All's Well That Ends Well (Vol. 38) | Roger Warren (essay date 1969)
Roger Warren (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: "Why Does It End Well? Helena, Bertram, and The Sonnets," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production, Vol. 22, 1969, pp. 79-92.
[In the following essay, Warren maintains that the personal emotions found in Shakespeare's sonnets provide some explanation of the puzzling conclusion of All's Well That Ends Well.]
An extreme version of the general modern reaction to All's Well occurs in a review of Tyrone Guthrie's 1959 production: 'the tone of the play and its confusion of values . . . raises a dozen issues, only to drop them all with a cynical, indifferent 'all's well that ends well'. No wonder Shaw liked it so much'.1 Now I am convinced that whatever else the ending of this play may be called—puzzling, unsatisfactory, even bungled—Shakespeare was by no means 'indifferent' and certainly not 'cynical'. I think that his own personal poetry, in the...
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