i''ve read All's Well that Ends Well many times (thrice just in the last week), always with puzzlement and dissatisfaction. It's a confused and confusing play. My best guess is that Shakespeare got going on some appealing but intractable material and struggled with it for many years but was never able to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.
Until this last reading, I had never paid much attention to the King of France who is, I think, more of a plot mechanism than a rounded character. Shakespeare never even bothered to give him a first name — he's "King" but whether Charles or Louis or Lothair we're never told. He plays a crucial part in the fable, because, dying of a "fistula," he is cured by our heroine Helen and in exchange grants her the husband of her choice (her obsession, actually) — the handsome soldier and crass lout Bertram. Later in the play, after Bertram has fled from the marriage, the King again intervenes to restore him (against his will) to Helen. The King is short-tempered and highly conscious of his regal status — as Kings are in literature — but he is not particularly eloquent or interesting.
But in my most recent reading, I was struck by some lines that I had not registered in my salad days. Helen urges the King to allow her to try her "receipts" (i.e. prescriptions or drugs) on him. He resists, of course, simply so that Helen may overcome another contrived obstacle. But the King's sentences, fable apart, are very pertinent, most particularly to those of us who have staggered to life's endgame:
We thank you, maiden,
But may not be so credulous of cure,
When our most learned doctors leave us and
The congregated college have concluded
That laboring art can never ransom nature
From her inaidable estate. I say we must not
So stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope,
To prostitute our past-cure malady
To empirics, or to dissever so
Our great self and our credit to esteem
A senseless help, when help past sense we deem.
"Empiric" is Shakespearean for "phonies." The King will not compromise his rationality or his dignity by indulging himself with the sixteenth-century version of faith-healers, herbalists, reiki masters, homeopaths, naturists or any other of the enormous plague of quack-quacks who litter our anti-rational landscape.
Good for him, I say, even though, as it turns out, he's wrong and the maiden successfully works her receipts. Shakespeare keeps us out of the sickroom, so we don't know exactly what she prescribes (just as well), but we do learn that the credulous bystanders attribute the cure not to science but to divine intervention. As the very orthodox and conventional Lafeu puts it, "They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern (i.e. routine, everyday) and familiar, things [that are] supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear (i.e. fear of the unknown)" — an interpretation that might made sense in Shakespeare's scientifically-ignorant late medieval world, but which is no longer applicable.
Nevertheless, I trust that when my time comes, I will follow the King's good example and come to terms with reality rather than succumb to irrationality and "esteem a senseless hope."
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