Why the original printing of this play should thus have been exceptionally bad, is a matter about which we can only speculate; and as in such cases speculation can hardly lead to any firm result, probably our best way is to note the textual corruption as a fact, and there let it rest.  Still it may be worth the while to observe on this head, that in respect of plot and action the piece is of a somewhat forbidding, not to say repulsive nature; and though it abounds in wisdom, and is not wanting in poetry, and has withal much choice delineation of character, and contains scenes which stream down with the Poet’s raciest English, yet it is not among the plays which readers are often drawn to by mere recollections of delight:  one does not take to it heartily, and can hardly admire it without something of effort:  even when it wins our approval, it seems to do so rather through our sense of right than through our sense of pleasure:  in short, I have to confess that the perusal is more apt to inspire an apologetic than an enthusiastic tone of mind.  It may be a mere fancy of mine; but I have often thought that the extreme badness of the printing may have been partly owing to this cause; that the Poet may have left the manuscript in a more unfinished and illegible state, from a sense of something ungenial and unattractive in the subject-matter and action of the play.

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No direct and certain contemporary notice of All’s Well that Ends Well has come down to us.  But the often-quoted list of Shakespeare’s plays set forth by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598, includes a play called Love’s Labour’s Won,—­a title nowhere else given to any of the Poet’s pieces.  Dr. Farmer, in his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, 1767, first gave out the conjecture, that the two titles belonged to one and the same play; and this opinion has since been concurred or acquiesced in by so many competent critics, that it might well be allowed to pass without further argument.  There is no other of the Poet’s dramas to which that title applies so well, while, on the other hand, it certainly fits this play quite as well as the one it now bears.  The whole play is emphatically love’s labour:  its main interest throughout turns on the unwearied and finally-successful struggles of affection against the most stubborn and disheartening obstacles.  It may indeed be urged that the play entitled Love’s Labour’s Won has been lost; but this, considering what esteem the Poet’s works were held in, both in his time and ever since, is so very improbable as to be hardly worth dwelling upon.  There was far more likelihood that other men’s dross would be fathered upon him than that any of his gold would be lost.  And, in fact, contemporary publishers were so eager to make profit of his reputation, that they forged his name to various plays which most certainly had no touch of his hand.