ABSTRACT
This essay examines the presence of religious language, action, tradition and controversy in All’s Well, That Ends Well, with a view to making a claim for the play’s substantial undertones of spirituality. From the play’s opening scene onwards, the language of secular desire and sacred devotion are interwoven, such that Helena worships at Bertram’s shrine and saves “relics” of his presence as he departs for the court. Helena’s subsequent success at court in curing the King of France is seen by Lafew as miraculous, but the play focuses on the difficulty of interpreting human actions: is the “help of heaven” indeed manifested in the work of “earthly actors” (2.1.152, 2.2.23)? A consideration of the complex religious concerns implicit in the play’s events will alert us to its dilemmas over freedom and agency. These issues also relate closely to the intense doctrinal debates of the early seventeenth century. Not only does the play reopen the question of miracles, but it also poses the problem of the relationship between words and things – or between riddles and actions – in a version of the Reformation arguments between the biblical and the sacramental. In addition, why is it that Helena sets out on her intensely Catholic pilgrimage towards the shrine of St. James at Compostella, and to what extent is her subsequent course of action endorsed by the gift of grace which was so esteemed in the Protestant tradition? The play’s climax involves two more apparent miracles: the reappearance of Helena as though resurrected, and the mysterious pregnancy of a supposedly virgin mother. If Bertram is finally moved to “love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (5.3.314), then yet another miracle will have occurred in anticipation, extending into the promised time after the end of the play. This essay suggests, therefore, that it is justifiable to refer to All’s Well as Shakespeare’s “miracle play,” not in order to imply a
as in the Countess’s farewell to her son: “Be thou bless’d . . . What heaven more will . . . my prayers pluck down” (1.1.59, 66-7). This is not acutely sacred language, but demonstrates what might be termed a litany of parenthood, in which the mother as intermediary prays for blessing on her son and envisages for her own part a dynamic religiousness. She will “pluck” gifts from heaven, and the hint of desperation in this chosen verb turns out to be not unwarranted with regard to Bertram’s later actions. In her maternal relationship with Helena, later in the first act of the play, the Countess again plays this actively prayerful role, though in blessing Helena the verb chosen by the older woman is the more conventional “pray” rather than “pluck” (1.3.249). Like the Abbess of Ephesus (Aemilia) in Comedy of Errors, the Countess depicts herself as a kind of abbess in her own estate, remaining within the home and away from the world of the court, practising a life of necessary prayer and contemplation rather than of action (see Figure 8.1).
