Shakespeare\'s Play All Well That Ends Well

Shakespeare's Play "All's Well that ends well" -- a Critique

Conflict between generations is a theme prevalent in many of Shakespeare's tragedies, histories, and comedies. Romeo and Juliet struggle against their parents' feud and values. Hamlet battles within himself to deal with the ethics of his father's order for revenge. Hal and his biological father, Henry IV, work out an uneasy coexistence, while the Prince simultaneously resolves his relationship with his spiritual father, Falstaff. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the mainspring of the plot is the willingness of Lysander and Hermia to go against the wishes of Egeus. In such works audience sympathy is usually with the younger generation, which often embodies a tolerance and understanding unrestricted by narrow beliefs and codes of behavior.

In All's Well That Ends Well, however, wisdom lies with the older characters, who frequently harken back to past years as a better, happier time. All's Well presents us with a dying problem and if, as has been suggested, it is a problem play, its problem is a basic one - how do you rejuvenate a constantly dying race? (Palmer, 1971).The younger figures, in particular Bertram, are not especially likeable or sympathetic. Indeed, one reason this play is difficult to interpret is Bertram himself, doubtless Shakespeare's least amiable hero. That the story ends with a marriage suggests the play is a comedy, but the road to this moment of contentment is so rocky and the antagonisms between characters so harsh that we enjoy little laughter, and the disentangling of the plot is far from joyous. Thus whether all "ends well" is problematic. The source of the story is "Giletta of Narbona," the ninth novella of the third day in Boccaccio Decameron (1353), a collection of 100 fables and folk tales ostensibly told by ten people who have taken refuge from the plague in France. Shakespeare probably read these stories in William Painter Palace of Pleasure (1567).

The plot of the play -- borrowed, via William Paynter Palace of Pleasure, 1566, from Boccaccio -- seems a bit far-fetched to have wide appeal to modern audiences. Bertram, Count of Rousillon, ordered by the King of France to marry Helena, decides that "a young man married is a man that's marred." Influenced by his boon companion, the rascally Parolles, he goes through the ceremony, and then leaves for the wars, declaring that when Helena presents him with his own seal ring and his own begotten son, he will acknowledge her as his wife. Helena in disguise follows Bertram; substituting for the pretty Diana at an assignation, she secures Bertram's ring, and in due time fulfills the second condition.

The value of the play lies, then, less in the story than in the characters. The play stands out artistically, said Bernard Shaw, by the sovereign charm of the young Helena and the old Countess of Rousillon, and intellectually by the experiment, repeated nearly three hundred years later in A Doll's House, of making the hero "a perfectly ordinary young man, whose unimaginative prejudices and selfish conventionality make him cut a very mean figure in the atmosphere created by the nobler nature of his wife" (James, 1983). Among the minor figures, the old Lafeu and the adventure-dreading, adventure-boasting coward Parolles are especially neatly drawn. Helena is beautifully attended and vouched for, largely by elderly people. Nothing graces youth more than the friendship of the old. The wise, kindly, clear-eyed Countess of Rousillon loves her as a daughter and knows her heart. A quite different interpretation was advanced by E.K. Chambers, in Shakespeare: A Survey (1925). He saw the play as a picture of the way in which love blinds and betrays a noble woman into a poor choice and into demeaning herself to win and hold him, "not Helena's triumph but Helena's degradation . . . It is a poor prize for which she has trailed her honor in the dust." This evaluation, however, smacks more of the doctrinaire twentieth century than of the sentimental sixteenth (Worthen, 1989).

Although it has not been a stage favorite, the play rewards the reader. Hazlitt considers it "one of the most pleasing of our author's comedies. The interest is, however, more of a serious than of a comic nature. The character of Helena is one of great sweetness and delicacy. She is placed in circumstances of the most critical kind, and has to court her husband both as a virgin and as a wife, yet the most scrupulous nicety of female modesty is not once violated. There is not one thought or action that ought to bring a blush into her cheeks, or that for a moment lessens her in our esteem" (Sue-Ellen, 1988). The men are of quite different nature. In some productions, the play was cut so as to make the scoundrel Parolles the central figure; King Charles I, in his copy of the Second Folio edition of Shakespeare's dramas, wrote as title for this play, Monsieur Parolles. Bertram is a cad, to whom Samuel Johnson could not reconcile his heart: "a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate; when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness" (Traub, 1992). These portraits are so tinged that Harold C. Goddard has suggested that there is an irony in this picture of two gentlemen of France similar to that in Two Gentlemen of Verona, (James, 1993) with their polished exteriors and their putrid core. At the end, there is only a hope that Helena and awakened love will change Bertram, but the King closes the play with an optimistic couplet.

An important element in the drama is the dialogue itself, prose and poetry. The ear is the sure clue to Shakespeare. Whether it be pure tone of beauty or sly twinkle of fun, the words in sound and echo fit the mood. The more important events of the play may seem far-fetched, but the motives and emotions are natural, are in us all. Combined with the character studies are enough poetry and comedy to make the reader find enjoyment still in thinking "all's well that ends well" (Margot, 1985).

The play's opening scene communicates the gloomy tone that dominates the work. In the first line the Countess mourns that the imminent departure of her son will be like the loss of a second husband. That son, Bertram, mourns his dead father, while the King he is soon to attend is himself mortally ill (I, i, 1116). Furthermore, the one physician who might have cured the King, Helena's father, is also deceased. Helena, who has been raised by the Countess, reveals that she, too, is possessed by sadness (I, i, 54), but she does not publicly specify its source. Thus a sense of mortality and human futility in the face of that mortality loom heavily.

The plot moves underway with the Countess's advice to Bertram, who is to leave for the court in Paris:

Thy blood and virtue

Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness (I, i, 62-68)

Her tone is like that of Polonius in Hamlet, but her counsel is wiser, and observations more perceptive. To Lafew she adds:

Farewell, my lord, 'Tis an unseason'd courtier, good my lord,

Advise him. (I, i, 70-72)

The Countess has little faith in either Bertram's judgment or his nature. He is not only inexperienced, but inclined to follow the advice and actions of less sterling characters. In contrast to these reservations is the attitude of Helena. Left alone, she reveals that she is weeping not for her long-gone father, but over her unrequited love for Bertram:

'Twere all one

That I should love a bright particular star (I, i, 85-89)

She is tormented by the difference in their classes. We, however, consider the object of her fascination. Thus far Bertram has given no evidence of being worthy of idolatry. We ponder, therefore, whether Helena intuits something deep within him or if she will in some way work to redeem him.

Our impression of Bertram is reinforced with the entrance of Parolles, a braggart soldier whom Helena describes:

One that goes with him. I love him for his sake,

And yet I know him a notorious liar,

Think him a great way fool, soly a coward . . . (I, i, 99-101)

Helena has been such a puzzle and provocation to critics because she occupies the "masculine" position of desiring subject, even as she apologizes fulsomely for her unfeminine forwardness and works desperately to situate herself within the "feminine" position of desired object. 5 At the same time, Bertram poses problems because he occupies the "feminine" space of the objectified Other, even as he struggles to define himself as a man by becoming a military and sexual conqueror. He is the desired object, the end of the hero's (or, in this case, heroine's) gendered journey of self-fulfillment.

Helena's opening soliloquy conveys the plight of a woman trapped between active ("masculine") and passive ("feminine") modes of desire. She clearly expresses her desire to consummate a sexual love, calling herself a "hind" who wishes to be "mated by the lion" (1.1.85-92). At the same time, she adopts a "feminine" posture: she cannot mate but only be "mated." Furthermore, as a hind desiring a lion, she cannot mate at all. Helena thus naturalizes the culturally established distinctions of gender and class that make Bertram a forbidden object. In addition, Helena trains a desiring look on Bertram, submitting her "curled darling" to rapturous objectification, only to affirm a "feminine" helplessness, lamenting the impossibility of eliciting his returned look. That Helena imagines a sexual feeding here seems plausible, given the imagery of "joining" and "kissing," not to mention the suggestive phraseology of "mounting my love." The "space" separating her and Bertram she portrays as a product not of nature, which favors their "joining," but of "fortune," which seems here to mean "standing in life" (OED 5) and thus to represent culture.

The language Helena employs is characteristically elliptical, stemming from her guarded, coded, sexually charged dialogue with Parolles. The obscurity of her discourse perhaps reflects the unspeakability of her desire. Her exchange with Parolles begins as a theatrical "turn," with Helena playing "straight man" for the swaggering poseur. As straight man, Helena translates her unspeakable desire into the discourse of male bawdry, seeking a kind of release through the sublimated pleasures of naughty talk, even if her lines serve principally as cues for Parolles' ribaldry.

Helena's salacious banter with Parolles marks her first explicit deviation from normative femininity, marks her as provocatively "open" in a social spectacle that, in Shakespeare's time, demanded female "closedness." 7 Lisa Jardine asserts that Helena reveals herself as "too [sexually] knowing for the innocent virgin she professes to be." 8 Yet Helena does not profess to be anything at all in the play's opening scene. Rather, she challenges the spectator's attempt to hold her to a stable identity. She appears a grieving daughter, reveals herself a despairing lover, and finally emerges a resolute wooer, signaling subjectivity that eludes a coherent singleness.

Certainly Parolles regards Helena as sexually knowing and therefore "open" to ravishment. Performance could make clear that Parolles not only jests with Helena but cheekily flirts with her, launching, behind the cover of licentious badinage, an assault against her own virginity. The two of them may actually engage in some version of the erotic combat they describe: Helena "blows up" (arouses) Parolles, and Parolles seeks an opportunity to "blow up" Helena (make her pregnant). Although Parolles casts Helena as desired object, she maintains her status as desiring subject, rejecting subjection to his controlling look. Her objection to his greeting -- "save you, fair queen" (106) -- registers a protest against being treated like a "quean." She claims the right to control her own sexual destiny, resisting Parolles' injunction to "answer the time of request," and thus rejecting the notion that a woman must not exercise choice but must make herself the object of a man's. If Helena initially agrees to play the role of imperiled virgin, she ends the scene by emasculating Parolles, not simply by declining to gratify his desire but by mocking his cowardice and thereby undermining his masculine honor, provoking his retributive threat to return in order to "naturalize" (i.e., debauch) Helena.

Helena's query, "how might one do, sir, to lose [virginity] to her own liking?" (150-51) conveys something more than a rebuff of Parolles' lecherous overtures. By invoking the possibility of fulfilling her own desire, Helena begins to take seriously Parolles' aspersion of virginity -- or, more specifically, his vision of the naturalness and regenerative ness of sexuality. She steps outside the scene's theatrical frame and trades the role of "straight man" for that of surprised convert. She disregards his censure of her wish to choose rather than be chosen and answers his challenge, "will you anything with it?"

Modern editors have been inclined to assume a missing line between Helena's terse defense of virginity and her expansive list of lovers' endearments. "There" is usually taken to mean "at the court," and the speech is explained as Helena's anxious contemplation of courtly rivals whose enchantments may well stir Bertram's desire. The speech might be better understood, however, as a coded disclosure of Helena's own erotic stirrings. Her need to speak cryptically and elliptically not only betrays a compulsion to conceal her sexual passion but also reflects the difficulty of representing female sexuality within an oedipal plot that typically idealizes or erases it. If one gives up the idea of a missing line, the sense of Helena's response is captured in G. Wilson Knight's paraphrase, "I shall not part with my virginity to anyone yet, because therein your master has an infinite love." Knight, however, backs away from the aggressively sexual connotations of this decoding, asserting, "I do not think, at this early stage in her story, it can mean 'in giving your master my virginity I shall give him a thousand loves,' since she has no good reason at this stage to expect such an event." Helena's lacking a reason to expect "such an event" is surely beside the point; she clearly desires to "mate" with Bertram and, stoked by Parolles' libidinous exhortations, she presumably builds on the tantalizing possibility of losing her virginity to her own liking -- that is, to Bertram. The speech becomes the link between this heretofore unthinkable idea and the conception of her bold plan for winning him.

She wishes Bertram well, she tells Parolles, but would rather do him well -- "show what we alone must think." She would like to give her well wishing (that is, her love) a "body" which "might be felt" (180-81). Her wish that Bertram feel the body of her love foreshadows the offering of her body in the bed-trick and in marriage. Perhaps "at the court" has seemed the best candidate for Helena's imagined "there" because virginity -- or rather the unpenetrated female territory it predicates -- has been perceived, within a phallocentric register of meaning, not as a "there" but as a "nowhere," a "nothing-to-be-seen" in Irigaray's striking phrase. In a Shakespearean sense, the virgin "knot" connotes a "not."

Thus the key to the speech may lie not in a missing line but in a missing language -- one that embodies a woman's "thereness" and enables the expression of female desire. Helena appears trapped within the phallocentric linguistic system that Lacan describes, in which female desire is literally unspeakable, always already reconfigured as the desire for male desire. 13 The unspeakability of Helena's passion compels her to speak it evasively and mystically. She thus characterizes her "virginity" as a kind of philosopher's stone (5.3.102), a "tinct and multiplying medicine" that blesses Bertram with a supernally expansive love and allows her, for his sake, to assume all the guises of the courtier's beloved -- to become a kind of shape-shifting superwoman. "I am his anything," Helena seems to say, as though embracing the status of possession that Petruchio prescribes for Kate when he calls her "my any thing" (3.2.332).