All's Well That Ends Well (Vol. 86) - Susan Snyder (essay date 1993)
Susan Snyder (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: Snyder, Susan, ed. Introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
[In the following essay, Snyder examines the diverse critical assessments of All's Well That Ends Well's Helena from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.]
All's Well that Ends Well has never been a favourite with audiences and readers. No allusions to it from Shakespeare's own time have been found, and evaluations by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics tend to be at best defensive; more often their tone is embarrassed or denunciatory, and some, like Quiller-Couch, Tillyard, and Josephine W. Bennett, do not hesitate to label the play a failure. Eighteenth-century audiences enjoyed the Paroles plot, but the Garrick version they saw displaced and dimmed the heroine and her trials of love to highlight the braggart...
[The entire page is 5431 words long]
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