All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘The Web of Our Life is of a Mingled Yarn’

Episode 211: Through the last few episodes on Shakespeare’s plays, we seem to have seen a playwright in a serious mood, even when he was writing comedies. ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Measure For Measure’ are often referred to as having an autumnal tone, something serious underlying the comedy and of course we also have the even darker worlds of the tragedies of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Othello’. The next play we come to from Shakespeare fits well into this group, but I choose my words carefully there because I can’t say for sure that ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ was his ‘next’ play after ‘Measure For Measure’ as the dating of this comedy is difficult. The dating of the play The sources for the play A brief summary of the plot How Shakespeare subverts the original folk tale into a comedy Irony in the play The two sides of the character of Helen What does Helen see in Bertram? The role reversal between Helen and Bertram The character of Bertram The bed trick The character of Parolas Some examples of criticism of the play The performance history of the play Support the podcast at: You can find an advertisement free version of the latest podcast episodes by joining on Patreon at the lowest paid tier level – that’s for just £1 per month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You can listen to All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘The Web of Our Life is of a Mingled Yarn’ online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘The Web of Our Life is of a Mingled Yarn’ is an episode from The History Of European Theatre by Philip Rowe.

This episode is 33:29 long.

This episode was published on Apr 13, 2026.

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