[In the following essay, Cartelli suggests that the "problematic" ending of All's Well That Ends Well was purposely created by Shakespeare to prompt the audience to recognize its role as theater-goer, and notice the art of play making.]

I

The problem of closure in All's Well is not a new one. It has been with us since Dr. Johnson first characterized the play's ending as "improbably produced or imperfectly represented" and endures in such forms as Richard A. Levin's recent contention that "At the conclusion of All's Well, we look around the stage and see that a real reckoning has not taken place."¹ And yet, as Ian Donaldson tells us, in no other play of Shakespeare's is the playwright more concerned with the problems of ending and endings as they concern both drama and life.² Appropriately enough, Donaldson also tells us that despite Shakespeare's preoccupation with ending, the formal problem of dramatic closure is never fully resolved by the play-proper. Rather, "All's Well That Ends Well speaks constantly of an end which is not finally realized within its dramatic framework, but pushed forward beyond the play into an undramatized future, . . ."³ In short, the problem remains a problem still, at least insofar as we—as readers, as audiences—require the endings of our plays to confine themselves within the bounds of their dramatic frameworks.

Those who see All's Well trying to do just that, however imperfectly, have rationalized the play's predicament by associating the play with Shakespeare's more obviously successful experiments in kind. As G. K. Hunter has it:

Much of the perversity of the dénouement disappears if we see it as an attempt at the effects gradually mastered in the intervening comedies, and triumphantly achieved in The Winter's Tale, an attempt foiled in All's Well by stylistic and constructional methods inappropriate to the genre.⁴

Working from much the same perspective as Hunter, Richard Wheeler instructively looks backward as well as forward in his own testimony to All's Well's failure to achieve the "controlled unity" only a minority of scholars has claimed for it. Placing the play against the backdrop of Shakespeare's earlier comedies, Wheeler argues that 'All's Well... is unable to absorb entirely the pressures of a changed psychological condition with dramatic strategies rooted in festive comic form."⁵

Briefly summarized, the arguments broached by Hunter and Wheeler commonly designate All's Well as a transitional moment in Shakespeare's development as a playwright, as a rather shaky bridge between the festive comedies and the late romances. Employing an unbalanced mixture of the now inappropriate strategies of festive comedy and the insufficiently mastered methods of late romance, All's Well is incapable, the composite argument goes, of resolving the problems it raises in any psychologically convincing or smoothly stylized manner. Important and illuminating as this argument is, it does not, despite Hunter's suggestion to the contrary, make much of the perversity of the dénouement disappear, much less help us to contend with whatever perversity (if perversity it be) remains after the relevance of the argument is exhausted. An auditor or reader of All's Well who is, for instance, unversed in the triumphant achievement of The Winter's Tale is not likely to be consoled by being told that the best comes later. Comparisons of All's Well with the festive comedies and late romances are, in this respect, most helpful when they enable us to isolate and distill exactly what effects the play is aiming at on its own, and to determine how and in what peculiar way it attempts to achieve them.

II

It is common currency that the endings of plays generally tend to call attention to the artifice of playmaking itself. In Shakespeare especially, an audience or reader is always and ever made aware that a play is moving towards closure when loose threads begin to be tied, mysteries unraveled, and heroes and villains meet their respective noble and ignoble ends. This awareness usually effects the gradual withdrawal of the audience from complete engagement with the cultivated illusion on the stage and prepares it, in Erving Goffman's terms, to forego its role as involved "onlooker" in favor of reassuming the more disinvolved role of "theatergoer" in which status the audience first entered the theater.⁶ In the festive comedies and late romances, Shakespeare negotiates his audience's transformation with no discernible difficulty. The fact that most of us have little problem accepting the endings of these plays as endings attests to his success in integrating the artifice of closure with the reassumption of our original roles as disillusioned theatergoers and with the expectations about closure we have conceivably developed in the course of the production. The endings of such plays are, in the words of Barbara Herrnstein Smith, 'clinched' or 'secured' in a manner that conforms rather faithfully to the generic description of closure, in Smith's words,

In most novels and plays the themes are defined in the reader's perception with considerable certainty as the work unfolds, and his experience of the conclusion follows accordingly. If the conclusion confirms the hypothesis suggested by the work's thematic structure, closure will be to that extent secure; .. . In other words, the end of a play or novel will not appear as an arbitrary cut-off if it leaves us at a point where, with respect to the themes of the work, we feel that we know all there is to know.⁷

As Smith describes it, secure closure depends upon and is virtually synonymous with the intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction of the audience. It is a form of artifice that calls attention to its own status as skillful contrivance, but remains sufficiently consistent with the themes it brings to conclusion that it does not strike the audience as unduly artificial or contrived.

If it is, indeed, secure, closure also maintains an ongoing rhythm with the audience's emerging self-consciousness as it sheds the illusion of involvement in anticipation of the sundering of the world of the play. In his deliberately controversial article on contemporary refuters of Shakespeare's endings, Richard Levin defines this rhythm as "the rhythm of the ending," which rhythm Levin finds "unmistakable in most of Shakespeare's plays and those of his contemporaries":

The repentances and reformations, the reconciliations and restitutions, the distribution of rewards and punishments, the marriages, the festive dance or feast, .. . all operate together very powerfully to create it, and as we get swept along in it we naturally tend to assume—unless there are equally powerful indications to the contrary—that the reformations are genuine, that the marriages are permanent . . . that any leftover details will be taken care of, and the final settlement is final.⁸

The predictable response to Levin's defense of Shakespeare's endings, at least insofar as All's Well is concerned, involves arguing that there are, indeed, "powerful indications to the contrary" in the play which, as it were, break the rhythm of its ending and add a dissonant note to its closural proceedings. If this were the case, then in Smith's terms, the ending of All's Well would present itself as "an arbitrary cut-off," a distinctly ungratifying disclosure that subverts the play's dramatic integrity.

Although I am quite willing to concede that the closure of All's Well is problematic, I am unwilling to do so on the grounds that it is inorganic, arbitrary, rhythmically disruptive, or insufficiently worked-up. Rather, I proceed from the assumption that the problem of closure in All's Well involves the possibly oversubtle operation of Shakespeare's self-consciousness about the role of the playwright as problem-solver upon our conventional expectations about what makes dramatic closure secure, what constitutes the appropriate rhythm of an ending. The entire movement towards closure in All's Well effectively represents a self-reflexive experiment in ending which Shakespeare seems to have undertaken in an effort to maintain a rhythm consistent with his play's eccentric design. What conspicuously distinguishes the ending of All's Well from the endings of the festive comedies and late romances is, of course, its apparent suddenness and speed, what Donaldson calls "the drastic foreshortening of its final twenty-five lines," which foreshortening communicates a psychological as well as dramatic compression.⁹ This foreshortening is, however, symptomatic of the prevailing design of the play as a whole which, unlike the designs of the late romances, does not explicitly smooth out whatever wrinkles the action of the drama may occasion in the minds of its beholders. As Richard Wheeler has noted, "whereas the late romances achieve a design that calls out the fullest dramatic possibilities of. . . immersion in the miraculous and which protects it from the psychological hazards it evokes, All's Well does not."¹⁰

All's Well's failure to protect itself "from the psychological hazards it evokes" has the virtue of drawing out into the open the ever-simmering conflict between the roughness and intractability of human nature and the smoothness and stability that the artful magic of dramatic manipulation would like to impose upon it. It forces the audience into an enhanced awareness of the seams and joints of playmaking devices and compels the audience to play a more attentive role in its own transformation from onlooker to theatergoer. Indeed, as early as IV,iv Shakespeare begins to divide our collective attention between the ongoing process of Helena's problem-solving (which is itself predominantly concerned with the problem of closure) and the far end of the course she has set for herself: "All's well that ends well; still the fine's the crown./Whate'er the course, the end is the renown" (IV,iv,35-36).¹¹ Moreover, what we experience through Helena, from the very start of the play, is the charting of a difficult course of fantasy-fulfillment which, like playmaking itself, thrives as much on obstacles, setbacks, and confusion as on ends and means.

In its basic outlines, All's Well constitutes a very elaborate confirmatory fantasy: that is, a fantasy that not only desires, but requires, confirmation. Although the idea is my own, it is partially indebted to Roger Warren's persuasive documentation of the closeness of this play's emotional interests to the passions that frequently break the surface of the more private world of the sonnets.¹² As a dramatic utterance, artfully crafted and skillfully sublimated, All's Well, of course, operates in a broader, more public field of reference than do the sonnets: in a field of 'others' who resist and recoil from the impulse towards mastery and possession. It is, in short, a play, first and foremost, and, as a play, must rely on the most conventional dramatic strategies to have its starting fantasy—namely, the 'rightness' of Helena's love for Bertram—fulfilled. Fulfilling the fantasy dramatically is clearly a more involved task than simply dwelling upon it privately or poetically. Not only must the immediate object of desire—in this instance, Bertram—be won over, but so too must a correspondingly resistant audience that is less apt than Helena to believe unconditionally in the justice of her dramatic cause. In order to counter this resistance and, eventually, to break it down entirely, Shakespeare needs to make the audience an accomplice in the common quest for an ending that fulfills the audience's need for dramatic and emotional satisfaction, but does not do so at the expense of protecting the audience fully from the psychological disproportion such satisfaction entails. He requires to this end the audience's surrender of its conventional expectations about dramatic wholeness, about closures so securely enforced that no loose ends peep out: a surrender that becomes equivalent to a theatrical act of faith in the rough magic of artifice by which the play effects its confirmation of Helena's fantasy. Helena's confidence that her fantasy will be confirmed—"Though time seem so adverse and means unfit"—is, for that matter, the same kind of confidence we all bring with us when we go to the theater to see a comedy. It exploits, in other words, our reason for going to the theater in the first place, reminds us that the play is a play, is play. Helena is, in this respect, an obvious playwright-figure insofar as her attempt to master, control, and otherwise manipulate a cast of characters that ranges from the Duchess, the King, and Bertram at the start of the play to Diana, the widow, and Bertram again at the end, gives us insight into the ways in which Shakespeare attempts to master, control, and manipulate our own response to the broader fantasy that is the play as a whole.¹³

III

All well and good, but given the abundance of critical dissent on the ending of the play, it would seem that Shakespeare has not made his reminder nearly explicit enough. In placing so great a burden on the ending, Shakespeare has, perhaps, cast in overly bold relief what generally constitutes the most fragile and vulnerable device in the fine art of playmaking. And unconventional considerations to the contrary, what is really potentially dark about this play is not its theme or themes so much as its insistence on confirming an extravagant romantic fantasy which most of us assume could not be confirmed outside the framework of the play-proper, or would not be confirmed in so sudden and promising a manner if it could be confirmed at all. I employ the proverbial designation "dark" in this context because it seems to me that our anxieties as playgoers are not only aroused by what we discern to be "too realistic," but can be provoked when our inmost, hence, most frequently forsaken fantasies are made capable of realization in a world not totally divorced from, but significantly foreign to, our own. To the extent that the world of All's Well remains or becomes foreign to us as the play moves towards closure, our own remains or becomes "dark," empty of the possibilities the play confirms.

My logic here is, admittedly, tricky, so I will try another angle. If the closure of All's Well is deemed more ingenious than ingenuous, the reader or spectator is apt to become more aware than he would be normally of the disparities between art and life, illusion and reality. His sense of ending as a variety of cheating fantasy may darken his conception of the already comparatively restricted possibilities of life outside the theater and, moreover, may undercut the mimetic claims and capacities of the play itself. If, on the other hand, the artifice of ending is felt to be relatively inobtrusive, if it sufficiently transcends its obvious condition as dramatic device so as to seem ingenuous, the reader or spectator is apt to remain relatively unconcerned about the disparities between art and life and is apt, moreover, to engage himself more unconditionally in the fantasy fulfillment afforded by the play-at-hand. Having gone this far, I should now like to take perhaps the even more untenable step of contending that in the last scene of All's Well Shakespeare manages a balancing act that bridges the gap between my two paradigmatic possibilities: makes us acutely conscious of the artifice of ending as a means towards gratifying our desire for emotional satisfaction and secure closure.

Broadly speaking, V,iii presents us with three successive versions of ending: the first a "false" happy ending; the second an equally false tragi-comic ending; and the third our ever problematic ending-proper which is, I believe, "true" insofar as it is earned, but which spills over into a fourth, extra-dramatic ending in the person of the Epilogue. The first version of ending constitutes a rather brutal parody of the conventional happy ending and requires—without being able to command—the same kind of forgiving and forgetting as the endings of the festive comedies require and usually command. As such, it calls immediate attention to its palpable falsity, to its status as an artificial construct imposed from on high by the King of France who records a veritable inventory of the rhetoric of ending as he sets about the business of closure: "I have forgiven and forgotten all" (9); "We are reconcil'd" (21); "The time is fair again" (36); "All is whole" (37). An attentive audience should, for its part, remark the grudging, uneasy undertone at the base of each of these statements, and should especially recoil at the transparently artificial cast of so blatant a piece of rhetorical cant as "All is whole." Cant, however, is the word of the day in this first movement towards closure and, if it is grudgingly delivered by the King, Bertram virtually luxuriates in the rhetoric of courtly duplicity as he protests his love for the ever-behind-the-scenes Maudlin and the long-suffering Helena:

. . . At first
I stuck my choice upon her, ere my heart
Durst make too bold a herald of my tongue;
Where, the impression of mine eye infixing,
Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me,
Which warp'd the line of every other favour,
Scorn'd a fair colour or express'd it stol'n,
Extended or contracted all proportions
To a most hideous object. Thence it came
That she whom all men prais'd, and whom myself
Since I have lost, have lov'd, was in mine eye
The dust that did offend it.

(V,iii,44-55)

What Shakespeare is doing here is providing his audience with a supremely negative representation of the artifice of closure; he is compelling the audience to remark and register the beguiling ways in which style can impose itself on and blot out substance.

But substance will out, even in the midst of the King's attempt to eschew it once and for all. And when it does, this little scenario begins to melt before our willing eyes:

. . . Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave.
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust;
Our own love waking cries to see what's done,
While shameful hate sleeps out the afternoon.
Be this sweet Helen's knell, and now forget her.

(V,iii,60-67)

"Helen's knell," indeed! How do we forget it once it starts ringing? The first seven lines of this passage cut out the ground beneath the eighth and turn the King's desire to "make an end" on its head as comic forgetfulness sinks beneath the weight of tragic awareness. And as it sinks, so too perhaps does our conventional faith in comedy's smooth ways of dealing with the resistance of tragic circumstance. It is, I submit, with an answering sigh of relief from all of us that the King proceeds to tear his own poor excuse for an ending to tatters over the question of Helena's ring. This temporary sundering of falsity has the added effect of schooling the audience in the psychology and mechanics of ending, of making it ill-at-ease with easy solutions and the most palpable devices of plays. Having witnessed the King's own anxiety about patching the holes of a tragic reality with the cloth of comic forgetfulness, the audience conceivably gains insight into the inadequacy of wrapping complicated dramatic packages into neat bundles, brightly be-ribboned and pleasant to look upon. It consequently becomes more skeptical and more demanding as the difficulties of making a satisfactory end mount.

IV

Shakespeare contends with these difficulties not by intensifying the tragic dimensions of the situation, but by reverting to the even more artificial device of the play-within-a-play, beginning with the entrance of the wronged Diana. Upon the reading aloud of her letter—which is, of course, scripted by the true deviser of these revels, Helena—the audience is cued to the commencement of a more satisfactory movement towards closure. Whether it takes that cue or not is, however, dependent upon its response to Bertram whose callousness in side-stepping Diana's indictment makes him seem increasingly not worth the effort expended upon him. Yet effort is expended, and it is expended in a remarkably playful way, given the superficial seriousness of the proceedings. Within the appropriate confines of the play-within-a-play, Shakespeare places Bertram's continued resistance to Helena's wish-fulfillment fantasy in a context in which he is, in the words of Diana, "guilty" and "not guilty" at one and the same time. A completely unsavory Bertram is clearly not in the best interests of secure closure, but neither is a Bertram who is redeemed or redeemable before the time allotted to his dramatic redemption. His present resistance, though it issues in the baldest lies and continues to fasten on the worst excesses of aristocratic chauvinism, is in its way analogous to our own in the face of unconvincingly mediated closure. Although Diana serves as an attractive and appealing stand-in for Helena, she neither embodies for Bertram the moral force soon to be commanded by Helena, nor for the audience the dramatic goal towards which the energies of the play have been tending. Appropriately, as soon as this playlet reaches its climax—with Parolles' testimony on behalf of Diana—it too begins to break apart. This second version of ending fails, as it must, when Diana refuses to fulfill the perverted fantasy she has had Parolles confirm and implicitly calls attention to the artifice of her own playmaking. Even more appropriately, the frustrated King responds to Diana's apparent double-dealing like a fickle playgoer who has not heard what he has come to the theater to hear: "Take her away. I do not like her now" (V,iii,275).¹⁴ In stepping out of her allotted role, Diana puts another crimp in the King's attempt to "make all whole" and again alerts the audience to the inherent difficulty of making things whole within either the province of drama or life. Her reversion to paradox in the face of both the King's and the audience's need for facts to hang on to operates as a conditioning device in regard to our reception of the next attempt at ending which ensues. Wholeness may not, she seems to instruct, be a commodity that is ours for the asking, given the skewed logic of the turns of the heart and, especially, of the turns of this play.

With the ruins of two false endings littering the stage and the language of paradox sounding in all ears—"Dead though she be she feels her young one kick./So there's my riddle: one that's dead is quick" (V,iii,296-97)—Helena is finally resurrected in grand fashion to the instant puzzlement and relief of the King and Bertram respectively. I note the responses of these two representatives of the play's onstage audience in the same breath because each of them embodies the competing impulses of our hypothetical offstage audience that conceivably looks on with a greater sense of understanding and detachment than the two characters can command. The King is at once a frustrated stagemanager and spectator whose desire for secure closure and the appearance of wholeness has made him incapable of fully recognizing and confirming the "true" ending when it actually occurs: "Is there no exorcist/ Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?/Is't real that I see?" (V,iii,298-300), he asks as the appearance of someone for whom he has made no provision disarms him of any control over the situation. For his part, Bertram embodies, in a paradoxical manner, both the audience's previous resistance to confirm Helena's romantic fantasy and its newly-schooled resistance to the artificial endings negotiated first by the King, and then by Diana. Consequently, when he now confirms Helena's fantasy by giving body to "the shadow of a wife" the King had conjured up but could not give life to much earlier in the play, we too are encouraged to overcome our own earlier resistance and confirm that fantasy with him:

Helena. No, my good lord;
'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see;
The name and not the thing.
Bertram. Both, both. O pardon!

(V,iii,300-02)

Although this is precisely the moment in the play to which the now conventional designation "dark comedy" is indebted, I see Bertram's response documenting the exact moment when what amounts to secure closure in this play is clinched. The suddenness of his apparent transformation may remain a problem for normative psychology to solve, but not insofar as the psychology of theatrical experience is concerned.¹⁵ For Bertram is not simply speaking for himself as the words "Both, both" leave his mouth. Rather, he is speaking as well for an audience that has now been conditioned to receive so sudden and seemingly spontaneous a turn as the only acceptable way of negotiating this play's closure. Given its status as privileged spectator, endowed with ample knowledge about the behind-thescenes maneuvering of Helena, the audience cannot be expected to reciprocate the sense of surprise or intimation of the miraculous that informs Bertram's response to Helena's "resurrection." But it can, in all likelihood, respond in kind to the sudden breakdown of Bertram's resistance to Helena and to the fulfillment of her dramatic design which that breakdown confirms.

We are, I believe, meant to be surprised and surprised pleasantly by the simplicity of Bertram's response which follows in the track of so much complexity and complication: surprised by the simple fact that two bodies coming to terms with each other on the stage can do more to persuade us than a more prolonged interaction or a greater showering of words. At the same time we are meant to (indeed, made to) remain aware that the apparent simplicity of this ending is only apparent, that it is indebted to the most conventional and conspicuous theatrical devices: a bed-trick, the confused exchange of rings, mistaken identities, etc.—indebted to, but, significantly, not finally identified with them since these devices provide only a means to an end. This cultivated sense of simplicity encourages us to accept the few last words allotted to Bertram—"If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly/I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly" (V,iii,309-310)—not with the smirk of superior sophistication, or with condescension for Bertram's inability to turn a well-honed blank-verse epigram, but with relief that he says nothing more studied to disturb our collective gratification at a fantasy fulfilled.

If I have presented Bertram as little more than a cipher in an elaborate theatrical design, it is not because I am unaware of the threat he has traditionally posed to the play's attempt to secure closure, but because I believe that Shakespeare has mastered or, at least, controlled that threat by making the breakdown of Bertram's resistance a shared dramatic event. Bertram responds positively to the revelation of Helena, not because he has in the space of three stage-minutes come to terms psychologically with a problem which would probably remain unresolvable in life outside the theater, but because in the foreshortened drama of the stage he has been made capable of distinguishing true endings from false ones. Like the audience—and, moreover, with it—he has been schooled to recognize the true face of closure when he sees it. Drama, and the drama of closure particularly, is the therapy that breaks down his and, conceivably, our own resistance. Bertram's inability to believe is, in short, mastered when he is given something to believe in that makes dramatic sense, however great the psychological disparity between his starting and concluding positions remains.¹⁶

The breakdown of Bertram's resistance does not, in other words, make Bertram whole, a completely realized or thoroughly understandable character or commodity. But making things whole is not, finally, the purpose or intention of this play, a lesson that the King, who continues to arbitrate the ending, has failed to master. If, in our scheme of things, Bertram's response embodies the collective breakdown of the audience's resistance to the dramatic fulfillment of Helena's fantasy, then the King, in his lust for wholeness, embodies the competing desire, which we attribute to playwrights and audiences alike, to tie all loose threads together in the manner of the conventional comic ending: "Let us from point to point in this story know / To make the even truth in pleasure flow" (V,iii,319-320). The King is operating here like a frustrated playwright who needs to realign the steps to conclusion in order, first, to make the truth "even" and, then, to make it yield the kind of "pleasure" which he clearly feels is lacking in the present state of resolution. He is also operating in much the way that an audience, weaned on the general satisfactions of the festive comedies or late romances, might operate in the face of a dramatic resolution that has insufficiently combined psychological truth with dramatic pleasure. In either respect, he is calling the latest device of ending into question, "darkening" the dramatic resolution that has just been achieved by distrusting its efficacy and staying power, and by communicating that distrust to the audience.

He communicates his distrust by reintroducing a note of complexity into the now simplified rhythm of an ending that can hardly brook question if it is to maintain its newly-acquired balance. Observe, for instance, his reversion to the play's characteristically inverted syntax in the last two lines he utters within the confines of the play-proper: "All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,/The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet" (V,iii,327-28). The King's replacement of Helena's "All's well" refrain with "All yet seems well" has given many a reader and scholar pause, especially given the phrase's crucial placement at the exact close of the drama. But the syntactical ambiguity of what immediately follows—"and if it end so meet,/The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet"—is even more striking since it represents the King's defensive attempt to manufacture positive significance and pleasure out of an alliance of "bitter" with "sweet" with which he is clearly uneasy. This casting about by the King on the shoals of rhetorical inversion, as the "flourish" signaled by the stage-direction sounds around him, threatens to undercut, rather than to confirm our faith in the closure Helena has already negotiated. I say "undercut" because in attempting to smooth out paradox and redeem retrospectively the plain facts as we know them, the King proposes an obviously rationalized formula for ending that promises the kinds of conventional satisfactions that are not actually offered by the ending-at-hand. The King is, indeed, a playwright-figure as he goes about the tricky business of trying to bring the "bitter past" to a "more welcome" close. But he is not, for that reason alone, a surrogate for the playwright, Shakespeare, who seems to prefer the comparatively improvisatory art of Helena which promises only a "plain" and not necessarily "even" truth. The King is a character in the play, first and foremost, a character who from start to finish is preoccupied with attempts at mastering or controlling uneven circumstances and events. And it is as such a character that he attempts to encapsulate and formularize the resolution of an event that resists the retrospective imposition of wholeness just as surely as it resisted the false endings that preceded it.

In an apparent effort to qualify the King's notions about what does and does not constitute secure closure, Shakespeare takes the not unusual expedient of having the King step out of character in the play's Epilogue:

The king's a beggar, now the play is done;
All is well ended if this suit be won,
That you express content; which we will pay
With strife to please you, day exceeding day.
Ours be your patience then and yours our parts;
Your gentle hands lend us and take our hearts.

In his altogether indispensable essay on All's Well as a "play of endings," Ian Donaldson sees Shakespeare sustaining here "the notion of apparent endings into the very last moments of theatrical experience:" that is, the notion that since all endings in this play are equally "apparent," they are all equally open, incomplete, unresolved, and unresolving.¹⁷ Although I owe an obvious debt to Donaldson's observations, I cannot follow him in praise of inconclusiveness. In the first place, the speech spoken out-of-character in the Epilogue does not really echo or amplify the sentiments expressed in the speech spoken in character by the King of France a few moments before. In each instance, we do have, as Donaldson notices, a marked emphasis on the "if-ness" or conditionality of things. But in the second speech we have also a subtle displacement of the King's "seems" by the Epilogue's "is", a substitution that is notably consistent with the form of the phrase favored by Helena. In short, if the Epilogue echoes anyone, it echoes Helena for whom the play is well ended when Bertram speaks the magic words "Both, both," whose analogues the Epilogue is soliciting from the audience when it sues for an expression of contentedness. The point is that what the King, in character, could not retrospectively order or command can only be legislated by the audience itself in its willingness to accept the dramatic foreshortening of the play's ending and to become active participants in securing the play's closure. The Epilogue thus serves the extra-dramatic function of having reconfirmed by the theatergoer what has, presumably, been already confirmed by the onlooker. Although we are, as Donaldson states, "beyond the formal closure of the play" in the province of the Epilogue, we are not there to elongate the ending into eternal inconclusiveness. Rather, we are there to register our own triumph as theatergoers over the darkness that descends upon those who, like the King, cannot take the ending for what it is: a form of rough magic, that is no less magical for being rough.

V

We are now ready to return to an earlier point that has, perhaps, been lost sight of and so make an end of our own. I argued earlier that to the extent that the device of ending sticks out as a form of "arbitrary cut-off or transparent artifice, our conception of the play as a whole and of its ending in particular is apt to darken. Now I believe that Shakespeare was, in his way, every bit as aware as we are of this possibility, and that the measure of his awareness can be taken by seeing the King as its exponent. I would contend, moreover, that the crucial role delegated to the King in closing out the play-proper, in having what becomes the penultimate word in respect to the Epilogue that follows, suggests that Shakespeare did not wish to drown dark possibility in the warm bath of secure closure. The darkness is there, and will remain there so long as we have this play before us. It constitutes a conspicuous and instructive reminder that the artifice of ending is, in the end, no more than artifice and cannot, therefore, be of much help to us in negotiating our own endings in our lives outside the theater. But "dark possibility" is not, finally, the prevailing impression with which the play, as play, is geared to leave us. The felt closure carefully cultivated by Shakespeare in the prolonged movement towards ending and the reconfirmation of that closure ingenuously effected by the Epilogue frame and contain the King's and our own uneasiness in a more than merely linear manner. They master and control it by means of one of the strongest appeals commanded by drama—theatrical appeal, the invitation to participate in a fantasy fulfilled—in much the way that the artifice of ending breaks down and, eventually, masters our original resistance which is conquered, finally, by the gratification of our desire—as theatergoers and onlookers alike—to make truths that are and always will remain uneven "in pleasure flow."

Notes

¹ Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare" in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 71-72; Richard A. Levin, "All's Well That Ends Well, and 'All Seems Well'." ShakS 13 (1980), p. 142.

² See Ian Donaldson, "All's Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare's Play of Endings," EIC 27 (1977), pp. 34-55.

³ Donaldson, p. 52.

⁴ G. K. Hunter, "Critical Introduction," New Arden All's Well That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1967), p. iv.

⁵ Richard Wheeler, "The King and the Physician's Daughter: All's Well That Ends Well and the Late Romances," CompD 8:4 (1974-75), p. 324; see also Wheeler's expanded analysis of the play in his recent Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 35-91. The term "controlled unity" belongs to Nicholas Brooke who is, perhaps, the most formidable of that minority of scholars to which I refer. In an essay entitled "All's Well That Ends Well," ShS 30 (1977), Brooke contends that "far from being a play that falls apart," All's Well "has a controlled unity of a kind rare even in Shakespeare" (83).

⁶ See Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 129-130. I am indebted to Duncan Harris for bringing Goffman's distinction to my attention in his contribution to the seminar on the psychology of theatrical experience in which we both participated at the recent International Shakespeare Congress. Harris applies the distinction to the endings of plays in the following passage from his unpublished essay, "Ending the Play and Leaving the Theater: The Dissolution of Audience": " . . . one might expect to find in the closing movement of a play features which, while consistent with or required by the action and aesthetics of the fiction, also affect one of the difficulties specific to the situation of the audience as audience: the transformation of the dominant role of a member of an audience from onlooker to theatergoer."

⁷ Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 120.

⁸ Richard Levin, "Refuting Shakespeare's Endings," MP 72:4 (1975), p. 345.

⁹ Donaldson, p. 53.

¹⁰ Wheeler, "The King and the Physician's Daughter," p. 324.

¹¹ All quotations from the text of the play are taken from the New Arden All's Well That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1967), edited by G. K. Hunter.

¹² See Roger Warren, "Why Does it End Well? Helena, Bertram, and the Sonnets," ShS 22 (1969), pp 79-92.

¹³ See Richard A. Levin, "'All Seems Well'," whose entire essay is devoted to demonstrating how Helena manipulates the other characters throughout the course of the play.

¹⁴ Cf. Donaldson: "Diana's interview with the king, her teasing and riddling answers, tantalizingly interrupt his determined course of action, pushing it away into the realms of 'not yet,' . . ." (51).

¹⁵ One of the problems encountered by the psychoanalytically inclined critic of drama is the temptation to impose normative psychological constructs upon the abnormative conditions of theatrical experience. There is, I would argue, a crucial difference between how characters behave in plays and how people behave in everyday life—between how audiences behave in theaters and how they behave in their homes—that must be observed if psychoanalytic criticism is to prove as potent an interpretive instrument as it can be. In the present instance, Bertram's abbreviated response to Helena is a direct consequence of the conventional shorthand employed by dramatists to compress the normally slow transformations of mood or character we all experience into the necessarily brief stage-moment that is all the time drama can afford to portray them. Responding to this shorthand on its own terms, as an attempt to simplify and distill an otherwise complicated psychological event, and not as an incomplete behavioral profile that poses many more questions than it resolves, is what ultimately distinguishes the psychology of theatrical experience from normative psychology.

¹⁶ Cf. Brooke: "The ending here is . . . right for the dominant tone of the play, the limiting and very precise application of a naturalistic vision to a magical motif (79).

¹⁷ Donaldson, p. 52.