All’s not well if you want subtlety; but then the Globe doesn’t do subtlety and John Dove’s superficial production knows its audience. Helena, a physician’s daughter, heals the king of his sickness and asks, as her reward, to be married to Bertram; but he is a count and doesn’t want to marry somebody who is his social inferior. They are embarrassed and humiliated when the king insists they wed. Bertram declares she will never be his true wife until she can give him an heir and get a ring off his finger. This is going to be difficult since he refuses to consummate the marriage and immediately goes off to fight in the wars. Helena has to resort to that old fairy tale trick: a bit of timely bed-swapping. Bertram is totally unaware who he is bedding.
The play has always been very low-down in the Shakespearean popularity stakes. In the last 30 years there have been only two productions which have been really worth seeing: one by Elija Moshinsky on television and the other by Trevor Nunn for the RSC. Bertram and Helena are, probably, the least attractive hero and heroine in the whole Shakespearean canon. She is an insipid prig and he’s a ruttish liar. It is difficult to find anything positive to say about him and the Globe’s groundlings are audibly outraged by his behaviour and the appalling things he says. The happy ending isn’t happy. (Incidentally, whilst we are on the subject of weddings, by far the best verse speaking I have heard recently was by James Middleton reading from Romans in Westminster Abbey.)
The sub plot is the humiliation of Parolles, a commedia dell’arte cowardly braggart soldier. He is a vulgar, pompous sham, and a vagabond and a fop to boot. The soul of the man is entirely in his clothes. Nobody likes him and everybody sees through him; except for Bertram, and so an elaborate joke has to be played to expose him for the coward everybody already knows he is. King Charles I was much amused; but that scene, where, blindfolded, he believes he is going to be executed, is too cruel to be really funny. Parolles is played by James Garnon who had a big success last year at the Globe when he played King James, as a man afflicted by Tourette’s syndrome, in Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn. Brenton’s play is getting a welcome reprise later this season.