"This sterner and more meditative cast is so predominant that the whole play may be remarked as being comparatively of a gray and sober hue, uncolored by those rainbow tints of fancy, or fiercely bright flashes of passion, that give such diversity of splendor to many other dramas. The reason of this cannot be that which Schlegel assigns, that the glorious colors of fancy could not have been introduced into such a subject; for it is not easy to find any reason, in the subject itself, why Helena's subdued, yet cherished and absorbing passion, might not have been. clothed by Shakespeare in thoughts and words as tender as those of Imogen, as intense with passionate beauty as those of Juliet. The only intelligible reason is, that such was not the prevailing mood of the author's mind at the time, nor congruous with the main objects on which he had fixed his attention that the play was thrown into its present shape, and assumed its present expression, at a time when the author's moral and reflective faculty was more active and engrossing than his poetic fancy, or his dramatic imitative power. "The contrast of two different moods of thought and manners of expression, here mixed in the same piece, must be evident to all who have made the shades and gradations of Shakespeare's varying and progressive taste and mind at all a subject of study. At any rate, the opinion just expressed was formed before the writer learned, from Mr. Collier's information, that it was the opinion of Coleridge, an opinion which he first delivered in 1813, and again in 1818, though it is not found in his Literary Remains, that All's Well that Ends Well, as it has come down to us, was written at two different, and rather distant periods of the Poet's life. He pointed out very clearly two distinct styles, not only of thought, but of expression; and Professor Tieck, at a later date, adopted and enforced the same belief.' Whether Coleridge regarded the additions as belonging to the same period of the author's manner to which it has been here assigned, I am unable to say. Tieck appears to ascribe to an earlier period some of the darker and thought-burdened passages which I should assign to that later period, when the Poet's mind brooded habitually, in pity or in anger, over man's vices and misery. Still the contrast of diction and thought struck the acute German as much as it must do the student of his own native language." To be somewhat more particular than Mr. Verplanck, it is to be observed that passages of rhymed couplets, in which the thought is somewhat constrained and its expression limited by the form of the verse, are scattered freely through the play, and that these are found side by side with passages of blank verse in which the thought, on the contrary, so entirely dominates the form, and overloads and weighs it down, as to produce the impres sion that the poet, in writing them, was almost regardless of the graces of his art, and merely sought an expression of his ideas in the most compressed and elliptical form. The former trait is characteristic of his youthful style; the latter marks a certain period of his maturer years. Contracted words, which Shakespeare used more freely in his later than in his earlier works, abound; and in some passages words are used in an esoteric sense which is distinctive of the poet's style about the time when Measure for Measure was produced. Note, for instance, the use of 'succeed' in "owe and succeed thy weakness," in Act II. Sc. 4 of that play, and in "succeed thy father in manners," Act I. Sc. 1 of this. It is to be observed, also, that the advice given by the Countess to Bertram when he leaves Rousillon is so like that of Polonius to Laertes in a similar situation, that either the latter is an expansion of the former, or the former a reminiscence of the latter; and as the passage is written in the later style, the second supposition appears the more probable. Finally, it is worthy of remark that both the French officers who figure in this play as 1 Lord and 2 Lord are, somewhat strangely, named Dumain, and that in Love's Labour's Lost, Dumain is also the name of that one of the three attendants and brothers in love of the King who has a post in the army; which, when taken in connection with other circumstances, is at least a hint of some relation between the two plays. There seems, therefore, to be warrant for the decided opinion that Shakespeare, in the earlier part of his career, after the production of Love's Labour's Lost, and probably a little before that of Romeo and Juliet, desiring to bring out a counterpart to the former, pitched upon Boccaccio's story of Giglietta of Narbon as containing the materials for a comedy to be called Love's Labour's Won; - that he produced this play some three or four years before Meres wrote his Palladis Tamia - perhaps in 1593 or 1594; and that after its novelty was well worn off it was laid aside, and when it had passed out of the public mind, probably about 1604, he rewrote many passages, retouched many others, and brought it out again under a new name. It is worthy of remark that the adage which furnished this name occurs three times in those parts of the play― Act IV. Sc. 4, and Act V. Sc. 1- which bear most unmistakable marks of the later of the two styles which are to be distinguished in the comedy. The folio is the only source of the text, which appears there in a very unsatisfactory state. Indeed, there is no play of Shakespeare which gives the reader and the editor more fruitless trouble than this. No other is more deformed by the corruption of important passages: and this corruption is doubtless chiefly due to two reasons; - first, the involved, disjointed, and elliptical style in which the author wrote much of the matter which he added at the revision of the play; - and next, the fact that the play was printed from the very copy in which the author himself had made these alterations and additions, which, there can be little doubt in the mind of any man of letters, or any printer of experience, were in many cases interlined in a manner that, however clear to the poet himself, was obscure enough to a compositor who did not know exactly what his author would be at: — and as to proof-reading, the folio had none of it. Consequently there are some passages in which conjectural criticism is entirely at fault; and in these the original text is given in this edition in its corrupted form. For only the reasonble certainty that we are restoring the poet's own words justifies a change in that text: and the reader of Shakespeare can better pass by a line as incomprehensible, than accept a comprehensible line which is not Shakespeare's. The period of the action of this play is not determinable with any approach to probability, not to say accuracy. Indeed it is more than likely that Shakespeare himself had no clear idea upon the subject. Boccaccio wrote about 1350; but the Florentines and Siennese were constantly at petty war during the middle ages. The allusion to Austria and its Duke, as the latter has no influence on the action of the play, is a mere touch of local color, and is of no value in the consideration of this question. The incidents upon which the action does turn are such as could have happened only in the society of an early feudal period; but the comic Scenes have all the stamp of Shakespeare's own time; and dramatic propriety will be entirely preserved by adopting the costume of that day - authority for which exists in Vecelli and Montfauçon. DRAMATIS PERSONE. KING of France. DUKE of Florence. BERTRAM, Count of Rousillon. LAFEU, an old Lord. PAROLLES, a follower of Bertram. French Lords serving in the Florentine Army. Steward, Clown, A Page. } to the Dowager Countess of Rousillon. Dowager COUNTESS of Rousillon. HELENA, a Gentlewoman protected by the Countess. Lords attending on the King. French and Florentine Officers and Soldiers. SCENE: partly in France, partly in Tuscany. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. ACT I. SCENE I. Rousillon. A Room in the COUNTESS's Palace. Enter BERTRAM, the COUNTESS of Rousillon, IN COUNTESS. N delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband. Bertram. 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, evermore in subjection. Lafeu. 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 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 abandon'd his physicians, Madam; |