[In the following excerpt, Russell Fraser gives a chronological survey of All's Well That Ends Well on the stage; Philip Brockbank further discusses productions of the play from 1967 to 1980.]

Stage history

In the seventeenth century, Jonsonian comedy was in, Shakespearean comedy was out, and All's Well That Ends Well failed to get a hearing. 'No man', said Charles Gildon [in The Life of Betterton, 1710], 'can allow any of Shakespear's comedies, except the Merry Wifes of Windsor.' Subsequent auditors have been less severe, but All's Well has remained an unpopular play in the theatre.

In the eighteenth century, it received only 51 performances in the London theatre, as against 274 performances for As You Like It and 133 for Measure for Measure. Such success as it enjoyed turned mostly on its supposed character of rudimentary farce. In the nineteenth century, five revivals are recorded but only 17 performances. All five revivals made a hash of the text. The twentieth century has done better but not a lot better until quite recently. It took thirty-five years for the new Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon to get around to All's Well (leaving only Titus Andronicus still to be played at that time). As late as 1929, Harold Child, in the New Shakespeare, could find 'no record of its ever having been staged in the United States of America'.

The early English theatre shows the same dismal blank. There is no record of a production of All's Well in Shakespeare's time and no record in the century that followed his death. We cannot be certain, however, that there were no performances, and we are free to speculate about possibilities. … When the play came to be performed, in the eighteenth century and later, it was generally trivialised almost beyond recognition. This isn't surprising. All's Well, said M. C. Bradbrook [in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, 1951], 'is a play which is of its age rather than for all time'. Over the centuries, that has been the accepted view, and stage directors have no doubt appealed to this view to justify their maladroit reading of the play. 'If All's Well must be played', said Joseph Price satirically in his account of the stage history [The Unfortunate Comedy, 1968], 'then play it as removed as possible from the original.' By and large, that is how it has been played.

The first recorded performance of All's Well took place on 28 September 1741 at Henry Giffard's theatre in Goodman's Fields. Where Giffard was more or less satisfied with Shakespeare's text, his successors received it as a blank page and filled the page as they pleased. The eighteenth century saw All's Well as a comic vehicle for 'Monsieur Parolles', and Theophilus Cibber and Charles Macklin contended for this part in the Drury Lane production of 1742. 'Young Cibber's exhibition' - Macklin having had to settle for the role of Lavatch - elicited from the poet Shenstone 'as sincere a laugh as I can ever recollect'. [quoted in The Letters of William Shenstone, 1939]. Peg Woffington, 'the most captivating comedienne of her time', [quoted in George C. D. Odell's Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 1921] played Helena. But in the eighteenth century the part of the heroine attracted little attention, the part of Bertram still less, and no leading actor ventured to perform it between Giffard in 1741 and John Philip Kemble a half century later.

During the first five years following the 1741 performance, All's Well was played 22 times in four different theatres. Then for ten years it fell from the stage. David Garrick engineered a second major revival on 24 February 1756. For this performance at Drury Lane, Garrick prepared an acting version which held the stage for eighteen years. In his reductionist view, All's Well was exhausted in the comedy of ParoUes, and the comedy itself was pure and simple. 'One of the greatest on the English stage', said the London Chronicle (1 December 1757) of the character of Parolles as personated by Harry Woodward, who made the part his own for the next generation. Woodward played Parolles at the Crow Street Theatre in Dublin on 24 October 1760, and again at Covent Garden in 1762. Abruptly the play was popular, and Garrick, Woodward's erstwhile employer, mounted a rival production at Drury Lane with Thomas King as the cowardly soldier.

The popularity of All's Well depended substantially on eviscerating the play. Frederick Pilon's adaptation of 1785 for the comedian John Bannister suggests how this was so. The adaptation was played at the Haymarket, a house of farce, and the smoking of Parolles was the centrepiece of the play. To heighten this business, Pilon cut the first three acts almost in their entirety.

A new reading of All's Well is evident in its third stage incarnation. For this, responsibility belongs to John Philip Kemble. In 1793, Kemble published his adapted version in which the focus shifts to Helena and her selfless love. Kemble's All's Well, produced at the new Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on 12 December 1794, is a sentimental comedy. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the literary essayist Nathan Drake [in Shakespeare and His Times, 1817] filled out the portrait which Kemble had sketched in outline:

Helen, the romantic, the love-dejected Helen, must excite in every feeling bosom a high degree of sympathy; patient suffering in the female sex, especially when resulting from ill-acquitted attachment, and united with modesty and beauty, cannot but be an object of interest and commiseration.

Musing on Helena's flight from Rossillion, this writer concludes: 'how does she, becoming thus an unprotected wanderer, a pilgrim barefoot plodding the cold ground for him who has contemned her, rise to the tone of exalted truth and heroism!'

Though Kemble took the part of Bertram (where his predecessors would have chosen Parolles), All's Well failed to please and closed after a single performance. The damage to Shakespeare's text proved more enduring, however.

Seventeen years later, Charles Kemble, the manager of Covent Garden, revived his older brother's lachrymose adaptation. Performances were scheduled on 24 May 1811 and again on 22 June. Then Covent Garden dropped the play, and a revival at Bath ten years later did nothing to persuade the public that All's Well was worth serious attention.

As the taste of the Regency was displaced by that of the Victorians, it was not the sentimentality of Kemble's version that gave rise to objection but its carnality. 'The plot', said The Theatrical Observer in 1832, 'is in itself so objectionable to modern refinement, that it has long been acknowledged not to be fit for representation.' In this year the dramatist Frederic Reynolds did his best to make amends for Shakespeare's plot. He created an operatic version at Covent Garden (11 October 1832), admitting nothing offensive and nothing farcical either. A sweetly suffering Helena was acted, and also sung, by Miss Inverarity. 'I am Saint Jaques' Pilgrim' [III. iv. 4], this Helena sang. Material from other plays was grafted to this stock. A Midsummer Night's Dream provided a chorus of fairies. Songs were set from verses in Othello, Love's Labour's Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, to music by Rophino Lacy. Taking his cue from Romeo and Juliet, Bertram sang how 'Love is a smoke' [I. i. 190]. The entire chorus, accompanied by Helena, Diana, the Gentle Astringer and assorted Falconers, rendered the lines from Twelfth Night: 'If music be the food of love' [I. i. 1].

Still the critics declined to be mollified. 'The revival at all, at this time of day', said the Court Journal (20 October 1832), 'of the only play of Shakespeare that is really exceptionable in its moral tone and tendency, is a sufficient blunder.' The blunder was compounded by uniting All's Well 'in a forced marriage with the most touchingly pure, innocent, and pastoral, and at the same time most exquisitely and exclusively poetical, and most divinely human and beautiful, of all the same author's plays'. This was A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Two decades later, Samuel Phelps tried again. For the production of All's Well in 1852 at his theatre, Sadler's Wells, Phelps relied on J. P. Kemble's adaptation. He left nothing to chance, though, further expurgating the text and further refining the character of Helena (no reflections on 'my virginity'): He eliminated the bed-trick. But the critics found him out or they found Shakespeare out. Alter the play as you will, said John Bull (4 September 1852), it cannot 'be made presentable to an audience of which decent females form a portion'.

For almost half a century, that was the last of All's Well. In 1895, for only the fourth time on the London stage in the nineteenth century, the Irving Dramatic Club put on a performance. This prompted a review by Bernard Shaw, who thought the play had been 'vivisected' - an intolerable fault to the anti-vivisectionist - and the fragments mutilated in the interest of accessories 'which were in every particular silly and ridiculous'. When the Florentine army passed beneath the walls of the city, 'a few of the band gave a precarious selection from the orchestral parts of Berlioz's version of the Rackoczy March'. The dresses of the ladies 'were the usual fancy ball odds and ends, Helena especially distinguishing herself by playing the first scene partly in the costume of Hamlet and partly in that of a waitress in an Aerated Bread market' [Saturday Review, 2 February 1895].

Later Shaw wrote that in Shakespeare there were parts 'like that of Helena in All's Well for instance - which are still too genuine and beautiful and modern for the public' [Letter to Janet Achurch, 23 April 1895]. That of the Countess was among them, he said, 'the most beautiful old woman's part ever written'. All's Well stood out artistically by virtue of the sovereign charm of the young woman and the old woman, 'and intellectually by the experiment, repeated nearly three hundred years later in A Doll's House, of making the hero a perfectly ordinary young man, whose unimaginative prejudices and selfish conventionality make him cut a very mean figure in the atmosphere created by the nobler nature of his wife [quoted in John F. Matthews (ed.), Shaw's Dramatic Criticism (1895-98), 1959].

The nobler nature commended itself to the actor-manager Frank Benson in his production for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon in the spring of 1916. Benson's ignoble Bertram was redeemed by Lady Benson in the role of Helena. For William Poel, the celebrated revivalist of Elizabethan plays, Helena's wooing of Bertram manifested a love, 'religious in impulse, which no convention could repress'. In Poel's production on 20 May 1920 at the Ethical Church in Bayswater, the play acquired 'an ethical significance which gave it a place in the history of woman's emancipation' [quoted in Robert Speaight, William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival, 1954].

There was more comedy than social history in the Old Vic performance of 28 November 1921, directed by Robert Atkins, and in the Bridges-Adams revival at Stratford in 1922. Interest in Parolles was on the upswing again and brought with it renewed attention to the long-neglected role of the Clown. This role got special mention in a revival at the Maddermarket, a new theatre in Norwich, in September 1924. Three years later, a production in modern dress at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre featured young Laurence Olivier as Parolles; 'an amiable, too smart young man, a sommelier's scourge', said Bernard Shaw. [quoted in J. C. Trewin, The Birmingham Repertory Theatre: 1913-63, 1963]. None of these productions was especially convincing to the critics, however, and when Robert Atkins repeated his version at the Arts Theatre Club in 1932, they went away, said one of them, 'with no idea in head except that it was Shakespeare botching and bungling at his worst' [James Agate, Brief Chronicles: A Survey of the Plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans in Actual Performances, 1943].

The idea persisted. 'Dull' was the judgement passed on the Stratford 'birthday' production in 1935, presided over by B. Iden Payne. When Atkins offered a third revival in the fall of 1940, the ugly duckling had another chance to prove itself 'a true cygnet of Avon' [Ivor Brown, Punch, 16 October 1940]. It failed this chance. The play was 'too grim, unwitty and disconcerting to be called comedy at all', and 'anybody heard defending its poetry should be asked point-blank to quote two consecutive lines' [Alan Dent, [Preludes and Studies, 1942].

Tyrone Guthrie made a notable defender, though not of the poetry and not of the play as Shakespeare conceived it, and he chose All's Well (and Richard III) to inaugurate the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario, in 1953. Alec Guinness in a wheel-chair presented the King of France, and the play went off to stormy applause. Six years later, at Stratford-upon-Avon, Guthrie broadened the farce and repeated his initial success (see illustrations 1 and 5). The costumes and settings were Edwardian except for the war scenes, which Guthrie located in the North African desert. There was a lot of suppositious, spurious fun in the desert. Diana, whom Bertram found chaste to a fault, was played 'as a wartime factory tart who sits on the doorstep in nightgown and housecoat, with a turban on her head and a lollipop in her mouth, giggling the lines in coffee-bar cockney' [Alan Brien, 'All's Well that Ends Well', The Spectator, 24 April 1959]. For one scholar-critic with a turn for understatement [Joseph Price], this 1959 production 'revealed in every aspect the strong hand of the director'.

The director who brooks no interference from the playwright was fully realised by Michael Benthall in the Old Vic production at Edinburgh on 15 September 1953. This comic rendition, distinguished by 'drastic cutting, transposing, the masking of awkward speeches with music or outrageous buffoonery', struck Richard David in his review for Shakespeare Survey (1955) with the force of revelation. 'King and Countess as Disney dwarfs, the hero and heroine reduced to decorative pasteboard, Parolles taking over … as a sort of amateurish Mephistopheles'—this, David thought, made a play. No doubt, said another reviewer [Eric Keown, 'All's Well that Ends Well', Punch, 30 September 1953], some of the finer moments were diminished, 'but in the lightness of the production we gain a sort of surface plausibility, and laughter is the kindest anaesthetic against the increasing outrage of the plot'.

The pendulum swung back in Noel Willman's production at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955, in which Helena, far from acquiescing in the role of a pasteboard heroine, demonstrated 'a pertinacity worthy of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police' [Peter Fleming, 'All's Well that Ends Well', The Spectator, 6 May 1955]. It moved backward still further, perhaps in the general direction of Shakespeare, in John Houseman's tragi-comic reading of 1959 for the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut. Houseman was humble, and also eccentric; he took the text as Shakespeare wrote it. This revolutionary gesture of acceptance inspired and animated the great production at Stratford, Ontario, in 1977, directed by David Jones. William Hutt defined the King and Margaret Tyzack the Countess, and the result was among those incandescent evenings when all the myopic conceit of reviewers and the bumptiousness of poor players and the bustle of vulgar directors falls away, and we participate in that communal experience which is the drama at its highest pitch.

In the last generation, directors have been willing to let the play be seen without cosmetics, and the reward for their scrupulousness—or say their humility—has been the emergence of a great play. That the greatness of All's Well has rarely been evident to previous generations of theatregoers is owed to the fact that we see only so far as our cultural conditioning allows. Brander Matthews, a distinguished Shakespearean, estimating Helena's conversation with Parolles [in Shakespeare as a Playwright, 1913] found it 'reeking with vulgarity and quite impossible to a modest-minded girl'. Essentially, he is asking: How can we find the concord of this discord where tears mingle with laughter? How could Helena, a chaste woman, engage in smutty discourse, or give her love to a cad? How can Parolles, knowing what he is, be what he is? The governing psychology from the mid seventeenth century to the second half of the twentieth century has precluded answers to these questions. It seems presumptuous to conclude that only in our time has Shakespeare recovered the audience once available to him. But the history of All's Well in the theatre appears to support this conclusion.

Recent years

In 1967 John Barton for the Royal Shakespeare Company set out, as he put it, to 'trust the play', and the result, it was said, 'was a blessedly direct production' [Illustrated London News, 10 June 1967]. It was achieved at the cost of some five hundred lines, including the whole of Act 3, Scene 4, and a number of telescopings and transpositions.

The gain in economy and clarity of narrative line did not wholly atone for the loss of some emotional subtleties and tensions, but in one reviewer's judgement [Harold Hobson, Sunday Times, 21 January 1968] the play was 'raised to the head of the corner' of Shakespearean comedy. Lavatch, omitted from the play by Tyrone Guthrie, was admitted in a much reduced role by Barton, and played by Ian Hogg as if his devotion to the Countess were dangerously simple-minded. A certain responsiveness to the mood of the 1960s ('Crabbed age and youth cannot live together' [The Passionate Pilgrim, 12.1]) was offset by graces of style and by costumes that recalled the early seventeenth century. The set, by Timothy O'Brien, evoked a neo-classic stage-upon-a-stage, 'patterned like French marquetry', it was said, and 'elegant and functional as a huge musical instrument' [Ronald Bryden, The Observer, 4 June 1967]. The only staging extravagance was a 'red flamed romp' at the start of the Florentine campaign, with soldiers 'wheeling and marching in time to the muffled barks and howls of a gargantuan drill major' [Peter Ansorge, Plays and Players, August 1967]. War became a gentlemen's game played with toy combatants, and more was made of the elegant, humorous ironies of the play than of its moral astringency and weight. Brewster Mason's Lafew, for example, was described as 'master of the graceful insult, the thrust and lazy flick' [Hilary Spurling, The Spectator, 9 June 1967], and he was clearly a better swordsman than Parolles. Helena persuaded the King to yield to therapy with a mesmeric tenderness that kept a tactful distance from sexual enticement. The unmasking of Parolles … was cruelly executed (with drum rolls and a falling axe at the moment of revelation) while that of Bertram was more generously hilarious. Helena's entry was a moving event to which Bertram responded with a passionate cry on the words, 'Both, both. Oh pardon!' [V. iii. 308]; his 'ability to collapse', in R. L. Smallwood's phrase, was 'his salvation' ["The design of All's Well that Ends Well," Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972)].

Trevor Nunn's 1981 production for the RSC opened with a waltzing couple in silhouette, recalling the music of Vienna and the art of John Singer Sargent. It was the prelude to an English Edwardian and Imperial European rendering of the play which was comprehensively retentive of the text and attentive to its significances. Fewer than a hundred lines were cut and, as in 1967, Act 4, Scene 3 was recast to bring Parolles's discovery to a climax in the reading of the letter to Diana. The transmutations of time and place did more to sharpen than to diminish the play's social and historical impact. The Countess (Peggy Ashcroft) and Lafew (Robert Eddison) were enlightened and cultivated survivors of a Victorian dispensation, looking critically but solicitously upon their heirs. But the play's tensions were not naively expressed as a conflict between generations. Lavatch's cryptic, reductive wit was consistent with deep devotion to his mistress; the Dumaine brothers (the First and Second Lords) sustained traditions that Bertram flouted; and Helena's daring, new-style deceptions were endorsed by the Countess and served at once a divine and human comic purpose. The itinerant form of the play, scattering events and colloquies all over Italy and France, was served by a beautifully articulated glass and wrought-iron set (by John Gunter …) which made a conservatory, a gymnasium, a railway station (for the Florence battle scenes) and a wartime canteen. The war was reminiscent of the Crimea and prescient of 1914, with Helena's speech about 'tender limbs' and 'smoky muskets' spoken with great conviction. The deaths were actual enough, and Bertram owed his promotion to 'general of our horse' [III. iii. 1] to a manifestly high casualty rate. But the drums and colours on parade were an engaging show, the soldiery (Parolles in the rear) in its element, under the searching gaze of the pilgrim Helena. War-delight and woman-delight kept festive company in a scene (insinuated before 4.2) in which Diana's seductive vivacity was expressed in song and Bertram looked like its easy prey. As in Measure for Measure, however, his passion was the more excited by her resisting virtue, much to the disgust of his fellow officers; the words 'he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour' [IV. iii. 16] were spoken with vehement contempt. The production allowed the audience to reflect, however, that it is in this 'ruttish', 'dangerous' and 'lascivious' state that he goes unaware to consummate his marriage. Bertram, like Parolles, was clearly 'crushed with a plot' [IV. iii. 325] but he was not allowed the same resilient power of recovery. No attempt was made to charge his last words with great feeling and very little of the man was left for Helena to take by the hand and lead away. The golden harmonies prefigured at the start were restored as the waltz resumed, but they had been bought by 'expense of spirit in a waste of shame'—by 'lust in action' [The Sonnets, 129.1-2].

Between the two RSC versions there appeared Jonathan Miller's BBC production in 1980, directed by Elijah Moshinsky. It used the constraints of the medium to remarkable effect, revealing through close-up much of the emotional intensity latent in the play. The creative, generative energies of sexuality were fully expressed in word and symbol, as in the firelight that literally plays upon Helena's face as she speaks for her 'flame of liking' [I. ii. 211] and in her cure of the King we saw 'grace lending grace' [II. i. 160] with something of 'a strumpet's boldness' [II. 171], The play's resolution was accomplished with great confidence in the romance tradition—Bertram, said Moshinsky, 'has achieved a potential for change'. It may be coincidence that when the television cameras in recent years have given us an All's Well that does indeed end well, the theatre has left us a touch more sceptical—'All yet seems well [V. iii. 333].