ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.
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ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL is one of the
most pleasing of our author's comedies. The
interest is however more of a serious than of a
comic nature. The character of Helen is one
of great sweetness and delicacy. She is placed
in circumstances of the most critical kind, and
has to court her husband both as a virgin and
a wife: yet the most scrupulous nicety of female
modesty is not once violated. There is
not one thought or action that ought to bring
a blush into her cheeks, or that for a moment
lessens her in our esteem. Perhaps the romantic
attachment of a beautiful and virtuous girl
to one placed above her hopes by the circumstances
of birth and fortune, was never so exquisitely
expressed as in the reflections which
she utters when young Roussillon leaves his
mother's house, under whose protection she has
been brought up with him, to repair to the
French king's court.
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"Helena. Oh, were that all--I think not on my father,
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him. My imagination
Carries no favour in it, but my Bertram's.
I am undone, there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star,
And think to wed it; he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
Th' ambition in my love thus plagues itself;
The hind that would be mated by the lion,
Must die for love. 'Twas pretty, tho' a plague,
To see him every hour, to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls
In our hears's table: heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet favour.
But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics."
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The interest excited by this beautiful picture
of a fond and innocent heart is kept up afterwards
by her resolution to follow him to France,
the success of her experiment in restoring the
king's health, her demanding Bertram in marriage
as a recompense, his leaving her in disdain,
her interview with him afterwards disguised as
Diana, a young lady whom he importunes with
his secret addresses, and their final reconciliation
when the consequences of her stratagem and the
proofs of her love are fully made known. The
persevering gratitude of the French king to his
benefactress, who cures him of a languishing distemper
by a prescription hereditary in her family,
the indulgent kindness of the Countess, whose
pride of birth yields, almost without a struggle,
to her affection for Helen, the honesty and uprightness
of the good old lord Lafeu, make very
interesting parts of the picture. The wilful
stubbornness and youthful petulance of Bertram
are also very admirably described. The comic
part of the play turns on the folly, boasting,
and cowardice of Parolles, a parasite and hanger-on
of Bertram's, the detection of whose
false pretensions to bravery and honour forms a
very amusing episode. He is first found out
by the old lord Lafeu, who says, "The soul
of this man is in his clothes," and it is proved
afterwards that his heart is in his tongue, and
that both are false and hollow. The adventure
of "the bringing off of his drum" has become
proverbial as a satire on all ridiculous and blustering
undertakings which the person never
means to perform: nor can any thing be more
severe than what one of the bye-standers remarks
upon what Parolles says of himself, "Is
it possible he should know what he is, and be
that he is?" Yet Parolles himself gives the
best solution of the difficulty afterwards when
he is thankful to escape with his life and the
loss of character; for, so that he can live on, he
is by no means squeamish about the loss of pretensions,
to which he had sense enough to know
he had no real claim, and which he had assumed
only as a means to live.
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"Parolles. Yet I am thankful: if my heart were great,
'Twould burst at this. Captain, I'll be no more,
But I will eat and drink, ant sleep as soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live: who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this; for it shall come to pass,
That every braggart shall be found an ass.
Bust sword, cool blushes, and Parolles live
Safest in shame; being fooled, by fool'ry thrive;
There's place and means for every man alive.
I'll after them."
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The story of ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL,
and of several others of Shakespear's plays, is
taken from Boccacio. The poet has dramatised
the original novel with great skill and comic
spirit, and has preserved all the beauty of character
and sentiment without improving upon it,
which was impossible. There is indeed in Boccacio's
serious pieces a truth, a pathos, and an
exquisite refinement of sentiment, which is
hardly to be met with in any other prose writer
whatever. Justice has not been done him by
the world. He has in general passed for a mere
narrator of lascivious tales or idle jests. This
character probably originated in his obnoxious
attacks on he monks, and has been kept up by
the grossness of mankind, who revenged their
own want of refinement on Boccacio, and only
saw in his writings what suited the coarseness
of their own tastes. But the truth is, that he
has carried sentiment of every kind to its very
highest purity and perfection. By sentiment
we would here understand the habitual workings
of some one powerful feeling, where the
heart reposes almost entirely upon itself, without
the violent excitement of opposing duties or
untoward circumstances. In this way, nothing
ever came up to the story of Frederigo Alberigi
and his Falcon. The perseverance in attachment,
the spirit of gallantry and generosity displayed
in it, has no parallel in the history of
heroical sacrifices. The feeling is so unconscious
too, and involuntary, is brought out in such
small, unlooked-for, and unostentatious circumstances,
as to show it to have been woven into
the very nature and soul of the author. The
story of Isabella is scarcely less fine, and is more
affecting in the circumstances and in the catastrophe.
Dryden has done justice to the impassioned
eloquence of the Tancred and Sigismunda;
but has not given an adequate idea of the wild
preternatural interest of the story of Honoria.
Cimon and Iphigene is by no means one of the
best, notwithstanding the popularity of the subject.
The proof of unalterable affection given in
the story of Jeronymo, and the simple touches
of nature and picturesque beauty in the story of
the two holiday lovers, who were poisoned by
tasting of a leaf in the garden at Florence, are
perfect master-pieces. The epithet of Divine
was well bestowed on this great painter of the
human heart. The invention implied in his
different tales is immense: but we are not to
infer that it is all his own. He probably availed
himself of all the common traditions which were
floating in his time, and which he was the first
to appropriate. Homer appears the most original
of all authors--probably for no other reason
than that we can trace the plagiarism no farther.
Boccacio has furnished subjects to numberless
writers since his time, both dramatic and narrative.
The story of Griselda is borrowed from
his Decameron by Chaucer; as is the Knight's
Tale (Palamon and Arcite) from his poem of
the Theseid.
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