So you can imagine my apprehension (more like terror) when a review for this summer’s All’s Well That Ends Well included the phrase “[Insert name of director] has done it again!” And, by God, the reviewer was right! It was clear from the very first instant!

The first line of the play is the Countess: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.” You might think that in this line the Countess is comparing her husband’s recent funeral to her son’s departure for the court, and that neither event would fill her with cheer. Imagine our surprise — skip that, you can’t possibly — when the cast came on stage dressed in colorful costumes and everybody went waltzing around in great, lighthearted swoops. This went on for a long time, but that’s all right, because said director — oh, hell, let’s print his name: it was the well-known Elmer Fudd — had cut a lot of Shakespeare’s lines, and had to fill up three hours somehow, and he seems to like waltzes. At some point the dance came to an end, and the Countess, beaming happily, said to her son Bertram, “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.” Bertram smiled back and said, “And I in going, madam, weep o’er my father’s death anew.” I know you don’t believe this happened. But it did. This is not meant as a criticism of the actors. I never had any intention of throwing my fried chicken at them.

The revelation of Olivia’s betrothal,
from “Twelfth Night,” Act V, Scene i, ca. 1790
(Oil on canvas, 34.3 x 43.2 cm)
BY William Hamilton
Yale Center for British Art
Paul Mellon Collection

Sometimes the hammer hit the nail. For example: all the women in the play, even the gentle, victimized Diana, had Attitude, as if they had all just come from rehearsing a bad production of Medea. Attitude worked pretty well when the Countess was bullying the truth out of Helen — that Helen loves Bertram. It’s better than making the Countess the gentle, kindly, sweet grandma which some directors assume she is, but the effect was spoiled by the fact that the Countess listened not a whit to Helen’s answer. Attitude required her to look elsewhere. Even the Astringer whom Helen asks to carry a message to the King (though he had no goshawk) had Attitude, for no reason I could see, unless he just didn’t like girls, in which case his surly consent to do Helen’s errand made no sense at all, and I seem to be developing a theme here, something to do with “made no sense at all.”

Some well-meaning but dreadfully misguided soul must have praised the effective use of music in Elmer Fudd’s production of Twelfth Night to him, because music (by a different composer) had been added in liberal scoops to All’s Well, in the intelligent manner in which any sensible person would add scoops of strawberry ice cream to a pork roast. When Helen was working up to her peroration “For with the dark, poor thief, I’ll steal away” — which we are shortly to learn means she’s going to commit suicide — she was suddenly underscored — overscored — ridden down and trampled to death — by the recorded throbbing of violins of Brobdingnagian size, and no matter how high you boost Helen’s volume, the music rendered Shakespeare’s words inconsequential. There was no way for the actress to say those lines like a woman who has lost all desire to live. What came out of her mouth sounded like Lady Macbeth’s injunction for thick night to pall itself in the dunnest smoke of hell, and she exited like somebody determined to commit a murder, but certainly not suicide.

Really, I have only two complaints about the play: that the director didn’t understand it as a whole, and didn’t understand it at any point. For the structure of the play, let’s point out that it is a morality play from beginning to end. Shakespeare’s conceit is that Helen (the good angel) and Parolles (the bad angel) are contending for the soul of the flawed Bertram. Everybody else in the play fits into this structure: the King is God, and Lafew (from the French le feu, the fire) is the devil. But Shakespeare shifted the morality play focus to the right: every single person in the play is good, human and flawed. The brothers Dumain in this play are both so intelligently virtuous that Shakespeare himself could only keep track of which was the Good Angel and which the Evil by calling them “Lord G.” and “Lord E.” in his manuscript (see the Folio). Shakespeare no longer believed in God when he wrote this play, but he believed that human beings were capable of behaving as if they were under the influence of divine grace, and he signaled that they were under such an influence by writing their dialogue in rhymed couplets (as when Helen cures the King).