ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL is one of the most pleasing of our
author's comedies. The interest is, however, more of a serious than
of a comic nature. The character of Helen is one of great sweetness
and delicacy. She is placed in circumstances of the most critical
kind, and has to court her husband both as a virgin and a wife: yet
the most scrupulous nicety of female modesty is not once violated.
There is not one thought or action that ought to bring a blush into
her cheeks, or that for a moment lessens her in our esteem. Perhaps
the romantic attachment of a beautiful and virtuous girl to one
placed above her hopes by the circumstances of birth and fortune,
was never so exquisitely expressed as in the reflections which she
utters when young Roussillon leaves his mother's house, under whose
protection she has been brought up with him, to repair to the French
king's court.
Helena. Oh, 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. My imagination
Carries no favour in it, but Bertram's.
I am undone, there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star,
And think to wed it; he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
Th' ambition in my love thus plagues itself;
The hind that would be mated by the lion,
Must die for love. 'Twas pretty, tho' a plague,
To see him every hour, to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls
In our heart's table: heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet favour.
But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics.
The interest excited by this beautiful picture of a kind and
innocent heart is kept up afterwards by her resolution to follow him
to France, the success of her experiment in restoring the king's
health, her demanding Bertram in marriage as a recompense, his
leaving her in disdain, her interview with him afterwards disguised
as Diana, a young lady whom he importunes with his secret addresses,
and their final reconciliation when the consequences of her
stratagem and the proofs of her love are fully made known. The
persevering gratitude of the French king to his benefactress, who
cures him of a languishing distemper by a prescription hereditary in
her family, the indulgent kindness of the Countess, whose pride of
birth yields, almost without struggle, to her affection for Helen,
the honesty and uprightness of the good old lord Lafeu, make very
interesting parts of the picture. The wilful stubbornness and
youthful petulance of Bertram are also very admirably described. The
comic part of the play turns on the folly, boasting, and cowardice
of Parolles, a parasite and hanger-on of Bertram's, the detection of
whose false pretensions to bravery and honour forms a very amusing
episode. He is first found out by the old lord Lafeu, who says, 'The
soul of this man is in his clothes'; and it is proved afterwards
that his heart is in his tongue, and that both are false and hollow.
The adventure of'the bringing off of his drum' has become proverbial
as a satire on all ridiculous and blustering undertakings which the
person never means to perform: nor can anything be more severe than
what one of the bystanders remarks upon what Parolles says of
himself, 'Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he
is?' Yet Parolles himself gives the best solution of the difficulty
afterwards when he is thankful to escape with his life and the loss
of character; for, so that he can live on, he is by no means
squeamish about the loss of pretensions, to which he had sense
enough to know he had no real claims, and which he had assumed only
as a means to live.
Parolles. Yet I am thankful; if my heart were great,
'Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more,
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live; who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this; for it shall come to pass,
That every braggart shall be found an ass.
Rust sword, cool blushes, and Parolles live
Safest in shame; being fooi'd, by fool'ry thrive;
There's place and means for every man alive.
I'll after them.
The story of ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, and of several others of
Shakespeare's plays, is taken from Boccaccio. The poet has
dramatized the original novel with great skill and comic spirit, and
has preserved all the beauty of character and sentiment without
improving upon it, which was impossible. There is indeed in
Boccaccio's serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an exquisite
refinement of sentiment, which is hardly to be met with in any other
prose writer whatever. Justice has not been done him by the world.
He has in general passed for a mere narrator of lascivious tales or
idle jests. This character probably originated in his obnoxious
attacks on the monks, and has been kept up by the grossness of
mankind, who revenged their own want of refinement on Boccaccio, and
only saw in his writings what suited the coarseness of their own
tastes. But the truth is, that he has carried sentiment of every
kind to its very highest purity and perfection. By sentiment we
would here understand the habitual workings of some one powerful
feeling, where the heart reposes almost entirely upon itself,
without the violent excitement of opposing duties or, untoward
circumstances. In this way, nothing ever came up to the story of
Frederigo Alberigi and his Falcon. The perseverance in attachment,
the spirit of gallantry and generosity displayed in it, has no
parallel in the history of heroical sacrifices. The feeling is so
unconscious too, and involuntary, is brought out in such small,
unlooked-for, and unostentatious circumstances, as to show it to
have been woven into the very nature and soul of the author. The
story of Isabella is scarcely less fine and is more affecting in the
circumstances and in the catastrophe. Dryden has done justice to the
impassioned eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda; but has not
given an adequate idea of the wild preternatural interest of the
story of Honoria. Cimon and Iphigene is by no means one of the best,
notwithstanding the popularity of the subject. The proof of
unalterable affection given in the story of Jeronymo, and the simple
touches of nature and picturesque beauty in the story of the two
holiday lovers, who were poisoned by tasting of a leaf in the garden
at Florence, are perfect masterpieces. The epithet of Divine was
well bestowed on this great painter of the human heart. The
invention implied in his different tales is immense: but we are not
to infer that it is all his own. He probably availed himself of all
the common traditions which were floating in his time, and which he
was the first to appropriate. Homer appears the most original of all
authors--probably for no other reason than that we can trace the
plagiarism no further. Boccaccio has furnished subjects to
numberless writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative. The
story of Griselda is borrowed from his DECAMERON by Chaucer; as is
the KNIGHT'S TALE (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of the THESEID.