The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read: How Coleridge got ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ right AND wrong!

….and: How John Dover Wilson got ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ NEARLY right! (Part One)

and

How John Dover Wilson got ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ NEARLY right! (Part Two)

and

Thomas Nashe was Shakespeare’s collaborator on ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’

FIRST!!!

In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson wrote:

I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.

In the twentieth century, Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote :

We hold this play to be one of Shakespeare’s worst.

Even John Dover Wilson…..

…..the eminent Shakespearean who, in 1933, first suggested Shakespeare had been a teacher, factotum and entertainer for the Southampton family in Titchfield – wrote:

In the final scene it is hard to tell whether the verse or the sentiment it conveys is the more nauseating.

So is the play a failure?

It all depends on what Shakespeare was setting out to do….

Samuel Taylor Coleridge……

……the great poet and critic, was the first to suggest (in 1813) that…

All’s Well that Ends Well as it has come down to us, was written at two different and rather distant points of the poet’s life.

Coleridge thought that there were two distinct styles, not only of thought but of expression. This, The Shakespeare Code believes, also springs from the change in Shakespeare’s INTENTION from the first play to the second.

But what was this first play? And where and when was it performed?

The clue comes from a passage in Palladis Tamia, written by Francis Meres in 1598:

…..witness his  [Shakespeare’s]  Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labors wonne, his Midsummers night dream, & his Merchant of Venice…

In All’s Well that Ends Well Helena says to Bertram:

Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?

…and the whole play rests on her heroic labours to make her husband love her.

It is The Code’s belief that Love’s Labour’s Won was the first version of All’s Well that Ends Well, that it was an answer to Love’s Labour’s Lost and, like that play, was performed in 1592 by a cast of professional actors and aristocrats (women as well as men) in private performance in Titchfield – to a commission from Mary Browne, Second Countess of Southampton.

See: ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ Revisited.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a light hearted, satirical play in praise of heterosexual love.

But it does not resolve in marriage: the Princess of France’s father dies in the course of the action.

This is because Countess Mary’s father, Lord Montague….. 

…..and twin brother Anthony were both dying when the play was first performed at Whitsun.

A joyous ending to the play would have been totally inappropriate.

By December, though, both men were dead and it is highly probable from the title (though obviously we don’t have the text) that Love’s Labour’s Won was….

a Christmas comedy

…..that ended happily in love and marriage.

Given the bitterness of All’s Well that Ends Well, this may seem hard to believe: but Shakespeare’s source for the play – William Paynter’s translation of Boccaccio’s The Story of Giletta from his Decamerone – is a warm hearted romance, a fairy-story even….

‘Giletta’, who loves the ‘aimiable and fair’ Count Beltramo, [let’s call them Helena and Bertram from now on] is the rich and beautiful daughter of a celebrated Physician who has died.  Because Bertram is an aristocrat, he has to leave Rossillion and became the King’s Ward of Court.

Helena – who from childhood has loved him…..

 more than is meet for a woman of her age

 …..determines to follow him and win his hand in marriage.

She does this by curing the King’s fistula with one of her father’s prescriptions….

….and the help of God.

The King has promised her that she can have the husband of her choice if she succeeds in curing him, but is horrified when she chooses the aristocratic Count Bertram .

Bertram is also horrified at the thought of marrying a commoner , but obeys his King.

However, he rushes off to the wars without consummating the marriage and Countess Helena returns to Rossillion , which has fallen into disrepair because Bertram has been away.

She gains everyone’s respect by the way she restores Rossillion, then sends word to her husband that she is prepared to leave the city if her presence there means he will never return.

Bertram replies that he will only live with her when she has his ring – valued for its healing powers – in her possession and…..

 …a son in her arms begotten by me.

When she hears this, Helena leaves Rossillion so that he can return and, much to her subjects distress, sets off to become a Pilgrim.

By chance she encounters Bertram, from a distance, and learns he has fallen in love with another woman, respectable but poor.

Helena persuades the woman to gain Bertram’s ring as a token of his love, then, under cover of night, sleeps with her husband, posing as the woman he loves.  

God arranges it that Helena conceives and, when she knows she is pregnant, she and the woman, richly rewarded by Helena, leave the town .

Helena gives birth to twins and nurses them while Bertram, urged back by his subjects, returns to Rossillion.

One day he is about to celebrate the All Saints Festival when Helena arrives in her pilgrim’s clothes, with two sons, not one, in her arms and her husband’s ring.

Bertram is astonished at her ‘constant mind and good wit’, clothes her in a beautiful dress fit for a Countess and….

….kept great chere. From that time forth, hee loued and honoured her, as his dere spouse and wyfe.’

Bertram, in the Boccaccio story, is in a situation very similar to Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (‘Harry Southampton’), the Countess Mary’s only son .

Harry, like Betram, had a father who had died and was a ward of court. He was eager, like Bertram, to go off to fight the wars and, also like Bertram, was being asked to wed against his will.

Lord Burghley, his guardian…….

…….wanted Harry to marry Elizabeth de Vere, his granddaughter…….

…..and was threatening to impose a tremendous £5,000 fine on the Southampton family.

But there was one major difference between Harry and the Bertram in the story:

Harry was gay!

Countess Mary had commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen Sonnets for Harry’s seventeenth birthday in 1590, urging him to marry Elizabeth and father a son and heir.

See: Trixie the Cat’s guide to the Birthday Sonnets.

Mary had followed this up with another commission two years later – Love’s Labour’s Lost – in which a group of aristocratic men swear to give up the company of women to pursue their studies, but one by one succumb to their charms.

Shakespeare cast the dark-skinned musician and courtesan, Amelia Bassano – whom he had met and fallen in love with on the Queen’s Progress to Hampshire in 1591 – as the dark skinned coquette, Rosaline.

He cast himself as Berowne (a play on Countess Mary’s family name) as a Lord who attempts to seduce her…

After the show Amelia stayed on at Titchfield because the plague was raging in London and, as we know from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, art turned into life.

Harry was jealous of Amelia (he wanted to be the centre of Shakespeare’s attention) and when Shakespeare asked him to plead his love-suit with Amelia, Amelia swooped on Harry. Harry (despite himself) also swooped on Amelia.

A painful love-triangle ensued which ended in Amelia’s pregnancy and marriage to a minstrel ‘for colour’.  It also ended in Shakespeare’s own realisation he was more in love with the boy than he was with the girl.

But Shakespeare knew that, as an aristocrat, Harry had to get married and have a son. Shakespeare, after all, was married with children himself. So he was happy to pen Love’s Labour’s Won to please Countess Mary and celebrate the worth of women and the worth of marriage.

But why, in All’s Well that Ends Well, written fifteen years later, did Shakespeare turn Bertram/Harry into a psychopath – that is, someone displaying……

…….amoral and antisocial behaviour, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity and failure to learn from experience?

The King in the play even suspects Bertram of murder….

To find the answer, click: HERE!