LITERARY HISTORY.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL was first printed in 1623 in the First Folio. In the entry of this volume in the Stationers' Register, November 8th of that year, it is enumerated among such plays as had not been previously entered to other men. This is the first time we hear of the play under its present name, and the period at which it was first produced is therefore purely a matter of conjecture. The theories here put forward are substantially those received by most modern critics, but every reader is at liberty to form his own opinion.

Francis Meres, in the list of Shakespeare's plays which he gives in the well-known passage of his Palladis Tamia (1598), mentions a comedy entitled Love labours wonne, and this immediately following Love labors lost. No other mention of this comedy has ever been found, and since Mere's testimony to its existence is unimpeachable, we are left to make the best conjecture we can as to its fate. Has it been lost, or is it one of the plays which we now know by another name? That Love's Labour's Won, an undoubted work of so popular a dramatist as Shakespeare, should have utterly disappeared, while Love's Labour's Lost has survived, is very unlikely; and there is every probability that, if it had so far escaped the printer, there would have been an acting copy in existence which the editors of the First Folio would have secured. But they have printed no play under this name, and we must, therefore, conclude that it is in some sense or other identical with one of the existing plays. Which play this was is a question which seems to have troubled nobody till Farmer in his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare suggested that it was All's Well That Ends Well, and al

though two or three others have been put forward,1 no other has such strong claims.

There is, however, an insuperable difficulty in the way of the supposition that Love's Labour's Won and All's Well are absolutely identical. Considerations of style and metre forbid us to suppose that the latter in its present shape was written as early as 1598; if it was, we should have to put it earlier than such plays as Much Ado, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, none of which are mentioned by Meres, and which he could not fail to have pointed to, had he been acquainted with them, rather than to the "Gentlemen of Verona" and the "Errors" in order to prove Shakespeare's excellence "for the stage." But although the prevailing tone and style of All's Well unquestionably indicate a later date than these three plays, there are good reasons for believing that it is an earlier play remodelled, and that this earlier play was the Love's Labour's Won of Meres. Love's Labour's Won was evidently considered by Meres to be a companion play to Love's Labour's Lost, and in All's Well there are certain passages quite in the rhyming, balanced, somewhat artificial style of that play-passages which Mr. Fleay, who was the first to call attention to them, aptly terms "boulders from the old strata imbedded in the later deposits." The following is a list of them as picked out by Mr. Fleay, and among them, at the end of the play, may be noticed an expression of Helena suggestive of the old title:

This is done:

Will you be mine, now you are doubly won? -Act v. 3. 314, 315.

Act i. 1. 231-244. Speech of Helena, preserved for its poetic worth; it is also very appropriate to

1 The Tempest, Hunter (impossible!); Much Ado, Brae; The Taming of the Shrew, Hertzberg.

the situation, emphasizing, as it does, Helena's selfreliance and strength of purpose.

Act i. 3. 134-142. Nine lines spoken by the Countess, the first four in alternate rhymes.

Act ii. 1. 132-213. Dialogue between the King and Helena in continuous rhyme, quite different in tone from the rest of the play, and quite in Shakespeare's early style. The gradual yielding of the sick king to Helena's persuasions is well depicted, and it probably struck the author as a bit worth preserving.

Act ii. 3. 78-111. Rhymed lines spoken by the King, Helena, and the two lords, with prose comments by Lafeu inserted on the revision. Helena's choice of a husband, naturally a telling bit in the original play.

Act ii. 3. 132-151. Speech of the King, of which the same may be said.

Act iii. 4. 4-17, and iv. 3. 252-260. Two letters in the form of sonnets. "This sort of composition," says Mr. Fleay, "does not quite die out till the end of Shakespeare's Second Period, but it is very rare in that period, and never appears in the Third." It is, however, conceivable that Shakespeare may have recurred to this form for a letter by a poetical character like Helena, or a fantastic character like Parolles, even in his Third Period.

Act v. 3. 60-72, 291–294, 301-304, 314-319, 325-340. Rhyming bits, chiefly from the speeches of the King and Helena, the last, which includes the epilogue, forming a suitable finish to the play.

The above passages will be seen to be quite in Shakespeare's early style, as we find it in Love's Labour's Lost, the title of which play probably suggested that of Love's Labour's Won, and we cannot be far wrong in surmising that both plays were written about the same time, i.e. in the period 1590-92.1 The date at which the play was recast and appeared in its present shape of All's Well That Ends Well was probably the period 1601

1604. We should thus put it, with Professor Dowden and others, later than the romantic comedies Much Ado, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, and earlier than the three great tragedies, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, while we should bring it near to Measure for Measure, to which the conjectural date 1603 has been assigned, a play which, apart from certain resemblances of incident, it resembles

1 In common with Love's Labour 's Lost may be noticed the name Dumain, All's Well, iv. 3. 200, &c.; and perhaps an allusion to the crazy Italian, Monarcho (see Love's Labour's Lost, Introduction), All's Well, i. 1. 118.

perhaps more closely than any other in "motif" and expression.

The source from which Shakespeare derived the story of All's Well is the story of Giletta of Narbona, which forms the Ninth Novel of the Third Day of the Decameron. He probably became acquainted with it through the translation in Painter's Palace of Pleasure, 1566-67, but all that he derived from it was the outline of the plot. The name Giletta he changed to Helena, Beltramo he anglicized into Bertram; the other names, with the exception of that of Helena's father, Gerard de Narbon, are his own. Lafeu, the Countess, the Steward, the Clown, and Parolles, are entirely his own creation, nor is there the slightest hint of the comic scenes in the original story, the extent of Shakespeare's obligation to which will be evident from the following analysis of it.

Giletta, the daughter of Gerado of Narbona, a physician, having been brought up in the family of the Count of Rossiglione with his only son Beltramo, fell in love with Beltramo more than was meete for a maiden of her age." On his father's death, Beltramo, as the king's ward, was sent to Paris, "for whose departure the maiden was verie pensife." Accordingly she watched for an opportunity of going herself to Paris and joining Beltramo, and at last, hearing that the king "had a swellynge upon his breast, whiche by reason of ill cure, was growen to a Fistula," and had abandoned all hope of cure, she thought that "if the disease were suche (as she supposed,) easely to bryng to passe that she might have the Counte Beltramo to her husbande." So she "made a pouder of certain herbes, which she thought meete for that disease, and rode to Paris" (act i. sc. 1 and 3). Here she obtained an interview with the king, and "putte hym in comforte, that she was able to heale hym, saiyng: 'Sire, if it shall please your grace, I trust in God, without any paine or griefe unto your highnesse, within eighte daies I will make you whole of this disease.' The kyng hearyng her saie so, began to mocke her, saiyng: 'How is it possible for thee, beyng a yong woman, to doe that, whiche the best renoumed Phisicions in the worlde can not?'