All's Well That Ends Well Trivia Quiz

Answer: "Hamlet", "Measure for Measure" and "Troilus and Cressida"

"Problem play" was a term invented by the distinguished nineteenth-century scholar F. S. Boas, and is notoriously hard to define accurately - not that this has noticeably affected its general popularity in academic circles. Different critics have interpreted the phrase in a variety of ways, with pretty confusing results. To refer to "All's Well", as the late Professor Frank Kermode once did, as "a Jacobean problem comedy", sounds impressive in a vague sort of way, but so far as I know he never explained exactly what he meant by it.

Having mocked Professor Boas,the original author of the "problem play" tag, for his terminological inexactitude, the twentieth-century critic Ernest Schanzer - rather amusingly, I think - then published a lengthy work entitled "The Problem Plays of Shakespeare", in which he almost completely ignored "All's Well That Ends Well", "Troilus and Cressida" and "Hamlet" and instead devoted himself to long and searching chapters on the particular problems he found in "Measure for Measure", "Julius Caesar" and "Antony and Cleopatra". One in the eye for the critical consensus there!

Answer: dark comedy

"Dark comedy" may not sound like everyone's idea of fun, but the genre offers perhaps a special appeal of its own. It seems to have been more satisfactorily defined than "problem play": the critic D.A.Traversi lucidly characterises plays such as "All's Well That Ends Well" and "Measure for Measure" as "comedies, in the formal sense, but conceived in a spirit almost entirely opposed to that of Shakespeare's early comedies and indeed of comedy in general". Their happy endings tend to be ambiguous, while the future well-being of their heroes and heroines apparently hang by a thread. One could argue that this makes "dark comedies" potentially more interesting than the more conventional kinds of theatrical comedy.

Traversi himself, however - like many other critics before and after him - is dismissive of "All's Well", relegating it to the status of "a preliminary sketch for some aspects, not always the most important, of "Measure for Measure". This seems very harsh, and other commentators have been more complimentary about "All's Well"'s merits as they perceived them: Andrew Dickson, for example, has praised "the special intensity and charm of this neglected play".

Answer: Giovanni Boccaccio

Paynter translated just sixteen of the hundred stories included in Boccaccio's "Decameron", and many of the juiciest and bawdiest tales were not included in his English version. In spite of this apparent drawback to its readability, however, some scholars believe that Paynter's book probably ranked among Shakespeare's favourite reading material, although this is somewhat speculative. To the plot as he found it in Paynter, the playwright added four memorable characters of his own - the Countess, Lafew, Parolles, and Lavatch the Clown - and integrated them expertly into the plot.

Answer: France and Italy

The play opens in Rosillion (in French "Rousillon", a medieval region of France). The action then moves on to the French court in Paris, before three of the chief protagonists head off for Italy, where the "Florentine wars" are taking place. The somewhat enchanted air of Italy and the fairy-tale romance elements in some of the episodes that take place there will speed on the eventual ingenious resolution of this play, as everyone meets up again in Rossillion for the final scene.

A certain dove-tailing of fairy-tale devices and realistic passions is one of the hallmarks of "All's Well", and this is a feature which - as Ernest Schanzer remarked - connects the drama more closely to "Cymbeline" than to anything else in the Shakespearean canon. Another possibly related feature is the presence, first noted by Coleridge, of two distinct literary styles in the play - passages of conventional heroic couplets being juxtaposed with others of passionate and high-flown blank verse - a duality which has sometimes led to mutterings about shared authorship, or alternatively of an incomplete, partially botched, rewriting by the Bard of one of his own earlier plays (the mysterious and still inexplicably missing "Love's Labours Won", for example). Here, perhaps, lies the true "problem" of this play. (It is also possible that Shakespeare further revised what F.E.Halliday once called his "recalcitrant play" during the years of retirement at Stratford-upon-Avon: certainly, the text as we have it contains some particularly beautiful examples of what we usually think of as the late Shakespearean blank-verse style.)

Answer: all in black

The characters - including the play's heroine, Helena, who is later revealed to have something quite different on her mind from that she appears to have - are in mourning for the recently deceased Count of Rosillion, while more gloom is added to the scene by references to Helena's late father, a brilliant physician.

The critic Barbara Evett observes that the four figures in black "make a strangely sombre opening tableau for a comedy" - and although Shakespeare had attempted something not entirely dissimilar before, in "Twelfth Night", the clouding of the atmosphere somehow seems more pervasive in this later play's opening scene.

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

Helena's silent, brooding presence in the play's first scene and the cryptic one-liner she utters when finally induced to break her silence are both calculated to arouse the audience's interest in her as a character. And as the drama progresses, our sense is heightened of a young woman who is not, like Shakespeare's earlier comic heroines, all surface. She has depth: we often cannot tell what she is thinking or why she says the things she says.

This play, or at least the greater part of it, may well have been written immediately after "Hamlet": the years 1602-06 are tentatively assigned to its composition, although there is no external evidence and other dates have also been suggested. Of Helena's first line, one of "All's Well"'s twentieth-century editors, Barbara Evett, commented perceptively that "when uttered, this remark (like much that she says in the first scene) is enigmatic and riddling, which makes Helena's first appearance in the play curiously like Hamlet's in his".

Answer: she is given several soliloquies during the course of the play

The troubled heroine's first soliloquy, in which she opens her heart - passionately, if not perhaps completely - to the audience after evidently having felt constricted by the presence on stage of the other characters, begins arrestingly:

"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."

Her second soliloquy at the end of the scene is - like much of the verse in the first half of the play - written in heroic couplets, as if belonging to an earlier period of Shakespeare's career. Nevertheless it too begins quite forcefully: "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,/Which we ascribe to heaven." The action of the play, as it develops, serves to demonstrate how completely Helena has taken this maxim to heart. When she soliloquises later on, she sometimes takes on a more choric role, summarising the action in which she herself is playing a part.

Answer: no original music for it has survived

The rapscallion of a Clown, a stock dramatic example of the witty servant who punctures the pretensions of his sophisticated betters, adds spice to many of the scenes involving the Countess, whom he follows around like a malevolent shadow. There seems, unfortunately, little to be said in praise of his song, possibly the least inspired in the whole of Shakespeare. Given that the conversation during this scene is about the play's heroine, Helena, the Clown takes it upon himself to perform a doleful number - apparently corrupting a popular ditty of Shakespeare's own time - which refers obliquely to Helen of Troy. It is not known whether the Clown sang, or merely declaimed, this number, but there is an implicit challenge here to latter-day composers (the versatile Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who died in 1916, would have been ideal) to create a suitably nerve-wracking musical setting in order to divert the audience's attention from the poverty of its text.

There was apparently a very funny Clown (who can be glimpsed in a tantalisingly brief video clip on youtube) in John Dove's well-received 2011 production of the play at the restored Globe Theatre on London's Bankside. Unfortunately I didn't see the original performance, so I don't know what he did with the song.

Answer: Bertram

"I cannot reconcile myself to Bertram," grumbled Samuel Johnson, with some degree of justice: "a man noble without generosity, and young without truth...who...sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness". In a similar vein, George Bernard Shaw downplays the character as "a perfectly ordinary young man, whose unimaginative prejudices and selfish conventionality make him cut a very mean figure".

On the stage, however, Bertram's youthful good looks and physical bravery can still attract some sympathy, in spite of his obvious faults: wikipedia calls him, reasonably enough, "a callow youth learning valuable lessons about values". He can be seen as a victim, too, forced by his King to marry a woman he does not love and is not remotely interested in. His initial refusal to bow to the King's command to marry Helena - although the only reason he gives is that his intended bride is a low-born commoner - has been interpreted by the contemporary British critic Andrew Dickson as "the honest response of a man being forced to play along with someone else's bizarre fairy tale".

It is a source of the greatest distress to Helena that, like Ophelia in "Hamlet", she loves a man of noble rank, "out of her star", while lamenting the sad fate of those like her: "we, the poorer born,/Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes".

Answer: she cures him of his wasting disease

Helena's late father, an extraordinarily gifted magician, bequeathed to her many medical secrets and - having studied these - she decides to leave for the French court and try to cure the King of his debilitating "fistula", which has defied the attempted remedies of all his other doctors, and has left its victim resigned to a slow and painful death. She is most strongly motivated in her actions, however, by the prospect of seeing Bertram again at court. Once there, she immediately captivates the old courtier Lafew, who - calling her "Doctor She" - rhapsodises on her extraordinary powers:

"I have seen a medicine
That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With sprightly fire and motion."

As the fairy-tale tradition demands, the King is immediately cured by Helena's treatment and honours the promise she had previously extracted from him to let her choose a husband from the assembled lords of his court. Of course, she chooses Bertram - but is cruelly rejected, until the King bullies the reluctant bridegroom into going through with an immediate marriage ceremony. Bertram then absconds from court in order to forget his sorrows by fighting in the Florentine wars - wars the King had forbidden him to participate in on the grounds of his tender age.

Bertram betrays the cold arrogance of youth in his contempt for his unfortunate new wife: "Wars is no strife/To the dark house and the detested wife...tomorrow/I'll to the wars, she to her single sorrow". Most cuttingly of all, "here comes my clog", he sneers, at the poor girl's next appearance on stage.

Answer: she follows him to Italy

Helena receives a letter from Bertram in which she reads the sentence "Till I have no wife I have nothing in France". This elicits from her a self-accusing and anguished blank-verse soliloquy:

"Is it I
That drive thee from the sportive court, where thou
Wast shot at with fair eyes,to be the mark
Of smoky muskets?"

Her first thought is to leave France, so that Bertram may return there without needing to be hampered and "clogged" by her presence. Then, rather quixotically, she writes and sends an impromptu sonnet to the Countess, expressing her intention to travel to "St Jaques"' shrine at Compostela in Spain. We are left to guess at her true state of mind and intentions, for while (in line with this stated intention) she dresses as a pilgrim, her steps actually lead her in the exactly opposite direction, to that very Florence where her husband is to be found soldiering.

It has appeared to most readers and audiences - but one can never be sure with Helena - that her intentions are not primarily religious but that she is, in fact, chasing Bertram and seeking to entrap him, in defiance of any moral scruples she may be supposed to be feeling. Barbara Evett suggests that Shakespeare "is using the romance mode...to move the stress from the rational motivation or cause of events, on to their fruits or effects", adding that "the mystery worries few in the theatre".

Nevertheless, Helena's behaviour in pursuing Bertram to Florence, and what she does when she gets there (involving the time-honoured literary device of the "bed trick"), was considered quite shocking by many readers in the nineteenth century. Ernest Schanzer, however, has argued forcefully that "what may seem morally perplexing or ambiguous...would not have seemed so to an Elizabethan audience...Helena's actions conform to the common folk-tale motif of the Clever Wench fulfilling her seemingly impossible task...an Elizabethan audience would have felt undivided sympathy and admiration for her".

Answer: he never gives up his ring to anybody

The riddle Bertram sends Helena before leaving France has something of the flavour of raw fairy tale: "When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband." Helena is clever enough to fulfil both of these impossible demands by the stock comedic device - which Shakespeare had used before in "Much Ado About Nothing" and was to use again in "Measure for Measure" - of the "bed trick".

She impersonates young Diana, with whom Bertram is infatuated (but who is, in fact, a feisty young woman capable of handling her impetuous admirer without any difficulty), and thus she, Helena, succeeds both in sleeping with her husband and in persuading him to exchange rings: he gives her his valuable family ring ("It is an honour 'longing to our house,/Bequeathed down from many ancestors") and she in return presents him with the equally splendid one she had from the King of France. All this intimate action, of course, takes place off-stage.

The French lords ruefully reflect on what they believe to be the ruining of Diana's virtue: "this night he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour", as the Second Lord salaciously puts it.

Answer: Parolles

Parolles - "that jackanapes with scarfs", as the Florentine Diana scornfully characterises him - is a great talker, but his actions always completely fail to match up to his words. He is finally exposed in Italy as a total coward by a trick, engineered by his comrades-in-arms with Bertram's approval - an episode which provides Shakespeare with a glorious opportunity to display his gift for hilarious theatrical comedy. The boisterous realism of this scene helps to distract the audience's attention from the inherent improbability of the "bed-trick" action, which is evidently going on at the same time.

After having been utterly exposed to all and sundry as an incorrigible coward who would happily betray his nearest and dearest without batting an eyelid, Parolles is left briefly to reflect alone on stage upon his ruined reputation. He does not appear to be greatly disconcerted: "Yet am I thankful", he confides to the audience: "if my heart were great,/'Twould burst at this.../...simply the thing I am/shall make me live". The contrast with Bertram's martial courage could not be greater.

It is Parolles too who, in an earlier scene in France, uses the admirable nonce-word "kicky-wicky", which evidently means something like "a sexually-active girlfriend". (In the glossary accompanying their twentieth-century American edition of Shakespeare's works, W. G. Clark and W. Aldis Wright delightfully transmogrify this coinage into the even more delicious "kicksy-wicksy", which they then rather disappointingly define merely as "a wife".)

Answer: Helena

Helena's first use of the catchphrase occurs in a chiming couplet to round off a long passage of dialogue in blank verse, and it is really little better than doggerel: "All's well that ends well: still the fine's the crown./Whate'er the course, the end is the renown." Its second occurrence, however, has the strength of echo and is also poetically superior: "All's well that ends well yet,/Though time seem so adverse and means unfit."

Through the long and troubled journeying of Helena back through Marseilles to Rossillion in the company of Diana and her mother, the Widow of Florence, these unobtrusive verbal echoes give a sense of the play's momentum, and of the possibility of a final happy outcome to the various strifes and torments of the play's action. They may also subliminally suggest that everything is being driven purely and solely by Helena's will-power and strength of character, so that she herself, in a way, becomes Fate and Fortune combined in her own person. It is almost as if Helena is taking control of Shakespeare's own pen as she drives the drama on inexorably to the conclusion which she has desired and planned all along.

Shakespeare's profound sense of verbal irony may well be present in the play's title: the sudden happy ending, as various critics have noted, is hedged around with "if" clauses. But this is balanced by the more positive feeling of a dark and wintry story hesitantly looking forward to a happier season, particularly in the achingly beautiful lines which Shakespeare gives to Helena at the beginning of the long journey which she makes, accompanied by her two Italian friends, back to Rossillion: "the time will bring on summer,/When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns/And be as sweet as sharp".

Answer: none

Although no one dies during the course of the action, thoughts of death - as in "Hamlet" and "Measure for Measure" - are often present in the characters' minds. The Clown, Lavatch, follows his Countess around everywhere like a lugubrious ghostly shadow. The recently-deceased Count and his physician are referred to so often that they seem almost to be participants in the drama.
The King, too, although he remains relatively active, is self-consciously dying a slow and agonising death until magically cured by Helena. His new-found vigour, however, does not prevent him from remarking shortly before the end of the play that "we are old, and on our quick'st decrees/The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time/Steals ere we can effect them".

In addition to all this, Helena is believed by the entire French court to be dead after her adventures in Italy: Bertram, with evident sincerity, laments "she whom all men praised, and whom myself/Since I have lost, have loved" (at which the King sneers morosely at "love that comes too late"). After this, Helena's sudden reappearance in their midst minutes before the end of the drama is made to appear a magical resurrection, hinting forwards to the magical climax of the moving statue in "The Winter's Tale".

We are, perhaps, meant to feel that Bertram has suffered enough for his insensitive behaviour when he impulsively turns to the King with the words, "If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly/I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly." At this point the triumphant optimism of youth and life seems finally to break through the wintry fatalism of old age and death, which has been seen to dominate the court at Rossillion for too long.

Answer: the King

The play's final dénouement is so breathlessly achieved that the King seems to have begun and finished his brief Epilogue before the audience has had time to blink. "The King's a beggar, now the play is done./All is well ended if this suit be won,/That you express content...".

It is a very conventional ending, but we are left afterwards to dwell on all the human complexities of the drama which the quickfire finish has inevitably glossed over.

Answer: Thomas Middleton

Middleton was in London at the right time, but theories of his supposed collaboration with the Bard appear to be mere conjecture (it is always tempting to dismiss the occasional doggerel couplets which disfigure the texts of Shakespeare's late plays as the botching of a second hand, but there does not seem to be any proof.) Wikipedia, however, quotes Laurie Maguire (writing in 2012): "stylistically it is striking how many of the widely acknowledged textual and tonal problems of "All's Well" can be understood differently when we postulate dual authorship".

Answer: the unfortunate comedy

"All's Well"'s ill fortune may be said to have begun much earlier, when the text of the play published in the posthumous "First Folio" of Shakespeare's works (1623) - the only surviving early version of "All's Well" - proved to be riddled with various strange errors and inconsistencies. It was, however, a series of theatrical mishaps in the 1740s which led to the "unfortunate comedy" tag. The play's first known performance, in London in 1741, was apparently stymied by the arrival in town of the illustrious David Garrick, demanding of the company that they should switch to better-known Shakespearean works. Then the following year, when "All's Well" was staged in the Drury Lane Theatre, the actor playing the King fell ill and died and the run was cancelled.

Garrick, great actor though he doubtless was, suffered from an apparently compulsive addiction to "improving" Shakespeare to suit his own tastes, and during the 1750s and 1760s he was responsible for so mangling "All's Well That Ends Well" that Parolles (the part Garrick himself liked to play) became the main character in the drama. A number of later productions, such as Sir Frank Benson's at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1916 and William Poel's at Bayswater in 1920, were also evidently sabotaged by matters outside the Bard's control. Andrew Dickson, in "The Rough Guide to Shakespeare", quotes a newspaper critic of that era describing "All's Well" as "very nearly the worst play its distinguished author ever wrote".

"The Unfortunate Comedy" is also the title of a book published in 1968 by J.G.Price which is still, I believe, in the early twenty-first century, the only full-length study of "All's Well That Ends Well" ever to have seen the light of day. Price offers a robust defence of the play against its many detractors.

Answer: George Bernard Shaw

Shaw was captivated by the character of Helena, famously comparing her to the intellectually forward and "modern" figure of Nora in Ibsen's "A Doll's House". The playwright's actress friend Ellen Terry, however, felt otherwise, calling Helena "despicable" and echoing the traditional Victorian objections to the character as an immodest and unprincipled man-hunter. Neither Shaw nor Terry appear to have given due weight to the fairy-tale conventions on which much of the heroine's behaviour is based, but it is true that some of her utterances, rich and memorable as they are, can strike a kind of crypto-feminist note: "O strange men!/That can such sweet use make of what they hate,/When saucy trusting of the cozen'd thoughts/Defiles the pitchy night... ".

Answer: Peggy Ashcroft

Harriet Walter played Helena, and Mike Gwilym and Philip Franks both took on the part of Bertram at different times, under John Barton's direction. In spite of the high calibre of the rest of the cast, it was widely felt that Dame Peggy stole the show with her sensitive portrayal of what G.B.Shaw had once called "the most beautiful old woman's part ever written for the theatre".