The Alls well that ends well garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here is the Garden for All’s Well That Ends Well.

[Interlocutor]: What plants do you mention in the play All’s Well That Ends Well, Will Shakespeare?

[Shakespeare]: Saffron, onion, rush, and briers; marjoram, grass, and herb o’ grace; roses, nuts, grapes, dates, pears, and pomegranates.

[Interlocutor]: There is a pomegranate tree here, but the pear tree is in the neighboring garden, the one for Romeo and Juliet.

[Shakespeare]: That play too speaks of both the pear and the pomegranate and so it’s well done that those two plays are planted side by side.

[Interlocutor]: Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy; All’s Well That Ends Well is a comedy.

[Shakespeare]: Yes. This play is a love story of Helena and Bertram. Helena’s father was a great physician, and when he died, the Countess of Rousillon took Helena as her ward. Bertram is the Countess’s son, a brave and valiant soldier. Helena falls in love with him, but she knows full well that she cannot marry him, for she is of common birth, while he is noble. Bertram leaves Rousillon to serve the King of France. Helena laments to herself that now she will lack even the sight of him. Parolles, a braggart whom Bertram takes for a proper fellow in arms, commences to jest with her:

Are you meditating on virginity?

He gives many reasons against the keeping of virginity. He says it is like a date, and he means both the fruit and the date in a calendar:

Your date is better in your pie and your porridge than in your cheek.

[Interlocutor]: O, I see! The date in the pie and the porridge is the sweet fruit, but it’s age—the date in the calendar—that appears in a withered cheek.

[Shakespeare]: Parolles, a man whose name means “words”, continues the coarse jest:

your old virginity,
is like one of our French withered pears,
it looks ill and eats drily.

[Interlocutor]: Helena joins the jesting about virginity, hiding her longing for Bertram in a question:

How might one do, sir, to lose it to her liking?

Such a prolonged discourse so early in the play makes one think that the question of virginity lies at the heart of this play.

[Shakespeare]: And so it does. Helena determines to follow Bertram to court, hoping to cure the King of France’s incurable disease with her physician’s art, learned from her father.

[Interlocutor]: Ah, but the Countess understands the true reason for her going, as she observes in Helena the same love and pain she felt at that age:

Countess: Even so it was with me when I was young:
…this thorn
Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong.

[Shakespeare]: In France Helena needs help if she is to come into the presence of the king. The wise old courtier Lafew advises the King to see her and the King refuses, believing this infirmity is past cure. Lafew gently mocks his despair with the old tale of the fox who could not reach the grapes and therefore called them sour:

O, will you eat no grapes, my royal fox?

[Interlocutor]: The King consents to see her, with the thought that he will soon prove Helena as useless as all the other physicians.

[Shakespeare]: Ah, but she cures him. In his gratitude, the King grants her chosen reward: she may take as a husband any of his courtiers.

[Interlocutor]: And naturally she chooses Bertram. He is appalled, but he marries her rather than defy the king’s command.

[Shakespeare]: Aye. The wedding ceremony past, he leaves the court that very day, bound for the wars in Florence with Italy.

[Interlocutor]: Parolles supports him in this. Bertram still thinks Parolles a brave and seasoned soldier.

[Shakespeare]: Parolles has his own reasons to leave. Lafew knows him for the empty braggart that he is, and says so to his face:

Go to, sir; you were beaten in Italy for picking a
kernel out of a pomegranate.

He warns Bertram of Parolles’ quality, too:

There is no kernel in this light nut; the
soul of this man is his clothes. Trust him not in
matter of heavy consequence.

[Interlocutor]: But Bertram takes no heed of the warning.

[Shakespeare]: Not at all. Bertram leaves Helena a letter saying he will never live as her husband unless she is with child by him and, moreover, has in her possession his family ring always on his finger. He goes to the Duke of Florence and does valiant service.

[Interlocutor]: Helena comes to Florence and meets a widow who provides her lodging. Bertram seeks to seduce the widow’s daughter, Diana, to surrender her virginity to him.

[Shakespeare]: Diana is virtuous, and does not trust Bertram’s vows to love and serve her forever. She says:

Diana: Ay, and you serve us
Till we serve you; but when you have our roses,
You barely leave our thorns to prick ourselves
And mock us with our bareness.

Helena proposes that Diana seem to consent to meet Bertram, if he will give her his ring. Then, instead of Diana, Helena will meet Bertram in the dark and lose her virginity to her husband. Diana and her mother consent to help Helena in this way.

[Interlocutor]: Oh! the famous bed trick!

[Shakespeare]: This was the first play in which we used it. It was well received, so well that we employed it again in Measure for Measure a few years later.

[Interlocutor]: So Bertram gets Helena with child and never knows it. Then Helena persuades Diana and her mother to return with her to France:

Helena: The time will bring on summer,
When briers shall have leaves as well as thorns,
And be as sweet as sharp. We must away.

[Shakespeare]: Soon the war ends, and Bertram with the other French lords turns toward home.

[Interlocutor]: But meanwhile everyone believes that Helena has died.

[Shakespeare]: Yes. Lafew visits the Countess, Bertram’s mother, at Rousillon. Lafew comforts the Countess that Bertram is not to blame, but rather Parolles:

No, no, no, your son was misled with a
snipped-taffeta fellow there, whose villainous saffron
would have made all the unbaked and doughy
youth of a nation in his color.

[Interlocutor]: Everyone mourns for Helena. The Countess says:

If she had partaken of my flesh,
and cost me the dearest groans of a mother,
I could not have owed her a more rooted love.

[Shakespeare]: Lafew too mourns Helena in the language of plants:

’Twas a good lady, ’twas a good lady:
we may pick a thousand salads ere we light on such another herb.

[Interlocutor]: The Countess’ clown adds:

Indeed, sir, she was the sweet marjoram of the
salad, or rather, the herb of grace.

[Shakespeare (Lafew)]: They are not herbs, you knave; they are nose-herbs.

Interlocutor (Clown): I am no great Nebuchadnezzar, sir; I have not much skill in grass.

Their exchange of wit seems out of place in a time of grief.

[Shakespeare]: Nay, rather it is relief from the mourning. In their exchange, the wit of the clown suggests what damnation is :

I am a woodland fellow…
I am for the house
with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little
for pomp to enter. Some that humble themselves
may, but the many will be too chill and tender, and
they’ll be for the flowery way that leads to the
broad gate and the great fire.

[Interlocutor]: But, after all this, Helena is not truly dead. The King too comes to visit Rousillon, and there they all meet again—the King, the Countess, Bertram, Helena, Diana, and even Parolles.

[Shakespeare]: Diana and Helena make plain to Bertram and the King that Bertram got Helena with child instead of Diana. On Helena’s hand, Bertram sees his ring. He is bedazzled by her persistency and her devices for truly winning him, and he cries out:

I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.

[Interlocutor]: And so all’s well that ends well.

[Shakespeare]: Ay. Good Lafew is so glad that he sheds tears, saying:

Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon.

The King too is greatly pleased. The play ends when he rewards Diana for her part in Helena’s tale:

If thou be-est a fresh uncropped flower,
Choose thy husband, and I'll pay thy dower.