Dating All's Well

3When establishing a date for the composition of All's Well, the evidence with which we might work is generally ambiguous and often contradictory. Because there are no clear external references to the play before it was licensed for the Folio – references in the Stationers' Register, say, or in theatrical account books, or in extant letters – attempts to pin down the play's date are based on evidence derived from the text itself and from more or less impressionistic judgments about the characteristics it shares with plays for which we have more concrete dates. When working with such slippery evidence, scholars often combine a variety of strategies to arrive at plausible dates of composition; these strategies include:

• locating the play among thematically "similar" plays in Shakespeare's corpus, and using the dates of those plays to approximate the date of All's Well;
• locating the play among other plays in Shakespeare's corpus according to its style, and using the dates of those plays to approximate the date of All's Well;
• discerning historically specific topical references that will set a "no-earlier-than" date for the play's composition;
• discerning topical references that locate the play in a historically specific milieu;
• identifying the actors for whom a role was likely written and using the dates during which they were with the Lord Chamberlain's Men or the King's Men in order to set dates for the play's composition.

4Each of these strategies for dating the play is both helpful and inexact, relying for the most part on critical and interpretive arguments that are often compelling but rarely "scientific" in their precision or in the clarity of the answers they provide.

5When the play's themes and tone are thought to indicate the period of the play's composition, All's Wellis often located within Shakespeare's oeuvre alongside Hamlet and the so-called "problem comedies," all of which were written between 1601 (for Hamlet) and 1604 (for Measure for Measure). The argument that All's Well"fits" with this group of plays is generally made by appeal to its relatively dark tone, its preoccupation with paternal mortality (as in Hamlet), its skeptical vision of monarchical moral authority, its almost vulgar preoccupation with female erotic virtue, its general moral pessimism, and its ambiguously "comedic" conclusion.

6Within this group of plays, All's Well is generally allied most closely with Measure for Measure, a play that shares these characteristics with All's Well and that also shares a variety of character types and dramatic devices. In such readings of the play, Helena and Isabella are considered similar characters in that they are both virtuous virgins on a potentially providential mission, and Angelo and Bertram are considered similar characters where their morally repugnant erotic deceptions are publicly exposed. The dénouements of these plays – handled "legalistically" (Hunter xxiv) after a bed trick – are also seen to be quite similar. This presumed close relationship between Measure for Measure and All's Welloften leads critics and editors to date All's Wellin 1603 or 1604, prior to the production of Measure for Measure because Measure for Measure seems more "mature" at many points of this comparison. In Hunter's words, "If All's Well is earlier than Measure for Measure it cannot be later than 1604 – the date normally assigned to Measure for Measure. . . . The close interconnection of the two plays also implies that it is not much earlier" (Hunter xxv). Fraser generally agrees with Hunter (despite Fraser's divergent dating of the play's composition as c. 1605) when he points out that "[a]ffinities in tone and idea with Hamlet and Measure for Measure are often remarked, and since these plays date ascertainably from the early years of the seventeenth century, it seems reasonable to locate All's Well in that period, too" (4). What seems "reasonable" to Fraser here is far from certain, however, and it provides only a tenuous date for the play's composition. Such a method for discerning the date of the play relies most problematically about on perhaps problematic assumptions about Shakespeare's relation to his plays, as if his general mood at one point in his life determines the content of his plays and as if he would be unable to return to themes or issues a few years after he first engaged with them.

7This attempt to date the play by pointing to thematic similarities also seems problematic considering thematic parallels with Shakespeare's late romances and recent debates about Middleton's co-authorship of the play (discussed at length in the introduction to this edition). As Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith point out in their essay on Middleton's co-authorship, All's Well "begins where Pericles ends – with a maiden healing the sick patriarch – and ends where The Winter's Talebegins – with the legible body of a pregnant wife." Similarly intriguing is their recognition that both All's Well and The Winter's Tale conclude with the "resurrection" of a woman presumed dead by her husband. Gordon McMullan's observation that late romances foreground the relationship between mothers and their children further puts All's Well in this group of later plays (16). With these observations in mind, the "thematic parallel" method for dating plays puts the date of composition in 1606 or 1607 just as readily as it puts the play in 1603.

8Where one might turn to All's Well's thematic concerns to derive its date of composition, one might also turn – as many critics and editors have – to the play's "style." Presuming a generally teleological development of Shakespeare's poetic, intellectual, and dramaturgical capacities throughout his career, one can interpolate the date of a play by parsing its characteristics and subsequently situating it along the trajectory of Shakespeare's artistic growth. Until machine-reading became possible in the middle of the twentieth century, such discussions of style were fairly impressionistic, leading to conclusions that seem generally unreliable. Nineteenth-century critics and editors such as Coleridge and Collier, for instance, often pointed up Helen's couplets when speaking to the king in 2.1 and argued that the apparently "immature" verse-form situates the play at an early moment in Shakespeare's career, sometime prior to 1598. Buttressing their argument by conflating All's Well with the Love's Labour's Won mentioned in Francis Meres' 1598 commonplace book Palladis Tamia, these critics often offered an argument for Shakespearean revision: the play seems stylistically "mature" at some points but it seems stylistically "immature" at others, and so it seems that Shakespeare returned to it. For Collier, who followed Coleridge's lead after attending Coleridge's 1811-12 lectures, it seems clear that the play was amended after its early composition, apparently "written at two different, and rather distinct periods of the poet's life" (529).

9Of course, questions of stylistic maturity, particularly in regards to Helen's couplets, are imprecise, and one might read these couplets differently. Hunter, for instance, claims that there is "a complete dramatic justification for the couplets. . . . In II.i the verse begins at the point at which a higher note of exaltation is required, just where Helena begins to enforce the claim to divine sanction and encouragement. The dialogue assumes an incantatory, liturgical tone" (xxi). Fraser similarly finds a "dramatic justification for the couplets" claiming that for "this kind of reminiscence [about Helen's father's quasi-magical medical gifts] . . . we want the recurring rhyme and metronomic beat" – a form that he reads as potentially mature rather than immature (2). Depending on one's reading of Helen, one might also argue that these couplets are dramatically justified as a sign of her selfish scheming: she might here be conspicuously faking an incantatory tone after previously declaring, in a gesture of sheer calculation, that "Our remedies oft in our selves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven" (TLN 223-24). If we read Helen as a schemer, then we might in fact find a sign of a relative "lateness" or dramatically sophisticated "mature ambivalence" rather than a sign of "earliness" or "immaturity" in the couplets Helen delivers. Regardless of our readings of the scene or of Helen's character, however, such debates only emphasize the imprecision that is characteristic of such impressionistic readings of Shakespeare's style and the problems that plague "maturity" as a data point.

10While such impressionistic readings of style mean little when we attempt to date the play, one can also follow a variety of critics and editors who parse "style" in more compelling, formally precise, and empirical ways. After subjecting Shakespeare's corpus to a variety of formal tests – for metrical habits, for rare (to Shakespeare) vocabulary, for colloquialisms, for sense-pauses that measure the relation between speech-endings and line-endings – scholars engaging with All's Welltend to locate the play between 1604 and 1608. This latter date, later than the usual late date of 1605, comes from an unpublished metrical analysis of the play by John Livingston Lowes who dates the play between 1606 and 1608. Hunter and Taylor both mention this analysis, but Lowes' findings and methods are not, as far as we can find, available. Though Brian Vickers has recently called into question the validity of such empirical stylometric analyses in Shakespeare, Co-Author (112-115), they seem more compelling when combined with thematic analyses that tie the play to Measure for Measure and arrive at a similar date between 1603 and 1605 for the composition of All's Well. Making this more empirical strain of stylometric criticism more knotty, however, is the recent authorship debate between Maguire and Smith, on the one hand, and Vickers and Marcus Dahl on the other. Drawing on what they identify as characteristically Middletonian linguistic markers, Maguire and Smith argue for a later date based on what they identify as Middleton's contributions to the play: collaborating late in his career with Middleton on Timon, it makes sense, they suggest, that another collaboration with Middleton would be late in his career, around 1607 or 1608. Vickers and Dahl argue that the evidence is unconvincing and that the linguistic markers that Maguire and Smith identify are far less characteristic of Middleton than they suggest, with Vickers going so far as claiming, in a comment on the Oxford Center for Early Modern Studies blog, that the Middleton attribution is a "hopeless project." As of 4 September 2013, the debate is unsettled, but the critique of Maguire and Smith's position by Vickers and Dahl makes their surprising claims of a later date for All's Well feel particularly uncertain.

11This use of stylometric and thematic analyses of All's Well to determine its date is certainly imprecise, but it seems generally more reliable than other forms of dating analysis that rely on questions of historical topicality, a category that is often troubled by interpretive ambiguities unless topical references are explicit. When dealing with presumed topical references in All's Well, critics and editors have regularly pointed up potential allusions to Queen Elizabeth I in the play's preoccupation with virginity or in lines about "woman's command" (TLN 413). In a similarly suggestive reach, Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson find veiled allusions to the Jacobean Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in references to "underminers" and "blowers up" (TLN 125, 126), thus moving the date of the play's composition some time beyond 1605 (122). Most recent editors and critics have dismissed the idea that the play refers to the Gunpowder plot (see DeSomogyi, xlix), and the arguments for allusions to Elizabeth seem unconvincing. These imagined allusions to Elizabeth are found in a single scene near the end of 1.1 as Helen and Paroles discuss virginity, the nonfecundity of virginity, and the threat that men pose to female erotic virtue. In this context, and considering the broad thematic interests of the All's Well, the specific historical topicality of such allusions is hardly obvious: the play is concerned with chastity and virtue and discussions of chastity and virtue are dramatically justifiable without reference to the virgin Queen, just as a trope that allies military and erotic conquests (the source of the "blowing up" and "undermining") is hardly new and hardly specific to a post-Gunpowder Plot world (see, for example, the similar references in Henry V). Even more problematic, as Snyder points out, the implications of an allusion to Elizabeth are unclear if we hope to use this presumed allusion to determine the date of composition: Does a snide allusion to virginal non-productivity indicate that the play was written in relation to a sitting monarch, or does a critical vision of mature female chastity mean that the play was written after her death in 1603, when such critique would be more politically safe? (24) Where Snyder wrestles with the allusions to Elizabeth – eventually deciding that such a derogatory reference to Elizabeth indicates that the play is post-Elizabethan – it remains unclear that the play invokes the Queen at all, even obliquely. Again, that is, Paroles' derogatory descriptions of mature virgins fit within the play's thematic framework, diffusing their potential allusiveness by rendering them dramatically suitable to the play as a whole.

12The attempt to set a date for the play's composition by looking at presumed casting choices is also a project beset interpretive imprecision, though it seems to provide fairly consistent results in the case of All's Well. When attempting to decide which actor was cast in which role, and thus to set external dates on the play's composition, critics and editors generally turn to the character of Lavatch, the play's clown. Making such a move seems, in some respects, a safe one: if Shakespeare was writing a clown part, then he would likely remember the specific and unique skills of the clowns with whom he was working in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men: Will Kemp prior to 1600 and Robert Armin sometime after the start of 1600. Accepting Leslie Hotson's original distinction between the styles of Kemp and Armin, recently seconded by David Wiles, we can set a terminus ad quem for a play's composition by appeal to the nature of its clown: if the clown seems more physically boisterous, then it was likely played by Kemp prior to 1600; if the clown is more ironically foolish, then it was likely played during or after 1600 by Armin. According to such a logic, and as many editors and critics have noted, we need to put All's Well in the latter camp because Lavatch is clearly more akin to Lear's fool or Feste than he is to Dogberry or Launce (Fraser 2; Hunter xxi; Somogyi xxx; Wiles 65-66, passim). Certainly this strategy for dating the play may be troubled by assorted impressionistic distinctions ("How different is Kemp's clown from Armin's fool? Would either actor have been hamstrung by a different role?") but the post-1600 date seems convincing when combined with the rest of the evidence which strongly suggests a date after the turn of the century. One might, of course, be leery of using the clown to make any more specific claims about the play's date: it seems problematic, for instance, to follow Fraser, who moves the play close to 1606 simply because Lavatch is quite similar in some ways to Apemantus in Timon or to the fool in Lear. If Armin can play Lavatch, Thersites, Lear's fool, Apemantus, and Feste, then such calculations are troubled by the assumption that Shakespeare was writing one type of clown at a certain point in his career when he would be unable or unwilling to write a different type of clown. Such an assumption – plausible or not – remains too uncertain to help us date the play with certainty.

13Considering the evidence that has been marshaled in attempts to date the play, we are left, then, with a date around 1603 or 1604; 1605 remains an unlikely but not impossible outlier, though setting the play's composition in 1605 would date the play after Measure for Measure, a move that many critics find problematic by assuming (on the basis of style and tone) that Measure for Measure is more "mature" than All's Well. Again, such a dating seems reasonable given the ambiguity of the evidence with which we are able to work and the paucity of precise methods we have at our disposal; it also seems compelling because it is a dating derived according to a variety of criteria that count different sorts of data as evidence. In the absence of any radically new methods for dating Shakespeare's plays, in the absence of any new evidence about Shakespeare's compositional practice, and in the absence of any external evidence that would fix the date of composition, 1603-1604 is still the most compelling date we can discern for the composition of All's Well, especially after Skinner has challenged the later date offered by Jackson – a later date on which Taylor's, Smith's and Maguire's later dates are based. Of course, as of 2013, as we deal with lively debates about Middleton's hand in the play, the question remains too open to offer a solid conclusion. Indeed, the openness of these debates speaks to the play's resistance to current critical methods for dating early modern plays. This strangeness is, as Maguire and Smith observe, often clear in the sense of "doubleness" that characterizes criticism on the play: the play often feels Shakespearean and often, in some ways, Middletonian; if written wholly by Shakespeare, then it often feels "early" in its style (as Collier argues), and often feels late (as McMullan argues); the folio often follows typically Shakespearean spellings and conventions, and often it refuses to follow these typically Shakespearean conventions; F1 seems printed from an odd sort of underlying manuscript that exists between foul papers and playbook.