ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well seems centrally concerned with conflicting beliefs about disenchantment and miracles in early modern culture. Responding to the wondrous healing of the King’s “past-cure malady” (2.1.120) by the “simple maid” Helena (2.3.67), the “old lord” Lafeu initially offers Bertram’s friend Paroles the most common Protestant position on miracles: “They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless” (2.3.1-3). However, he immediately undermines this disenchantment thesis by adding, “Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors” (2.3.1-6).1 Thus Lefeu appears to endorse the view of the ballad from which he quotes that this is, indeed, a miraculous healing-“A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor” (2.3.24-25). The “hand of heaven” (2.3.32) has cured the king through the vehicle of the virtuous, poor maid Helena.
