What You’ll Love About… All’s Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare
Bad boy Bertram is outmaneuvered by manhunter Helena.
All’s Well That Ends Well is one of the plays that was first printed in the anthology of Shakespeare plays referred to as the First Folio in 1623. Many of Shakespeare’s more popular plays had been printed in a smaller quarto format during his lifetime, but many of the less popular plays were never published while he was alive (he died in 1616). Plays were written mainly to be performed, and there was no pipeline for converting all plays to books. Books were becoming cheaper, but they were still too expensive for regular people to buy many of them. If the First Folio had never been published, All’s Well That Ends Well may have been lost forever.
Scholars have found it difficult to date this play accurately, but it is similar to Measure for Measure in several ways, and it was probably written around the same time as that play.
The title might seem offhand and playful, but it will take on a darker meaning by the end of the play. Another way to express the same idea is “the ends justify the means.”
Female agency and sexuality are central concerns of the play, which is interesting for several reasons. If you didn’t know, women’s roles in English Renaissance plays…
