[The following review first appeared in the Pall Mall Budget.]

A performance of the Irving Amateur Dramatic Club at St. George's Hall (22 and 24 January) last week gave me an opportunity of seeing a play as yet unknown to me on the stage—All's Well that Ends Well. I never miss a chance of "bagging" a new Shakespeare, and adding its scalp, or, in plain language, its playbill, to my collection. As I enjoy the proud privilege of being an Englishman (à peu près), and not a German, I shall certainly go to my grave without having seen anything like the full cycle of his playable plays. My ambition stops short of Troilus and Cressida, which was not intended for the stage, and of Titus Andronicus, which is absurd; but now that All's Well is bagged, there still remain The Tempest, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Richard II., the second part of Henry IV., the whole of Henry VI. (which, after all, is part of our great historical epos, and is so treated in Germany), the Comedy of Errors, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona, unacted in my time. Several of the others I have seen only once, presented by amateurs—Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, and Henry IV., Part I. Mr. Beerbohm Tree once played King John, at the Crystal Palace, several years ago; Cymbeline I have seen only in the provinces; and Julius Caesar, perhaps the most magnificent acting play ever written, has been performed in London, and admirably performed, within the memory of man—but by a German company.

Far be it from me to maintain that all or any of these plays ought to be constantly represented; but is it utterly chimerical to dream of a theatre at which no year should pass without a revival for a few nights of one or two of the less-known Shakespearian plays, so that the whole repertory should be passed in review once in ten years or so? The Germans possess such theatres; we poverty-stricken islanders cannot afford one. But I perceive I am trenching on the inflammatory topic of the Municipal or Endowed Theatre, which causes angry passions to rise in many otherwise equanimous bosoms. I sheer off hastily with the confession that All's Well that Ends Well, which forms the text of my discourse, is not in itself a very great loss to the theatre. Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, and the two parts of Henry IV are plays which could really be made to live for a modern audience—not so All's Well Hazlitt calls it "one of the most pleasing of our author's comedies," but I think a "dis" has dropped out before "pleasing." Despite its extraordinary inequalities of style, indeed, it is pleasant enough reading, though I don't know but that I would rather read Boccaccio's story in his own words. In any case, a story may be delightful in "the golden pages of Boccaccio," and very much the reverse when expanded and realised on the stage.

In a romance, a fairy-tale (and practically this is nothing else), we have a right to look for some resting-place for our sympathies; where are we to find it here? In plain latterday English, Bertram is a snob, Helena an adventuress. I turn to one of the latest German commentators, Dr. Louis Lewes, author of The Women of Shakespeare, and I find that "Helena's love is passionate, spiritual, free from all egotism"! "Her position," Dr. Lewes proceeds, "is not only unhappy, it offends our taste, and yet her character rises in inward sincerity, touching nobility, and beauty, above the unworthiness of her condition." Character, in other words, is independent of conduct, and love which has recourse to tyranny and perfidy in order to gain its ends shall be held "free from all egotism" if only the young lady expresses herself nobly and poetically. If Bertram had promised Helena marriage, even if he had betrayed and deserted her, one must still have questioned her taste and dignity in carrying her breach of promise suit to the King's Bench in such a spirit of intrigue and chicanery. But there is no suggestion that Bertram ever breathed a word of love to Helena. She simply made up her sincere and noble mind to marry him willy-nilly, and she carried her point by methods which, if used by a man towards a woman, would brand him as a villain of the deepest dye, and earn him the execrations of every gallery in Christendom. The thing is a fairy-tale, and as a fairy-tale it pleases the imagination, on its sensual rather than its spiritual side. On the plane of real life, Shakespearolatry alone can find the fable edifying or attractive. The text had been so carefully bowdlerised for the Irving Club that the story would scarcely have been comprehensible to any one who did not know it beforehand. Miss Olive Kennett played Helena with dignity and intelligence, Mrs. Herbert Morris made a charming Diana, and Miss Lena Heinekey a good Countess of Rousillon. The male performers were passable, but undistinguished.