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Letters
An essential plot element in All’s Well That Ends Well is the letter. Throughout the play, characters send and receive letters to communicate across distances. Often the time delay involved in sending letters plays a significant role in the plot. For instance, Bertram frequently uses letters as a tactic of delay and retreat, allowing him to escape responsibility and evade disappointing others in person. This is precisely what happens after he lies to Helen’s face about his departure to Florence. Once she’s back in Rossillion, he sends a letter in which he lays out his impossible conditions for acting as Helen’s husband—a cowardly act of evasion. Helen also uses letters as a part of her plot to win Bertram. When she covertly leaves the Countess’s house to go on pilgrimage, she leaves a letter that prevents her adoptive mother from “divert[ing] her intents” (3.4.21). She also writes letters that falsify her death and set up her victorious reentry in the play’s final scene. Letters appear elsewhere as well, as when Parolles’s interrogators find an incriminating letter in his pocket. We also learn that Bertram’s initial courtship of Diana occurred through letters. Throughout the play, then, letters are important tools for delay, misinformation, and deceit.
Metaphors of Love and War
All’s Well That Ends Well features several metaphors that relate love and war. For instance, when the King of France dispatches his lords to the war in Italy, he councils them “not to woo honor but to wed it” (2.1.17). For his part, Bertram is not husband material. And so, though he goes to war, he frames it as an escape from the travails of love: “Great Mars, I put myself into thy file. / . . . I shall prove / A lover of thy drum, hater of love” (3.4.12–14). Tellingly, the women of the play have rather different understanding. Helen, in particular, sees love as a form of war. She indicates as much when, during a discussion about chastity, she asks Parolles: “Man is enemy to virginity. How may we barricado it against him?” (1.1.117–18). Later, speaking of Bertram’s courtship of Diana, she says that he “lays down his wanton siege before her beauty” (3.7.22). This understanding of love as war may explain why Helen takes on the strategies of a military tactician to plot Bertram’s capture. And indeed, her language at the play’s end sounds like that of a military conqueror: “Will you be mine now you are doubly won?” (5.3.359).
Rhetoric of Emptiness
A key idea in the play is that a person’s social class isn’t the true source of nobility. Linked to this theme is a motif in which various characters use the rhetoric of emptiness to poke fun at how shallow those born into the nobility can be. For instance, while attempting to convince Bertram that Parolles isn’t all he’s cracked up to be, Lafew says, “there can be no kernel in this light nut” (2.5.44). His point is that Parolles is all talk, and that he never substantiates his words with action. The Fool makes similar observations about nobles more generally. For example, in a jovial conversation with the Countess he ridicules court nobility for their constant use of the empty phrase, “O Lord, sir” (see act 2, scene 3). Later, the Fool tells Parolles that “to have nothing is to be a great part of your title, which is within a very little of nothing” (2.4.25–26). Amusingly, Parolles confirms the shallow “nothing”-ness of his title by using the phrase “O Lord, sir” (4.3.330) in the interrogation scene where he reveals his cowardly nature to Bertram. But though much of the rhetoric of emptiness is directed at Parolles, it’s important to note how convincingly it applies to Bertram as well.
