That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
And all the craggy mountains yield.
There will we sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
There will I make thee a bed of roses,
With a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Then live with me and be my love.
LOVE’S ANSWER
If that the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.
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As it fell upon a day
In the merry month of May,
Sitting in a pleasant shade
Which a grove of myrtles made,
Beasts did leap and birds did sing,
Trees did grow and plants did spring;
Everything did banish moan,
Save the nightingale alone:
She, poor bird, as all forlorn,
Lean’d her breast up-till a thorn,
And there sung the dolefull’st ditty,
That to hear it was great pity.
‘Fie, fie, fie,’ now would she cry,
‘Tereu, Tereu,’ by and by;
That to hear her so complain,
Scarce I could from tears refrain,
For her griefs so lively shown
Made me think upon mine own.
Ah, thought I, thou mourn’st in vain!
None takes pity on thy pain.
Senseless trees they cannot hear thee,
Ruthless bears they will not cheer thee;
King Pandion he is dead,
All thy friends are lapp’d in lead,
All thy fellow birds do sing,
Careless of thy sorrowing.
Whilst as fickle fortune smiled,
Thou and I were both beguiled.
Every one that flatters thee
Is no friend in misery.
Words are easy, like the wind;
Faithful friends are hard to find.
Every man will be thy friend
Whilst thou hast wherewith to spend;
But if store of crowns be scant,
No man will supply thy want.
If that one be prodigal,
Bountiful they will him call,
And with such-like flattering:
‘Pity but he were a king.’
If he be addict to vice,
Quickly him they will entice;
If to women he be bent,
They have at commandement.
But if fortune once do frown,
Then farewell his great renown:
They that fawn’d on him before,
Use his company no more.
He that is thy friend indeed,
He will help thee in thy need:
If thou sorrow, he will weep;
If thou wake, he cannot sleep:
Thus of every grief in heart
He with thee doth bear a part.
These are certain signs to know
Faithful friend from flatt’ring foe.
The Phoenix and Turtle
Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
5
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever’s end,
To this troop come thou not near.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
10
Save the eagle, feather’d king;
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
15
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak’st
With the breath thou giv’st and tak’st,
’Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
20
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the Turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they lov’d, as love in twain
25
Had the essence but in one:
Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seen
30
’Twixt this Turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine
That the Turtle saw his right
Flaming in the Phoenix’ sight;
35
Either was the other’s mine.
Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same:
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was called.
40
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded:
That it cried, How true a twain
45
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts, can so remain.
Whereupon it made this Threne
To the Phoenix and the Dove,
50
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As Chorus to their tragic scene.
THRENOS
Beauty, truth and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos’d, in cinders lie.
55
Death is now the Phoenix’ nest,
And the Turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest.
Leaving no posterity,
’Twas not their infirmity,
60
It was married chastity.
Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but ’tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
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That are either true or fair:
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
All’s Well That Ends Well
The only early text of All’s Well That Ends Well is that of the 1623 Folio, in which it is the twelfth of the comedies, though it seems, judging from its tone and style, to have been written some twenty years earlier, probably about 1602-5. On 8 November 1623, along with fifteen other plays ‘not formerly entered to other men’, it was entered in the Stationers’ Register to the Folio’s principal publishers, Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard. Neither in print nor on stage has the play enjoyed great popular success, no doubt because it lacks the joyful exuberance of many other comedies. Nonetheless it is a fascinating if disturbing play, a subtle and sober exploration of human desire and human aspirations to honour.
The story of the healing of the king and the satisfying of apparently impossible conditions by the young heroine is the stuff of folklore, but Shakespeare seems to have read it in William Painter’s translation of the ninth story on the third day in Boccaccio’s Decameron, first published in 1566 in his collection of translated novelle, The Palace of Pleasure (which was several times reprinted). The heroine, Giletta of Narbonne, cures the French king of a painful fistula and demands, as her reward, the hand of Beltramo, Count of Rossiglione. The Count flees this unwanted marriage, but Giletta finds him and ‘by policy’ gets pregnant by him, ‘
which known to her husband, he received her again, and afterwards he lived in great honour and felicity’.
Shakespeare follows this plot closely, but he has darkened its outlines and sharpened the social particularity of its characters. The callow, cowardly and ungenerous Bertram is hard to like, while Helena’s single-minded pursuit of the unwilling Count is itself too insistent and self-regarding to be an unproblematic source of audience delight. The play ends well for Helena, who has got her man, and for Bertram, who will not now face the charges of murdering his wife and of seducing Diana; but the two stand together at the play’s end in the knowledge that the process which has brought them there has also humiliated each. Shakespeare’s distinctive additions to the story include his portrayal of the older generation, the Countess, the King, Lord Lafeu, perhaps also Lavatch, the dead Count’s fool, and Diana’s mother, the widow of Florence. Their beneficent support does much to win Helena a sympathy not always invited by her actions. The unmasking of Parolles – also a Shakespearean addition –reveals an unexpected humanity in the braggart sadly lacking in Bertram when he in turn is shown for what he truly is.
The ending is appropriately hedged with qualifications and conditionals: ‘All yet seems well, and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.’ The comedy has achieved the union of its lovers and the ordering of its society, as comedy must, but it has done so by questionable means, and the stability even of its subdued resolution is called into question by the King’s offer to Diana: ‘Choose thou thy husband and I’ll pay thy dower.’ The King’s gesture can seem merely absurd – an invitation to the release of happy laughter at his inability to learn from experience – or, more disturbingly, it can be presented as a reassertion of the arbitrary power whose earlier exercise in imposing marriage on Bertram and Helena when both held back initiated the unhappiness only now, perhaps, resolved.
No wonder, then, that modern criticism has sought other terms than comedy to designate this play’s genre. The label ‘problem play’ was first attached to it in 1896 by F.S. Boas, who recognized its kinship to Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. These three plays, according to Boas, produced neither ‘simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome’. This is arguably the very source of the play’s interest for us, as it complicates and holds up for criticism the wish-fulfilling logic of comedy itself. Helena desires to assure herself and us: ‘All’s well that ends well yet, / Though time seems so adverse and means unfit.’ Even if the action ‘ends well’, the ‘means unfit’ by which it does so must challenge the comic claim. All is not automatically well that ‘yet seems well’, and dramatic actions that end well may be comic only in the most formal sense.
The Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio.
LIST OF ROLES
KING
of France
DUKE
of Florence
BERTRAM
Count of Rossillion
LAFEW
an old lord
TWO LORDS, the brothers Dumaine
French lords, later captains serving the Duke of Florence
PAROLLES
a follower of Bertram
A French GENTLEMAN
Rynaldo, a STEWARD
to the Countess of Rossillion
Lavatch, a CLOWN
in her household
PAGE
MESSENGER
COUNTESS
of Rossillion, mother to Bertram
HELENA
an orphan protected by the Countess
WIDOW Capilet
of Florence
DIANA
daughter to the widow
neighbours and friends to the widow
Lords, Attendants, Soldiers etc., French and Florentine
All’s Well That Ends Well
1.1 Enter young BERTRAM, Count of Rossillion, his mother, the COUNTESS, and HELENA, LORD LAFEW, all in black.
COUNTESS In delivering my son from me, I bury a
second husband.
BERTRAM And I in going, madam, weep o’er my father’s
death anew; but I must attend his majesty’s command,
to whom I am now in ward, evermore in subjection.
5
LAFEW You shall find of the king a husband, madam;
you, sir, a father. He that so generally is at all times
good must of necessity hold his virtue to you, whose
worthiness would stir it up where it wanted, rather
than lack it where there is such abundance.
10
COUNTESS What hope is there of his majesty’s
amendment?
LAFEW He hath abandon’d his physicians, madam;
under whose practices he hath persecuted time with
hope, and finds no other advantage in the process but
15
only the losing of hope by time.
COUNTESS This young gentlewoman had a father – O
that ‘had’, how sad a passage ’tis! – whose skill was
almost as great as his honesty; had it stretch’d so far,
would have made nature immortal, and death should
20
have play for lack of work. Would for the king’s sake he
were living! I think it would be the death of the king’s
disease.
LAFEW How call’d you the man you speak of, madam?
COUNTESS He was famous, sir, in his profession, and it
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was his great right to be so: Gerard de Narbon.
LAFEW He was excellent indeed, madam; the king very
lately spoke of him admiringly – and mourningly; he
was skilful enough to have liv’d still, if knowledge
could be set up against mortality.
30
BERTRAM What is it, my good lord, the king languishes
of?
LAFEW A fistula, my lord.
BERTRAM I heard not of it before.
LAFEW I would it were not notorious. Was this
35
gentlewoman the daughter of Gerard de Narbon?
COUNTESS His sole child, my lord, and bequeathed to
The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works Page 31
