I don't know but I quite like. It will definitely rank up in my scale but under most tragedies, at least till now. I joined the club in time to Othello so I will be completing in between plays. So we'll see

Jonathon Glover

Late to the party here, so just wanted to add something that I thought about after this play, and Shakespeare in general. Shakespeare’s use of language, and ability to build complex characters, make him the best to ever do it. Yet, there are times, across his body of work, where he just doesn’t seem to care about his characters, and how their stories conclude. His comedies are riddled with hideous characters (particularly secondary characters) who end up marrying, or being forgiven, without any real consequences for their actions. There is a part of me that would like to dismiss this as part of the cultural norms of the time, but there are many plays where Shakespeare raises the stakes immeasurably for characters that he cares about (Macbeth, Richard III, Lear etc.) I detest Two Gentleman of Verona for this reason, find one half of Much Ado so incredibly frustrating, and then this awkward ending. But he also has elements of this in plays that I adore - with Celia absent from Act V of As You Like It, or Antonio in The Tenpest, who is given no dialogue after Prospero’s reveals. The Shakespeare Project has allowed me to see the heights of genius that he was able to achieve - beyond my own expectations, but also the lows too. And within all that, you can definitely start to see the human behind the plays - thoughtful, witty and brilliant, but also sensitive, frustrated and fallible.

Brock Eldon

Interesting thoughts on Bertram being possibly more likeable than critics make him out to be, Ben. Interesting. I do like this play. Much more than "Two Gentleman of Verona," "Merry Wives." I also do not like "Troilus and Cressida." A lower tier play but not THAT bad.