In the first scene of All's Well, Shakespeare's stage suggests that among its little group of people all is not at all well. This opening, indeed, is another striking example of the playwright's control of his actors at the outset of a play, and of course through them his audience. The action on stage totally complements what an audience is to perceive and understand from the beginning if the play is to go rapidly to work. This essay will therefore focus especially upon the essential signals of seeing and hearing that Shakespeare has built into his text in order that his initial intentions shall not be missed by actors or audience. The nature of those intentions, together with the hints about the genre and attitude of the comedy contained within them and what they foreshadow of things to come, will, it is to be hoped, emerge.

In at least two respects the theatrical exposition of All's Well is unusual. First, unlike its companion problem comedies, Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, All's Well opens with prose and not verse—and with a prose that imposes a rather ponderous and enigmatic style of speech that is not intended to be readily understood, one suspects, by either a modern or an Elizabethan playgoer. Shakespeare's opening words are usually transparent, intended to hit the audience directly between the eyes (or ears); so what is he up to? On the one hand the choice of prose for the dialogue suggests that it must seem domestic, naturalistic, human—if a little pompous, or at least inflated, to mark the social standing of the Countess of Rossillion and her household (simple, prose clarity will follow soon enough). The audience is to share thus far the scene's rather stiff mood of mourning and parting.

On the other hand the element of the enigmatic, the supressed and mysterious, is, curiously, also present—a certain riddling that begins with the famous first thematic line of the play from the Countess (who is entered in the Folio as ‘Mo.’, i.e., ‘Mother,’ throughout this first scene):

In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.

(1-2)

This play will have to do with leaving home and coming back, with giving birth and with dying, although it remains to be seen whether the mother or the son is to be satisfactorily recycled by these related processes. But by no means is that the end of it. Lafew will shortly strike up with his news of the King of France's sickness by quibbling about gaining or losing hope and time:

He hath abandoned his physicians, madam, under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hope, and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time.

(10-12)

Not only the King, of course, but also Helena will be teased by her hopes under pressure of time. For both of them, the issues will be those of life and death, although we shall have to wait until the end of the play before the enigma of hope and time is resolved; then we shall hear more enigmatic lines like:

Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick.
So there's my riddle: one that's dead is quick.

(V. 3. 291-2)

And when Helena first speaks of her grief, in what appears to be an aside (knowing nothing of such a technicality, Shakespeare of course did not mark his text with this directive), she does so in yet another riddle:

I do affect a sorrow indeed, but I have it too.

(42)

The audience will learn soon enough what she means by this subtlety when she is alone with us. But so much double talk! Yet how seductive and challenging it can be, catching and holding our attention (at least for quite a time), and alerting us to the fact that there's a great deal in all this discourse that is left unspoken, perhaps only to be heard between the lines.

Nevertheless, why did Shakespeare write his opening lines in prose? The answer to this, too, we shall learn soon enough when we hear the kind of verse spoken later by the Countess and, especially, Helena. The truest and most personal thoughts—as opposed to the surface formalities and proprieties of this household—will issue and ascend as poetry, and those thoughts that are the most hidden, possibly the most profound of all, will be accorded (surprise!) rhyming, ringing, couplets. Helena's play will therefore seem to proceed on two levels, the first superficial, even cold and cruel, and the second on the warm level of her deepest desires, constituting almost an expression of her dreams.

As we look over the text, we, like any readers, are being to a degree distracted by the language of the play. It may be that even an audience in the theatre is being similarly distracted. Nevertheless, a primary theatrical effect is being perpetrated the while, one based on what the eyes tell us, centered on costume and what costume determines by way of movement and gesture. All's Well is unusual in that it carries an extraordinary, and very clear, instruction from the outset about what the players shall all wear. If in Hamlet on his first entrance the Prince is seen in his ‘nighted color,’ the court of Denmark is not; in All's Well, on the contrary, everyone in the house of Rossillion is required to be in mourning, for the Folio direction reads,

Enter young Bertram Count of Rossillion, his Mother, and Helena, Lord Lafew, all in blacke.

Such a stage direction is a sure indication of the close relationship between the Folio text and playhouse practice, and since the author was present at the first performance, it almost certainly tells us of his intentions. The command for a mournful and cheerless stage governs the initial pace and tone of speech, and the whole spirit of the performance. This, together with the double talk and the excessive propriety of the language, lends the action of this opening scene a grimly formal aspect. An audience may expect solemn looks from the men, with tears from the women, and it is possible that Bertram exhibits both, since he responds to his mother's first line with:

And I in going, madam, weep o’er my father's death anew.

(2)

Certainly Lafew sees Helena crying at line 36:

Your commendations, madam, get from her tears.

All this, of course, is to set an audience in the theatre by the eyes and ears immediately, compelling us to search out the sources of grief. We may, however, be more than a little surprised to find them everywhere we look. We have no reason to doubt that mother and son are mourning the dead father, the old Count, as is Lafew, the faithful old family friend, and this group is also full of regret at the departure of the young Count. Nor have we reason yet to doubt that there is some grief on Helena's part, too, for the death of her father:

The remembrance of her father never approaches her heart but the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood from her cheek.

(37-9)

Nevertheless, we have yet to learn of Helena's greatest source of grief, which has to do not only with Bertram's departure, but also with her unrequited love for him, as we shall see.

With the subdued, even suppressed, feelings and uneasy relationships suggested by the low tones of the actors, the opening of All's Well may be described as somewhat Ibsenish in style. Suspense is gently evinced as more and more of the past is revealed, and the spectator (like the actor in rehearsal) has the pleasure of piecing together the evidence of appearances, before he dare unravel the tangled information about the past. Well, Shakespeare's theatre is not Ibsen's, and we shall not have long to wait before the playwright lays all the facts before us; but Shakespeare anticipates Ibsen in this play by withholding some of the details and teasing us with the rest. He manipulates by frustrating his audience in its natural wish to make sense of what it sees, and the impact of this exposition will be felt less in what is said than in what is not. For we are not to be deceived by the careful, surface manners and protocol of behavior in a high-born family; performance will focus attention upon what is hinted and guessed at by the less conscious conduct of the assembled characters. (Tuned in to hearing more subtle inflexions of voice, or learning to perceive the little gestures and slight movements, we may be forgiven if we are later shocked and amazed by the sensational events to come—curing a king of a fistula, choosing a husband by dancing with him, substituting a partner in bed, coming back from the dead.)

For the moment we must be prepared, then, for the somewhat unShakespearean exercise of listening between the lines, and this kind of drama may have the contingent effect upon the writing of sharpening its visual performance signals. Following the explicit stage image of “all in blacke,” Shakespeare calls next for an important disposition of his characters about the stage, making an impressive use of his stage space. Modern productions (like Trevor Nunn's for the RSC in 1981) often attempt to fill the void of a bare, non-naturalistic stage at the rise of the curtain with such realistic business as having bustling servants carrying Bertram's travelling gear to a waiting offstage carriage—they troop across the back of the stage with bits of luggage, a clutch of tennis racquets, a set of foils. This may be amusing, but is surely misplaced ingenuity. Nothing should take our attention from the careful relationships set up physically between the figures on the stage.

The general picture is of Helena as a misfit: she looks out of place. The simpler, plainer dress of her lower social status marks her out, but Shakespeare ensures that we recognize her difference above all by her silence; in turn, her silence is emphasized by her apparent exclusion from the family group of the Countess, Bertram, and Lafew. While the mother is saying her adieus to her son, and he to her, Helena has no words to speak for some 40 lines and, as performance insists, is set apart from the others. The character who now begins to interest the audience most by her uncomfortable isolation becomes an object of urgent dramatic importance by this very distinction, and will be foremost in the spectator's thoughts for the rest of the play. The family shares its many griefs, but not with Helena, who stands humbly apart in tears.

It is not that the family does not know she is present, since the discussion about the King's illness neatly turns to the man who might have cured him, Gerard de Narbon, Helena's father, and so prompts the Countess to make reference to his daughter:

This young gentlewoman had a father—O, that ‘had,’ how sad a passage ’tis—whose skill was almost as great as his honesty. …

(13-14)

“This young gentlewoman” (like the first reference to Edmund in King Lear, “Is this not your son, my Lord?,”) carries an indicative gesture, and makes its point in performance only if the speaker indicates the object of consideration from a distance. The reference serves to draw new attention to Helena, and grants the actress playing her a cue for a silent response, also very much part of this exposition: a curtsy would signify her different station, a turn away would embody an image of her separation, even her rejection. After this, her silence grows increasingly eloquent.

Shakespeare next arranges for Lafew to change the subject smoothly from Gerard de Narbon and the King's problems of health. He changes it to the daughter Helena and her perceived character, and this change coincides with a balancing silence of 20 lines from Bertram. Again the directorial signal is to be recognized, and the actor's opportunity seized, in the light of events to come. The balancing silence suggests that, like Helena, Bertram in his turn now move away to another part of the stage. Is it out of his lack of interest in Helena, a lowly physician's daughter? Is it out of pique that she has temporarily displaced him in his mother's attention? Whatever the actor decides, the audience cannot know his reasons for sure at this point in the play. However, what we may well perceive is the enactment of a kind of sibling rivalry, especially if Helena now takes Bertram's place in the intimate family group, as the lines suggest when Lafew refers to her tears.

Your commendations, madam, get from her tears.

(36)

And the Countess appears to comfort her,

No more of this, Helena, Go to, no more. …

(39-40)

The rivalry, or at least Bertram's irritation at the interest shown in his mother's ward, would be apparent if he were to cast a resentful glance back in Helena's direction, at the creature who has usurped his place. She may even stand on the very spot on the stage he has just vacated, creating a visual echo.

The Countess believes that it is “the remembrance of her father” that is the cause of Helena's tears, and she advises that so much grief should be restrained, “lest it be rather thought you affect a sorrow.” However, it is less the logic of argument, and more the purposeful stage blocking, that prepares the ground so strongly for the line of Helena's that rivets attention when it comes:

I do affect a sorrow indeed, but I have it too.

(42)

The line will have to mystify Lafew and the Countess if they appear to ‘hear’ it (and some editors have followed Quiller-Couch in transposing Lafew's “How understand we that?” from line 48 to help them out); but if the audience has seen Helena glance at Bertram, she may speak the line as an aside with no danger of mystifying us. The initial puzzle of Helena's character and motives is now for the audience to unravel, as the issue of her secrecy comes into focus.

The importance of the moment is capped when an impatient Bertram interrupts the little domestic scene with a peremptory,

Madam, I desire your holy wishes.

(47)

He has presumably stomped across the stage to take Helena's place (a petulant performance that justifies the next line of Lafew's that has troubled some literary editors after Theobald—“How understand we that?”).

It is here that Shakespeare calls up another device of stagecraft and, with mother and son center-stage, shifts gear into the more emphatic mode of verse. Naturalistic characterization and commonplace human relationships are for the present less in focus when the playwright returns to matters thematic. The peevish young Count kneels to the Countess and formally asks her blessing, whereupon to the rhythms of verse she takes his hand and speaks warmly of ideals of birthright and estate, breeding and gentility:

Be thou blest, Bertram, and succeed thy father
In manners as in shape. Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright.

(49-52)

The lines pick up notions of what may and what may not be acquired by upbringing, echoing distinctions also heard just before on the Countess' tongue when she described Helena's own more simple natural endowment. Thus we now may well listen with Helena's ears as the Countess reinforces the importance of blood and breeding. So Helena's misery deepens.

The director of the BBC television production (1980), Elijah Moshinsky, at this point had his Countess give Bertram a ring, thus endowing it with the precious significance of the word ‘birthright’; later, this will be the same ring which in his letter in 3.2 Bertram will challenge Helena to take from his finger, and which in the ‘seduction’ scene of 4.2 Diana will demand of him in exchange for her chastity, for her ‘honor.’ This clever stroke of direction reinforced the point of these hortatory and rather conventional lines (see those of Polonius to Laertes), that the moral qualities Bertram will acquire by going off into the world should equal those of his noble birth. The rest of the play, we can be sure, will put these qualities to the test.

I find it a nice Shakespearean touch that, after highflown words like “my prayers pluck down, / Fall on thy head” (with, presumably, a charming kiss on his head to go with them), the Countess can turn away more like an ordinary mother than a dowager duchess, and slip a brief stage aside to Lafew almost under her breath:

’Tis an unseasoned courtier; good my lord,
Advise him.

(58-9)

The quick detail, the little touch of realism, tends briefly to remind the audience of Bertram's green youth. The spotlight is, however, not upon Bertram for long, since the expository emphasis on Helena must, I believe, remain strong and vivid.

The Countess gone, an audience might anticipate a highly charged moment when Bertram could freely show his feelings for the doctor's daughter, and even she for him. It is not to be. Should Bertram's actor introduce an instant of hesitation before he leaves, the resulting pain of his rejection of her will be felt by spectator and Helena alike, although we should never know what might be passing through his mind. As it happens, he has used the word ‘servant,’ and it may be this that triggers the scorn in the hasty lines that follow:

Be comfortable to my mother, your mistress, and make much of her.

(63-4)

I hear the actor stress the word “mistress,” putting Helena firmly in her place. And it is interesting that for these words the Folio again has prose (unaccountably and unnecessarily blankversified in the New Cambridge edition), as it has for Lafew's cruelly unsympathetic addition:

Farewell, pretty lady. You must hold the credit of your father.

(65-6)

While Lafew reintroduces the former idea that Helena must live up to her father's memory (perhaps putting the idea into the head of G. B. Shaw that she was ready to become Shakespeare's lady doctor), that phrase “pretty lady” is as belittling as Bertram's “your mistress,” and seems to invite a pat or a pinch, rather than love and affection, from her master. At all events, the two men sweep past poor Helena, leaving her alone on the stage.

On her next lines, it may be that Helena, once alone, will suddenly change her modest demeanor, perhaps run to try to call Bertram back, perhaps break into uncontrolled sobbing, perhaps collapse upon the floor. This prerogative belongs to the actress, whose contribution Shakespeare here programs and expects. But the playwright has also been waiting for this moment in the development of his story to deliver some of the finest love poetry in this or any other play. The script shifts into a yet higher gear, as so often for soliloquy or other charismatic moments (in Twelfth Night, one thinks of Viola's “patience on a monument” speech, or her “willow cabin” aria, in the presence of Orsino and Olivia respectively). With Helena in her despair, this moment of expository confession modulates into a terrible honesty, and then is made to soar aloft and seem to reveal and release what is in the depths of her soul:

O, were that all! I think not on my father,
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him. My imagination
Carries no favour in’t but Bertram's.
I am undone! There is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. ’Twere all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And think to wed it, he is so above me.
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. …

(67-77)

In these lines the audience faintly hears and has a first glimpse of the other Helena, the Helena whose fantasies so govern the play that the drama must henceforward work on two levels, one belonging to the realistic world of Paris and Florence, of an earthier Bertram and Parolles, and the other moving stylistically on the level of the “divine” inspiration that furnishes her with a cure for the King, and nourishes the driven, single-minded dream that will test her will and carry her through the ordeal of the second half of the play.

When Helena speaks the proverbial lines,

The hind that would be mated by the lion
Must die for love,

(79-80)

we hear a sad echo of the Countess's melancholy motif, that life can only follow death, mixing hope with despair. Alone on the stage, Helena seems to take upon herself, with the burden of the poetry, the whole burden of the play.

Where does the opening of a play stop? When does the second movement begin? Certainly not after 80 lines of text of five minutes’ playing time. The comedian Parolles enters at line 85 and drops the tone drastically with his cynical joking about virginity, forcing Helena to respond in kind, and putting the idea, also thematic, into her chaste mind that she should use her body to resolve her problem: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie” (187). By juxtaposing the comic and the pathetic, Shakespeare is arranging his episodic building-blocks to control the balance of mood and pace of his play—and this parataxis, this deploying of his forces for battle, is of course also part of the mechanism of an opening.

But perhaps we may agree that enough of the play's central themes, the expository fodder, the opening signals, have been fed to the expectant audience. We, like the actors, have been shown the territory to be traversed. It will appear at first like an undulating landscape, on one side the realistic foothills of an understandable and commonplace domestic event, the departure of a young man from home, part of his initiation into manhood, a rite of passage, and on the other the romantic heights of a girl's imagination, one whose longing for this young man, even if he is indifferent to her, will provide the awesome challenge of her own rite of passage. The spectrum for the director and his actors, too, has ranged between the realistic and the romantic, as productions over the last few years have shown.

In the first book to recount the stage history of All's Well, Joseph Price (The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of ‘All's Well That Ends Well’ and Its Critics, Toronto, 1986) showed that the play has been seen either as a psychological study or as a tale of romantic love. One of the play's major themes, which appears to be the effect of class differences on the relationship between the sexes, with an emphasis on the role of women, the limits of their freedom, and the infamous double standard, may be treated realistically: born into the nobility, Bertram is merely obeying the dictates of his own upbringing by refusing her; however passionate Helena's love for him, her brazen pursuit of the man she wanted is unacceptable. Yet shift the mode into something more romantic, even visionary, and Helena's love may be seen to be unshakable, so resolute and faithful that she deserves and converts Bertram at the end. This division has affected speech and movement, together with casting, costume and setting, and all the elements of style that depend upon the quality of the text.

At one extreme, Michael Benthall's Old Vic production of 1953 had its stage decorated in the manner of a picture-book, with a colorful quasi-medieval illuminated manuscript for a stage set, bright with flowers and castellated walls; there John Neville played Bertram like Prince Charming, while as Helena Claire Bloom in a long blonde wig and flowing tresses wept fairytale tears. At another extreme, in 1981 Trevor Nunn and the RSC set the play against the grim background of France in World War I, with Mike Gwilym as Bertram, now a prissy young officer off to the Western Front, and Harriet Walter as Helena, now a desperate young woman prepared to work as a nurse among the ugly horrors of a front-line field hospital. Under the banner of the RSC, therefore, the vicissitudes and pain of love could thus take on a widely understood reality, and the nostalgic years of the Edwardian twilight could (following the success of the sophisticated cliches of the BBC-TV soap series Upstairs, Downstairs) supply the need for the romantic.

While such contrasts in directorial perspective are common, it would be a mistake to suggest that either the romanticizers or the realists are misguided. From the text it seems incumbent upon any production of this play to incorporate both the realistic/psychological and the romantic/visionary view. The evidence for integrating and interweaving these contradictory elements is particularly strong in the opening lines of the play, as it is in each of the problem comedy openings, and confirms one's sense that Shakespeare knew what he was doing from the beginning. Certainly there are tragic overtones felt behind the play's suggestions of ever-present death, in the mortality of the flesh as well as the death of the heart; and pain and anguish are implicit in the disheartening limitations that, potentially, lie behind all human relationships. Yet the idea of dying into life is planted from the start, and in this play, at least, there is hope in the way that the young are seen to find redemption through the older generation. However, in balancing the realistic and the romantic in performance there lies something of even greater importance.

In the opening scene the stage is inhabited by an old man and woman and by a young man and woman: the spectator is thereby encouraged to mark generational differences in the good and bad manners of class and gender, and between the wisdom of experience and the follies of inexperience. Such differences persist through the play. However, they contribute infinitely more than this. The conflict of age and youth constantly reinforces the distance with which comedy requires its audience to see the action on the stage. When the Countess smiles at Helena her ward, or Lafew at Bertram his young master, we do also. They are as a Feste to Olivia and Orsino. And, moreover, where such images of time past and time present are in conflict, we are not easily prepared to allow the tragic muse to stalk idly among them. Like Shakespeare, the audience to All's Well That Ends Well looks for the exquisite balance that is always to be found in the richest comedy. The play is neither Ibsen and Strindberg, nor Gilbert and Sullivan, but mature Shakespearean comedy, in which the compassionate ingredients that make up the sad story of Helena's unrequited love and Bertram's sorry imperfections, are in their unhappy situation to be seen and felt only in tandem with what is inherently comic, and therefore both moving and amusing.