The Third Eye

This play presents many difficulties. There is nothing quite like it in Shakespeare. It has not the humorous buoyancy of the Comedies, the narrative appeal of Romeo and Juliet, or the intellectual texture of Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure; it resembles none of the Tragedies, nor, in story-structure at least, the Final Plays, though much of it is on their wavelength; ¹ and much of what is not on that wavelength recalls the Sonnets more nearly than any play. We naturally look for a unity of meaning such as that which interpretation has been able to reveal in other works, but the coherence of All’s Well that Ends Well is far less easy to demonstrate. We seem at first to find Shakespeare taking from The Decameron, probably through the medium of Paynter’s Palace of Pleasure, a plot of no particular interest and some silliness into which he has been able to inject comparatively little vitality. Conventional trickery is found in other plays, but does not matter. Here it tends to stick out; we complain that a field of meaning strong enough to assist our ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ has not been generated; and we are accordingly repelled.