All’s well that ends well

Famous of course as the title of one of Shakespeare’s plays c.1601, this expression meaning that any enterprise with a satisfactory ending justifies the risk, was a well-known proverb long before Shakespeare adopted it. It appears in John Heywood Proverbs (1546) but there is evidence that it was known in English at least a 100 years before and in Latin before that. As with many proverbs, the universal truths that most of them express make it highly probable they existed in many ancient texts now lost to us. There is a citation for the following Latin version in Gesta Romanorum, “Si finis bonus est totum bonum erit” which means, if the end is good, all will be good. This translation from the ancient Latin text was completed during the 13th or 14th century.