SOURCE: “Lavatch and Service in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 241-58.

[In the following essay, Roark asserts that Lavatch is an indicator of the failure of All's Well That Ends Well, noting that “[t]he fool fails to serve in the same way the play fails to serve.”]

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be consider'd. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

(Hamlet III.ii.38-45)¹

Of Shakespeare's wise fools, Lavatch in All's Well that Ends Well has been the most expendable in performance, and the most superfluous to critics. Tyrone Guthrie's 1953 production of All's Well at Stratford, Ontario, eliminated Lavatch's role.² Robert H. Goldsmith remarks, “he is unlike Shakespeare's other fools in that his role bears no significant relationship to the meaning of All's Well. He is in no way a measure of the play's meaning, as Touchstone, Feste, and Lear's fool are for their plays.”³ Hamlet's advice to the players tells us that fools like Lavatch are mere comic relief, provoking laughter which distracts the audience's attention from the play's necessary questions.

However, Jay Halio writes, “The clown's speeches pose some interesting problems of interpretation which scholarship has left almost entirely ignored; until they are worked out it seems wise to reserve comment on the true function of this character.”⁴ G. K. Hunter observes that “the action of the play is seldom allowed to make simple unimpeded effects, but is complicated throughout by a commentary, implicit as well as explicit, of which the principal agent is the clown.” He notes that “we approach Helena's request to the Countess that she may pursue Bertram by way of Lavatch's request that he may marry Isbel.” Later, the fool speaks of his growing distaste for Isbel at the same time the Countess reads Bertram's letter of rejection for Helena. The fool points to “the distinction between physical nurture and moral discipline so important to the play,” as when Lavatch describes himself as “highly fed and lowly taught.” Hunter wisely remarks in a footnote that “it is dangerous to assume that Shakespeare's clowning is making only obvious points.”⁵

I submit that Lavatch's part, especially when it appears to be most superfluous, can add a crucial dimension to our understanding of All's Well that Ends Well, and is useful for focusing the critical debate about the play's unsatisfying resolution and other problems. Lavatch's fooling with the Countess about an answer that “serves all,” a scene that occurs during the King's healing, has been particularly singled out as obscure. It has been called “silly stuff” by John Dover Wilson, “almost pointless” by Glynne Wickham, and omitted in modern productions directed by Henson, Benthall, Guthrie, and Willman.⁶ Yet in this scene I believe Shakespeare is doing something odd to startle us into paying close attention. The fool goes through an elaborate buildup (twenty-eight lines) to an answer that will serve all men and fit all questions, though this only leads to a disappointing answer—nothing more than an exclamatory remark, “O Lord, Sir!” (II.ii.40). The long prologue and the answer are ridiculous, seem to serve no one, and appear to do nothing more than mock the play's occasional affected courtly talk. It also seems to confirm that Lavatch's part is tenuous.

But, if we begin to consider the scene within the larger dramatic context, it is at this crucial moment that the King's miraculous cure takes place, an answer that does serve all in the sense of serving the entire kingdom. When the King appears in the following scene, after some elaborate introductory remarks by Lafew and Parolles about Helena's miracle cure, it is a moment of festive celebration. Like the ending of many comedies, something heavenly or magical, beyond human comprehension, has restored things to their proper place, after earthly reason has failed.⁷ The folktale origins of the play's story have been noted by W. W. Lawrence, with Helena as a virgin whose magical powers show “a heavenly effect in an earthly actor” (II.iii.24).⁸ Following closely Lavatch's mock invocation to heaven, “O Lord, sir!” as the answer that serves all things, we have Helena's answer that also invokes providence, now to cure the King and thus serving all men. We expect her actions to lead to a happy marriage, the usual comic conclusion.

But like Lavatch's answer, Helena's cure does not really serve all men, especially Bertram. Her remedy for the King is with the help of heaven, but the cure for her love sickness is in stark contrast to the healing because it lies within her own designs:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselve are dull.

(I.ii.215-18)

Helena's thoughts are like the bastard Edmund's attitude in King Lear.⁹ After Gloucester has attributed the kingdom's problems to heaven, Edmund also comments on false beliefs in providential control and such explanations for human behavior: “This is an excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion” (I.ii.121-25). Though it is an unflattering comparison, and though Helena does ally herself with heaven to cure the King, both she and Edmund forego dependence on providence and excel at the same kind of instrumental reasoning, employing various deceptions to rise in society. Both know providence cannot be depended upon and that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.” Whether it is for Bertram's own good or not, the ease with which Helena manipulates him to achieve her end is troubling, especially later in the play with the bed trick.¹⁰ In spite of her professed admiration for Bertram, Helena's plot with the rings is based on an acute understanding of his weaknesses, on her knowledge that Bertram cannot control his lust, which she uses against him. I suggest that her manipulative reasoning, especially as it permits her to move up in society, was troubling for Shakespeare. In none of his other comedies do we find a marriage that attempts to cross such wide social boundaries, and those characters who dream of such things, such as Malvolio, are rudely put in their place. In the great tragedies to come, the skill with which Iago, Edmund, and Lady Macbeth are able to exploit the other characters' weaknesses helps to set the tragic wheels in motion. These characters also aspire to a higher social rank.¹¹

Helena's manipulation of Bertram (even if it is out of love) so that he will recognize her new status (as the King and Countess do) is a basic problem in All's Well that Ends Well that reminds us more of Shakespeare's tragedies than his comedies. However, Shakespeare was aware of this problem and indicates this to us through the fool's discussion with the Countess during the King's healing. At the same moment that Helena is at the height of her heavenly powers, inherited from her father, the fool is also put to the “height” of his “breeding” (II.ii.2), invoking providence, “O Lord, sir!” as the answer that serves all. Helena, following the comic form, has also called upon providence to heal the King so that society can be reconstituted and her marriage follow. But like the fool, and as the action of the play bears out, Helena (and Shakespeare) discover that comic solutions, as Lavatch remarks, “may serve long, but not serve ever” (II.ii.55). The fool's “O Lord, sir!” is a glance at a comic solution by Shakespeare that parodies Helena's solution, points out its limits, and takes place at the same moment she is invoking her solution. The providential solution perhaps serves well for the pastoral (“Tib's rush for Tom's forefinger”) and holiday references (“Shrove Tuesday, a morris for May day”) that the fool invokes, but then fails to serve when the Countess reminds Lavatch that he is a fool, not a courtier, and that his low station makes him subject to whipping. In an odd way, the fool's difficulty is Helena's: invoking heaven, a comic solution, fails to treat the problem of his low station, and similarly Helena's heavenly healing of the King, also a comic solution, is unable to change her station in Bertram's eyes and lead to marriage.¹²

Like these two scenes, the characters in All's Well that Ends Well again and again offer answers that only partially, temporarily, or simply cannot serve the problems they encounter. In Lavatch's “silly stuff” we find a clue to a dominant characteristic of the play: time and again Shakespeare gives us elaborate buildups that often try our patience but lead only to answers that do not serve the problem at hand. Shakespeare takes every opportunity to reiterate this pattern, pointing toward the final episodes, especially Parolles's exposure (his answers only serve to damn him during the elaborate inquisition) and the play's exasperating final scene, where Bertram's “answers” (or rather lies) continually fail, and Helena's plan to reveal the truth seems to bring as many problems as solutions.

In the opening scenes, the characters also dwell on problems that seem unsolvable: first the King's incurable fistula; then the defense of virginity, discussed by Bertram and Helena; and later the service of “our young Lords,” which the King holds to be inadequate. In all three cases, the answer is in a dead or lost past: Gerard de Narbon could cure the King, remaining a virgin was “formerly better,” and the King finds the dead Count Rossillion's service superior to the young lords. With the exception of Helena's cure, often when characters do offer solutions, their answers are contradictory. When the Countess, to assuage Helena's sorrow, calls herself Helena's mother, Helena can only see herself as Bertram's sister, contradicting her wishes for married love (I.iii.158-63); or later in the scene when Helena desires to “Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian / Was both herself and love,” we again have an answer to her problematic love for Bertram that is contradictory. Lavatch's elaborate answer to Helena's inquiry about the Countess's health, expressing that she is both well and not well, underscores this tendency (II.iv.1-13). His answer simply doesn't serve, and it prepares us for the same mutually exclusive answers that Parolles and Diana give in the play's last scene. Parolles's drum is another example: his elaborate complaints trap him with a problem he cannot solve. This is particularly highlighted when the Lords spy on the parasitical soldier ticking off five answers to his dilemma, all of which the Dumains observe are inadequate (IV.i.46-61).

An earlier example of this dominant pattern is Bertram's response to the marriage. Again, the play presents a curiously prolonged, and seemingly unneeded, buildup to the “answer,” Helena's choice of Bertram (II.iii.63-101). Yet thinking that Helena's solution will not serve, but rather corrupt his bloodline forever (II.iii.115-16), he responds to her choice by going to war and serving the Duke of Florence, an answer which serves himself but not the King, his mother, or Helena. For Bertram's difficulties, Shakespeare again offers an instructive parallel with the fool that focuses a necessary question of the play. When we are introduced to Lavatch, Shakespeare presents us with Bertram's problem in reverse. No one is forcing the fool to marry and corrupt his bloodline; rather, the fool petitions the Countess to allow him to marry so that he can “have issue o' my body; for they say barnes are blessings” (I.iii.24-25). The fool is knowingly driven on by the flesh to marry so he may “repent”; Bertram is also driven by the flesh to repent, though unknowingly. The Countess contends that Lavatch should be married before he is wicked, which again recalls Bertram, who is unfaithful after he is married. Lavatch's final reason for marrying strikes us as an absurd answer, and an example of perverted service:

Clown: I am out o'friends, madam; and hope to have friends for my wife's sake.
Countess: Such friends are thine enemies, knave.
Clown: Y'are shallow, madam, in great friends; for the knaves come to do that for me which I am aweary of. He that ears my land spares my team and gives me leave to in the crop; if I be his cuckold, he's my drudge. He that comforts my wife is the cherisher of my flesh and blood; he that cherishes my flesh and blood loves my flesh and blood; he that loves my flesh and blood is my friend. Ergo, he that kisses my wife is my friend.

(I.iii.39-50)

The fool tells us that a man who cuckolds him does him service by cherishing what he cherishes. Even here, the fool's twisted logic relates to Bertram: cuckoldry is not just a problem with an unfaithful wife, but also a problem of awareness: that is, a cuckold is someone whose wife has sex with a man without the husband's awareness, which is what Bertram does when he has intercourse with Helena in Italy. In essence, Bertram cuckolds himself, and if we follow the fool's “logic,” in doing so he becomes his own best friend. Yet our usual logic tells us that the man who cuckolds another's wife is the husband's worst enemy. Shakespeare is careful to emphasize at the opening of the last scene that in losing Helena, along with his seeming ill behavior toward Diana which is revealed moments later, Bertram “Did to his Majesty, his mother, and his lady / Offense of mighty note; but to himself / The greatest wrong of all” (V.iii.13-15). The irony of this, as we sense with the fool's twisted logic, is that Bertram has been at once his own worst enemy and his own best friend, both without his awareness. Lavatch's fooling exposes an uncomfortable contradiction about Bertram, emphasizing that the Count's worst desires, by Helena's trick, do him service, just as the fool's worst embarrassment, cuckoldry, by a trick with logic, does Lavatch service.

Excessive lust, cuckoldry, and the need for greater social status (for whatever reason), are all potentially tragic problems that are linked to service in All's Well. Lavatch's remarks show that service in the play is somehow perverted, especially as that service is related to marriage. In the festive comedies, Shakespeare controls problems with lust or status by relegating them to minor characters, such as Touchstone or Malvolio. But in All's Well these are Helena's and Bertram's difficulties. Our sense of disjunction about the play is summed up by the fool's banter about cuckoldry: we see a tragic problem solved by a trick with logic in a comic or humorous context, after an elaborate buildup, but it is not an answer that we feel satisfied with: it provokes more questions, as most “answers” in the play do, and calls attention to its own inadequacy.

It is with the peculiar behavior of the fool that Shakespeare underscores these difficulties and guides critical assessment of the play. The Countess's response that Lavatch will “ever be a foul-mouth'd and calumnious knave” (I.iii.56) uncomfortably echoes how easy it is to relegate him to a role of mere bawdy mockery or simple parody, as the other characters do. Unlike Touchstone and Feste, whose intelligence is recognized by both Rosalind and Viola respectively, Lavatch's relevance is unnoticed, except for Lafew's brief recognition of his shrewdness (IV.v.63). When Lavatch responds to the Countess's accusation by saying “A prophet I, madam, and I speak the truth the next way” (I.iii.58), he seems to know that his remarks, especially when the fool mentions a man at a women's command, foreshadow Bertram's problems later. Here Lavatch's part hints at the prophetic qualities of fools that become significant in King Lear.

The remark which continues Lavatch's discourse on cuckoldry is also prophetic, “If men could be contented to be what they are, there were no fear in marriage” (I.iii.50-51). Even the wit and wisdom of a Rosalind or Portia does not serve entirely to unite the divisive forces in Shakespeare's festive comedies; rather, it is the characters' recognition of their wisdom's limits and their ability to understand their own weaknesses, or simply be what they are and trust in providence, that enables difficulties to be overcome. Helena's intelligence, especially when she interrupts her pilgrimage and devises the bedtrick, allows her to escape confronting what she is, a skillful doctor's daughter whose station is abhorrent to the one she loves. But both Parolles and Bertram must be rudely introduced to themselves. The difference between Parolles's contented capitulation, and Bertram's final skepticism about whether or not he has been foolish (“If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / I'll love her dearly,” V.iii.313-14) will be discussed later.

Clearly, though, Bertram's inability to recognize his shortcomings is an important problem. At the end of the play, we can still ask, as the Lords ask of Parolles, can Bertram know what he is and be what he is? During the reconciliation he stands isolated from the others, united to society by the same trick that has exposed his foolishness. He has been a man unknowingly “at a woman's command.” Whether or not any harm's been done, as Lavatch also remarks (I.iii.91), is a troubling question which will be explored properly in the tragedies that follow, where Shakespeare is able to confront questions of self-awareness, sexuality, and human folly that he can only suggest here with Lavatch and others. In any case, with All's Well that Ends Well, it is a lack of self-awareness that serves Bertram, and also the play's plot and purpose of reconciliation, just as the soldiers who capture Parolles know how they are to serve that plot though ignorant of what they say to each other: “Not to know what we speak to one another, so we seem to know, is to know straight our purpose” (IV.i.17-19).

Another indication that All's Well that Ends Well is an interesting midwife between the festive comedies and the birth of Shakespeare's later tragedies is the fact that virginity, rather than something inviolately preserved until the play's end as in the festive comedies, becomes a means to trap Bertram. Providential aid does not serve to unite the protagonists in marriage, and likewise virginity and virtue in a woman no longer serve to attract a husband. It is because women are no longer virgins in the plays that Shakespeare must confront problems with procreation, heredity, and incest that figure so largely in the tragedies. Just as the comic form no longer serves the questions about self-awareness and service that Shakespeare is now asking, so virginity is “a commodity will lose the gloss with lying; the longer kept, the less worth” (I.i.154-55). Yet where Parolles only sees “rational increase” coming from the loss of virginity, the fool knows better; “The danger is in standing to't; that's the loss of men, though it be the getting of children” (III.i.41-42). Lavatch's previous desire to get married is gone after visiting court; perhaps like Bertram, he begins to sense the problems with procreation and marriage. Isbel and a family, like the play's comic solutions, no longer serve, giving way to lust: “I have no mind to Isbel since I was at court. Our old ling and our Isbels o' th' country are nothing like your old ling and your Isbels o'th'court. The brains of my cupid's knock'd out, and I begin to love, as an old man loves money, with no stomach” (III.ii.12-16). The clown recites this as the Countess reads Bertram's letter announcing his intention never to bed Helena and to roam the world. Lavatch's remarks parody Bertram's inability to recognize any domestic values and remind us that the spoils of war for him include the lusty pursuit of women.

Bertram's letter closes with an ironic twist; he signs off with “My duty to you,” though his behavior is in violation of his proper duty to his mother's wishes. The problem at the heart of All's Well is that Bertram cannot recognize that his duty or service is only to himself, nor can he recognize the true service of others. Shakespeare carefully illustrates the contradiction between Helena's constant offers of humble service to Bertram (II.iii.103; II.iv.47, 51, 54; II.v.55, 73, 75, 87) and Parolles's declaration that Bertram, a count by inheritance, is nothing more than his equal (II.iii.186-93, 243-45, 260-63). In choosing to follow Parolles to war, rather than accept Helena in marriage, Bertram is choosing the answer that literally does not serve. Parolles is mere language and clothes that pervert true service. Lavatch does not only attack Parolles's apparent (except to Bertram) opportunism and pompousness (as Lafew also does), but also his service to the count: “Marry, you are the wiser man; for many a man's tongue shakes out his master's undoing. To say nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing, and to have nothing, is to be a great part of your title, which is within a very little of nothing” (II.iv.23-27). Parolles's banter is a “nothing” that Bertram, his master, follows. His talk both shakes out Bertram's undoing as it goads him to Italy, and then also undoes his master at the play's end, when Parolles's attempt to say nothing conclusively ties Bertram to his seeming crime against Diana (V.iii.257-64). Here, Parolles has been reduced to a fool-like servant who desires to say, do, and know nothing. The fool's remarks about Parolles, like his remarks about Bertram, precisely describe what is to come. They are underscored when Lavatch says to Parolles “much fool may you find in you, even to the world's pleasure and increase of laughter” (II.iv.36-37).

The fool's, the play's, and the critic's search for answers that serve well leads us also to consider Helena's service. Yet even her behavior, though obviously a better choice than Parolles, is hard to swallow because she so thoroughly traps and exposes Bertram. Helena's love does not allow her to remain simply his servant, but rather to have the “best wishes that can be forg'd in … thoughts be servants” to her as she pursues him (I.i.75-76). The service that her calculating thoughts do for Bertram makes us uncomfortable, and even her initial service to the King is tainted; she thinks of helping him only because it may give her an advantage with Bertram (I.iii.229-33). Similarly, Shakespeare is careful to repeat three times that Helena must pay for Diana's services, thus suggesting that no service in the play is without some sort of blatant self-consideration.¹³

Lavatch proclaims himself “A fool, sir, at a woman's service, and a knave at a man's.” First, for his own lusty sake, he would “cozen the man of his wife and do his service,” and then “give his wife my bauble, sir, to do her service” (IV.v.23, 27-28). All service, the fool tells us, is somehow perverted into self-service. Even the fool's desire to satisfy the cuckolded man's wife results in nothing more than her own self-serving masturbation. Lavatch also suggests the cause of All's Well's corrupt service when he responds to Lafew's admonition that he should continue to serve the devil:

I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always lov'd a great fire, and the master I speak of ever keeps a good fire. But, sure, he is the prince of the world; let his nobility remain in's court. I am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little for pomp to enter. Some that humble themselves may, but the many will be too chill and tender, and they'll be for the flow'ry way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire.

(IV.v.47-55)

In contrast to Lavatch's narrow gate suggesting domestic values and service, Bertram remarks to the Countess in his letter as he flees marriage: “If there be breadth enough in the world, I will hold a long distance” (III.ii.23-24). Service in the court world, the fool suggests, is tainted, and often merely self-service.

Parolles is more parasite than braggart soldier, and the play's most obvious example of self-service.¹⁴ And yet his response to the exposure of his false service, linked to the fool's remarks here, is one of the strangest moments in the play. Just as Parolles is the play's most blatant example of self-service, so also is he the only character who is forced to acknowledge his limitations, then be truly humbled and so transformed by them. Parolles's search for any answer to serve the enemy elaborately builds towards his invocation “O Lord, sir” (recalling Lavatch) before he is unmasked. Following this, his answer to “live / Safest in shame: Being fool'd by fool'ry thrive!” (IV.iii.340-41), is borne out when he returns after his exposure, now unrecognizable in the rags of a fool, and ready to enter Lavatch's narrow gate for domestic service. When he encounters Lavatch, the fool's earlier observations about him become true, “‘Before a knave th' art a knave’; that's, ‘Before me th' art a knave.’ This had been truth sir” (II.iv.29-31). Parolles, by becoming a fool, has found Lavatch in himself: “Did you find me in yourself, sir? Or were you taught to find me? The search, sir, was profitable; and much fool may you find in you, even to the world's pleasure and the increase of laughter” (II.iv.34-37). Appropriately, Lavatch's last words bequeath Parolles to Lafew, “I do pity his distress in my similes of comfort, and leave him to your lordship” (V.ii.25-26).

Lafew enlists Parolles into service that recalls Lavatch's woodland fellow:

Parolles: It lies in you, my lord, to bring me in some grace, for you did bring me out.
Lafew: Out upon thee, knave! Dost thou put upon me at once both the office of God and the devil? One brings thee in grace and the other brings thee out … though you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat.

(V.ii.47-55)

Like Lavatch, Parolles also serves a devil. Like the fool with the Countess, Parolles has been introduced to his real status; however, when he looks to a “lord” for grace he is saved. Parolles will humble himself and serve Lafew (“I'll make sport with thee”) as Lavatch used to serve his old master (“My lord that's gone made himself much sport out of him”). Both characters forego the wide gate of pomp and reputation and enter into honest domestic service. Instead of interrupting Lafew with worthless courtly verbage, Parolles now humbly begs one single word to identify himself. His answer, “Parolles” (V.ii.40), is of course a fool-like pun, a play on a word that means “words,” and also a contradiction like so many answers in All's Well. But importantly, this is a contradiction that serves: it leads to Parolles's recognition, and his service to Lafew. In an odd way Parolles's former vice of excessive language, exactly that which denoted his perverted service, literally now leads to his honest service, again showing that a character's vices, by a trick with a pun here, aid him, and allow the plot to be worked out. Later, Parolles, like a wise fool, exposes Bertram's folly with Lavatchian contradictory answers and thus does the count service. It is appropriately a humble domestic's service that forces Bertram himself into marriage, a bond that requires humble and honest service to another.

But to assess Parolles's importance, his exposure should be compared with Bertram's, especially as it bears on the play's understanding of service. Unlike Parolles, we do not see Bertram enthusiastically accepting his exposure, and we thus cannot be sure whether he can serve others. Parolles can both know himself and be himself, and in doing so can commit himself to serve others. But for Bertram this is one of the play's most nagging problems, and one that Shakespeare knows he cannot serve well in a comic context.¹⁵ Since Bertram qualifies his last remark, (“If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly”), we simply do not know whether he can be himself and know himself, and thus whether he can commit himself to serve Helena and their marriage, or merely fall back on more self-service. Here we are returned to Lavatch's earlier proposition, “If men could be contented to be what they are, there were no fear in marriage” (I.iii.50). Our fear is that Bertram cannot recognize his shortcomings, much less correct them and serve another. Parolles can understand his limitations through a kind of comic self-consciousness; thus for him “there's place and means for everyman alive.”¹⁶ For someone to find his place, the play emphasizes, admitting one's limitations is crucial, exactly what Bertram fails to do again and again in the play's last scene, as he continually lies and returns to answers that don't serve. Bertram's one short request for pardon (“Both, both, O, pardon”), as noted, is quickly qualified by the “if” of his last remark.

Bertram's shortcomings, especially his vain lack of self-knowledge, are too much like those found in Shakespearean tragedy to be resolved here by anything more than artificial tricks which do not serve to correct the problem, as Shakespeare evidently knows. By titling the play All's Well that Ends Well he ironically underscores exactly what we do not feel at the play's close, for this title is an answer that does not serve, a proverb pasted over our discomfort as the play's resolution is pasted over Bertram's unconfronted problems.¹⁷ Along with Helena's all too calculating entrapment, the play fails to find a satisfying response to Bertram's self-service of his selfish needs. If we accept that Parolles's transformation, and offer of service, is a gesture that counters Bertram's selfishness, then Shakespeare makes this a weak gesture at best.¹⁸ Parolles's transformation prefigures those of Kent and Edgar, both fool figures who serve, but his, too late and too little, lacks the powerful tragic context that makes their sacrifices so unforgettable.¹⁹ In the same sense, Bertram's vain lack of self-knowledge is an extremely muted version of Lear's slender knowledge of himself, as the comic context of All's Well continually mediates against the development of these tragic issues.

Lavatch himself, compared with Shakespeare's other wise fools, fails to serve. Although he does focus the play's necessary questions, he is more detached than Touchstone, Feste, and Lear's fool, and it takes a more careful search to understand how he highlights the other characters', and the play's, failure to serve. No other characters in the play have any hint of his curious relation to the larger action, and we wonder just how conscious Lavatch himself is of how his parodies or perverse remarks parallel the behavior of others. Touchstone's parody is more direct and obvious than Lavatch's, and unlike Feste and Touchstone, Lavatch is not in the play's final scene, when Parolles appears to take over his role. Again, as Parolles's final behavior reminds us of Kent and Edgar, in an oddly reductionistic way Parolles's fool anticipates Lear; like him, Parolles is also stripped of his position along with his clothes, and so takes on the missing fool's part.²⁰ That part means speaking the “truth,” as Lavatch himself asserts; he foreshadows events and consistently focuses our attention on the play's problems. And yet, if Lavatch does have a fool's traditionally prophetic powers, it seems out of place in the realistic world of All's Well. In addition, with the exception of Lafew, the others cannot pun or play with language like Lavatch; they are little more than straightmen when speaking to the fool, unlike those who banter with Touchstone or Feste. On the whole, the play is barren of engaging battles of wit. The fool fails to serve in the same way the play fails to serve, for the answer that there are no answers that serve, which Lavatch's fooling reveals and the play itself consistently returns to, is not an answer that serves.

Do we then conclude that Shakespeare has failed? In a strict sense, he has with this play. The answer that there is no answer which serves well lies at the heart of our dissatisfaction with All's Well. If Shakespeare is claiming “no adequate answer” to the problems he has raised as the law, in the sense of an enabling poetic, of this play, then he is failing at what he has set out to do as a dramatic poet creating comedy, just as if critics claimed the same “no adequate answer.” To explain the play as an experiment for what will receive proper attention in the forthcoming tragedies, especially King Lear, as I have in part done, is not really to interpret the play, but rather to assuage the failure by pointing to examples or other sets of laws outside of the play itself.²¹ This is Hunter's strategy when he looks to the romances at the close of his introduction.²² As critics, perhaps we can make the play “explainable,” but strictly speaking the play lacks if it can only be understood by laws outside of itself or by examples from other plays. As a poem which contains the rules of its own interpretation, as Shakespeare's better plays do, All's Well that End's Well fails, and Shakespeare in the process calls attention to that failure, especially with Lavatch.

Given this problem, we must ask why Shakespeare wrote All's Well. On the one hand, with the admission that to say so we are not really interpreting the play, we can say that Shakespeare is experimenting; he purposely tries to resolve what are tragic motifs in a comic context, and so works with the problems that he will render with brilliance in his later tragedies. But it is the way he experiments, I think, that we must also try to understand, specifically his service as an artist as he confronts problems that turn out to be unresolvable in a comic context. Sigurd Burckhardt, in a study of Shakespeare's Prince Hal trilogy, argues that Shakespeare discovers “a lethal mixture of two mutually inconsistent and severally inadequate models of succession.” Burckhardt makes this helpful comment in an effort to understand Shakespeare's solution:

Some three centuries before Niels Bohr, Shakespeare discovered the need of complementarity—i.e., of operating with two mutually inconsistent and severally inadequate models because, and as long as, a single, consistent, and adequate model has not been found. Complementarity differs from and is superior to mixing because it remains aware of its “illegitimacy” and pays the price for choosing one model over the other. It does not pretend to be a solution, hence it does not close the road of discovery but on the contrary compels us to take the risk of following it. Its passionate demand for order forces us to leave the safe prison of a static, once-for-all world picture, to suffer the grief of imperfection and disorder, and the joy of genuine action and creativity. Complementarity, in short, asserts the value of human action in time, which is to say, of history, of drama.²³

A compelling way, I think, to reconcile the problems of All's Well with Shakespeare's awareness of those problems is to say that he understood the illegitimacy of what he was doing and also its consequences, that he knew he was paying a price for choosing the comic model over the tragic for the treatment of Bertram's selfishness and lack of self-awareness, or Helena's self-regarding manipulation of the count. Shakespeare is leaving the safe prison of the comic genre and posing problems that, he discovers, he cannot pretend to solve convincingly with comic solutions, especially providential help. But his passionate demand for a humane solution to human difficulties, to problems of self-awareness, uncontrolled lust, lying, one character's questionable manipulation of another, and social status, all problems that block significant relations between people, required him first to try to solve these difficulties in a manner that would not exact the awful human destruction of tragedy. Before he could confront these problems in the most destructive of tragic contexts such as King Lear, Shakespeare, I would like to suggest, had to try to solve them in a benevolent comedy.

Shakespeare, I believe, understands his failure in All's Well, and carefully expresses this to us with Lavatch. He also underscores this failure in the play's final lines. Like Bertram, Helena, “the shadow of a wife,” also begins her final remark with an “if” (V.iii.315). In addition, the King hedges about whether or not the ending is complete, “if this suit be won”: it is exactly the “oneness” of Helena's and Bertram's marriage that troubles us. The King, like Parolles, is transformed to a humble “beggar” as he subtly thanks the audience for their patience, and asks them to put themselves in the actors' shoes, as the actors put themselves in the audience's place, “ours be your patience then, and yours our parts.” While the King may have the audience “express content,” one can't help but feel that the audience, like the King, senses the discontent, and has patiently endured the incomplete working out of the play's problems, and that Shakespeare is apologetically asking them to try to see it from the actor's point of view, whose service will “pay / With strife to please you, day exceeding day.” The beggar-King's suggestion that the players will “pay” the audience uncomfortably echoes the fact that most of the service in the play is paid for rather than unselfishly given. The conclusion, then, is a tacit admission of All's Well's failure to serve the audience.

But service itself is an important idea for the ending of All's Well. Though there is no service that redeems the characters' severe problems or Shakespeare's failure to serve as a comic dramatist, Parolles hints that a character can free himself from false courtly artifice and deceit to serve honestly. But again, this does not tell us if Bertram can know himself and truly serve another or if Helena's manipulative intelligence, and the abuse that such control can lead to, will merely keep him “at a woman's command.” Whether both can gain a comic understanding of their limits, and achieve an honest self-awareness, or whether their behavior will lead to tragic destruction, is an either-or proposition the play leaves us with, a problem of service and a question of complementarity insofar as the comic marriage and unresolved tragic problems clash. Burckhardt also writes:

And the metaphor is one of complementarity, of either-or. It is neither a mixture nor a synthesis, but a metaphor: that strange entity which demands to be analytically dissolved because it means and creatively “made good” because it is. It is pregnant, hence promises birth; but the birth is never certain, while labor and pain are certain. Is even the father certain? Can we be sure of legitimacy? Will the offspring be the child of passion or of duty, of self-assertive lust or submissive routine? There are no guarantees, only the risk and the will—the need—to order.²⁴

It is Bertram's inability to serve, and Helena's questionable methods of service, that lead to the pregnancy, an answer to the play that is literally and dramatically, and thus metaphorically, of questionable legitimacy. It is a clash of elements the play cannot resolve yoked together by pregnancy, by something with the potential to give birth both to good and bad. Shakespeare as dramatist has failed to serve because of this illegitimate answer, but the service itself that the play's creation also represents works metaphorically, a metaphor pregnant with possibilities that will be borne out in his great tragedies. As he wrote All's Well that Ends Well the birth of King Lear was not certain, but the labor and pain toward the highest achievements of drama, the “strife to please you,” would be. The child in Helena now, of whom the father and the legitimacy is uncertain, is the child of both Bertram's lust and Helena's questionable service and duty, but what that child will turn out to be, and how the family and their love grows or is destroyed, is an either-or question the tragedies must answer as Shakespeare moves beyond complementarity to depict the clash of man's inhumanity with his humanity, of his selfish self-service with his service to others. It is a question that Shakespeare will serve with his greatest artistic skill, risking the road of discovery that leads to suffering, grief, and discord (especially as he questions the value of his own role as an artist), but also to the joy of genuine action and creativity.

The metaphor of pregnancy, it seems to me, is how we can understand this problem play: All's Well that Ends Well brings together clashing elements which lead to a product of questionable legitimacy. But the play itself is pregnant with questions which will be creatively made good in the great tragedies that follow, especially King Lear, where the necessary questions of duty and service, of both his characters and of the dramatist Shakespeare, will be presented along with the worst extremes of human destruction and self-service that poetic drama can portray, in a search for the questions and answers that will serve well. If Bertram's unresolved problem is his inability to recognize his limits, know himself, and serve others, and there is no adequate example in the play to counter his self-service (or something to counter Helena's self-regarding manipulation) then we must look ahead to Shakespeare's understanding of his role as an artist and his service to us in the later tragedies, as he leaves the seeming knowledge of comedy, of a static, once-for-all world picture, and submits himself and his characters to the unknown fear of tragedy. Miracles are past, and things unnatural and causeless must now be confronted head on.

Notes

1. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1980).

2. Oscar James Campbell, ed. The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (New York: Crowell, 1966), p. 17.

3. Robert H. Goldsmith, Wise Fools in Shakespeare (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1963), p. 60.

4. Jay Halio, “All's Well That Ends Well,” SQ 15 (Winter 1964):35.

5. G. K. Hunter, introduction and notes to The Arden Edition of All's Well That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1959), pp. xxxiv, xxxv, 47, 50.

6. J. L. Styan, All's Well that Ends Well: Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), p. 55.

7. Shakespeare takes pains to show that Helena's healing is an act of heaven. When she first argues with the King her language becomes religiously infused, “So holy writ in babes hath judgement shown / When judges have been babes; great floods have flown” (II.i.138-39). She goes on to speak of “miracles” (141); “Him,” referring to God (149); “the help of heaven” (152); and “of heaven not me make experiment” (154) to the King. All this stands in stark contrast to how she must win Bertram, “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven” (I.ii.215-16).

8. W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York: Ungar, 1960), pp. 35-63.

9. W. L. Godshalk writes that “religious references are replaced by the appeal to nature, an appeal frequently made in the play” in Helena's speech at the end of II.i. He continues, “Nature allows man to bridge the gaps made by Fortune; and, like Edmund in King Lear, Helena accepts Nature as her guide.” See All's Well That Ends Well and the Morality Play,” SQ 25 (Winter 1974):64.

10. David Scott Kastan writes, “In the problem comedies the contrivance is the character's own and is throughout too self-regarding, too unresponsive to the needs of others.” See his fine essay “All's Well that Ends Well and the Limits of Comedy,” ELH 52 (Fall 1985):579.

11. Helena's remark cited in note 7 which links her to Edmund can be compared to Viola's “O time, thou must untangle this, not I; it is too hard a knot for me to untie” (II.ii.40-41). Rosalind and Portia do deceive their husbands, not to win a love they already possess, but rather to expose follies which do not mar the close of their comedies. Helena's social position, and her method for advancing, is part of the larger issue of social mobility that needs further treatment in Shakespeare. However, as Lawrence Stone persuasively argues, we can say that the Elizabethans would have been sensitive to the aristocracy's “crisis” regarding social mobility, its “unprecedented” expansion during Shakespeare's age and the conservative backlash that sought to control it. For a thorough study of this problem, see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

12. Kastan's essay cited in note 10 is also concerned with the limits of comic solutions. However, he writes that the problem is “not Helena's social class or even Bertram's intractable snobbery but an inadequate conception of love—or, put differently, an inadequate conception of comedy, a conception that would exclusively formalize comic action, shaping comic characters and events to our desires” (p. 580).

13. Godshalk notes that “the fact that Helena is conducting a dubiously moral intrigue returns to haunt our excuses” each time Shakespeare reminds us that Helena is paying Diana (p. 65).

14. Hunter, p. xlvii.

15. See Phillip Edwards for an intelligent discussion of Bertram's behavior in Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 113-15. Edwards points out that the count's “execrable” behavior is not a matter for critical debate: “The treatment of Parolles shows us a scoundrel changed by shame into a new recognition and a new way of life. Bertram is not so treated. Helena never saves Bertram. He is unredeemable: Shakespeare could not save him. It is not a matter of failing to write the lines that would have changed the soul of the play: it is a matter of not being able to force one's conscience to alter a character whose alteration would be, simply, incredible.”

16. Shakespeare's wiser comic characters have an acute sense of their own folly, a comic and unpretentious appraisal of their failings, exactly what Bertram shows no trace of in the last scene especially, but also when the blind-folded Parolles anatomizes the count's bad behavior (IV.iii.216-37). M. C. Bradbrook's analysis, like Edwards's, makes it clear that Shakespeare intends little sympathy for Bertram: “The Elizabethan code of honour supposed a gentleman to be absolutely incapable of a lie. … To give the lie was the deadliest of all insults and could not be wiped out except in blood. … Alone among Shakespeare's heroes Bertram is guilty of the lie” and by such conduct “forfeits his claims to gentility”; see “Virtue and Nobility in All's Well that Ends Well,” RES 1.4 (October 1950): 289-301.

17. Ann Barton makes this insightful comment on the proverbial nature of the play's title: “Like the proverbs continually employed in the perverse and contradictory fashion by the bitter fool Lavatch—traditional bits of lore existing uneasily in a world grown too complex for such simplifications—it serves as a gentle reminder that fairy tales, ultimately, are not true.” See her introduction in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1974), pp. 499-503.

18. For an alternative view of Parolles's effect on the last scene, see Gerard J. Gross, “The Conclusion to All's Well that Ends Well,” SEL 23 (Spring 1983):275-76.

19. See Jonas A. Barish and Marshall Waingrow, “Service in King Lear,” SQ 9 (1958):347-55.

20. James Calderwood writes that Lear's fool's disappearance “makes foolish sense. When Lear has absorbed the fool's truths and begins to utter them himself, the fool becomes redundant.” See “Creative Uncreation in King Lear,” SQ 28 (1986):10.

21. Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 296-98.

22. Hunter, p. lv.

23. Burckhardt, p. 183-84.

24. Burckhardt, p. 185.