SOURCE: “Lavatch and Service in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 241-58.

In the following essay, Roark asserts that Lavatch is an indicator of the failure of All's Well That Ends Well, noting that “[the fool fails to serve in the same way the play fails to serve.”]

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be consider'd. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

(Hamlet III.ii.38-45)¹

Of Shakespeare's wise fools, Lavatch in All's Well that Ends Well has been the most expendable in performance, and the most...