The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Sixty-Seven Love's Labour's Won

Love's Labour's Won is, in fact, the first version of the play now known as All's Well That Ends Well. It was one of Mr Shakespeare's earliest comedies, a companion piece in spirit to his Love's Labour's Lost.

I count this particular revision a spoiling and a pity. The trouble with All's Well That Ends Well is that you can see two hands at work in it. Both of them are Shakespeare, but the second is Shakespeare in a ruthless mood. Something about the froth of the original dissatisfied him. But in slashing out several key speeches he had given to Helena he removed, in my opinion, the heart of the thing.

As promised in Chapter Seventeen (the one where I first told you about the room where I am writing this book) I will now give you all that remains in my possession of Love's Labour's Won. As you will see, this consists entirely of Helena's speeches, as I remember them, and as I had written them out for my learning. Where they fit into All's Well That Ends Well, as it stands now, I cannot exactly remember. That play, to speak plainly, is a spatchcock. It was never popular with the public, nor was Helena a favourite part of mine.

As to the clever place where I conceal this treasure - would it surprise you, sir, to look under your nose? The best place to hide anything is out in the open. Therefore, I keep all that is left of Love's Labour's Won in that envelope there on the mantelpiece. Yes, madam, that one, propped beside my clock, which (as you say) you had not even noticed. Here, hand me the pages down, and I will speak them for you ...

First, Helena remembers her childhood in Narbonne, the hot south-land where her father was a physician:

'Twas ever summer in my dandled days

But sometime when the sky grew tired with heat

Slow thundry raindrops came, O it rained kisses

To cool my ear with whispers.

Then quickly flowers were jewels and moss was treasure

And long laburnam dripped like melting gold

And in the interstices of the stones

Small snails and lizards, spiders and black toads

Slid their wet scales against the cavern walls

Into the business of the flooded day.

First there was murmur in the tops of trees

Where the sky moved to ease the spate of rain,

Which though you could not see the branches tossed

To lay your hand upon the unmoved trunk

You knew the coming splendour of the storm,

And found the whole world water.

Great rivers grew where little trickles ran

And swans sat on them, cygnets in their wings,

And tall flamingoes beat against the wind

To find a higher perch above the surge.

All round me in the trees were watching eyes

As small things shivered for the wind and rain

And saw their masters ruffled from their lairs

Shake angry paws and pick fastidious ways

To proper earth where they could sit and lord it,

Letting the storm borrow their wilderness

And waiting for its idle strength to spend.

Which, when it had, the sun unburst his heat

And drew the vapours steaming from the ground

And with his stupid vapour hung the air

Till everything became itself again.

Among their drying stones the lizards lurked

And from the hill the lions swung their way,

Drooping their heads and blinking in a dream

As if the sky had never touched their peace.

Then, after they had passed, I saw a man -

A figure made of stone who stood whereat

That torrent had splashed down, sudden and strong.

Thinking I saw him move I held my breath

But he was stone and still and blind as silence.

And all around him in the working grass

The insects hummed, and birds' wings rushed again,

And all the noises heard themselves once more.

This next little excised passage came where Helena made her entrance in Scene 3 of the first Act, just after her guardian the Countess has spoken of love as 'this thorn' which belongs to 'our rose of youth'. No doubt the speech is too abrupt and not a little obscure, but (again) I think that its excision takes sympathy away from Helena who as she exists in All's Well That Ends Well lacks the essential dash of poetic feeling that's necessary to her deeds. Without lines like these, her pursuit of Bertram, and her use of the bed-trick, can strike the audience as repellent.

Anyway, picking up the image just expressed by the Countess of Rousillon, Bertram's mother, in Love's Labour's Won I had to say as Helena:

A counterfeit of silence is the rose -

For it's substantial fire, a patient palace

Listening to ghosts, a sorrow in sunlight.

Then there is this, which must come from Act IV, when Helena is in the widow's house in Florence, about to perform her trick on Bertram:

Far, far from such festivity of flesh

I dream in ignorance of sanctuary,

Night-compassed.

How may the swarming sun the hive of flesh

Exhaust our quintessential sense, madam?

All men are strangers! O rivers, rivers,

Solve in your too bright burden of reflection

The hubbub of an overhanging noon,

And by your volubility hush up

The synonyms of Echo.

Where this came in, God only knows, but I consider it a shame to have lost so much imagery of pretty fishes, which again adds beauty to the part of Helena:

Those rainbow waters vellumy

Are all the pages of my book:

A kind of prick-fish, stickleback,

And ticklish trout in the binding.

Roach, bleak, loach, minnow, pickerel -

A perch voracious for her own blind eyes

In the frowsty primer of my blindness.

Lavish as gudgeon, the dropsical carp

Came at my call, to troll the sun

Through nibbling nets of moss, or dusk,

Wounded with tench.

And - exhalations smouldering the far water -

The swans drift down on me with Lethe in their wings.

I have this written out as verse, but it may be prose. Here, with your permission, I might mention a private theory of my own - namely, that there are several passages given to female characters in Shakespeare which have been taken for prose but which sound, in fact, quite new and original verse-rhythms. The later speeches of Lady Macbeth, for example, which are printed in the Folio as prose, are to my ear really verse, and very fine verse at that. When I spoke them I delivered them always in measure, and Mr Shakespeare never stopped me. Those lines drawn out in monosyllabic feet seem to me as wonderfully effective as any he wrote. The speeches in the sleep-walking scene, for instance, if spoken as verse, have a very great majesty.

You have had enough of Love's Labour's Won, have you, friends?

Very well, then. But just one speech more, before I put the sheets back in the envelope. This must surely belong at the end, where in All's Well Helena never seems to have sufficient to say to Bertram to make it true in any sense that all ends well:

Helena (to Bertram)

Do not suppose I love you less because

My heart beats words to cheat the meaning out

Of love I cannot cheat so beat with words.

I have had carnal knowledge of the night

And move within the rose's jurisdiction.

Because I lack wet willow's simple touch

Do not suppose I love you overmuch.