payment page
Summary
The bed-switch trick has succeeded: Helen has taken Diana’s place in Bertram’s arms without him being aware of the deception. Meanwhile, a truce has ended the war, and Bertram, believing his wife to be dead, plans to return to France. Helen thanks the Widow and her daughter profusely for their assistance, and then invites them to accompany her to Marseilles, where the King of France’s court is now located, and where she plans to find her husband and reveal how she has fulfilled his conditions.
Meanwhile, in Rossillion, the Countess laments her daughter-in-law’s death to Lafew, who proposes that Bertram now be betrothed to his daughter. The Countess assents, and the Fool comes in to announce that Bertram has returned home.
In Marseilles, Helen finds that the King has removed his court to Rossillion, and she hurries after him, accompanied by the Widow and Diana.
Parolles arrives at the Countess’s home as a beggar. Lafew takes pity on him and gives him a meal.
Shortly thereafter, as the King prepares to announce Bertram’s new engagement to Lafew’s daughter, he notices a ring on the young Count’s finger that belonged to Helen. Bertram bungles the explanation of how he came by it. Not wanting to tell the story of his dalliance with Diana, he lies and says a Florentine woman threw it to him from her casement. But the King, having given the ring to Helen himself, is furious; he believes that Bertram stole it and threatens to throw him in prison. Just then, Diana enters, and, with her mother beside her, she tells the story of how Bertram seduced her. Parolles, called as a witness, confirms it. Diana declares that she gave the ring to Bertram, but she refuses to say how she came to have it. The King’s anger is now turned on her, but only briefly, since the Widow goes out and returns with Helen, who explains the entire deception, and tells her husband that the conditions have been met: she has his ring and is pregnant with his child. Bertram, repentant, agrees to be a good husband and love Helen. Lafew weeps, and the King promises Diana her choice of husband.
Analysis
As with the bedchamber switch with Diana, Helen’s decision to fake her own death is eminently practical and necessary: only with her out of the way will Bertram return to France. But like her exploitation of male lust in Florence, the falsified reports of her demise leave the audience feeling troubled: her willingness to plunge the people who love her the most—especially the Countess and the King—into deep mourning makes her seem almost ruthless, willing to hurt anyone and do anything to gain her prized yet reluctant Bertram. Still, she does get the job done, and, somewhat fortuitously, the characters all converge on Rossillion for the happy ending.
Or is it a happy ending? Many critics remain unable to reconcile themselves to a finale that asks us to rejoice at a marriage between the worthy Helen and the unpleasant, mediocre Bertram. Certainly, many Shakespearean heroines choose men who are unworthy of them, but then no husband seems as perfectly unsuitable as Bertram. From this perspective, then, the end may be happy for Helen, but it is hardly satisfying. Indeed, the question of why Helen continues to pursue Bertram despite his ever-worsening reputation appears not to have been answered. Although she has proven herself resourceful in orchestrating an elaborate plot to win him, there remains no clarifying evidence that would reveal the cause of her undying affection for the undeserving Bertram. We are left, then, to make the less-than-satisfying conclusion that her love is little more than an extension of a girlhood crush—albeit a crush that she follows through on in the worthiest of ways.
What, then, about Bertram? The play’s final scene focuses on making his treachery public once and for all. Though some critics have argued that his kind words toward Helen in the final scene indicate growth in his character, it’s difficult to sustain that argument when he turns right around and tells despicable lies to the King. He may speak well of Helen, but only now that he believes she’s dead and thus no longer his responsibility. Moreover, the King’s extended interrogation of Bertram about his ring strongly recalls the interrogation of Parolles from act 4. Just as Parolles did under pressure, Bertram seems willing to say anything to save his own skin—in his case by lying until eventually caught out. With all this in mind, it’s possible to interpret the final scene’s primary function not as the resolution of Helen’s marriage plot but as the climax of Bertram’s chastening—the first step toward a possible rehabilitation. We see such possibility in the figure of Parolles, who, though no longer among the count’s companions, finds a minor redemption through Lafew’s kindness as well as his own honest testimony to the King. Bertram is ultimately no better than Parolles, but he still needs to find a way to accept his chastening and grow from it.
The play hastens to its end after Helen’s triumphant reappearance, and the final lines seem subtly to acknowledge how unsettling it all is. The King declares: “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet” (5.3.378–79). Consider these words again: “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet . . .” These are not confident words, and in their lack of surety they undermine the play’s title, which they otherwise closely resemble. This is an important point, since it is Helen who at two points confidently proclaims, “All’s well that ends well” (see 4.5.39 and 5.1.30). From a certain perspective, all’s well at the play’s end in the sense that no one died or suffered harm great harm. Yet for things to have truly ended well, the audience would arguably need to believe that Bertram’s public shaming leads to meaningful change in behavior and to a genuine affection for Helen. For many, though, the play’s hasty dismount isn’t convincing at all. In the end, we may respect Helen’s resourcefulness without loving her, and we might likewise hope for Bertram’s rehabilitation without liking him. Such a quandary is precisely why critics categorize All’s Well That Ends Well as a “problem” comedy.
