Учебное пособие 4 unit I. The renaissance 1485-1649

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
All’s Well That Ends Well, written about 1603 but not published until the
1623 Folio, adheres to the conventional pattern for comedy, as its title
promises, ending with the reunion of a separated couple. But the reunion is
deeply troubled and troubling. The callow, cowardly, and ungenerous
Bertram is finally successfully paired with Helena, but they have reached that
point through a process that has humiliated each. He immediately flees to
Italy, and she must trick him to consummate the marriage. At the end they
accept each other, but the ending is appropriately hedged with conditionals:
“All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,/ The bitter past, more welcome is

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the sweet.” The stability of even this muted resolution is itself unsettled by
the King’s offer to Diana, a young woman Bertram has tried to seduce, to
choose a husband for herself. At best this offer reveals how little the King has
learned and at worst it threatens to start the dispiriting action all over again.
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
Against the backdrop of the Trojan War,
Prince Troilus
has become
infatuated with Cressida. The young woman is niece to Pandarus, one of the
lords whom Troilus knows well from the battlefield. Cressida has long
admired Troilus but has been wary of showing her affection. However, when
Pandarus steps in and arranges a secret tryst between the pair, she consents.
As Act 3, Scene II of Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida
begins, Pandarus
awaits the arrival of Troilus, who is eagerly anticipating his meeting with
Cressida. Pandarus fetches her in and fusses around the pair, making
preparations for their night together. The play is complex —critics have long
argued over its genre, whether it is tragedy, comedy, or something different
—and this scene demonstrates some of its ambiguity. Although on the
surface the action is that of a romantic union, the talk is more of fear,
falsehood, folly, doubt, and shame, than of love. Moreover, the presence of
Pandarus undercuts any illusion that this is an idyllic, generous-spirited love-
affair, despite Troilus’s apparent concern with integrity, truth, and constancy.
As the young couple walk in together to the bedchamber prepared for them,
Pandarus joins their hands to seal the “bargain” of their love: instead of a
priest to join them in the mutual service of marriage, they have only a
businesslike “pander”, or pimp, able to guarantee only temporal concerns.
Critics always have had trouble classifying
Troilus and Cressida
(written
about 1602) as a tragedy, a history, or a comedy. In many ways it qualifies as
all three, and its earliest readers did not seem to know what kind of play it
was. The editors of the First Folio placed the play at the beginning of the
section of tragedies; the 1609 quarto titles the play The Famous Historie of
Troylus and Cresesid
; and the prefatory note in that edition considers the
play one of Shakespeare’s comedies and worthy of comparison with the best
of the classical comic playwrights. Some critics believe that Troilus
somewhat resembles the satiric comedy in fashion at the time it was written.
The play has two plots. The first, a dramatic version of the siege of Troy by
Greek armies during the Trojan War, and the second, which gives the play its
name, a rendering of the medieval legend of the doomed love between
Troilus, son of the king of Troy, and Cressida, daughter of a Trojan priest
who defects to the Greek side during the war. The legend inspired a number
of other works, including the tragic poem Troilus and Criseyde (1385?) by
Geoffrey Chaucer. Shakespeare’s play, however, brilliantly combines the two
plots in a withering exploration of the realities of both chivalric honor and

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romantic love.