—Act III, scene v, line 35
A pilgrim who had visited the Holy Land was privileged to wear palm leaves as a token he had done so (it is a plant native to Palestine) and was therefore called a "palmer."
Helena asks the question of an old Widow, who offers her lodgings. The Widow has a beautiful and virtuous daughter, Diana, and it quickly turns out that Bertram (who is doing very well in Florence and is now a cavalry officer) is busily engaged in trying to seduce the girl.
Helena reveals her identity and persuades the two women to let her take Diana's place so that Bertram will sleep with her unknowingly, thinking she is Diana.
Diana agrees and cajoles Bertram into giving her his ring (the one he wrote in his letter that Helena would have to display before he would accept her as wife) and offers him an assignation provided he promises to stay only an hour and to refrain from speaking to her during that time. She promises to give him another ring in exchange for his after he has slept with her. So eager is he to win her that he agrees.
Helena then arranges to have herself reported as having reached Santiago de Compostela and to have died there.
Parolles, meanwhile, has won the contempt of all the officers, and they scheme to maneuver him into betraying his real character. Parolles has been sent out on a dangerous mission for which, out of sheer stupid braggadocio, he has volunteered. He is captured by his own colleagues and is blindfolded.
Pretending to be foreigners of strange speech, they question him through a mock interpreter. At the merest hint of torture, he tells everything he knows and reviles the very men who (unknown to him) are holding him prisoner. He even defames Bertram.
Thus, of one officer, he says:
—Act IV, scene iii, line 264
Nessus was the centaur who tried to rape Hercules' wife, Deianeira (see page I-380).
When he has completely unmasked himself for the coward he is, his blindfold is removed and he realizes that he is ruined. He decides to make the best of it, however, and later, in fact, he enters the service of the kindly Lafew and does well enough.
With Helena's reported death, Bertram can return to Rousillon, but first he wants to go through with the seduction of Diana. This takes place offstage, but we gather that Helena has safely substituted herself. Bertram has kept the bargain, stayed an hour, refrained from speaking, and accepted the ring (Helena's ring, which she, in turn, had received from the King of France). And Helena has the ring Bertram gave Diana.
Helena is therefore also ready to return, taking the Widow and Diana with her. She intends to see the King and says to her companions:
—Act IV, scene iv, lines 8-10
Marseilles is the great French port on the Mediterranean, about 280 miles west of Florence and 140 miles northeast of Roussillon. If Helena goes to Marseilles, she is two thirds of the way home.
She is counting on the King's continuing gratitude, for she says her services were such that
—Act IV, scene iv, lines 6-8
In the thirteenth century Mongol tribes from central Asia swept westward and penetrated deep into Europe, reaching almost to the Adriatic in 1240. This gave Europe a scare from which it didn't recover for a long time.
The Mongols called themselves Tatars, but to the Europeans this became Tartars (from Tartarus, see page I-40). The Tatars, considered as creatures from hell, were naturally considered the epitome of heartlessness, and Helena felt that even they would feel gratitude for services such as hers.
Helena has gone through a great deal and there is more yet to go through, but she keeps up her spirits with a stouthearted:
—Act IV, scene iv, line 35
The word "fine," from the French fin, means "end" here. Helena is saying that the nature of the end crowns the work, making it success or failure. This so summarizes the play-which, from Helena's point of view, is nothing but misery all the way to very nearly the end-that it has become the title of the play.
Yet is it possible the play once had a different title?
An English clergyman, Francis Meres, wrote a book in 1598 in which he compared contemporary English authors with classical and Italian ones, and, in the process, he listed Shakespeare's plays. He included one named Love's Labor's Won. This is the only play ever attributed to Shakespeare that we have no record of under the title mentioned. Either it's a lost play or we have it under a different title.
If the latter, it must be one that isn't mentioned by Meres under its own title and one that had already been written by 1598. One possibility is The Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio must labor hard indeed to establish love between himself and Katherina (see page I-462). There is, however, a reference in a 1603 account book to both The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labor's Won.
The most popular theory, therefore, is that it refers to All's Well That Ends Well and to Helena's hard labor to win Bertram. But, alas, that means that the play would have had to be written several years before it was.
It's a problem that may never be solved completely, but I would like to suggest a possibility I have not seen advanced. Shakespeare may perhaps have written Love's Labor's Won in, say, 1597, and because it was a failure, rewrote it extensively and produced it as All's Well That Ends Well, with no record of the earlier version except for the casual mention of Meres, writing between the two.
There is an interval before the resolution in the last act in which the Countess has the last of several confrontations with a Clown. None of these serves to advance the plot, but each is intended as comic relief. In this last, the Clown mentions "grace" and promptly expands it into wordplay by saying to Lafew:
—Act IV, scene v, lines 21-22
This equates "grace" and "grass," and Nebuchadnezzar is brought in because according to the biblical account (Daniel 4:28-37) he was punished for his arrogance by being stricken with a madness that drove him out into the fields and caused him to eat grass for seven years.
The Clown also refers to the devil as having an English name, for he is
—Act IV, scene v, lines 43-44
It is quite appropriate to speak of the devil as the "prince of darkness," for our modern conception of the devil comes, in part, from the Persian notion of a dualistic cosmic order in which the forces of light and good under Ahura Mazda fight a continuing giant battle against the forces of darkness and evil under Ahriman.
And a prince of darkness would naturally be a Black Prince like the famous eldest son of Edward III (see page II-260).