The title of All's Well That Ends Well seems prophetic of the play's fate in the theatre. Until three decades ago the stage history of All's Well made for short and simple annals indeed. Although the play was one of sixteen entered in the Stationer's Register by Blount and Jaggard in November, 1623 before they published the First Folio, its earliest recorded performance was at Henry Giffard's theatre in Goodman's Fields on 7 March, 1741. It was touted as a novelty, 'written by Shakespeare and not acted since his time', and its eight-performance run was a modest success. All's Well was chosen to lead off the following season, but William Milward, who played the King, died of a recurring respiratory disease and, when the run was resumed, Peg Woffington, his Helena, fainted in the wings and could not go on; hence the epithet 'unfortunate comedy' which has dogged the play ever since. Despite all this the play had ten performances. Apparently audiences were pleased by the comedy centring on Parolles, who was played by Theophilus Cibber. All's Well was revived in 1746, less successfully since Harry Woodward had to be substituted for Cibber on too short notice. Yet between 1741 and 1746 All's Well had been performed 22 times in four theatres. Joseph Price, whose Unfortunate Comedy (1968) is the authoritative study of the play's early stage history, informs us that this compares well with the runs of other comedies revived at the time.

Although there were some provincial productions of the play in the early 1750s, its next London revival was in 1756. The play was adapted, probably by Garrick, into a farcical vehicle for Parolles, who was played by Woodward, by now an accomplished comic actor. After further revision for a second performance, the adaptation had seven performances in all between 1756 and 1758. It was revived for two performances in 1762 at Drury Lane. A rival Covent Garden version was performed late in November of that year and after that occasionally (17 times in all) until 1774, the attraction once more being Woodward's Parolles.

All's Well was less successful in revivals by the brothers Kemble, John Philip late in 1794, and the younger Charles in 1811. John Kemble's adaptations, however, became the 'French's Acting Edition', used in London productions as late as 1852. Rejecting Garrick's emphasis on farce, Kemble transmogrified All's Well into sentimental comedy. Helena's selfless love dominated his 1811 version; gone were smut, bed-trick, ambition and ambiguity. Here was Coleridge's Romantic 'loveliest' Helena. Yet again the play was cursed: John Kemble fell ill during the production and hence was as 'merry as a funeral'; Mrs Jordan as Helena was awkwardly pregnant in all five acts. The next performance, in 1811, with Charles Kemble as Bertram, was repeated only once. The play was produced at Covent Garden in 1832 as a kind of opera, and embellished with a masque, song and dance. Yet still it did not suit; it was insufficiently purged of a plot that was thought 'objectionable to modern refinement'. There was an eleven-night revival of the operatic version at Sadler's Wells in 1852, after which the play lay dormant for half a century, a silent tribute to Victorian high-mindedness. All's Well received only 17 performances during the nineteenth century, 11 of them as opera in 1852-3.

There were several attempts to rehabilitate the play after the First World War, largely in response to the needs of the Stratford-upon-Avon festivals. In 1916, 1922 and 1935 Benson, Bridges-Adams and Iden Payne offered productions, none of great interpretative distinction. There were some glimmers of a social rethinking of the play in William Poel's 1920 revival at the Ethical Church, Bayswater; the beginnings of a restoration of the play's 'indelicacies' in Robert Atkins's Old Vic production of 1921; and an attempt at balance between romance and realism in his third production of the play in 1940. However, the onset of the war (a performance was interrupted by air raids) dampened the play's comedy and seemed to move its plot toward melodrama.

The modern stage history, some would say the stage history, of the play properly begins with Tyrone Guthrie's Stratford, Ontario production in 1953 (1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon). The play was a grand success, with Irene Worth as Helena ('a rather more dangerous character to have around than Richard III', according to one reviewer), with greatly effective comic business and an exploration of the play's realism of motive and romanticism of plot, all of this placed in a handsome Edwardian setting designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch. Since then the play has entered the flow if not the mainstream of the Shakespeare repertory. Critical laments that it is a stage failure, heard throughout the first half of the century (from Quiller-Couch in 1929 to Jay Halio in 1964) have given way first to surprised or grudging admissions that All's Well 'acts better than it reads', and then to the now widely shared certainty of its New Cambridge editor, Russell Fraser, that All's Well is a play whose time has come.

Among the productions that are both products and causes of this change of mind are Michael Benthall's fairytale production of 1953 for the Old Vic, with Claire Bloom as Helena, and John Barton's productions of 1967 and 1968 with their sensitivity and intelligence in realising the play's ironic observation of class and sexuality. Two subsequent productions deserve special notice, the first because it provided and still provides the most substantial audiences for the play. Elijah Moshinsky's elegant BBC All's Well offered all one could wish in conveying the profound intimacy between Angela Down's Helena and Celia Johnson's Countess, though some doubts have been expressed about Moshinsky's cutting, Donald Sinden's flamboyance as the King and the elevated sentiment of the last scene. Another distinguished recent production was Trevor Nunn's All's Well of 1981-2, with its sharp playing off of the romantic and the realistic, its surprisingly effective visual suggestions of World War I (both affirming the element of class friction in the play) and its nostalgic use of music and song. Harriet Walter's Helena and Peggy Ashcroft's Countess were deeply moving.

The excellence and diversity of productions in recent years is a just reward for the play's earlier paltry stage history. But plays performed often (as many of Shakespeare's plays are) sometimes ossify into acting or interpretative traditions, and these in turn call forth the challenge of useless high jinks. Ralph Berry records an interview with a Polish avant-garde director whose All's Well cast its leading males in a homosexual quadrille and had Lavatch utter his thoughtful follies while insinuating his hand up the Countess's skirt. For the most part, however, professional and amateur productions alike are still discovering the diversity of Shakespeare's 'unfortunate' comedy.