INTRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2010
Summary
In dealing with this play let us rid ourselves at the outset of speculation whether it be or no that lost one mentioned by Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) under the name of Love's Labour's Wonne. Its plot would warrant the title; passages in it are plainly juvenile work and date back to a period before, if but a little before, 1598; so that Meres may have seen it, in its first shape, billed under the title he reports, as again that old title may possibly lurk in Helena's words in Act 5. 3.313–
Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?
upon which the curtain might well have closed.
On the other hand many other passages belong as convincingly to Shakespeare's later period, if not to his very last. The play as we have it in the First Folio–our only text and a vile one–has quite obviously been scratched over by a master's hand upon a poor original: and the improvements are numerous enough to have excused a new title. But it remains that on any evidence as yet discovered, All's Well can only be identified with Love's Labour's Wonne by guessing: and our text covers problems to a critical mind far deeper than any suggested by that puzzling entry of Meres'.
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- Information
- All's Well that Ends WellThe Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare, pp. vii - xxxvPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009