All's Well That Ends Well (Vol. 26) | Thomas Davies (essay date 1784)
Thomas Davies (essay date 1784)
SOURCE: "All's Well that Ends Well," in Dramatic Miscellanies, 1784, pp. 4-6.
[Davies was a bookseller and actor, as well as the author of a Life of David Garrick (1780) and Dramatic Miscellanies: Consisting of Critical Observations on Several Plays of Shakespeare (1784). Below, Davies comments on the handling of several roles in eighteenth-century productions of All's Well That Ends Well, including Theophilus Cibber's Parolles.]
A Physician's daughter curing a king, distempered with a fistula, by a recipe of her dead father, is the history on which this play is founded; a plot strange and unpromising. But the genius of Shakspeare meets with no obstacle from the uncouthness of the materials he works upon. Action and character are the chief engines he employs in this comedy, and he raises abundance of mirth from the situations in which they are placed. Parolles and Lafeu are admirable...
[The entire page is 847 words long]
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