All's Well That Ends Well
1623
All's Well That Ends Well
1623
Among Shakespeare's most unsettling comedies, All's Well That Ends Well defies easy categorization. This is a romance that never quite feels romantic, a comedy that leaves a sour taste. Helena, brilliant and beguiling, loves Bertram, the Count of Roussillon, but he is repulsed by her beneath-him status. When she cures the King of France, she demands as her reward the hand she cannot otherwise win. Bertram flees to war, issuing an impossible challenge: she must bear his child and obtain his ring to claim him as her husband. Through a notorious bed trick, Helena succeeds, and the play ends with reconciliation. But watch it curdle in your mind afterward. This is Shakespeare at his most uncomfortable, asking whether love won through cunning and compulsion counts as love at all. The heroine is both transcendent and troubling. For readers who prefer their comedies dark, their happy endings haunted by doubt, and their Shakespeare with teeth.
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“Love all, trust a few,Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemyRather in power than use; and keep thy friendUnder thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,But never tax'd for speech.””
— William Shakespeare
“All's well that ends well.””
— William Shakespeare
“No legacy is so rich as honesty.””
— William Shakespeare
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud,if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.””
— William Shakespeare
“Good with out evil is like light with out darkness which in turn is like righteousness whith out hope.””
— William Shakespeare
“Love is holy.””
— William Shakespeare
“My friends were poor, but honest; so's my love:””
— William Shakespeare
“Now I see the mystery of your loneliness .””
— William Shakespeare
“They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.””
— William Shakespeare
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Shakespeare, William. All's Well That Ends Well. Lex, lex-books.com/book/all-s-well-that-ends-well-3bc170e2-919d-4e3b-87b1-64ac7923f72d.Shakespeare, W. (1623). All's Well That Ends Well. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/all-s-well-that-ends-well-3bc170e2-919d-4e3b-87b1-64ac7923f72dShakespeare, William. All's Well That Ends Well. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/all-s-well-that-ends-well-3bc170e2-919d-4e3b-87b1-64ac7923f72d.
