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PERSONS REPRESENTED.1

King of France.

Duke of Florence.

Bertram, count of Rousillon.

Lafeu,2 an old lord.

3

Parolles, a follower of Bertram.

Several young French lords, that serve with Bertram in the Florentine war.

Steward,} servants to the countess of Rousillon.

A page.

Countess of Rousillon mother to Bertram.

Helena, a gentlewoman protected by the countess.
An old widow of Florence.

Diana, daughter to the widow.

Violenta,

Mariana,

neighbours and friends to the widow.

Lords, attending on the king; officers, soldiers, &c. French

and Florentine.

SCENE,

Partly in France, and partly in Tuscany.

1 The persons were first enumerated by Mr. Rowe.

2 Lafeu,] We should read—Lefeu. Steevens.

3 Parolles,] I suppose we should write this name- -Paroles, i. e. a creature made up of empty words. Steevens.

4 Violenta only enters once, and then she neither speaks, nor is spoken to. This name appears to be borrowed from an old metrical history, entitled Didaco and Violenta, 1576. Steevens.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.*

ACT I.....SCENE I.

Rousillon. A Room in the Countess's Palace.

Enter BERTRAM, the Countess of Rousillon, HELENA, and LAFEU, in mourning.

Count. In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.

Ber. And I, in going, madam, weep o'er my father's death anew: but I must attend his majesty's command, to whom I am now in ward,1 evermore in subjection.

Laf. You shall find of the king a husband, madam ;— you, sir, a father: He that so generally is at all times good, must of necessity hold his virtue to you; whose

* The story of All's well that ends well, or, as I suppose it to have been sometimes called, Love's Labour Wonne, is originally indeed the property of Boccace, but it came immediately to Shakspeare from Painter's Giletta of Narbon, in the First Vol. of The Palace of Pleasure, 4to. 1566, p. 88. Farmer.

Shakspeare is indebted to the novel only for a few leading circumstances in the graver parts of the piece. The comic business appears to be entirely of his own formation. Steevens.

1 in ward,] Under his particular care, as my guardian, till I come to age. It is now almost forgotten in England, that the heirs of great fortunes were the King's wards. Whether the same practice prevailed in France, it is of no great use to inquire, for Shakspeare gives to all nations the manners of England.

Johnson.

Howell's fifteenth letter acquaints us that the province of Normandy was subject to wardships, and no other part of France besides; but the supposition of the contrary furnished Shakspeare with a reason why the King compelled Rousillon to marry Helen. Tollet.

The prerogative of a wardship is a branch of the feudal law, and may as well be supposed to be incorporated with the constitution of France, as it was with that of England, till the reign of Charles II. Sir J. Hawkins.

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worthiness would stir it up where it wanted, rather than lack it where there is such abundance.

Count. What hope is there of his majesty's amendment? Laf. He hath abandoned his physicians, madam; under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hope; and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time.

Count. This young gentlewoman had a father, (O, that had! how sad a passage 'tis !2) whose skill was almost as great as his honesty: had it stretched so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work. 'Would, for the king's

2— O, that had! how sad a passage 'tis !] Imitated from the Heautontimorumenos of Terence, (then translated) where Menedemus says:

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Filium unicum adolescentulum

"Habio. Ah, quid dixi? habere me? imo

66 habui, Chreme,

"Nunc habeam necne incertum est." Blackstone. So, in Spenser's Shepheard's Calender :

"Shee, while she was, (that was a woeful word to saine) "For beauties praise and pleasaunce had no peere."

Again, in Wily Beguil'd, 1606:

"She is not mine, I have no daughter now;

"That I should say I had, thence comes my grief."

Malone.

Passage is any thing that passes. So we now say, a passage of an author, and we said about a century ago, the passages of a reign. When the Countess mentions Helena's loss of a father, she recollects her own loss of a husband, and stops to observe how heavily the word had passes through her mind. Johnson.

Thus Shakspeare himself. See The Comedy of Errors, Act III,

sc. i:

"Now in the stirring passage of the day."

So, in The Gamester, by Shirley, 1637: “I'll not be witness of your passages myself:" i. e. of what passes between you. Again, in A Woman's a Weathercock, 1612:

Again:

-- never lov'd these prying listening men' "That ask of others' states and passages.”

"I knew the passages 'twixt her and Scudamore." Again, in The Dumb Knight, 1633:

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"Your vile and most lascivious passages."

Again, in The English Intelligencer, a tragi-comedy, 1641: "-two philosophers that jeer and weep at the passages of the world."

Steevens.

sake, he were living! I think, it would be the death of the king's disease.

Laf. How called you the man you speak of, madam? Count. He was famous, sir, in his profession, and it was his great right to be so: Gerard de Narbon.

Laf. He was excellent, indeed, madam; the king very lately spoke of him, admiringly, and mourningly: he was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.

Ber. What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of? Laf. A fistula, my lord.3

Ber. I heard not of it before.

Laf. I would, it were not notorious. Was this gentlewoman the daughter of Gerard de Narbon?

Count. His sole child, my lord; and bequeathed to my overlooking. I have those hopes of her good, that her education promises: her dispositions she inherits, which make fair gifts fairer; for where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities, there commendations go with

SA fistula, my lord.] The King of France's disorder is specified as follows in Painter's translation from Boccaccio's Novel, on which this play was founded: "She heard by report that the French king had a swelling upon his breast, which by reason of ill cure, was growen into a fistula," &c. In Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, 1589, p. 251, we have also mention of this inelegant disorder. Speaking of the necessity which princes occasionally find to counterfeit maladies, our author has the following remark: "And in dissembling of diseases, which I pray you? for I have obserued it in the Court of Fraunce, not a burning feuer, or a plurisie, or a palsie, or the hydropick and swelling gowte, &c. But it must be either a dry dropsie, or a megrim or letarge, or a fistule in ano, or some such other secret disease as the common conuersant can hardly discouer, and the physitian either not speedily heale, or not honestly bewray." Steevens.

virtuous qualities,] By virtuous qualities are meant qualities of good breeding and erudition; in the same sense that the Italians say qualità virtuosa; and not moral ones. On this account it is, she says, that, in an ill mind, these virtuous qualities are virtues and traitors too: i. e. the advantages of education enable an ill mind to go further in wickedness than it could have done without them. Warburton.

Virtue and virtuous, as I am told, still keep this signification in the north, and mean ingenuity and ingenious. Of this sense, perhaps, an instance occurs in the Eighth Book of Chapman's Ver sion of the Iliad:

pity, they are virtues and traitors too; in her they are the better for their simpleness; she derives her honesty, and achieves her goodness.

Laf. Your commendations, madam, get from her tears. Count. 'Tis the best brine a maiden can season her praise in. The remembrance of her father never approaches her heart, but the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood" from her cheek. No more of this, Hele

"Then will I to Olympus' top our virtuous engine bind, "And by it every thing shall hang," &c.

Again, in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, p. I, 1590:

5

"If these had made one poem's period,
"And all combin'd in beauties worthynesse,

"Yet should there hover in their restlesse heads
"One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,
"Which into words no vertue can digest." Steevens.

they are virtues and traitors too; in her they are the better for their simpleness;] Her virtues are the better for their simpleness, that is, her excellencies are the better because they are artless and open, without fraud, without design. The learned commentator has well explained virtues, but has not, I think, reached the force of the word traitors, and therefore has not shown the full extent of Shakspeare's masterly observation. Virtues in an unclean mind are virtues and traitors too. Estimable and useful qualities, joined with an evil disposition, give that evil disposition power over others, who, by admiring the virtue, are betrayed to the malevolence. The Tatler, mentioning the sharpers of his time observes, that some of them are men of such elegance and knowledge, that a young man who falls into their way, is betrayed as much by his judgment as his passions. Johnson.

In As you Like it, virtues are called traitors, on a very different ground:

6

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to some kind of men

"Their graces serve them but as enemies;

"No more do yours; your virtues, gentle master,
"Are sanctified and holy traitors to you.

"O what a world is this, when what is comely
"Envenoms him that bears it!" Malone.

― can season her praise in.] To season has here a culinary sense; to preserve by salting. A passage in Twelfth Night will best explain its meaning:

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all this to season

"A brother's dead love, which she would keep fresh,
"And lasting in her remembrance."

Malone.

So, in Chapman's version of the third Iliad:

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"Season'd with tears her joys, to see," &c. Steevens.

· all livelihood —] i. e. all appearance of life. Steevens.

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