1 00:00:00,780 --> 00:00:03,090 Morning, everyone, thanks for coming back. 2 00:00:03,090 --> 00:00:10,570 This is a series of lectures on Shakespeare plays which tries to take one question to think about a particular play from different angles. 3 00:00:10,570 --> 00:00:14,620 So there's going to be talking about all's well that ends well. 4 00:00:14,620 --> 00:00:19,220 I'm then to suggest that this play a second question already people as well, that ends well. 5 00:00:19,220 --> 00:00:23,160 Tell me if that's what this play is about. I'm to do that. 6 00:00:23,160 --> 00:00:28,050 I'm going to think about structure, tone and genre. 7 00:00:28,050 --> 00:00:35,070 Maybe to try and think about a more ethical context to thinking about this troubling comedy. 8 00:00:35,070 --> 00:00:40,110 Like the other 28 lecture's so far on planes in this series. 9 00:00:40,110 --> 00:00:48,060 This is going to end up on our team team. So let's start with an outline of what happens in this play. 10 00:00:48,060 --> 00:00:53,790 Helen or Helena is the daughter of a doctor who recently died. 11 00:00:53,790 --> 00:00:55,830 She's in love with her social superior. 12 00:00:55,830 --> 00:01:05,070 Bertram, the count of Russi on his father has also just died, and that's made him a ward of the King Bertram's mother. 13 00:01:05,070 --> 00:01:12,190 The contest is very keen that the pair should marry. But Bertram, crucially, is not. 14 00:01:12,190 --> 00:01:22,110 When Helen uses some of her dad's old prescriptions to cure the king's illness, she asks him for a reward to be so Bertram. 15 00:01:22,110 --> 00:01:26,400 Her husband, Bertram, is horrified. 16 00:01:26,400 --> 00:01:30,030 He leaves court for the wars and leaves behind the letter, 17 00:01:30,030 --> 00:01:39,540 saying he will not recognise his marriage to Helen until she can prove that she has the ring from his finger and is pregnant with his child. 18 00:01:39,540 --> 00:01:46,380 Helen is undeterred under cover of going to Santiago de Compostela on pilgrimage. 19 00:01:46,380 --> 00:01:51,720 She follows Bertram and learns that he is about to seduce Diana. 20 00:01:51,720 --> 00:01:59,820 She arranges with Diana's mother, the widow that, unbeknown to Bertram, she will substitute herself for him. 21 00:01:59,820 --> 00:02:05,490 For her? No. For Diana. That's right. In the bedroom, it would be more interesting. 22 00:02:05,490 --> 00:02:09,870 Bedrick, perhaps, if you were going to somebody for butterfish isn't a substitute for Diana. 23 00:02:09,870 --> 00:02:21,300 Diana arranges this assignation with Bertram and Halliburton step in a complicated series of pop Propp twists plot twists which rely 24 00:02:21,300 --> 00:02:30,630 heavily on the prop of a ring quite reminiscent of the end of Merchant of Venice and on the misinformation that Helen is dead, 25 00:02:30,630 --> 00:02:36,450 reminiscent of loathsome Bertram returns to court. 26 00:02:36,450 --> 00:02:40,680 His behaviour is revealed. He is under suspicion of having murdered Helen. 27 00:02:40,680 --> 00:02:42,230 But eventually she is brought in. 28 00:02:42,230 --> 00:02:49,680 She explains all the tricks, and Bertram has to accept that since she has got his ring and says she is pregnant with his child, 29 00:02:49,680 --> 00:02:55,640 he must acknowledge her as his wife. So celebrations all round. 30 00:02:55,640 --> 00:03:00,230 Or is it? That's my question for today, is all's well that ends well. 31 00:03:00,230 --> 00:03:04,160 Let's just start with something a little bit of time on this apparently proverbial phrase. 32 00:03:04,160 --> 00:03:17,410 All's well that ends well. The historian Maurice Tili, in a reference work on Proverbs that you can find on line lists a number of similar phrases. 33 00:03:17,410 --> 00:03:22,220 All is well. And the man shall have his Mayr again. All is well. 34 00:03:22,220 --> 00:03:28,740 And the old man down says all is well. When the mistress smiles. 35 00:03:28,740 --> 00:03:33,770 They seem to be to me to be more straightforwardly linear in their import. 36 00:03:33,770 --> 00:03:43,490 We know it's all okay now because X has happened. So there's that phrase which seemed to sort of had forwards rather than as in old. 37 00:03:43,490 --> 00:03:48,860 Well, that ends well, a kind of backwards causation. The status of prior events. 38 00:03:48,860 --> 00:03:53,810 That phrase suggests, is modified by something that comes later. 39 00:03:53,810 --> 00:04:00,860 We look back at events which might have read one way because of what we know happens at the end. 40 00:04:00,860 --> 00:04:10,880 The ending modifies what's gone before, smooths it out, reassures us that, however uncertain it might have seemed at the time, it was for the best, 41 00:04:10,880 --> 00:04:13,130 because although we didn't know it at the time, 42 00:04:13,130 --> 00:04:21,620 all those things were part of moving to a happy conclusion to that kind of modification of the earlier parts of the text. 43 00:04:21,620 --> 00:04:28,070 By the end, particularly appropriate for plays as text which exist in time. 44 00:04:28,070 --> 00:04:35,570 Most most of our reading, most of our military texts don't exist so much in time because they don't have a they didn't 45 00:04:35,570 --> 00:04:39,950 take up a certain amount of time that the amount of time that we've encountered them, 46 00:04:39,950 --> 00:04:47,210 it's elastic. It's up to us. But plays, certainly in performance, have a set amount of time. 47 00:04:47,210 --> 00:04:54,680 You can't go back to earlier events, but you can rethink them in your mind. 48 00:04:54,680 --> 00:05:02,030 Now, like many of Shakespeare's comic titles, the phrase all's well that ends well never quite emerges in its play. 49 00:05:02,030 --> 00:05:09,020 The same is true of as through life kept pretty much true of measure for measure. 50 00:05:09,020 --> 00:05:18,410 True, as people said crossly about Twelfth Night Piech goes to see Twelfth Night says it's a terrible play and nothing to do with Twelfth Night. 51 00:05:18,410 --> 00:05:27,320 So comic titles tend not to emerge exactly in the in that phrase, in the play, but here in all's well that ends well. 52 00:05:27,320 --> 00:05:36,530 There are a number of occasions as the play begins to wind up that we get an attempt or a version of the title. 53 00:05:36,530 --> 00:05:44,370 Helen herself reassures the widow, Diana's mother, that that plot will work out despite the hiccup. 54 00:05:44,370 --> 00:05:48,740 But the king isn't there to receive their petition in time. 55 00:05:48,740 --> 00:05:52,310 So Helen tells the widow. All's well that ends well. 56 00:05:52,310 --> 00:05:58,820 Yet, though, time seems so adverse and means unfit. 57 00:05:58,820 --> 00:06:05,750 All's well that ends well. Yet, though, time seems so adverse and means unfit. 58 00:06:05,750 --> 00:06:13,430 The second line that actually rather compromises the first, that half rhyme trying to lose the bit about rhyme. 59 00:06:13,430 --> 00:06:24,590 Later in the lecture. But the half rhyme yet unfit seems to emphasise a kind of faltering confidence, even as she utters the same ten shy. 60 00:06:24,590 --> 00:06:30,350 All's well that ends well, yet is speculative rather than definitive. 61 00:06:30,350 --> 00:06:42,290 It can still work out. Don't lose hope. The King's couplet that ends to play two themes later is hardly more secure. 62 00:06:42,290 --> 00:06:53,340 Again, we've got this modifier. Yet all yet seems well, we know that seems as a real kind of red light word in Shakespeare. 63 00:06:53,340 --> 00:06:59,900 Seems usually is not the same as is all yet it seems well. 64 00:06:59,900 --> 00:07:03,830 And if it ends so meet the bitter past more welcome. 65 00:07:03,830 --> 00:07:08,690 It's the sweet fall yet seems well, a dividend. So meet the bitter past more welcome. 66 00:07:08,690 --> 00:07:20,690 It's the sweet. So that combination of yet seems and if it all yet seems well and if it ends so meet is curiously inconclusive, tentative, 67 00:07:20,690 --> 00:07:31,100 unwilling to state quite categorically either that all is well or that the bitter past can be reconciled by current sweetness. 68 00:07:31,100 --> 00:07:38,900 But what the King says here that a bitter past might be contrasted or juxtaposed with sweet conclusion suggests that we 69 00:07:38,900 --> 00:07:46,610 might think about all's well in that genre of tragicomedy that I discussed briefly in relation to symbolism last week. 70 00:07:46,610 --> 00:07:51,560 Bitterness followed by sweetness is in some ways the definition of tragicomedy. 71 00:07:51,560 --> 00:07:59,390 I'm going to talk a bit more about that parallel minute, but still with references to all's well in the play. 72 00:07:59,390 --> 00:08:05,210 The epilogue, which follows The King's final speech, opens the phrase, the title phrase up again. 73 00:08:05,210 --> 00:08:09,650 It's like an H at the end of the play. Can't quite resist. 74 00:08:09,650 --> 00:08:13,880 The king's a beggar. Now the word sorry, the king's a beggar. 75 00:08:13,880 --> 00:08:17,600 Now the play is done. All is well ended. 76 00:08:17,600 --> 00:08:23,870 If this suit be one that you express contenders, all is well ended. 77 00:08:23,870 --> 00:08:34,820 If this suit be one that you express contempt. So now the question of whether all's well and has ended well is explicitly handed over to the audience. 78 00:08:34,820 --> 00:08:40,190 They have to decide all's well. If you express consent. 79 00:08:40,190 --> 00:08:42,590 Well, at least that's the conceit. 80 00:08:42,590 --> 00:08:52,220 But it seems interesting to me that like other kinds of choice, this play proposes, the possibility to refuse turns out to be illusory. 81 00:08:52,220 --> 00:08:59,450 Like the characters in the play. That's to say we might think we have an option to express content or not. 82 00:08:59,450 --> 00:09:10,640 But actually, we don't. If we don't express content by clapping, we'll never, in a kind of perpetual existentialism, be able to escape the theatre. 83 00:09:10,640 --> 00:09:17,780 So references to all's well, but not exact quotations of it proliferate as the plots come to that conclusion in the play. 84 00:09:17,780 --> 00:09:25,060 And thus, in certain ways, they enact its own premise. At the end of things, we review how it all has been. 85 00:09:25,060 --> 00:09:30,770 Now, that might be particularly appropriate for comedy structured around this kind of narrative. 86 00:09:30,770 --> 00:09:37,970 Broadly speaking, a comedy in this period is something where things are better at the end than they were at the beginning. 87 00:09:37,970 --> 00:09:43,130 A tragedy is vice versa. As the playwright and apologists for theatre, 88 00:09:43,130 --> 00:09:50,950 Thomas Haywood put neatly in a tract on theatre dating from sixteen, twelve tragedies and comedies differ. 89 00:09:50,950 --> 00:09:56,330 Thus, in comedies Turbulent Uprima Tranquila. 90 00:09:56,330 --> 00:10:01,140 Ultimate in Tragedies. Tranquila. Premer Turbulent. 91 00:10:01,140 --> 00:10:06,240 Ultima comedies he translates. Begin in trouble and end in peace. 92 00:10:06,240 --> 00:10:11,480 Tragedies begin farms and end in Tempest. 93 00:10:11,480 --> 00:10:21,170 So if comedies begin in trouble and end in peace, according to this logic, all's well that ends well is the very definition of comedy. 94 00:10:21,170 --> 00:10:28,260 So let's think for a few minutes about genre and how this might impact on our central question. 95 00:10:28,260 --> 00:10:37,190 Like somebody that I talked about last week, All's Well was first published in 16 twenty three in the First Folio, as I'll discuss in a minute. 96 00:10:37,190 --> 00:10:43,380 It stated composition is actually curiously flexible in Shakespearean criticism right now. 97 00:10:43,380 --> 00:10:49,020 Most players we know broadly or if there's a consensus broadly about where they come off, not so much this one. 98 00:10:49,020 --> 00:10:55,220 And I'll talk about that in a minute. It appears amongst the comedies. 99 00:10:55,220 --> 00:10:56,220 And clearly, 100 00:10:56,220 --> 00:11:05,790 there are loads of ways in which it echoes comedies which are more central to that show in being structured around female romantic desires. 101 00:11:05,790 --> 00:11:15,630 It links the comedy roles of Rosalind in As You Like It or Viler in Twelfth Night with our determined protagonist, Helen. 102 00:11:15,630 --> 00:11:22,920 By contrast, the Week Bertram is like earlier male lovers who waver in two gentlemen of Verona 103 00:11:22,920 --> 00:11:27,330 with overtalking environment couple of weeks or A Midsummer Night's Dream. 104 00:11:27,330 --> 00:11:32,610 Broadly speaking, this play is associated with marriage and particularly fertility. 105 00:11:32,610 --> 00:11:40,170 Fertility tends to be implied in it in so regular comedy rather than brought on stage. 106 00:11:40,170 --> 00:11:47,820 But pregnancy fertility is one of the obviously the key elements of the play's conclusion. 107 00:11:47,820 --> 00:11:57,360 And as with other comedies, it gives us a plot managed by human ingenuity rather than cosmic determination. 108 00:11:57,360 --> 00:12:04,080 So comedies tend to be about how humans make their world or make robots. 109 00:12:04,080 --> 00:12:10,240 And that's that's an agency which tends to be broadly denied to tragic characters. 110 00:12:10,240 --> 00:12:15,650 And we'll talk more about agency as we go forward. Like other of Shakespeare's comedies, 111 00:12:15,650 --> 00:12:22,170 Old-World dramatises the painful social necessity for young men in comic plots to 112 00:12:22,170 --> 00:12:29,750 separate themselves from male company and reengineer their emotional lives around women. 113 00:12:29,750 --> 00:12:32,960 This is a particularly obvious theme of much ado about nothing. 114 00:12:32,960 --> 00:12:41,840 The costs of getting together with Beatrice for Benedek is the instruction to kill his best friend Claude here. 115 00:12:41,840 --> 00:12:51,620 But it's clear here in all's well that ends well. And part of the military plot and the character Parolees Parole's is Bertram cybercafes, 116 00:12:51,620 --> 00:12:59,930 is to offer male friendship or a kind of militarise bromance as the alternative to heterosexual marriage. 117 00:12:59,930 --> 00:13:11,330 The zeringue, the parole's with whom Bertram takes off in escape from his marriage is probably the same low and social status as the despised Helen. 118 00:13:11,330 --> 00:13:18,260 So that brings out the kind of parallel between them as different companions for Bertram. 119 00:13:18,260 --> 00:13:24,380 So there are ways then in which all's well. It's quite clearly within the comedy genre, but on the other hand, 120 00:13:24,380 --> 00:13:30,140 to play Flip's a lot of expected trips of comedy in some clever and unsettling ways. 121 00:13:30,140 --> 00:13:34,590 Let's take for a moment. The older generation takes miss. 122 00:13:34,590 --> 00:13:43,550 Comedies, as we know, are about young people making their own decisions. Plots either forcibly separate them from their parents. 123 00:13:43,550 --> 00:13:49,730 As with Rosalind or Viler, who are without the guidance and support of older confidants, 124 00:13:49,730 --> 00:13:55,220 or they make the parental figures ineffectual or irrelevant in some way or another. 125 00:13:55,220 --> 00:13:59,960 Think carefully and not. Perhaps the bemused father is much ado about nothing. 126 00:13:59,960 --> 00:14:07,580 Or insurgent who's the missing mother from that from that play character who written into the play during 127 00:14:07,580 --> 00:14:17,100 draughting but gets lost because there isn't a role for these parental figures in that kind of comedy. 128 00:14:17,100 --> 00:14:27,720 So comedies tend to construct a present older generation as kind of blocking figures who have to be circumvented. 129 00:14:27,720 --> 00:14:32,120 Now the blocking figure is particularly common in place by other Renaissance 130 00:14:32,120 --> 00:14:38,000 dramatists where the mean father or uncle who won't let the young couple be together. 131 00:14:38,000 --> 00:14:44,540 It's a stop figure. Might think about Middleton's case made in Cheapside, for instance. 132 00:14:44,540 --> 00:14:53,360 To some extent, Baptista, who is the father to Katherine and Bianca and Vincent Yo, the father to Lou Sentier in Taming of the Shrew. 133 00:14:53,360 --> 00:15:01,460 Fall into this type telling issue is partly about the struggle between parents and children, about how they can play more clearly. 134 00:15:01,460 --> 00:15:09,170 The dead father who sets up the casket test for Portia's Souters in the Merchant of Venice or even Shylock himself, 135 00:15:09,170 --> 00:15:13,340 locking up his daughter Jessica to prevent her going off with Christian boys. 136 00:15:13,340 --> 00:15:18,260 These are classic blocking figures now in all's well that ends well. 137 00:15:18,260 --> 00:15:29,030 Something slightly different is afoot here. The parental figures, including the king, the countess of Russi on the widow who is Diana's mother, 138 00:15:29,030 --> 00:15:35,160 all neglect their traditional comic roles and show themselves to be great supporters of the couple. 139 00:15:35,160 --> 00:15:42,450 The older generation and not the block, in fact, that the most enthusiastic supporters, particularly of Helen. 140 00:15:42,450 --> 00:15:48,640 They all want to marry Bertram. I want to say two things about this. 141 00:15:48,640 --> 00:15:57,520 Firstly, it was recognised. All's well, that's a play. That's my roundly concerned about the interaction between the older and the younger generation. 142 00:15:57,520 --> 00:16:06,880 And the sense of a generation gap. We might want to put it in some plays that have been traditionally thought to come later in Shakespeare's 143 00:16:06,880 --> 00:16:14,030 career with King Lear and with the late plays or romances with which Shakespeare finishes his writing career. 144 00:16:14,030 --> 00:16:20,200 Simply as we talked about last week with Winter's Tale and The Tempest. 145 00:16:20,200 --> 00:16:24,010 In fact, recent criticism has begun to question whether all's well, 146 00:16:24,010 --> 00:16:33,070 which has no records of early performance and no print edition before 16 23 might actually be better dated to join that late 147 00:16:33,070 --> 00:16:40,540 group of compromise fairy tales that turn on the question of women's virtue and therefore be written more like around sixteen, 148 00:16:40,540 --> 00:16:52,010 seven eight rather than 16 three four. So sixteen, three four was the problem play designation as generated at the end of the 19th century. 149 00:16:52,010 --> 00:17:02,340 A little group of players from the early 17th century. Initially these were Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida measure for measure and all. 150 00:17:02,340 --> 00:17:06,610 Well, we can see a way of thinking about the play as. 151 00:17:06,610 --> 00:17:15,550 As one of those problem plays, but with no absolute reason to date the play in that cluster. 152 00:17:15,550 --> 00:17:24,840 The sense of the play being about generations might be one reason to put it a bit later, to put it with the romance. 153 00:17:24,840 --> 00:17:30,460 So you might think that reediting all's well that ends well is the most arcane and pointless scholarly activity. 154 00:17:30,460 --> 00:17:40,870 But it does help us to think that place can be limited by the groups with which we choose to associate them. 155 00:17:40,870 --> 00:17:46,600 Putting anything into context with anything else obviously flaps up certain kinds of similarities. 156 00:17:46,600 --> 00:17:56,960 And that problem play category with which all's well that's tended to be grouped may have limited the range of critical responses we might make. 157 00:17:56,960 --> 00:18:01,760 So all's well that ends well. And measure for measure is a slightly cliched pairing, I think. 158 00:18:01,760 --> 00:18:08,090 All's well that ends well and apparently so symbol in A Winter's Tale might be a more interesting one. 159 00:18:08,090 --> 00:18:12,260 One. At one point then about the role of the pet parent figures. It is generic. 160 00:18:12,260 --> 00:18:19,250 It helps us to see how the company we make plays keep shapes, what we're able to say about this. 161 00:18:19,250 --> 00:18:27,980 The other point I want to make about the parents is broadly character. Logical is about the construction of character here. 162 00:18:27,980 --> 00:18:33,470 The romantic couple are not bound to each other against a hostile environment. 163 00:18:33,470 --> 00:18:43,900 The environment is actually rather benign, despite the fact that there's a war that we've never seen seem to have much, much war going on. 164 00:18:43,900 --> 00:18:48,310 The editor of the Ardern latest in Much Ado about Nothing. 165 00:18:48,310 --> 00:18:52,690 Clare McGucken makes a really smart remark that Beatrice and Benedick. 166 00:18:52,690 --> 00:18:54,840 She says in much debate, nothing. 167 00:18:54,840 --> 00:19:03,880 The first Shakespearian comic couple who can't get together for psychological reasons rather than for circumstantial or environmental ones. 168 00:19:03,880 --> 00:19:08,290 So she says it's not that the world is keeping them apart in some way or that one 169 00:19:08,290 --> 00:19:12,300 of them happens to be dressed as a boy as you are and companies be recognised. 170 00:19:12,300 --> 00:19:19,660 You there aren't these kind of factors going on. What happens is that they've got some kind of psychological block about being together. 171 00:19:19,660 --> 00:19:24,160 We could build on that to say that Helen and Berchem have a similar impediment. 172 00:19:24,160 --> 00:19:30,760 What's stopping them from being together is not their environment, which is actually quite positive about it. 173 00:19:30,760 --> 00:19:39,250 The king himself has said they should marry. So the social environment is entirely prote their marriage. 174 00:19:39,250 --> 00:19:47,070 But what's stopping them is something to do with character. 175 00:19:47,070 --> 00:19:51,970 We might do about that by saying that Helen and Bertram are characters who really should not get together, 176 00:19:51,970 --> 00:19:56,370 their central romantic characters who find themselves in a play that looks like a 177 00:19:56,370 --> 00:20:02,760 comedy but who really should not go forward into that happy ending coupledom factory. 178 00:20:02,760 --> 00:20:10,810 That is Shakespearean romantic comedy. There an antique comic couple trapped in a comedy. 179 00:20:10,810 --> 00:20:21,900 The brilliant Structuralist Lithographer critic Northrop Frye tells us that, quote, The action of comedy is intensely Freudian in shape. 180 00:20:21,900 --> 00:20:30,420 The erotic pleasure principle explodes under the social anxiety sitting on top of it and blows them sky high in comedy. 181 00:20:30,420 --> 00:20:36,510 We see a victory of the pleasure principle that Freud warns us not to look for in ordinary life. 182 00:20:36,510 --> 00:20:40,770 It's a great idea that comedy is the ultimate kind of wish fulfilment. 183 00:20:40,770 --> 00:20:47,100 This is where we get our desires satisfied in ways which we can't hope for in real life. 184 00:20:47,100 --> 00:20:52,050 But perhaps all's well that ends well is Freudian in a different and darker way. 185 00:20:52,050 --> 00:20:56,580 Perhaps that would give its title a more cautionary import. 186 00:20:56,580 --> 00:21:07,710 Be careful what you wish for. All could not be well, I think if Heaven and Bertram got together because Bertram really does not want to marry Helen. 187 00:21:07,710 --> 00:21:13,220 It's quite hard actually, in a kind of modern environment to think how much credence we should give to that. 188 00:21:13,220 --> 00:21:19,980 And of course, we should, even though the reasons he doesn't want to marry are broadly snobbery. 189 00:21:19,980 --> 00:21:26,710 He doesn't think she's a suitable class position for him, but he keeps saying he doesn't want to marry her. 190 00:21:26,710 --> 00:21:32,630 And in some ways, this is a play. Interestingly, I think about consent, about the difficulty of consent. 191 00:21:32,630 --> 00:21:43,770 I know her well, he says of Helen to the king. She had her breeding at my father's charge, a poor physician's daughter, my wife. 192 00:21:43,770 --> 00:21:47,910 He vows I cannot love her nor will strive to do it. 193 00:21:47,910 --> 00:21:53,130 I cannot let her know, will strive to do it. So it's a very queasy comedy that makes that happen. 194 00:21:53,130 --> 00:21:59,360 A kind of pincer movement of royal Fiete and female ingenuity that entraps Bertram. 195 00:21:59,360 --> 00:22:04,290 And although we might want to praise Helen's stubborn pursuit of her own desires, 196 00:22:04,290 --> 00:22:09,840 it's hard to know quite what to do with the authenticity of Bertram's own feelings. 197 00:22:09,840 --> 00:22:14,760 I thought about this. I wondered if Bertram has become slightly feminised by the plot here. 198 00:22:14,760 --> 00:22:20,250 It's the position of women in Shakespeare's comedies often to say they do want to get married. 199 00:22:20,250 --> 00:22:27,510 Beatrice, who we've already heard about Catherine and the 10, is the Shrew Olivia in Twelfth Night. 200 00:22:27,510 --> 00:22:39,690 And what men do is break down or circumvent their opposition or demonstrate that it's in some way kind of buttoned up or frigid, emotionally frigid. 201 00:22:39,690 --> 00:22:46,530 It needs to be it needs to be broken down. Mostly, those women are against marriage in general. 202 00:22:46,530 --> 00:22:50,280 That might be thought to be fair game for persuasive suitors. 203 00:22:50,280 --> 00:22:56,160 But rather than set against a specific individual as Bertram, it's so Bertram's not saying he doesn't want to get married. 204 00:22:56,160 --> 00:23:01,920 He's saying he does not want to marry Helen. Now, all Shakespearean comedy demands, of course, 205 00:23:01,920 --> 00:23:08,280 that we suspend to some extent our misgivings or incredulity about the central romantic couples are always going to be saying, 206 00:23:08,280 --> 00:23:10,330 well, will they really get on to the future? 207 00:23:10,330 --> 00:23:17,940 Probably going to miss the point of the play when Sebastian quickly accepts Olivia's marriage proposal in topflight, 208 00:23:17,940 --> 00:23:28,140 although he's never seen her before. When Orlando, in his wrestling kit is so all conquering that it wasn't felt immediately in love with him. 209 00:23:28,140 --> 00:23:31,770 I'm not so Shakespeare means to be realistic, 210 00:23:31,770 --> 00:23:38,490 except perhaps to say that the reasons people get together are often happily quite mysterious to other people. 211 00:23:38,490 --> 00:23:45,550 Whether the course of their relationship takes to the actual minutes or many real years of dating. 212 00:23:45,550 --> 00:23:51,400 While we they be encouraged to question the precise nature of or cenotes attraction to Viler in her voice clothing, 213 00:23:51,400 --> 00:23:57,030 or to worry a bit about the Sanyo the bounty hunter off to Belmonte Merchant of Venice. 214 00:23:57,030 --> 00:24:05,930 There are other elements of the plays which allow us to take pleasure in the fiction of these structuring and interrupted courtships. 215 00:24:05,930 --> 00:24:12,660 So comedy tends broadly to make us feel what we want, what the characters want and when they get what they want. 216 00:24:12,660 --> 00:24:17,100 At the end, we feel satisfied with our fictional experience, 217 00:24:17,100 --> 00:24:23,040 knows precisely this that almost all readers of all as well have had difficulty with and criticism as well. 218 00:24:23,040 --> 00:24:31,620 If you look through the history 20th century aurélio, who does history criticism of all's well criticism has been pretty evenhanded in finding 219 00:24:31,620 --> 00:24:39,720 both parties problematic coverage called Helen Shakespeare's loveliest character. 220 00:24:39,720 --> 00:24:44,640 But she's also been called a keen and unswerving huntress of man flushable. 221 00:24:44,640 --> 00:24:52,790 That's supposed be a good thing. No. Probably not. Not so much, Dr. Johnson felt that Bertram was a coward and a profligate. 222 00:24:52,790 --> 00:24:59,690 Other critics have felt he should be pitied for being trapped in Helen's implacable pursuit. 223 00:24:59,690 --> 00:25:07,540 Certainly, as I've suggested, a modern political vocabulary of consent could be interestingly and provocatively applied to this plan, 224 00:25:07,540 --> 00:25:12,500 particularly in a way that difficult encounter between Bertram and Diana. 225 00:25:12,500 --> 00:25:20,600 It looks as if Diana, who's being kind of pimped really to Bertram, is is a figure who doesn't have much agency in this situation. 226 00:25:20,600 --> 00:25:27,380 But there's a way in which Bertram also is trumped by other people's narratives. 227 00:25:27,380 --> 00:25:32,060 If Helen were a man stalking a woman who told him to get off. 228 00:25:32,060 --> 00:25:39,740 How would we think about the play's ending? But not as Bertram himself garner audience sympathy. 229 00:25:39,740 --> 00:25:41,450 At best, he is callow. 230 00:25:41,450 --> 00:25:51,050 Like much ado, Claudia, but at worst he is deeply selfish, incapable of empathy and resistant to the impulse towards education of men. 231 00:25:51,050 --> 00:25:53,690 That's at the heart of Shakespearean comedy. 232 00:25:53,690 --> 00:25:59,840 Lots of Shakespearean comedies are showing men how to behave, how to behave better than they have done better. 233 00:25:59,840 --> 00:26:05,660 Never has a speech of affirmation and self reflection, which suggests he has reformed. 234 00:26:05,660 --> 00:26:10,450 He never shows that he has repented or accepted what's been placed on him. 235 00:26:10,450 --> 00:26:16,490 And so often a comparison with Shakespeare's source is useful here. 236 00:26:16,490 --> 00:26:20,960 Shakespeare takes the story of all's well from captures the Kameron. 237 00:26:20,960 --> 00:26:26,630 It's the same source he uses for the play discussed last week. Kimberly, actually, you know, 238 00:26:26,630 --> 00:26:33,650 by the time might be a reason to think of them as being composed rather more closely together in time than we've conventionally done. 239 00:26:33,650 --> 00:26:38,020 This is the only time Shakespeare uses the catchier answer. 240 00:26:38,020 --> 00:26:48,260 You can look up sources just as a reminder in Jeffrey Bullock's great Bible of Shakespeare's reading narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare. 241 00:26:48,260 --> 00:26:55,690 Shakespeare, probably Access's captures Italian via the translation into English of William Painter. 242 00:26:55,690 --> 00:27:02,180 The story in Painter is identical, but as we'll see, the tone of the ending is quite different. 243 00:27:02,180 --> 00:27:13,130 According to Painter, when presented with a heroine who can answer all his preconditioning, Bertram graciously bangs himself to the situation. 244 00:27:13,130 --> 00:27:18,540 He agrees, quote, to accept her forever as his lawful wife. 245 00:27:18,540 --> 00:27:29,000 Folding her in his arms and sweetly kissing her diversed times together, he paid her welcome to him as his virtuous, loyal and most loving wife. 246 00:27:29,000 --> 00:27:33,950 And so, for ever after. He would acknowledge her from that time forth. 247 00:27:33,950 --> 00:27:40,390 Painter concludes he loved and honoured her as his dear spouse and wife. 248 00:27:40,390 --> 00:27:46,700 So Bertram agrees to accept her forever as his lawful wife, sweetly kissing her diversed times together. 249 00:27:46,700 --> 00:27:53,140 I've said before in these lectures that actually sometimes the most useful thing about looking at Shakespeare sources is what he leaves out, 250 00:27:53,140 --> 00:27:59,690 because the existence of something in the source which Shakespeare chooses not to use establishes it as a possibility, 251 00:27:59,690 --> 00:28:05,840 distinctly rejected rather than as something which was never part of the picture in the first place. 252 00:28:05,840 --> 00:28:14,450 This is a really good example. I think Painter's final paragraph that I've just read works hard to confirm that the union of his Helen and Bertram, 253 00:28:14,450 --> 00:28:21,260 is, for all its twisted courtship, happy, and that it will continue to be so into the future. 254 00:28:21,260 --> 00:28:30,320 All's well that ends well in the sorts quite distinctly, but it's a very different ending from Shakespeare's in the play. 255 00:28:30,320 --> 00:28:35,810 Far from folding Helen into his arm, his arms or sweetly kissing her, Bertram accept just about that. 256 00:28:35,810 --> 00:28:41,960 He's been outwitted. He acknowledges his wife, but with another significant caveat. 257 00:28:41,960 --> 00:28:47,090 This is something to think about in the light of those modified. All's well that ends well. 258 00:28:47,090 --> 00:28:59,450 Phrases that I'm talking about a few minutes ago. If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I love her dearly, ever, ever dearly. 259 00:28:59,450 --> 00:29:08,300 If if it's the weasel word here now how an actor delivers the repetitions of that line, which is Berkland last speech in the play seems right. 260 00:29:08,300 --> 00:29:13,690 Good possibility would be a great thing to do an investigation of the performance tradition. 261 00:29:13,690 --> 00:29:20,510 But if we were to take it to our central question is all's well that ends well, we'd have to raise a question mark. 262 00:29:20,510 --> 00:29:28,190 Bertram puts his acceptance of Helen as well as his wife into some post plays future when he has heard the evidence to back up her, 263 00:29:28,190 --> 00:29:32,180 her audacious claim that he's pregnant, that she's pregnant with his child. 264 00:29:32,180 --> 00:29:42,890 One way of reading that might be to say it's not over yet ends then becomes the term that's problematic because well as well. 265 00:29:42,890 --> 00:29:48,430 So if Bertram is a problematic and uncommitted group. Helen, too, is a difficult prospect. 266 00:29:48,430 --> 00:29:53,950 She takes the active female comic protagonist we've seen elsewhere and runs with it. 267 00:29:53,950 --> 00:29:58,540 And she also defines expectations from her very first lines in the play. 268 00:29:58,540 --> 00:30:04,660 She enters all's well sorrowful. All the characters in the opening scene are wearing black. 269 00:30:04,660 --> 00:30:13,360 According to the stage direction, this makes a striking tableau mourning and gives a kind of atmosphere of death and mourning, 270 00:30:13,360 --> 00:30:20,020 particularly for Bertram's father, but also for Helens that pervades the whole play. 271 00:30:20,020 --> 00:30:26,200 But as soon as Helen is alone onstage, she confesses like a kind of photo negative Hamlet. 272 00:30:26,200 --> 00:30:32,920 She's actually not sad about her father at all, but about her unrequited love for Bertram. 273 00:30:32,920 --> 00:30:39,220 So the question marks over Helen's likeability in this play, a question marks about her, 274 00:30:39,220 --> 00:30:46,210 our engagement with her quest and our engagement with character. If we don't really like her, is her getting what she wants. 275 00:30:46,210 --> 00:30:49,180 The equivalent of a happy ending? 276 00:30:49,180 --> 00:30:57,550 To return to the source for a minute in Painter's version of the of the heroine is repeatedly praised for her cleverness, 277 00:30:57,550 --> 00:31:02,440 and her husband recognises her strength of character and ingenuity. 278 00:31:02,440 --> 00:31:08,410 In the end of the story, what Painter seems to bring out is the kind of moral of his version of all's well 279 00:31:08,410 --> 00:31:13,000 that ends well is that people can change their lives by their own energies. 280 00:31:13,000 --> 00:31:16,200 They don't need to bowed to the inevitable. 281 00:31:16,200 --> 00:31:24,940 Now, if that's the moral that Shakespeare inherited, he, it and its heroine underwent some tarnishing in his hands. 282 00:31:24,940 --> 00:31:32,170 One thing we could see Shakespeare doing here is taking a fairy tale and systematically darkening it. 283 00:31:32,170 --> 00:31:39,430 Probably the play's most successful modern performance that at the National Theatre in 2009, 284 00:31:39,430 --> 00:31:48,040 directed by Marianne Elliott, this production stressed the play as a fairy tale with a set up of an illustrated, 285 00:31:48,040 --> 00:31:56,380 grim part children's book, part Gothic folk tale, ramparts, wolves, magic lanterns, 286 00:31:56,380 --> 00:32:08,860 silhouettes and an indeterminate ending with Helen and Burton caught momentarily in a freeze-Frame wedding photograph. 287 00:32:08,860 --> 00:32:18,380 The wise cynic in the play, Leffew has a remark which is quite helpful for thinking about this place. 288 00:32:18,380 --> 00:32:27,950 Curious balance between romance and pragmatism or between fairy tale and modernity. 289 00:32:27,950 --> 00:32:39,320 They say miracles are passed, says Leffew, and we have our first philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. 290 00:32:39,320 --> 00:32:45,410 It's a great line actually, for thinking about the way ideas are changing during this period. 291 00:32:45,410 --> 00:32:52,640 They say miracles are parts, the miracles that are associated with promises and with all kinds of different use of the world. 292 00:32:52,640 --> 00:33:02,380 We have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless, with great mind for thinking about the supernatural. 293 00:33:02,380 --> 00:33:09,110 And in fact, something that is typical of this place knowingness that it deploys an idealised 294 00:33:09,110 --> 00:33:16,340 folkloric structure in the shrewd service of human desires and selfishness hands magic, 295 00:33:16,340 --> 00:33:25,910 healing of the king partakes of a fantasy world. The idea of a kind of magical healing but is a miracle sheets floats for her own agenda. 296 00:33:25,910 --> 00:33:34,510 Just as when she goes on pilgrimage, she's got distinctly earthy, earthly not to say sexual rather than religious aims. 297 00:33:34,510 --> 00:33:37,010 And this doctrine of pragmatism, Helen, 298 00:33:37,010 --> 00:33:45,010 will do what it takes to get what she wants brings the notion of all's well that ends well into a more ethical sphere. 299 00:33:45,010 --> 00:33:52,160 Want to look at that by thinking about Helen's soliloquy at the end of Act One scene one left on stage for a moment. 300 00:33:52,160 --> 00:34:02,930 Helen speaks directly of her ambitions. Our remedies, often ourselves, do lie, which we ascribe to heaven. 301 00:34:02,930 --> 00:34:10,580 Fated sky gives us free scope. Only dive back would pull our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. 302 00:34:10,580 --> 00:34:16,390 What power is it which mounts my love so high makes me see and cannot feed my knife. 303 00:34:16,390 --> 00:34:23,540 The mightiest space in fortune nature brings to join like likes and kiss like native themes. 304 00:34:23,540 --> 00:34:30,800 Impossible be strange attempts to those that way their pains incense and do suppose what have been 305 00:34:30,800 --> 00:34:38,580 cannot be who ever strove to show her much to show her merit that admit her love the king's disease. 306 00:34:38,580 --> 00:34:47,420 My project may deceive me, but my intents are fixed and will not leave me remedies often ourselves to lie, 307 00:34:47,420 --> 00:34:55,130 which we ascribe to heaven to really striking speak. I think Helen is the only woman in Shakespeare who speaks like this. 308 00:34:55,130 --> 00:35:01,070 It's a soliloquy. She's alone onstage stage affiliates her with ambivalent characters in Shakespeare's plays, crucially, 309 00:35:01,070 --> 00:35:09,920 who have something to hide, who might think of Hamlet at a similar point in his play of Iago at a similar point in Othello. 310 00:35:09,920 --> 00:35:15,110 Each stays behind early in the play to tell us of a separateness, 311 00:35:15,110 --> 00:35:20,420 an implacable separateness they feel from the community in which they find themselves and 312 00:35:20,420 --> 00:35:27,220 have a secret interior which is at odds with the public face they feel obliged to promote. 313 00:35:27,220 --> 00:35:32,300 Now we tend to think of the soliloquy as a definitive, privileged mode of the tragic era. 314 00:35:32,300 --> 00:35:34,670 I think that's actually really not correct. 315 00:35:34,670 --> 00:35:45,950 In Shakespeare, soliloquies more often belong to those who cannot reconcile inner and outer a paradox that is often villainous character only later, 316 00:35:45,950 --> 00:35:51,860 really, that I think it's come to seem like the condition of being a person to have a secret life. 317 00:35:51,860 --> 00:35:57,660 You really want to try and voice. I think in Shakespeare more often this is a this is a problem. 318 00:35:57,660 --> 00:36:04,220 This is something which bad people encounter. We might think of it again of the algo. 319 00:36:04,220 --> 00:36:11,360 I am not what I am. Now, these troubling associations are amplified in Helen's speech, 320 00:36:11,360 --> 00:36:21,080 where she echoes the radical agency of the argot or Kubilius, Edmund or Cassius urging Brutus to the assassination of Caesar. 321 00:36:21,080 --> 00:36:27,170 There are ways in which this UN superstitious autonomy is admirable as it is in these other figures, too. 322 00:36:27,170 --> 00:36:28,730 But she does share it. 323 00:36:28,730 --> 00:36:38,570 She shares this credo of self-sufficiency with some other characters who are not entirely happy role models for a comic female character. 324 00:36:38,570 --> 00:36:46,010 If I were broadly to try to simplify a large philosophical shift that is beginning during the career of Shakespeare and 325 00:36:46,010 --> 00:36:55,490 will get its English codification in the work of Thomas Hobbs in the mid seventeenth century will be the idea of agency, 326 00:36:55,490 --> 00:37:06,690 the motor of events shifting from the providential to the human, shifting from an idea that things happen because of the will of God. 327 00:37:06,690 --> 00:37:11,550 To an understanding that things happen because of the behaviour of individuals. 328 00:37:11,550 --> 00:37:17,630 This shift has profound consequences for narratives that causation such as the writing of history. 329 00:37:17,630 --> 00:37:21,720 And it's a question which is really pressing in cheques with history points, 330 00:37:21,720 --> 00:37:28,260 but also for morality and ethics and for our understanding of the human operating in the world. 331 00:37:28,260 --> 00:37:35,340 It's a shift which I think Shakespeares really fascinating because he keeps giving us characters who believe that the world is up 332 00:37:35,340 --> 00:37:44,610 for human manipulation against characters who think that you ought to stay in your place or submit yourself to higher authorities. 333 00:37:44,610 --> 00:37:49,800 It's a shift that then which Shakespeare Shakespeare's fascinated with, but which he recognises I think is dangerous. 334 00:37:49,800 --> 00:38:00,490 He associates it with men whose will to power places them beyond conventional systems of morality that dangerous figures be Helco and Cassius. 335 00:38:00,490 --> 00:38:04,380 So perhaps in this context, the essential question. All's well that ends well. 336 00:38:04,380 --> 00:38:12,720 Seems less the conclusion of a comic fable and more the morality of the Renaissance pragmatist Machiavelli. 337 00:38:12,720 --> 00:38:18,180 Machiavelli advocated ruthless self-interest at the heart of power politics. 338 00:38:18,180 --> 00:38:24,870 We associate the phrase the end justifies the means which we might see as a gloss of all's 339 00:38:24,870 --> 00:38:30,930 well that ends well with Machiavelli and philosophers to probably say it comes from. 340 00:38:30,930 --> 00:38:36,900 Of it. But it's a pragmatic theory of human interaction, which has a lot of traction. 341 00:38:36,900 --> 00:38:43,290 In early 17th century England, manuscript translations of Machiavelli and the illicit print editions. 342 00:38:43,290 --> 00:38:50,430 Persuasive figures like the stage Machiavelli, Barabas in Malis du Malta all attest to the reach of this new philosophy. 343 00:38:50,430 --> 00:38:55,740 The philosophy of human self-interest. Guiding events. 344 00:38:55,740 --> 00:39:01,800 And this is all in counter to a broadly providential XTS thrust of English historiography. 345 00:39:01,800 --> 00:39:06,150 So Helland own pragmatism gives the play a distinctly modern cast. 346 00:39:06,150 --> 00:39:15,670 That's to say set off by the players engagement with folkloric motifs. 347 00:39:15,670 --> 00:39:22,540 So all's well that ends well. Seems like a comedy. It looks like a comedy. 348 00:39:22,540 --> 00:39:30,210 Perhaps it doesn't quite quack like a comedy. Maybe that, too could be a good gloss for its title. 349 00:39:30,210 --> 00:39:41,260 All's well. Ten to one. Part of what seems hollow to me about this phrase and the implications of all's well that ends well with it's repetition. 350 00:39:41,260 --> 00:39:47,470 Not only is an approximation of this phrase repeated as we've already seen, but piece itself a repetitive phrase, 351 00:39:47,470 --> 00:39:56,500 a kind of self identical self or identical rhyme that chimes or jar's rather than connects and builds. 352 00:39:56,500 --> 00:40:04,120 Rhyming things with themselves is a very particular kind of rather pathetic use of rhyme. 353 00:40:04,120 --> 00:40:10,900 I want to think about that, to think about one of Oswald's formal properties, the prominence of rhyme. 354 00:40:10,900 --> 00:40:14,890 It's a notable and very audible feature of Elseworlds. 355 00:40:14,890 --> 00:40:19,510 It makes more frequent use of rhyme than most of Shakespeare's later plays. 356 00:40:19,510 --> 00:40:24,980 You know, of course, that the blank in blank first means on rhyming. 357 00:40:24,980 --> 00:40:34,960 And although rhyming is relatively common in Shakespeare's early plays, in which the second prompts on Midsummer Night's Dream by later in his career, 358 00:40:34,960 --> 00:40:41,020 we tend to praise him for a more flexible form of unrivalled verse that uses on 359 00:40:41,020 --> 00:40:48,430 job long running over the line end to approach a more varied poetic pattern. 360 00:40:48,430 --> 00:40:55,240 If you think of someone like Ross MacDonald writing on the language of the late place, for instance, 361 00:40:55,240 --> 00:41:03,450 one striking example of rhyme in the play is in Helen's interview with the sick king in Act two. 362 00:41:03,450 --> 00:41:10,330 I just read this you it's not particularly important, apart from the rhyme words that thoughts to help me in such science. 363 00:41:10,330 --> 00:41:14,680 I give us one near death to those that wish him live. But what a fool. 364 00:41:14,680 --> 00:41:19,680 I know there are no snow part. I know more my peril than no art. 365 00:41:19,680 --> 00:41:22,960 This is hell. What I can do can do no harm to try. 366 00:41:22,960 --> 00:41:30,280 Since you set up your rest against remedy here, that of greatest works is finish the OFT does them by the weakest minutes death. 367 00:41:30,280 --> 00:41:34,570 So holy written babes have judgement shown when judges have been base. 368 00:41:34,570 --> 00:41:43,720 Great floods have flowed from simple sources and great seas have dried when miracles have by the grace, been denied. 369 00:41:43,720 --> 00:41:55,840 It's striking this use of rhyme because it juxtaposes formal courtesy and artificiality with a more cynical and material play world. 370 00:41:55,840 --> 00:42:04,540 In Shakespeare's plays, as more widely in Renaissance culture, the trope of the sick king is usually in part, a political one. 371 00:42:04,540 --> 00:42:07,810 Sick kings have sick kingdoms. 372 00:42:07,810 --> 00:42:16,900 It's not always clear in which direction the cocoa's in effect goes, whether the king is sick, that kingdom is sick or vice versa. 373 00:42:16,900 --> 00:42:27,250 The some kind of analogy between this is a political thing to be a sick king and the king in all as well has a really demeaning, fatal illness. 374 00:42:27,250 --> 00:42:29,190 A fistula, 375 00:42:29,190 --> 00:42:41,350 a fistula is an abscess or that tunnel made from a bodily organ out outwards through the outside of the skin most frequently in early modern medicine. 376 00:42:41,350 --> 00:42:46,240 Fistula is an anal fistula fistula in honour. 377 00:42:46,240 --> 00:42:54,900 There were special chairs made in the Renaissance with holes cut into the seat to alleviate the terrible pain of this condition. 378 00:42:54,900 --> 00:43:00,250 What are you saying about it is not a very fairytale illness to have an evil fistula. 379 00:43:00,250 --> 00:43:08,470 It's really kind of embarrassing, demeaning, literally low kind of illness. 380 00:43:08,470 --> 00:43:14,020 Symbolically, its associations are all rather negative. 381 00:43:14,020 --> 00:43:26,260 So this decorous rhyming scheme is set against the rather shameful secret or dirty medical reality of the king's literal and metaphorical condition. 382 00:43:26,260 --> 00:43:34,840 So Ryan here becomes a microcosm of the formal structures with which the play surrounds and decorates less altered reality. 383 00:43:34,840 --> 00:43:37,820 It's part of a kind of total uncertainty, 384 00:43:37,820 --> 00:43:45,430 an early modern theatrical version of what in the modern cinema we would call sound track dissonance virulence. 385 00:43:45,430 --> 00:43:52,450 We'll meet again in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or singing in the Rain in Clockwork Orange. 386 00:43:52,450 --> 00:43:58,660 You don't know these examples. They were music with light or positive or cheerful associations. 387 00:43:58,660 --> 00:44:07,120 It's juxtaposed with psychotic violence or nuclear Armageddon or some kind of visual art, which is quite different. 388 00:44:07,120 --> 00:44:15,760 So artificiality and cynicism make believe and practise pragmatism are held together in the way that Ryan manages the surface of the play, 389 00:44:15,760 --> 00:44:25,420 a kind of dissonance, that's to say, between the owl of sound track characteristics of the play and its content or subject matter. 390 00:44:25,420 --> 00:44:33,430 One last point, and this is the last point I'm going to make in the lecture. It's to do with Ryan and relating it to authorship. 391 00:44:33,430 --> 00:44:37,870 You'll know now that the old idea of Shakespeare is a proto romantic, poetic genius, 392 00:44:37,870 --> 00:44:46,090 working alone to pen perfect plays and perhaps rather resenting meddling players who changed or mangled this perfection. 393 00:44:46,090 --> 00:44:54,280 That's all gone. Not only do we now celebrate and analyse Shakespeare as a theatrical collaborator, working with theatrical spaces, 394 00:44:54,280 --> 00:45:02,200 actors and audiences to create commercially successful fine entertainment, we increasingly now think that he was involved. 395 00:45:02,200 --> 00:45:08,470 Like most of those in the theatre industry, in collaborative writing, collaborative writing, 396 00:45:08,470 --> 00:45:13,890 these collaborations took different forms from working together with Middleton on time. 397 00:45:13,890 --> 00:45:18,610 And if Athens or Fletcher on Two Noble Kinsmen took quite a lot about collaboration, 398 00:45:18,610 --> 00:45:25,300 intellectual on time, perhaps picking up an unfinished or started play by someone else. 399 00:45:25,300 --> 00:45:31,480 Titus Andronicus may be or paraphrase maybe working in a team as on the Henry the six phrase, 400 00:45:31,480 --> 00:45:39,040 which we now think half Nash and Marlowe in the writing team providing speeches all seem to play, 401 00:45:39,040 --> 00:45:45,460 such as the Book of Thomas Moore or the rebooted kids Spanish tragedy or the domestic tragedy. 402 00:45:45,460 --> 00:45:54,190 Often of Faversham. Recent scholarship has uncovered lots of different forms of collaboration, that's to say, and the most recent collected edition. 403 00:45:54,190 --> 00:46:02,650 The new Oxford Shakespeare, published in 2016 and its accompanying authorship companion is the best place to look. 404 00:46:02,650 --> 00:46:09,010 One of their suggestions is that a group of plays that were originally by Shakespeare but probably 405 00:46:09,010 --> 00:46:18,760 overwritten for revivals before sixteen twenty three by Thomas Middleton includes All's Well That Ends Well. 406 00:46:18,760 --> 00:46:23,080 There are three plays Macbeth measure for measure and all's well that ends well. 407 00:46:23,080 --> 00:46:29,740 But the new Oxford Shakespeare suggests have some element of Middleton in them. 408 00:46:29,740 --> 00:46:35,560 There are lots of markers of Middleton, lots of ways and ticks and clues to Middleton's writing. 409 00:46:35,560 --> 00:46:43,420 But then I won't go into. Now, the one I've just with mention is Ryan Middleton rhymes in his writing in this period a lot more than Shakespeare does. 410 00:46:43,420 --> 00:46:48,220 The Rhine may be a sign of Middleton's authorship, 411 00:46:48,220 --> 00:46:55,780 but the Middleton connexion could also give us a grittier play all round Shakespeare's particular brand of romantic comedy. 412 00:46:55,780 --> 00:47:05,350 Those young people conquering obstacles in Mediterranean or rural contexts is very different from Middleton's urban economies at sex, 413 00:47:05,350 --> 00:47:13,720 self-interest and class ambition. Middleton's endings are usually compromises rather than fairy tales. 414 00:47:13,720 --> 00:47:17,370 Reading all as well as a partly middle Tony in play with a middle Tony. 415 00:47:17,370 --> 00:47:27,240 In view of the world, my hope is bring out some of its more cynical aspects rather than sentimentalising it as earlier criticism tended to do. 416 00:47:27,240 --> 00:47:31,330 It also perhaps places ends in a different and more writerly context. 417 00:47:31,330 --> 00:47:36,520 When does this play end? Not if we believe the editors of the new Opta Shakespeare. 418 00:47:36,520 --> 00:47:43,180 When Shakespeare has finished, but when Middleton has said putting the play's own question, all's well that ends well. 419 00:47:43,180 --> 00:47:48,100 So much of our investigation helps us. Think about genre. About tone. 420 00:47:48,100 --> 00:47:54,070 About politics and about competing philosophies of human agency. 421 00:47:54,070 --> 00:48:01,450 As with many questions in this series of lectures, we can see all's well that ends well is a question the play asks rather than answers. 422 00:48:01,450 --> 00:48:09,130 Part of that thoroughgoing interrogative critique that always makes us think Shakespeare was there for us. 423 00:48:09,130 --> 00:48:15,820 Next week I'm going to think about place, location and specificity in Shakespeare by asking about Mary Wines at Windsor. 424 00:48:15,820 --> 00:48:19,632 Why would you want to come back and play?