In All’s Well, Helena leaves France as a pilgrim and returns from Italy only once she has faked her own death and won her worthless husband, Bertram, through a bed-swap and the exchange of a ring. The ending is far from as secure as the play’s title suggests.
The play has several voices. This use of popular plots and traditional fairy-tale language rubs shoulders with courtly encounters and literary language. Shakespeare was also writing for the court and the cultural elite who wanted their plays charged with witty banter and wordplay and ‘the expression of a new, harsher, misogynistic fear of sexual betrayal’ (Van Es 2013, p. 222). The verse is often compressed, elliptical, abstract, even obscure — suggesting by its very fabric that things (like words) are not straightforward.
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