SOURCE: "Why Does It End Well? Helena, Bertram, and The Sonnets," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production, Vol. 22, 1969, pp. 79-92.

In the following essay, Warren maintains that the personal emotions found in Shakespeare's sonnets provide some explanation of the puzzling conclusion of All's Well That Ends Well.

An extreme version of the general modern reaction to All's Well occurs in a review of Tyrone Guthrie's 1959 production: 'the tone of the play and its confusion of values . . . raises a dozen issues, only to drop them all with a cynical, indifferent 'all's well that ends well'. No wonder Shaw liked it so much'.¹ Now I am convinced that whatever else the ending of this play may be called—puzzling, unsatisfactory, even bungled—Shakespeare was by no means 'indifferent' and certainly not 'cynical'. I think that his own personal poetry, in the Sonnets, sheds an interesting...