ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
Based on a tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the plot details five serious tricks the characters play on each other (or, more properly, that Shakespeare plays on all of them). Helena, the orphaned daughter of a famous physician, is pining away at the court of Rossillion from a near-hopeless love for the snobbish young Count Bertram. “There is no living, none, if Bertram be away,” she says in a lovely speech that yet reeks of one-sided adoration. Helena will use any means to gain his love.
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After curing the king of France of a nearly fatal malady (using one of her daddy’s secret home remedies), Helena asks the grateful monarch to reward her by letting her marry whomever she wants from the court. Though the finest French nobles vie for her favor, Helena’s choice is Bertram, the only man not willing to marry her–he doesn’t want to throw himself away on a poor doctor’s daughter. Seeing Bertram’s anger, Helena withdraws her request, but the king has been stung by Bertram’s insolent opposition and forces him to marry Helena anyway.
One way to get beyond the plot’s multifaceted unpleasantness is suggested by a line that is used to describe Parolles but could fit the lovers as well: “Is it possible that he should know what he is and be what he is?” These characters don’t know themselves, and that excuses some things and explains much of the rest. Helena’s unquestioning love for Bertram blinds her both to his faults and to her own self-abasement. Bertram is a worthless cad who’s blind to natural nobility and his own real needs. (He’s also clearly, and justifiably, scared by the sheer ferocity of Helena’s pursuit.) But ironically the target of the comment–Parolles–knows himself only too well; it’s the men he’s duped who expose him as the cowardly fraud he is, a fact he tries to conceal. They do it in one of Shakespeare’s funniest and meanest exposure scenes; in its unsettling mix of hilarity and pathos, it ranks with Malvolio’s comeuppance in Twelfth Night.
The cast never lacks for appropriate, undistracting stage business–Diana and her mother drying carpets, the Countess and Helena dining al fresco, the sick King signaling his anger by shutting the curtains of his sedan chair. These touches humanize the tale and make All’s Well well enough despite itself; in Court’s production, the dramatic means really do justify the artistic end, a clear and present reading of the play.
