All's Well That Ends Well

Third Series

William Shakespeare, Suzanne Gossett, Helen Wilcox, Suzanne Gossett, Helen Wilcox

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781408151921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

In All's Well That Ends Well, Helen, a lowly ward, risks her life to satisfy her boundless love for Bertram, a count and ward to the King of France. Following him to Paris, she concocts an endangering plan to win the King of France's favour and induce Bertram's hand in marriage. In the comprehensive introduction to this new, fully-illustrated Arden edition, Suzanne Gossett takes a transformative look at the play's critical and performance history by offering fresh perspectives on the conundrum of genre, sexuality and moral dilemmas with masculinity and the structures of family. The authoritative play text is amply annotated to clarify its language and allusions, and two appendices debate the play's authorship and review its casting. Offering students and scholars alike a wealth of insight and new research, this edition maintains the rigorous standards of the Arden Shakespeare.

APPENDIX 1

The text of All’s Well
That Ends Well

Some of the problems that have puzzled readers and audiences of All’s Well over the centuries are bound up with the history of its text. The story is a complicated one; this account does not seek to answer all those problems but to draw attention to their existence and to indicate some of the explanations that have been offered for them. There are two main and inter-related issues to look at: the nature of the manuscript copy for the play that was printed in the Folio and its treatment by those who set the play’s text.

THE FOLIO

The only substantive text for All’s Well is the one first printed and preserved in the First Folio (F) of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623. The title ‘All’s well that ends well’ was listed in the Stationers’ Register for 8 November 1623 as the sixth of the sixteen plays to be included in F that were ‘not formerly entred to other men’ – that is, not previously registered for publication.¹ In F, it appears in the first section of the book containing the Comedies, coming between The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night. F is a book made up of gatherings of six leaves, consisting of three sheets of paper folded in half and nested within one another. Each sheet was printed on both sides; when folded in half, the sheet consisted of two leaves or four pages; the first page is known as the recto and the second as the verso – abbreviated as a raised r (^r) and a raised v (^v). Each page was made up of two columns: the left-hand one is usually called ‘a’ and the right-hand one ‘b’.

The first and fourth pages of each sheet are known as the outer forme and the second and third as the inner; pages sharing the same forme are known as forme-mates (when they are listed together they have a colon between them). To understand the nature of the text of the play that F preserves it is necessary to understand how the play was set in type in William Jaggard’s printing office. This was examined at great length by Charlton Hinman; his findings were based on attribution of work to individual compositors and the order in which formes were set. He achieved this through such techniques as the analysis of brass rules used to produce the box frames around each page; the identification of individual types and of which types were kept in which type-case; the spelling habits of the compositors; and other observable typographical features. His findings have been modified in the light of further research, but are still fundamentally accepted by most scholars.²

The three gatherings in which All’s Well appears have signatures (letters of the alphabet, accompanied in F by the numbers 1, 2 or 3) at the foot of each of their first three rectos indicating that they belong to gatherings V, X and Y (W was not used). More specifically, the play’s 25 pages in F occupy signatures V1^v to Y1^v and are numbered from 230 to 254. Because of the way the sheets are nested, V1^v was set as part of an inner forme along with V6^r; V2^r was set as part of the outer forme of the following sheet along with V5^v; V2^v was set as part of an inner forme along with V5^r; and so on. The last page of The Taming of the Shrew, V1^r, occupies the same outer forme as V6^v of All’s Well that contains the end of 2.4 and the start of 3.1. Similarly, Y1^v, the last page of All’s Well, occupies the same inner forme as Y6^r, containing parts of Twelfth Night 2.4 and 2.5.

The individual pages were not set in the order in which they are to be read. Instead, the manuscript copy from which they were printed was cast off – divided into portions, more or less accurately, at the point at which new pages would be expected to begin. This would have allowed the compositor to set, say, the first and twelfth pages of a gathering together in the outer forme without having to set any other part of that gathering. The compositors tended not to start with the outer sheet of the gathering and work their way in order through the text to be set, but to begin at its middle (pages 6 and 7) and then regularly proceed outwards (pages 5 and 8, 4 and 9, 3 and 10, 2 and 11), finishing with pages 1 and 12. Thus the first parts of All’s Well to be set in type were the pages V3^v and V4^r, containing the end of Act 1 and the opening of Act 2. This regular setting order was used in gatherings X and Y; but in the first gathering, V, after the first two formes had been set in the expected order, V2^r:V5^v was set before V2^v:V5^r and V1^v:V6^r was set before V1^r:V6^v.

Hinman and other textual scholars have established that two compositors, designated C and D, worked together on the last four formes of The Taming of the Shrew, C setting the left-hand pages of the formes and D the right-hand ones. Working in this way, two compositors could theoretically set the forme in half the time it would take one compositor alone. When they began work on All’s Well, they started, as we have seen, at what would be the centre of the gathering (V3^v:V4^r), followed by V3^r:V4^v but, for some reason, with these two formes, they reversed their roles, with D setting the left-hand page and C the right-hand one. Having only got so far into the setting of the play (TLN 346–863),³ work on it stopped: ‘there was a delay’ of ‘Something between … a few weeks and two or three months’; it was ‘a major interruption, in all likelihood the most extended one that was suffered throughout the whole course of the printing’ of F. The cause of the delay was ‘Either some smaller book or a large piece of jobwork’; William Burton’s The description of Leicestershire is implicated.⁴

When work on the play began again after this interruption, a new compositor, called B, worked alone – and so at a slower rate than C and D – on the next twelve formes, finishing gathering V and the whole of X (TLN 1–345, 864–2913).⁵ In V, when B picked up work after C and D, he changed the regular order of setting the formes, but he returned to it in X. There is evidence that B’s work on X was interrupted after he had set the first forme or possibly the first two formes, when he worked on the preliminaries to Augustine Vincent’s A discovery of errors.⁶ Having completed X, there was another interruption in the setting of All’s Well, this time to work on the Histories. Compositor B was put to work with Compositor C on gatherings a and b, containing the whole of King John and the opening of Richard II. When these two gatherings were completed, B returned to All’s Well and set the small remaining final part of the play (TLN 2914–3078), along with the opening of Twelfth Night. Hinman says that ‘no substantial delay is in evidence’ in the switch from gathering X to a and b and that ‘no delay is in evidence’ in the ‘jump back’ to gathering Y after work on a and b.⁷ The significance of the first interruption to the other project and of the switch to and from the Histories is worth pausing over; the first ‘was probably the only occasion on which the printing of the book was suspended for any considerable period’.⁸ Both had the effect of taking Jaggard’s compositors’ eyes off All’s Well for some time.

The copy for F

For most of the twentieth century, it was generally agreed that All’s Well was set from Shakespeare’s working autograph manuscript of the play; this sort of copy is often called his ‘foul papers’ to distinguish it from an authorial or scribal fair copy.⁹ The indicators for such an authorial manuscript are generally taken to be inconsistent speech prefixes; characters who are mentioned but do not appear (‘ghosts’); literary or permissive stage directions; and characteristic authorial spellings and punctuation. There is plentiful evidence of the first three in the F text of All’s Well that has usually been taken to show – in the words of Fredson Bowers, one of the greatest textual scholars of the last century – ‘Shakespeare at Work’.

This view has been challenged by Paul Werstine in the course of his work on dramatic manuscripts.¹⁰ Rejecting the belief that a text used in the theatre for performance had to be internally consistent in its dramatic features (notably speech prefixes and stage directions), Werstine examined the roles of the two Lords against the received view that ‘no scribe can have intervened between Shakespeare and the Folio printers’ and that ‘Shakespeare’s latest and rather untidy draft of the play lies just behind its surviving printed version’. F’s ‘ambiguous’ speech prefixes and stage directions, he maintains, ‘cannot be used as evidence that printer’s copy for it must have been author’s foul papers, not a scribal transcript’; rather, they (‘the confusing and contradictory’ speech prefixes and stage directions) ‘may be assumed possibly to have been produced by a variety of hands’.¹¹

Werstine’s argument that the F text of All’s Well need not have been set from authorial copy may well explain the relative absence in it of characteristic Shakespearean spellings. Although scholars have detected a few of these in F and noted that its aberrant punctuation (as...