All's Well That Ends Well

Summary

All's Well That Ends Well turns on a cure. Helena, orphaned daughter of the famous physician Gerard de Narbon, lives as a ward in the household of the Countess of Rossillon and loves the Countess's son Bertram, who is far above her in rank. When Bertram leaves for the French court, where the King is dying of a fistula his doctors have abandoned, Helena follows with one of her father's prescriptions. She persuades the reluctant King to try it, staking her life on its success, and asks as her reward the husband of her choice. Cured, the King gives her Bertram. Bertram, disgusted at marrying 'a poor physician's daughter', obeys in form only: he sends Helena home unbedded and runs away to the Florentine wars with his flashy companion Parolles, leaving a letter that he will call her wife only when she has the ancestral ring from his finger and is carrying his child. Helena leaves Rossillon disguised as a pilgrim, so that Bertram, believing her gone, may come home. In Florence she lodges with a widow whose daughter Diana is being pursued by Bertram. With Diana's and the widow's consent Helena arranges the 'bed trick': Diana demands Bertram's ring as the price of a night, and Helena takes her place in the dark. Meanwhile the French lords expose Parolles: blindfolded and 'captured' by his own comrades speaking nonsense, he betrays every military secret and insults his master to save his life. Reports that Helena has died reach both Florence and Rossillon. Bertram returns to France, where the King has forgiven him and is ready to marry him to the old lord Lafew's daughter, until the King recognises Helena's ring on his finger. Bertram lies, Diana arrives to claim him, and only when Helena appears, pregnant and holding the ring, are the riddles solved. Bertram asks pardon and promises to love her 'dearly, ever, ever dearly', in a couplet whose conditional 'If' has troubled audiences ever since. Probably written around 1604–05 and first printed in the 1623 Folio, the play adapts a tale from Boccaccio's Decameron (Day 3, Story 9). It is often grouped with Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida as a 'problem play', because its comic shape sits uneasily over hard material: an unwilling husband, a deception performed in bed, and a happy ending that the title asserts and the last scene only half delivers. The play rewards study for its arguments about merit and birth, especially the King's speech that honour should come 'from our acts' rather than from ancestors, for its portrait of a woman healer who outdoes the learned faculty, and for Parolles, a coward who discovers that 'simply the thing I am' is enough to live on. Teachers should know that the bed trick and Parolles's bawdy talk about virginity in Act 1 require mature readers.

Plot or Argument

• Act 1: Mourning at Rossillon

  The Countess, newly widowed, sends Bertram to court. Helena, grieving for her father, reveals in soliloquy that her real sorrow is love for Bertram, and spars with Parolles about virginity. The Countess's steward overhears her love; the Countess draws a confession from her and gives her leave to go to Paris with her father's remedy for the King.

• Act 2, Scenes 1–3: The cure and the choosing

  Lafew brings Helena to the King, who first refuses to 'prostitute' his incurable malady to empirics, then yields to her confidence and her wager of her own life. Cured, the King gathers his wards; Helena passes over several lords and chooses Bertram, who refuses until the King threatens him and lectures him on true honour.

• Act 2, Scenes 4–5: Wedded, not bedded

  Urged by Parolles that 'A young man married is a man that’s marr’d', Bertram decides to flee to the Italian wars and sends Helena home with a cold farewell. Lafew sees through Parolles and baits him.

• Act 3: Pilgrim to Florence

  The Countess receives Bertram's letter setting the impossible conditions and disowns her son's conduct. Helena blames herself for driving him into danger and leaves secretly as a pilgrim to Saint Jaques. In Florence she meets the Widow and Diana, learns that Bertram is courting Diana, and wins their help for a plan that is, in her words, 'wicked meaning in a lawful deed'.

• Act 4, Scenes 1–3: The unmasking of Parolles

  The French lords stage a mock capture of Parolles, who has boasted he will recover a lost regimental drum. Blindfolded and interrogated in invented gibberish, he betrays numbers, names and Bertram's character. Unmasked, he resolves to live on as he is. The lords report Bertram's seduction of Diana and news of Helena's death.

• Act 4, Scenes 4–5: 'All's well that ends well'

  Helena prepares to return to France with the Widow and Diana, consoling them with the proverb that gives the play its title. At Rossillon the Countess and Lafew mourn Helena, and Lafew proposes a marriage between his daughter and Bertram.

• Act 5: The ring and the riddle

  Helena misses the King at Marseilles and follows him to Rossillon. The King forgives Bertram, but recognises the ring Helena once had from him. Bertram's lies multiply, Diana claims him as her seducer, Parolles gives evasive evidence, and the King orders arrests until Diana presents her riddle, 'one that’s dead is quick', and Helena enters. Bertram asks pardon; the King offers Diana a husband of her choice; an epilogue asks the audience for applause.

Characters

• Helena, heroine

  Daughter of the physician Gerard de Narbon and ward of the Countess. Resourceful, devout in speech and relentless in pursuit of Bertram, she heals the King, chooses her husband and fulfils his conditions by stratagem.

• Bertram, Count of Rossillon

  Young, proud and untried, he refuses a wife chosen beneath his rank, deserts her, lies freely in the last scene, and submits only when exposed.

• The Countess of Rossillon, Bertram's mother

  A widow of great dignity who loves Helena as a daughter and judges her own son's conduct severely.

• The King of France, ruler and patient

  Ageing and near death when the play begins; once cured, he uses his authority to impose the marriage and to defend virtue against birth.

• Parolles, Bertram's follower

  A braggart soldier dressed in scarves whose name means 'words'. His exposure in Act 4 parallels Bertram's in Act 5, and he ends as a hanger-on in Lafew's service.

• Lafew, old lord

  Shrewd, humorous courtier who introduces Helena to the King and sees through Parolles at first meeting.

• Diana, Florentine maiden

  Daughter of the Widow, courted by Bertram; she bargains for his ring, lends her name to the bed trick and confounds the court with riddles in Act 5.

• The Widow, Diana's mother

  A Florentine of good birth and fallen fortune who agrees, for Helena's gold and assurances, to the plan that preserves her daughter's honour.

• The Clown (Lavatch), Countess's servant

  A cynical, bawdy household fool whose talk of marriage and the court comments sideways on the main plot.

• The two French Lords (the Dumaine brothers), officers in Florence

  Bertram's fellow soldiers who devise Parolles's unmasking and speak the play's most balanced moral judgments.

Lessons

• Honour from deeds, not from blood

  When Bertram scorns Helena's birth, the King answers that blood mixed in a basin cannot be told apart, and that 'The place is dignified by the doer’s deed.' The speech is a strong statement of honour as earned rather than inherited. Yet the same King enforces the marriage by royal command, which raises the question whether virtue can be rewarded by compulsion.

  • Summarise the King's argument in Act 2, Scene 3. Which of his claims is strongest?
  • Does the King's power to 'build up' Helena's title contradict his own argument that titles are empty?
  • Is Bertram wrong to refuse a wife he does not love, even if his reason (her rank) is a poor one?

• A physician's daughter and the learned college

  The King's doctors and the 'congregated college' have given him up; Helena, 'a poor unlearned virgin', cures him with a remedy her father tested by experience. Shakespeare stages a contest between official learning and practical skill, and Helena frames her cure as heaven's work through a weak instrument. Students can see both early modern debates about medicine and a theological claim about providence.

  • Why does the King fear being thought credulous if he trusts an 'empiric'?
  • Helena says 'Of heaven, not me, make an experiment.' Is this humility, persuasion, or both?
  • Lafew mocks those who 'make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless'. What attitude to wonder does the play recommend?

• Wicked meaning, lawful deed

  Helena describes the bed trick as a paradox: Bertram intends adultery, she intends lawful union, and the act is lawful though his meaning is sinful. The scheme borrows a story pattern from Boccaccio and the Bible (Leah and Jacob, Tamar and Judah). Students should weigh whether good ends justify deceptive means and how the play itself judges the plan.

  • Read Helena's couplets at the end of Act 3, Scene 7. Does her reasoning hold?
  • How do the Widow and Diana protect their own honour while helping her?
  • Compare Helena's stratagem with Tamar's in Genesis 38. What does each woman seek?

• Parolles and the shame that saves

  Parolles is a coward who dresses as a soldier. Unmasked before his comrades, he does not repent so much as accept his size: 'Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live.' His humiliation prepares for Bertram's in Act 5, where a nobleman is caught in lies before the court. The First Lord's comment that life is 'a mingled yarn, good and ill together' gives the play's most generous moral frame.

  • What does Parolles learn about himself in Act 4, Scene 3, and is it enough?
  • Why does Lafew take Parolles into his service at the end?
  • How does the 'mingled yarn' speech change the way we judge Bertram?

• Does all end well?

  The title is a proverb Helena speaks in Act 4, Scene 4, and the King's final couplet says only that all 'yet seems well'. Bertram's promise to love Helena comes with an 'If', and the epilogue asks the audience to supply the approval the ending lacks. Students should practise reading an ending that knows its own uncertainty.

  • List every 'if' and 'seems' in the last fifty lines. What effect do they have?
  • Is Bertram's repentance believable? What would an actor need to do to make it so?
  • Can a marriage that began in compulsion and deception become a good one? What does the play suggest?

Context

The play belongs to the years around the accession of James I (1603), when Shakespeare also wrote Measure for Measure and Othello. Its French and Italian settings, its court of wards, and its Florentine war draw on the conventions of romance novella rather than on any specific historical campaign. Wardship, the crown's right to control the marriages of noble orphans, was a real and resented institution in England, which gives the King's disposal of Bertram a contemporary edge.

Composition

No quarto was printed and there is no record of performance in Shakespeare's lifetime; the play first appeared in the 1623 First Folio. Dates between about 1602 and 1606 have been proposed on grounds of style and its kinship with Measure for Measure; around 1604–05 is a common estimate. The plot comes from Boccaccio's Decameron, Day 3, Story 9 (Giletta of Narbonne), which Shakespeare probably read in William Painter's English version in The Palace of Pleasure (1566). Parolles, the Countess, Lafew and the Clown have no counterparts in the source. Some recent scholars have argued that Thomas Middleton had a hand in the text; this remains a proposal, not a consensus.

Reception

The first recorded performance is at Goodman's Fields, London, in 1741. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences enjoyed Parolles but were troubled by Helena's pursuit and the bed trick, and the play was often cut or rarely staged; Samuel Johnson wrote that he could not reconcile his heart to Bertram. In 1896 F. S. Boas grouped it among Shakespeare's 'problem plays', a label still common. Twentieth-century productions, notably Tyrone Guthrie's (1953) and Trevor Nunn's (1981), helped restore its reputation.

Comparisons

• Measure for Measure

  Both plays of about 1604 use a bed trick to bind a reluctant man to a woman he has wronged: Helena substitutes for Diana with Bertram, as Mariana does for Isabella with Angelo. In Measure for Measure a Duke engineers the trick; in All's Well the woman who benefits designs it herself.

• Twelfth Night

  Each play features a resourceful heroine who loves above or beyond her station and a gull exposed by a practical joke. Malvolio is tricked by a letter and leaves vowing revenge; Parolles is tricked by a fake ambush and stays, accepting what he is.

• Troilus and Cressida

  Written in the same years and placed with All's Well among the 'problem plays', Troilus treats honour and war with open bitterness. All's Well keeps a comic shape and a healing at its centre, but shares the sense that military glory and noble titles can be hollow.

• The Winter's Tale

  Both end with a woman thought dead restored to a husband who has wronged her, before a king. Hermione's return feels like grace given after sixteen years of penance; Helena's is the planned climax of her own campaign, and Bertram's repentance comes in a few lines.

• Much Ado About Nothing

  Much Ado also turns on a woman reported dead so that a slandered match can be remade, and on a braggart's exposure. Claudio, like Bertram, is a young nobleman who behaves badly and is forgiven quickly, which invites the same question of whether the comic ending is earned.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The whole plot hangs on a medical event: a dying King, a fistula his physicians have abandoned, and a cure by a woman using her dead father's tested prescription. The play stages the status anxieties of early modern medicine: the King's fear of 'empirics' (unlicensed practitioners), the authority of 'the congregated college' (suggesting the London College of Physicians), Parolles's mention of 'Galen and Paracelsus' as the two rival authorities, and Helena's wager of her own life as a guarantee of her treatment. Shakespeare never names the remedy and gives no clinical detail; claims that the fistula is a veiled venereal disease are critical speculation. Helena's healing is also framed providentially, which lets the play hold medicine and miracle together.

• Act 1, Scene 1

  Lafew reports that the King has abandoned his physicians; the Countess praises Gerard de Narbon's skill, Lafew names the disease as a fistula, and Lafew and the Countess discuss moderate and excessive grief.

  Physicians Doctors Grief
• Act 1, Scene 3

  Helena tells the Countess of her father's prescriptions 'of rare and prov’d effects', and the Countess doubts that the court will credit 'a poor unlearned virgin' when the schools have given up.

  Women and Medicine Physicians Doctors
• Act 2, Scene 1

  The King refuses to 'prostitute our past-cure malady / To empirics'; Helena offers her life as forfeit if the cure fails, and the King accepts her as 'Sweet practiser'. A model scene for consent, risk and the credentials of a healer.

  Quackery Charlatans Medical Ethics Physicians Doctors Women and Medicine
• Act 2, Scene 3

  Lafew and Parolles discuss the cure as a wonder, the King having been given up by 'Galen and Paracelsus' and 'all the learned and authentic fellows'.

  Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors
• Act 5, Scene 3

  The restored but aged King speaks of 'the inaudible and noiseless foot of time' stealing on his decrees.

  Aging Senescence

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation, never shown on stage, between Helena and the Widow on the night of the bed trick, as they wait for Bertram to arrive.

• Essay

  Is Helena the heroine or the problem of All's Well That Ends Well? Argue from at least three scenes, and treat her own words about heaven seriously.

• Classroom

  Stage the last thirty lines of Act 5, Scene 3 twice, once with Bertram sincerely repentant and once grudging. Record what changes in voice, gesture and placement, and which version the text better supports.

• Fiction

  Write Gerard de Narbon's deathbed instructions to Helena about the prescription, in prose or blank verse, using what Act 1, Scene 3 and Act 2, Scene 1 tell us.

Further Reading

• The Decameron, Day 3, Story 9, Giovanni Boccaccio

  The tale of Giletta of Narbonne, Shakespeare's source.

• The Palace of Pleasure, William Painter

  The 1566 English collection through which Shakespeare probably knew Boccaccio's story.

• Shakspere and His Predecessors, Frederick S. Boas

  The 1896 study that grouped the play among the 'problem plays'.

• Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare

  The companion play with a second bed trick.