All’s Well That Ends Well is a problematic play written by Shakespeare in the early 1600s, inspired by a folktale. The play’s morally ambiguous territory led to it being called a “problematic play.” The play’s heroine, Helen, marries Bertram through twisted circumstances, which is not a typical rom-com approach. The play’s complexity increased the literary qualities of Shakespeare’s works. Actors have had to find likable ways to portray the characters due to their questionable actions. Shakespeare’s title asserts that in a play, a happy outcome is all that really matters.
All’s Well That Ends Well is a play written by William Shakespeare in the early 1600s. It was inspired, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, by a folktale that had been recorded in older works of literature. All’s well that ends well is described as one of the “problems” he wrote during this period. This was because Shakespeare’s approach to the story was unconventional for plays of the time. Since then numerous generations of actors and literary critics have offered their own interpretations of what Shakespeare meant.
While its precise date is not known, Shakespeare scholars believe that All’s Well That Ends Well was written between 1601 and 1605. By this time, he had been active in London theater for a decade, writing plays and comedies historical. His probable source for the story was William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, a contemporary book offering English translations of European literary works. In this case, it was a tale reported by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio in the 14th-century classic The Decameron. Boccaccio’s source, in turn, was probably a folk tale common in medieval Europe.
In the play, the heroine Helen manages to marry the nobleman Bertram through twisted circumstances. Bertram flees the country rather than follow a royal order to marry Helen, whom he particularly dislikes. Helen follows him and tricks him into impregnating her, forcing him to reluctantly agree to the marriage in the final moments of the play. This is not a typical rom-com approach, either then or now. The morally ambiguous territory of Shakespeare’s plays such as All’s Well That Ends Well led the 19th-century literary critic FS Boas to coin the term “problematic plays.”
Problem games include Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida as well as All’s Well that Ends Well. All were written between 1600 and 1605, the same period that saw the creation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet. It is possible that these plays represent the Bard’s dissatisfaction with the simple comic tropes of his time. By adding darker and more complex actions and motivations to his characters, he increased the literary qualities that keep his works alive for audiences centuries later. This literary complexity was also present in the plays he created later, including King Lear, Macbeth and The Tempest.
However, that doesn’t make all’s well that ends well any easier for the actors to portray. Bertram’s character is disliked almost to the end of the play, and Helen’s methods of overcoming him are morally questionable. Since no records of the play’s earliest performances have survived, it fell to later generations of actors to find likable ways to portray the characters. They achieved this by adding subtle emotional layers of naivety or amorous confusion, or simply through physical charm. Shakespeare’s ambiguity about the story may extend to his title, which asserts that in a play, a happy outcome is all that really matters.
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