In All's Well That Ends Well, ‘the end is immanent’ from its opening as its mourning-attired characters enter the stage discussing death. Of course, for theatregoers, the play's end is immanent even before it begins. Through his proverbial and metatheatrical title, Shakespeare positions his audience to adopt an end-oriented hermeneutic. We read All's Well's characters and plot in view of the comic and romantic resolution that its title signals. Does Shakespeare's play achieve this end? By its ambiguous dénouement, ‘we don't know’. Gadamer phrases an apt response for us.

Ends absorbed the attention of many people in Shakespeare's Protestant England. Theology, specifically the Christian doctrine of last things – eschatology – informed this preoccupation. Eschatology shapes a way of reading for the interpreting self and a way of reading the interpreting self that incorporates epistemological, interpersonal, ethical and psychological dimensions of human being. The doctrine permeates All's Well's end-oriented hermeneutic. Act 2, scene 4 offers a glimpse of how eschatological ideas may have inflected people's day-to-day reading of ‘the progress of an individual life’ (to borrow Frank Kermode's phrase). The fool Lavatch jestingly describes the Countess as ‘very well indeed, but for two things. […] One, that she's not in heaven, whither God send her quickly! The other, that she's in earth, from whence God send her quickly!’ (II.iv.8–12).