All’s Well That Ends Well by Shakespeare

“All’s Well That Ends Well”: it’s a phrase that rolls off the tongue without stirring much more than a pleasant sensation, but with layer upon layer of thought encoded in its monosyllables. One could write an entire doctoral thesis on the significance of this modest yet rich phrase. Too, one could write reams about the many layers of meaning to this play. “All’s Well That Ends Well” is actually a complex reworking of “the ninth story of the third day of Boccaccio’s “Decameron” (Barton 535). But, if anything, it’s neither simply pleasant nor entirely monosyllabic. As the title says, it’s “All’s” well that ends well: there’s a bit of everything in this comedy. Bed tricks, ruses, disguises, fools, clowns, social constraint, villainy, death, seduction, etc, course through both blank verse and rhyming couplets. But one has to marvel at the brilliance and all-inclusiveness of that title.

“All’s Well That Ends Well” is about the ofttimes unfortunate and comedic discrepancy between word and deed. It’s an exploration of the tension between saying and doing as represented by such duplicitous characters as the aptly named Parolles and the clown Lavatch, or in the misguided and elitist behavior of Bertram, and at the core of Helena’s values-an intrinsic consistency of word equals deed that Bertram fails to grasp even when she presents him with the play’s two deal-makers, the ring and unborn child.

Unlike those around her, Helena is what she says she is and does what she says she’ll do-almost. For even Helena, the peerless example of virtue, must stoop to subterfuge in order to move through this world where “the fine’s the crown” (Shakespeare 569). But that’s Shakespeare for you, isn’t it?

Do the ends justify the means? Can a thing be and do what it says? Ironically, in Shakespeare a thing is a thing, yet it may be something entirely different in order to prove that things must be and do what they say. For Shakespeare makes use of the double-entendre, simile, metaphor, and all manner of linguistic devices as well as the aforementioned plot devices in his plays. Shakespeare is the master of employing “both” “and”.

It’s no surprise, then, that at the play’s end we find Helena transformed from a wife in name alone to a corporeal and worthy woman who is at once herself (which she was at the start of the play) and now somehow more of herself. This is a play in which a person or thing is not a matter of words alone, but has value in and of itself if it is true-if it is well. “All’s” well that ends well: all=everything. Not partially, not proportionally, but “all”. And Helena is the only character that has “all”. No wonder Shakespeare has her mouth the lines “All well that ends well!” (569).