Welcome to the first of (let's seeeeee onetwothreefourmumblemumble...) eleven previews for the coming season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: All's Well That Ends Well. Written by William Shakespeare, it will be playing from June 30 until November 1 in the New Theatre. It is the OSF directorial debut of Amanda Dehnert, who has an impressive resume with the Trinity Reportory Company in Rhode Island. Now, obviously there's a mountain of excellent of information out there about this pillar of the canon. I'm not out to reinvent the wheel here, nor am I qualified (or interested, for that matter) in trying to make like a PhD candidate and blow your minds. What I'm offering is a convenient collection of material about the play and the production (as that becomes available), plus a look at the cast and what that might tell us.
The Play
One benefit of Shakespeare's plays being so old is that they're freely available in the public domain. A favorite site for text and analysis is Play Shakespeare; you can find their copy of the text here.With a little help from Wikipedia (as of November, 2008) here's a quick summary.
Helena, our female protagonist, serves as a gentlewoman in the household of the Countess of Rossilion. There she has become acquainted (and fallen in love) with Bertram, the Countess' son, who is making preparations to leave for Paris to become a ward of the King of France. Helena has long nursed a secret love for Bertram, despite their class differences. It is revealed that the King is terminally ill of a fistula (to Shakespeare it was a long pipelike ulcer). Helena, whose father was a well-renowned physician, offers to cure him if he will allow her to marry the Lord of her choice - he agrees. Her medicinal knowledge proves fruitful, and she saves the King's life. The King is overjoyed and accedes to her condition, upon curing him, of being granted the husband of her choice. Of course, she chooses the reluctant and unwilling Bertram. She offers him freedom to deny her, but the King is insistent on the marriage as a reward to Helena and Bertram is forced to consent. After their (enforced) wedding, Bertram decides he would rather face death in battle than remain married to Helena, so he steals off to fight in the Italian war developing between the Florentines and the Senoys. While at war, he writes dismissively home to Helena:
"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." (III.ii.55-58)
Bertram thinks these things an impossible task. Nevertheless, Helena sets out with a plan to recover her husband.
Back at the war front, the young lords strive to convince Bertram that his ne'er-do-well friend Parolles is a coward. They set up an elaborate ruse to convince Parolles to recover a company drum stolen by the enemy and trick him into believing he has been captured. Parolles, thinking himself begging for his life, readily spills all his army's secrets to his "captors", betraying Bertram ("a foolish idle boy and for all that very ruttish...") in the process. Dishonored and stripped of his title, Parolles returns to France as a beggar. Helena, meanwhile, enlists the aid of Diana, a maiden who has taken Bertram's fancy. Together they execute the bait-and-switch "bed trick" during which Helena successfully gets the Rossillion family ring and sleeps with Bertram as per the conditions in his letter. In the final act, Helena's cunning plot is revealed, and Bertram promises to be a faithful husband to her and "love her dearly, ever, ever dearly." (V.iii.354)
All's Well is a tricky play on several levels. Like last year's Clay Cart, there's a certain moral flexibility that you have to be comfortable with. Bertram is not very sympathetic, treating our heroine with disdain bordering on outright scorn. Helena, meanwhile, accepts his hostility as a challenge worthy of the prize. While feigning death to illicit sympathy is common enough in Shakespeare (see Much Ado About Nothing, for example), the sheer amount of deception, the depth of it, and the cause that it is in service of, can't help but make you think "is it worth it?" For all of that, the writing is what you'd expect and worth your consideration even if the story doesn't thrill you. At least, if things go right!