All's Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays

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ALL’S WELL, THAT ENDS WELL

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S HAKESPEARE C RITICISM P HILIP C. K OLIN , General Editor

ROMEO AND JULIET Critical Essays edited by John F. Andrews

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS Critical Essays edited by James Schiffer

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CORIOLANUS Critical Essays edited by David Wheeler

PERICLES Critical Essays edited by David Skeele

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TITUS ANDRONICUS Critical Essays edited by Philip C. Kolin

THE TEMPEST Critical Essays edited by Patrick M. Murphy

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LOVES LABOUR’S LOST Critical Essays edited by Felicia Hardison Londré

HENRY VI Critical Essays edited by Thomas A. Pendleton

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THE WINTER’S TALE Critical Essays edited by Maurice Hunt

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW Critical Essays edited by Dana E. Aspinall

TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA Critical Essays edited by June Schlueter

OTHELLO New Critical Essays edited by Philip C. Kolin

VENUS AND ADONIS Critical Essays edited by Philip C. Kolin

HAMLET New Critical Essays edited by Arthur F. Kinney

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AS YOU LIKE IT FROM 1600 PRESENT Critical Essays edited by Edward Tomarken

TO THE

JULIUS CAESAR New Critical Essays edited by Horst Zander

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS Critical Essays edited by Robert S. Miola

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE New Critical Essays edited by John W. Mahon and Ellen Macleod Mahon

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Critical Essays edited by Dorothea Kehler

KNTONY AND CLEOPATRA New Critical Essays edited by Sara M. Deats

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ALL’S WELL, THAT ENDS WELL N EW C RITICAL E SSAYS

EDITED

BY

GARY WALLER

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First published 2007 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data All’s well, that ends well : new critical essays / edited by Gary Waller. p. cm. – (Shakespeare criticism) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. All’s well that ends well. I. Waller, Gary F. (Gary Fredric), 1945– PR2801.A87 2006 822.3′3–dc22 2006022252 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 0-203-96591-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 13: 978–0–415–97352–6 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–203–96591–7 (ebk)

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FOR KATIE AND PHILIP, MICHAEL AND ANDREW CRAIG AND MICHELE, AND THE PURCHASE 2005 SENIOR ACTING COMPANY Let us from point to point this story know, To make the even truth in pleasure flow. All’s Well, That Ends Well, 5.3.322–23.

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Contents General Editor’s Introduction

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List of Figures and Acknowledgments

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Contributors

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Preface

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From “the Unfortunate Comedy” to “this Infinitely Fascinating Play”: the Critical and Theatrical Emergence of All’s Well, That Ends Well GARY WALLER Revising the Sources: Novella, Romance, and the Meanings of Fiction in All’s Well, That Ends Well STEVEN MENTZ “As Sweet as Sharp”: Helena and the Fairy Bride Tradition REGINA BUCCOLA

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Tying the (K)not: The Marriage of Tragedy and Comedy in All’s Well, That Ends Well PAUL GLEED

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All’s Well, That Ends Well and the Art of Retrograde Motion DEANNE WILLIAMS

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Performing Woman: Female Theatricality in All’s Well, That Ends Well KENT R. LEHNHOF

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“To make the ‘not’ eternal”: Female Eloquence and Patriarchal Authority in All’s Well, That Ends Well ELLEN BELTON

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Contents Shakespeare’s Miracle Play? Religion in All’s Well, That Ends Well HELEN WILCOX

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She is in the Right: Biblical Maternity and All’s Well, That Ends Well MICHELE OSHEROW

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“The credit of your father”: Absent Fathers in All’s Well, That Ends Well DAVID M. BERGERON

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“’Twas mine, ’twas Helen’s”: Rings of Desire in All’s Well, That Ends Well NICHOLAS RAY

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“Sweet Practicer, thy Physic I will try”: Helena and Her ‘Good Receipt’ in All’s Well, That Ends Well CATHERINE FIELD

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All’s Well, That Ends Well and the 1604 Controversy Concerning the Court of Wards and Liveries TERRY REILLY

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Playing it Accordingly: Parolles and Shakespeare’s Knee-crooking Knaves CRAIG DIONNE

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All’s Well as Television: the 1980 Moshinsky Production BOB WHITE

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Appendix: Select List of Productions of All’s Well, That Ends Well, 1953–2006

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Select Bibliography Index

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General Editor’s Introduction

The continuing goal of the Shakespeare Criticism series is to provide the most significant and original contemporary interpretations of Shakespeare’s works. Each volume in the series is devoted to a Shakespeare play or poem (e.g., the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, Othello) and contains eighteen to twenty-five new essays exploring the text from a variety of critical perspectives. A major feature of each volume in the series is the editor’s introduction. Each volume editor provides a substantial essay identifying the main critical issues and problems the play (or poem) has raised, charting the critical trends in looking at the work over the centuries, and assessing the critical discourse that has linked the play or poem to various ideological concerns. In addition to examining the critical commentary in light of important historical and theatrical events, each introduction functions as a discursive bibliographic essay citing and evaluating significant critical works—books, journal articles, theater documents, reviews, and interviews—giving readers a guide to the vast amounts of research on a particular play or poem. Each volume showcases the work of leading Shakespeare scholars who participate in and extend the critical discourse on the text. Reflecting the most recent approaches in Shakespeare studies, these essays approach the play from a host of critical positions, including but not limited to feminist, Marxist, new historical, semiotic, mythic, performance/staging, cultural, and/or a combination of these and other methodologies. Some volumes in the series include bibliographic analyses of a Shakespeare text to shed light on its critical history and interpretation. Interviews with directors and/or actors are also part of some volumes in the series. At least one, sometimes as many as two or three, of the essays in each volume is devoted to a play in performance beginning with the earliest and most significant productions and proceeding to the most recent. These

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essays, which ultimately provide a theater history of the play, should not be regarded as different from or rigidly isolated from the critical work on the script. Over the last thirty years or so Shakespeare criticism has understandably been labeled the “Age of Performance.” Readers will find information in these essays on non-English speaking production of Shakespeare’s plays as well as landmark performances in English. Editors and contributors also include photographs from productions across the world to help readers see and further appreciate the ways a Shakespeare play has taken shape in the theater. Ultimately, each volume in the Shakespeare Criticism Series strives to give readers a balanced, representative collection of the most engaging and thoroughly researched criticism on the given Shakespeare text. In essence, each volume provides a careful survey of essential materials in the history of the criticism for a Shakespeare play or poem as well as cutting-edge essays that extend and enliven our understanding of the work in its critical context. In offering readers innovatively and fulfilling new essays, volume editors have made invaluable contributions to the literary and theatrical criticism of Shakespeare’s greatest legacy, his work. Philip C. Kolin University of Southern Mississippi

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List of Figures and Acknowledgments

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Helena enters in triumph after curing the King (Act2.3) Purchase Repertory’s All’s Well That Ends Well, 2005, directed by David Bassuk Lavatch and “the woman” Isbel Reproduced by kind permission of Gustavus Adolphus College 2005. Robert Gardner (director) King and lords (Act1.2) Purchase Repertory’s All’s Well That Ends Well, 2005, directed by David Bassuk Interrogating Parolles (Act 4.3) 2003 production of Culver City Public Theatre’s All’s Well That Ends Well directed by Gregg W. Brevoort L-R: Christian Saglie, Chris Foreman, Kyle Nudo, Greg Ellery. Photo by Gregg W. Brevoort Bertram and Diana (Act 4.2) Ark Theatre Company, All’s Well That Ends Well directed by Paul Wagar. David Stevens (Bertram) and Anna Quirino Miranda (Diana) Helena and Diana exchange roles (Act 4.2, 4) Purchase Repertory’s All’s Well That Ends Well, 2005, directed by David Bassuk Helena and Bertram (Act 5.3) Purchase Repertory’s All’s Well That Ends Well, 2005, directed by David Bassuk The “bed-trick” (Act 4.2, 4) Reproduced courtesy of Washington University Photographic Services

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Figure 4.1

List of Figures and Acknowledgements

The King gives Bertram to Helena (Act2.3) Ark Theatre Company, All’s Well That Ends Well directed by Paul Wagar. Back row, L-R: Kris Allen, Fredric Rooney, Chairman Barnes, Benjamin Bradford Front row: L-R: David Stevens, Jake Austin, Coco Kleppinger, Spencer Nicholas, Michael Agrusso. Photo by Richard Tatum Figure 5.1 Helena and Parolles (Act1 Sc1) Reproduced by kind permission of Gustavus Adolphus College 2005. Robert Gardner (director) Figure 6.1 Helena cures the King Purchase Repertory’s All’s Well That Ends Well, 2005, directed by David Bassuk Figure 7.1 Countess and Helena with Bertram’s letter (Act3.2) Holly Twyford (Helena) and Catherine Flye (Countess of Rosillion) in Folger Theatre’s All’s Well That Ends Well. Directed by Richard Clifford. Photo: Carol Pratt Figure 7.2 Helena and the Florentine Women (Act3.5) Anne Stone (Mariana), Naomi Jacobson (Widow), Erika Sheffer (Diana), Holly Twyford (Helena), All’s Well That Ends Well, Folger Theatre, 2003. Directed by Richard Clifford. Photo: Carol Pratt Figure 8.1 Countess and Helena (Act1.3) University of North Dakota, Department of Theatre Arts. Director: Mary Cutler; Scenic Design: Greg Gillette; Lighting Design: Bryan Duncan; Costume Design: Katherine Jacobs; Sound Design/Technical Director: Loren Liepold; Photography: Loren J. Liepold. Helena: Lynette Lepire; The Countess: Margaret McDonald Figure 8.2 The final ‘miracles’ Reproduced by kind permission of Gustavus Adolphus College 2005. Robert Gardner (director) Figure 9.1 The pregnant Helena greets the Countess Purchase Repertory’s All’s Well That Ends Well, 2005, directed by David Bassuk Figure 10.1 The King as father to Helena (2.3) Reproduced courtesy of Washington University Photographic Services

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List of Figures and Acknowledgements

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Figure 12.1 To cure a ffistula From Mary Baumflde, Receipt Book (c. 1626). Reproduced with permission from Folger Library MSV. a. 456 Figure 12.2 Helena cures the King (2.1) reproduced courtesy of Washington University Photographic Services Figure 13.1 Bertram’s reluctant betrothal (Act 3.2) From Walden Theatre’s Production of All’s Well That Ends Well, photography by Harlan Taylor Figure 14.1 The interrogation of Parolles (Act 4.3) Purchase Repertory’s All’s Well That Ends Well, 2005, directed by David Bassuk

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Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased to hear from any copyright holders not acknowledged here, so that this acknowledgement page may be amended at the earliest opportunity.

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Contributors

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Ellen Belton is the Acting University Dean of the Honors College of the City University of New York and Professor of English at Brooklyn College. She has published on Shakespeare, other Renaissance dramatists, and Jane Austen, most recently “Reimagining Jane Austen: The 1940 and 1995 Screen Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice,” in Jane Austen on Screen. David M. Bergeron is Professor of English at the University of Kansas. He is the author of many books, including King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family, and English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642. He serves on the editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly and as longtime editor of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama.

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Regina Buccola is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Roosevelt University, and the author of Fairies, Fractious Women and the Old Faith: Fairies in Early Modern English Drama and Culture and co-editor of Marian Moments in Early Modern Drama. She has also published in Sixteenth-Century Journal, Early Theater Journal, and Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England. Craig Dionne is Professor of English Literature at Eastern Michigan University. He is co-editor of Disciplining English and Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. He has published on early modern literature and the reception of Shakespeare, and is editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.

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Catherine Field currently teaches at the University of Perugia. Her recent research focuses on Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books and the Politics of Writing Food for the Nation.

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Paul Gleed is a graduate of Lancaster University, and is currently pursuing a Doctorate at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His dissertation is on the cultural poetics of Renaissance tragicomedy. Kent R. Lehnhof is Assistant Professor of English at Chapman University. He has published essays on Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. His current research project examines representations of chastity in Renaissance epic and play texts. Steve Mentz is Assistant Professor of English Literature at St John’s University. He is the author of Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction and co-editor of Rogues and Early Modern English Culture as well as articles on Shakespeare, Sidney, Nashe, Greene, Lyly, and Gascoigne. Michele Osherow is Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Assistant Director at the Shakespeare Association of America. She has published on early modern women, biblical heroines, and has just completed a book, ‘Even I will sing’: Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern Texts. She is currently working on a study of Shakespeare and women of the Bible. She has appeared frequently on stage, most recently as Marianna in Measure for Measure at the Folger where she works as dramaturg. Nicholas Ray is Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Tragedy and Otherness: Psychoanalysis, Shakespeare and the Greeks. Terry Reilly is an associate professor of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has published widely on relationships between early modern literature and law. He is on the editorial advisory board of the Oklahoma City University Law Review, and is working on a book about early modern literature and inheritance law, and a play on Shakespeare and the Inns of Court. Gary Waller is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at Purchase College, SUNY. His books include The Sidney Family Romance, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, Shakespeare’s Comedies, Reading Texts, Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life, Mary Sidney Countess of Pembroke, and editions of the poems of Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth. He is currently working on literary and artistic ‘splittings’ of the Virgin Mary from the late Middle Ages to Shakespeare and the Radical Reformation. R. S. (Bob) White is Professor of English, Communication and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia. He was awarded an Australian Centenary Medal for service to Australian society and the humanities. His

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books include Innocent Victims: Poetic Injustice in Shakespearean Tragedy, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature and Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s. He contributed ‘Twentieth Century Criticism’ to the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies. He is writing a book on Pacifism and Literature. Helen Wilcox is Chair of English at the University of Wales, Bangor. She has published widely on early modern texts, in three main areas: devotional poetry (particularly the poetry of Herbert, which she has edited for Cambridge), women’s writing (particularly autobiographies), and Shakespeare. She is the editor of the Arden 3 All’s Well and is preparing the volume on the tragicomedies in the Routledge Feminist Readings of Shakespeare series. Deanne Williams is Associate Professor of English at York University. She is the author of The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare, which won the Bainton Prize for Best Book in Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society. She co-edited Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures and is working on Renaissance Medievalism.

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Preface

This collection gives voice to recent critical and theatrical evaluations of Shakespeare’s All’s Well, That Ends Well. None of the essayists makes a claim for its being one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays—not even I, who evangelize constantly on its behalf. But whenever the contributors have met—at performances, in libraries, or through the never-ending emails that have flown back and forth—we’ve agreed that, while flawed (though intriguingly, we never quite agree why), All’s Well is nonetheless one of his most—we all say it—‘interesting’ plays. In fact, in the last twenty years, All’s Well has increasingly attracted incisive commentary and enjoyed striking productions, not only by established institutions like the RSC, but by regional, community and university companies, some of which are discussed and illustrated. This unprecedented interest in the play comes through in the essays, all new, many written by up-and-coming scholars, as well as in the discussions of and illustrations from recent productions. I came to this project tentatively. Early in the 1990s, I had edited a collection of essays on the comedies, which included Carolyn Asp’s feminist/ psychoanalytical analysis, which at that time startled me into studying the play more closely, and which a number of contributors in this volume continue to see as foundational. In Spring 2004, just as I was stepping down from a dozen years in university administration and wanting to be back working with scholars, critics, directors and students, a series of conversations returned me to the play. David Bassuk, Dean of the Conservatory of Theatre Arts & Film at Purchase, invited me to work with his senior acting company, proposing that he would direct All’s Well after I had taught it to them in the Fall semester. The book is in part dedicated to those students, who staged the play under David’s subtle direction. A number of the essayists saw and comment on that production and so it has something of a pivotal status in the collection. At the 2004 Shakespeare Association of America

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meeting in New Orleans, Michele Osherow re-introduced me to that august body (and graciously contributed an essay). Michele is a former student of mine, as is Craig Dionne, another contributor: for encouraging their old teacher, they are also acknowledged in the dedication. And then, in summer 2004, in my annual return to Cambridge, I saw a lively production in the Shakespeare Festival there which reinforced my belief in the project. I was unable to get permission to reproduce photographs from the production, but it is referred to frequently in the Introduction. Throughout, series editor Philip Kolin has helpfully guided me. A number of scholars also took an active interest in the project. These include Russell Jackson, Carol Neely, Mary Ellen Lamb, Elizabeth Archibald and Marion Wynne-Davies. I regret I was unable to include a number of excellent papers I received, including those written by Al Cacicedo, Kathryn Moncrief, and Siobhan Cox. The staffs of the University of Cambridge library, the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon, the Archives of the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., were unfailingly helpful, as was the interlibrary staff at Purchase. I was grateful for small research grants from the Purchase College Foundation and United University Professions. A special note of thanks needs to be given to the directors, actors, and theatre personnel with whom I have discussed the play, especially those kind enough to provide photographs and responded to a survey about their approach. The productions are listed in the Appendix, and I am extremely grateful for their willingness to share their insights. Part of my underlying argument rests on the remarkable way the play has recently been brought to varied life by an intriguing variety of non-mainstream theatre companies, and the illustrations are a tribute to their parts in that. I am especially grateful to the senior acting company at Purchase for allowing their production to be a workshop for my (and other contributors’) discussions about the play. I would also like to thank Katherine Sheppard and Polly Dodson of Routledge, for their immensely helpful and efficient work through the production stage of the book. Finally, on a personal note, my son Michael helped me negotiate backstage parts of the Festival Theatre organization in Stratford, Ontario, where many years ago I had taken him to see his first Shakespeare plays; one day, I hope he will direct All’s Well there, or elsewhere. My second son, Andrew, as usual, patiently advised me on the electronic transmission of images, and my third son, Philip, stimulated my thinking about the play with derisive (and occasional admiring) comments on a number of productions: one day I hope he gets to play Bertram—he is one of the few young actors who could probably bring it off. My wife, Kathleen McCormick, has been her usual fiercely perceptive, stimulating and rigorous self. My family is therefore gratefully acknowledged in the

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dedication along with the representatives of my two generations of students. They have taught me even more valuable lessons. All quotations from All’s Well, That Ends Well are taken from the Penguin Shakespeare edition, edited with a commentary by Barbara Everett, introduced by Janette Dillon; General Introduction Stanley Wells (London: Penguin, 2005).

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Figure 1.1 Helen enters in triumph after curing the King (2.3), Purchase Repertory 2005, David Bassuk (director). Diana Hoyt (Helena).

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From “the Unfortunate Comedy” to “this Infinitely Fascinating Play” The critical and theatrical emergence of All’s Well, That Ends Well GARY WALLER

REDISCOVERING ALL’S WELL, THAT ENDS WELL In the last third of his career, Shakespeare carried out some extraordinary experiments with comedy. All’s Well, That Ends Well (?1604–5) is among the first of these ambitious plays, which culminate in The Winter’s Tale (?1610) and The Tempest (?1611). All’s Well is striking for its focus on sexual and gender politics; its heroine was termed by Shaw “too . . . modern” for early-twentieth-century audiences, and it was called a “radical” play even as recently as the 1990s. It is a play that has benefited from what Hugh Grady has termed “presentist” criticism, that is “shaped by the ideologies and discourses of our cultural present.”1 Indeed, perhaps only in the last twenty years has an adequate critical vocabulary been developed to appreciate, even to describe, All’s Well, and in recent years it has engendered both intense critical debate and diverse and often spectacularly successful productions. Theatrically, despite a few loose ends, and notwithstanding a highly flawed text, among the least trustworthy in the Folio, it is tightly constructed, and without Shakespeare’s occasional middle-act untidiness; it has a number of powerful long scenes and contains two bold theatrical devices, an exchange of sexual partners and a climactic revelatory scene with strong religious overtones. It is also one of Shakespeare’s theatrically most open-ended plays; at points, he only sketches crucial pieces of what conventionally would be most looked for in “realistic” plot and characterization, thus providing significant openings for directorial decision and interpretative debate. It is, overall, we are rediscovering, or discovering for the first time, an unjustly neglected play. Or such should be the case. All’s Well has, in fact, been and continues to be one of Shakespeare’s least praised plays—and also, until the late

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twentieth century, one of the least performed. The description in the above paragraph would be regarded sceptically by many critics (and directors) in the past century—and, admittedly, does require some qualification and refinement, as this introduction and the essays that follow are evidence. But nevertheless, recent work on such matters as theatrical fashion (and the very nature of what constitutes theatrical experience), historical context, genre, sexual and gender politics, and almost a century’s investigations of the origins or stories behind the play have all made All’s Well not so much—in words used to describe its first production in 1741—an “unfortunate” comedy, but what a 2004 reviewer termed “this infinitely fascinating” play. The essays collected here, all written in the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, assess for the first time not only the problems but the radical achievement of All’s Well. It is a play, as many of the contributors argue and in quite different ways, whose time has come, bearing out Terry Eagleton’s joco-serious observation that “though in many ways we appear to have left Shakespeare’s age behind, there are other ways in which we have yet to catch up with him.”2 Working with the play has clearly seemed for many recent critics and directors an exercise in genuine discovery, and the essays here try to capture something of the excitement of “catching up with” All’s Well.

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Whatever else about the play is currently in question, its textual and publishing history is relatively straightforward. The only authoritative text occurs in the 1623 First Folio. It is demonstrably neither an authorial nor a performance text. It appears to be still in process of detailed authorial revision; in addition, there may have been as many as 400 misreadings and minor typographical errors inserted in the printing house. The copy was probably some stage of the author’s own “foul papers;” De Somogyi argues, in fact, that the Folio All’s Well is “among the closest material we have to the inkwell on Shakespeare’s desk,” and is in a state “in which he would have submitted it to his company,” thus giving us valuable insights into his working habits. Sorting out the sloppy transmission of the text from revisions— possibly by Shakespeare himself, but perhaps by one or more members of his company in preparation for a production or simply for the Folio publication—is a difficult challenge. Recent editors, working on the perhaps overoptimistic assumptions of the “New Bibliography” that the various layers of the text can be identified, have generally agreed that the most likely late authorial or company additions are the Countess’s brief soliloquy comparing her youthful love experiences with Helena’s; and, possibly, additional lines written for Helena as she considers her own boldness in requesting the King to give her Bertram as her reward.

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Other possible revisions that surface inconsistently in the Folio include the name of the Florentine girl Diana, and the piecemeal correcting of some discrepancies in stage directions, punctuation and nomenclature which still reflects Shakespeare’s common working practice of drafting a script by generic types or actors (e.g. Clown) rather than for named fictional characters. The French lords are variously named as “E,” “G,” and “Lords” in the play; they may be two, four or even more distinct characters. The Countess is referred to by variants of “Lady,” “Old Lady,” “His Mother,” and “Countess;” the heroine is Helena, Helen and Hellen; Bertram’s name also varies, sometimes to stress his family name or status, sometimes for no apparent reason. Shakespeare, summarizes De Somogyi, “seems to have repeatedly gone back over his script, changing (and sometimes forgetting the changes) somewhat inconsistently.”3 Directors—and, for that matter, readers and spectators—have to remind themselves that, perhaps more than with any other Shakespeare play, the Folio text is not sacrosanct. Distinguished recent editions include those of Susan Snyder (Oxford, 1993); the Arden 3, edited by Helen Wilcox, is due to appear in 2007, as is an Internet edition, allowing for an archive rather than a simple sampling of sources, edited by Karen Bamford and Helen Ostovich.

DATE There is no reliable external indication when All’s Well was written. Eighteenth-century editions (dating from Percy’s in 1767) suggested that it, or an earlier version, was the mysterious “Love’s Labour’s Won” mentioned by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598). That identification—based also on supposed early stylistic characteristic of frequent rhymed couplets—is now generally dismissed.4 A few topical references do help date the play. The extended discussion of virginity, especially the pejorative reference to “old” virginity by Parolles (1.1.158), makes unlikely any date before the death of Queen Elizabeth in March 1603. Echoes of the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint—probably completed by 1603–4 —suggest that as a possible date. Common thematic and stylistic parallels with Measure for Measure (performed December 26, 1604) reinforce that, though current textual scholarship suggests that All’s Well was probably written after Measure. Using quantitative methods, including tests for common-word frequencies, Gary Taylor has suggested an even later date, and many scholars have pointed to the play’s anticipations of the so-called “late” romances (1608–11), but there is no need to postulate a proximate dating for the plays to have common features. So while it has been dated as late as 1609, the most probable is 1604–6, the terminal date, De Somogyi argues, made likely by the number of invocations of God in the play, a

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habit that was curtailed in 1606 by James’s edict against “the great abuse of the Holy Name of God in stage plays.”5 Although listed among the comedies in the Folio, All’s Well shows that Shakespeare is clearly making a transition to a more serious and complex kind of theatre that may still incorporate his frequent comic ending of marriage or some apparent restoration of social or familial harmony, but with significant tonal and structural complications, including the incorporation of pain and suffering to an extent rarely approached in the earlier plays. As will be later suggested, Shakespeare is moving towards what Italians termed commedia grave, serious comedy. Indeed, many recent critics suggest that we think of the “late romances”—a category that has been quasi-canonized in the Riverside edition—not as an exclusive group of four or five “late” plays, but as the culminating phase of a broader group of late tragic-comedies over the period 1604–1611.

ORIGINS AND SOURCES The question of Shakespeare’s sources for the play is also relatively uncomplicated. The play’s main action is based on Boccaccio’s Decameron (Ninth story, Third Day). William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure, a popular translation of Boccaccio’s stories published in 1566 and reprinted in 1569 and 1575, is likely to have been Shakespeare’s direct English source. Reading the play alongside Painter, however, is like entering a hall of mirrors after being in the light of day. Shakespeare makes the story far more complex, adding shrewd situational juxtapositions that bring out psychological and social dislocations, inserting complexities of gender identity, class status, and sexuality. He emphasizes coincidence and surprise: Helena and Bertram, for example, have sex only once, not a long affair; and from that single encounter, Helena becomes pregnant. Rather than bringing up twins and proving herself a competent estate manager like Boccaccio’s Giletta, Helena pursues Bertram, and supported by a group of women friends from Florence, she confronts him at the play’s end, both triumphantly pregnant and still obsessively desiring him. The title’s cheerful blandness is deepened: indeed (an important detail almost universally overlooked by critics and directors alike) the Folio’s comma after “All’s Well,” suggests that any happy ending will be achieved only at the play’s end or even beyond, and that the achievement may not necessarily seem “well” on the way. Some readers and spectators have found what Leah Scragg terms “the quantum leap in terms of demands that [the play] makes on the reader” jeopardizes “the intellectual satisfaction that could be derived from the work;” others have found that it is precisely the surprise and wonder of the ending which gives the play its power. Shakespeare had an uncanny ability to find rich and often highly problematic

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issues within the most trivial story—and All’s Well is an especially interesting example since the narrative source is so clear and his changes so obvious and significant.6 Shakespeare also makes important changes to the story’s central characters. He seems to go out of his way to make his hero, Bertram, less attractive, so much so that directors often feel they have to work against the author’s changes from his sources and build up Bertram’s likeability. His rejection of Helena, before and after the wedding, is harsher and more dismissive than in the source; her “tasks” are announced as a punitive sentence, and her reaction is more despairing; and in the final scene, Bertram’s lying and evasiveness are Shakespeare’s embellishments. Parolles is Shakespeare’s addition, if not (remembering Falstaff) a totally new invention. The whole older generation is expanded from Boccaccio. The King’s role is greatly increased; the key character of the Countess is completely new, as is the clown Lavatch, and the courtier Lafew (as well as his mysterious daughter Maudlin, who (unless cut) plays a key though usually unseen role at the end). Expanding the older generation opens up a crucial perspective on the younger generation of Helena, Bertram, and the young lords at court. As Snyder notes, all members of the older generation function “to dispose the audience in Helen’s favour by their unanimous approval of her, and thus to defuse any negative reactions when she transgresses class and gender conventions.”7 For a century, scholars have asked why Boccaccio’s tale might have any lasting appeal, broadly agreeing that the play draws on stories that bring out powerful recurring human desires. I shall return to these “stories” when the play’s ending is considered, but as first identified by W.W. Lawrence in the 1920s and published in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (1931), the traditionally favored underlying story has two parts. The first Lawrence termed “the Healing of the King,” or (in a revealingly patronizing phrase) the “Clever Wench,” in which an ingenious young woman wins the man of her choice by an apparently miraculous cure of a monarch who, in gratitude, rewards her with the desired bridegroom. The second, termed by Lawrence the “fulfillment of the tasks,” relates how the (now) wife gains her reluctant husband’s affection by fulfilling seemingly impossible conditions—in Helena’s case, gaining a ring which Bertram swears he will never take off, and by having him sleep with her against his intentions and becoming pregnant. But other stories, including some in Boccaccio, may have helped Shakespeare develop his plot. Mentz adds the story of Cupid and Psyche, the tale of a mortal falling in love with a superior being; Buccola provides connections with the rich “fairy” tradition upon which Shakespeare had drawn in earlier plays. Nor should we ignore the popular tradition of romance stories of patient, self-sacrificing heroines or the array of medieval saints’ stories and plays to which Shakespeare

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was drawn in his later comedies, many of which turn on events of miracle akin to All’s Well’s final scene.8 There are undoubtedly rich social and psychological resonances to all these stories. Lawrence found parallels in many cultures, and claimed that their appeal lay in the enjoyment we take in watching a courageous heroine overcome impossible odds to win the man she wants, and then (when she seems to have been thwarted) watching her achieve a second, even more improbable, victory. Such stories are in part built on the stereotypical support for an attractive underdog—especially because Helena is a woman taking on the challenge of succeeding in a patriarchal world, so that even the unlikelihood of her achievements, and the cleverness with which she pursues her goal, become (it is hoped) acceptable to an audience. All’s Well’s variation on such stories, and the heart of the play’s interest, centers on an aggressive woman who gets what she wants—a story that may account for much of the play’s long-standing “unfortunate” reputation.

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GENRE: ALL’S WELL AS A “PROBLEM” PLAY?

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Today, most critics regard All’s Well—whether negatively or positively— as posing distinctive “problems.” Both Bergeron and Williams tackle aspects of the play’s structure, on the surface and at deeper structural levels. But until recently, it was overwhelmingly judged as a failed comedy and, as if to stress the distinctiveness of its failure, labeled as a “problem play” or “problem comedy,” terminology which originated with F. S. Boas in 1896 and which, given its repetition in books, articles, editions, and university courses, has almost achieved canonical status.9 A variety of plays have been designated as “problem” plays, including Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and even Hamlet. The fact that almost a fifth of the canon has been accorded membership perhaps shows up the ambiguity of the term, but it has hung on. For some it connotes a play “about” problems; for others, a play “with” problems. All’s Well may well be the latter—it is, one recent director responded to my questionnaire, like a puzzle in which some of the pieces provided don’t quite fit or are missing, or where some seem to belong to other puzzles, and therefore inviting selection and completion by director and actors. But for many critics the term “problem play” became a generic and almost a moral category. Behind such categorization lay a major critical and broader aesthetic preoccupation of the twentieth century, that of seeing “unity”—whether expressed as organic, aesthetic, or thematic unity—as the mark of a successful work of literature. Such an ideology, implying that all parts of a work need somehow to combine in a rational and harmonious whole, was shared across the twentieth century’s dominant critical schools, including “Old” Historicists,

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British Leavisites, American New Critics, and Continental Structuralists. A work of art, if successful, ought to have a structure that is inherently coherent, consistent, “organically” coherent. “Problem play” seemed a convenient label for plays that were incomplete or impure; it became popular in a period when scholars were examining the generic “unity” of Shakespeare’s plays, and were puzzled by their mixed nature or that they raised issues they could not solve—something Shakespeare, the unquestionably great writer, would surely not have deliberately done—and were therefore failures. Since the mid-1980s, however, other approaches to the generic puzzle of All’s Well have emerged—an especially interesting development given the increasing stage success of the play. In her edition (1993), Snyder offered an alternative “generic fix” by looking to All’s Well’s affinities with medieval drama. She pointed out that the pivotal bed-trick has theatrical and emotional roots in Christ’s outwitting of the devil through the great cosmic trick of the Incarnation. Yet as she acknowledged, a key part of the medieval pattern is the sinner’s recognition of the grace the Virgin Mary (or a saint) brings, and helpful as such a comparison is, it is not so much the defining characteristic but rather part of the mix with which Shakespeare is experimenting.10 Another useful corrective to the dismissal of All’s Well as an aberrant “problem play” has simply been to look at it in relation to other plays on the Jacobean stage or elsewhere in Europe. Italian comedy of the late sixteenth century, for instance, had developed commedia grave, a generic mélange that included romantic comedy, farce, strong and serious women characters, near-tragedy, heroism overcoming seemingly impossible odds, and scenes of wonder that invoke a magical or religious world, all clearly designed to evoke strong individual and collective utopian fantasies. Girolano Bargagli’s La Pellegrina, which was presented as part of the entertainment for a Medici wedding in 1589—and incidentally interspersed with intermedi which are often seen as the basis of opera—is a relevant case in point since it is also based on the story of Giletta in the Decameron. Looking at parallels on the English stage, David Farley-Hills (1988,1990) showed how All’s Well may be linked to the “Prodigal Husband” plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men repertoire in the early-1600s. He also compared it with Chapman’s mythic comedies like The Gentleman Usher (1602) which combine mythological and fairytale subject matter with realistic social issues. W. David Kay suggested that Helena was aligned with the loyal and selfless wives in plays like The London Prodigal (1605) and Wilkins’s The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607). The rebuilding of a broken marriage through a wife’s virtues, heroes with sensual or moral weaknesses, and sudden conversions combined to make these plays popular. They were the English equivalent to Italian “serious comedies,” no less “comic” in that they end in reconciliation, but adding an unusual dimension of moral seriousness.11

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The traditional comparison with Shakespeare’s other comedies and the consequent ostracization of All’s Well as a “problem” play has, in fact, been somewhat superseded in recent years—and to be fair, there were isolated suggestions along these lines as long ago as Wilson Knight in the 1920s—that the most fruitful connections are between All’s Well and the so-called late “romances.” The Riverside Shakespeare separated out the “romances” as a separate generic category; yet much as one might admire the plays so identified, it seems an artificial imposition to separate them from Shakespeare’s long experimentation with, and subversion of, comedy, in which, increasingly, pain, loss, and human contingency became more sharply present, and the recognition or joy at the end more intense. Typically, the later comedies complicate emotional situations in order to emphasize the potential tragedy of events while not quite losing belief and hope of a transformative ending. Increasingly, therefore, scholars have seen the plays as examples of “tragic-comedy,” a term often associated with the Italian dramatist Guarini and defined in England by John Fletcher in The Faithful Shepherdess (1608), as wanting “deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy.” Such mixing of genres had, in fact, been characteristic of English drama through the Middle Ages; it was only with the advent of neo-classicism in the sixteenth century that generic purity had become an issue. Shakespeare’s comedies are arguably all mixed. Ros King argues that there is a native tradition of tragic-comedy surfacing in Richard Edwards’s 1564 play Damon and Pythias, and that English writers “were not only conversant with the concept of tragicomedy . . . but were happily writing in that form.” She suggests that “tragic-comedy” best fits the earliest of all of Shakespeare’s “comedies,” The Comedy of Errors and in fact is a staple of Shakespeare’s approach to comedy. The tragic-comic author, Barbara Mowat, notes he “decides on the effect he intends to have on the audience, carefully selects some elements from tragedy, some from comedy, blends them . . . and thus creates for the audience a dramatic experience which avoids alike the terror of tragedy and the raucous laughter of comedy.” Her description fits All’s Well neatly. Carol Rutter comments that it “opens like Hamlet and proceeds like Chekhov before ending like the Book of Revelations.” Such an approach to All’s Well, drawing on Classical, English and European precedent, certainly offers a more satisfactory account of what kind of play it is than the label “problem” play.12 But if “problem play” can now be seen as too clumsy, and in part growing from modernist aesthetic ideologies, there was another sense in which the term seemed to a number of modern critics from Shaw onwards, to apply to All’s Well. Since the rise of expressionistic, socially oriented, drama (Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw himself, for instance) Helena has struck many as resembling an Ibsenite or Shavian heroine—articulate, determined,

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adaptable and representing something akin to Shaw’s Life Force. Setting the play in the late Victorian-pre World War One period has become popular and have brought out its social radicalism. Tresnjak’s production exploited such connections well, and echoes of Chekhov were explicit in the Nunn production with its decadent, sleepy and (at least to Bertram) frustrating Rossillion.13

ALL’S WELL ON THE STAGE Whether experimental, radical, or incompletely written, we have no record of a performance of All’s Well before 1741, 135 or more years after it was probably written. Even by the mid-twentieth century, its production history was characterized by inept adaptations, radical cuts and, as an early commentator noted, “the disagreeable accidents which fell out several times during the acting of it.” Eighteenth-century productions played down the romantic story: Irene Dash has shown from the promptbooks how productions eliminated parts of Helena’s speeches that made her seem bold, independent and sexually aggressive. There are a few appreciative remarks from the time, but they are primarily about Parolles, Rowe (1709) commenting that the character was “as good as anything . . . in Plautus or Terence.” Charlotte Lennox, however, objected to the “cruel, artful and insolent” Helena and the despicable Bertram who, in one of Dr Johnson’s famous dismissals, was evaluated thus: I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble 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.

Critical and stage fashions change. From the late eighteenth century on, the play was assimilated to the pattern of the early comedies and their charming heroines. Coleridge called Helena Shakespeare’s “loveliest creation;” Nathan Drake said she had “the most bewitching tenderness of heart” and rising to “exalted truth and heroism.” What were seen as the indelicacies of both her situation and the play’s language were cut; and in some performances, even Bertram’s demand for a child as part of fulfilling her task was eliminated. Perhaps the culmination of the nineteenth century’s sentimentalization of the play was Mary Cowden Clarke’s hundred-page fictionalization of “Helena the Doctor’s Orphan” in The Girlhoods of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–55). A series of sentimental anecdotes, it nonetheless constitutes a remarkable commentary on the play, though it decorously stops short of the opening scene and its discussion of the

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heroine’s virginity. Clarke portrays Helena as patient, forgiving, and wise, helping Bertram, even when they were children, to grow into a mature and responsible young man—occasionally with the help of Lafew’s daughter Maudlin, who visits from court and reprimands Bertram for his discourtesy to his devoted companion.14 A key period in the stage history of All’s Well is around 1920, when the celebrated producer William Poel mounted an “authentic” Elizabethan reading in London; the following year a production used the full text, probably for the first time, and in 1922 the play was staged at Stratford. This relative plethora of productions (another Stratford production followed in 1935) coincided with the pioneering scholarly work of W. W. Lawrence. But performances remained rare. Between 1920 and the 1980s (and occasionally even beyond) many critics echoed Tillyard: “Fail the play does, when read: but who of its judges have seen it acted? Not I at any rate; and I suspect that it acts far better than it reads.” Productions were reviewed with surprise if the play seemed to work well, with eye-rolling dismissal if it didn’t. G. K. Hunter’s pioneering Arden 2 edition (1959) typically stated that All’s Well “is not a play that is often read or performed, and on the rare occasions when it is seen or heard it does not seem to give much general pleasure,” an opinion which is not only gloomy but inaccurate given that three remarkably successful productions—at the Stratford (Ontario) festival, the Old Vic, and by the Royal Shakespeare Company, had been mounted in major theaters in the previous six years. Hunter did observe, however, that critical approaches to the play had also, to that point, “failed to provide a context within which the genuine virtues of the play can be appreciated.”15 For 1959, that is not overstated. From our vantage point, half a century later, what stands out is the insistent attempt by directors—like critics, as noted above—to find “unity” in the play and to choose between the mixed “romance” and “realism” of the play. In 1953, however, All’s Well was chosen as one of the two plays to initiate the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival, and in this landmark production, Tyrone Guthrie combined both romance and realism, thus staging the supposedly contradictory aspects of the play that seekers for critical unity like Lawrence, Tillyard and others had been unable to reconcile. The play was reviewed enthusiastically, as was his revival at Stratford-upon-Avon six years later. It was precisely the diversity, not the unity, of tone which impressed reviewers. Fifty years later, Robert Shaunessey looked back to the 1953 production as a landmark in the play’s stage history: chosen precisely for its unfamiliarity, he argues, Guthrie’s production opened up the play for scrutiny both as non-realistic theatre and as a play about gender centered on a heroine who was both attractive and aggressive—and with whom we were, emphatically, intended to sympathize.16 Indeed, of the major productions since 1953, the one that has stood

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out as the most “united” has been the 1981 Moshinsky TV version— discussed by Bob White in this volume—where the medium itself allowed for a blanketed mood through the use of seventeenth century Dutch interiors and art and music. Since Guthrie’s, there have been several significant productions at major venues, including the 1967 RSC (directed by John Barton), the RSC Chekhovian production by Trevor Nunn (1981), Barry Kyle’s (1989) and Peter Hall’s (1992) Stratford-upon-Avon productions, and Richard Monette’s at the Stratford Festival (2002). This line of “establishment” productions culminates in the 2003–4 RSC Greg Doran production, which was rapturously reviewed, largely because it was built around the cameo performance of Judi Dench as the Countess. Russell Jackson praised its “fine balance of melancholy and humor, and . . . the intimation that Helen’s forgiveness was a promising sign of Bertram’s having begun a maturing process.”17 It was charming, gentle and reassuring in tone, everything that a conventional Shakespearean comedy should be for the majority of London and Stratford audiences. Where Peter Hall’s RSC production ten years previously had seemed radical and edgy, reviewers of the Doran oozed nostalgia and reverence. More significant than “establishment” productions, I will argue, has been the remarkable number of times All’s Well has been staged in local, regional, and university theatres in the first decade of the new century. Perhaps this reflects a search for a play that has not been often seen; or, given the success of the Doran production, partly as a perception that it is an “in” play. But the number and variety of productions, and the quality of many, suggests that All’s Well has become a play for our time—and one that directors have seized upon as a particularly intriguing challenge. The Appendix to this volume lists the majority of the 60 or more productions in British, Irish, Canadian and American theatres since 2000. I surveyed the directors of a number of these performances: they were asked— and reviews of earlier productions were studied—for their responses to a series of directorial issues. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cuts, mainly involving Helena and sexual content, were noted earlier; today’s changes have been no less drastic and, often, innovative. Preliminary tableaux are common: Nunn’s chess-playing children, Bassuk’s farewell dance with Helena insinuating herself into Bertram’s arms; Williamson’s dumbshow of Lavatch chaperoning the two children (with Bertram attempting to seduce Helena, thus providing a new perspective on the Virginity discussion with Parolles that followed). Both Cambridge and Purchase turned the part of Lavatch to a woman, which required significant textual changes. Williamson, Gardner at Gustavus Adolphus (Figure 1.2) and Tresnjak added the “woman” Isbel, thus filling out rather than eliminating the Clown’s part in order to emphasize the sexual level of the play. Alan Dessen notes that

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Figure 1.2. Lavatch and “the woman” Isbel (1.3), Gustavus Adolphus College 2005, Robert Gardner (director). Jesse Ray (Fool), Emily Coussens (Isbel).

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Williamson also added lines to Bertram’s part in the final scene from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 109, which “eliminated much ambiguity, greatly diminished the potential hurt of the ending, and in effect transformed the final moments,” and of course is a response to a widely felt verbal gap at the end, which otherwise must be filled by gesture and movement.18 Diana has occasionally played as—in Bertram’s clearly desperate words—a “common gamester to the camp” (5.3.188). Nunn had Diana as a singer in her mother’s café/lodging house, though still insisting on her virtue. Other directorial choices and innovations have been noted throughout this introduction and in many of the essays. In discussing the play, I have moved from “generic” and “thematic” to “performative” criticism—but it should be noted the last category involves far more than a history of productions, which may imply that the stage simply mounts a pre-existent, authoritative text. All’s Well is especially useful for considering the Shakespearean play as potential performance, requiring not just directorial decisions about a pre-existent “work,” but participation in organizing, even completing, the script. We all speak of “Shakespeare’s” play: but the relationship between text and performance, W. B. Worthen argues, is “deeply inflicted by the use of the power of ‘authority.’” Dramatic meanings are not “given,” but are generated within the flexible space of text, script, director, actors, readers, settings; individual productions add such factors as setting, company, performance or location. Such fluidity is in the nature of theatre. Yet someone seemingly inevitably asks, unconsciously harking back to the aesthetics and ideology of modernism, “ah, but what does it really mean?” Or: “what did Shakespeare really intend?” How does Shakespeare “mean” us to interpret Bertram’s lies in the final scene? There are no definitive answers to such questions not because we cannot give them, but because we are asking the wrong kind of question. Part of the problem is our residual essentialist critical vocabulary and the recurring positivistic nostalgia for certainty. There is no original meaning of any Shakespeare play; nevertheless, the language with which we characteristically talk about plays tends to be what Worthen terms an “essentializing rhetoric,” a discourse that implies we can give definitive answers to such questions, and further, that if we could, those answers would be authoritative. The critics and scholars in this collection (and the editor) are guilty (and sometimes unapologetically so) of committing such shorthand—but we need always to remember that the reading and viewing situation is a polylogic one that undermines our tendency to claim authorial or textual authority for the iterative nature of interpretation.19 To conclude this crucial but necessarily brief excurse into performative criticism, I will take as my cue an article by David Bevington in which he discusses his experience of working as dramaturg on the Chicago Court Theatre production of 1989. He notes what a privilege it is for a critic or

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scholar to work with a talented director, a company of enthusiastic and well-trained young actors, all determined to prove they could tackle a complex play and fascinate audiences when very few of which had read it.20 My similar experience in the ongoing history of All’s Well was with the Purchase Repertory Theatre production (February 6–20, 2005), directed by David Bassuk. The company had to consider such matters as talent, gender balance, the play’s place in the season, the possibilities offered by “historical,” “contemporary” or “eclectic” staging and costume. The issue (always important and rarely not awkward in American productions) of the racial and ethnic background of the actors provided part of the context. Some lines were blithely pronounced unactable by the dramaturg; in some cases, the cast proved otherwise—and, in fact, the actors made their view of the play very clear at times, for instance finding Helena’s behavior in the “choosing” scene more plausible than is usually felt to be. They brought, as we all do, their other theatrical experiences to bear on the play—in this case, coming off an intense production of Three Sisters: Helena is like a sister who does get to Moscow, one said. Some brought an extreme brand of “method” acting to bear on lines where clearly it did not work but in other cases, worked brilliantly. Each performance changed; each audience brought out different playing; directorial notes subtly modified the interpretation as the season moved along. What these seemingly incidental factors show is Worthen’s key point—that a work is “produced” within continually varying contexts, both details and broader conceptual frameworks, and is not something fixed. Just as the New Critical text, fixed on the page, is a myth, so is the idea of an “author”itative script, whether designed as an acting text or as “literature.” The Purchase production provided something of a focus for this collection of essays. Some of the essayists in this volume saw or were peripherally involved in it and comment on it; it is illustrated in Figures 1.1, 1.3, 1.6, 1.7, 6.1, 9.1, and 14.1.

OLD AND NEW HISTORICISMS I turn now to ask the question of why All’s Well may work—often spectacularly well—on stage and in the study, and to the different critical approaches represented in this collection. I start with historical criticism. The questions that literary and cultural historians pose to texts nowadays usually differ radically from those of two decades ago. Current critical discussion, somewhat loosely, still refers to “New” Historicism as the dominant critical mode, though “New” is, by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, almost a misnomer, since so many of its “innovations” have been abandoned by a resurgent historical positivism, a materialism without political commitments to the present. New Historicism’s challenge to an older historical positivism saw the Shakespearean text placed as part of a network of cultural

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forces, deliberately blurring the difference between “literary” and “historical” material, looking for clues to the wider networks of power within the society that produced a text or event. Culture was seen as bound together, like a network, even a conspiracy, within which the texts of “literature” and individual “subjects” (what earlier criticism unselfconsciously referred to as “individuals” or “persons”) are both imprisoned and legitimated. A New Historicist essay characteristically starts with an anecdote that may seem only marginally connected to the literary text under discussion, and goes on to show there are hidden connections, demonstrating the interweavings of power across seemingly disparate cultural practices. “Old” Historicists were uneasy with the seemingly arbitrarily “presentist” caste of American New Historicism and even more so with its British, more politically committed ally, Cultural Materialism, while Feminist critics have sometimes claimed that New Historicism avoids analysis of class and gender, while its treatment of the play-spaces popular culture or the underclasses—in Shakespeare so often the source of the ludic, grotesque or rebellious—is another widely perceived weakness.21 Dionne’s essay on Parolles and Field’s on Helena’s “receipts” in the present volume are examples in this tradition. However, the most highly publicized recent “historical” essay on All’s Well is decidedly of an “old” variety—and can be linked to a resurgence of apolitical, antiquarian or “material” historicism. In a widely distributed background essay to his production, Doran suggested that Bertram might have been based on William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and the Countess Rossillion on Pembroke’s celebrated mother, Mary Sidney Herbert. Such an argument may remind us of an older, biographical criticism, where events in Shakespeare’s plays were assumed to be transcriptions of autobiographical experience or current events and persons. Kyle’s 1992 RSC production—without making its claim for historical “sources” so specific—had used well-known portraits of Elizabeth and James behind the final scene to stress a sense of historical transition, though it was difficult to see how the analogy worked if the Countess was supposed to be Elizabeth and the King to be James (as suggested by his Scots accent). In an even more archaic “old” historicist vein, Oxfordians have long pointed to what they see as parallels between Bertram and the Earl of Oxford, who (they believe) actually wrote the play. None of these allegedly “historical” references—which range from the plausible to the ludicrous—have seemed to recent critics as a major key to the play, but they remind us that All’s Well does reflect on contemporary court politics. The battles between Florence and Siena were longstanding, going back at least as far as Dante’s and Boccaccio’s time, and Schrickx has shown how Shakespeare incorporated incidental references to European conflicts in the early-seventeenth century, specifically to an important peace conference held early in James’s reign.22

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MATERIAL DETAILS: THE COURT AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS The court, kingship, and aristocracy have all received attention in recent historicist scholarship, including (from their varied perspectives) New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, and the newer apolitical “materialist” historicism. The court, says Helena, is “a learning-place” (1.1.174); Bertram goes to the court to find freedom, identity, autonomy; Parolles vows to Helena that he will “return perfect courtier” (1.1.204); Lavatch mocks court manners with his “O Lord, Sir!” refrain (2.2); he journeys to the court and returns disillusioned with life in the country—in Tresnjak’s production, to be reprimanded by a pregnant Isbel for his moral wavering. Bertram, so long criticized as impetuous, or churlish, was not atypical of young, aspiring courtiers in the Jacobean court. In Paris, Bertram tries to prove himself— he is away from his mother, the memory of his father, his childhood, and Helena. With Parolles’ encouragement, he wants to emulate the other young men who are in “activity,” to use a favorite phrase of William Herbert’s.23 He sees war as a way of affirming (or discovering) his masculinity, and resents the “clog” (2.5.53) of Helena not just because of the enforced marriage but because she threatens to bring him back to his childhood and his mother and adult responsibility, away from the lure of autonomy and glory provided by the court. At the center of the court is the monarch. In Boccaccio, the King of France is largely a plot device but Shakespeare’s king—no doubt in part reflecting the contemporary power of the monarchy and court, all the more current in the new reign of James I—plays a major role in the play’s development. The play was likely written shortly after James’s accession to the throne, and it is clear from the opening scene that the King, through his intermediary Lafew, is claiming his right to control the newly made count’s destiny in terms that go straight to a particularly sensitive Jacobean issue. When he first speaks, Bertram informs whomever will listen that he “must attend his majesty’s command” since he is “now in ward,” and he adds, stressing the general frustration of his situation, he will be “evermore in subjection” (1.1.4). Wardship is the subject of Reilly’s essay. In England, the King controlled the estate of any noblemen who inherited before he turned 21 and (at least, it is implied in the play) could dispose of a ward in marriage. But, as the example, once again, of William Herbert—who became Earl of Pembroke just before his twenty-first birthday—shows, it was actually possible to defy a royally mandated marriage. As Zitner summarizes, “wards did have a nominal legal protection against what was called ‘disparagement,’ the imposition of gross misalliances of rank, and they could, at great cost, buy their way out of unwanted marriages.” In Bertram’s case, it is unwanted, at least in part, because of

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the great social disparity with Helena. Technically, as Berkeley and Keesee point out, her marriage to him is “an enforced marriage between ‘armigerous’ persons, one of high nobility and a ‘mean poor gentlewoman’ or, as it would have been put in Jacobean England, ‘nobility native and gentry dative’.”24 The motif of an unknown, orphaned or abandoned person attracting the affections of someone high-born permeates the late romances, but we know that the castaway rusty-armored Pericles is really a King, and Marina and the shepherd’s daughter in The Winter’s Tale really princesses. Helena, the physician’s orphan daughter of All’s Well, is just that—really a physician’s daughter. But of course she is also a romantic heroine. At root, the play reinforces the fantasy—and assumes we all have it or its equivalent—that even our most extreme wish will come true: “Who ever strove/To show her merit that did miss her love” (1.1.222–3) is a sentiment that looks to the audience for agreement though, as we all know too well, such wishes do not always materialize. Helena knows all too well the seeming impossibility of her desire, that she might as well “love a bright particular star/And think to wed it:” but her impossible fantasy is granted by the King when he reprimands Bertram: “Tis only title thou disdainst in her, the which/I can buildup” (1.1.84–5, 2.3.116–7). All the other characters, especially the Countess and the King, take a more romantic view of the marriage than the actual practice of English law and custom. They not only encourage and materially support Helena in her course; of the play’s characters, only Bertram and Parolles see any objection to the marriage. Zitner argues that the King is one of Shakespeare’s “more congenial” royal creations, with a self-effacing acceptance that he merely “fill[s] a place” (1.2.69) and an overall impression of “modesty and conscientiousness.”25 Many modern, mainly comically-orientated, productions do play him as “congenial.” Tresnjak had his King drily witty, beneficent, and initially patient with Bertram, explaining unthreateningly as if to an overreactive adolescent, how court favor and reward work. He is, however, often played with a more threatening side, not only ill but edgy, unpredictable, and arbitrary. Kyle played him as a hot-tempered Scot, threatening Bertram with a drawn sword. Bassuk played him as a slightly ridiculous mafioso figure (Figure 1.3). Does he represent, to use a New Historicist commonplace, the absoluteness and unpredictability of power? Or the decadence and tiredness of an older generation? Is he wilfully sinister? Or is he, especially once he is cured, a jovial and beneficent figure? Does playing his illness semi-comically enhance a “comic” reading of the play; does enhancing the gloom of the play’s opening scenes and treating his illness seriously make the play more somber, or enhance the apparent miracle of Helena’s cure? Today’s productions center predominantly on Helena, but how the King is played is crucial in establishing the tone of her achievements.

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Figure 1.3 King and lords (1.2). Purchase Repertory 2005, David Bassuk (director). Shane Stokes (King), Brian Hills (George Dumaine), Amefika El-Amin (Edward Dumaine).

Such questions lead straight to an aspect of the play which many historical critics have been uneasy—the court’s hierarchical rigidity is challenged not only by the spectacular success of the play’s déclassé heroine but by the King’s own meritocratic, even democratic, sentiments. His determination that Bertram marry Helena arises initially from his promise to Helena, and only after Bertram has refused, from his insistence on his authority; and it is accompanied by an insistence that degree and rank are less important than inner worth. His sentiments are not especially original—but they are, to put it mildly, unusual for an absolutist King. However strongly humanist moralists may have insisted that what the play terms “blood” (e.g. 2.3.117) is inferior to merit, social realities were very different. Davis calls the play’s political position “radical romanticism,” and as Hillman notes, “the dice are loaded in favor of the virtuous and sympathetic Helena to an extent quite implausible in terms of Elizabethan social structures and practices.”26 Countess and King transgress hierarchy, the Countess by encouraging her young ward to pursue her own son; the King, by agreeing to let Helena marry Bertram and, further, by enriching her to compensate for her lack of birth and wealth. Boccaccio had emphasized the class differences, but his Giletta is nonetheless described as well off. Consistent only in its continually combining social realism with romance, Shakespeare’s version of Helena’s story presents us with a young woman without family, name, or

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riches, who becomes a countess and marries the man of her choice. The play allows its audience to indulge in the unlikely fantasy that seemingly impossible social barriers can be overcome by a gifted and idealistic young woman—and (we might note in passing) all in a couple of days.

FISTULAS, RECEIPTS, AND THE LEARNED WOMAN Another social fantasy where recent historical scholarship has provided major new insights is its celebration of Helena as “doctor She” (2.1.79) and her successful treatment of the King. Lafew informs those at Rossillion that the King suffers from an unspecified “fistula.” Painter’s account seems uncomplicated: the King is reported to have “a swelling upon his breast, which by reason of ill cure was grown to be a fistula, which did put him to marvelous pain and grief.”27 Modern editors still predominantly gloss the fistula as a kind of ulcer—and the King at one point (2.1.8–10) seems to locate it near his heart. Neither commentators nor productions seemed to have seen the “fistula” as controversial until modern editors consulted historical medical references, and then it was noted (from at least as early as the mid-nineteenth century) that a fistula in Shakespeare’s time was more commonly found in or near the anus. The discovery of a possible anal location has in recent decades opened up a number of speculative re-interpretations of the King’s plight and Helena’s cure, ranging from the medical to the allegorical. Field argues that an anal fistula makes richer thematic sense: intimate, and therefore embarrassing to discuss (hence Lafew’s unease in the opening scene as Bertram inappropriately probes the matter), extremely painful, often associated with military service and excessive horseback riding and—given the number of coy and suggestive references (for example, to buttocks at 2.2.16–18)—adding to the provocative sexuality or at least the physicality of the play. Ray’s essay burrows deeply into the play’s “alternate” erotics. Recent productions have tended to be neutral on the nature of the disease; those few that have occasionally interpreted the fistula as anal have, almost inevitably, turned it to farce. The 2004 Cambridge production had the King on hands and knees in his first scene (1.2), emitting howls of pain—which immediately became humorous when, by emphasis and gesture, the location of the pain became clear. Most productions, however, have not located his illness so specifically, preferring a more general impression of infirmity, frequently represented by the King’s simply being in a wheelchair or unsteady on his feet. Helena’s “receipt” for curing the King is not discussed in detail in the play, and the staging of her visit to the King has traditionally stressed its magical nature. Kyle had Helena engage in a vaguely Celtic ritual encircling of the King as she intoned her lines; Hall used music and laying on

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of hands, plus a draught of some kind of medicine; Bassuk’s Helena played a triangle (see Figure 6.1). Such interpretations associate Helena with magical powers and hark back to saints’ miracles. Older critics, likely looking to Eliot and other modernist students of myth, saw Helena’s curing of the King as the curing of the land, with such renewal embodied in a traditional female healer and the King’s ailment representing a wider social sickness.28 It is tempting to label such “magical” interpretations pre-feminist, patriarchal idealizations of the mysterious powers of womanhood, and some recent scholarly work has moved away from the fairy-tale presentation still dominant in most stage productions to stress Helena’s medical professionalism. Field looks at early modern controversies in medicine and the roles women played in understanding and treating disease. Lafew bewails that the King’s doctors have given up hope and the King confirms that his “pastcure” disease is “inaidable” and that he will not “prostitute” himself to consult “empirics” (2.1.121–2). Traister notes that the reference is to the College of Physicians of London which approved medical licenses and prosecuted the unlicensed “empirics,” unlicensed amateurs, many of whom were women, and who characteristically specialized in “natural” cures for disease.29 Just as Helena embodies the fantasy of an aggressive, independent and resourceful woman who desires and chooses her sexual partner—as men seemingly are easily able to do in a patriarchal society—so, as a doctor, she takes up a role that men, traditionally dominant in the learned professions, have assumed they were empowered to do. Further, despite the King’s disapproval, “emperic”ism of course becomes the basis of post-Renaissance medicine. The recurring tension between “realism” and “romance” once again surfaces here. Helena can be read as a fairytale figure, the heroine of a social fantasy who is somehow directed by providence or magic to a miraculous cure of the King; or she can be presented as a learned, educated woman, the inheritor of her father’s skill and of his famed “receipts,” cures or prescriptions, which he charged her to keep and apply. Tresnjak’s Helena was business-like, bringing in a doctor’s bag and a large book, and giving no indication of any “magical” cure. Medical aides carrying bloodstained cloths hurried across the stage before the King entered, cured. Some productions stress both magic and realism—Nunn’s Helena brought in two doctor’s bags (neither of which she opened) but then ritually intoned over him. The magical healing connects with the romance tradition, but the learned “Doctor She” invokes skill in medicine and empirically grounded knowledge. Helena thus encompasses both what Jardine terms “specialist knowledge” and “iconic and folkloric modes of female transgression.”30 In the theatre, separately or together, each can emphasize what a performance should be aiming for—to generate sympathy for Helena’s completing her task.

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PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM Shakespearean commentary based on psychoanalysis goes back, predictably enough, to Freud, and in the past century has had variously uneasy and productive inter-relations with both positivist historical and (as the next section will show) feminist criticism. In her seminal article of 1986, Carolyn Asp illustrated how psychoanalysis could open up insights into gendered sexuality in ways that make All’s Well seem strikingly contemporary. Asp focuses on Helena and argues that the play benefits from using “certain paradigms from psychoanalytical theory that are congruent with Renaissance notions of the character and place of women.” Psychoanalytic theory is an especially useful tool with Helena, she claims; it shows how she “breaks out of both the cultural (historical) and psychic (trans-historical) strictures applied to women in both her time and our own.”31 As for Bertram, Janet Adelman’s essay on “Marriage and the Maternal Body” in Suffocating Mothers (1992) offers striking insights into the patterns of masculinity in All’s Well, and like Asp’s article, her analysis has been highly influential on subsequent criticism. Adelman argues that beneath the sometimes cryptic and perhaps underscripted figure of Bertram is a male “fantasy, in which a virgin is violated and then abandoned,” thus enabling him to prove his manhood. Boyhood fantasies of woman as a sacred space which at once incites worship and desecration motivates Bertram’s eagerness to leave his mother, go to Paris, his objections to marrying Helena, abandoning her, apparently seducing Diana, and then repudiating her. Adelman argues that behind Bertram’s simultaneous attraction and recoiling lies a fear of union with the mother figure. He flees the mother and “yet sexual desire brings [him] home, to the problematic maternal body and to its traces in the self,” specifically to a woman who has become nearly undistinguishable from the mother, and who eventually turns out to be the redemptive agent who brings him to a new maturity. Bertram is thus ironically “returned to the place of origin.” When he does try to express his erotic desire, it is significantly for a woman who is not a mother-figure—not one of the Rossillion or Paris entourage. But even the woman as “other” turns out to be a way of returning to the Mother figure. In Bertram’s unconscious all women are part of the same cosmic force—a matter which the bed trick emphasizes; psychologically, Adelman sees the scene not only representing “the dark waywardness of desire,” but also its “personalization, the interchangeability of the bodies with which lust plays.”32

SHAKESPEARE’S CRITIQUE OF MASCULINITY As feminists have long claimed about psychoanalysis generally, such a reading focuses primarily on the male pattern—though as the next section

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will show, feminist critics have constructed equivalently powerful arguments centered on Helena and to some extent Diana. But the importance of Adelman’s argument—and those of other psychoanalytical readings of the play by Carol Neely and Coppélia Kahn—is not that it needs to be accepted in every detail but that it looks through the play at underlying psycho-social patterns and attempts to account for the allure of the play, and in particular the puzzling figure of Bertram. A crucial test of any performance is whether sufficient sympathy can be generated for Bertram. Even alongside Shakespeare’s other romantic heroes—who often seem unworthy of their partners—Bertram has proven to be unusually difficult to view favorably. In fact Shakespeare goes out of the way to make him more obnoxious than in Boccaccio, especially by increasing the backtracking and downright lying in the final scene. Classbound, immature, easily led, rude, impolitie, dishonest—what is there to like about Bertram? Why does Helena want him so badly? Why (if at all) should he be forgiven? Whether a production plays him as one callow youth among many, he is certainly an “unseasoned courtier” (1.1.69), and what he lacks is not just the seasoning of years, but the experiences simply of others, of mature human relationships. Can we see him grow over the course of the play? Or is his seemingly compulsive mendacity proof of continuing weakness? What has been “seasoned” at the court by the end? Has he simply learned his proper place in the social hierarchy? Nobody (except Parolles) seems to think Bertram has a right to resist marriage to Helena, though for today, in an age when (for the most part) choice of a romantic partner is assumed, Bertram’s plight has received more sympathy, presenting directors with a special challenge to somehow make the “choosing” scene plausible. Some sweep it up as part of the fairy tale; others respond to contemporary uneasiness about sexual choice and blame the King for his authoritarianism. Kyle had the King first strike Bertram and then threaten him with a sword; Barton’s King took Bertram quietly aside and talked to him as a friend. Nunn staged an amusing game, like musical chairs, with all the contestants eliminated until only Bertram was left, and had the King himself kneel beside Bertram and explain how he will provide “great additions” (2.3.126) to Helena’s fortune, becoming firm but not angry. Adelman’s Freudian explanation therefore helps us understand the pattern Bertram exemplifies—even if it remains underscripted. His bad behavior has been attributed to Parolles’s influence, blamed on his mother, on western ideologies of masculinity, the decline of feudalism, Shakespeare’s lack of interest in his comic heroes—and the playwright’s own supposed fascination for a haughty, rich, spoilt and emotionally immature “fair youth” in his sonnets (since Shakespeare himself, such an argument goes, was obsessed with such a young man, he did or could not write

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sufficiently critical lines). Defenders of Bertram have pointed not so much to the text as the concepts behind it: to his youth, his need to break from stifling upbringing and family entourages or his urge to prove himself a “man.” Those critics, mainly in the early- and mid-twentieth century, who were most sympathetic to Bertram, include Wilson Knight who (as we shall see) glorifies Helena even more. On the one hand, he acknowledges Bertram’s undisciplined rudeness but argues that “we cannot altogether stifle our sympathies;” and while Bertram’s values are “all wrong,” nevertheless he represents the Male Search for Honor in “the exercise of power among men and nations,” the world of masculine action.33 One of the most influential studies of Western masculinity in the past decades, one that has striking relevance to All’s Well, is Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of “soldier-males” in his psychoanalytical-sociological study, Male Fantasies. His work leaves no doubt that the dominant “not-fully-born” male personality, expressing itself in aggression, violence and domination, has deep psychosocial roots in Western history. In early modern England there was a multitude of cultural practices in which male aggression was reified as seemingly “natural,” not only in the most obvious manifestations of war and politics, but across a vast range of experience characterized by rivalry, struggle, and conquest.34 Productions in the fifties and sixties, with World War Two not far behind them, conveyed a sense of military authenticity and saw Parolles’s betrayal of his companions as reprehensible and an affront to traditional masculinity; more recently, feminist-sociological critiques of the masculinist world like Theweleit’s have meant that the military aspect of the plays are treated more satirically. The Cambridge production opened with Parolles and then, imitating him, Bertram preening before a mirror; at court, Kyle gave all the young French lords their own mirrors by which they could set their images. Kyle opened the play with Bertram playing with toy soldiers, taking up the description of war as “a nursery to our gentry” (1.2.16); Parolles turned up in Florence with a set of golf clubs, and the war was presented as a fantasy game for boy scouts. Bassuk had the war scenes played largely as farce, which ridiculed not only Bertram’s attempt to be a soldier, but all the French lords’ military pretensions. As Zitner summarizes what has become a consensual view of the military scenes, Shakespeare’s picture of aristocratic manhood is centered on “honour with its prime attributes of physical courage and verbal honesty;” on the other hand, the play is an exposé of “honour’s dark corners: aimless aggressiveness and brutal indifference to its consequences, hierarchical domination and its attendant exploitation of women and neglect of inferiors.”35 All’s Well thus draws attention to the narrowness, obsessiveness, unsociability, and destructiveness of the masculinist ethos. As Davis puts it, “the development of male identity and character is a recurrent interest

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throughout Shakespeare’s plays” and All’s Well a “vivid illustration of the social pressures that strongly impinge upon male identity and desire.”36 Part of the problem with seeing Bertram as anything than obnoxious and superficial is that he and Helena have so few scenes together. They share only thirty-nine lines—and even most of Bertram’s exchanges with other characters can easily be read as suspicious, defensive, or insincere. The lines scripted for him seem singularly detached or obtuse, comments Spencer, “even more . . . than [with] Orsino in Twelfth Night, whom we prefer because he speaks better poetry.” To bring out a favorable interpretation of Bertram requires adding gestures, looks and actions that for many critics seem to be contradicted by much of the text. Recent productions have taken various tacks. Many, including Kyle, assume that the ending is ironical, disturbing, and that this is not a marriage that should have happened, or one that has little future. Such an approach simply accepts Bertram’s inadequacies and heavily qualifies the “all’s well” tone of the play’s finale, deliberately increasing the problematic aspects of the play. Alternatively, a director can build up Bertram’s admirable points by using every possible hint in the play to develop his potential. Spencer amusingly remarks that it is “regrettable” that Shakespeare did not include “some scene in which the recreant husband might help an old lady across the street.” A number of productions have, in fact, found “old ladies.” Richardson’s 1967 performance at Stratford made Bertram as charming as possible, even when expressing amused surprise and polite concern when the King turns him into Helena’s reward. Purchase emphasized positive moments— Bertram and Helena dancing together fondly at the play’s start; Bertram’s running to help the King as he staggers; his being momentarily touched by Helena’s devotion at their parting, even while knowing Parolles is anxious to leave for Italy; clearly touched by the news of her death; and, in the final scene, confessing his mistake over her worth as sincere as possible. Nickolas Heck’s Bertram in the 2006 Yale Rep production was the most charming I have seen or discovered since Richardson’s: courteous, even to Helena, grateful to the King, he had no sense Helena would choose him, was puzzled rather than angry when it happened, and pragmatically accepted the King’s insistence of an instant ceremony, ingeniously staged in an upstage cloister while Parolles and Lafew verbally sparred downstage. Even when he wooed Diana it was more of a good-natured lark. Other directors have, more drastically, added lines from other plays, including extracts from Shakespeare’s sonnets; some critics have, indeed, seen Bertram as, in Shalkwyk’s words, “a severely disillusioned rewriting of the ‘sweet’ and ‘lovely’ boy of the sonnets,” which might suggest a reason for the character’s underdevelopment.37

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PAROLLES A key to answering questions about Bertram, at least conceptually, is the interpretation of Parolles. Before psychoanalytical criticism, Parolles was overwhelmingly seen as a stock theatrical type, a jocular braggart—a pale Falstaff with a dash of Malvolio—or the (sometimes forgivable) scapegoat for Bertram’s immaturity. He was also often seen as the height of the play’s theatrical achievement. He is the Miles Gloriosus—pretentious but likeable. In the light of the discussion of masculinism offered by recent work in psychoanalysis and feminism, however, Parolles has come to represent a “fiction of masculine grandeur that Bertram attempts to actualize . . . a narcissistic reflection of an idealized self that confers an illusion of wholeness.”38 Dessen sees Parolles’ fate at the play’s end as paralleling Bertram’s and therefore part of the careful plotting of the play. If we look at what Shakespeare did with his sources, he argues, we can see his intentions. Parolles is a “signpost” to the folly of the court and military worlds, the values of which must be “ ‘found’ or transformed if Bertram is to recognize Helena’s value.” When Bertram finds the truth about Parolles, he finds out a truth about himself. Dessen suggests that in staging the parallels between Parolles’s and Bertram’s, unmaskings be made explicit through props and tableaux so that “the beleaguered Bertram should be clearly analogous to the beleaguered Parolles.”39 Many have detected a medieval Morality structure to the play—Parolles as Bad Angel, Helena as Good, fighting for her husband’s soul (and body), a view of Parolles that seems to be shared by the Countess and Helena herself. Such a reading allows for Parolles to be played either seriously or farcically, but it is rare for a production to underplay the potentially comic side—especially given the work that must be done to make the Clown Lavatch other than a very pale imitation of Feste or Touchstone. Parolles’s attractiveness paradoxically includes his lies and exaggerations, his overthe-top dressing, and his pompous self-aggrandizement about recapturing the lost drum. As the play develops, his humor may, however, become more sinister; or, it may be that a production will bring out a weak and slightly pathetic side, allowing the torture scene to move from raucous male humor to something more unnerving. Hall played him as sinister, vindictive, almost as if transposed from a Jacobean tragedy, a Vendice or De Flores, a reading consistent with his aim to have the play as dark as possible before a remarkable turnaround in the final scene. The interrogation scenes (4.1, 4.3) require separate mention. Traditionally, the scenes have been played as farce. We know who the actors are; Parolles does not; we therefore laugh with them and at him. Whether Parolles is lying, exaggerating, or telling the truth about the troops, the Dumaines or his supposed friend and patron Bertram, we know that in

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the end he may be humiliated but not, as he fears, destroyed. The ridiculous language of his captors has proven, invariably, to be amusing, with productions often adding or substituting nonsense-language with local references. “Tooooti Frroootti” intoned an Italianate Russian in the 2004 Cambridge festival. “Pasta primavera” replied his companion, and as they exited, he added, sotto voce, looking quizzically at the audience, “Tutti frutti?” But in the wake of American torture of Iraqi prisoners in 2003–4, and specifically the evidence of hooding and blatant humiliation, it may be more difficult to dismiss the interrogation scene as merely farcical. Crider points to Bertram’s increasing cruelty to his supposed friend as he become more integrated into the war-machine: “our pleasure at Parolles’ exposed cowardice slips into fear and pity . . . as the test becomes increasingly violent.” Given that torture is “violence against one who is powerless to resist,” reactions after the Iraq invasion may be that ridicule of Parolles turns into sympathy, as the audience becomes “afraid that the play of ‘torture’ may become real”—or at least reminded of something they would rather forget.40 My survey of productions after 2003 reveals, perhaps disturbingly, that the interrogation scenes continue to be played predominantly as farce. The Doran production played the interrogation scene as straight comedy, as did Purchase (Figure 14.1, see p. 230), and Brevoort’s Culver City production (Figure 1.4). Directors responding to my questionnaire saw the scenes as comic in intent. Yet some audience members overheard at the five New York productions in 2005–6 that I attended voiced some unease. It is hard to give up the easy effects of farce in a production in a play that already opens up many awkward issues. Of major productions before the turn of the century, only the Hall has stressed the viciousness and malevolence implied by the scene. It is significant that in the video-recorded performance at least, the audience’s laughter is intensely uneasy. Dionne’s essay offers some perceptive commentary on this dimension of the play. It is one area where socially aware criticism has been largely resisted by directors. The Parolles/Bertram relationship has also undergone scrutiny for its homoerotic potential. In 1991, Michael Friedman argued for an underdeveloped homoerotic relationship which, he argued, is never allowed to flourish; it is “interrupted by” the play’s insistence on the triumph of a heterosexual marriage plot. Friedman accuses “modern productions” of deploying “elements of stagecraft . . . to encourage audiences to accept the romantic basis of the relationship” and to “discredit the anti-matrimonial position.” Such a reading, although oddly termed by Friedman as “feminist,” does open further possibilities for sympathy with Parolles.41 Like Helena, he can be read as an outsider who struggles to assert himself in the face of “blood” and privilege. Like Helena, he is humiliated before he is redeemed—even if his redemption consists of Lafew’s promises to see

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Figure 1.4 Interrogating Parolles (4.3), Culver City Public Theatre, California 2004. Greg Brevoort (director), Kyle Nudo (Parolles).

him fed and employed. A somewhat distasteful variation of this reading was seen in Bertram’s explicitly handing Parolles off to Lafew at the end of the play, as occurred in the Hudson Valley production (2003).

FEMINIST CRITICISM Of all Shakespeare’s plays, All’s Well probably has benefited most from the rise of feminist critiques of the male canon and critical approaches that traditionally effaced gender and sexual politics. Most of the essays in this collection owe their major insights to feminism. If we go back fifty years, it is depressingly easy to find a condescending and often blatantly sexist attitude to the play, especially of Helena, characterized by either idealization or denigration or both—that fatal combination that constitutes, as Freud termed it, the traditional Western masculinist “overvaluation” of women. Kay Stanton suggests that All’s Well is “a play so far ahead of its time that we have only now come into sync with it, especially through recent advances in psychoanalytic and feminist theory and criticism.”42 To her and other feminist critics, the scandal of All’s Well is not lack of unity or inadequate characterization, let alone its “unfeminine” heroine—these are matters that reflect modernist or even pre-modernist concerns—but its radical gender politics. “That man should be at woman’s command,” as Lavatch complains, “and no harm done” (1.3.89–90) is the scandal. How

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can patriarchal society tolerate that a woman should rule over men? How can a woman become the subject of her own desire? Or as Helena asks in the play’s key question as she contemplates the uses of her virginity: “How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?” (1.1.149). Singularly among the plays in the canon, as Asp puts it, All’s Well “is written out of the female subject and this history of her desire;” it lays bare the dynamics of patriarchy that have kept women “ever more in subjection” (1.1.5), and opens the possibilities of alternative roles for women outside the control of patriarchy. All’s Well, Irving Wardle claimed after seeing the Kyle production, “comes as near as Shakespeare can to being a woman’s play.”43 Before the rise of feminist criticism, gender, sexuality and desire were emergent rather than dominant concepts within Shakespearean criticism: the preferred word, with its Platonic and religious baggage, was “love”— and traditional discussions of Shakespeare’s comedies, seemingly naturally, added the ubiquitous “marriage.” By focusing rather on sexuality and desire, feminist criticism has enabled the scandal of All’s Well to emerge. Romantic love may be the basis of Shakespeare’s early comedies, but around 1600, the urgency of sexuality, not just the idealism or humor of love, becomes a major theme in his plays. Mary Bly makes the point that Shakespeare is not alone: around the turn of the century, she argues, there develops a distinctive boldness in English stage comedy to “present lascivious scenes as explicitly as possible, while at the same time safeguarding the desiring woman from wholesale condemnation.” All’s Well is saturated with sexuality: “every character . . . from Helena and Parolles to the Countess and King, is drawn into an erotic commentary on the story,” Stanton similarly observes. As with Measure for Measure—where an even more seamy and morally perplexing atmosphere is created against which to juxtapose the romance ending—All’s Well is not shy about rooting human ideals in the body and the uses that can be made of our sexual desires. It is a “radical experiment—a bold effort to place on the comic stage women who show sexual desire, pursue consummation, have intercourse during the five acts, and are celebrated at the end.” Intriguingly, a 2004 production in Dublin— which the director saw as a city apposite for such an approach—described the play as being “about repressed sexuality,” with Helena as “a powerhouse of desire,” and the play demanding that “men look at their fear of sex and their fear of women.”44

HELENA: WHAT DOES A WOMAN WANT?

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I now turn to Helena—also known as Helen, Hellen, Helena in the Folio— who is today the center of most productions—with the exception of the 2004 Judi Dench extravaganza. In the following remarks, anticipating points developed in the collection’s essays, Helena will be considered as

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a determined and resourceful woman, a sexually aggressive lover, and as one among the four (or five) women who dominate the play’s final scene focusing the play’s conclusion on sexual and gender issues. Judging from the variants in the Folio text, Shakespeare may have vacillated over his heroine’s name. It recalls Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helen from Greek mythology, or even Saint Helena, the Emperor Constantine’s mother. In the past two centuries, interpretations of Helena have yo-yoed from the high idealism of Coleridge or Wilson Knight—“almost beyond the human . . . the supreme development of Shakespeare’s conception of feminine love”—to Quiller-Couch’s blaming Helena for spoiling Bertram in their shared childhoods and being a “heroine of the pushing, calculating sort.” As Zitner remarks, amusingly but all too accurately, “the critical response to Helena is an anthology of (largely) male thinking about the status of women.” Miola’s summary epitomizes the accuracy of Zitner’s comment. In a mildly head-shaking and chuckling tribute—a little like a benevolent Petrucchio—he comments that Helena is partly “untitled virgo, part wondrous woman, part simple serving maid, part religious sermonizer, part incantatory folk-tale sorceress,” adding that she is a “determined schemer.”45 Patronizing clichés abound: for J. C. Trewin she is “a calculating little opportunist;” even Harriet Walter, who played Helena in the 1981 Nunn production, said that what she saw as Helena’s characteristic obsessiveness and manipulation did not add up to “someone you’d like to have at a dinner party”—unlike, say, Rosalind or Olivia, who were presumably better born and could be expected to hold a conversation on polite trivialities rather than on her research into new cures for fistulas or women’s rights to choose their sexual partners. Cynthia Marshall, interestingly, observes that a similar tendency occurred in As You Like It criticism: “because tender feeling had come virtually to define the feminine” at the end of the nineteenth century, criticism of that play saw Rosalind similarly until the 1960s, when she became a feminist rather than a “feminine” heroine. Rosalind has long been the more favored heroine, maybe because the play is more finished, the part more rounded, but it is also, as Marshall indicates, because of the charm and grace with which Rosalind has traditionally reassured male members of the audience—“emotional but restrained, alluring but loftily unavailable, playful but intelligent.” Recent feminist directors of All’s Well have increasingly highlighted Helena’s aggressive, “outsider” qualities: Helena Kaut-Howson directed the play twice in London in the 1990s, each time stressing how Helena was “a palpable outsider in a filthy rich society;” Bassuk likewise played her as earnest, focused, slightly an outsider in a corrupt world, but very determined to get what she wanted.46 Deconstructing the language of male commentators on Helena is perhaps too easy a party game. What continues to stand out in criticism

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and performance reviews even since the 1980s is that interpretative nervousness about Helena is a continuation of the suspicion of her when the play first appeared on stage. Dash’s brilliant analysis in Women’s Worlds in Shakespeare’s Plays of the cuts and adaptations made to eighteenth-century stage versions shows unmistakably that the play was edited to make Helena more reassuring to the assumed audience: a clever woman (not merely “a wench,” clever or otherwise, to use Lawrence’s unconsciously pejorative term) who pursues her desires, sexually, socially, and professionally, clearly made for unease.47 Asp notes that “throughout history, women, not men, have been sexual objects, gifts,” and she quotes Lacan: “What would happen if a woman demanded a certain man as her gift rather than the other way around,” noting that All’s Well “shows what happens.” A number of feminist critics have suggested (and I was pleased that some of my student actors also affirmed this) that Helena can be admired for calculatedly playing the different roles expected of her by authority figures, whether the Countess, the King, or Bertram. Judith Weill points out how well Helena’s status as a servant initially allows her to become an adaptable and conscientious but still obedient wife, as she carries out her husband’s orders.48 Of course, responses to her adaptability (read, too often: manipulation) remain very uneasy: strong women are difficult enough to deal with; strong women who are rhetorically adaptable, and therefore even more unsettling to the male, are somehow altogether too much. Helena has occasioned such anxiety in part, then, because of gender politics. She attracts admiration also, very simply, because of her emotionally rich lines. Paul Yachnin argues—in a poststructuralist slant on Bloom’s claim that Shakespeare “invented” the human—that Helena is displayed with a “complex, inward, mental life” as part of Shakespeare’s remarkable project of “identity formation” and “inward characterization.” The very vividness of Shakespeare’s “most important innovation,” his mode of characterization, brings home the outrageousness of the fantasies, demands, achievements that she embodies. Set within the time of its writing, Helena’s “daring activism” may have presented her as a potentially revolutionary figure, which may account for the play’s not being staged; even today, she is clearly capable of producing analogous unease or praise. In Bly’s words, Shakespeare carries out “a radical experiment—a bold effort to place on the comic stage” a woman who shows “sexual discrimination,” has “intercourse during the five acts,” and not merely after the play is over, and who is “celebrated” for her sexual aggression at the play’s end. Helena is therefore an unusual figure of social and gender utopianism. Cleverly, Shakespeare provides just enough apparently “empiric”al details for what Yachnin terms her “movement from adoration to action” to root her achievements in what can pass for social reality.49 In addition to the

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help she receives from the Countess and the King—that is in itself a possibly unsettling social fantasy of some magnitude—she is determined, ingenious, coolly farsighted, considerate, tactful, and all as needed by changing circumstances. In production, the actors with whom I worked—even when they were prompted to critique the (largely male) chorus of criticism of her deviousness—found her admirable in her combination of activism and subtlety. They pointed out to me that she even offered Bertram a way out of his opposition to the marriage by exposing her absolute devotion to him, an expression of her own vulnerability which some (men and women alike) saw as mature and tactful: she was, one of them put it, offering to build a relationship on mutuality, not simply on her own desires for autonomy. Stanton argues likewise that Helena’s “attribution of her skill to heaven is her means of soothing bruised male egos.”50 Is this “manipulation” or tact and adaptability? Helena is arguably manipulative in a way we are meant to admire.

Helena: sexuality Helena can be played as restrained and quietly determined, a woman driven by faith—a “true believer within a decadent society” as Bassuk explained to his cast his choice to have her, except for her triumphant entry after the King’s recovery (Figure 1.1, see p. xx) plainly, even primly, dressed among flamboyantly costumed socialites, or else as adventurous, sexy, and aggressive. Either way, Helena is a combination of the narrative traditions with which Shakespeare is working—forthright Dr She, patient romance heroine, providentially directed saint—even though there may be doubts voiced (though, importantly, never within the play) about whether the goal of her quest is worth her efforts. She is also presented—a further scandal within patriarchy—as determinedly passionate and unambiguously sexual. The medieval and early modern period produced remarkably frank assertions of women’s sexual capacity as well as, more ominously, widespread references, by men, to the need to control women’s “unruly” sexual desires. Sexuality is clearly an area of a woman’s experience that is not entirely controllable by men. It includes pleasures and powers that can be claimed by a woman through her own actions—something that is particularly threatening to patriarchal control in a society like Shakespeare’s. What Jessica Benjamin terms woman’s “search for her own desire” goes beyond the “sexual,” yet the sexual may be precisely where that search is concentrated and also where the potential independence it may promise is all too readily persecuted.51 The play puts such issues right in the forefront in the opening scene. The Helena/Parolles exchange on virginity is not original in its ideas; what is distinctive is Helena’s asserting the right of a woman’s sexual

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choice. Her key question to Parolles about choosing to lose her virginity to her own liking insists on her ownership of her body: she wants to express her sexuality, but only on her own terms and with subtly different goals in mind from the one he patronizingly suggests to her, to marry “a good husband” (1.1.210–1). Sexuality, the urges of the flesh, for both men and women, is an immediate and recurring interest of the play. One function of the Clown’s bawdy dialogues with the Countess (1.3 and 3.4) is to reinforce explicitly and (somewhat) humorously the level of sexuality the play’s main action delineates—the urges of the body.

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The anguished cry of unrequited desire was the conventional mark of the medieval and Renaissance lover. In the predominantly male tradition from courtly love through Dante, Petrarch and into the Renaissance, we are meant to sympathize with and admire with the distraught lover. His desire—the gender is not universal, but the male subject dominates the discourse—is directed towards the beloved who is unresponsive, or who has been taken from the lover, or who is simply too far above him to reciprocate. Such love is not necessarily looked for, but visited upon the lover. Dante, for instance, characterizes Beatrice’s effects on him as being smitten, invaded, transfixed; his feelings are sexual, aesthetic, moral, devotional; he acknowledges changes that are occurring in him over which he has no control and which in a sense he did not seek. Yet however strong the lover’s feelings, reciprocity is never certain—indeed the tradition is built on the anguish of the male lover never attaining the beloved. The bringer of the gift of wonderment may herself not recognize what is asserted to be her special status and may have little of the same feelings, and being unable to understand why his ardor should not suffice to win the beloved is the arrogant, or at least unselfconscious, male stance that is central to the tradition. In All’s Well the primary fact is that the cry of desire goes out from the woman, and Helena’s appropriation of male erotic obsession is an important crux in the play’s interpretation and production. After Bertram leaves for the court, in her first soliloquy, she confesses her love for him, and for the rest of the play, as Tresnjak put it in his program notes, “her love for Bertram is humiliating, obsessive, cruel and one-sided.” A doctor, she “diagnoses her love for Bertram from the outset as a form of sickness.” In her cries of love, Helena has many literary ancestors, female as well as male. Like Petrarchan lovers before (and after) her, she is the bereft one, and therefore the fetishizer often in performance, as in the Cambridge production, stooping to pick up a glove or handkerchief he has dropped on departing for Paris at once idealizing and masochistically complaining

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against the heavens that she cannot have what she wants so intensely— and that is Bertram. Helen Cooper points out the long tradition of romance heroines expressing their desires in determined soliloquies, and confident in their conviction that “whoever strove/To show her merit that did miss her love?” (1.1.222–3).52 Her obsessive longing for Bertram has attracted a number of disapproving readings. Westlund sees it as exemplifying “the danger of inventing what one wants, of idealizing others beyond what seems a reasonable extension of actual truth.” And yet why, the play seems to be asking, should not a woman, like a man, have the right to live by an obsessive, alldemanding love and then feel it is her right, as men assume it is theirs, to pursue him, and to do so regardless of what he may want? Or even of his merit? In recent criticism, this “right” has been much commented upon. In particular, it has been related directly to what are sometimes felt to be Shakespeare’s own feelings, as supposedly expressed in his sonnets. First argued by Wilson Knight, developed in Hunter’s Arden 2 Introduction, and in further detail by Roger Warren, the deep affinities between the language of Helena’s expressions of love for Bertram and that of Shakespeare’s sonnets have intrigued recent commentators. Biographically inclined critics often argue that the close connection between the play and the sonnets may even explain why Helena maintains such an uncritical view of Bertram, combining idealization and self-deprecation, with the verbal parallels between Helena’s self-abnegating yearnings for Bertram and the sonnets leading to speculation about the relationship between the play and Shakespeare’s own emotional life. Zitner suggests that that the speaker of the sonnets is (like Shakespeare himself) a kind of Helena, a provincial gaining entree to the court by virtue of a rare skill, and seeking a passionate attachment “beyond his sphere.” The sonnets of self-abnegation (e.g. 49, 57, 61, 72, 87, 96) are those frequently singled out. What Zitner terms Bertram’s “withholding” of himself is a note in common with the sonnets; he points to the magnificent Sonnet 94 as an accurate description of Bertram in the first two acts.53 Helena may have some ancestors, male and female, in the long tradition of what Sidney in Astrophil and Stella 15 termed “Poore Petrarch’s long-deceased woes;” what is radical about Shakespeare’s play is not that such desire is appropriated on behalf of a woman—but, that almost blasphemously, she is allowed to be successful in her desires. She gets what she yearns for. To the wounded male ego of the tradition that is bad enough, but Helena in fact gets it twice—and seemingly against the will of the one yearned for. No wonder, as one director put it in his response to my questionnaire, spectators (and, we should add, many critics) are suspicious of Helena. The long tradition of misogynic criticism of her aggression and “unfeminine” nature may have some of its roots here.

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HELENA: HOW DOES A WOMAN GET WHAT SHE WANTS?

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Much of the play’s concern with sexual and gender issues centers on the concept of Virginity. It is introduced in the exchange between Helena and Parolles, which ends with the play’s key question of how Helena might lose her virginity to her own liking. The rest of the play gives us her answer, showing Helena’s claiming her “right” to use her body according to her choice, however difficult, even perverse, that choice may be. The Virginity discussion is picked up in the scene (1.3) between Helena and the King; it introduces Helena’s replacement of Diana in act four; and it culminates in the play’s final scene, where Helena’s virginity has been indeed transformed, and certainly to her own liking—and where Diana’s virginity also becomes a matter for intense discussion. Behind the banter between Helena and Parolles and her subsequent actions lies a complex history of changing sexual, marital, and broader social ideologies. Virginity, specifically female virginity, has been widely fetishized in patriarchal societies. The reasons are complex, multiple, and contradictory, involving a myriad of religious, economic, social and psychological factors. Shakespeare’s age inherited—and was only very partially breaking from—medieval Catholicism’s valorization of virginity as a desired religious commitment for both men and women, especially as embodied in the Blessed Virgin, undoubtedly one of the most powerful cultural constructs in human history. Virginity is therefore seen residually as a magical force— menacing, mysterious, even mystical, a hangover in Shakespeare’s time from the magical universe of the Old Religion. In Shakespeare’s society, the female virgin also carried a political cachet—though it is hard to disentangle political and religious associations here, both because of the nationalistic adaptation of the medieval cult of the Blessed Virgin by Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, and because of the centuries of popular religion still lingering in Shakespeare’s time. Virginity is also seen more materially, as a commodity, a bargaining chip in the battles of social order and family aggrandizement.54 The dominant view was that virginity was a step towards marriage within a normative Protestant heterosexual society. Rarely if ever would virginity be approved as a deliberate choice for an adult women, which would mark her as non-compliant, even deviant. The Reformation did not invent the commodification of virginity; but as part of what historians see as an increasingly rigid “confessional definition” enforced by “an ever more rationalized bureaucratized, and determined state,” sixteenth-century Protestant regimes attempted to channel the process by which virginity was used, emphasizing the vocation of marriage and procreation as a woman’s duty to God and the commonweal.55

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Helena’s provocative question to Parolles concerning the control of her own body is the core of the play’s radicalism for today, but also for its own time—and may even account for the play’s non-appearance on stage. Her claim to choose strikes at the heart of patriarchal presumptions about the control of women’s bodies by men for socially approved ends. Jankowski argues that in the activity that conventionally defines the virgin/non-virgin boundary, the initiating actor is traditionally “[the penis of] a man, and the reason for the change (a man’s wish to gain control, usually via impregnation, of a woman’s body) are all male-controlled, male-initiated, and male-determined.” In All’s Well the claim is made and the initiation (and the impregnation) undertaken by the woman. Jankowski argues that Helena thus “queers” the Protestant ideology of heterosexual marriage. Helena “represents Protestant society’s ideal virgin and chaste wife,” but challenges the normative model even as it seems to be reified: “few would expect a dowryless middle-class physician’s daughter to be able to obtain any sort of a husband, much less such a prize as the wealthy and aristocratic Bertram.” There is therefore, concludes Jankowski, “something distinctly queer about Helena’s character.”56 The fact that the play’s ending brings about the integration of the radical heroine into the reassuring structure of dominant heterosexuality, marriage, family, and property does not negate the boldness of her resistance—and it makes the place of Diana, the play’s more obvious militant virgin, even more important. After Helena leaves France—there are occasional doubts raised about whether she really intends to go on pilgrimage but from 3.3 it seems clear that putting Florence near or on the route to St James of Compostella in northern Spain may be a typical Shakespearean geographical vaguery— we see her still optimistic that eventually all will end well. She now has not only resourcefulness but resources to help her achieve her goal. She is now, after all, the Countess Rossillion, and the second half of the play is her attempt—some see it as calculated, aggressive, even inappropriate for a woman; others as ingenious, determined, and resourceful—to achieve her goal of claiming her husband. As in other late comedies (Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale stand out), Shakespeare surrounds her with a support group, who enter the action soon after the play’s lowest point, as if hope depends on such fortuitous contingencies. While Bertram is discovering how mistaken he has been about Parolles, male friendship, and even Helena herself, she aligns herself with the Florentine widow Capilet, Diana, Mariana—who has been sometimes played as a pregnant daughter or neighbour who has visibly suffered as a result of men’s carelessness and irresponsibility—and, since Bergeron makes a witty and powerful case for the importance of including her, Violenta, the silent daughter.57 The interplay of Helena and the Florentine women in the second half of All’s Well can be a superb countermovement from what has seemed to be an

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impasse, much like the pastoral scene in The Winter’s Tale or Cymbeline, moving the play towards a striking “romance” ending, not merely a comic reconciliation.

HELENA: HOW DOES A WOMAN GET WHAT SHE WANTS?

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The key character among Helena’s supporters is Diana. In Boccaccio, the Diana function in what has traditionally been named the “bed trick” is performed by a nameless woman; in All’s Well, Shakespeare builds the character up considerably, constructing a minor masterpiece of symbolic characterization who has often stolen the play’s later scenes, as reviewers noted about the Folger production—even if she does not steal Helena’s husband. If one of the play’s key questions is the control of female sexuality and the female body, in the second half Diana’s virginity becomes a crucial piece of the play. Parolles asserts that Bertram is a “whale to” virginity (4.3.216), but he is usually played as naïve, alternating between the idealism of addressing Diana as a goddess and urgently pressing his “sick desires” (4.2.35) upon her. Some productions play the attraction as a genuinely romantic one, at least on Bertram’s side and representing his (perhaps first) sexual choice (Figure 1.5). But on Diana’s side, the text at least seems clear: Diana’s learning of Bertram’s “sick desires” and realizing that “my mother told me just how he would woo” (4.2.69) does not put male desire or Bertram’s maturity in an especially favorable light and usually serves to reinforce the audience’s appreciation of the women’s cleverness in outwitting Bertram. Her revelations about him—even if she is played as initially flattered or attracted by his attentions—may be seen as reinforcing not just her scorn for him but for all men; after she agrees to sleep with him, her general comment on male behavior suggests that maintaining her sexual independence is a choice for her as it should be for any woman. Jankowski argues that Diana, like Helena herself, represents a deliberate choice for women. By this reading, at the play’s end, after being manipulated by Bertram, her mother, Helena, and finally the King’s offer to find her a husband, she deliberately chooses not to involve herself in marriage. A refusing—what Kelly terms a “menacing”—virgin, Diana can be seen (in Jankowski’s terms) as “a queer space within the otherwise very restrictive and binary early sex/gender system.”58 In Measure for Measure, just as Isabella’s response to the Duke’s proposition is the play’s final crux, so is Diana’s response to the King’s offer to provide a dowry and find her a husband. If Helena’s preservation of her virginity has been to assert her

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Figure 1.5 Bertram and Diana (4.2), Ark Theatre Company, Los Angeles, 2004, Paul Wager (director). David Stevens (Bertram), Anna Quirino Miranda (Diana).

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right to choose, so too would be Diana’s refusal. Refusal by Isabella and an uncompliant Diana entail a repudiation of a father’s, husband’s, even a duke’s or king’s ownership—unless or until the women herself chose otherwise. However, such a reading has rarely been followed in recent performance. Most productions—despite feminist criticism—have not been so bold and have played the King’s gesture to find Diana a husband as generous, and thus part of a comic ending. Bassuk had Diana pair off with one of the miscellaneous lords around Bertram (the Dumaine Brothers, whether G or E!). Somewhat tastelessly, Cambridge’s King looked out to the audience for offers, although intriguingly in the performance I attended, a number of men (myself included) firmly repudiated him. The substitution of Helena for Diana in Bertram’s eager (though, at least as usually played, inexperienced) arms, traditionally termed the “bed trick”—a term which immediately strikes a note of defensive indignation on behalf of males fooled by manipulative women—has usually occasioned moral (and theatrical) disapproval. Between 4.3 and 4.4 we are to understand that Bertram has his encounter with the woman whom he supposes to be Diana; Helena has sex with Bertrand while he thinks she is another woman. The scene is not scripted; and there is no dumbshow indicated. The closest we get to the scene in Shakespeare’s script is Helena’s reaction in 4.4, as her plans move forward, and then, only as an aside or a shared confidence with her allies and of course the audience. She ponders Bertram’s enjoyment of sex and the layers of desire she has encountered in the experience, the “sweet use” that sexual desires make of the body (4.4.21–5)—which she then wonderingly extends to all men. She has slept with the man whom she had hoped—so long ago, it seems—would be the providential reward for her cleverness and her desire to lose her virginity to her “own liking.” It is certainly possible to see these lines merely as an immediate reaction to feeling degraded: but within the broader context, Helena’s reaction can point to any of growing complexity about her own sexual desires which will be echoed in the final scene where she reminds Bertram that he had been “wondrous kind” in their encounter (5.3.308)— and where, of course, she presents visibly the effects of their sexual union. As with the equivalent scene in Measure for Measure, recent criticism has taken the “trick” more in stride. Desens (1996) showed that exchanges of sexual partners were very common in English plays after 1598, coinciding with the increased frequency with which issues of sexuality appeared on the London stage.59 A variety of earlier precedents in folktale and mythology have been found, including the biblical ones which Osherow’s essay touches upon. Adelman provides an ingenious reading of the event as showing how the conventional (but historically all too prevalent) projection of the dual roles of virgin and whore upon women may be positively resolved. The boy’s first fantasies of revering and then soiling a sacred

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space are able to mature into a safe and fulfilling relationship, which is brought about (as so often in Shakespeare) by the wisdom and adaptability of a woman. The play, Adelman argues, exemplifies “the fundamental incompatibility between marriage and male desire” and then provides a “magical solution to it.” Yet, psychologically, it is perhaps less “magical” than what the psychoanalyst Estela Welldon terms “biological-psychological:” men, she argues from her clinical work, “are more prone to the pleasure principle. Women’s drives are object-seeking.”60 Generically, like other late comedy heroines, Helena saves the erring man from himself; Bertram returns to the mother he repudiated and can now re-discover the masculinity distorted by his association with Parolles. Actually staging Bertram and Helena’s lovemaking in any form is, however, a startling new development in the play’s theatrical history. There is no record of any approximation of the “scene” being staged before David McCandless’s discussion in the mid-1990s where he envisages acting out the exchange, using a blindfold on Bertram (parallel to the scene Parolles has just undergone) and having the Widow and Diana witnessing Helena and Bertram in bed so that multiple female subjects appropriate the traditional male role of fetishizing the opposite sex, thus reversing the usual gender stereotype. His production at Carleton College followed in 2000. Leggatt describes a 1996 Toronto production in which the two women silently exchanged places in a bed, each wearing similar nightgowns; Monette’s 2000 Stratford Ontario production had Diana blindfold Bertram, lead him into bed where Helena took her place.61 Washington University’s production likewise used blindfolds and a mattress (Figure 3.1, see p. 76). Bassuk cleverly used a pathway of spotlights to the bed, along which the two women, dressed alike, danced (Figure 1.6), with Diana finally leaving and Helena displaying herself as Bertram waited on the bed. From my survey of recent directors, acting the sexual substitution was not presented as sexual exploitation but rather as an act initiated and carried out by the women. The audience’s reactions were, the directors reported, predominantly amused admiration for the boldness of the plan—plus, no doubt, a voyeuristic sense of observing an intimate act, at once intensely personal, in other ways a remarkable transformation of a ritual of patriarchal sexual conquering and possession. The play’s first half shows Helena battling to assert herself in a world dominated by men. Her strongest support comes from another woman, the widowed Countess. Like “virgin,” “widow” was, Carlson and Weisl argue, a “contested space.” Widows, especially in the upper classes, were able to exercise significant power and patronage, and cultivate friendships.62 Although Helena is a ward of the Countess, she benefits from a mother’s love and commitment: “You ne’er oppressed me with a mother’s groan/yet I express to you a mother’s care” (1.3.140–1). Most recent productions have portrayed the Countess as supportive, emotionally drawn to both her

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Figure 1.6 Helena and Diana exchange roles (4.2, 4), Purchase Repertory, 2005, David Bassuk (director). Diana Hoyt (Helena), Zoey Martinson (Diana), Keynan Burnett (Bertram).

son and her daughter-in-law, but able to be stern about Bertram’s inadequacies—and supportive of Helena’s ability to step into the mothering role and help him mature. In the second half, another widow, Capilet, steps into the supportive role; “having been argued over by two angry men in a roomful of other men, [Helena] now surrounds herself by women,” observes Leggatt.63 Her relationship with the Florentine women is not, as in so many Shakespeare comedies, simply one of friendship, but a negotiated and active alliance of planning and support. Always combining elements of realism and romanticism, however, Shakespeare does not permit easy idealization: Helena (as generally interpreted) has to buy the cooperation of Diana and her mother, offering to pay Diana’s dowry—and thereby, ironically, taking on the King’s role of manipulating others’ lives to fulfill her desires. Helena, like all of us, lives in a morally murky world. A conventional comic ending would stress the bringing together of the marital couple(s); All’s Well permits such an ending, but also allows for another, which focuses on the unity of the women. Recent productions have found different ways to stress this element of the play (Figure 7.2, see p. 133). Sometimes the women are presented as a group bonding together against a harsh patriarchal world. The domestic togetherness of the women of Florence around the kitchen hearth with breadmaking and domestic “receipts” was especially effective in the BBC

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TV version, analyzed in White’s essay, setting up a contrast between the traditional aristocracy of Rossillion, the newly ennobled Helena, and the poor but honest women of Florence. Kyle showed the women hugging each other after their successful “bed-trick,” packing their cart together, and listening sympathetically as Helena ruminates over the strangeness of men.

HELENA: WHAT DOES A WOMAN GET?

Acts four and five: realism, romance, resurrection The play’s structure—once Helena gets to Florence, persuades her new acquaintances to help her, and Bertram is “trapped” by the women’s “plot” (4.3.314), a term that Parolles uses of his own treatment but which also applies to Bertram’s—seems carefully put together. Act four alternates between Bertram and his military colleagues and Helena with the Florentine women. The link between these two worlds is Bertram who becomes the subject of much speculation and manipulation by both groups, reinforcing the interpretation of the play as a kind of Morality with an errant hero caught between conflicting moral demands, and being moved to repentance or a more mature understanding of himself and his obligations under the tutelage of a strong woman. The play’s action therefore moves towards the “all’s well” of its title, though with some degree of anxiety and struggle— perhaps “all’s well,” but only “that ends well.” Helena herself uses the play’s title, with its qualifying punctuation, in various forms, largely to cheer on her Florentine helpers and perhaps herself; and the repetition of such sentiments as “Whate’er the course, the end is the renown” (4.4.36) can underline her determined (or manipulative) nature, though an actress delivering the lines in an up-beat, encouraging tone can also increase the mood of determination in the face of increasing difficulties. The end of Act four and the first two scenes of Act five are structured to rekindle anxiety about the outcome. In fact, we watch two contradictory outcomes being planned. At the end of Act four, Helena’s death is announced, and the King and Countess bring their entourages together in anticipation of Bertram’s return. The ending they now expect fits Northrop Frye’s notion of comic structure: a society has been disrupted, and now it will be healed.64 Such a conclusion overcomes the anxieties of the patriarchy: the disruptive force, a woman, is restored to her proper place outside the world of patriarchal assumption and control. No royal intervention, gallant or meritocratic, is needed; events will end with a marriage that will have the support of all parties—Bertram, Count of Rossillion and Maudlin, daughter of Lafew. My survey of recent productions and current criticism shows a great diversity of approaches to the play’s ending. Some align the play with

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romantic comedy, smoothing the potentially ironic and distasteful, and compensating for the play’s flaws and its arguable underscripting by skillful staging and textual changes to stress the restored marriage, Bertram’s new or potential maturity, and the King’s confident conclusion, “the bitter past, more welcome is the sweet” (5.3.331). Others prefer an ending that is ironical, less celebratory, leaving the audience dislocated, even indignant. One director responded to me that the ending was “grim.” This approach remains responsive to the notion of All’s Well as a problem comedy—and many contemporary directors unproblematically use the phrase in their program notes. One extreme variant of a disturbing or ironic reading needs mentioning. Kathryn Moncrief and Margaret MacKenzie both argue that the ending poses the question whether Helena is really pregnant. Boccaccio’s heroine presents Beltramo with twin sons; Helena reveals herself as merely pregnant (Figures 1.7, 8.1, 9.2). A reading of her as ruthlessly manipulative might, it is suggested, accommodate an ending where Bertram (and everyone else) continues to be out-maneuvered by the cunning physician’s daughter whose pregnancy is faked. In my view, too much of the text legislates against such an ending, and directors with whom I discussed it all rejected the idea firmly. The only production I have discovered that might support such a reading is the 2003 “Blessed Unrest” staging in New York where, as a reviewer noted, the director “made the unusual decision to have [Helena] appear in a slim, body-hugging satin gown, with no visible sign of pregnancy;” yet even here, it was a testament to the actress playing Helena that “despite the slim body, no one doubted that the claim was real.”65 That such a reading has even a minimal plausibility perhaps shows up the loose ends of Shakespeare’s script rather than the logic of the play. The comic ending—whether romantic or ironic and “problem”atic— seems to characterize most current productions, suggesting that most directors want to assimilate the play to conventional expectations of Shakespearean comedy, or alternatively, still view the play as an aberrant, dark or “problem” comedy. It is perhaps an indication that critical paradigms change more rapidly than stage fashions, for as Zitner notes, the play’s conclusion takes a mischievous and adversarial “attitude towards the [comic] genre” by the return of Helena and the “conversion” of Bertram. Shakespeare’s decision to anticipate the conclusions of the late romances— with difficult situations asking for seemingly impossible solutions, surprising revelations, and a triumphant resolution designed to leave the audience in “wonder”—has been seen in a few productions. Some directors (notably Nunn and Hall), have noted that the play echoes Measure and anticipates The Winter’s Tale. Their productions intensified the emotional discomfort in early scenes in order to stress the transformation occasioned by Helena’s return, which is presented as a miracle, a counter-movement against “the ‘natural’ order of things” and is perhaps summed up by Lafew’s remark,

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“Mine eyes smell Onions, I shall weepe anon” (5.3.318).66 The term much discussed in current All’s Well criticism to explain such an effect is “wonder.” Lafew’s earlier remark that Helena’s curing of the King is “the rarest argument of wonder” (2.3.8) is echoed in the even greater “wonder” of the final scene. Richman’s discussion in Laughter, Pain and Wonder (1990) focused on the play’s combination of pain and laughter. Wonder, he argues, is generally associated with tragedy, and an effective romance ending incorporates as much pain as possible before producing the desired “wondrous” effects.67 But there is a genuine question whether Shakespeare has adequately scripted the play to achieve this goal. The variety of possible readings, again, may point to faulty writing as much as modern uneasiness before miraculous or wondrous endings. It is certainly arguable that the basis of the conversion is certainly prepared for, even if cryptically, in the script. In Act four, one of the lords comments that Bertram is “changed almost into another man” (4.3.4). In performance, the import of that remark may or may not be taken up, and there is a question whether Shakespeare provides enough supporting detail for it. After Helena’s entry in 5.3, Bertram is accorded few lines, and yet (as actors quickly learn) he must play a significant role in establishing the scene’s overall effect by emphasis, posture, gesture and attitude. As with Leontes in The Winter’s Tale and Posthumous in Cymbeline, the scene positions him as a repentant husband; like Angelo in Measure, he is desired by a woman whose taste might be questioned but whose determination cannot be. A director may need to find positives that can be staged, if not spoken, in order to emphasize Bertram’s conversion not so much as plausible psychologically as acceptable emotionally. Many augment the text by using special blocking or gestures, cutting lines, even adding additional lines or speeches to fill out Bertram’s part— and do so not only in the final scene, where there is little enough time, but from the play’s start. Barton had Bertram smiling affectionately at Helena in the opening scene; Nunn started with Bertram and Helena playing chess as children; as Bertram left for Paris, Hall had him give her a quick but not unaffectionate peck on the cheek; Bassuk had them dancing together and embracing, affectionately on Bertram’s part, passionately on Helena’s. Bertram’s attitude to Helena in the choosing scene (2.3) seems more proscribed, and productions tend to stress his indignation and derision; some, however, soften his negativity in various ways, and (as some directors responded to my questionnaire), a degree of harshness may be a necessary prerequisite to establishing the depths of despair and impossibility from which the “miracle” of Helena’s triumph must come. Bertram’s negativity towards Helena can also be softened by emphasizing the play’s recurring hints about Parolles’s malign influence; as Bertram rejects Helena, for instance, Parolles often sidles up to Bertram, coaching him by gesture to

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escape. The Countess and Lafew eventually blame Bertram’s misdeeds on Parolles, a “snipped taffeta fellow” (4.5.1–2). When the exposure of Bertram occurs, a more difficult moment in Bertram’s possible rehabilitation is reached. The ring Bertram chooses to send to Maudlin is revealed as Helena’s and originally the King’s; the ring that Diana has, to be Bertram’s—and in a nice touch, Tresnjak had the Countess present it to him when he left for Paris. As the exchange of rings is revealed in the final scene, the King is puzzled and angry, the Countess anxious, Bertram increasingly trapped and bewildered, trying to lie his way out. Why does Shakespeare make Bertram much more reprehensible than in Boccaccio? Many see it as evidence of a play out of control; others, of one as yet incompletely developed. Many critics become sternly moralistic: Miola sternly terms Bertram “a liar and a snob in need of exposure;” Zitner speaks of his needing to be coerced into decency.68 This is surely, however, where the “comic” reading of the play seriously breaks down. The play seems to be deliberately blackening Bertram’s character in order to build towards something more emotionally extreme. The sense of a miraculous transformation is the climax of all the late “tragi-” or “serious” comedies. The key moment of the finale is Diana’s announcement of the “answer” to the “riddle” she poses. Like Mariana in Measure or Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, Diana sets up a tableau in which the emotional force of the play’s ending is concentrated. Like a heavenly messenger, she announces the culminating revelation: “dead though she be, she feels her young one kick. And now behold the answer” (5.3.302–3). In Boccaccio, the managerial competence of Giletta convinces Beltramo that his wife is acceptable. There are no psychological complications and nothing of the ritualized resurrection atmosphere Shakespeare builds around the return of the apparently dead Helena, signifying the revolutionary set of counter-actions that have been taking shape, as it were, undercover, in the body of the triumphantly pregnant Helena. Haslem’s summary—Helena’s “body presented as a visual solution” to the seemingly unsolvable “riddle”—points back to the incarnational theatricality of medieval miracle plays. Osherow provides historical and biblical precedents for the play’s affirmation of pregnancy.69 Behind the scene specifically is the artistic tradition of the triumphantly pregnant Virgin in the Gravida tradition, as exemplified by Piero della Francesca’s famous Madonna del Parto, which was also a favorite medieval motif in England, as Gail Gibson shows in her study of the East Anglian Mary plays. Helena’s entrance is therefore both a resurrection scene and a miracle of the miraculous pregnant virgin. The woman whom all saw last alive as married yet unbedded, determined to preserve her virginity “to her own liking” (1.1.153) is here returned, pregnant, confronting her husband who has sworn to all (truthfully, as far as he knows) that he had not touched her sexually. Shakespeare’s play, of course, falls short of the certainty of a medieval

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resurrection play. Nunn, according to Harriet Walter, who played his Helena, saw her as “a redeemer, a woman whose faith and integrity were going to save Bertram”. Although, intriguingly, neither Walter nor her Bertram, Mike Gwilym, fully accepted Nunn’s concept of Helena as “redeeming saint”. The “salvation” offered is far more tentative, more suitable for an age in which “miracles are past” (2.3.1).70 Staging is crucial here and central to an interpretation of the whole play. A low-key entrance for Helena, as occurred in the Cambridge production, de-emphasizes the reconciliation and instead stresses the irony. The interpretation of Bertram’s line, “Both—oh both. O pardon!” (5.3.306), is also crucial. Critics and directors stressing a comic or ironic ending may need to see his line as unmotivated or insincere; but it is hard, when we put the play in the context of the romances, to see it as not animated by wonder. His final lines have also occasioned much comment: “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly/I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (5.3.313–4). Everett emphasizes how such forward-looking “if”s are scattered throughout the play. Often read as a qualification, as by a number of the essayists here, on stage these lines can easily become a further affirmation. If [as is now manifestly obvious from her visible presence and pregnancy, to which the actor can gesture] she has indeed shown her skill, ingenuity and now love, then Bertram is moved to respond positively—the repletion of “ever, ever dearly” emphasizing his acceptance and conversion (Figure 1.7). Significantly, Bertram says no more in the scene. As Wilbur Sanders points out in his brilliant reading of the equivalent scene in The Winter’s Tale, it is so often Shakespeare’s verbal silences where the deepest effects of wonderment may lie. If Bertram’s response to Helena’s reappearance seems anti-climactic, as Sanders puts it, “there are anticlimaxes in literature richer than any climax can hope to be. This is one of them.”71 Some recent productions have, however, settled for a less affirmative ending: having Bertram and Helena eyeing each other warily, hardly touching, and thus restoring a sense of the uneasiness of the “problem play” taxonomy so beloved by critics fifty to a hundred years ago. Hall’s ending requires special mention. The genius of his production was to have a seemingly cynical, even ruthless Bertram, an obnoxious boy turning, on the surface, into a mean-spirited man—an anticipation of Posthumous and Leontes in the suffering he caused—until, abandoned by his mother, the King, the court, and undone by his own confused lies, he collapses in despair. He looks up to find unexpected (however undeserved) rescue by the woman he has abused, thought dead, and who (as we in the audience know) has dedicated her life to fulfilling the conditions he has set, the only person who loves him wholeheartedly, without condition, and who now raises him from the floor in a miraculous unlooked for redemption that goes beyond desert or expectation. Helena read the first few words

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Figure 1.7 Helena and Bertram (5.3), Purchase Repertory Company 2005, David Bassuk (director). Diana Hoyt (Helena), Keynan Burnett (Bertram).

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of his “dreadful” letter, then ripped it up, enacting, as Holland put it, “the possibility of change, the possibility of forgiveness.” Helena’s return was also brilliantly staged, as commentators have frequently noted, in the BBC TV version with the camera panning the faces of the astonished spectators before showing the object of their admiration. We may acknowledge—as Coppélia Kahn and Shirley Garner have argued—that such an interpretation enacts an all too deeply engrained male fantasy that however badly a man behaves there will always be a woman waiting to rescue or redeem him.72 But it is certainly a fantasy structure Shakespeare returned to over and over and one which is clearly central to All’s Well. The play ends quickly. Shakespeare’s focus is primarily on our being caught up in the moment of revelation. Explanations of the seemingly miracles are promised for afterwards, as in The Winter’s Tale—indeed, they will occur in a sense in our own thoughts and feelings as we contemplate not the “lives” of the fictional characters on the stage, but our own lives. Questions of whether Bertram and Helena will be happy or whether Diana will one day marry, or what Parolles’s employment will be, are as irrelevant as how long it will take for Leontes and Hermione to become re-acquainted, when Paulina and Camillo had a chance to get to know each other, whether Posthumous will get a right dressing down from his wife— or, as L. C. Knights pointed out long ago, the number of Lady Macbeth’s children. Richman’s concept of “wonder” therefore seems to fit the ending best. But Richman does not examine its psychological roots. Recent psychoanalytic approaches to the play have been helpful in showing how wonder is rooted not merely in the progression of the plot, but within shared stories, narratives we carry and recognize perhaps only partly consciously, that become engaged in such moments of high emotional energy. What are those stories? The work by Lawrence and others early last century pointed the way, but did not perhaps go deeply enough—and as I argued at the start of this Introduction—had to wait until the past twenty years or so to be adequately articulated, and in fairness, as ever with this play, there is disagreement on whether they are adequately realized. The play started with an expression of a desire—that of a woman determined to pursue a seemingly impossible goal, and thus affirm herself as a desiring subject, not simply as an object of male desire (or loathing). For contemporary feminist critics, a key aspect of the story of Helena’s desire is centered on her discovering and affirming her own sexuality. Some commentators wishing to stress the sexual story in All’s Well argue that, in Hodgdon’s words, both Helena and Bertram have “a commitment to their shared sexuality;” such a reading sees the cryptic nature of the scripted lines between Bertram and Helena at the end not as a weakness, but as expressing their bond through the body rather than through language: their

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sexual discoveries and commitments are, she says, “hesitantly apparent, more in silence than through extravagant speech or romantic gestures.”73 If sexuality and sexual choice constitute a primary “story” evoked at the play’s end, another is the consequence of sexuality and Helena’s own choice, motherhood. Osherow’s essay pushes this argument further than any previous criticism. At the start Countess had teased Helena about being her mother, and affirmed that without suffering a mother’s pain that she nonetheless had a mother’s care for Helena. At the play’s painful center, as both Countesses (Bertram’s mother and now his wife) receive news that he has fled to Florence, the old Countess cannot decide which of the two she loves more. At the play’s end, her returned “daughter” steps back into the final scene—pregnant, affirmative, triumphant, as an affirmation of motherhood as one of the great “miracles” of life. The Cambridge production underlined the point by having Lavatch, the [woman] clown, increasingly pregnant as the play moved along, giving birth off stage during the final scene and entering at the play’s end with a new infant. New mother and mother-to-be stood side by side. Bassuk had Helena visibly pregnant in the scenes where she and the Florentine women go to search for the King, and finally, entering down a long rake to center stage to be met by the amazed Bertram and then by the Countess (Figures 1.7, 9.2). These were both clever touches that emphasized the play’s affirmation of a woman’s choice to express her sexual and reproductive powers “to her own liking.” The movement of the play has been from death to rebirth and regeneration and there is a sense, Osherow argues—again the parallel is with The Winter’s Tale— of the irrelevance of Bertram, and indeed males generally, to the process. While productions inevitably have to incorporate Bertram, if not the King, into the final tableau, All’s Well is remarkable for its affirmation of the heart of women to embody literally, that continuity and “right” ordering of life. A further connected “story” that the play’s ending valorizes is, uniquely for Shakespeare, women’s solidarity. Unlike the ending scenes in As You Like It, Twelfth Night, or even The Winter’s Tale, where the emphasis is on the re-united patriarchal families, All’s Well affirms women’s collective power. It is epitomized in Helena’s turning from her reunion with Bertram to the old Countess, and—recognizing the triumphant success of the “plot” they have concocted—to the Florentine women. While directors arrange the groupings at the play’s end in a variety of ways, there is the clear possibility for the women of the play to be presented as the triumphant force—as expressing how they have been proven “right.” If the final scene affirms the sisterhood of women—together representing quite distinct sexual, marital, and relational choices—what of the men? Can the final scene also be read as yet another story of men trying to regain control of events that are out of their control? The King tries

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once again to preside over the marital fate of his subjects: remarrying Bertram to Maudlin, and offering to provide Diana with a husband. Stanton asserts that if “all” fails to be “well,” it will be by “male refusal to accept the rejuvenation of the society through feminine leadership.”74 How the King’s interventions are received will depend in part on how he has been played earlier in the play. With the recent stage tendency of having him played as overbearing, even a ridiculous figure, the focus shifts from his authority to that of the women. Interestingly, Shakespeare does give the King the prologue, as “a beggar” in a variation of the traditional self-effacement of the actor stepping out of role and addressing himself to the audience, as if he has learnt some kind of lesson. The epilogue is often overlooked in commentary on All’s Well—and, some directors acknowledged to me, frequently omitted in production or allotted to Lavatch or even Bertram. Another of the stories designed to awake our emotional “faith” at the play’s end (to use a celebrated phrase from the equivalent scene of The Winter’s Tale) and perhaps the crucial story, is the return of the apparently dead Helena to life. Fifty years ago, Wilson Knight argued for All’s Well’s being saturated in religious language and allegory, and described Helena as “a semi-divine person, or some new type of saint.” As part of a broader reconsideration of Shakespeare’s religious sensibility, the late comedies generally have been increasingly seen as displaying Shakespeare’s affinities with remnants of the “old” religion, or showing his use of that fading world’s emotional resonances without its theological substance. R. G. Hunter argues that Helena is a “literary descendant of the Virgin’s figure typically found in medieval narratives like the many dramatic miracles of ‘Our Lady;’” she becomes what Maquerlot terms “the Providential Agent” whose return “is shrouded in an atmosphere of miracle.” Hunter notes, however, that given the religious paranoia of Protestant Jacobean England, “a straightforward reference to the Virgin as intercessor is too Popish to be probable,” and at the opposite end of the theological spectrum, Hunt argues that the play’s action is based on a Protestant pattern of salvation through grace alone and predestination so that what is unforeseen and seemingly fortuitous is actually predetermined. He sensibly adds, however, that Shakespeare is not a theologian and is using theological concerns that are in the end for dramatic purposes.75 As Wilcox poses the question, “could it be that the fascination with religious devotion remains a superficial aspect of the drama, disguising a core which is thoroughly secular?” All’s Well is certainly not alone among Shakespeare’s plays in using one of the great stories of Western culture: the desire to overcome death. The resurrection motif occurs repeatedly in the comedies, and even though we in the audience know that Hero, Marina, Thaisa, Imogen, Claudio, and others are not “really” dead, the plays’ actions are structured to create identification, relief, and triumph when they re-appear. Of course, skepticism and disbelief are possible

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reactions from readers and audiences, and directors may also avoid stressing the motif and downplay the religious dimension to the play—though interestingly, the 2006 Shakespeare Association of America session on the Reformation featured more papers on All’s Well than on any other of Shakespeare’s plays, and most of them stressed its Catholic rather than Protestant affinities. Clearly, the play draws on a reservoir if not of doctrine at least of that which religious doctrine purports to describe. The final “story” establishing the “wonder” of the ending is, as in so many Shakespeare plays, that of the theatre itself. The culmination is a deliberately staged, self-consciously theatrical moment. Recent work on the performative traditions in Shakespeare’s time has emphasized the level of meta-drama in commedia grave and mannerist art generally. At the play’s end Shakespeare draws attention not just to the magic of Helena’s resurrection but that of his own art. What the final scene enacts is that the craft of the dramatist in articulating those stories and drawing them out in our experience of the play. Helena becomes a surrogate dramatist, staging the miracle of her completing the tasks; Diana helps stage Helen’s entry; between them they preside over the actions of the final moments of the play. While never as explicitly as with Prospero’s final scenes, in All’s Well, Shakespeare is already moving towards affinities with mannerist artists like Pontormo or Parmigianinno, where the mechanics of representation become a subject of the work, unveiling the cleverness of conception and execution and having the audience marvel at the effect the play creates and not just, transparently, at its “meaning.” Greenwood sees the King’s outcry as he witnesses the marvel of Helena’s reappearance as epitomizing the recognition of Mannerist virtuosity: “Is there no exorcist/Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?/Is’t real I see?” (5.3.304–306).76

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What, then, according to contemporary commentators, critics, and directors alike does an audience leave with? That is a question with which both criticism and production continue to grapple. The essays collected here show how commentary on All’s Well has moved in new directions, parallel to (though not necessarily overlapping with) current fashions in staging. A question that the variety of answers offered by recent work on the play prompts is as follows—is its open-endedness more than is characteristic of Shakespeare’s plays? Does “open-endedness” cover inadequacies in conception or execution? I have stressed, in surveying recent commentary and productions, the multiple perspectives that may be legitimately taken on the final scene. With All’s Well, one cannot say the intention, or outcome, is something that can easily be pinned down since so much is still potential. That is not, however—as it would have been twenty years ago—necessarily

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a criticism of the play. The very question implied by the play’s title—All’s Well followed in the Folio title by a comma, as if pausing for a response— is indicative of the always-already-under-interrogation nature of this “intense and moving play.”77

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Shaw quoted in Joseph G. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: All’s Well That Ends Well and its Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 43; Mary Bly, “Imagining Consummation: Women’s Erotic Language in Comedies of Dekker and Shakespeare,” in Gail Finney, ed., Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy (Langhorne: Gordon and Breach, 1994), 37; Hugh Grady, “Shakespeare Studies 2005: a Situated Overview,” Shakespeare 1 (2005), 114. Michael Billington, “All’s Well that Ends Well,” The Guardian (December 12, 2003), 17; Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 5. Nick De Somogyi, ed. All’s Well that Ends Well: the First Folio of 1623 and a Parallel Modern Edition (London: Nick Hern, 2004), xxxii, xxxiv, xxxvii. G. K. Hunter (ed.), All’s Well, That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1959), xviii–xx, summarizes the history of claims regarding “Love’s Labour’s Won.” Somogyi, xxx; Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor and John Jowett, eds. William Shakespeare: a Textual Companion (NY: Norton, 1997), 492–500. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron. Trans. G.H. McWilliam, 2nd ed. (NY: Penguin Books, 1995); William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, ed. Joseph Jacobs. (London: David Nutt), 1: 10–14, 171–79; Leah Scragg, Shakespeare’s Mouldy Tales: Recurrent Plot Motifs in Shakespearian Drama (London: Longman, 1992), 100. The pertinent extracts from Painter’s translation are conveniently reprinted in Susan Snyder, ed. All’s Well that Ends Well (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 225–32. Snyder, All’s Well, 3. William W. Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (NY: Macmillan, 1931), 73–7; Karen Bamford, “Foreign Affairs: The Search for the Lost Husband in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well.” Early Theatre 8.2 (2005), 88–103, adds the “search for the lost husband” motif widely found in oral tradition. Frederick S. Boas, Shakespere and His Predecessors (London: John Murray, 1896), 345. Snyder, All’s Well, 41–2. For an older view of the Morality play comparison, see G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower: on Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism (London: Methuen, 1958), 138–57. Michele Marrapodi, “From Narrative to Drama: the Erotic Tale and the Theatre,” in Michele Marrapodi and A. J. Hoenselaars, ed. The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama: Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 49–57; W. David Kay, “Reforming the Prodigal: Dramatic Paradigms, Male Sexuality, and the Power of Shame in All’s Well That Ends Well,” in Evelyn Gajowski (ed). Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein (Newark: University of Delaware Press,

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All’s Well, That Ends Well 2004), 108–127. See David Farley-Hills, Jacobean Drama: a Critical Study of the Professional Drama, 1600–25 (NY: St Martin’s Press, 1988); Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights (London: Routledge, 1990). John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess: a Critical Edition. ed. Ada Kirk (NY: Garland 1980), xx; Ros King, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 13; Ros King, Introduction to T. S. Dorsch, ed. The Comedy of Errors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6; Barbara A. Mowat, “Shakespearean Tragicomedy,” in Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics, ed. Nancy Klein Maguire (NY: AMS Press, 1987), 85, 91; Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today (NY: Routledge, 1989), 74. Price, 95. Price, 6, 76, 84. 94; Irene G. Dash, Women’s Worlds in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), esp. 32–64; Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1906), I. 199–237. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 89; Hunter, All’s Well, xxiv. Robert Shaughnessy. The Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth-Century Performance (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 141. For an account of the Guthrie productions from one of the actors, see Zoe Caldwell, I Will be Cleopatra: an Actress’s Journey (NY: Norton, 2001), 115–9. Russell Jackson, “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon: Summer and Winter 2003–4,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 55 (2004), 195. Alan Dessen, Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76, 79. See, for example, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). David M. Bevington, “All’s Well that Ends Well,” in David G. Allen and Robert A. White, ed, Subjects on the World’s Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 162–80. Gary Waller, ed. Shakespeare’s Comedies (London: Longman, 1991), 18–22; Grady, 109–16. Gregory Doran, “That Man Shakespeare,” The Guardian, Nov. 29, 2003: subsequently excerpted on the RSC website (www.rsc.org.uk/allswell/teachers/ historical.html) and in the RSC program for the production; Ton Schrickx, “Elizabethan Drama and Anglo-Dutch Relations,” in A. J. Hoenselaars, ed. Reclamations of Shakespeare (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 29–30. For the Oxfordians, see, for example, Dorothy and Charlton Ogden, This Star of England: “William Shakespeare” (NY: Coward-McCann, 1952). HMC, Salisbury, XI, 341; see also John Donne. “To Sir Henry Wotton. . . .” The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 217. Sheldon P. Zitner, All’s Well, That Ends Well (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 6–7, 42, 43; David S. Berkeley, and Donald Keesee,

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“Bertram’s Blood-Consciousness in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 31 (1991), 247–58. 25 Zitner, 67. 26 Lloyd Davis, “‘Sick Desires:’ All’s Well That Ends Well and the Civilizing Process” in Lloyd Davis, ed. Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 113; Richard Hillman, William Shakespeare: the Problem Plays (NY: Twayne, 1993), 58. 27 Painter, in Snyder, 225. 28 See, for example, Wilson Knight, 151, 154; Hunter, All’s Well, xxx. 29 Barbara Howard Traister, “‘Doctor She’: Healing and Sex in All’s Well That Ends Well,” in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, eds. A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 36. 30 Lisa Jardine, “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines: These Are Old Paradoxes” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 8. 31 Carolyn Asp, “Subjectivity, Desire and Female Friendship in All’s Well That Ends Well.” Literature and Psychology, 32, no. 4 (1986), 48–63. Reprinted in Waller 176–7. 32 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (NY: Routledge, 1992), 78–81; Cf. Sigmund Freud, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1952–66), XI, 177–90. 33 Wilson Knight, 116. 34 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans Stephen Conway (Minneapolos: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 213, 222. 35 Zitner, 123. 36 Davis, “ ‘Sick Desires,’ ” 96. 37 Hazelton Spencer, “All’s Well that Ends Well,” in Robert Ornstein, ed. Discussions of Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1961), 42, 44; David Shalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 200. 38 David McCandless, “Helena’s Bed-trick: Gender and Performance in All’s Well That Ends Well” Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), 449–468; reprinted in Emma Smith (ed.), Shakespeare’s Comedies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 146. See also McCandless, Gender and Performance in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). 39 Dessen, Moral Plays, 122, 130. 40 Scott F. Crider, “Our Boundary Stones: ‘Torture’ in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Ben Jonson Journal, 2 (1995), 79. 41 Michael Friedman, “Male Bonds and Marriage in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Studies in English Literature, 35 (1995), 235, 243. 42 H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London: Methuen, 1938), 258; Lounsbury, quoted in Price, 96; Kay Stanton, “All’s Well in Love and War,” in Robert P. Merrix and Nicholas Ransom, eds., Ideological Approaches to Shakespeare (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1992), 155.

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Asp, in Waller, 176; Irving Wardle, The Times (London) 12 October 1989, 20. Bly, 37; Stanton, 163; Deidre Mulrooney, “Shakespearean Shenanigans,” The Sunday Post, Sunday, June 13, 2004; http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/ 2004/06/13/story645364369.asp. Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance (London, Continuum, 2000), 55; Wilson Knight, 131–2; Quiller-Couch, quoted in Price, 105; Zitner, 102; Alexander Leggatt, Introduction to Fraser, All’s Well That Ends Well (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2; Robert S. Miola, “New Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993), 37. Trewin, quoted by Barbara Everett, ed. All’s Well That Ends Well (London: Penguin, 3rd edition, 2005), xxvii; Rutter, 81; Cynthia Marshall, ed. As You Like It (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26, 41; Stanton, 157; Elizabeth Schafer, MS-Directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 113–7. Irene G. Dash, Women’s Worlds in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 18–64. Asp, 183; Judith Weill, Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 65. Paul Yachnin, “Shakespeare’s Problem Plays and the Drama of his Time: Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure.” In Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, eds. A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 53, 49; Bly, 45. Stanton, 57. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (NY: Pantheon, 1988), 128. Darko Tresnjak, “Director’s Note,” Playbill [The Duke on 42nd Street] 122.2 (February, 2006); Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 393. Joseph Westlund, Shakespeare’s Reparative Comedies, a Psychoanalytic View of the Middle Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 121; Wilson Knight, 157; Roger Warren, “Why Does It End Well? Helena, Bertram, and the Sonnets,” Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), 79–92; Zitner 30, 25. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie, ed. Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 17. For Elizabeth and Virginity, see, for example, Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia, 1994). Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “Changing One’s Mind: Transformations in Reformation History from a Germanist’s Perspective,” Renaissance Quarterly, 58 (2005), 1123. Theodora A. Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 5, 106–7.

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David M. Bergeron, “All’s Well That Ends Well: where is Violenta?” Explorations in Culture, 29 (2003), 171–84. Kelly and Leslie, 17; Jankowski, Pure Resistance, 145. Marliss C. Desens, The English Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama: Explorations in Gender, Sexuality, and Power (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994). Adelman, 78; Estela V. Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood (NY: Guilford Press, 1992), 21. McCandless, “Helena’s Bed-Trick,” 449–68; Leggatt in Fraser, 35–37. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl, eds. Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (NY: St Martins, 1999), 2, 9. Leggatt in Fraser, 35. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (NY: Columbia University Press, 1965), 73. Kathryn Moncrieff, ‘She is spread of late into a goodly bulk’: Reading the Pregnant Body on the Shakespearean Stage” in Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson, Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate: forthcoming); Mary McKenzie, “Pregnancy as Life or Death?: All’s Well That Ends Well,” in The Pregnant Boy: The Performance of Pregnancy on the London Stage, 1601–1625, unpub. PhD. Diss. (Canberra: Australian National University, 2001), ch.2; Patricia Lennox, “All’s Well That Ends . . . Well” Shakespeare Bulletin, 21 (2003), 136–7. Zitner, 154; Rutter, 88. David Richman, Laughter, Pain, and Wonder: Shakespeare’s Comedies and the Audience in the Theater (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 16. Miola 57; Zitner, 149. Lori Haslem, “Riddles, Feminine Space and Closure in All’s Well that Ends Well,” ELN, 38 (2001), 19–20. For more extensive analysis of the Madonna del Parto motif in the play, see Gary Waller, “Shakespeare’s Pregnant Virgin: All’s Well, That Ends Well and the Madonna del Parto,” in Sid Ray and Martha Driver, eds. Medieval Shakespeare in Performance (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007). Elena Bonelli, “Maternity on Stage Between Veils and Curtains,” 19th International Conference in Literature & Psychology, University of Siena, Arezzo, Italy; June 26–July 01, 2002; see www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/abstr-02.htm; Sandra Miesel “Mothering God,” Crisis: Politics, Culture, & the Church, December 2001; www.crisismagazine.com/december2001/feature1.htm. For the medieval background, see Gail M. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Everett, xxv; Wilbur Sanders, The Winter’s Tale (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 121. Peter Holland, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 121; Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Barbara Hodgdon, “The Making of Virgins and Mothers: Sexual Signs, Substitute Scenes and Doubled Presences in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Philological Quarterly, 66 (1987), 122.

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Stanton, 163. Wilson Knight, 146; R. G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (NY: Columbia University Press, 1965), 129–30; Jean-Pierre Maquerlot, Shakespeare and the Mannerist Tradition: a Reading of Five Problem Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 151; Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness: its Play and Tolerance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 107. John Greenwood, Shifting Perspectives and the Stylish Style: Mannerism in Shakespeare and his Jacobean Contemporaries (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988), 100; Maquerlot, 150. Everett, All’s Well, xxi. See also “The Love of a Good Woman,” TLS, 27 Oct. 1989, 1185.

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Revising the Sources: Novella, Romance, and the Meanings of Fiction in All’s Well, That Ends Well STEVEN MENTZ

It is the backward motion toward the source, Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in, The tribute of the current to its source. Robert Frost, “West-Running Brook”

Much of contemporary Shakespeare criticism’s ambivalence about traditional “source study” arises from the discrepancy between how easily available the vast array of putative sources is and how weak their explanatory force has become. If scholars want to know the sources of any play or poem of Shakespeare’s, they are ready to hand in most scholarly editions, from the detailed critical history in Harold Jenkins’s Arden2 Hamlet (1982) to J. J. M. Tobin’s summatory table in the Riverside Shakespeare (1997).1 Reprints of this material cluster in the back of teaching editions, and compilations like those of Bullough (1957) or Muir (1957) are easily found. But discovering that All’s Well derives from the thirty-eighth story in William Painter’s popular three-volume collection of stories, The Palace of Pleasure (1566–67), does not satisfy our desire to understand the play. Even knowing that Painter in turn adapted his material from Boccaccio’s Decameron, or that the story has affinities with medieval tales about witty women and classical romances like the story of Cupid and Psyche does not resolve the question of why identifying a source should be a valuable activity for Shakespeare critics. The compelling reason to return to source study today must be its ability to produce new ways of understanding the narrative and rhetorical patterns whose histories have been so densely traced. Numerous books and articles still clamber to locate (or dismiss) “new” sources for Shakespearean works, but this effort carries a taint of old historicism, and at times it seems mainly good for demonstrating (to no one’s

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great surprise) that Shakespeare’s version of the story is better than Painter’s. If source study – called “the elephants’ graveyard of literary history” by no less an authority than Stephen Greenblatt – is to provide more than material for scholarly footnotes or introductory lectures, it needs to reinvent itself as a critical method that facilitates engagement with Shakespeare’s plays as dynamic literary and dramatic objects.2 Thus my argument in favor of a return to source study begins by stressing the tension within my epigraph from Frost: returning to sources and to source study must always be a “backward movement. . .against the stream” as well as “toward the source.” All’s Well is a particularly apt play through which to reconsider Shakespearean source studies because of its distinct position in the canon: it is the only play that relies on just one source. In discussing Shakespeare’s use of Painter, I will contrast the narrative genre of the Italian (or Italianate) novella, in which a heroine triumphs through wit and ingenuity, with its ideological opposite in early modern literary culture, the classical romance plot, in which a suffering heroine gets transformed by providential rescue.3 Shakespeare’s (and the early modern English theatre’s) embeddedness in the wider storytelling cultures of early modern Europe has been obscured by both the vertical source-mining of traditional scholarship and the idiosyncratic horizontal surveys of New Historicism. The Shakespeare industry has tirelessly identified resemblances of plot, character, and language between Shakespeare and other writers, but All’s Well in particular rewards a critical approach that moves past simple identification to find meaning in Shakespeare’s use of the myriad narrative forms that Salman Rushdie calls “the sea of stories.”4 The contrast between the novella-plot of All’s Well (which I describe below as the “Doctor She” plot) and its romance inflection (which I call the “Idolater” plot) reveals a split within the play. The double source underwrites All’s Well’s fundamental division: the play is both comedy of wit and romance of suffering. This bivalence motivates many of the features that led generations of critics and theatregoers to label it a “problem play,” even though, as Gary Waller emphasizes in his introduction to this volume, some recent criticism and stage history have left such pejorative descriptions behind. The play gives dramatic form to the competition between two major early modern genres, the novella and romance, and their nearly opposite ideologies. Reconsidering these narrative forms as sources produces a reading of the play that is not radically new – the tensions I adduce here are well-known – but naming these narrative forms as sources valuably provides a precise and meaningful language to discuss the play’s fundamental division. While I prefer to use Shakespeare’s language whenever possible (hence “Doctor She” and “Idolater”), connecting these phrases to

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the long histories of the novella and romance adds literary and historical depth to local textual analysis. Source study begs foundational questions of intertextual agency and the proper subject of critical analysis. Literary meaning may be located in three distinct places – the author, the text, or the reader/audience – and giving one of these primacy characterizes any critical methodology. If critics concern themselves with the author and his or her practices of imitatio or aemulatio, they remain squarely in the realm of traditional criticism. Against this authorcentered approach a school of “intertextuality” grew up following Julia Kristeva’s coining of that term in 1969.5 This theoretical re-configuration of the relationship between sources and texts remains visible in the wide use of the term “text” in place of the older “work.” Despite its post-structural language, however, intertextuality in practice has marked affinities with traditional editorial practices like tracing allusions and echoes, and I consider theoretical intertextuality and editorial practice alike “text-centered” methodologies. A third strain of source studies, influenced by Foucauldian notions of the episteme, the postmodern Marxist analyses of Fredric Jameson, and the prominence of New Historicism in the last two decades, takes aim at neither the practical author nor the multivoiced text but instead at the ideological claims that generic affiliation and intertextual allusion make on the reader’s (or theatregoer’s) experience. My reading of All’s Well as registering and manipulating the tension between its “Doctor She” and “Idolater” plotlines and source-texts draws most completely on this third (Jamesonian/ New Historicist) mode, but I also suggest that exfoliating all three models provides a fuller sense of how “source study” can still affect critical responses to Shakespeare. Uncovering lines of tension and competition among rival sources makes powerful claims on readers and audiences. Sources that come in oppositional pairs unsettle traditional ideas of lineal descent or Oedipal (Bloomian) rebellion. Recourse to multiple sources clarifies this play’s underlying ambivalence. For example, when Helena claims that she forced Bertram to flee Paris for the Florentine wars – “I am the cause,” she says (3.2.115) – source study recognizes allusions to two distinct classical sources: Ovid’s story of Apollo and Daphne, in which the god protests that “love is the cause of my pursuit” (“amor est mihi causa sequendi”), and Virgil’s request that the Muse “tell me the cause” (“mihi causas memora”) of Aeneas’s troubles. These competing subtexts represent Helena’s dual status as Ovidian victim of desire and Virgilian endurer of destiny. Shakespeare’s line invokes two classical sources that can serve the modern critic as a coded language for the ideological rift within All’s Well. By reconsidering how competing sources interact, a methodology that many think of as old-fashioned reveals the dynamism of the dramatic text.6

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VERSIONS OF THE SOURCE: AUTHOR, TEXT, READERS The vocabulary of source studies, with its reliance on words like “origin,” “influence,” and “source” itself, likens literary culture to a flowing river, with greater power being attributed to whatever lies upstream. As Michael Baxandall has written, privileging prior works “is a curse of art criticism because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient.” Baxandall prefers to locate agency in the recipient of influence, thus generating a “much richer and more attractively diversified” vocabulary, including terms like “draw on, resort to, avail oneself of . . .” But as Robert Miola recalls in his list of sixteen terms commonly used for source, the language of Shakespearean criticism still locates power in the external text, which is variously termed a “deep source, resource, influence, confluence, tradition, heritage, origin, antecedent, precursor, background, milieu, subtext, context, intertext, affinity, and analogue.”7 Even if Miola’s list is expanded to include terms like “infracontext,” “paradigm,” or “genre,” the question of agency remains unsettled. Returns to and revisions of source study in recent work suggest that choosing a source is both an act of ideological affiliation and a practical choice. The connection between authorial practice and ideological impact has been a staple of influence studies for some time; the classicist Gian Biago Conte connects these two modes by observing that “[w]hat is a critico-philological problem for us was a problem in poetic composition for Virgil.” In All’s Well, Shakespeare’s mixing of novella and romance, like Helena’s dual invocation of Ovid and Virgil, structures the play as a double bind. Two source-streams in one play: this fundamental duality typifies the play’s thematic ambivalence (comedy of wit or romance of suffering?), Helena’s unsettled status (witty wife or saintly near-martyr?), and the varied reactions of readers and audiences.8 The most familiar version of source studies in early modern literary criticism, which Miola calls “traditional” as opposed to “intertextual,” fixes on the author as the key figure. Historical studies of Renaissance imitatio and aemulatio have clarified how early modern scholars understood imitation and its role in composition. G. W. Pigman’s distinction between various kinds of imitation (transformative, dissimulative, competitive) and his identification of the five major metaphors used by classical and Renaissance writers when discussing imitation (apian, digestive, filial, simian, aviary) paint a detailed picture of what early modern writers were taught about imitative composition. Perhaps the richest exploration of how this practice unfolds in Renaissance literary works appears in Thomas Greene’s The Light in Troy (1982). Greene’s notion of a “mundus signficans, a signifying universe” in a given work enables allusion-hunting and source study to generate structuring principles for understanding early modern poetry.

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While resolutely author-centered, Greene is acutely sensitive to the need of modern readers to generate meaning out of texts that are culturally distant. Greene expands Pigman’s categories of imitation from three to four (reproductive, eclectic, heuristic, dialectical) and suggests that Renaissance awareness of the distance of the classical past adds poignancy to its strategies of imitation: “In the literature of the Renaissance, intertextuality has to be analyzed as an interplay between stabilizing etiologies and a destabilizing perception of disjuncture.” Positing the early modern writer as embodying a crisis of historical self-knowledge (his paradigmatic example is Petrarch), Greene suggests that this writer’s position is not unlike that of the modern critic: each writes to recover the mediated presence of a vanished culture.9 Against this author-centered discourse, the intertextuality that flourished in theoretical criticism in the 1970s and 1980s posited a multitextual space of flux and variety. The most rousing claims for intertextuality as a defining characteristic of literary texts came from European critics like Kristeva, Foucault, Barthes, and Bahktin.10 As the wave of high theory recedes, however, intertextuality as a practical matter shows its resemblance to (and dependence on) the detailed webs of allusion and reference woven by scholarly editors. I single out Claes Schaar’s notion of “infracontexts” and a “vertical context system” as a method that performs the difficult highwire act of acknowledging a text’s multiplicity and also its perceived unity. Schaar’s distinction between his work and the “more limited” concept of source study argues that “[t]he student of infracontexts . . . deals with the expansion and stratification of meaning.” Especially for highly allusive poets like Dante, Milton, and Eliot, Schaar’s notion that patterns of reference produce “context systems” that then yield meaning to scholarly inquiry extends Greene’s fascination with humanist writing practices while demoting the humanist author from his position of privilege. Schaar contrasts his “context system” to traditional naming of “allusions” by linking his method to the “intellectual habits of Milton’s age” in which classical and Biblical sources especially were broadly shared rather than obscurely hunted. His efforts to uncover patterns of meaning in Milton’s wide sphere of reference represents the coalescing of the editorial and theoretical paths of modern source study in Renaissance criticism.11 The “system” in vertical context system also sets the stage for larger claims about the ideological or intellectual force of sources and contexts. Schaar’s preference for a “deep” rather than “surface” reading of intertextual reference gestures toward the claims of critics like Fredric Jameson that any literary genre “is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or in other terms, that form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right.” As Douglas Bruster has cogently argued, this move from reference

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to ideology typifies what New Historicist critics have done with source study. According to Bruster, Greenblatt’s well-known essay “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” is “what source study looks like after Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams, and Pierre Bourdieu.” By carefully tracing Greenblatt’s differing comments on source study in the three published versions of that essay – the first (1981) refers offhandedly to Muir’s identification of a source, the second (1985) adds the remark that source study is, “as we all know,” the “elephant’s graveyard of literary history,” and the third, in Shakespearean Negotiations (1989), mentions neither Muir nor elephants – Bruster suggests that New Historicism attempts to hide its own origins as a revision or extension of source study. When ideology critique becomes central to the critical enterprise, Bruster implies, the critic feels compelled to cut his ties to traditional methods like source study. On one level what occurs is simply a shift in terminology – Bruster archly cites an “old historicist” study by T. W. Baldwin (1965) and suggests that replacing “background” with “milieu” might make it a “typical new historicist essay” – but more charitably Greenblatt, following Foucault, Jameson, and others, has shifted critical focus away from authors and texts toward the work’s impact on its readers and audience.12 By summarizing these three strains of source study, I do not mean to overemphasize a critical meta-narrative that progresses from author to text to reader, nor to suggest that our emerging post-New Historicist methodologies (whatever they turn out to be) will solve perennial problems about the relationships between sources and texts. I do suggest, however, that greater awareness of the trade-offs made by focusing on authorial practices, textual variations, or ideological effects can enrich our critical practice. Returning to All’s Well, my reading of novella and romance as competing sources asks questions about ideology and social impact that are similar to those of the Jameson/Greenblatt/Foucault school, but I shall modify this method by drawing on Greene’s sense of the historical dilemma of the Renaissance poet and Schaar’s vertical contextual lines running through a given text. My aim is not to reconstitute Shakespeare as an “universal genius” (a task which hardly needs doing), nor to insist on nascent political radicalism in what was, presumably, designed to be a popular play. Rather, by reading All’s Well as comprising points of intersection between two fundamentally different narrative forms, I hope to show the potential of renewed critical attention to source material. The play’s title can be a guide for relating these two strands of story: if “all’s well, that ends well,” as the play repeatedly tells us, we should expect radical shifts between different narrative forms, but also seek a structural principle undergirding their relationship by the end.

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DOCTOR SHE AND THE IDOLATER: READING ALL’S WELL THROUGH ITS SOURCES Helena’s first line replicates the generic division that structures All’s Well. “I do affect a sorrow indeed,” she says, “but I have it too” (1.1.52). The two halves of this line divide our heroine into an outside that “affects” or acts and an inside that “has” true feelings. This announced division represents the split between the active heroine of novella and the passive heroine of classical romance. Like Hamlet, who makes a similar claim early in his play (1.2), Helena privileges the inside that “has” over the outside that “affects,” but the play as a whole (perhaps also like Hamlet) is less willing to accept this easy preference of inside over outside, private selfhood over social affect. Rather, the play resembles Helena’s opening line; it is both fractured and concerned with suturing up that fracture. The connection-throughopposition, represented syntactically by the conjunction “but,” suggests that these two incompatible ways of being, Helena’s roles as Doctor She and the Idolater, begin in contact and competition with each other. Despite having only one source listed by Tobin, All’s Well highlights the dual inheritance of the novella and classical romance from the heroine’s first line. The descriptions of Helena I use for this section’s subtitle represent two different ways of understanding the play’s plot. Under the “Doctor She” rubric, the play tells the story of a witty heroine of moderate birth who manages, after some difficulty, to marry a Count. Its immediate source is Painter, but Painter adapts the ninth story of the third day of The Decameron, during which “the discussion turns upon people who by dint of their own efforts have achieved an object they greatly desired, or recovered a thing previously lost.”13 This version of Helena’s story values her active, conniving efforts, her deceptive rhetorical abilities, and her practical skills as a doctor. The socially active heroine “affects” her sorrow about Bertram’s loss and eventually recovers him; she does not merely suffer in silence. Lafew names her “Doctor She” (2.1.79) when she arrives in Paris to cure the King, and he lauds her power: “I have seen a medicine / That’s able to breathe life into a stone, / Quicken a rock . . . [/] . . . whose simple touch / Is powerful to araise King Pippen” (2.1.71–5). Her medical and magical powers work by manipulating human sexuality, which underlies Helena’s social force in her bawdy exchange with Parolles about losing her virginity to her liking, in explicit puns about the sick King’s “rising up” and becoming “lustique” (2.3.40) when visited by his beautiful young doctor, and of course in the bed trick itself. This story locates itself metaphorically and literally on earth, not heaven, and in a social rather than solitary setting. The “Idolater” narrative thread, by contrast, emphasizes Helena’s passivity rather than her activity. Its heroine presents herself through

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despairing monologues, especially soliloquies and asides, more than engaged banter. (Helena’s numerous soliloquies, especially in Act 1, provide another link to Hamlet). In this story, Helena’s marriage is less the achievement of wit or sexual agency than a Providential reward for patience and suffering. Her ideal linguistic model is not persuasive rhetoric but prayer; her story’s symbolic location is heaven, not earth; and the plot emphasizes chastity over desire. This narrative’s literary heritage draws broadly on classical (“Greek”) romance, saints’ lives, medieval hagiographies, sermons, and conduct literature, but the most specific reference is to the story of Cupid and Psyche, from Apuleius’s The Golden Asse, a second-century Latin romance translated by William Aldington in 1566. Apuleius tells the story of the mortal woman Psyche’s love for the god Cupid, who marries her but hides his face when he comes to her bed so that she will not be dazzled by his immortal beauty. This story inverts Helena’s bed trick, in that the husband rather than the wife hides himself, but its heroine is also impregnated by “her unknowne husband” and the pair’s public marriage gets celebrated in the closing scene.14 Psyche’s union with the god of love provides an example of passivity rewarded, the romance plotline that would become increasingly central for Shakespeare in the final decade of his career. Each of these narrative models posed dangers for early modern English writers. The novella was problematic because of its frank treatment of sexuality and irreverent attitude toward authority.15 Authority figures like Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, condemned English translations of Italian novelle as “enchantments of Circe” that corrupted innocent English readers (and theatregoers). Ascham further emphasized that these stories were problematic not only because of their erotic content but because they “subuert trewe Religion.”16 Already in the 1560s when Painter produced his three volumes of English novelle, he took pains to distance himself from Boccaccio in particular as a figure for Italianate vice. In his “To the Reader” epistle, Painter admits that some of Boccaccio’s stories are “worthy to be condempned to perpetual prison.” His collection, however, has carefully “culled out” “tenne in number.” He emphasizes that these ten stories are the best of the lot: “but of them such haue I redemed to the libertie of our vulgar may be best liked, and better suffered.” (He further notes that of Boccaccio’s hundred, “the sixt part” [i.e., 16 or 17 stories] “may full well be permitted.”) The tale itself bears out Painter’s justification by accenting moments in which the heroine Giletta submits to God’s will: she tells the King that she does “not minister Physicke by profession, but by the aide and helpe of God,” and the narrator emphasizes that she conceives a child by Beltramo after one night because “God so disposed the matter that the Countesse was begotten with child.”17 These appeals deflect possible charges of witchcraft

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(if she had cured the King without divine aid) or illicit sexual powers. These careful deflections of Giletta’s agency, while present in Boccaccio’s original, assume a defensive function in Painter’s translation: alongside his attack on Boccaccio in his prefatory letter, they emphasize that this English writer will not adapt the licentiousness of the Italian novella. Painter’s combative attitude toward his source provides a model for Shakespeare’s own practice. The source-trail grows more complex when we recall that Boccaccio drew on classical romance among his numerous sources, including Apuleius; his scandalous reputation in early modern England, however, clearly sets him in opposition to romance and its virtuous heroines.18 The Apuleian material also posed risks for early modern English writers. While J. J. M. Tobin has called The Golden Asse “Shakespeare’s favorite novel” and documented its wide currency in the drama of the period, its Elizabethan translator William Aldington felt the need to defend it on moral terms, writing “that although the matter therein seeme very light and merry, yet the effect thereof tendeth to a good and vertuous moral.” Aldington’s “To the Reader” epistle extends his defense through an elaborate allegorical reading that invokes the parallels of Ulysses and Circe and Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. He further suggests that The Golden Asse shows its readers that “we [can] never bee restored to the right figure of our selves, except we taste and eat the sweet Rose of reason and virtue, which the rather by mediation of praier we may assuredly attaine.” This religious interpretation transforms a pagan romance into a doctrinaire Elizabethan text, but that Aldington should have felt such a defense necessary highlights the risks of his material. The Psyche and Cupid inset tale in particular verges on sensual idolatry; when Psyche says to Cupid, “little doe I regard the night and darknesse thereof, for you are my only light,” Aldington must have hoped that his readers would take the language figuratively, because otherwise religious authorities would have disapproved.19 I do not want to over-emphasize the danger Shakespeare faced in using these two sources; both were well-known and the defensive comments of Painter and Aldington were common sentiments by the turn of the seventeenth century when Shakespeare wrote All’s Well. Both tales also share a political conservatism and reverence for power that would have been amenable to the courts of Elizabeth and James. This political quietism, however, is notably muted in Shakespeare’s play. Painter’s Giletta, unlike Shakespeare’s Helena, distinguishes herself as a businesswoman by running Beltramo’s estate after he abandons the marriage. In the source, the wife’s worth can be measured through the “great diligence and care” with which she “disposed his thinges in order againe.”20 In The Golden Asse, Jupiter himself approves Psyche’s idolatrous love for Cupid; the king of the gods seals the marriage by making Psyche a goddess: “And then he tooke a pot of immortality, and said, Hold Psyches, and drinke, to the end thou maist

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be immortall, and that Cupid may be thine everlasting husband.”21 Compared to this divine transformation, the last-minute assurance of Shakespeare’s King that he will make a good marriage for Diana (5.3.324–7) and his re-appearance as “a beggar” in the epilogue suggest profound limits to royal power. How does All’s Well negotiate these two sources and two narrative models? In answering this question it is important to remember that the novella and romance are not just rhetorical alternatives but competitive opposites with very different ideological meanings in Shakespeare’s England. The morally doctrinaire plot of classical romance accents the dilemma of a woman in distress, as Helena’s first soliloquy reveals: “’Twere all one / That I should love a bright particular star / and think to wed it” (1.1.84–6). For early modern moralists, this passive position was not just that of a low-born lover, but the basic condition of all mortals, especially when contemplating God or their King. What Helena calls her “idolatrous fancy” (1.1.96) in loving Bertram – like Psyche’s in loving Cupid – carries her dangerously above her station. Nonetheless, she passively persists in this transgression, “Religious in mine error” (1.3.200). Idolatry and religious error were dangerous topics in Tudor-Stuart England, but Helena’s religion of love places her in Psyche’s position, waiting for divine aid to redeem an impossible desire. In this version of the story, she is dutiful daughter, loyal subject, and eventually rewarded wife. The novella-plot, by contrast, hinges on moral reversals and clever people getting their way by resisting or outwitting authority. Studies of Boccaccio and the novella have suggested that the genre’s two basic plots are “punishment avoided” and “conversion,” and that the stories combine compact linear plotting with the inversion of ethical norms.22 These reversals make lively theatre. The banter about virginity between Helena and Parolles transforms the heroine from a static revealer of her inner world through asides and soliloquies into a dynamic stage presence. Thus her later soliloquy recasts passive acceptance as a spur to activity: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.212–3). This localizing of theatrical agency in herself anticipates her later assertion that “I am the cause” (3.2.115) of Bertram’s unhappiness after their marriage. It also later enables her to patch things up with the bed trick: “All’s well, that ends well; still the fine’s the crown. / Whate’er the course, the end is the renown” (4.4.35–6). Like Painter’s heroine, who proclaims near the end of her story that “I haue the thing that I desire,” Helena knows what she wants and knows how to get it.23 The most distinctive thing about Shakespeare’s handling of these competitive narrative models is how thoroughly they intermingle. They function as mutual antidotes: when the novella-story seems too racy or disorderly, the moral solidity of romance rescues it, but when a purely

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passive heroine promises theatrical dullness, witty tricks return to the play (through Parolles or Lavatch as well as Helena). To chose one example, when Helena cures the King, the sexualized banter might seem threatening to royal authority, especially if the play was performed before James I. As Doctor She announces her arrival and later her success, however, she describes herself not as skilled medical practitioner but as patient supplicant: “Of Heaven, not me, make an experiment” (2.1.154), and later “Heaven hath through me restored the King to health” (2.3.63). By displacing agency from herself as witty heroine to Heaven as all-controlling power, Helena avoids calling too much attention to her own power. In a sense, her rhetoric mimics the trick she will later play on Bertram: she hides her face before she can re-appear with an accomplished medical (and sexual) miracle. I do not claim these two models are the only ways to think about Helena, or about the narrative structure of the play as a whole. I do think that considering the tension the passive idolater and the active Doctor provides a reasonably exact and historically rich vocabulary to discuss the “problem” of the play. Ultimately, of course, actors, directors, and readers must make choices. Do we want to see Helena as a self-made woman, like Boccaccio’s or Painter’s heroine, who exposes the foolishness of Bertram’s obsession with social hierarchy? Or would we prefer to think of her as Psyche, a young woman blessed by a love that ennobles her and finally enables her to produce something of lasting value? (Cupid and Psyche’s child is named “Pleasure.”) Helena’s amalgamation of these modes on some level represents the play’s transitional position between Shakespeare’s early comedies and late romances. But speculation about these two sources can also inform critical and theatrical practice, if Helena’s bifurcated rhetorical stances, her ability to pray and persuade, to engage in bawdy dialogue and solitary soliloquy, allow her to voice a social critique that is not available to either the novella or the romance in isolation. When Helena remarks about Bertram’s lovemaking, “O, strange men / That can such sweet use make of what they hate” (4.4.21–2), she deflates both the erotic playfulness of the novella (in which sex is always and only fun) and romance’s insistence on chastity (in which sexuality itself – seeing Cupid naked – is a crime for which Psyche must be punished). Helena, unlike Giletta or Psyche, plays both games at once, and she recognizes that men are (to quote another comedy) “giddy things” who have limited reasons for what they do. Another way to make this point is to claim that Helena knows exactly what she is doing in the uncomfortable last scene: she is refusing to be limited to the role of either witty conqueror or rescued heroine. Instead she wins a game that she has already exposed and is left with something like a formalized shell of marriage, one that “affects” outwardly but keeps hidden the inwardness of idolatrous love. (Helena’s intimacy with the audience, so prominent in her two soliloquies in 1.1, has long disappeared.)

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She knows what Bertram is worth, both his strangeness and his “sweet use.” Perhaps that is why her final lines are not to her husband, but her mother-in-law?

SOURCES AND FORMS

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Reconsidering what source studies can do for All’s Well leads naturally to considering how this reading speaks to understandings of Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist. In the almost-chronological shift from novella plays about wit and human agency (the Henriad, Much Ado, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, even Othello) to romance plays about suffering and redemption (the late romances, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, even Macbeth), All’s Well sits uncomfortably at the crossroads. The play’s deliberate and sustained juxtaposition of two opposed sources provides a vocabulary to extend traditional understandings of Shakespeare as a writer who thrived on contradiction and what Keats (following Hazlitt) called “negative capability.” But relating Shakespeare’s eclecticism to the transitional position of All’s Well in his career is not the only benefit of a return to source studies. This method also allows us to hold the mirror up to our own critical paradigms. When Bruster documents Greenblatt’s erasure of his use of traditional source study, he suggests that the New Historicist project defines itself in part through a willful blindness about its own dependence on prior critical texts. This blindness, along with the wide availability of the results of traditional source study, enables modern critics to use the results of source study while denigrating the practice. To perform source study on New Historicism, then, feels oddly like pulling away the curtain to find that the “new” methodology is, to a large extent, source study from a modern perspective.24 If this claim makes “new” historicism seem “old,” perhaps the reassertion of continuity in criticism as in literature is one of the services source study can perform. Reclaiming source study, however, involves more than simply asserting (or even demonstrating) that many types of modern criticism, theoretical and historicist, remain indebted to its methods. As Baxandall and Miola have suggested, the vocabulary of “source” and “influence” acts as a rhetorical straight-jacket that inhibits the critical imagination. I close by suggesting that while the term “source” has become firmly entrenched in our discourse, it might be valuable to consider supplementing the specifically verbal meaning of “source” with the structural claims of “form.” Admitting that the factors that shape authorial practices, textual productions, and audience reactions are as often literary forms (or genres) as exact combinations of words can lead to an understanding of sources and influence that moves easily between “source-hunting” per se and wider generic linkages. Returning briefly to Helena’s “I am the cause” suggests the limits of purely verbal

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source-hunting. There seems no way to determine if Shakespeare is borrowing from Virgil or Ovid, and of course Ovid himself presumably alludes to Virgil, but treating Ovid and Virgil as generic markers makes the ambiguity of the reference itself meaningful. Treating literary forms as creating meaning for audiences and solving problems for authors enables critics to draw connections between compositional practices and ideological results. Thus a crucial term for source studies as it moves forward may be genre, not simply in the taxonomic senses of Frye or Fowler, but in the ideological sense of Jameson and other recent studies. Verbal echoes and generic forms can and should be distinguished from each other, but not absolutely: literary forms are made up of words, and a writer’s verbal choices always have formal ends in mind. Exploring All’s Well as the juxtaposition of the Doctor She novella and the Idolater romance begins by recognizing documented verbal and thematic parallels, but it also provides a vocabulary to talk about the play as a whole and its place in Shakespeare’s career. In this case, the major sources are competing literary forms, and source study enables the complex generic shape of the play to be accurately delineated. The meanings revealed by identifying these formal alternatives sufficiently reward the labors, current and past, of hunting sources in the elephant’s graveyard.

NOTES 1

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Douglas Bruster notes the omission of a “Sources” section from Greenblatt’s Norton Shakespeare (1997) and from some Arden 3 editions as evidence of the “low status” of source study at the end of the twentieth century. Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (NY: Palgrave, 2003), 173–5. On Greenblatt’s position, see Bruster, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 29. On the novella versus romance, see Steve Mentz, “Escaping Italy: From Novella to Romance in Gascoigne and Lyly,” Studies in Philology 101 (2004), 253–71. Peter Womack, “Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 22 (1999), 168–87. See Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, eds., Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 18. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Frank Justus Miller, trans. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 38. Virgil, Aeneid, H. Rushton Fairclough, trans., G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 262; Claire MacEachern, “Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare’s Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1998), 272. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 58; Robert Miola, “Othello Furens,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), 49. Gian Biago Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, Charles Segal, ed. and trans. (Ithaca: Cornell

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All’s Well, That Ends Well University Press, 1986), 141. See also Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 17–46. Robert Miola, “Othello Furens” and Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 50; G. W. Pigman III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 3–4; Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 20, 30. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, eds. Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Richard Fleming and Michael Payne, eds., Criticism, History, and Intertextuality (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1988); Linda Hutcheon, “Literary Borrowing . . . and Stealing: Plagiarism, Sources, Influences, and Intertexts,” English Studies in Canada, 12 (1986), 229–39. Claes Schaar, The Full-Voic’d Quire Below: Vertical Context Systems in Paradise Lost (Arlove: C. W. K. Gleep, 1982), 22, 18, 16–17. See Barbara Mowat, “Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter’s Tale 4.3,” Shakespeare Studies, 22 (1994), 58–77. While Mowat terms Schaar’s method “a variant of familiar intertextual models from Bakhtin through Kristeva to Riffaterre” (58), I suggest that he has deep affinities with editorial as well as theoretical practices. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 141; Bruster, Quoting Shakespeare, 31, 29–36, 219n, 30–1. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliams (NY: Penguin, 1995), 189. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, William Aldington, trans., Charles Whibley, ed., (NY: AMS Press, 1967), 104. See Mentz, “Escaping Italy,” 154–56. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), II, 2–3. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, ed. Joseph Jacobs, (London: David Nutt, 1890), 1:11, 172,177. Corradina Caporello-Szykman, The Boccaccian Novella: The Creation and Waning of a Genre (NY: Peter Lang, 1990). J. J. M. Tobin, Shakespeare’s Favorite Novel: A Study of The Golden Asse as Prime Source (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984); Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 4, 9, 109. Painter, 174. Apuleius, 129. See Tsvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Decaméron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), and Hans Robert Jauss, “Theories of Genre and Medieval Literature,” Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 92, 209n. Painter, 178. Bruster, 167–90.

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“As Sweet as Sharp” Helena and the fairy bride tradition REGINA BUCCOLA

Critical debate has long surrounded the question of the precise genre of Shakespeare’s enigmatically titled “comedy” All’s Well, That Ends Well. Building on the work of Edward Dowden and Frederick Boas, W. W. Lawrence joined the dispute over the genre of All’s Well in the sections devoted to it in his suggestively titled study Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies. An august group of critics and scholars have subsequently drawn connections between the plot and characters of All’s Well and those of medieval morality plays. W. L. Godshalk helpfully summarizes their various positions in an essay which suggests that the play might be an anti-morality, since by act five “Deceptive means have led to the union of two deceivers.” Contemporaneously with Godshalk, J. M. Silverman maintained that the play failed to satisfy because it contained two different strains of nonsymbiotic comedy (“a deliberately naïve and ‘miraculous’ form of comedy” and “one more devious and filled with intrigue”), battling each other for control until the bitter end. Suggesting that the play has affinities with a sixteenth-century offshoot of the morality genre, Paula Neuss connects All’s Well (along with Measure for Measure) to proverb plays, such as William Wager’s Enough is as Good as a Feast (circa 1571). Robert S. Miola traces Shakespeare’s project to New Comedy, particularly his early habits of drawing upon Plautus and Terence, as in The Comedy of Errors’ reliance on Plautus’s Menaechmi. However, Miola does not pursue the local, contemporary significance of his own observation that “All’s Well bears interesting similarities to Shakespeare’s Merry Wives, his earlier exploration of the miles gloriosus. Both plays blend Roman comedy and folk tale.” Miola notes that in both plays, “the women control the male libido, transforming their attempts at illicit sex into a ratification of existing marriages.”1 These transformations are linked to popular beliefs about fairies, and the role that

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they were believed to play in governing early modern women’s sexuality and fertility. More will be made of such narrative relationships anon. Tracing the play’s roots to a different, continental source, Louise George Clubbe links the nymphs and naiads of sixteenth-century Italian comedy to Shakespeare’s exploration of similar material in green world comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Clubbe’s estimation, Shakespeare makes innovative use of “the principles of nova comedia, not by borrowing plots from source, but by contaminatio of structures, recombining in novel ways theatergrams that had become part of a large common repertory.”2 In Italy, oral tales provided the inspiration for many of the supernatural characters given responsibility for resolving complex new comedic plots. Similar tales abounded in early modern England, where fairies were made the guardians of both true love and unrequited love, and were alternately construed to be a source of lifelong blessing, or menace. Therefore, Shakespeare had numerous plot strands – both popular/oral English narratives, and an Italian folkloric tradition refracted through classical/literary plots – to draw upon in weaving together his unique variations on these long-familiar stories, characters and themes. Thus, the Italian tradition, itself derived from oral narrative, refracts backward through Shakespeare’s appropriation of it, to return to its roots in oral culture. Many elements of the plot which have led critics from the eighteenth century on to regard All’s Well as a comedy problematic on the level of genre – Helena’s violation of class and gender protocols governing marriage; her mystical cure of the ailing King of France and attendant claim on one in his charge as a spouse; the bed trick subterfuge required to reclaim her resistant, runaway husband; and the riddling, ring-swapping conclusion with its abrupt return of a Helena believed by all to be dead – would have been recognizable to early modern audiences as components of fairy narratives related to human/fairy interactions. Like All’s Well, these popular tales often privilege the central female character(s), which makes sense if one credits the dismissive attributions of early modern writers like Reginald Scot and Samuel Harsenet of such tales to women. Harsenet, for example, attributes beliefs in all manner of spirits, including fairies, to “children, fooles, women, cowards, sick, or blacke, melancholicke, discomposed wits.” In a female imaginative landscape of the sort that fairyland is frequently alleged to be, why wouldn’t women be placed in control of situations that they did not necessarily have power over in real life? Perhaps “Little Helen” is an interloper from those grandam’s tales told by a country fire – if Harsenet and Scot are to be believed – for the benefit of women.3 Katharine Briggs links folklore, history and literary study together as inexact sciences on the grounds that “though all three may make use of technical aids, [they are] still inexact because there can be no controlled experiments.”4 When Harsenet and Scot were writing derisively about the

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oral tradition of fairy belief, there was no one transcribing such tales for posterity, with neat documentation of the region in which they heard the tale and the gender and age of the taleteller. Likewise, playwrights such as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson who invoked such popular beliefs in their plays did not provide supporting apparatus indicating where they had heard such lore or what they thought about it. Tracing the curious aspects of All’s Well to the equally curious body of popular lore about fairies is, therefore, a tricky bit of business. Dismissing the idea that the complex plot and characterization of the “comedy” All’s Well ought to pose any sort of problem for the consistency of Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre, Madeleine Doran notes that “Helena’s problem of getting the man . . . is a fairy-tale problem, with certain conditions understood or given that must be fulfilled: a difficult task to be accomplished and a promised reward; the reward at first denied, making necessary the accomplishment of a still more difficult task before the reward is secured; the reward itself quite naturally a husband.”5 Before fairy tales developed these characteristics in standardized print narratives of the nineteenth century, popular, oral lore about fairies also included many of these elements. However, many of the stories that we now identify as “fairy tales” would actually have fallen under the rubric of romance narratives in early modern England. Since one of the central beliefs about fairies was the danger inherent in openly naming them, or directly interacting with them, they are often only gestured to in popular lore. Shakespeare’s audience understood the “code” that identified characters, subtly, as having some relationship to “the good people,” a placatory nickname for fairies seemingly intended to ward off the evil of which they were considered capable. Helena, therefore, might have cut a rather different character to early modern theatergoers than, say, a fairy tale counterpart such as “Cinderella.” An early modern audience might, in fact, have perceived her as at once highly desirable and potentially dangerous. Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature provides a chain of references under the headings “Marvels” and “Tests” that connect the dots between Shakespeare’s Italian source, Boccacio’s Decameron, and the fairy lore that Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have been familiar with from popular stories.6 Elements of these traditions render both Bertram and Helena characters with fairy attributes. These fairy lore attributes would have been consistent with tendencies within the play itself and certainly in our own era to revile Bertram and valorize Helena. Thus, an understanding of the folkloric traditions that inform the plot of All’s Well does less to clarify why the play’s plot should be considered to end well than it does to illustrate the widespread acceptance of such a troubling story line, both in the world of Shakespeare’s source story, and in early modern English popular lore. Stories involving fairies by no means consistently end “happily

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ever after.” Rather than resolving All’s Well’s status as a “problem play”, bringing the complex ambiguities of fairy lore to bear on the play’s equally complex plot will likely only problematize it for you further. When one traces the trail of plot elements from All’s Well through Thompson’s Motif Index, one finds many connections between Shakespeare’s play and popular lore from rural communities such as Shakespeare’s hometown, Stratford. While Thompson traces many of these traditions locally to Ireland, Celtic lore had infused English literature since the preChristian era, and Queen Elizabeth’s aggressive colonization campaign only augmented this infusion. Moreover, as Jennifer Schacker argues in National Dreams, England did not systematically use its popular lore to assert national identity; therefore, early collection of popular narratives often occurs in collections and studies that are potentially deceptive in their regional specificity.7 So, while I will take care to note the ostensible origin of the tales discussed here, we need to bear in mind that the narratives may well have had a much wider currency in the proto-United Kingdom than the local origins identified by early antiquarians might suggest. In a tradition Thompson identifies as specifically Irish, fairies are associated with healing powers and, indeed, linked to the gods in their power to heal. This is particularly interesting with respect to All’s Well when linked to another Irish tradition, in which a fairy agrees to aid a mortal if he will promise to marry her.8 While the aid that Helena offers in exchange for acquiring Bertram as her spouse is not aimed directly at assisting him, it is an inescapable fact that she strikes a clear cure-for-a-husband deal with the man who is in the best position to grant such a request, the King of France, Bertram’s guardian. Once Bertram chooses war over marriage to her, Helena reads his riddling letter vowing self-exile until he has contrived to remove his “clog” (II.5.53), and muses: “Poor lord, is’t I / That chase thee from thy country and expose / Those tender limbs of thine to the event / Of the none-sparing war?” (III.ii.102–105). Helena’s anxious prognostications of Bertram’s death in battle and her efforts to prevent it also have their counterpart in fairy lore. The Motif-Index lists instances in Irish tradition of fairy mistresses who possess the ability to prophesy the fate of their mortal lovers in battle, and who rescue heroes in dire straits on the battlefield.9 Then there is the widely known popular tale about Selena Moor, in which a farmer encounters a fairy feast in the middle of the night on the moor and is warned from eating or drinking at the fairy revel by his former lover, long thought dead. Had he taken sustenance from the fairies, he would have been trapped like her forever in servitude to them. Ironically, in most versions of this story she tells her love that she was originally taken by the fairies while wandering the fields, looking for him. Despite her longing for him, she would rather lose him than allow him to meet the same fate, and be lost to the fairies (even if that would place

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him in her company).10 Helena is similarly self-abnegating in her dealings with Bertram. Fearing Bertram’s death in battle, Helena feigns her own. Though she tactfully attributes his return to Roussillon to “The army breaking,” the announcement of this news to Diana and the Widow occurs hard upon her other big news: “You must know / I am supposèd dead” (4.4.10–1). Helena’s disappearance from her community followed by rumored death has numerous links to fairy lore. Indeed, one of the consistent elements of tales of mortal/fairy interaction is the presumed death of the person passing time with the fairies. In addition to the tale of “The Fairy Dwelling on Selena Moor,” recounted above, tales such as “The Laird of Balmachie’s Wife” involve women who sink into states taken for death that actually prove to be the result of fairy tricks. The Lord of Balmachie discovers that his wife is actually a fairy abductee, replaced in her sick bed by a “stock” that returns to fairyland when tossed onto a roaring fire. In their turn, fairies are associated with the dead, either as the souls of the dead themselves, or as the overseers of a spiritual half-way house between heaven and hell that bears no small resemblance to the Catholic purgatory.11 The parallel plot that Shakespeare develops in All’s Well in which Bertram establishes a set of circumstances that Helena must meet in order to posses him, and Helena, in turn, establishes conditions for the bed trick scene Bertram will play with her (supposed by Bertram to be Diana) also has its counterpart in fairy lore (Figure 3.1). Fairies (as well as witches) are notorious in early modern lore for mandating special circumstances under which their mortal lovers can interact with them. Consider, for example, the taboos imposed on Lanval in Marie de France’s lai of the same title: Lanval is enjoined to tell no one of his fairy mistress, or pay the price of losing her forever. Both Bertram and Helena build equivalent challenges and conditions into their union, he by requiring his enforced spouse to acquire his family ring and a child of his body after he has fled from her presence, and she by meeting his demands with a bed trick executed in total darkness and silence, marked by an exchange of rings. In a piece of deception totally void of magic or mysticism, Helena’s paramour proxy, Diana, gets Bertram’s ring on Helena’s behalf, but Helena herself is gotten with child. Once more to Ireland, where fairy myth includes a tale of a mortal man who gives his fairy lover a ring after a night spent with her in fairyland.12 A run of bad luck upon leaving one’s fairy mistress is also traditional.13 We should remember here, again, Lanval: the hapless knight’s life is worthy of a country song after he foolishly boasts to Guinevere about his fairy mistress, thereby losing her. With the exception of the honor that he earns in the wars, Bertram’s luck runs steadily downhill from the moment that he leaves Helena. Although he thinks that he succeeds in bedding his Italian love-object, Diana, he actually has slept with his loathed wife instead,

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Figure 3.1 The “bed trick” (4.2, 4), Performing Arts Department, Washington University 2004, William Whitaker (director). Laura Flanigan (Helena), Brian Golden (Bertram), Judith Lesser (Diana). Washington University Photographic Services.

inadvertently binding himself irrevocably to her. He discovers that his soldier companion, Parolles, is a liar and a fraud. He then returns, ostensibly in military triumph, to the French court, only to be publicly castigated, humiliated, and returned decisively to the clutches of Helena. Like their human counterparts, female fairies scorned, rejected or betrayed by their mortal lovers are popularly believed to avenge their wrongs.14 Helena’s vengeance takes a particularly table-turning form, as Bertram’s dark deeds are publicly exposed to the court in a manner that perfectly replicates his earlier public repudiation of her as beneath him in the marriage market. Thus far, I have outlined specific relationships between All’s Well and popular beliefs about fairies. While it is certainly plausible that members of Shakespeare’s audience would have recognized the fairy valence of any number of these particular details of the plot, it is more likely that they would have perceived the story more holistically. When all of these fairy narrative elements are combined, as they are in All’s Well, they take on a marked resemblance to the Fairy Bride tradition that has been traced to Wales, but which is common throughout the folklore of the Middle Ages. So, for example, Edwin Sidney Hartland recounts in English Fairy and Folk Tales the saga of “Wild Edric,” who lost a fairy wife by violating

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her taboo: that he never upbraid her with her supernatural heritage or her sisters. Apparently, even fairies expected trouble with the in-laws.15 Fairy brides were believed to be the fairy spouses of mortal men, supernatural women who took control of marital arrangements including dowry and governed day-to-day spousal interactions. An existing body of popular tradition that alternately claimed that women who mysteriously disappeared for varying lengths of time from their homes had been abducted by the fairies to provide them with wives or paramours also potentially offered a woman who left her home for quite other reasons a socially acceptable explanation for her absence. In either case, the tradition imagines the female spouse with a degree of power in her human home uncharacteristic of medieval and early modern marital practice. The woman either ruled the roost (as a fairy bride of a mortal man) or could engage in adultery (as the mortal “abductee” of a fairy partner).16 The Fairy Bride tradition, with its emphasis on the supposed death of the wife, has a close relationship to the plot and central characters of All’s Well. While much of the Fairy Bride lore that has been documented to date is of Welsh origin, the central elements in the Fairy Bride tales as Juliette Wood and Katharine Briggs recount them are consistent across geographical and chronological cultural boundaries. As Wood notes, “About three dozen variants of the tale dating from the tenth to the twentieth century are known, and the very fact that the tale has attained such a curious, almost icon-like status, tells us much about perceptions of Welsh tradition in and outside Wales.”17 It also tells us much about the marital wants, needs and desires of women who have spent centuries relating such tales, longing, perhaps, for the autonomy and intolerance of ill treatment with which they imaginatively endow their fairy counterparts. The three central traditions that contain plot details relevant to All’s Well are the Fairy Bride tradition proper, a legend which Wood identifies as “The Sons of the Dead Woman,” and an intriguing tradition (about which frustratingly little is known) listed in the Motif Index as “The Calumniated Wife.” In the Fairy Bride tradition, a mortal man acquires a fairy bride by using deception to learn a secret about her. This secret is quite often her name, as fairies assiduously hide their identities from humans since the utterance of their name activates a sort of charm, giving the human who speaks it power over them.18 There is a clear parallel to this secrecy in All’s Well. Significantly, Helena does not inform Bertram or Parolles that she has followed them to the King’s court in France. Indeed, Parolles is quite surprised when he recognizes her as the King’s savior; he exclaims, “Mort du vinaigre, is not this Helen?” to which a seemingly equally surprised Lafew replies, “Fore God, I think so” (2.3.43–4). While they could be merely surprised to find her in the French court since they left her in Roussillon, the furtive concealment of her identity is intriguing,

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considering that her guardian, the Countess, has granted her leave to go. This detail is not necessary within the context of the play’s narrative, but it does heighten the mystical aura surrounding Helena, and her mysterious cure of the King. Obviously, of course, her identity is hidden again from Bertram during the execution of the bed trick, and her status as a living woman is also concealed from the entire French court in the play’s final scenes, when tales of her death are circulated to lure Bertram back to the home he fled to escape her. Furtiveness is a fairy calling card, and Helena plays it repeatedly over the course of the narrative. The fairy bride often brings an impressive dowry with her, such as fairy cattle that yield tremendous amounts of milk but eat very little, and often presents her spouse with a treasure which he is supposed to keep at all costs. In Helena’s case, the impressive dowry is acquired by virtue of her healing arts, a skill that, in turn, has fairy associations. Fairy brides often endowed their children with supernatural healing abilities – a gift that Helena acquires from her all-too-mortal father. Helena claims divine warrant for the healing she will practice on the King: “Of heaven, not me, make an experiment” (2.1.154). However, the play leaves entirely vague the precise nature of the cure that Helena performs, or of its potential supernatural (or spiritual) origins. It is her judicious deployment of this precious skill that shifts her from the position of orphan, ward to the Countess, and household servant to Bertram’s family to the power position of healer of the King, and recipient of an impressive new identity as a wealthy, titled woman by virtue of the dowry the King bestows upon her as well as the titled husband he permits her to select. As Wood notes, in the mortal/fairy union, “wealth and prosperity are dependent on the wife.”19 Of course, in the early modern era when increasing numbers of young men with titles but no money to show for them went looking for wives among the emerging middle class (like Fenton in Merry Wives – another play, not coincidentally, with fairy elements to it), situations in which the marital wealth hinged on the wife were not entirely surprising. In a variant in the Fairy Bride myth explaining how the mortal husband initially gains power over his supernatural wife, he might gain “possession of some object such as an item of clothing” which he can use to secure her in the mortal realm.20 In the case of Shakespeare’s play, the two rings mentioned above in conjunction with the bed trick figure prominently in the course of the action, and of Helena’s quest to claim and retain her spouse: the ring which Bertram dares her to acquire upon rejecting her claim on him, and the ring which Helena slips to him when he unwittingly beds her, that ultimately stands as surety for her success in satisfying his riddling demands on her. Thus both characters use personal tokens to attempt to control the nature of their interaction – Bertram to deflect Helena, she to draw in Bertram.

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Briggs recounts a tale that ties the details of Shakespeare’s plot even more directly to fairy lore. A young maid is reputedly abducted by fairies and miraculously restored to her family a year later. Having assumed their child to be dead, just as everyone assumes Helena to be, the family is initially reluctant to accept her as their daughter upon her return, “but at length a ring on her finger and a mole on her neck convinced both mother and father that this was indeed their daughter.” Helena’s ring on Bertram’s finger is initially taken to prove not that she lives, but that she is dead. Her own appearance before the assembled court, in possession of Bertram’s ring and carrying the required child, assures everyone not only that she lives, but that she has finally secured Bertram as her husband. As Thompson notes, “Tales of recognition are really tests of identity; riddles and the like, tests of cleverness; and tasks and quests, tests of prowess.”21 Helena proves herself a worthy possessor of the identity of Bertram’s wife because of the cleverness and nerve she demonstrates in meeting his outrageous demands upon her once he has been given to her in marriage. Marriage in early modern England may not have been considered sacramental by Protestant theologians, but it was still perceived to be a divinely-ordained and ordered institution. Martin Ingram notes that “the church enacted, in the canons of 1597 and 1604, more stringent regulations to govern the issue of licenses and the conduct of weddings.” However, as B. J. and Mary Sokol note, civil law did not necessarily cohere with ecclesiastical law, and common practice in many instances kept step with neither. Like many actions of mortal and fairy heroines in popular lore of the era, Helena’s pursuit and capture of Bertram constitutes a strike against both gender norms and religious practices with the force of law respecting marriage, particularly when, as Carolyn Asp argues, “Renaissance handbooks on marriage speak of the ‘choice of a wife’ but never the choice of a husband.” Asp continues: One of the most interesting types of female rebels is the one who, like Helena, insists on the right to choose her own husband, to assert her own desire. This was a radical demand. A woman’s right to love and marry according to her own desires could not be admitted without upsetting an established order which regarded women as inferior beings who needed to be governed by the sex for whose pleasure and convenience they had been created.22

Shakespeare shows us this type of rebel again and again in his plays and, again and again this type of rebellion is linked to the fairy realm. The Helena of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (as well as her friend Hermia) is helped by the fairies in her headstrong pursuit of the man of her choice. The assertive Anne Page uses fairy subterfuge to elope with her choice of

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mate. Though we meet Imogen after she has boldly married Posthumus against her father’s will, she is repeatedly linked to fairies and the fairy realm throughout the course of her courageous quest for her banished husband. The fairy lore that is invoked with varying degrees of specificity in these three plays underpins the plot structure of All’s Well, too.23 In this case, though, as Snyder puts it, Helena “acts as her own Oberon to bring about her own order.” While Oberon can be seen to function as an externalization of Hermia’s and Helena’s own agency, in All’s Well this fairy role has been collapsed into Helena’s character alone, rendering her a solo figure of subversion. Robert S. Miola characterizes Helena as “Part untitled virgo, part wondrous woman, part simple serving maid, part religious sermonizer, (2.1.133ff.), part incantatory folk-tale sorceress.”24 Though Helena’s complex character stymies many critics, the folk tales that Miola invokes in this summary of her multi-faceted persona point the way to at least one way of resolving her seeming contradictions. The full extent of Helena’s power is publicly revealed in the play’s long and intense final scene. Initially, it is Diana who takes center stage, calling upon Bertram to uphold his somewhat sick promise to marry her as soon as Helena dies. As Ann Jennalie Cook notes, since Bertram receives written word of Helena’s death before his midnight assignation with “Diana,” but after he has promised to marry her as soon as Helena dies, “he has made a de futuro contract of marriage which, when consummated, becomes wedlock, precisely as Diana claims.” Indeed, given the early modern understanding of the interrelationship between promises of marriage and sexual intercourse, Bertram in essence “screws himself” in the course of the bed trick. As Cook notes above and B. J. and Mary Sokol further explain, “sexual intercourse following a de futuro contract was taken to imply the consent forming an immediate marriage” when the sex act was undertaken with a genuineness of feeling appropriate to marriage.25 Herein lies the trickiness of the bed trick in All’s Well: Helena finds Bertram “wondrous kind” (5.3.308) when he thinks that she is Diana. The fact that he has slept with (and impregnated) his own wife and unwittingly passed his ring to her via Diana makes him a voluntary – if unwitting – upholder of his marital contract to Helena. However, if Helena were dead, the evidence that he approached his liaison with Diana with such alacrity would also bind him in marriage to her. Bertram, in effect, can’t fall back on the “dirimentary impediment” of “mistake of person”26 because that would only save him from marriage to Diana. Having sex with his own proper wife – regardless of the fact that he didn’t know it was her – merely seals the deal he made with Helena in writing, in a letter that she waves in front of him as she explains how she has met his conditions in the final scene (5.3.312–315). In addition to the duplicity for which fairies are renowned – in matters of both sexuality and childbirth, among myriad others – there are also

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numerous fairy legends that involve male intercourse with a woman of ambiguous or changeable identity. So, for instance, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath recounts the tale of a wise hag (or loathly lady) who turns into a lovely, chaste young wife when her husband gives her mastery over him, and the Legend of Melusine features a beautiful young woman who forbids her husband to see her on Saturdays; when he violates this taboo, he discovers that he has been sexually involved with a woman who is half serpent.27 Although Helena has, at times, been critically reviled for her wiliness (mostly by male critics) the characters in the play (both male and female) consistently approve of her conduct. Indeed, she is even lionized by Bertram in the play’s final act when he refers to Helena as “she whom all men praised and whom myself, / Since I have lost, have loved” (5.3.54–55). Given the ingenuity and autonomy that she exhibits over the course of the play, it is difficult to apprehend why Helena consigns herself to Bertram, who evinces none of the praiseworthy characteristics with which Helena endows him in her quasi-blazon of 1.1.74–93 over the course of the play. Helena’s choice of Bertram may seem foolish, but it is a choice that she freely makes – repeatedly. As Miola notes, “it is not, after all, essential that we like Bertram for Helena to love him.”28 We may have little admiration for her choice, but have no choice but to admire the tenacity and resolve with which she pursues and achieves her objective. The situation that Helena and Bertram face in the final act is reminiscent of early modern accounts of people abducted by fairies who returned years later to find their spouses remarried, having long since concluded that they were dead. Clearly, such stories attempt to provide a supernatural explanation for human relationships gone awry. A fairy explanation was probably easier for all parties concerned than confronting the simple facts of marital infidelity, or outright abandonment. In popular lore, when the mortal spouses of fairy brides violated the taboos governing their union, the bride would return to fairyland.29 Return from there was possible, but only if the fairy bride herself freely chose to forgive her spouse and restore her relationship to him. Though Helena’s decision to forgive her renegade spouse may not make sense – particularly for those with feminist sensibilities – it fits comfortably into the fairy bride paradigm which gave early modern women at least a limited example of marital autonomy. Escape from an abusive spouse was possible for fairy brides, and return to the union occurred only on their terms. When Bertram realizes that he has been caught, like the proverbial woodcock to his own springe, he sniffs in an infamous conditional statement, “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly / I’ll love her dearly, ever ever dearly.” However, Helena’s response provides a condition of her own, and introduces the notion of “deadly divorce” – a subject that even the truculent Bertram has avoided openly raising. She fires back, “If it appear

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not plain and prove untrue, / Deadly divorce step between me and you” (5.3.313–6). As Paul Edmondson notes, Helena is “a heroine who is driven by an overriding knowledge of what she truly desires. . . . Helen stakes the largest generic claim as both instigator and concluder in this drama.”30 Like the fairy brides whom she resembles, Helena gets the last word in the convoluted negotiation of her relationship to Bertram, and it is a menacing one, openly suggesting that her devotion might have limits after all. Since fairy narratives frequently do not overtly identify a particular character as a fairy, relying instead on characteristic traits to mark out the mystical woman, early modern audiences of both popular tales and their appropriation in other forms, such as staged dramas, were likely more accustomed to reading such markers associatively, drawing connections to popular lore that has fallen out of the repertoire of the theatergoers and literary critics of today. Shakespeare’s audience might well have found Helena’s complex character even more multi-faceted than those of our era do. Concentrating on her versatility as well as her impressive power, David McCandless provocatively describes Helena as a “shape-shifting superwoman.”31 This moniker suggests the fairy lore connection I perceive in the play, highlighting as it does Helena’s metamorphic abilities and the more than woman, more than human courage and resolve that stand behind them. Fairy beliefs straddled a moral void in early modern thought; as creatures of ambiguous moral status themselves, fairies were associated with both beneficence and malice, with unlooked-for generosity and punishments out of all compass with the infractions to which they seemingly responded. Helena speaks the language of this ambiguous world throughout the play. Rallying her small troop of the Widow and Diana near the play’s close, she promises “with the word the time will bring on summer, / When briers shall have leaves as well as thorns, / And be as sweet as sharp” (4.4.31–33). Helena’s complexity does not resolve itself easily; her motives are neither entirely angelic and selfless nor completely malevolent and self-serving. She is of the fairy tribe that can change from sorrowful servant to bold physician to furtive pilgrim to deceptive paramour to pregnant wife without being held to any of those identities or to the commendation or condemnation that might attach to them. Her strength as a heroine inheres in her inscrutability. Ironically, perhaps, in turning to fairy bride tradition for his characterization of Helena, Shakespeare developed one of his most compelling and authentically human characters.

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W. L. Godshalk, “All’s Well That Ends Well and the Morality Play,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 24 (1974), 61, 70; J. M. Silverman, “Two Types of Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1974), 25;

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Paula Neuss, “The Sixteenth-Century English ‘Proverb’ Play,” Comparative Drama, 18 (1984), 1–18; Robert S. Miola, “New Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (Spring 1993), 24, 40. Louise George Clubbe, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 11, 16–17, 19–20. Samuel Harsenet, A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures . . . (London: James Roberts, 1603), 137. See also Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London: John Rodker, 1930), 86. Parolles’s use of “Helen” here is a metrical deviation from the norm and, like Susan Snyder, I find the use of “Helena” significant. Katharine Briggs, British Folk-Tales and Legends (NY: Routledge, 2002), 4. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: University of Milwaukee Press, 1972), 251. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaevel Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), F301.4, H373, H900. Jennifer Schacker, National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 3, 68 and 165 fn. 43. See also Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (NY: Routledge, 2002), 104–110. Thompson, F274, F302.3.2.1. Thompson, F302.7, F302.9. Briggs, British Folk-Tales, 181–184. See Briggs, British Folk-Tales, 190–191; Katharine Briggs, Fairies in Tradition and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 87; Diane Purkiss, At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things (NY: New York University Press, 2000), 48. Thompson, F302.1.2. Thompson. F302.5.3. Thompson. F302.3.3 and F302.3.3.1. English Fairy and Folk Tales, ed. Edwin Sidney Hartland (London: Walter Scott, 1890), 51–54. For a summary of fairy bride legends in Britain, see Briggs, Fairies in Tradition, 146–154. Juliette Wood, “Fairy Bride Tradition in Wales,” Folklore, 103 (1992), 56. See Katharine Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs Among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors (London: Routledge, 1959) and An Encyclopedia of Fairies (NY: Pantheon, 1976), as well as Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries (NY: Haskell House Publishers, 1968). Wood, 61. Wood, 57. Katharine Briggs, The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends (NY: Pantheon Books, 1978), 108. Thompson, 20; see Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); B. J.

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All’s Well, That Ends Well and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare, Law and Marriage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2–8, and also essays 1 and 3; Carolyn Asp, “Subjectivity, Desire and Female Friendship in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Literature and Psychology, 32, no. 4 (1986), 51, 52. I discuss all of these plays and their complex relationships to fairy narratives in Fairies, Fractious Women and the Old Faith (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2007). See Susan Snyder, “All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helena,” English Literary Renaissance, 18 (Winter 1988), 75; Miola, 27. Ann Jennalie Cook, Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 231; Sokol and Sokol, 26. Sokol and Sokol, 140. Dirimentary impediments included legal and moral obstacles to marital unions, including incest and the “mistake of person,” or forming a contract with a person other than the one intended either through deception or some sort of confusion. See Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, ed. David Damrosch, (NY: Addison-Wesley Longman, 2003), 1A: 356–364 and Jean d’Arras, Melusine (Lyons circa 1500). Miola, 38. These taboos included destructive actions on the part of the husband, such as forcing the fairy wife to eat mortal food, cursing or striking her, touching her with metal, or losing a token gift she had bestowed on him, such as a ring. See also Wood, 56–72. Paul Edmondson, “Comical and Tragical,” in Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, ed. Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 275. David McCandless, “Helena’s Bed-trick: Gender and Performance in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (Winter 1994), 453. Fairy lore and popular invocations of it typically problematize the social situation, offering alternatives to the existing order, but no solutions.

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Tying the (K)not The marriage of tragedy and comedy in All’s Well, That Ends Well PAUL GLEED

The subject of genre in All’s Well has proven a very knotty problem for critics. In his introduction to this volume, Gary Waller reveals the extent to which the play has been subjected to harsh appraisals over the centuries and some much needed revaluation in recent decades. Much of the traditional criticism focused on the play’s “problematic” qualities, specifically on its failure to be faithful to the conventions of romantic comedy. These interrogations have gleaned much insight, but they have also lead to a rigid view of the play as isolated and idiosyncratic. What this essay seeks to do is the opposite, to place All’s Well firmly into a mythic tradition that can help clarify (or at least structure) the play’s notoriously intractable generic elements. The principle movement in mid-twentieth-century genre-criticism of Renaissance comedy, under the influence of Northrop Frye, was to identify the festive and mythic resonance in plays.1 Seemingly, the play bites its thumb at the festive comic tradition. However, perhaps the play is not so antagonistic; it perhaps simply belongs to a very particular kind of festive lineage. In his classic text The Origin of Attic Comedy, F. M. Cornford writes of a festival that may enrich our understanding of Shakespeare’s play. Envisioning two ancient-Greek ceremonies taking place on consecutive days, one vanquishing death through human sacrifice, and the other welcoming new life, Cornfield encourages us to conflate the two events: “The Pharmakos, by some primitive conjunction difficult for us to grasp, is a representative both of the power of fertility and of the opposite powers of famine, disease, impurity, and death. The ceremonies of the Pharmakos and the Eiresione are complementary.”2 It is this darker side of comedy, still festive, but stained with fear, that seems to echo in the marriage resolution of All’s Well. The resolution speaks of regeneration that might take place through marriage, but also of the sacrificial and death-like fate of the

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couple. In the language of Bertram, as we shall see, the play contemplates the relationship between the marriage “knot” and his “not” (3.2.22). In purely generic terms, marriage is the principle force of comic unification for Renaissance dramatists. What happens, however, to the structure and meaning of comedy when marriage is resisted or undermined? I do not mean that dramatists sought new relationship structures for their characters outside of marriage. The changes, rather, came in how marriage was presented, what could be achieved or articulated through it. Although, of course, marriage persisted as a conclusion to the comic play after 1600, because to thwart marriage altogether would be to concede to the pulling forces of isolation and tragedy, it continued as a weakened force, less capable of cementing a resolution. An important new species of play questioned the ability of marriage to erase the ill will and disconnection created in the body of a play. This change in the meaning of marriage on stage occurred alongside momentous shifts in the idea of marriage off stage. As Susan Baker crisply puts it, “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the status and nature of marriage were debatable; no one version of marriage was fully naturalized.”3 The nature of the ideal marriage was hotly debated in pamphlet and pulpit, and variations ranged from the merits of the so-called “companionate marriage,” the loosely shaped idea that marriage should be founded on a loving relationship and equity, to the traditional arranged and one-sided, to shaping the parameters of divorce. Here, quite specifically I want to separate as much as possible the changes in stage marriage from discussion of the changes in “real” marriage. This is not because there is no connection; rather, because to historicize or socialize the changes in marriage on stage pulls attention away from the effects of dramatic changes and focuses it instead on causes. While the latter is of incredible interest and value, the former has been studied far less and deserves attention. Moreover, as Margaret Mikesell suggests, marriage “became a useful vehicle for playwrights’ exploration of a society in flux”4; or, to put it another way, dramatists were not simply responding to changes in marriage by mirroring them on stage; they were actively recognizing that changes in marriage could be used for purposes other than the explicit and literal discussion of marriage. The effect of this experimentation resonated down to the very core of dramatic form, and this seismic shift is the subject at hand. What were the effects of alternative representations of marriage on form, genre, and expectations in drama? These questions, of course, cannot be answered through a reading of All’s Well alone, but the play offers a valuable starting point. According to Leo Salingar, “the festive strains in [Shakespeare] always subserve or support the theme of love as initiation to marriage. This is the central, unifying theme that runs through all his comedies and romances.”5 In this model Shakespeare’s plays are literally celebrations, and marriage

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is not merely a structural convention but a necessary conduit for the spirit of festivity: it is the essence of the festive. Salingar’s version of Shakespearean marriage, moreover, grows out of a robust tradition of conservative criticism that identifies a uniform and cohesive use of marriage in the comedies. In the unfortunately titled Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies (1962), John Dover Wilson contends that The quality the first ten comedies have in common is happiness, liable to develop into merriment in the conclusion, yet threatening to become serious at times, otherwise there would be no play. And, though many critics do not say so, this quality is found only in these first comedies.

At the core of that “happiness,” Dover Wilson continues, is marriage: “The marriage bells crown the happy plays with happiness; it is the obstacles that hinder and protract that consummation for the best part of five acts which make the comedy.” If Dover Wilson’s view of marriage as the satisfying and efficacious denouement of Shakespearean comedy represents a traditional interpretation, more recent critics have asserted serious challenges to this position. Lisa Hopkins argues that “The Shakespearean ‘happy’ comedies do not celebrate marriage: they reveal its crucial functioning in the maintenance of society and also the internal stresses and contradictions to which it is constantly subject—an instability instanced by the repeated decentering of marriage from its supposed position of comic closure.” For Hopkins, Shakespeare’s use of marriage is ambiguous and qualified, both in its structural and narrative efficacy as well as its social discourses, and thus often “both redemptive and painful.” She resists, then, the idea that marriage, as Shakespeare employs it, can be relied on to resolve tensions and defeat obstacles, but also disputes the romantic ideal of Salingar and others that Shakespeare embraced “love as initiation to marriage.” Shakespearean marriage, in Hopkin’s formulation, is not a comic moment, a “happy” coming together, but a social contract, replete with as many obligations and costs as rewards.6 The “pain” Hopkins speaks of is key to understanding not only the rites and rituals of romantic relationships in many cultures, but festivity in general. As Francois Laroque puts it, “In the exuberance of the festival, ambivalence and metamorphosis can triumph, bestowing a positive and creative power to what is normally alarming or deformed, and transcending sexual differentiation along with the usual oppositions between what is above and what is below, suffering and pleasure and life and death.”7 Hopkins’s model of Shakespearean marriage, then, as both “redemptive and painful,” is in keeping with a complex and ambiguous view of festivity derived from Greek comedy in which pleasure and suffering, life and death, commingle endlessly.

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Perhaps, therefore, the truth incorporates both the marriage merriment of Dover Wilson and the more skeptical interpretations of contemporary critics. Hopkins argues that Shakespeare never uses marriage to crown his comedies with “happiness,” and yet it is undeniable that, to a greater or lesser extent, he does. After all, if he did not, or if he did not do so at least to some significant degree, we would have no seeming need for the separate category of “problem comedies.” Certainly, according to such a view, something uncouples the first ten plays from the later comedies. It is not the absence of marriage, but the transformation of marriage into a tragicomic festival, the acceptance of a complex notion of festivity that reflected more accurately the traditions and practices of festivals rooted in the tradition of Cornford’s ceremony of the Pharmakoi described at the start of this essay. It is just such a mix of fertility and “the opposite powers” that informs Shakespeare’s vision of marriage in the problem comedies. One alternative to seeing All’s Well as a “problem play,” as something of a failure or blip, is to recognize the inventiveness of Shakespeare’s use of marriage in the play. After all, herein lies the heart of generic complexity in All’s Well. How does Shakespeare create an ambiguous festive drive within the traditionally comic convention of the final marriage? What exactly is the nature of marriage in All’s Well? At the most basic level, of course, the play recognizes that marriage is a bond of some considerable power, not least of all social and legal power, that may, under certain unhappy circumstances, be holding fast two people in close union, one or both of whom may not have entered into the marriage with unqualified enthusiasm (see Figure 4.1). For Shakespeare’s audience the issues of arranged marriage, explored at the surface level of narrative in All’s Well, would have resonated strongly. As David Cressy outlines, the tensions that often accompanied marriage negotiations were many. “At every level of society,” he writes, “the freedom of the couple to conclude their own affairs was counterbalanced by the interests of parents, kinsfolk, and friends. The tension between patriarchal authority and individual choice produced many domestic dramas.”8 And so early audiences may have seen in Shakespeare’s treatment of Bertram and Helena something of their own “domestic dramas,” dramas in which they had been once cast as newlyweds, or dramas in which they were authoring the futures of their children. In one interesting recent essay, R. Brian Parker makes connections between the ambiguous union of Bertram and Helena and Shakespeare’s own marriage that, as Parker notes, seems to have been “by no means a companionate marriage.” According to Parker, “aspects of the marriage can throw light on several characteristics of All’s Well that have led to its description as a ‘problem comedy.’” But Shakespeare’s interrogation of marriage goes far beyond the perils of arrangement or “o’er hasty” marriage, and the problems of marriage in the play do not turn simply on questions of will and individual choice. Mary Free, for one,

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Figure 4.1 The King gives Bertram to Helena (2.3). Ark Theatre Company, Lost Angeles, 2004, Paul Wager (director). Coco Kleppinger (Helena), David Stevens (Bertram). Photo by Richard Tatum.

argues that “in its institution, its mixing of high personages with low, and the alliances between social groups, the foregrounded marriage . . . subverts the comic by creating discomfiting inversions in the play’s social spheres.” The problem, then, is one of power, and it manifests itself in several ways. Aside from the socially problematic elements of the marriage, critics have naturally been drawn to the sophisticated and problematic gender relationships in the play. Free also posits that the play “remains a comedy in structure, yet Helena’s agency in the enforced marriage, as well as the subsequent separation and ploys, distances us from the comic.” This untypical (for Renaissance drama) power dynamic is a prominent concern for critics of the play. Patricia Parker points out that “one of this problem play’s most problematic elements” is “the sexual pursuit of a reluctant male by an active and finally successful woman.” “It is this reversal,” she continues, “of women as ‘demanders’ and hence, in a patriarchal culture, de-manners— that provides us with much of the ‘problem’ of this ‘problem’ play.”9 Clearly, these issues of gender, class and agency are extremely germane to any attempt at comprehending the subtleties of the text. However, they are only a few aspects of a larger force that threatens (and eventually resists) the comic action of the play. David Scott Kasten adopts a generic approach when he argues: “the play is Shakespeare’s most insistent exploration of

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the nature of the comic assertion—indeed the idea of comedy itself.” Kasten evaluates the claim of standard Ciceronian comic theory in the Renaissance, that comedy provided a mirror that reflected “people’s lives.” It is difficult to reconcile this claim with lived reality. As Kastan suggests, comedy’s happy endings remind us “by their too ready compliance with our wishes that comedy is more fully responsive to human desire and design than life is.”10 Problem plays, and tragicomedies generally, draw our attention to this. In short, things do not always end well. Tragicomedy is the harshest of the genres, perhaps the most painful and the most cynical, as well as the most natural, because, like Cornford’s concept of ceremony, it uses structural dualism to illuminate the inevitable fusion of life and death that shapes existence. In All’s Well, more than any other play in Shakespeare’s canon, festive ambiguity is used to articulate this condition. As Patricia Parker observes, “the Shakespearean play whose title appears to emphasize final closure is not only notoriously ambiguous in its own ultimate close but filled with more pressing, and more immediate, senses of ending or closing off.” Parker’s study of moments of “ending” or “closing off” in the play is fascinating and thought provoking.11 However, it may be fruitful, as it often is when looking at puzzling texts, to turn matters on their head. In this case I want to pursue the idea of “wholeness” in All’s Well. This requires not only the rejection of traditional interpretations of the play, which as we have seen focused on the incompleteness of the work, but also to distance oneself from many modern readings of the play that, in their fashion, also stress and start from the play’s radical break with tradition. In both traditions, new and old, the emphasis is on singularity in the play, moments of rupture or discord that reveal limitations and inequities. For these critical approaches, one of the most ironic lines in the play is spoken at the beginning of 5.3 by the King. When forgiving Bertram and asserting his plans for a resolution, the King boldly proclaims that “All is whole” (5.3.37). In a sense, of course, this is laughable. After all, simply from a narrative point of view, things are very far from whole as Diana and Helena are yet to enter the stage, and the King’s proposed remedy of a second marriage appears injudicious, to say the least. But, more importantly, once Helena and Diana do re-enter the action, the concluding lines of the play fall far short of creating a satisfactory narrative whole. As countless critics of the play have justifiably observed, Bertram’s claim, that “If” Helena’s story is all true he shall love her “dearly, ever ever dearly” (5.3.314–5), is both conjectural and acerbic. However, the King may be, in at least one sense, taken at his word. After all, this is a play that, from a festive point of view, is remarkable for its wholeness and integrity, for balancing, albeit ambiguously, contrasting and apparently oppositional forces. Paradoxically, its resistance to a traditional unification means that the play is able to unify festive alternatives that comedy usually

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prefers to keep as separate as possible. In particular, the forces of sterility and procreation, of life and death, of marriage and dissolution, are brought into, if not harmony, then awkward but cognizant coexistence. “He loved her, sir, and loved her not,” is how Parolles explains Bertram’s relationship with Diana. “Because he’s guilty, and he is not guilty,” charges Diana of Bertram (5.3.249, 287). And so on. This is a play that refuses to “bring together” in the traditional sense, but stresses, over and over, alternative and paradoxical senses of what “coming together” might actually mean. Shakespeare’s play unifies these contesting powers through a broad and ambiguous synthesis of light and dark festive tempers. The play begins, as many critics have observed, under the shadow of death, but also ends under it. It is topped and tailed with “rites” that, while not funerary, are explicitly linked to funerals. “In delivering my son from me I bury a second husband” (1.1.1) claims the countess as she hands over Bertram to the King’s stewardship in the opening line of the play. Bertram’s father, then, and Helena’s father have recently died, and the King is set to imminently succumb. Just as the ritual of the countess transferring Bertram to the King’s care is described as a “second burial” so too, finally, is the marriage of Bertram and Helena imaged as a “burial” as much as a wedding. To create this strange and unexpected closing ritual, Shakespeare develops new interpretations of standard comic themes: virginity, lovemaking, youth and old age. Instead of allowing these ideas to run in linear opposition, as a standard comedy might, the interrelatedness of them is stressed and finally confirmed in a moment of mixed-festivity. The nexus for these themes is the comic taboo of death. The first dialogue to explore these themes is between Helena and Parolles. The latter responds to Helena’s “Man is enemy to virginity: how may we baricado it against him?” with a sequence of familiar arguments against virginity. “It is not politic in/ the commonwealth of nature to preserve virginity,” he argues, positing procreation as the natural ideal of life. Moreover, “To speak on the part of virginity is to accuse your mothers, which is most infallible disobedience.” Parolles’ stock arguments, which Bertram will unimaginatively rehearse during his wooing of Diana, gives an early example of the play’s tendency to repeatedly and obsessively merge comic themes, in this case virginity and old age: “your virginity, your old virginity is like one of our French withered pears:/ it looks ill, it eats drily, marry, ’tis a withered pear—it was formerly better, marry, yet ’tis a withered pear.” This early banter, though, primarily functions to establish a simple dichotomy between “virginity,” a rejection of the physical demands of human sexuality, and its opposite, the passionate embrace and enjoyment of those demands. In a typical comedy of the period, inevitably the passage of the heroine leads her to the place where she is master of both these discrete models of femininity, a wholesome virgin who yields and blossoms into a worthy

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wife. In this comic orthodoxy, the moral tone comes from a Helena-like desire to “barricade” against advances, but the narrative momentum finally sides with Parolles’ “natural ideal” of procreation (1.1.109–61). Such a comedy might reject Parolles in its rhetoric, but ultimately support him in its narrative drive towards the union of lovers. All’s Well, of course, is no ordinary comedy, however. So to what extent are we really intended to accept Helena’s notion of a military style defense of her sexual purity, or to dismiss Parolles’ arguments as clichéd utterances from a singularly foolish character? Just as Parolles will receive a partial rehabilitation by the close of the play, the discourses of virginity in All’s Well are also not easily characterized. The play, finally, neither sides with Parolles or Helena, nor, crucially, does it accept the standard comic “ideal” of virgin transformed into sexually active wife by a comic resolution. Instead, the discourse of “virginity,” the denial of coming-together, shifts throughout the play, finally attaching itself to the moment of resolution to create an ambiguous species of human relationship and an ending that is more a cerebration on human complexity than a celebration of human love. Before exploring the constructions of “virginity” in the play, and its influence on the final analysis of festivity in the play, it is worthwhile to examine an interrelated discourse in All’s Well, also initiated by Parolles in the above dialogue. As seen, Parolles cautions Helena that virginity carried through into old-age is likened to a dry, withered pear, the unappealing decline of something that “was formerly better.” This subject matter returns in the following scene as the King laments infirmity and recalls his youth and the excellent companionship of Bertram’s father. “He lasted long,” remembers the King, “But on us both did haggish age steal on,/ And wore us out of act.” The King’s nostalgic pining dilates, as such thoughts often do, to cover not simply personal memories of a better time for oneself, but to conclude that the world is also in decline, “was formerly better.” “Such a man/ Might be a copy to these younger times,” he continues, “Which followed well would demonstrate them now/ But goers-backward.” The mood is wistful, but also fatalistic, and the King wishes that “Since I nor wax nor honey can bring home,/ I quickly were dissolved from my hive/ to give some labourers room (1.2.28–30, 45–48, 65–67). Both old age and virginity, then, joined by the discourses of Parolles and the King, seem to represent barren, anti-festive forces, both traditionally opposed to the comic drive of a typical play. However, the King does not have to leave his hive, and, indeed, once cured, is buzzing and dancing around Helena like a bee round a flower. Moreover, All’s Well is a play that does not utilize the standard comic narrative device of an older generation inhibiting the amorous desires of the younger generation. Indeed, far from being obstacles here, the countess and the King are catalysts for romance. As Robert Miola puts it, “Here

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Shakespeare seems to have gone out of his way to violate the norm, to portray a different older generation, one sympathetic to young love, at least to Helena’s.”12 And, as we shall see, virginity survives to the end of the play without capitulating, fully, to the comic demand for sexual union. Sterility and fertility, then, are not antagonistic icons of festivity and anti-festivity, as they are in more formulaically arranged romantic comedy, but powers engaged in a strange dalliance of attracted opposites. To understand this dalliance fully, the figure of Diana is key. If Parolles had connected discourses of virginity and old age, Diana consistently fastens images of virginity to images of death. After Bertram exits the stage, believing he seduced Diana into sleeping with him, Diana opines on her role in deceiving the young noble, that “Since Frenchmen are so braid,/ Marry that will; I live and die a maid.” Her defense of her actions and virginity is grounded in the certainty and security of death, clearly connecting both virginity and sexuality to death. Her “I’ll lie with him/ When I’m buried” suggests that human beings finally share a state of enforced virginity, a sexless lying together, but also parodies the procreative possibilities of sexual activity by juxtaposing it with death and burial. But for Diana, of course, life and death are equal conditions: “I live and die a maid” (4.2.73–4). However, as her riddling in the final scene suggests, such clarity is misplaced. Indeed, through Diana and Helena, and the machinations of the bed trick, virginity and sexual activity are made bewilderingly interchangeable. Inevitably, this interlocking of concepts informs the play’s discourse on marriage. More surprisingly, however, is the extraordinary way in which marriage and reproduction, like virginity and sexual activity, are wedded to reflections on death. Lavatch’s reason for seeking marriage, for example, is straight out of St. Paul—“I have been, Madam, as you—and all flesh and blood—are, and indeed I do marry that I may repent.” Moments later, his vision of marriage darkens even further as he contemplates being at ease with what he sees as the inevitability of a dishonest wife: “He that comforts my wife is the cherisher of my flesh and blood. . .he that kisses my wife is my friend” (1.3.34–5, 46–9). Lavatch’s first idea, that marriage may be an arena where fornication can be turned into spiritually acceptable lovemaking, is threatened by the specter of cuckoldry and the implications of infidelity. The transient nature of wedding vows is literally represented, of course, when the married Bertram attempts to seduce Diana: “I was compelled to her,” says Bertram of Helena, “but I love thee/ By love’s own sweet constraint, and will forever do thee all rights of service.” “I prithee do not strive against my vows,” urges Bertram, but Diana is fully aware of the valuelessness not only of Bertram’s vows, but of the idea of a verbal and legal bond lacking true commitment: “’Tis not the many oaths that makes the truth,” she tells Bertram after he swears himself to her, “But the plain single vow

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that is vowed true . . . Therefore your oaths/ Are words and poor conditions but unsealed,/ At least in my opinion.” Diana’s sharp add-on, “At least in my opinion,” thematically cements her critique of marriage as potentially nothing more than an artificial and arbitrary union (4.2.14–7, 21–2). Diana’s doubtful view of men—justified by Bertram’s perfidy— combines with Bertram’s own arguments, and Lavatch’s fool’s insight, to create a skeptical interpretation of marriage within the play as a hollow institution that provides neither comfort nor security. This model of marriage contributes to the overwhelmingly dark vision of festivity that mingles funerals, meditation on old age, cold virginity, and the prospect of isolation and loneliness all within the confines of marriage. Perhaps the most complex articulation of mixed-festive modes emerges when Bertram declares: “they have married me. I’ll to the Tuscan wars and never bed her.” Tellingly, he plans that the King’s wedding gift of money “shall furnish me to those Italian fields” (2.3.287–8). The money intended to establish a marriage bed is instead used to pay for the passage to and expense of battle. David McCandless interprets this preference for war as Bertram’s assertion of manhood in opposition to Helena’s power to curtail that manhood. “While [Bertram] is primed to resent any imposed responsibility that keeps him from going a-soldiering,” writes McCandless, “marriage to Helena is the very worst of fates, taking him even further back into boyhood by returning him to the maternal domination he presumably escaped by ending his constrictive ‘marriage’ to the Countess.”13 This is correct, but provides only half the picture. What Bertram seeks out is as important as what he evades. The war offers Bertram a male community where individual glory and honor can be achieved within the group, and where the emphasis is not on life, as in the procreative marriage that Helena surely wants, but on death. It also represents the possibility/probability of destruction, both of others and oneself, and Bertram embraces this, playing with the strange interplay between weddings and wars. This connection between death and marriage is cemented in the riddle that Bertram sends to Helena: “She hath recovered the King and undone me. I have wedded her, not bedded her, and sworn to make the ‘not’ eternal” (3.2.21–2). The pun plays on the sense of marriage that emerges from the play, both as a knot that unites people in arbitrary and legal terms, and as a “not,” a state of emotional absence that resembles death. The “festive” resolution at the end of the play shows how, far from challenging this conflation of death and marriage, Shakespeare offers a final scene that plays with Helena’s perceived physical death and anticipates what we may envision as the fatal bonding of two people. Diana tells us: “[Bertram] knows himself my bed he hath defiled, And at that time he got his wife with child. Dead though she be she feels her young one kick. So there’s my riddle; one that’s dead is quick. And now behold the meaning” (5.3.298–302).

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This may be the cue for Helena’s entrance, but it certainly does not signal the revelation of meaning. Helena is both dead and quick here, just as Diana is both “strumpet” and virgin. It is difficult to read this as a moment of resurrection or rebirth; equally it is hard to read it as a moment of clarification. The confusion emerging from a dead mother carrying a live baby begotten in a virgin’s bed is too tightly packed to be easily and conveniently unraveled. Certainly, as Patricia Parker notes, this confusion is painful for Bertram whose experience “embodies the anxiety that it is never possible to go to bed with only one woman, that the woman in question is always split. Approach a ‘Dian,’ the ultimate male conquest, and you get, instead, a ‘Helen,’ the infamous strumpet or, what is worse, female sexuality with its own different and more active agenda . . . One woman, the desired one, turns out to be duplicitous, or two.” In a related argument, Janet Adelman suggests that it is the vagaries of male sexuality that undermine the comic closure. “Since the impediment to the conventional festive ending in marriage . . . is thus the construction of male sexual desire itself, the ending turns on the attempt to legitimize sexual desire in marriage— an attempt epitomized . . . by the bed trick, in which the illicit desires of men are coercively directed back toward their socially sanctioned mates.”14 Astute as both Parker and Adelman are here, Bertram’s befuddlement must be read as only a small portion of a greater confusion, one originating not in duplicitous women or mercurial men, but in the duality of experience broadly. The imagery that is most prominent in the final scene, and throughout the play, is not that which depicts a battle of the sexes, a turbulently complicated reversal of The Taming of the Shrew, but the depiction of ambiguous moments of festivity that are neither wholly comic or tragic. The disorientation is general and widespread at the close of All’s Well as the promise of comedy, to resolve and make well, like the promise of Bertram to Helena earlier, is broken. Finally, words and explanations do not undo the complexities of actions and feelings. “’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see,” proclaims Helena, “The name and not the thing.” But Helena’s analysis, which stresses the disruption of meaning in the same way that a semiologist might identify the rupture between the sign and the signified, is less accurate than the King’s accidental interpretation: “All is whole” (5.2.305–6, 37). The ‘festive’ ending of All’s Well, though appearing to be divisive (and for Bertram and Helena, being so), is, on a more humanistic level, about merging and coalescing life’s components into a ceremony of recognition, a marriage of different experiences tied into one knot/not. This tethering of generic elements appears to have significantly undone the generic purity in vogue during the 1590s. Although, of course, none of Shakespeare’s comedies from that decade were free of tragic elements, the earlier comedies did seek final solace in a lighter form of festivity. Shakespeare, along with other dramatists, embraced the conventions of

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romantic comedy, which, in turn, appear to have been much savored by audiences. But Shakespeare’s plays after 1600 signal a marked turn away from the relative certainties of this generic form. Nor, moreover, was he alone in adapting this more complex and heterogeneous model of festivity to marriage and the comic conclusion. Shakespeare’s problem comedies are only problematic, that is, exceptional, if you compare them to other Shakespeare plays. But if All’s Well or Measure for Measure are considered alongside other plays produced contemporaneously, they become part of a consistent, though far from complete, decline in marriage as comic resolution. They can only be considered a “problem” for the literary critic disposed to neat and totalizing taxonomies of Shakespearean drama. All’s Well is best considered as part of a community of plays, most of which are classified by scholars today as “tragicomedies,” that collectively interrogate and finally reject the received wisdom that marriage alone can make all well. In particular, several of John Marston’s plays (The Malcontent and The Dutch Courtesan) reveal, just as Shakespeare does in All’s Well, the limitations of marriage to provide generic unity and cohesion. Surrounded by distortions of the marriage bond in The Malcontent, for example, one character declares that “Hymen begins to put off his saffron robe,”15 while in The Dutch Courtesan a ring turns into the dual symbol of both fidelity and death. Hymen, the god of weddings, then, who appeared so triumphantly at the close of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, does seem to be loosening his robes and falling from fashion in the dramaturgy of early Stuart England. Indeed, this movement would, perhaps, reach a lurid apotheosis almost several decades after All’s Well in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge. Here, in a particularly strange and unsettling tragicomedy, the heavenly agent of love turns mass murderer! Shakespeare, then, as so often, is nothing less than pioneering in All’s Well. Along with Marston, we can say that he is at the forefront of a movement to challenge and overturn dramatic and generic orthodoxy. It is marriage, or rather the power of marriage to act as a panacea within the comic form that is resisted. Once this experimental move is made, the implications for a dramatic resolution, indeed for the entire play that precedes it, are significant. The result is nothing less than a new type of play, a new form. What critics have traditionally seen in this new form is problematic idiosyncrasies, particularly when it emanated from Shakespeare’s hand, often defining these as failures or weaknesses. The festive approaches to Shakespearean comedy so popular in the 1960s only made matters worse for these plays, as there then seemed to be legitimate grounds on which to judge them difficult and “not right.” However, if, as has been attempted here, the festive tradition is broadened to include festivities that combined fear and hope, life and death, then All’s Well and similar plays have a legitimate claim to a mythic lineage of their own. Like the festivities of old,

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these plays recognize that every “knot” is tied under the pervasive shadow of what is “not,” but also that life’s cyclical nature not only tarnishes the comic but mitigates the tragic.

NOTES 1 Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1963). 2 F. M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 11. 3 Susan Baker, “Sex and Marriage in The Dutch Courtesan.” In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, eds. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1991), 218–232, 219. 4 Margaret L. Mikesell, “The Formative Power of Marriage in Stuart Tragedy,” in Kehler and Baker, 233. 5 Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 16. 6 John Dover Wilson, Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), 36, 51; Lisa Hopkins, The Shakespearean Marriage: Merry Wives and Heavy Husbands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 33, 9. 7 François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage. Tr. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 49. 8 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 234–5. 9 R. Brian Parker, “All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Marriage.” Renaissance and Restoration, 25, 3, (summer 2001), 44, 45; Mary Free, “All’s Well That Ends Well as Noncomic Comedy.” Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Six Plays. Ed. Frances Teague (Cranbury: Associated University Press, 1994), 41, 43; Patricia Parker, “All’s Well That Ends Well: Increase and Multiply,” Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas Greene, ed. David Quint et al. (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 375, 380. 10 David Scott Kastan, “All’s Well That Ends Well and the Limits of Comedy,” ELH, 52 (1985), 579, 576. 11 Patricia Parker, 559. 12 Robert S. Miola, “New Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (Spring 1993), 25. 13 David McCandless, “Helena’s Bed-trick: Gender and Performance in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), 449–468, 458. 14 Patricia Parker, 386–7; Janet Adelman, “Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare’s Personality, ed. Norman Holland et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 152. 15 John Marston, The Malcontent, English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington et al. (NY: W. W. Norton, 2002), 545–615, 3.2.26.

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All’s Well, That Ends Well and the Art of Retrograde Motion DEANNE WILLIAMS 011

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It is the backward motion toward the source, Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in, The tribute of the current to the source. It is from this in nature we are from. It is most us. Robert Frost, “West Running Brook”

Helena and Parolles are having their first showdown (see Figure 5.1). The paragon of virtue confronts the libertine, with Helena taking the side of virginity, and Parolles advocating sexuality. Parolles uses the old argument that sex, by producing children, is an agent of progress. A form of “rational increase” according to the “rule of nature” (1.1.126, 133), sexual activity moves the life process forward. Their conversation drawing to a close, Helena comments: 0111

HELENA: PAROLLES: HELENA: PAROLLES: HELENA:

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The wars hath so kept you under that you must needs be born under Mars. When he was predominant. When he was retrograde, I think rather. Why think you so? You go so much backward when you fight. (192–6)

The OED defines “retrograde” as “apparently moving in a direction contrary to the order of the signs, or from east to west.” In the night sky, planets appear to move from west to east. At times, however, certain planets appear as though they are slowing down, even stopping, and then circling back to the west. The planet forms a complete circle as it returns to its

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Figure 5.1 Helena and Parolles (1.1), Gustavus Adolphus College 2005, Robert Gardner (director). Kirsten Kuicken (Helena), Nick Dillenburg (Parolles).

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original eastward direction. According to astrology, retrograde motion opposes the principles that are typically associated with the planet. For example, Mars, the god of war, is attached to energy, will, ego, and related powers of force and forward motion. Mars in retrograde therefore concerns introspection, depression, irrationality, and retrospectivity: in other words, moving backwards. When Mars is retrograde, it is best to take time to reconsider and reflect, rather than charge ahead with new projects. By suggesting that Parolles was born when Mars was retrograde, Helena implies that Parolles might not have the stomach for war (“running away, when fear proposes the safety,” 199–200). However, retrograde motion also signals Helena’s hopes for Bertram. About to leave his childhood home in Rossillion for the Italian wars, Bertram is sure to gain sexual as well as military experience (going backwards is, among other things, a euphemism for sex). If everything goes according to plan, Bertram will eventually choose a suitable bride and forget all about his childhood friend, Helena. But Helena wants things to move in retrograde. Looking back to her childhood shared with Bertram, to a time when social differences did not force them apart, Helena wants events to run contrary to the progressions of love and war, and politics and class, which cancel her out. Helena’s comment, “when he was retrograde,” invokes a key issue in the Copernican Revolution. In De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (1543) Copernicus argues that retrograde motion is an optical illusion. He explains how the motion of the Earth and the other planets in their orbits around the Sun produces the impression, from the Earth, that the planets are moving backwards. As the Earth approaches and passes Mars, which takes about twice the length of time as the Earth to revolve around the Sun, the position of Mars in the night sky appears to slow down and move backwards. It is a trick of the eye. With this insight, Copernicus dispensed with the mind-numbing calculations retrograde motion demanded of Ptolemaic astronomers, and called into question the entire world-view that hinged upon a geocentric universe. He undermined the Aristotelian certainties of the Ptolemaic structure, according to which all planets, like all earthly objects, have a particular role and function. By invoking the discredited Ptolemaic concept of retrograde motion at an early moment in the play, Helena encourages the audience to consider the events that follow in light of a cosmographical concept that was itself retrograde by the end of the sixteenth century. Patricia Parker’s reading of the play focuses upon its representations of what Parolles calls “rational increase,” with Helena’s pregnancy and the King’s fistula serving as emblems for the play’s concern with processes of rhetorical dilation and narrative forward motion.1 This interchange between Helena and Parolles, however, establishes a distinction between the principle of amplification represented by Parolles’s martial images of “bloody succeeding” (2.3.190),

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and the play’s contrary inclination, shared by the Countess, the King of France, and Helena herself, to move backwards and to resist, nostalgically, the inevitable, inexorable processes of nature and time. All’s Well applies the concept of retrograde motion to plot, character, and the idea of theater. We may think of literary or dramatic genre as a Ptolemaic universe, with comedy or tragedy supplying stock characters and situations, as well as an established, inevitable outcome, in marriage or in death. However, in All’s Well, Shakespeare presents many of the established elements of comedy in retrograde. Although she is named for Helen of Troy, the play’s heroine is the opposite of a femme fatale. She is defined, not by her beauty, but by her active participation in shaping her destiny. Like Helen of Troy, she is defined by love, but instead of being the passive object of male rivalry, she doggedly pursues her inferior choice, even going so far as to propose marriage herself (twice). Her beloved Bertram, the play’s ostensible hero, could not be less worthy, running away from war as well as from marriage (twice). Moreover, Helena’s anticipated westward journey from Paris to Santiago de Compostela shifts into retrograde when she heads back east to Florence to pursue Bertram, replacing penitential pilgrimage with erotic desire and a bedtrick. Retrograde motion offers a paradigm for the play’s overarching interest in turning back the clock, as well as for Helena’s progressive and constructive action as a female subject, rather than a feminine object, of comedy. All’s Well demonstrates how, in comedy as in life, it is possible to appear to be moving backward, while actually moving forward.

THE IMAGINARY DIVORCE “Retrograde,” from the Latin retro and gradus, meaning a step backwards, first appears in English in Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe (1391), a simple, elegant account of the movement of planets. However, “retrograde” came to signify much more than planetary motion. A truly interdisciplinary word, it describes anything that runs against the grain: lines of music and poetry that can read forwards and backwards; military exercises and strategies; geological as well as biological phenomena; amnesia; and (more recently) fashion and style (ie. “retro”). Although the planetary concept of retrograde motion had been disproved scientifically, it retains its imaginative and artistic significance through the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, appearing in the work of Francis Bacon, Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Barnabe Barnes, Michael Drayton, Thomas Churchyard, and Samuel Daniel.2 The association of retrograde motion with the Ptolemaic model may have made it more interesting and imaginatively accessible to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As Keith Thomas observes in Religion and the

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Decline of Magic, “what really destroyed the possibility of scientific astrology was [Copernicus’] undermining of the Aristotelian distinction between terrestrial and celestial bodies, what Bacon called ‘the imaginary divorce’ between superlunary and sublunary things.”3 Nevertheless, just as Copernican science was gaining wide acceptance in England, there was a resurgence of interest in astrology, with nativities and horoscopes an expected part of birth and major life events for the educated Elizabethan. Perhaps the terrifying prospect that the earth was no longer the center of the universe instigated a mental retreat into a system that provided answers where none was otherwise forthcoming. This nostalgia for a familiar and reassuring cosmology is comparable to the rekindling of religious fervor in English Catholics during and immediately after the Reformation. Indeed, if Ptolemy was associated with the old Catholic order, with its structures and certainties, Copernicus, with his connections to Wittenberg and the Lutheran north, was a chilly blast of Protestant air. Thus, by the late sixteenth century, “retrograde” connotes more than just movement backward, but an entire diminishing world view, as well as the sharp, exquisite sense of the end of an era. This sense of loss inflects Shakespeare’s other use of the term “retrograde,” in Hamlet. Claudius complains that Hamlet is spending too much time mourning his father (“your father lost a father,/ That father lost, lost his . . .” 1.2.292–3) and that “his intent/ In going back to school in Wittenberg,/ It is most retrograde to our desire” (2.1.112–3). Describing Hamlet’s proposed return to Wittenberg as “retrograde,” Claudius refers to the city where Copernicus’s De revolutionibus was first printed, and, therefore, to the place where it was first proposed that retrograde motion was an optical illusion. Deploying the concept of retrograde motion at the same time that he mentions the place where it was discredited, Claudius reveals himself as a kind of Ptolemaic throwback. Hamlet’s self-projection as the “king of infinite space” (2.2.254) makes him, by contrast, a Copernican. Claudius’s reference to retrograde motion brings Hamlet, probably Shakespeare’s best-known play, together with the lesser light of All’s Well.4 Each depicts the processes of mourning and melancholia, and with living in the past. Each contains a vulnerable king whose life is compromised, after the Arthurian fashion, by means of a physical opening or wound. And each concerns the love of a young woman for her childhood companion: a love for someone who is at once a perfect fit and a problematic choice. The shared appearance of “retrograde” might also lend support to the argument for an earlier date for All’s Well. It calls attention to their mutual concern with a dynamic described by Leggatt as “a monarch dying and reborn: are we on the cusp between Elizabeth and James?” (10). Each play reflects, in different ways, on time passing: with what could have been or should have been, and with the possibility of turning back the clock, as

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Hamlet does with The Mousetrap, or of altering the natural course of events, which Helena accomplishes by healing the King’s fistula. At a cusp period in England’s history, with the map of the universe changing, with Elizabeth on her deathbed or else having just died, with her succession uncertain and unsecured, and with the overarching sense of the end of an era, Shakespeare considers the pleasures and the possibilities of retrograde motion.

A CALENDAR OF PAST ENDEAVOURS A perpetual autumn mist enshrouds Rossillion. The Countess’s culture of mourning prevails at Rossillion, just as Orsino’s culture of lovesickness dominates Illyria. When the Countess looks at her son, she sees only her dead husband, and Bertram’s departure makes her think, not of her son’s bright future, but of her own sad past: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband” (1.1.1–2). As for Helena, memories of her father (“What was he like? I have forgot him” 80–1) fade in the face of her love for Bertram, her “bright particular star” (85). But no one notices. Melancholy places its sufferer entirely out of touch with reality, as Lafew’s comment to Helen illustrates, “moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, excessive grief the enemy to the living,” which is then reinforced by the Countess, “if the living be enemy to the grief, the excess makes it soon mortal” (53–7). For Helena, it is not the loss of her father, but erotic passion, with its hoping-against-all-hope for a happy future, which “takes all livelihood from her cheek” (49). At Rossillion, the grief-stricken and the lovesick persist, like planets, in their endless patterns. This retrospective preoccupation extends to Paris. When he sees Bertram for the first time, the King of France remarks to him, “thou bear’st thy father’s face” and muses, “I would I had that corporal soundness now,/ As when thy father and myself in friendship/ First tried our soldiering” (19, 24–6). The King’s obsession with the past is, like that of the Countess, just another form of self-absorption: “Methinks I hear him now.” When the King wishes that more young men today would emulate his old friend, who could provide “a copy to these younger times,” thus making contemporary men “goers backward,” he expresses a desire, not for progress, nor even for improvement, but for the return of “younger sons” to the ways of their fathers. Commenting, “it repairs me much to talk of your good father,” the King anticipates the extent to which Helena returns his former self to life, moving backwards in time as she counteracts the fistula’s relentless process of expansion (1.2.52, 46–8, 30–1). Helena’s “receipts,” moreover, summon memories of her dead father, whom the King also recalls. And Lafew sees Helena’s cure as a blast from the past, describing it as “powerful to araise King Pippen, nay/ To give great Charlemain a pen in’s hand/ And write to her a love-line” (2.1.76–8).

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Helena’s familiarity with the old Ptolemaic universe is that of a doctor’s daughter. Her interchange with Parolles is only the first of her many references to the role of the stars and the planets in shaping human destiny, reflecting not only the intimate connection between early modern medicine and astrology, but also the superstitious occultism of the lovesick. Helena uses the language of Ptolemaic astronomy to describe herself as outside of Bertram’s orbit: “In his bright radiance and collateral light/ Must I be comforted, not in his sphere” (88–89). Bertram, who agrees fully with Helena’s opinion of him, explains his reluctance to wed her in similarly astronomical terms: “You must not marvel, Helen, at my course,/ Which holds not colour with the time” (2.5.58–60). Helena understands how her ambitious love goes, like a retrograde planet, against the grain: “With true observance seek to eke out that/ Wherein toward me my homely stars have fail’d/ To equal my great fortune” (2.5.74–6). Helena’s Ptolemaic vocabulary looks back to Shakespeare’s medieval source material in Boccaccio’s Decameron. When she hopes, of the King, “that his good receipt/ Shall for my legacy be sanctified/ By th’luckiest stars in heaven” (1.3.239–41), Helena uses the language of Catholicism as well as Ptolemy, highlighting the relationship between the pre-Copernican and the pre-Reformation past. Phrases such as “my idolatrous fancy/ Must sanctify his reliques” (1.1.96–7) place Helena in a medieval and Catholic framework, and align her, as well, with the self-consciously literary archaism of lovers such as Sidney’s Astrophel (whose name reflects the Elizabethan love for the stars). As her rarified astrological discourse makes Helena retrograde, it also gives her lovesickness a distinguished literary genealogy. All’s Well looks back to the classical past as well as to the Middle Ages. With names such as Helen and Paris, wars in Italy, and the idea (recalling Dido) of the woman who loves too much, the play offers a set of variations on a Trojan theme. As Susan Snyder shows, the Trojan history of Helena’s name gives her interchange with Parolles a rich intertextual meaning.5 Helen of Troy’s capture by Paris is a case in point for Parolles’s argument against virginity: although the affair instigated a long and bloody war, it led to the foundation of Rome. Loyal and chaste where her namesake cheats, Helena represents Helen of Troy in retrograde. For Helena, the shared space of war and sex is only an exercise in futility. She takes the opposite view of the intertwined elements of love and empire, highlighting the destructive nature of military enterprises: “you go so much backward when you fight.” Nevertheless, like a retrograde planet resuming its course, Helena’s interview with Parolles (whose name is a homophone for “perilous”) produces a change in her, and she resolves to go to Paris, named for the original Greek adulterer (a name that also resembles Parolles). Fully aware of the dangers of love, and of following the path forged for

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her by her predecessors, Helena throws herself into Helen of Troy’s world of love and war. Although she is named for the most beautiful woman and the most notorious adulteress in history, Helena aligns herself with the Virgin Queen when she protests, “I know I love in vain, strive against hope;/ Yet in this captious and intenible sieve/ I still pour in the waters of my love” (1.3.196–8). Recalling the glory days of Elizabeth I, Helena invokes the tradition of the Sieve portraits, which address the question of female sexuality and its relationship to political power.6 Produced through the 1580s, the Sieve portraits connected England’s growing naval capabilities to Queen Elizabeth’s virginity.7 They draw upon an emblem of chastity made popular by Petrarch’s Trionfo delle pudiciza, in which a Roman vestal virgin, Tuccia, carries water in a sieve from the Tiber to her temple without spilling a drop. Helena uses the sieve metaphor to insert herself into an Elizabethan discourse concerning female power and chastity: an Elizabethan discourse that is becoming, at the time of All’s Well, That Ends Well, a thing of the past. However, as with her namesake, Helen of Troy, Helena moves in opposition to Queen Elizabeth. Helena’s sieve, ultimately, holds water: the love that she pours into Bertram is not wasted; in the end, she gets her man. Moreover, Helena’s sieve makes a distinction between virginity and chastity: unlike Elizabeth, Helena has no investment in virginity, and unlike Helen of Troy, she dedicates herself to one love. Helena is in full possession of her erotic feelings, which she expresses exquisitely, “’twas pretty, though a plague, to see him every hour” (1.1.91–2). She orchestrates sex, which we must assume she enjoys fully, as Renaissance gynecology taught that women must experience sexual satisfaction in order to conceive, and she arrives, at the end of the play, proudly pregnant. Neither a Helen nor an Elizabeth, Helena has more in common with Diana, the ancient classical mother goddess for whom her Doppelgänger, Bertram’s Italian fiancée, is named. The goddess of chastity as well as motherhood, Diana presides over fertility, the moon, and childbirth. She is a fierce huntress and, like the Virgin Mary, a resolute protector of children.8 Helena’s name, her words, and her actions look backwards to a variety of historical figures. She appears to go backwards geographically, when she takes a backwards course to Santiago, as well as euphemistically, when she facilitates the bed-trick, as well as metaphorically, when she compromises her safety and reputation in order to achieve her goals. However, even as Helena appears to move in retrograde, she rejects the paradigms represented by the past. With Helena, history, however cherished, does not repeat itself. In this respect, Helena is moving straight forward, not going around in a circle.

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THE BITTER PAST, MORE WELCOME IS THE SWEET As All’s Well looks to the past in order to establish the character of its heroine, it invokes the history of Troy, so central to the formation of English national identity, as well as the more recent history of the Elizabethan stage. When the Countess requests an interview with Helena, the clown Lavatch sings a little song, “ ‘Was this fair face the cause’ quoth she,/ Why the Grecians sacked Troy?” (1.3.68–9), that recalls Marlowe’s famous “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships.” Lavatch’s allusion compares the grave and purposeful Helena not only with her glamorous, adulterous, classical precedent but also with the Marlovian chimaera. The little jingle that immediately follows, “Among nine bad if one be good/ There’s yet one good in ten” (1.3.77–8), pursues this dialogue with Doctor Faustus as it prepares the audience for Helena’s entrance. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe makes a distinction between the wife Faustus longs for “I am wanton and lascivious, and cannot live without a wife” (2.1.142–3) and the Helen he settles for, however fleetingly (5.1.90). Once again, then, Shakespeare is naming Helena in a retrograde manner, for her opposite. Doctor Faustus dramatizes love, sex, and femininity through the polarities of the incorporeal Helen and the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt, defined by her physical condition and appetites. Whereas Marlowe’s Helen presents the idea that romantic love is an illusion and that all women are whores, Shakespeare’s Helena offers the love of a good woman. The revelation of Helena’s pregnancy at the end of the play recalls Marlowe’s Duchess, whose cameo briefly signals a positive, productive alternative to the frustrations of pursuing Helen of Troy. Like All’s Well, Doctor Faustus engages the astronomical concept of retrograde motion. In their dialogue on the movement of planetary bodies, Faustus and Mephastophilis touch on the controversial subject. They “reason of divine astrology” (2.3.34) and Mephastophilis gives Faustus a lesson in Ptolemaic cosmology. Marlowe, who would have encountered the New Astronomy at Cambridge, places Faustus’s thinking perfectly in line with Copernicus’s Wittenberg. In answer to his questions about the cosmos, Faustus receives the traditional Ptolemaic wisdom: Faustus leans towards Copernican possibilities, while Mephastophilis uses terms such as “erring” to describe retrograde motion. When Faustus suggests that planets might have different orbits depending on their distance from the sun, Mephastophilis reinforces Ptolemaic dogma: “All jointly move from east to west in four and twenty hours around the poles of the world” (47–8). Through Mephastophilis, Marlowe attaches the Ptolemaic system to the seductions as well as the imperatives of damnation. Faustus’s nascent Copernicanism, which imagines an alternative to the fated universe, implies that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in his interlocutor’s philosophy.

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By seeking a return to the sense of wonder that Marlowe portrays so fleetingly and pessimistically, All’s Well moves in retrograde to Doctor Faustus. Faustus chooses magic over faith: his achievements, such as summoning Helen of Troy or a bunch of grapes, are revealed to be fundamentally contingent and illusory party tricks, while grace, although it is hinted at, is frustratingly elusive. Whereas in Doctor Faustus the sinner’s choices lead to eternal damnation, All’s Well holds out the possibility that through grace even the most hardened sinner ultimately can be saved. Bertram, like Doctor Faustus, is “wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife.” Like Faustus, he does everything wrong, up until the very end of the play. Nevertheless, while Faustus appears to be headed straight to hell, Bertram is offered the possibility of salvation. Helen in Doctor Faustus is a figure of hopelessness; Helena in All’s Well is nothing if not hopeful. Like Doctor Faustus (though for different reasons), Helena relies on old books to work her “magic” and shape her destiny. In each case, a “doctor” works for the benefit of the King, be it healing a fistula or entertaining Charles V. But Helena reverses the process of the King’s illness: her medical achievements, which bring the near-dead King back to life, anticipate the restorations of Cerimon in Pericles. Doctor Faustus’s magic, however spectacular, is primarily self-indulgent. The best he can offer is momentary respite from a physical craving. By the end of Doctor Faustus we pity the hero for wanting, and settling for, all the wrong things. By the end of All’s Well we marvel at a woman who is capable of anything. Unable to decide whether Helena has relied more on miracles or medicine to heal the King, Lafew frames his uncertainty in terms of contemporary cosmological debates, remarking that “miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless” (2.3.1–3). Parolles glosses Lafew’s comments by referring to Galen and Paracelsus, the ancient and the contemporary physicians. However, Lafew is thinking about heavenly bodies, not human bodies. For Lafew, the “uncertain life, and sure death” from which Helena has liberated the King has also restored his faith in the “very hand of heaven.” Invoking the title of a ballad, “A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor” (30, 22–3), Lafew reinforces the sense of a return, not only to health, but also to faith. When Lafew comments, “why your dolphin is not lustier” (25), he is referring, not just to the longstanding Elizabethan pun on the French “dauphin,” but also to a common symbol for the Christian soul, with the idea of pursuing love for Christ as, and within, conjugal love. Lafew is acknowledging, even insisting upon, a renewed sense of presence and power of the spiritual and the supernatural in the face of the New Astronomy.9 In agreement with Lafew, Parolles places Helena’s accomplishments in the big picture: “great power, great transcendence, which should indeed give us a further use to be made than alone the recovery of the king” (34–6).

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Although Helena’s Ptolemaic vocabulary tags her as “retrograde,” her actions are Copernican, resisting the inevitabilities of a deterministic universe: Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. (212–4)

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Dismissing the notion that we can find guidance, meaning, or the future in the stars, Helena suggests, instead, that one relies on the self for help; the rest is an illusion or a rhetorical move. Yet Helena acknowledges freedom within heavenly or cosmic determinism here, mirroring traditional Catholic doctrine via Augustine, which accepts human free will and agency within the larger scope of God’s design. Moreover, when Helena asserts that the sky “doth backwards/ Pull our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull,” she uses the idea of retrograde motion to suggest how the heavens can provide a corrective. Implying faith in a benevolent universe or God, Helena uses retrograde motion to express her faith in the possiblities, not of nostalgia, but for renewal. The constellation of retrospective glances and overarching retrograde moves of All’s Well mirror the impulse and conscience of English recusancy. At the same time, however, retrograde motion also offers a comment on the theater and the fated, and therefore wondrous, universe of comedy. For within the comic structure, as well, “the fated sky gives us free scope.” The deepest mourning, the worst choice for a match, even unforgivable dishonesty, can all be redeemed and turned to the good. On the one hand, Helena herself makes a retrograde choice, going against all good sense by sticking with Bertram. Like a retrograde planet, Bertram does the opposite of what he should, first running away from Helena, and then moving, once again, into retrograde when he woos Diana, wins her, and then calls her a “common gamester” (5.3.188). As the King points out, Bertram’s modus vivendi is retrograde motion: “I wonder, sir, sith wives are monsters to you,/ And that you fly them as you swear them lordship,/ Yet you desire to marry?” (5.3.155–7). The play suggests, moreover, that retrograde motion is a fundamental process of the male heart: PAROLLES: KING: PAROLLES:

He did love her, sir, as a gentleman loves a woman. How is that? He lov’d her, sir, and lov’d her not. (5.3.155–7)

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The play dignifies Bertram through the love of Helena, who we trust will lead him to the right path. However, the King’s wise words on the folly of flighty friends and light lovers, and on the pain of regret, beautifully anticipate the alternative life that awaits him if he persists in his retrograde motion: “Our rash faults/ Make trivial price of serious things we Have,/ Not knowing them until we know their grave” (5.3.60–1). Whereas Marlowe uses Copernicus as an alternative to scholastic dogma, Shakespeare revisits the Ptolemaic concept of retrograde motion to propose, instead, a return to wonder. Although Helena proceeds as if there were no supreme power or system other than sheer force of will, her retrograde motions restore faith in the possibility of a miraculous reversal of fortune. Retrograde motion in All’s Well offers the opportunity to look backwards to a past that outshines the present, or to a past that the present opposes. As it provides the chance to move against the grain, so that history is not repeated even as it is invoked, All’s Well affirms the extent to which any and all backwards glances are illusory, as time moves forward, both on stage and off.

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Patricia Parker, “All’s Well That Ends Well: Increase and Multiply” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al. (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 355–90; and Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 185–228. See Bacon, “On Ambition” (1597) in The Essays or Counsels, Civill and Morall (London, 1625), 224. See also Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (London, 1593), sonnet 35; Churchyard, A pleasant discourse of court and wars (London, 1596), unpaginated; Daniel, The Poeticall Essays of Samuel Daniel (London, 1599), 95; Drayton, Matilda: The faire and chaste daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater (London, 1594), E2v; Greene, Greenes neuer too late. Or, A powder of experience (London, 1590), 9; Harvey’s Pierce’s Supererogation (London, 1593), 112; A new letter of notable contents (London, 1593), B2v. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (NY: Oxford University Press, 1971), 349. For a fascinating discussion of the relationship between Hamlet and All’s Well, see Alexander Leggatt, “In the Shadow of Hamlet: Comedy and Death in All’s Well That Ends Well” in Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 231–42. See also Leggatt, “Introduction,” All’s Well That Ends Well, ed. Russell Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7. Susan Snyder, “Naming Names in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1992), 272–77.

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All’s Well, That Ends Well For further discussion see Snyder, “Naming Names,” and my article, “Dido Queen of England” ELH, 71 (2006), 31–59. Sir Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 95–108. Snyder, “Naming Names.” The goddess Diana also makes an appearance in Pericles, reuniting Pericles and Marina with Thaisa. For a different reading of this passage, which emphasizes male anxiety about Helena’s medical powers, see Harry Berger, Jr. “Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Ethical Discourses” in Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 288–334, esp. 288–9.

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Performing Woman Female theatricality in All’s Well, That Ends Well KENT R. LEHNHOF

Because the professional acting companies in Renaissance England did not generally include female actors, it is common to exclude women from considerations of early modern theatricality. A recent collection of essays edited by Pamela Brown and Peter Parolin, however, demonstrates how rewarding it can be to counteract this critical oversight and investigate instances of early modern female performance. In her contribution to the collection, Bella Mirabella focuses on the parts women played in the medicine shows of the mountebanks or ciarlatani who peddled popular cures and folk remedies throughout England and Italy. While women were not usually the leading figures, Mirabella contends that they were, nonetheless, “crucial members of these troupes, acting as performers and healers and often responsible for the very success of these medicine shows.”1 In what follows, I will argue that Mirabella’s work recreates an important context for reading All’s Well. The challenging character of Helena—the wandering “Doctor She” whose highly theatrical cures ambiguously arouse both faith and skepticism, anxiety and desire—is perhaps best understood as an onstage enactment of this other onstage identity, the “Quacking Dalilah” or female mountebank.2 As the play’s principal performer and healer, Helena is largely responsible for whatever successes this notoriously problematic comedy achieves (see Figure 6.1). The connection between stage-plays and mountebank shows in Renaissance Europe was uncannily close. Each was a dramatic spectacle, offering to its audience similar sorts of pleasures. In addition to oils and ointments, mountebanks routinely trafficked in such comedic staples as music, dance, witty wordplay, bawdy humor, and erotic titillation, using these performative components to attract customers and encourage purchases. Sometimes they even offered comedy itself. In his description of the daily routine of Italian mountebanks, Domenico Ottonelli reports

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111 Figure 6.1 Helena cures the King, Purchase Repertory, 2005, David Bassuk (director). Diana Hoyt (Helena), Shane Stokes (King).

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that the head charlatan customarily concluded his sales for the day by crying “Bring on the comedy! Let the comedy begin!” In response to this call, “the boxes and trunks are packed, the bench changed into a scene, every charlatan becomes a comedian, and there begins a performance that will last around two hours, filling the people with laughter and delight.”3 The continuity between charlatans and comedians established in Ottonelli’s account is corroborated by early modern usage; Renaissance terminology does not discriminate between these various professions. As Peter Burke observes, the Italian word ciarlatano “might mean a hawker of medicines or a street actor.” Similarly, a person identified as a “player” in early modern England “might play instruments, play a part, play the fool, or all of these.” According to Burke, several mountebanks inhabited all of these possible positions, alternating the role of stage-doctor with that of street-doctor, performing in the public theaters as well as pitching in the city plazas.4 William Eamon speculates that the irony of this doubling was deliberate, intended to contrast the alienating erudition of the formally trained physician with the fast-acting, practical knowledge of the folk healer. By ironically spouting on stage “the physician’s elegant but meaningless prattle,” the mountebank could confirm the widespread assumption that “the empiric/charlatan was more deeply connected to the social realities of the people than the official Galenic physician, whose humoral theories were

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far removed from the rules and beliefs by which most of his patients lived.” The doubling of dramatic roles enabled the mountebank to advertise the immediacy of his experiential science, for “then as now, the people wanted action, not an intellectual understanding of their ailments’ causes.”5 This opposition between action and understanding is one that Shakespeare takes pains to establish in the opening scenes of All’s Well, where the numerous discussions of the King’s disease revolve around the inefficacy of his royal physicians. In the first of these conversations, Lafew tells the Countess that the King has lost confidence in their useless sophistication: “He hath abandoned his physicians, madam, under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hope, and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time” (1.1.12–5). It is not just the King, however, who has concluded that his doctors cannot help him. They have acknowledged their own insufficiency. As the countess reports: “The schools, / Embowelled of their doctrine, have left off / The danger to itself” (1.3.225–7). The failings of these royal physicians differ markedly from the marvelous skill of Helena’s father, rooted neither in formal training nor professional affiliation. Whereas the King’s doctors lay claim to the science “both of Galen and Paracelsus,” Gerard de Narbonne has his learning from “manifest experience” (2.3.11, 1.3.218). As the various accounts in the text indicate, he is an accomplished folk healer rather than an accredited physician, and his medicinal art—comprised of herbal remedies rather than interventional surgeries or purgative programs—is of a piece with that practiced by Renaissance quacksalvers. These connections become even more evident when Helena is put to the task of persuading the King to try her father’s cure. In a speech that plays out like a medicine show harangue, Helena invokes the legendary fame of her father as a way to authorize herself and extol the virtues of her medicine. After announcing that “Gerard de Narbonne was my father,” Helena tells the time-worn tale of a reverend sage whose lifelong pursuit of knowledge culminates in the discovery of a powerful secret remedy that he bequeaths to her on his deathbed. Spurred by selflessness, Helena offers her listener the opportunity to avail himself of this priceless potion, which just happens to be the precise thing to cure his present ailment (2.1.101–12). As she proclaims herself to be the sole beneficiary of Gerard de Narbonne’s legacy of learning, Helena presents herself as a second-generation healer, preserving and practicing the expertise of her accomplished father. In so doing, she aligns herself with a number of actual early modern female mountebanks. Clarissa Ferranti, for example, inherited from her husband the formula for his famous “orvietan” remedy and used it to fuel her own successful performance career spanning several decades and two additional marriages.6 Isabella Fontana similarly maintained control over

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her deceased husband’s curative, securing patents authorizing her as its sole distiller and dispenser. Upon her death, these patents passed to a number of other women, including one who managed the fabled medicine with such aplomb that the Senate of Bologna not only renewed her exclusive patent but also effusively praised her empirical skill.7 Helena’s tale of an inherited remedy, then, rehearses a recognizable chain of events, a scenario that played itself out in the workshops and on the scaffolds of numerous early modern women mountebanks. The manner in which Helena is introduced to the King perhaps furthers her association with the world of women mountebanks. When Helena arrives at court, she wears a disguise that seems to have prevented Lafew from recognizing her as the girl he had earlier met in Roussillon. The old lord never refers to her by name, nor does he allude to her highly regarded father when attempting to persuade the King to put himself in Helena’s hands. Because the fame of Gerard de Narbonne would indubitably have advanced his cause, Lafew’s failure to leverage the respected reputation of Helena’s father implies that he is unaware that the anonymous “Doctor She” he is recommending to the King is, in fact, the daughter of that gifted physician (2.1.77). These suspicions are confirmed when Helena, having cast off her disguise, re-enters with the rejuvenated King. Lafew and Parolles are alike taken aback to discover the identity of the woman accompanying their lord. An astonished Parolles interjects: “Mort du vinaigre, is not this Helena?” and Lafew’s reply registers equal surprise: “Fore God, I think so” (2.3.42–3). Lafew’s ignorance as to Helena’s identity raises interesting questions about his comportment. What would have prompted the aged advisor to present an unknown female healer to the King, and where would he have found such a woman in the first place? According to his own report, Lafew brings Helena because of something he has seen. “I have seen a medicine,” he says by way of explanation, “That’s able to breathe life into a stone” (2.1.72). Lafew’s claim to have seen the virtues of Helena’s medicine, together with his ignorance as to her identity, would seem to point to a public medicine show, where remedies were spectacularly exhibited by empirics whose actual identities were shrouded beneath stage personas. Lafew, in short, quite possibly saw a medicine show so impressive that he was moved to seek out the female mountebank and procure her services for the King. This highly speculative assessment perhaps demands an undue amount of inference on the part of the audience, but Helena’s connection to the profession of the ciarlatani does not depend upon a shadowy back history that may or may not place her on a public scaffold, performing for a crowd that includes an appreciative Lafew. To be sure, there is no need for the playtext to insist upon the parallels between Helena and her folk-healing

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counterparts, for empirical medicine was identified so strongly with women as to automatically implicate any female healer in its practice. For example, when Daniel Turner takes it upon himself to defend “the noble art of chyrurgery” from the incursions of quacks, he presumes physicians to be men and empirics to be women. His assumptions rather accurately reflect the social reality of Renaissance Europe. Modern historians concur that women made up a majority of early modern folk healers. To be sure, popular medicine was the only kind women could practice because they were barred from attending the universities where Galenic physicians were trained and credentialed. In his text, folk medicine figures as a fundamentally female craft, the work of “petticoat pretenders.” Decrying the ubiquity and influence of these female charlatans, Turner laments that the city of London is so overrun with “ignorant Women . . . who take upon them to practise both in Physick and Chyrurgery, that [there is] scarce a Street, Lane, Court, Alley, or other Building therein, which remains unfurnish’d.” Should you become wounded or infected, Turner advises, “you shall not walk far before you meet with some bawdy Doctress ready to entertain you, and administer to your Infirmities, be they never so obscene.”8 Turner’s accusations—routine for the Renaissance—reveal many of the fears and anxieties aroused by the figure of the female mountebank. His insinuation that female empirics supplement their sham medicines with forbidden sexual favors expresses a standard Renaissance distrust of “professional” women, particularly those who expose their bodies and abilities to strange men by way of public display. The connection between female theatricality and female sexuality can be seen in any number of early modern texts. On this count, Thomas Coryat’s Crudities might be considered representative. As Ann Rosalind Jones observes, Coryat’s lengthy description of Venetian actresses leads directly to a description of the city’s famous courtesans. The seamless transition from “actress” to “prostitute” evinces what Jones terms “a symptomatic association of ideas” in the Renaissance imagination.9 Early modern authors and orators regularly equate a woman’s willingness to perform dramatic roles with a willingness to perform sexual ones. Such an understanding suffuses early modern descriptions of female mountebanks. When Paolo Vinta anatomizes the makeup of mountebank companies, he uniformly categorizes the female cast members as “dishonest and lascivious women.” Analogous allegations of impropriety and promiscuity inform virtually all of the Renaissance references to women working in medicine shows. Tomasso Garzoni describes the female acrobat in the troupe of “Il Toscano,” for instance, as a “tumbling whore . . . [who] elicits a strange desire in the people with her lascivious graces.” Platter indicates that these medicine show actresses not only aroused erotic urges but also arranged to satisfy them. He claims that the women who transacted the money-ointment exchanges

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at a performance he attended in 1598 often “added a little note to the tin, detailing where they could be met, and at what hour.”10 It is the imagined proximity of prostitution and performance that powers Corvino’s fury upon finding his wife with the charlatan below her window in Jonson’s Volpone. Corvino is convinced that Celia has whored herself by participating in the mountebank’s performance. He accuses her of utilizing the show to summon a crowd of “hot spectators” and skillfully firing their lust through artful displays of feminine grace.11 Peter Parolin perceptively recognizes that what truly terrifies Corvino is not the thought that Celia will become a victim of Volpone’s seductive theatricality but rather that she will become a practitioner of it. Corvino’s rage peaks when he considers that Celia might actually want to imitate the montimbanco by doing some “mounting” of her own: “I think you’d rather mount? Would you not mount? / Why, if you’ll mount, you may; yes truly, you may— / And so you may be seen down to th’ foot” (2.5.18–20). The worst of Corvino’s jealous fears constellate around “mounting.” As Parolin explains, the idea represents “the complex convergence of Celia’s possible desires: her desire to mount the stage theatrically; her desire to mount a lover sexually; and her desire to rise in the world, to exchange her submissive status for greater power.”12 The various transgressions through which women potentially imperil civic, domestic, and divine order come together in the outrageous act of mounting. Thus, the female charlatan serves as the paradigmatic example of intractable, appetitive femininity. Of course, that which alarms Corvino in connection with Celia is the very thing that disturbs critics in connection with Helena. Shakespeare’s heroine enacts all of the dangerous desires—theatrical deception, sexual aggression, and social ambition—that Corvino imputes to his wife. For this reason, it is perhaps not coincidental that the idea of “mounting” surfaces in Helena’s very first soliloquy. Acknowledging the impropriety of her love for Bertram, she refers to it as an affection that has culpably climbed higher than it ought: “What power is it,” she complains, “which mounts my love so high, / That makes me see and cannot feed mine eye?” (1.1.216–7). As she blames her love for seeking to “mount” where and what it should not, Helena associates her transgressive affection with the various forms of illicit female agency that “complexly converge” in the actions of the female mountebank. Connecting Helena to the female charlatans of Renaissance Europe illuminates much that makes her both effective and unsettling as a healer in Shakespeare’s play. To view Helena as a mountebank, for instance, is to account in part for the simultaneity of skepticism and hope surrounding her character and her cures. In the king’s assessment, Helena is a “sweet practiser” (2.1.185). The lexical ambiguity of the label, uncertainly identifying Helena as one who practices medicine as well as one who practices

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fraud, perfectly expresses the ambiguities of her character. She is at one and the same time a divine agent dispensing heavenly cures and a scheming woman duplicitously pursuing her own interests. Such a conflicted characterization accords with Renaissance reactions to real ciarlatani. For example, Fynes Moryson’s assessment of the Italian mountebanks involves both admiration and accusation. “Many of them have some very good secrets,” he writes, “but generally they are all cheaters.”13 As he dramatizes the exploits of that quintessential cheater, Volpone, Jonson encourages us to join the cynical Sir Peregrine in laughing at Sir Politic’s naive belief that mountebanks are “the only knowing men of Europe” (2.2.9). As Mirabella points out, though, Peregrine’s counterclaim that charlatans are “most lewd impostors” stands in uneasy relation to the widespread enthusiasm of the large crowd that runs after Volpone (2.2.14).14 The theatrical delights of the medicine show, paired with persistent hopes for real healing, appear sufficient in many cases to cause consumers and spectators to overlook their rational doubts and embrace instead a willful credulity. This willing suspension of disbelief surely figures into the popularity of early modern mountebanks, a popularity that seems to contradict the strong likelihood that the virtues they claimed for their medicines matched up rather poorly with their patrons’ experiences. Buyers must have met with disappointment when applying pomades that were supposed to cement the teeth in the gums, cure the pox and the plague, restore lost maidenheads, or recover injuries up to and including decapitation. In many ways, the plight of these disillusioned patrons parallels that of the audience of Shakespeare’s play. In each instance, the consumer is confronted with a troubling disparity between expectation and outcome. When Helena’s healing of Bertram fails to fulfill our ideas about what such a cure should properly look like, some are prompted to dismiss her as a failure. Refusing to see her as a successful comedic heroine, Shakespeare’s more cynical spectators suggest that she is actually—to use Moryson’s epithet—nothing more than a cheater. Other viewers, however, are persuaded to believe (either on the basis of the pleasure they derive from her performance or on the basis of their optimistic hopes for happiness) that Helena has miraculously cured Bertram. The direct relationship between Helena’s success as a healer and her success as a heroine reveals the fundamental affinities between medicine and performance, an affinity vividly illustrated in the practices of the Renaissance mountebank. The success of the mountebank, like that of the playmaker, is a highly subjective affair, depending upon a certain readiness to subsume doubt and distrust beneath theatrical pleasure and the promise of human improvement. To view Helena as a female mountebank or “bawdy Doctress” is also to begin to make sense of the strangely erotic nature of her characterization

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and comportment in the court of the King. The amorous energy that she both excites and exploits has close ties to what Henke has called the “undercurrent of sexual thrill [that] enlivens mountebank performance.”15 Lafew sets the stage for Helena’s oddly erotic intervention when he introduces her in a speech riddled with obscene innuendo. Insistently alluding to male genital arousal, Lafew talks of testicular “stones” and “rocks” that have been inflamed with “sprightly fire,” as well as phallic “Pépins” and “pens” that have been erected or “raised” so as to write “lovelines.” “I have seen a medicine,” he crows, “That’s able to breathe life into a stone, / Quicken a rock,” and “whose simple touch / Is powerful to araise King Pépin, nay, / To give great Charlemagne a pen in’s hand.” The ribaldry culminates in Lafew’s energetic declaration: “Nay, I’ll fit you, / And not be all day neither” (2.1.70–8, 90–1). On the heels of so much priapic double-entendre, Lafew’s exclamation starts to sound like an offer to provide a receptive sexual partner, one that is fit (suitable) to fit (accommodate) the sexual desires and sexual organ of the King. When the King refers to that with which Lafew wants to fit him as a “special nothing” (“Thus he his special nothing ever prologues” [2.1.91]), he strengthens the obscene undertones, for “nothing” is common Renaissance slang for “vagina.” As the person who regularly provides the King with “special nothings,” Lafew seems to serve as the royal pander. It is a role he explicitly embraces upon exiting the stage: “I am Cressid’s uncle, / That dare leave two together. Fare you well” (2.1.96–97). The unmistakable allusion portrays the ensuing encounter as an act of sexual transgression in which Helena plays the part of the prostitute. As if these indicators were insufficient, Shakespeare deviates from his source text in such a way as to signal the sexual nature of the King’s cure. Although Helena’s counterpart in Boccaccio is to be burned at the stake if she fails to heal the King, Helena offers to endure instead the punishment of a prostitute. She hazards her “maiden’s name” on the success of her simple, proposing to be publicly taxed with “impudence” and “a strumpet’s boldness” should the King stay sick (2.1.171–2). In spite of Helena’s confidence, the King is initially reluctant to interact with his curing Cressida. He avows an unwillingness “to prostitute our past-cure malady / To empirics” (2.1.121–2). As the King’s sexually resonant term vacillates between the doubled discourses of deviant sexuality (prostitution) and unorthodox medicine (empirical physic), it brings Helena’s sexual role into alignment with her curative role. This convergence of sex and cure encourages us to connect the King’s restorative therapy with Bertram’s. In short, Helena’s healing of the King is implicitly sexualized so as to prefigure her explicitly sexual healing of Bertram. By associating these two treatments, the drama endeavors to verify Bertram’s dubious recovery by linking it to the dramatically demonstrable recovery of the King. But while the conflation of healing

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and having sex points proleptically toward Bertram and the bed-trick, it also points quite concertedly toward the early modern mountebank and the medicine show. Sex and medicine commonly combine in the performances of the ciarlatani. Mountebanks often promised to remedy sexual difficulties, including greensickness, impotence, barrenness, and syphilis. When singing the praises of their master’s oil, for instance, Volpone’s servants cheekily promise that the medicine will give men the capacity to “do the act [that] your mistress pleases” (2.2.207). The sexual subject matter that figures prominently into the promises of the charlatans similarly suffuses their prescriptions. Often, arousal is not only an effect of the mountebank’s oil but also a crucial component in its application. For instance, the English mountebank Thomas Rands claimed that his potion could alleviate all manner of aches—provided it was rubbed into the afflicted area by a nubile young girl: “Then, here is my Unguentum Cataphon. . . . [B]y the Application of this my Medicating Unguent, being properly us’d by Friction, and by the Hand of a Maid of Fifteen, you need not doubt a Cure, my Life to an Apple-Pye.”16 In such cases, it would seem that recovery results from a treatment at least as sexual as medicinal. The healing of the King in All’s Well is similarly ambivalent. This ambivalence is increased by the fact that the cure takes place offstage. Why would Shakespeare decline to represent the event? Why not capitalize in high theatrical fashion on the drama of human recovery, the remarkable moment when a lame and languishing king leaps from his litter? Shakespeare seems to omit the episode in order to allow it to assume a significance surpassing the relatively mundane operation of an herbal remedy. To be sure, the ballad commemorating the cure—“A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor”—transforms the invisible event into a kind of theophany, a metaphysical miracle that cannot be played for human eyes (2.3.22–23). The bawdy business preceding the cure, however, guides our collective imagination in another direction as well. When the King reappears after his “raising,” “lustier” than a dolphin and leading Helena in a quick-paced coranto (2.3.111, 27, 42), we are perhaps intended to wonder whether his rejuvenation results from Gerard de Narbonne’s receipt or rather from the manner of its administration, quite possibly “by Friction, and by the Hand of a Maid.”17 The notoriously carnal nature of mountebank physic was the source of contempt among its early modern critics. Gianna Pomata reports that the medical elite of Renaissance Europe strenuously endeavored to distinguish their “intellectual” mode of medicine from the grossly corporeal methods of apothecaries, surgeons, and mountebanks. Whereas physicians described themselves as drawing upon erudition to combat disease, learnedly discerning pathologies and prescribing oral medicines that worked internally

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and invisibly, mountebanks and other populist practitioners were said to intervene simplistically and superficially, haphazardly applying external ointments. Thus, Paolo Zacchia boasts that the physician “treats the body by using his intellect, not his body.” Lesser medical practitioners, on the other hand, use their hands rather than their minds. Empirics and barbers, Zacchia sniffs, “cure the body with the body.” Margaret Pelling finds a similar dynamic in Renaissance England. Pointing to “the long resistance of English physicians to contact with the body,” she observes that early modern English physicians “adopted a pose of aloofness, not touching the body of the patient but standing back from the bedside, or even giving an opinion from a distance, through an intermediary.” Pelling sees this posturing as an attempt to elevate the status of the medical profession. By ostentatiously avoiding the body, physicians tried to foreclose comparisons between medicine and those less noble offices with which it bears unsettling similarities, namely domestic service and manual labor.18 It is evident that female participation in a profession aiming to “cure the body with the body” is especially alarming in a culture committed to policing and preserving female chastity. This alarm only intensifies when these women—courtesan-like—advertise and enact their corporeal craft through theatrical display. Sexual scandal, however, is only part of the problem. Indeed, Zacchia is less concerned with female chastity than with male power, particularly the professional authority of male physicians. Similarly, Parolin contends that apprehensions about the sexuality of female stage actors only partially manifest much larger fears, namely the worry that female theatricality undermines masculine privilege by affording women too much agency. Because dramatic performance grants women access to forms of self-fashioning customarily reserved for men, Parolin writes, female theatricality calls into question cultural assumptions about male autonomy and female subservience: The actress figure forces the culture to rethink the conventional gendering of performance and theatricality. In the professional theater, the actress disrupts a previously all-male domain; in society, the actress . . . lays claim to the power of autonomous self-fashioning that male figures sought to reserve for themselves. . . . In this way, the actress figure reveals performance as no longer a field for the simple display of autonomous male self-fashioning but as a field of competition in which women may challenge masculine prerogatives and men may consequently feel effeminized.19

Although Parolin refers primarily to women play actors, the situation that he specifies generalizes to other instances of female theatricality, including that of the female mountebank. Like the professional actress, the female

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mountebank intrudes into an arena typically reserved for men. Establishing herself as a rival to the all-male College of Physicians, the female charlatan threatens to outperform men and steal from them their status. As the female mountebank asserts her authority and exhibits her abilities in the medicine show, she uses the power of performance to take control of the construction of her own person. Her subversive histrionics ally her with other female actors with whom she is frequently compared, such as the prostitute and the professional player, because all of these women seize a certain amount of self-determination through theatrical performance. Helena, variously resembling the mountebank, the stage-player, and the prostitute, demonstrates the convergence of all these forms of transgressive female theatricality (see Figure 1.1, p. xx). Performing as a theatrical actor (one who creates dramatic illusion), she becomes a social actor (one who takes action in the world), and consequently exemplifies the dangers of female theatricality. Her performances invariably allow her independence and power, giving her a degree of agency typically reserved for men. This dramatic self-empowerment demonstrates the link between theatricality and agency while also verifying the patriarchal anxieties to which Parolin alludes when discussing Renaissance resistance to professional actresses. As Parolin explains, English authors feared female players because of the possibility that they could displace men and usurp their privileges: “Women’s access to various forms of performance suggests that male performers may no longer be able to hold the stage alone. In theory, men may find their performances outdone and their identities shaped by women whose theatrical skills exceed their own.”20 This, of course, is precisely what happens in All’s Well. Bertram is bested by a woman more adept at acting than he, and she exploits her superior theatrical skill to shape his identity as well as his destiny. But Bertram is not alone; the King similarly surrenders to Helena his masculine prerogative. Her dramatic interventions leave both men lacking. Their loss of masculine self-sufficiency is represented by the transfer of a pair of precious rings. As Helena acquires these tokens of patriarchal privilege, she seizes for herself the masculine capacity for subjective self-determination. Wielding what passes in the play for the Phallus, Helena dictates outcomes. Although she properly parlays her performative power into a submissive place within the marital and maternal roles that ostensibly uphold patriarchy, Helena’s actions repeatedly give her control over men and, in so doing, shake patriarchy at its foundation. Her histrionic behavior, like that of the female charlatan and female stage actor, “forces a recognition of the fact that limitless male autonomy is a myth.”21 But limitless male autonomy is not the only myth exposed by Helena’s theatricality. As McCandless explains in his insightful reading of the play, Helena’s various performances confound the categories of “man” and

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“woman”—the very fact of sex itself. He comes to this conclusion by considering Helena’s inherent doubleness, her propensity to oscillate erratically between “feminine” postures of self-abasing passivity and “masculine” moments of self-asserting activity. McCandless provocatively proposes that this dynamic could be staged in modern productions by assigning two actors to the part: a woman to perform the passages when Helena displays a desiring independence, and a man in drag to enact the “hyperfeminine” episodes when Helena adopts an idealized posture of meekness and subservience. Such a staging, of course, recapitulates some of the gender confusion that would have characterized early modern productions, in which the part of Helena would have been played by a boy actor. The Renaissance “boy in drag”—like McCandless’s man in drag—complicates the concept of stable sexual identity by implying that masculinity and femininity are a function of costume, comportment, and custom.22 The point of McCandless’s staging would not be to stamp one of these subjective positions as “true” while stigmatizing the other as a normative stereotype from which Helena cannot escape or as a strategic façade behind which she cannily conceals her real intentions and identity. Rather, the point would be to show how Helena’s “masculinity” and “femininity” are equally predicated upon performance and to emphasize how her inconsistent performance of these respective roles perturbs ideas of stable sexual identities grounded in objective reality. McCandless argues that Helena’s “vexed and ungainly impersonations” lay bare the theatricality of gender by failing to veil it in the gauze of credibility that comes from consistency. As Judith Butler affirms: “The action of gender requires a performance that is repeated.” It is through repetition that the performance of gender becomes persuasive and is thereby able to obscure its genesis in a set of cultural fictions. Because Helena’s inconstant enactment of masculinity and femininity falls short on this count, it reveals that which is regularly concealed: the social constructedness of gender. In sum, Helena’s perplexing performance(s) explode the idea of inherent sexual difference.23 Thus, Helena’s theatricality can be seen to upset many of the bedrock beliefs about the source and stability of early modern identity. Her histrionics not only blur the lines between medicine and miracle, between lawfulness and illicitness, between chastity and promiscuity, but also between “man” and “woman.” Her performance, in short, translocates everything into the realm of pure play. She shows medicine, morality, and gender to be so just so many manifestations of the same performative mode. In this way, Helena’s theatricality authenticates early modern anxieties about performing women. The part she plays in All’s Well offers ample legitimation for the fear that female theatricality—whether in bedrooms, playhouses, or public piazzas—is incorrigibly transgressive. When women “mount,” they tend to dismount the structures of patriarchy.

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Bella Mirabella, “‘Quacking Delilahs’: Female Mountebanks in Early Modern England and Italy,” Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the AllMale Stage, ed. Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (London: Ashgate, 2005). I am grateful to Bella Mirabella for sharing her work with me. Richard Whitlock, Zootomia, or, Observations on the Present Manners of the English (London, 1653), 61. Quoted in William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 239. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 94–95. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 241. Jonathan Marks, “The Charlatans of the Pont-Neuf,” Theatre Research International, 23 (1998), 137. Gianna Pomata, “Practicing between Earth and Heaven: Women Healers in Seventeenth-Century Bologna,” Dynamis, 19 (1999), 119–20. Daniel Turner, Apologia Chyrurgica, A Vindication of the Noble Art of Chyrurgery (London: 1695), 106–07. Ann Rosalind Jones, “Italians and Others: Venice and the Irish in Coryat’s Crudities and The White Devil,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 18 (1987), 104. Quoted in Robert Henke, “The Italian Mountebank and the Commedia dell’Arte,” Theatre Survey, 38 (1997), 6, 17; M. A. Katritzky, “Was Commedia dell’arte Performed by Mountebanks?: Album amicorum Illustrations and Thomas Platter’s Description of 1598,” Theatre Research International, 23 (1998), 114. Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Brian Parker and David Bevington, Revels Student ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 2.5.3–10. Peter Parolin, “ ‘A Strange Fury Entered My House’: Italian Actresses and Female Performance in Volpone,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 29 (1998), 115. Quoted in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 237. Mirabella, 94. Henke, 5. G. D., The Harangues or Speeches of Several Famous Mountebanks in Town and Country (London, 1700), 2–3. The embarrassingly inelegant nature of the King’s ailment, which Lafew admits with chagrin is “a fistula” (1.1.30), likely locates the malady in the lower body, where Helena’s medical meddling—with or without friction—would suggest illicit sexual intimacy. The diagnosis also identifies the King’s sickness with common, quotidian problems that were the particular province of early modern charlatans. Pomata, “Practicing between Earth and Heaven,” 123. Margaret Pelling, “Compromised by Gender: The Role of the Male Medical Practitioner in Early Modern England,” The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion, and Gender in England and the Netherlands, 1450–1800, ed. Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1996), 107.

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“To make the ‘not’ eternal” Female eloquence and patriarchal authority in All’s Well, That Ends Well ELLEN BELTON

Feminist readings of English Renaissance drama invite us to understand the feminine in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as “a principle of Otherness,” which is “always something unlike and external to the Self, who is male.”1 In particular, the Renaissance assumption that language itself is fundamentally masculine would appear to foreclose the possibility that the speech acts of women can ever do more than ratify the superior verbal authority of men. At the same time, as Elizabeth Harvey has shown in her discussion of appropriations of female voices by male authors in non-dramatic English texts, a significant phenomenon in classical and Renaissance literature is the production of texts that “although written by male authors . . . are voiced by female characters in a way that seems either to erase the gender of the authorial voice or to thematize the transvestitism of this process.” This phenomenon, which Harvey calls “transvestite ventriloquism,” “accentuates the issues of gender, voice, and authorial property in ways that illuminate . . . Renaissance conceptions of language and their relation to the gendered subject.”2 In this discussion, I propose to explore the way in which Shakespeare constructs a heroine whose eloquence surpasses that of the male characters and who deploys that eloquence in order to establish her own and, by extension, other women’s discursive authority. In doing so, I will also be posing the riddle of a male author’s privileging a female voice as a comedic strategy. In Shakespearean tragedy, women who contest assumptions about masculine control of discourse (e.g., Tamora in Titus Andronicus, Goneril and Regan, Lady Macbeth) are demonized and punished for this behavior; ironically, of course, those who most closely approximate the conventional model of feminine obedience and verbal restraint (e.g., Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona) are often treated at least as badly by the patriarchal society they have been trying to propitiate. In Shakespeare’s mature comedies,

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however, the heroines, though claiming to operate within the limits of patriarchal discourse, actually deploy that discourse in ways that interrogate the signifying practices of patriarchal culture. While genuflecting before patriarchal values, Shakespeare’s comic heroines explicitly question, ridicule, or circumvent those values, clearing for themselves a space at center stage where they can use their own verbal and interpersonal skills to achieve a measure of autonomy and personal fulfillment. Catherine Belsey makes this point by asserting that “Shakespearean comedy can be read as disrupting sexual difference, calling in question that set of relations between terms which proposes as inevitable an antithesis between masculine and feminine, men and women.”3 Throughout these plays, the speech acts of women press against and threaten to escape from the limits set by men, referring, it appears, to an idea of the gendered self and its relationship to discourse that subverts the very notion of sexual difference and therefore of masculine discursive hegemony. A particularly striking, even extreme, example of this phenomenon is the case of Helena. Carolyn Asp observes that “singular among the plays in Shakespeare’s canon, All’s Well, That Ends Well is written out of the history of the female subject and this history is the history of her desire.”4 Helena uses language to compel belief in her own worth and ultimately to propose a new form of verbal authority, one that reacts with but also reformulates the conventional terms of presumptively masculine discourse. Helena’s relationship with the patriarchal system is mapped out on the one hand by the dominant ideology concerning male/female roles and on the other by impulses towards the subversion of that ideology, a renegotiation of the letter of patriarchal law in the spirit of a feminized rewriting. Patricia Parker argues that in many scenes in Shakespeare “it is often the logic of rhetoric, or of a particular rhetorical turn, rather than an anachronistic psychologic, which is being dramatized.”5 Parker reads All’s Well as a play that relies on “extension and delay”—both verbal and dramatic—as “a dilative means to a patriarchal end.” My position is that the impulse towards dilation in this play is complemented by a strategy of verbal doubling and crossing based on the rhetorical trope known as chiasmus, “a type of rhetorical balance in which the second part is syntactically balanced against the first but with the parts reversed.”6 Because of the linearity and prescriptive structure of English syntax, as opposed to the more malleable syntax and inflected grammar of Greek and Latin, uses of this figure by writers of English often require a wrenching or reversal of normal sentence structure and word order. This trope provides a means of understanding both the logic of certain formal attempts at persuasion at critical points in the play and the underlying dramatic structure of the play itself.7 In All’s Well, masculine speech is frequently characterized by antithetical constructions in which notions of masculine plenitude, power and

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worth are contrasted with feminine deficiency, powerlessness and worthlessness. Helena challenges these oppositions through syntactical and semantic strategies that replace notions of female incompleteness with images and rhetorical structures that evoke circularity, wholeness, and generativity. She establishes her own discursive authority by demonstrating her mastery of imagery, rhetoric, and poetic form. Her doubling or splitting of phrases and syntactical units functions not merely to draw out or reiterate meaning but to revise it. The first illustration of Helena’s rhetorical skill that I want to discuss is the crucial exchange in 2.1 where Helena overcomes the King’s resistance and not only convinces him to let her try her skill as a physician, but persuades him that she can succeed in curing him. Since we never see her actually ministering to the King as “Doctor She,” the skill that she must rely on in this scene is not that of the physician but of the orator. The mysterious/mystical “receipt” bequeathed to Helena by her father is in this scene only a name, an idea; Helena’s challenge is to create in the King’s mind a belief in the connection between the name and the thing it signifies and moreover to establish a correspondence between the thing it signifies and herself. In the course of the sentence in which Lafew first speaks of Helena to the King, Helena’s “medicine” is metonymically transformed into Helena herself. It is this metonymy that Helena sets out to operationalize. The formality of the language in this dialogue and the use of couplets beginning at 1.122 have occasioned much discussion and even discomfort on the part of critics. G. K. Hunter, for example, comments on what he sees as “the peculiarly irritating quality in many of the couplet passages” in the play and says of 2.1.148–57 in particular that “there is an appearance here of neat rhetorical balance within couplets of simple construction; but the intellectual complexity of the antitheses is such that the neatness of structure is felt as cramping and frustrating.” He also says, however, that the dialogue “assumes an incantatory, liturgical tone, which may not please those in search of anthology ‘beauties’, but which is eminently appropriate to the dramatic context.” Clifford Leech says that although the use of formal verse “confers a ritual quality on the drama,” it is “odd that the minister of grace should speak at times with the accent of the PlayerQueen.”8 And Howard C. Cole is sharply critical of the stilted meter and gnomic couplets in the exchange: “Whether we call this inflated stuff ‘cloudy incantation’ or ‘priestly puffery,’ matter and meter both work toward a high-comic treatment of divine direction.” Cole also sees as relevant to this scene the dispute between physicians who followed Galen and those who followed Paracelsus: “The very terms Helena uses to describe her father’s prescriptions . . . underline several commonplaces of Paracelsian theory as opposed to the Galenist.” Still, “it is difficult to know whether we should

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see in [Helena’s] appeal to ‘heaven, not me’ the essence of Paracelsian faith and humility or the height of Paracelsian arrogance, bombast, and hypocrisy.”9 If, however, we read this scene not as liturgy or incantation but as oratorical contest, the tightness and artificiality of its construction, like the extended use of couplets, can be understood as appropriate to the seriousness of the occasion, the importance of what is at stake, and the concomitant needed to regulate the meaning and impact of every word. The King’s first couplet lays out the terms of the debate and introduces the rhetorical challenge that Helena must overcome. The King insists that he cannot put his trust in “empirics” or “dissever so/ Our great self and our credit, to esteem/ A senseless help, when help past sense we deem” (122–24). The doubling/division between the King’s “self” and his “credit” in 1.123 is repeated in the doubling/division between “senseless help” and “help past sense” in the second line of the couplet. These lines establish the seemingly unbridgeable distance between the “great” King and the slight/insignificant (“senseless”) Helena. But the second line introduces a secondary effect, which provides Helena with a subtle verbal clue as to how to shape her argument. In this instance of chiasmus, the two halves of the line mirror one another in such a way that the second iteration (“help past sense”) offers an opportunity to literally reflect back on the meaning of the first. Perhaps the oxymoronic “senseless help” can actually be understood as a paradox, and perhaps “help past sense” can be interpreted not as the unreasonable expectation of help but as the possibility of help that cannot be comprehended by human reason. The King’s initial response to Helena’s claim that she has a “receipt” of her father’s that can cure his illness is a polite but insistent refusal of her assistance. The language of this rejection further demonstrates the assumptions that Helena must challenge. The King’s unwelcome plenitude, his “full” knowledge of his illness and of the magnitude of his “peril,” is contrasted with Helena’s emptiness (“no part,” “no art”). In the final, balanced lines of this speech the King has “all” and Helena nothing (2.1.125ff). Again, however, a subsidiary meaning that contravenes the King’s stated position can be found lurking in the homophones/puns “know” and “no,” which reverse the surface meaning of the phrases by turning positives into negatives and negatives into positives. In her response, Helena picks up on this ambiguity and gives it a further twist by turning her own. The very unlikeliness of Helena’s being able to cure the King now becomes an argument for letting her try. This speech concludes with an antithesis of Helena’s own making: “Oft expectation fails, and most oft there/ Where most it promises, and oft it hits/ Where hope is coldest and despair most fits” (142–4). In the first half of this sentence a succession of intensifiers (“oft,” “most oft,” “most”) empathizes with the King’s failed expectations.

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This contrasts, however, with the second part of the sentence, where the same intensifiers are used to offer new hope. The verbs in the two halves of the sentence, “fails,” in the first half, “hits,” and “fits” in the second, also contrast, while the buried structure of superlatives and intensifiers supports the more optimistic attitude Helena is trying to promote. A substructure of positive assertions in the ostensibly pessimistic first part of the sentence suggests the possibility of a solution to the very problem the sentence describes. In subsequent speeches Helena breaks down the King’s resistance by verbally erasing her personal identity and subsuming it under an all-knowing, all-powerful, and presumptively masculine authority, first that of her dead father, then that of “Him that all things knows” (149). As the King begins to trust her, he accounts for it by attributing Helena’s eloquence to “some blessed spirit” (175), whom the King also assumes to be masculine (“His powerful sound within an organ weak” [176]). At this point in the 1980 Elijah Moshinsky BBC/TV production, Helena, who at first approaches the King with caution, touches his hand and ritualistically/shamanistically strokes his forehead. The King’s face visibly relaxes, and it appears that his cure has already begun. Helena encourages the King in his belief that she is merely the instrument (“weakest minister” [137]) of divine grace; yet the eloquence that compels the King’s belief, like the skill that actually cures him, is Helena’s own. The antithesis between affirmative and negative statements in the King’s construction of the distance between his own knowledge and Helena’s is replaced by double negatives and double affirmatives in Helena’s answers. Images of circularity, wholeness, completion and generativity reinforce her arguments. These speeches culminate in balanced lines, seemingly antithetical in structure, but in fact using antitheses to double the affirmativeness of Helena’s assertions: “But know I think, and think I know most sure,/ My art is not past power, nor you past cure” (157–8); and “Health shall live free and sickness freely die” (168). The chiastic construction of 1.157 subliminally validates the affirmation of the surface message. The “certainty and confidence” (169) that the King hears in Helena’s words are soon reflected in his own change of heart and are further reinforced by Helena’s naming the punishment she is prepared to endure should her “physic” fail.10 The verbal contest between Helena and the King is, as it turns out, only a prelude to the more difficult contest between Helena and Bertram, which occupies the second half of the play. The special challenge that Helena faces is not merely the challenge of winning Bertram by means of her powers of persuasion but of getting him to speak with her at all. The only real conversation between Bertram and Helena consists of some thirtyfive lines of dialogue (2.5.54–89) when Helena corners Bertram in order to take leave of him before obeying his command that she return home

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without him. Bertram also addresses one sentence to Helena in the first scene (1.1.73–74), in which he makes it clear that he doesn’t really see her as a person at all, merely as a servant in his mother’s household. All his other speech in Helena’s presence is addressed to others, and most frequently to the King. Even his less than half a line of repentance in Act 5 (“Both, both. O pardon!”) is ambiguously phrased (296). Is he asking Helena’s pardon or the King’s? His next speech, which is his final utterance in the play, about which I will have more to say presently, is again directed to the King and refers to Helena in the third person. Not only does Bertram show a strong aversion to speaking with Helena, but he cannot even bear to say her name; with a single exception (2.5.58), he refers to her only by means of pronouns. In the BBC/TV production Bertram’s verbal erasure of Helena’s existence is reinforced by the fact that until the final moments of the play he rarely even looks at her. Bertram’s explanation of his abrupt departure from the court and of his separation from Helena following their offstage marriage is noteworthy for its lack of meaningful explanations. “Prepar’d I was not,” he claims; his “appointments have in them a need/ Greater than shows itself at the first view/ To you that know them not” (2.5.61, 66–8). This speech appeals to an image of hidden plenitude, which, however, the audience knows to be nonexistent. Like the King, Bertram claims for himself a constellation of attributes having to do with size, fullness, significance, knowledge, and worth, while implying that Helena, by contrast, is associated with smallness, emptiness, triviality, ignorance and worthlessness. Helena acquiesces in these notions but attempts to manipulate the antitheses between Bertram’s wealth and her poverty, his value and her worthlessness, his all and her nothing to win a farewell kiss. When Bertram impatiently asks, “What would you have?” Helena replies, “Something, and scarce so much; nothing, indeed” (83), a line in which words signifying substance and positive value (“something,” “indeed”) literally enclose words signifying deficiency and negativity (“scarce,” “nothing”) mediated by another phrase implying substance (“so much”). By devaluing the kiss, that is, by characterizing it as “nothing,” Helena apparently hopes not only to diminish its significance in Bertram’s eyes but to portray it as the property of the valueless female, thus implying that it already “belongs” to her. In fact, of course, the kiss, which Bertram refuses to grant, is not valueless; it represents a symbolic consummation of the marriage, an act that would at least make ambiguous Bertram’s refusal to perform the “ministration and required office” that normally follows the marriage ceremony. Helena’s request, then, as Bertram recognizes, is full of significance. It demonstrates her awareness that the betrothal that took place in 2.3, like the marriage ceremony that took place offstage, was incomplete. In the 2005 Bassuk production, Bertram actually grants the kiss that Helena

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requests. This interesting directorial choice may have been an attempt to mitigate the frequently voiced complaint about Bertram’s snobbery and general unattractiveness as a character. Allowing Bertram to kiss Helena, even as he is about to desert her, hints at an undercurrent of repressed physical attraction, or compassion, or even affection for Helena that makes the reconciliation at the end of the play easier to believe in. In the Tresnjak production, on the other hand, Bertram is clearly tempted to kiss Helena and seems about to do so when Parolles creates a distraction and breaks the moment. Marilyn Williamson argues that the King’s forcing Bertram to marry Helena against his will is “an abuse of wardship, a sort of marriage deeply feared and much lamented by Shakespeare’s contemporaries.” Bertram’s dilemma reminds the audience of the widespread abuses of this institution, especially with regard to enforced marriage, and even more especially to marriage “with disparagement,” that is, to one who is of inferior rank. In a sense, however, the King never does succeed in forcing Bertram to marry Helena. Subha Mukherji summarizes the marriage contract in Renaissance England as having two essential components, “a word component—the expression of present and mutual consent, and a deed component—the physical act of consummation.”11 In the betrothal scene, the King asks two things of Bertram, that he “Take her by the hand/ And tell her she is thine” (2.3.172–3). Bertram, however, complies with only the first of these directions. “I take her hand,” he says (175), but refuses to speak the necessary words of consent. The King allows himself to be satisfied with this enactment of half the ritual, but in effect he hasn’t completely performed the rite of betrothal because Bertram hasn’t signaled his verbal agreement. Although we are subsequently informed that Bertram has “sworn” “before the solemn priest” in the offstage marriage ceremony (2.3.268), we can only assume that the words of consent were spoken with the serious mental reservation that could in and of itself invalidate the marriage.12 Bertram’s assurance that although he has “sworn [without explicitly naming what he has sworn to],/ I will not bed her” (268–9) makes it clear that he has no intention of consummating the marriage. The half-contracted state of this couple replicates the state of their affections and is in turn replicated in their language. The terms of the two letters Bertram sends in Act 3, one to the Countess and one to Helena (see Figure 7.1), continue to construct his relationship with Helena as a set of irreconcilable antitheses: “I have wedded her, not bedded her, and sworn to make the ‘not’ eternal”; “. . . in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never’”; “Till I have no wife I have nothing in France” (3.2.21–2, 59, 74). Helena’s task is to find a way of re-reading these letters not as flat and final rejections but as riddles that the writer is challenging her to solve. In order to accomplish this, she must undermine Bertram’s syntax and subvert his meaning,

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just as she did the King’s. The thrice repeated statement “Till I have no wife I have nothing in France” is rewritten and unriddled as “Thou shalt have none, Rossillion, none in France;/ Then hast thou all again” (3.2.101–02). Helena substitutes two independent clauses mediated by modifying phrases for the subordinate and main clauses of Bertram’s sentence, replacing the antithetical either/or construction (a construction that seems to imply Helena’s death) with a structure whose reiterated negatives lead to a double affirmation: “Then hast thou all again.” Later, by treating the apparent impossibilities in Bertram’s letter as conditions to be fulfilled (“When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, . . . and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to” [57–9]), she validates her right to call Bertram “husband,” literally embodying feminine plenitude in the face of masculine resistance. Unlike the King, who, despite his initial resistance, is soon receptive to the power of Helena’s eloquence, Bertram, as we have seen, makes a vigorous and sustained effort to foreclose the possibility of even the most superficial communication with his wife. Helena successfully resists Bertram’s attempts to erase her existence or at least to deny her independent agency through a strategy that relies on her alliances with other

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Figure 7.1 Countess and Helena with Bertram’s letter (3.2), Folger Theatre, Washington, D.C., 2003, Richard Clifford (director). Holly Twyford (Helena), Catherine Flye (Countess). Photo by Carol Pratt.

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women.13 The emotional closeness and support among the women in this play amounts almost to a shared consciousness (see Figure 7.2). The Countess guesses Helena’s secret love for Bertram even before the Steward, who has had to resort to the interesting stratagem of overhearing Helena’s offstage soliloquy, divulges it. Helena, the Widow, and Diana collectively predict how Bertram will woo (4.2.69–73) and collaborate on Diana’s scripted responses. To a degree, all the other women, but especially Diana, become Helena’s doubles or surrogates. Helena impersonates Diana in bed with Bertram, and she ventriloquizes her in her verbal exchanges with both Bertram and the King. The rhetorical strategy that Diana employs as Helena’s agent emanates from Helena’s master strategy of appropriating masculine discourse and inscribing it with new meanings. In the love debate that prepares the way for the bed trick, for example, Diana employs antithesis and repetition to counter Bertram’s arguments or wrest their meaning from him. She wins the debate by creating a chiastic reversal of the terms “ring” and “honour” so that Bertram’s assertion, “It [the ring] is an honour ‘longing to our house” (4.2.42) is transposed as “Mine honour’s such a ring;/ My chastity’s the jewel of our house” (45–46). In this reformulation, Diana reverses the

Figure 7.2 Helena and Florentine Women (3.5). Folger Theatre, Washington, D.C., 2003, Richard Clifford (director). Holly Twyford (Helena), Naomi Jacobson (Widow), Erika Sheffer (Diana), Anne Stone (Mariana). Photo by Carol Pratt.

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emphasis of Bertram’s statement in order to demonstrate that the value of her chastity outweighs that of a material object and at the same time to enforce her claim to the ring by appropriating its symbolic value as the price of her virginity. Similarly, in her confrontation with the King in Act 5, Diana produces a cloud of rhetorical confusion that can only be resolved by the apparition of the “dead,” yet pregnant, Helena. Here she challenges what the other characters, particularly Bertram, think they know with a set of paradoxical assertions that play on the commonplace notion of man and wife as one flesh (5.3.169–75). Yet the chiastic paradox with which this speech concludes is built on a syntactical configuration that offers the key to the riddles it poses. In the line “That she which marries you must marry me” (174), the figure of Bertram (“you”) is poised between two iterations of the verb “marry,” which in turn are framed by third and first person pronouns. To the onstage auditors it must seem as if both pronouns refer to Diana herself, but the theater audience knows that “she” refers not to Diana but to Helena. This trope encompasses both Diana’s role as Helena’s surrogate and Helena’s agency in staging the legitimation of her claim that she has the right to call Bertram husband. Diana ultimately argues her case against Bertram (and, indirectly, for Helena) by means of a riddle consisting of a series of oppositional pairs: guilty and not guilty, maid and no maid, dead and quick. The key to Diana’s riddle, as to the other riddles in the play, whether intentional or unintentional, is embodied, literally, in the figure of Helena. In this final epiphany, Helena’s signifying transcends words. She is no longer in the process of constructing meaning. She is meaning. While Helena can only succeed in actualizing her marriage through alliances with other women (see Figure 8.2, p. 153), Bertram’s resistance can only be overcome through his severing his ties with other men. Helena’s infatuation with Bertram forces her into a competition with Parolles, a figure whose deceptive and sometimes literally nonsensical signifying practices are antithetical to her own. The discontinuity between Parolles’ brave words and his cowardly behavior is objectified and parodied in the gibberish used by the soldiers who pretend to take him prisoner (4.1). Only after learning to recognize Parolles’ corruption of language in himself and to repudiate that failing can Bertram (perhaps) begin to appreciate Helena’s plenitude and worth. Dympna Callaghan’s discussion of the malcontent in English Renaissance tragedy as a figure who “manipulates a permanent contradiction betweeen words and things” has an obvious application to Parolles, as Callaghan points out.14 This contradiction is objectified in two symbols that persist in Parolles’ appearance and in the language/abuse of language associated with him but that are also associated with Bertram. These symbols are

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the drum and the scarf, specifically, the knot in the scarf. Both are associated with specious claims or promises of manly achievement (one martial, the other amorous). Both can be read in double and contradictory senses. The drum is, on the one hand, an emblem of valor and an important instrument of communication, and, on the other, an emblem of hollowness and meaningless noise. Bertram’s metonymic substitution of Mars’ drum for warfare in general (3.3.8–11) implicates him in Parolles’ fixation with this symbol and reminds us of the need for Bertram to discriminate between true valor and the mere manipulation of its signs. The scarf can be either the memento of a military campaign or a mere decoration, indicative of vainglory, if not of outright dishonesty. The knot in the scarf is supposed to be the visible sign of a lady’s love, but the word itself can also represent an obstacle either in love or in interpretation, and as a homophone it can also stand for negation. All of these meanings are incorporated in the sarcastic consolation offered by the First Soldier upon Parolles’ exposure as a liar and a coward: “You are undone, captain—all but your scarf; that has a knot on’t yet” (4.3.313–4). It is surely significant that this confirmation of Parolles’ loss of credibility coincides with Bertram’s untying of Helena’s “virgin knot,” an act that, although he doesn’t understand its significance until some time later, establishes his identity as both a lover and a husband. Bertram’s alliance with Parolles has been interpreted as belonging to a pattern of male experience and male friendships that make it difficult for many of Shakespeare’s comic heroes to come to terms with adult heterosexual relationships.15 Additionally I would argue that this play reverses the pattern which Margaret Downs-Gamble describes in her analysis of The Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio assumes the role of “rhetor and orator” and in that guise “‘educates’ Katherine, simultaneously refiguring unruly woman, humanist pupil, and uncontrolled language.”16 In a speech early in the play, in which Helena meditates on the many amorous temptations that Bertram will encounter at the King’s court, the emphasis is on the kind of “learning” that the attractive, eligible, and impressionable Bertram is likely to acquire. Helena’s decision to pursue him to Paris follows directly from her perception that if she does not intervene, Bertram will quickly master what Hunter refers to as “the amorous dialect of the court,”17 thus widening the linguistic and social gulf that already divides them. But in addition to teaching Bertram not to pursue the knowledge of other women, Helena must also, though indirectly, teach him to re-evaluate the knowledge he thinks he possesses of Parolles’ worth. Helena succeeds in overcoming the King’s doubts about her abilities by appropriating the language in which he voices them. She succeeds in conquering Bertram’s objections to their marriage by turning speech acts that he evidently intends as unambiguous negatives into riddles with unanticipated solutions. Yet, when we consider the final denouement and the

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terms in which Bertram and Helena finally signal their formal reconciliation, it is difficult to refrain from wondering, as so many critics have done, just how “well” the “all” of this play really ends. Bertram’s final speech, uttered after he has been confronted with the true meaning of Helena (or Helena-as-meaning), no longer poses antithetical constructions that correspond to alternative readings of their relationship: “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly/ I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (5.3.309–10).This speech surfaces the unintended sense of his letter to the Countess: “I . . . have sworn to make the ‘not’ eternal” (3.2.21–2). The negatives in both of Bertram’s letters are here replaced with reiterated, open-ended affirmatives (“ever, ever”) that signify his substitution, on some level at least, of the marriage “knot” for the “not” in his previous written communication, a process mediated by the evidence that he has indeed, if inadvertently, untied the “virgin knot” of his bride. Yet the ambiguity of the rhetorical structure of Bertram’s last words reflects the ambiguity of his position. Does the reiterative chiastic structure of the last few words (“dearly, ever, ever dearly”), a structure that duplicates without amplifying or constructing new meaning, affirm or call into question the reciprocity of Bertram’s feelings for his wife? Does it represent a double bond between the marriage partners, or does it stand for Bertram’s double bind, namely, the fact that whether he chooses to resist Helena or to accept her, he is still obligated to this marriage? Helena’s response to Bertram’s last words can also be read in contradictory senses: “If it appear not plain and prove untrue/ Deadly divorce step between me and you!” (5.3.315–6). The speech expresses Helena’s confidence in her ability to make Bertram “know” the truth of her assertions about having fulfilled Bertram’s conditions, but the offer to undo the marriage if those assertions “prove untrue” is articulated through a pair of negations (“not plain,” “untrue”) and through negative imagery (“deadly divorce”) that undercut her stated meaning. In particular, the figure of “deadly divorce” that Helena chooses to represent her punishment if she should fail to make Bertram “know this clearly” literally and figuratively inserts between herself and her husband a personification of the disruptive, anti-romantic, and to some extent misogynistic attitudes that Helena has been rhetorically combating throughout the play. The surface meaning of Helena’s statement reaffirms her assurance, but the substructure expresses her doubt. Her rhetorical position is made even more problematic by the fact that her final line is addressed not to Bertram but to the Countess and that it is for the Countess (“O my dear mother”) that Helena reserves her verbal expression of affection (317). The fact that both Bertram’s and Helena’s final speeches begin with “if” and that the promises made in these speeches are conditional (i.e., expressed in the subjunctive), epitomizes and reinforces the ambiguities of

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their reconciliation and the ambivalence and discomfort of the audience. The King, who is the third voice in the center-stage trio that concludes the play (Lafew’s speech at 314–18 consists of a brief aside followed by some words addressed to Parolles), also uses conditional constructions preceded by “if”, again signaling the dubiousness of the proposition that all ends well in this play. The centerpiece of the King’s final speech (5.3.322–31), in which he offers Diana exactly the same opportunity that he had earlier given Helena, namely, to select the husband of her choice regardless of her prospective bridegroom’s wishes, makes it hard not to wonder whether anyone in this play has really learned anything. The King concludes his conditional promise to Diana with the chiastic statement that if Diana is indeed a virgin, she is to be rewarded because “Thou kept’st a wife herself, thyself a maid” (327). The juxtaposition of “herself, thyself” in this pair of transposed phrases replicates the conflation of Helena and Diana in the second half of the play and suggests that Helena’s catalogue in Act 1 of the “thousand loves” that Bertram may encounter at court represents a more nuanced understanding of feminine identity than Bertram (or the King) has the ability or the will to construct. While this erasing/conflating of individual women’s identities has worked to Helena’s advantage, it also reminds us of the disconcerting fact that Bertram has shown himself to be either incapable of recognizing or essentially indifferent to the differences between one woman and another. The King’s final couplet, which consists of the last two lines before the epilogue, encapsulates the radical uncertainty of the comic resolution. The couplet concludes with a final chiastic antithesis, in which “the bitter past” is rhetorically superseded by the “welcome . . . sweet.” Yet the King’s assertion that “All yet seems well” suggests not only that the concord of Helena and Bertram’s former discord may be an illusion but that even if, for the moment, it is authentic, it may be of short duration (330–1). The Tresnjak production concludes with a piece of staging that functions as a kind of visual equivalent for the chiastic rhetorical and emotional balancing act that recurs at so many critical moments in this play. The epilogue is replaced by a long wordless interlude, after all the other characters have exited, in which Helena and Bertram move around the stage, gradually approaching one another but never coming together. Eventually Helena sits down at one end of a bench at center stage, reaches into her holdall, and pulls out a miniature rocking horse. She puts it on the bench beside her and sets it rocking. Bertram gradually approaches and sits down at the opposite end of the bench, facing upstage (Helena faces the audience). He reaches out a hand and again sets the tiny rocking horse in motion. The happy endings of Shakespeare’s festive comedies and late romances are all complicated by minority opinions and question marks about the future. The comedic tide that moves us towards union, celebration, and the

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marginalization of anti-comedic forces is always accompanied by an undertow of doubt, cynicism and anxiety that acknowledges the precariousness of the comic resolution. If in All’s Well the undertow feels like a powerful riptide, that fact may reflect the extent to which Helena’s victory presents itself as a subversion of the prevailing social order. Catherine Belsey argues that “a contest for the meaning of the family which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries disrupted sexual difference, and in the space between the two sets of meanings, the old and the new polarities, there appear in the fiction of the period shapes, phantasms perhaps, that unsettle the opposition defining the feminine as that which is not masculine.”18 In privileging the voice and the point of view of his heroine, the playwright deliberately accepts the challenge of imagining a female character’s interior life and of endowing her with singular discursive authority. By means of her superior eloquence, Helena undermines basic assumptions about the antithetical relationship between masculine and feminine discourse. Though Helena stops short of challenging the King’s authority as head of state or Bertram’s at least nominal authority as the head of her future household, she does succeed in countervailing the authority of patriarchal institutions by positing a competing authority of her own. Yet the anxiety implicit in this transgendered project may help to explain the absence of a fully satisfying emotional closure in the play’s final moments. Like the rhetorical trope that plays a vital role in Helena’s persuasive strategy, the play itself can be read either as doubling back on itself and recoiling from the implications of its own transvestite ventriloquism or as valorizing the representation of ambiguity in gender roles and in the expression and fulfillment of feminine, as well as masculine, desire.

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Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 4. Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), 1–2. Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Routledge, 1986), 167. Carolyn Asp, “Subjectivity, Desire and Female Friendship in All’s Well That Ends Well,” in Shakespeare’s Comedies, ed. Gary Waller (London: Longman, 1991), 176. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 77–78, 19. William Flint Thrall, Addison Hibbard, and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature (NY: Odyssey Press, 1960), 82. Parker, 77–81, does not discuss the occurrence of this trope in the play.

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See J. M. Silverman, “Two Types of Comedy in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 24 (Winter 1973), 25, for a discussion of the dualism of All’s Well’s structure as a function of Shakespeare’s reliance on “irreconcilable dramatic modes” in the play’s first and second halves. 8 Hunter, “Introduction,” All’s Well That Ends Well, ed. G. K. Hunter (London: Methuen, 1959), lviii, xxi; Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in ‘All’s Well That Ends Well,’ ” ELH, 21 (March 1954), 20. 9 Howard C. Cole, The All’s Well Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 102, 122, 123. The phrase “cloudy incantation” is quoted from E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949), 106. 10 See Lisa Jardine, “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines: ‘These Are Old Paradoxes,’ ” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 10, and Susan Snyder, “All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and Subject, Subject and Object,” ELR, 18 (1988), 68–69, on the connection between female speech and sexual incontinence as it is reflected in this proposed punishment. 11 Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare’s Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 59, 61–63; Subha Mukherji, “‘Lawful Deed’: Consummation, Custom, and Law in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Survey, 49 (1996), 189. 12 Loftus Ranald, “The Betrothals of All’s Well That Ends Well,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 (1963), 186, summarizes the legal loopholes available to Bertram as follows: (1) consent obtained by threats sufficient to arouse fear in a strong man; (2) consent obtained through respect for authority (per metus reverentialis); (3) mental reservation at the time of the ceremony; (4) refusal to consummate the marriage indicated by a three-year absence from the province, or a two-year absence within the province. 13

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Asp, “Subjectivity, Desire and Female Friendship in All’s Well That Ends Well,” 177, says that Helena frees herself from “the strictures applied to women” by “the assertion of desire, the refusal of objectification and by interaction with other women in the play.” See also Susan Snyder, “All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and Subject, Subject and Object,” ELR, 18 (1988), 66–77. Dympna Callahan, Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King Lear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1989), 132. See Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Margaret Downs-Gamble, “The Taming School: The Taming of the Shrew as Lesson in Renaissance Humanism,” in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, 23, ed. Jean R. Brink (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1993), 65–66. 1.1.161, n. Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference,” 178.

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Shakespeare’s Miracle Play? Religion in All’s Well, That Ends Well HELEN WILCOX 011

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This essay examines the presence of religious language, action, tradition and controversy in All’s Well, That Ends Well, with a view to making a claim for the play’s substantial undertones of spirituality. From the play’s opening scene onwards, the language of secular desire and sacred devotion are interwoven, such that Helena worships at Bertram’s shrine and saves “relics” of his presence as he departs for the court. Helena’s subsequent success at court in curing the King of France is seen by Lafew as miraculous, but the play focuses on the difficulty of interpreting human actions: is the “help of heaven” indeed manifested in the work of “earthly actors” (2.1.152, 2.2.23)? A consideration of the complex religious concerns implicit in the play’s events will alert us to its dilemmas over freedom and agency. These issues also relate closely to the intense doctrinal debates of the early seventeenth century. Not only does the play reopen the question of miracles, but it also poses the problem of the relationship between words and things – or between riddles and actions – in a version of the Reformation arguments between the biblical and the sacramental. In addition, why is it that Helena sets out on her intensely Catholic pilgrimage towards the shrine of St. James at Compostella, and to what extent is her subsequent course of action endorsed by the gift of grace which was so esteemed in the Protestant tradition? The play’s climax involves two more apparent miracles: the reappearance of Helena as though resurrected, and the mysterious pregnancy of a supposedly virgin mother. If Bertram is finally moved to “love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (5.3.314), then yet another miracle will have occurred in anticipation, extending into the promised time after the end of the play. This essay suggests, therefore, that it is justifiable to refer to All’s Well as Shakespeare’s “miracle play,” not in order to imply a reliance upon medieval dramatic traditions, but rather to assert that devotion, faith and redemption are among its chief concerns.

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What kinds of religious language are employed in All’s Well? The opening scene immediately provides examples of devotional vocabulary in use, as in the Countess’s farewell to her son: “Be thou bless’d . . . What heaven more will . . . my prayers pluck down” (1.1.59, 66–7). This is not acutely sacred language, but demonstrates what might be termed a litany of parenthood, in which the mother as intermediary prays for blessing on her son and envisages for her own part a dynamic religiousness. She will “pluck” gifts from heaven, and the hint of desperation in this chosen verb turns out to be not unwarranted with regard to Bertram’s later actions. In her maternal relationship with Helena, later in the first act of the play, the Countess again plays this actively prayerful role, though in blessing Helena the verb chosen by the older woman is the more conventional “pray” rather than “pluck” (1.3.249). Like the Abbess of Ephesus (Aemilia) in Comedy of Errors, the Countess depicts herself as a kind of abbess in her own estate, remaining within the home and away from the world of the court, practising a life of necessary prayer and contemplation rather than of action (see Figure 8.1). In the case of Helena, the Countess has a less daunting supplicatory task on her hands than in her duty of prayer for her own son. On arrival at court, Helena herself declares that, in her plan to effect a cure of the King, she may be considered a “minister” – albeit the “weakest” – of “He that of the greatest works is finisher” (2.1.137). Helena’s reference to her own weakness not only reveals a conventional modesty with regard to her gender and social position, but also indicates her knowledge of the biblical precedent for her actions: according to St. Paul, “God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty” (1 Cor. 1:27). She goes on to make direct reference to the bible as the authority for her apparent audacity in believing that she can help the King: “so holy writ in babes hath judgment shown” (II.i.138). Shakespeare probably had in mind here the Old Testament “babe” Daniel who, when still a child, was found “ten times better” in wisdom and judgment by King Nebuchadnezzar than all the wise men in his realm (Daniel 1:20). The parallel with the situation in the French court, where the “most learned doctors” have given up any hope of the King’s recovery, is unmistakeable. Helena’s language continues to be explicitly religious and it is she who first introduces the term “miracle” to refer to the promised healing of the King, likened to “miracles” that “have by the great’st been denied.” The source of her confidence is divine aid or “greatest Grace lending grace”, for which she claims simply to function as a conduit (2.1.141, 160). When the King has indeed been cured, Helena denies having had an active role in his recovery, insisting that “Heaven hath through me restor’d the king to health.” Those around her at the court acknowledge that they perceive in the King’s transformation the “very hand of heaven” and confirm that there is indeed “some blessed spirit” in her (2.3.63, 30, 2.1.175).

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Figure 8.1 Countess and Helena (1.3). University of North Dakota 2005, Mary Cutler (director). Lynette Lepire (Helena), Margaret McDonald (Countess).

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How seriously can we take this kind of religious language in the context of the play and its times? Helena herself evokes our dilemma by commenting twice on the misinterpretation of things sacred and profane. In private she asserts that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,/ Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.212–3), introducing the strong strain of sceptical selfsufficiency found in the play. In public debate with the King, however, she turns the argument around: It is not so with Him who all things knows As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows; But most it is presumption in us when The help of heaven we count the act of men. (2.1.149–52)

We who read or see All’s Well are clearly among those who are forced to “square our guess by shows,” both as flawed humans in a complex world and as an audience in the theatre, puzzling out the meaning of the play. However, the problem for us as we attempt to understand this tragicomedy is the awkwardly reversible nature of the interpretative strategy put forward here by Helena. How can we distinguish the “help of heaven” from the “act of men” – or rather, which is the metaphor and which the real event? During the action of the play, the remedies for ill health and lost love may be perceived to derive from either heavenly or human intervention; both interpretations are signalled in the play. Those who tend to emphasise human actions and to deny miracles are regularly reminded, by Helena in particular, that it is a mistake to dismiss the possibility of supernatural intervention in human affairs. On the other hand, if a providential or miraculous understanding of effective action is favoured, then it becomes all too easy to dismiss individual creativity and human responsibility, particularly when these qualities are exercised by Helena – a woman, and a mere doctor’s daughter at that – as she first wins and then regains her beloved Bertram.1 How can we know the source of an individual’s agency? The debate is a very real one in the play, affecting not only Helena but also Bertram, Parolles and Diana, and the wider social, political and military worlds that they inhabit. Religious language in All’s Well is not, therefore, a conventional or empty vehicle but a sign of deep-seated controversy both in the play and in early seventeenth-century England. When Helena has cured the King, the comments of Lafew grumpily refer to an ongoing argument between traditionalists and those who would deny the influence of supernatural powers: They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is

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All’s Well, That Ends Well that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (2.3.1–6)

These words invoke the major uncertainties of Shakespeare’s era: the relationship between the old religion and the new, between ancient truths and the new scientific knowledge, and between an inexplicable fate and the familiarity of individual action. Like Donne, Lafew is suspicious of the “new Philosophy” which “cals all in doubt”; like Sir Thomas Browne, he would rather submit himself to a divine mystery than deny its impact by explaining it. “Wee doe too narrowly define the power of God,” Browne pointed out, by “restraining it to our capacities.”2 At this turning point in the play, it would seem that the old styles of believing and knowing have the upper hand. Medical science seems to have been put in its place by supernatural influences, and a new Saint Helen appears to be in the making, with her power to effect miracles and her almost sacramental embodiment of a “heavenly effect in an earthly actor” (2.3.23). However, we are soon led to question Lafew’s reliability as an interpreter of events. He approvingly reads out the ballad ascribing the King’s cure to heaven, but a few moments later, in the very same scene, he completely misunderstands Helena’s dealings with the young Lords offered to her in marriage. An audience quickly begins to wonder how far Lafew’s sense of the nature of events should be trusted, and becomes disconcertingly aware of the slippery quality of religious assurances in the play. Multiple uncertainties in the area of religious language have thus already been introduced before we are even half-way through the play. Is the vocabulary of faith being used accurately by the characters to whom it is assigned, or with more enthusiasm than reason? The boundary between the literal and the figurative use of this terminology is difficult to discern, especially in an age when, as Donne put it, God himself was perceived as both “a literall God” and “a figurative, a metaphoricall God too.”3 Is the divine in All’s Well an image of the human, or vice versa? Does Shakespeare’s use of some aspects of sacred discourse signify the play’s response to contemporary controversies and, if so, are they concerned generally with faith versus scepticism – “miracles” as opposed to the “modern and familiar” – or with more specific differences between Catholicism and reformed belief? Let us examine each of these questions in turn. Religious language is rarely used with serious accuracy and consistency in All’s Well by characters other than the Countess. Even Helena, who appears to take her heavenly role seriously at the beginning of the play and later chooses the way of a pilgrim, uses devotional vocabulary more frequently with reference to her very earthly love for Bertram than for the adoration of God: “Indian-like,/ Religious in mine error,” she

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“adore[s]/ The sun that looks upon his worshipper” (1.3.199–201). Helena’s complete but unnoticed devotion to Bertram is expressed in terms of pagan worship, erroneous but all-consuming. Towards the end of the play, still “religious” in her misdirected love, Helena refers to her heavenly “fate” in yet more questionable circumstances, as she plans the bed-trick and asserts her God-given role as “dower” to Diana (4.4.19–20). The specifically providential gloss on the play’s eventual comic pattern emerges solely from the lips of the Countess. As she contemplates Bertram’s folly and cruelty in rejecting Helena, she asks: What angel shall Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive, Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath Of greatest justice. (3.4.25–9)

As matters proceed, however, it is not so much the “prayers” of Helena that appear to “reprieve” the “unworthy” Bertram, as her ingenuity and secular (or even “Indian-like”) devotion. On the other hand, as the play’s optimistically redemptive title reminds us, the very principle of Bertram’s salvation from the “wrath” of justice is a spiritual one. The concept of loving a flawed individual and giving him a second chance, even though he may not seem worthy of it, is fundamental to the “divine comedy” of the New Testament as well as to the final scene of All’s Well. The play’s general framework of spiritual consciousness manifests itself in the enthusiastic dialogue of characters like Lafew (as we have seen in his celebration of miracles) and, even more strikingly, the clown Lavatch. When we first encounter him, Lavatch comes up with some rather predictable jokes on matrimony as a means of repentance, clarified by the Countess in her wry comment that he is likely to repent his marriage sooner than his “wickedness” (I.3.38).4 Throughout the play, Lavatch’s mode of wit is one which toys with life’s spiritual dimension. He points out to Helena that there are but two things that keep the Countess from being well: “One, that she’s not in heaven . . . The other, that she’s in earth” (2.4.10–12). The pun on physical and spiritual health is simple enough, highlighting the clown’s ironic otherworldly meaning that to be on earth at all is to be unwell. However, this wit functions well because it is in a dramatic context in which we have already been alerted to the close, and contested, relationship between the human and the divine. Later Lavatch spars verbally with Lafew and, having yet again introduced heaven and hell into the conversation, rejects the service of the devil, that master who “ever keeps a good fire”: “I am for the house with the narrow gate”

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(4.5.46–8). This reference to Christ’s statement in the Sermon on the Mount is quite remarkable for its (mock) confidence in an age when the quotation was more often used as a threat than a promise: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:14). Although overtly providential language is rare in the play, fundamentally hopeful religious vocabulary and assumptions occur frequently. The fact that the wit of All’s Well keeps touching religion like a sore tooth suggests that, despite the relative lack of serious doctrinal discussion in the play, there is a consciously spiritual context for its characters’ actions. If religious language can function in the play to signify sincerity, enthusiasm, devotion (in the widest sense) and wit, then what can we discern from this of the play’s “devotional” centre? Is it the love of God that makes the world of All’s Well go round, or is it sexual desire? In the 2004–5 RSC production, Helena’s selection of Bertram from among the courtiers was staged as a courtly dance in which the men whirled around with everincreasing speed, suggesting not only their unease with the ritual but also the urgency of her desire. Indeed, the “miraculous” cure of the King by Helena only comes into consideration because of Helena’s love for Bertram which leads her to seek favour at the court. This inspirational love, “confessed” by her to the Countess in quasi-liturgical manner “on my knee, before high heaven” (1.3.187–8), anticipates by two centuries Keats’s commitment to the “holiness of the Heart’s affections.”5 The idea of devotion in sexual love is echoed in the wooing scene between Bertram and Diana; inspired by the overtones of Diana’s name, the references to love as “holy-cruel” are classical in origin, but the play is never far from the hope of a Christian heaven. Bertram vows, with blasphemous effect, that to be in Diana’s bed will be “heaven on earth”; Diana adds, out of his hearing, that when he realises that he has found his wife Helena there instead of Diana, he should indeed “live long to thank both Heaven and me” (IV.ii.32, 67). The term “grace” is also used in All’s Well in ways which draw attention to its rich multivalence, with meanings which include physical attractiveness, social dignity and spiritual redemption. Helena represents “grace” to the King, primarily because she can “breathe life into a stone,” a phrase echoing the power of Jesus to turn his followers into “living stones” (1 Peter 2:4–5). Christ-like, Helena reflects the “greatest Grace” in saving the King and offering him hope of new life. However, she is simultaneously a female beauty of whom Lafew is obviously aware in sexual terms; bringing her into the King’s presence, he likens himself to Pandarus, “Cressid’s uncle/ That dare leave two together” (II.i.72, 59, 97–8). In the extended final scenes, the ambiguity of grace is again introduced. When the disgraced Parolles petitions Lafew “to bring me in some grace” (5.2.45),

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the phrase is elaborately shown to refer to both courtly favour and religious salvation; grace doubles as social preferment and the gift of God. By contrast, when Bertram is brought face to face with Diana he refers to her “modern grace” (5.3.216), a gift which appears to be a very earthly sexual attractiveness. The “herb of grace” (4.5.14) apparently has a flavour of the royal court and the Florentine bedroom as well as of the bible. Despite its deliberate and occasionally disorienting mixture of the social and the sacred, All’s Well does contain certain scenes which make use of religious language specifically in order to raise doctrinal controversy. One of the play’s first references to prayer is heard in Parolles’s mocking farewell to Helena after their extended discussion of virginity. Among the comic ironies of the play is the fact that this man, who relegates prayer to the status of an optional activity for hours of “leisure” (1.1.209), later becomes the “hoodwinked” wretch reduced to the desperate need to “pray, pray, pray” for his life (4.1.81, 78). Parolles, whose “soul” is said to be “his clothes” (2.5.43–4), is forced into a very public “recantation” of his jaunty self-confidence as well as a betrayal of any loyalty he might once have had to Bertram and their fellow-soldiers. Bertram himself twice undergoes a “recantation” (2.3.186) with respect to Helena, whom he has twice rejected, first at the court when she claims him, and soon afterwards as he runs away from her when she has become his wife. Indeed, the play’s action is built around the men’s public rejection of their former beliefs, in spectacles of confrontation and confession which are secular shadows of the religious recantations so familiar in post-Reformation England. Is this, then, another sense in which All’s Well is a “miracle play”? In this meaning of the phrase, the wonder is not the apparently miraculous curing of the King but rather a broader and wittier sense – the amazement felt at the recognition of men’s brittle loyalties, whose sudden recantations can yet lead to repentance and forgiveness in the end. The specific context in which the play is set is Catholic Europe – France and Italy – but Shakespeare’s mental universe, as ever, is that of his own contemporary England in the midst of the religious tensions of the early Jacobean era. Why else would Lavatch refer in passing to the disagreements between “young Charbon the puritan and old Poysam the papist”, whose hearts are “sever’d in religion” (1.3.51–3) even though they are united in being cuckolded by their wives? This ribald comment functions primarily as an attack on women’s unfaithfulness, but at the same time it mocks both religious groups (on account of their dietary habits) and highlights the similarity of men in spite of their doctrinal differences. The ongoing controversy in England about the significance of the host in the sacrament of Holy Communion – sacrifice or memorial, transubstantiation or symbolism, object of worship or culinary item – is touched upon in Parolles’s blatantly false vow to his interrogators, “I’ll take the sacrament

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on’t, how and which way you will” (4.3.135–6). His reference to “how and which way” flippantly evokes the debate about whether to receive the sacrament kneeling or sitting, as well as the question of receiving communion in one or two kinds, the bread alone or both bread and wine. His final phrase, “you will,” suggests his own lack of interest in the debate, thereby undermining any implied seriousness in his vow. The very fact that the characters who mock these doctrinal issues are the clown (Lavatch) and the unreliable witness (Parolles) might alert us to the necessity of taking them seriously in the play’s larger scheme. Helena’s pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostella, a major centre of devotion for Catholics, is pivotal not only to the working of the plot of All’s Well, but also to the audience’s perception of her character. Relics, as found and adored at such shrines, feature in Helena’s language in the opening scene, long before she has decided to embark upon her pilgrimage. Helena laments Bertram’s departure for the court, and comments: “But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous heart/ Must sanctify his relics” (1.1.96–7). Is her heart “idolatrous” because it adores at the shrine of Cupid, or is the Catholic practice of sanctifying relics itself the object of criticism here? Since the pilgrimage by Helena is only ever completed in a reported fiction, the only (metaphorical) “relics” left in the final scene of the play are the King’s memories of the seemingly-dead Helena, which he resolves to bury “deeper than oblivion” in an act of forgiveness towards Bertram (5.3.24–5). Is this a hint that Catholic devotional practices should ultimately be left behind, whether in the world of the play or in the Jacobean context in which it was written and performed? It is certainly possible to interpret the play along these lines. Like the closely related tragicomedy, Measure for Measure, All’s Well creates an image of a society which turns its back on the imprisoning forces of the convent, pilgrimages, fasting, devotion to relics, and idolatrous reliance on physical signs of spiritual reality. The frequent use of the word “grace” in All’s Well, though ambiguously poised on the boundary of the sacred and the secular, would have been notable to an audience alert to the key importance of this term in the theological debates of the period. In Protestant theology, particularly that of Calvin, human beings are seen as utterly dependent on divine grace, a gift which will simply “drop from above”, undeserved, on the heads of those who are saved.6 The play’s apparent movement towards reformed theology, the faith of words and grace rather than sacrament and action, seems to be confirmed by the increasing emphasis on words in the closing scenes of All’s Well. When Bertram eventually capitulates and accepts that he has been “won” again by Helena, the most important evidence is the fact that the words of his apparently impossible riddle have been followed. The “letter” of the law has been fulfilled by Helena, and Bertram is born again, “doubly won” (5.3.312) as though by

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birth and then the rebirth of baptismal conversion (Rom. 6:3–11). This suggests a conclusion to the play which is redemptive in a strictly Protestant sense. However, things are not really so clear cut in the theological realm of All’s Well. Helena’s proof – “There is your ring” (5.3.308) – is a reminder of how important signs are, too, in the play’s conclusion. The ring, like an element in the Catholic Mass, is worth more than its own created nature: it is transformed into an emblem signifying history, identity, loyalty, honesty. The physical sign speaks louder than words. In the 2005 production of All’s Well at Lancaster castle, the ring was passed around the courtroom as evidence, being examined and touched by members of the audience as well as the King and assembled courtiers. As the King reminds Bertram, Helena “call’d the saints to surety/ That she would never put it from her finger,/ Unless she gave it to yourself in bed” (5.3.108–10). The power of these lines is partly that of folk-tale, but it also awakens strong parallels with Catholicism, a tradition more sacramental and emblematic than verbal. The ring is a “token” of relief (5.3.85), and its powers are confirmed by reference to the “saints.” Words alone do not seem to be sufficient, but the ring – associated with the intercessions of the saints – ensures Helena’s identity and confirms the truth of her story. Faith in the word is, indeed, undermined throughout the play by the name given to the least trustworthy character, the cowardly Parolles, the literal translation of whose name from the French is, of course, “words.” There are also serious objections to the hypothesis that the end of the play upholds a Protestant vision of all-powerful divine grace, since the redemption brought about by Helena does not “drop from above” on to passively accepting heads, but is won by active intervention closer to the good works favoured by Catholic theology. However, it is perhaps beyond the wit of a Jesuit to label a bedtrick as an instance of good works – and so the religious dilemmas of this equivocal play go on. It might be possible to argue that this mixture of religious attitudes, expressed through doctrinal vocabulary from a variety of traditions and sources, simply forms the texture of the world constructed by Shakespeare in All’s Well. In other words, could it be that the fascination with religious devotion remains a superficial aspect of the drama, disguising a core which is thoroughly secular? The language of independence from providence – as in Helena’s assertion that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie” (1.1.212) – is very persuasive. Helena does indeed create a solution to her dilemma through her own resources of mind and body, as well as those of a group of other women. The play is undoubtedly a triumph of sisterhood over both rank and sex, though we may wonder whether the prize of the reluctant husband was really worth all the effort. Nevertheless, there is no escape from the prevailing religiousness even of the women’s plotting; the bed-trick is

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described by Helena as “Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact” (3.7.47). The specific references to sin, and the paradoxical structure of this line and those that precede it, are echoed in Diana’s soliloquy spoken after she has apparently agreed to sleep with Bertram (4.2.71–6). Her self-justification partly depends upon teasing wordplay on lying and dying, and flimsy generalisations concerning gender and nationality. However, she also reasons out her decision in consciously religious terms – “I think’t no sin/ To cozen him that would unjustly win” (4.2.75–6) – before complying with Helena’s wishes and tricking Bertram in the “pitchy night” (4.4.24). Sin or no sin, the bed-trick is a clear reminder of the real basis of any supposed self-sufficiency in the play. In a brief dialogue between two French courtiers before the capture and gulling of Parolles – an event which parallels in the military world the tricking of Bertram in the amorous one – Bertram is said to have “perverted a young gentlewoman” and “this night he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour.” The response of the fellowcourtier to this statement is of major significance to the mood of the whole play: “Now, God delay our rebellion! As we are ourselves, what things are we!” (4.3.13–9). The context of this comment makes it clear that it is not spoken in wistful admiration of individual human potential, but offers a spur-of-the-moment lament for human weakness and folly. The phrase “what things we are” anticipates the reduction of Parolles by the end of the play to “simply the thing I am” (4.3.323). The play’s moments of metaphysical contemplation have the effect of reducing human nature to its bare essentials, almost the “unaccommodated man” of Lear’s bleak vision. The sin that the French courtier had in mind when facing up to what “we are ourselves” – that is, “our rebellion” – is the original sin inherited from Adam and Eve who rebelled in Eden. The courtier’s exclamation reveals an assumption that the “things we are,” though flawed, will always be understood as spiritual as well as physical. The play simply does not allow the separation of the secular from the religious, whether in love, loss, vulnerability or achievement. The Duke of Florence, engaged in a war which provides the setting for the later part of the play, is said to have a “holy quarrel,” and Florentine requests for military assistance from France are termed “borrowing prayers” (III.i.4,9). Even in jest, Parolles delights in the play’s all-prevailing spirituality when he will not allow that Bertram alone is his “lord and master” (2.3.241). Parolles is the servant of at least two masters, God and the devil, according to the perceptive Lafew as well as the mock-devout Parolles himself. Later in the play, the quick-witted clown Lavatch shows his familiarity with the bible as he talks of herbs, quipping that he is “no great Nabuchadnezzar, sir; I have not much skill in grass” (4.5.18–19). The reference to the Old Testament king who was made to eat grass until he acknowledged the power of God over the inhabitants of the earth (Daniel 4:28–37) recalls

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the scepticism of the King of France when faced with Helena’s claims of divine assistance. Shallow and temporary though these playfully religious exchanges may seem, they reflect the deeper issues debated by the play. They hint at its prevailing spirituality and occur with striking regularity, filling out the more overtly religious aspects of the plot itself, such as miracles, pilgrimages, recantations and conversions. The light-hearted quibbles keep the audience simultaneously in multiple worlds: biblical and fictional, Jacobean controversy and continental devotion, all at once. The final moments of All’s Well appear to restore the belief in miracles asserted and debated after Helena’s triumphant curing of the King. The extended last scene is a sequence of apparent miracles: Diana the virgin who is no maid, Helena the dead wife who returns to life, and the riddle which is fulfilled without Bertram’s realisation of his involvement in its resolution. The biblical precedents lying behind the first two seeming miracles are the paradox of the virgin Mary, mother and maid, and the resurrections of Lazarus and Christ (Matthew 1:22–5, John 11:37–45, John 20:11–18). The Marian parallels in Helena’s situation, as she turns the words of Bertram’s riddle into flesh by her conception of their child, remind the audience of the miracle of the incarnation and its potential to overturn the death sentence of original sin. The “meaning” of Helena’s revelation is miraculous: the restorative effect of love can transform the “dead,” spiritually or physically, into sources of new life (5.3.300–2). Helena is both Christ-like in her resurrection and her power to redeem Bertram, and Mary-like in her (pseudo)virginity and the echoes of the incarnation. Indeed, the cases of both Diana and Helena evoke the Catholic tradition of devotion to the Blessed Virgin, raising anew the possibility of recusant echoes in the play. However, the fact that Helena is, after all, not a virgin but a loyal and chaste wife could well be seen as a compromise between the cult of the Virgin Mary and the Protestant commitment to companionate marriage.7 Once again, though, the course of the play evades any neat resolution of its doctrinal dilemmas. In the first scene, Helena famously engages in a long and witty debate about virginity, during which, ironically, it is the unreliable Parolles who expresses the Protestant objections to virginity, a state valued and encouraged by the convents of Catholic tradition. By the play’s conclusion, Helena’s purity and pilgrim-like devotion have been tainted by the false story of her death. The play’s ambivalence about the rights and wrongs of the virgin state persists to the end. However, what is certain is that a practical and secular virginity – in the form of the alliance of Diana and Helena – has triumphed. At the start of the play, Helena had asked for advice from Parolles as to “how virgins might blow up men” (1.1.119–20), and the closing scene shows both Bertram and Parolles thoroughly “undermined” by their female counterparts. This is the social “miracle” with which the play ends.

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The biblical model for the third amazing turn of events in the conclusion, Bertram’s apparent repentance, is the parable of the Prodigal Son, in which the profligate son returns home to his father’s house and is forgiven (Luke 15:11–32). Back at the court of his substitute father and patriarchal monarch, the King of France, Bertram indeed finds forgiveness, though unexpectedly it comes primarily from his wife – miraculously returned to life and pregnant with his child – and from his mother, the Countess. The story of the Prodigal Son is rewritten in the final act of All’s Well, to fit into a dramatic context in which women are the prime movers and vessels of providence. Their consciousness of this role is an important part of the play’s spirituality: as Helena says when urging the King to submit to her care, “Of heaven, not me, make an experiment” (2.1.154). Recalling the question implied in the title of this essay, it does indeed seem appropriate to call All’s Well a sort of “miracle play”, since its prevailing concern – both implicit and explicit – is with the miracle of redemption and the divinely-instigated priority of life over death. With its rich texture of religious language and references, the play depicts a world in which even the most sceptical are located in a spiritual framework of thought, speech and action. One of its predominant concerns is devotion in interconnectedly sacred and secular senses: devotion to Helena (by the King, Lafew, the Countess, Diana and the widow) as a perceived agent of providence, and the devotion of Helena to the fulfilment of her love for Bertram. Both kinds of devotion are subjected to considerable questioning and assault during the course of the play, and by the conclusion neither has been thoroughly rewarded. There is no unequivocal sense of a proper theological position in the play: pilgrimages, relics and virginity are used but never completely endorsed, and the idea of commitment to faith rather than works, or to the word rather than the “thing itself”, is also challenged by the events of the final scene. There is, in addition, no easy assurance of the rightness of Helena’s confidence in Bertram, as the King’s epilogue reminds us with its repeat of the provisional “If” which tempers Bertram’s last speech. We leave the theatre with the King’s line, “All is well ended if this suit be won” (Epilogue 2, my italics) echoing in our memories. In the end it is humbling to realise that, as an audience, we, too, are regularly tested by the play’s language and action, particularly with regard to our sense of the spiritual and the miraculous. Through the events and the debates of All’s Well, our confidence in the interpretation of heavenly influence in earthly affairs (and vice versa) is repeatedly buffeted. We are asked to accept on trust the least conclusive of all Shakespeare’s happy endings, and to believe that it has ended “well.” As Paulina asserts in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, while preparing to perform another theatrical miracle in bringing the statue of the “dead” Hermione to life: “It is requir’d/ You do awake your faith.” A “miracle play” like The Winter’s

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Figure 8.2 The final “miracles.” Gustavus Adolphus College 2005, Robert Gardner (director). Kirsten Kuicken (Helena), Matt Dittes (Bertram).

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Tale or All’s Well tests the “faith” of the audience in miracles, both theatrical and sacred. Can Bertram really be redeemed? Is Helena a genuine agent of the “help of heaven” (2.1.152)? The predominance of “If” in the closing scene suggests that the play is an exploration of the potential for the miraculous and the redemptive, rather than a celebration of it. But whichever position one takes – believing or sceptical, Catholic or Protestant, sacred or social – the religious quality of the play remains one of its prevailing characteristics. Perhaps the only unequivocally devotional statement in the whole play, rising above doctrinal, social and gender differences, is one not contained in its action but in its title – referring not to the drama, but to the deferred judgment of heaven.

NOTES 1

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Lisa Jardine, “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines: ‘These are old paradoxes,’ ” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 11. John Donne, “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World,” The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985), 335; Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, I.27, The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 95. John Donne, Expostulation 19, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1975), 99. For the religious and bawdy wordplay in this scene, see Peggy Muñoz Simonds, “Sacred and Sexual Motifs in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 48. Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 36–7. See George Herbert, “Grace”, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 60–1, and Romans 5:15–21. See Alison Findlay, “ ‘One that’s dead is quick’: Virgin Re-birth in All’s Well That Ends Well,” in Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama, ed. Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

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She is in the Right Biblical maternity and All’s Well, That Ends Well MICHELE OSHEROW

Who can find a virtuous woman / For her price is far above rubies? (Proverbs 31.10, KJV translation)1

The well-known description of a “woman of valor” that closes the book of Proverbs recognizes female virtues even while grieving their scarcity. According to Proverbs 31, women may be wise and articulate, resourceful, shrewd, strong, determined, and generally admired. Though the proverb does not identify biblical heroines by name, midrashic tradition attributes the celebrated characteristics to specific women of the Hebrew Bible. The vast majority of these women (sixteen of the nineteen named) are mothers. It is not surprising that the Bible would value maternity, given its repeated emphasis on regeneration. More puzzling are the curious histories of those biblical mothers theoretically championed in the poem. They are women of valor to be sure, but they are also women whose narratives feature episodes of manipulation, deception, and sexual trickery. The behavior of these heroines not only disputes the value of rubies, but also the value and meaning of virtue itself. A similar complexity surrounds Helena, the would-be heroine of Shakespeare’s problematic All’s Well, That Ends Well. Though numerous characters claim her virtuous, readers are often baffled by Helena’s behavior and find her actions “ambitious and scheming.”2 Helena is championed for her agency by some critics, blamed for her poor choice of bedfellow by others, or may simply be dismissed as inconsistent. I suggest, however, that the complexities surrounding Helena establish her part of a biblical tradition of women who, in the name of motherhood, risk modesty and honesty to achieve their goals. Recognizing this tradition does not remove the troublesome quality of Helena’s behavior, but it does authorize it. Biblical matriarchs behave in ways that are peculiar, if not immoral; nonetheless,

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the Bible makes clear that their deeds are extraordinary, heroic, even divinely sanctioned. Biblical matriarchs’ association with approved deception occurs in the Bible’s early chapters in which maternity is presented as a state born from deception. Eve’s delivery of forbidden fruit to her mate prompts a series of events that lead to their expulsion from Eden. Though Eve is punished severely for her transgression, she nonetheless assumes great authority as a result of it. The chapter after the expulsion opens with childbirth and Eve’s declaration that she has “gained a man child with the help of the Lord” (Genesis 4.1). Eve insists on the woman’s lead in procreation; God assists her in motherhood and Adam is removed from the process altogether. Repeatedly the Bible demonstrates that female authority is secured in maternity. Immediately after the birth of his long-awaited son Isaac, Abraham is divinely instructed to heed his wife’s counsel: “whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says” (Genesis 21:12). Her wishes include her husband’s abandonment of his first-born son, and the betrayal of Hagar. Deception and manipulation surround any number of maternal achievements. When one examines All’s Well within this biblical framework, the story’s focus shifts from romantic relationships to maternal ones. Tracking biblical allusions in Shakespeare is common enough, but All’s Well demands that focus. The Bible commonly enters critical discussion of the play as a source of the so-called bed trick. And yet the most consistently referenced biblical example of the “trick” is inconsistent with the play’s action. In Genesis 29, Jacob is tricked into marrying Leah, the elder sister of the desired Rachel. Jacob’s marital duping at the hand of his fatherin-law is a problematic comparison to the trick played in All’s Well. It not only directs our sympathies toward the deceived male (who, after all, labored seven years for his beloved) but it is also a plan conceived and instigated by a man rather than by one of the women in the narrative. The All’s Well bed trick is orchestrated entirely by women who justify their activities in the belief that it is “no sin/ To cozen him that would unjustly win” (4.2.75–6). Marliss C. Desens interprets the use of the trick played upon Jacob to demonstrate the power of an older generation of men over a younger generation.3 The action of All’s Well mocks such power, for though the King of France bullies Bertram into marrying Helena, Bertram avoids his bride’s bed and leaves her with no marriage at all; in her words she is a “shadow of a wife” (5.3.305). The older characters’ desires are met at the play’s end, but they are achieved through Helena’s resourcefulness rather than their own. Desens limits her examination of biblical tricks to that surrounding Jacob’s marriage. However, Genesis presents another bed trick, one devised by a woman whose actions are very much like those of Helena. It is the story of Tamar in Genesis 38 that most thoroughly ties All’s Well to a biblical source and to a maternal agenda. Tamar is a woman who is denied

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access to a husband and cleverly tricks a man into sex. Like Helena, Tamar confirms her victory through pregnancy. Simonds notes the relevance of the Tamar story to Shakespeare’s plots; she argues that this narrative would have been read annually in English churches on the morning of 21 January.4 The Tamar narrative was familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences, but is less familiar to many modern scholars. It is worth recounting. The heroine’s story appears as part of the larger history of Judah, Jacob’s fourth son by Leah. Tamar enters the narrative as wife of Er, Judah’s first-born. When Er dies without an heir Judah entreats his second son Onan to “do his duty . . . as a brother-in-law” and provide offspring for his brother. This duty refers to the performance of a levirate marriage in which one man marries his brother’s widow in order to provide offspring for the deceased; the first born child of that union is considered the dead brother’s heir.5 Onan does seem to uphold the law by having sex with Tamar, save for one detail: “Onan, knowing that the seed would not count as his, let it go to waste whenever he joined with his brother’s wife” (v.9). Following this, Onan also dies. Judah has a single remaining son and promises him as husband to Tamar when the boy comes of age. Judah instructs Tamar to return to her father’s house (v.11) where she realizes that Judah has no intention of keeping his word. After the death of Judah’s wife, Tamar “took off her widow’s garb, covered her face with a veil” and waited for Judah on the road (v.14). Judah thinks her a prostitute and propositions her. The disguised Tamar demands his seal, cord, and staff as collateral for payment, and from there things happen quickly: “So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she conceived by him” (18). Judah attempts to recover his items by delivering payment, but the woman he calls a zona (prostitute) is nowhere to be found. Months later Tamar’s pregnancy is revealed and Judah orders her immediate death. When she is brought forth she publicly presents the markers of the man who impregnated her. Judah is quick to acknowledge the grace and legality of her act declaring, “She is more in the right than I” (38:26). Tamar gives birth to twin sons, one of whom will be named as a direct ancestor of King David. Genesis 38 is a tale of procreation and this emphasis appears prior to Tamar’s introduction. In verse two Judah marries and his wife assumes agency: “She conceived and bore a son, and he named him Er. She conceived again and bore a son and named him Onan. Once again she bore a son and named him Shelah; [Judah] was at Chezib when she bore him” (v. 3–5). The emphasis on female conception and labor at the start of the essay—an emphasis impossible to ignore given its repeated description— prepares readers for a more complex account of Tamar’s efforts to conceive and bear children as well. The delivery of Tamar’s twins in the final verses brings the action full circle; her sons replace the two the first mother lost. Though one might be inclined to read this as yet another example of

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patriarchal emphasis on female reproduction, it is important to note that Tamar not only appears to desire a child, but also has legal rights to that child. The presence of the levirate marriage law in the narrative incorporates issues of justice into Tamar’s story. Tamar does not seduce Shelah to whom she should be wed, but rather the older patriarch whose responsibility it was to enforce the levirate code. The term used by Judah to describe Tamar, sadequah, has a legal emphasis and is used to distinguish something as just, righteous, straight. It refers to vindication, acquittal. The word appears in the Bible to describe the government of kings, and is frequently found in the Book of Job. Tamar is “in the right;” the actions she takes in the name of motherhood are legally and morally valid. Like Tamar’s narrative, the All’s Well story both begins and ends with reference to childbearing. The pregnant Helena’s grand entrance at the close of the play manifests the hope that all might end well yet given that she has fulfilled her ridiculous husband’s ridiculous demands. But the play puts an immediate emphasis on childbirth with the Countess’s opening lines, “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband” (1.1.1). This remark is generally understood to mean that the departure of the Countess’s son is a loss as significant to her as her husband’s death. This initial line proves extremely revealing, however, for the Countess immediately announces herself a mother and identifies the act of delivery that establishes maternity. Snyder notes that the Countess’s opening “suggests the importance of women and their initiatives.”6 More importantly, the line draws our attention to an initiative essential to the play’s heroine: Helena will both anticipate the delivery of her own child, and facilitate the delivery of another woman’s child home to Rossillion. The women of the play work toward deliveries of all sorts—delivering an errant husband to his wife, delivering themselves up for assistance, delivering a pregnant wife to her rightful home and status. The various deliveries that reinforce maternity have biblical precedent, for Old Testament matriarchs continue to be defined by deliveries after their children’s births. Hannah’s maternal victory manifests itself in the delivery of her son Samuel to serve inside the sanctuary. It is following this delivery that she voices her song in praise of God and herself (1 Samuel 2.1–10). Naomi, as promised, delivers a redeeming kinsman to her widowed daughter-in-law (Ruth 3.1–2). An infamous delivery is made by Rebecca who betrays her husband and his favorite son in order to secure the birthright for her favorite (Genesis 27.8–10). Rebecca’s delivery of the disguised Jacob to the blind Isaac is a notorious deception. It is one orchestrated entirely by the mother, demonstrating that women’s commitments to children overwhelm any obligation to husbands. The Countess’s conspicuous metaphor at the start of All’s Well prepares us for such alliances. By pairing the delivery of children with the departure of husbands, the Countess hints at one’s replacement of the other. The

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remark anticipates the delivery that will dominate the play’s conclusion; it also indicates a detachment of husbands and wives. Though distance between Helena and Bertram is an unromantic reading of the play’s conclusion, it is warranted. The conditional phrases abundant in the final scene cloud Bertram’s acceptance of his wife: “If she . . . can make me know this clearly,” he says, “I’ll love her dearly” (ll.313–4, emphasis mine). But Bertram has proven an unreliable lover; his word is worth little. In the final scene of discovery he is revealed a liar, seducer, and adulterer. Lafew would rather “buy me a son-in-law in a fair” (5.3.148) than wed his daughter to him. Helena’s actions are initially motivated by her desire for Bertram, but her marriage is not her great achievement; maternity is. Consideration of the Tamar narrative alongside All’s Well highlights this distinction, for the appropriation of a husband is immaterial to the biblical mother’s success. Tamar’s triumph manifests itself in her delivery of children, not in Judah’s delivery of a husband—a promise he never fulfills. The Genesis narrative explicitly states that Judah “was not intimate with [Tamar] again” (38.26). Nonetheless, Tamar’s heroine status is established and her tale ends triumphantly. The description of her sons’ birth has distinct similarities to the birth of Rebecca’s twins Jacob and Esau, suggesting that Tamar’s children also will sire great nations. Clearly, Tamar’s delivery of her sons buries her need of a husband. The stories of Genesis 38 and All’s Well go beyond the implication that a romantic union is unimportant; both indicate the hazards of fond alliance. Judah attributes the deaths of two sons to their sexual encounters with Tamar, and consequently withholds his youngest son from her. Judah’s direction to Tamar to return to her father’s house is motivated by his fear that “[Shelah] too might die like his brothers” (Genesis 38.11). As Mieke Bal explains, “Judah tried to protect his younger son from contact with the woman, which he judged lethal.”7 Tamar is taxed with the burden of overcoming man’s fear of woman. Fear of the female is also given as the likely cause of Bertram’s staunch refusal to wed Helena; Neely notes Bertram’s “revulsion from Helena’s sexuality,” and “his sense of his own sexual inadequacy.”8 Regardless of the cause of Bertram’s boycott of his bride, romantic love is repeatedly associated with risk and disaster in this comedy. In confessing her love for Bertram, Helena claims that “it hurts not him/ That he is loved of me” (1.3.191–2), but there is palpable fear of the contrary. Bertram insists he is “undone” by marriage, and that the hazards of war are preferable to “the dark house and the detested wife” (2.3.269.290). Bertram’s sentiments are echoed in the thoughts and advice of others. Parolles suggests Bertram go to battle rather than spend his “manly marrow” in a wife’s arms (2.3.279); the clown also communicates that a “loss of men” results from their (sexually) “standing to’t” (3.2.40). The King’s

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greatest fear for his wards going off to war is their intercourse with Italian women. Women’s aversion to male contact is equally extreme. The subject of female virginity surfaces within moments of the play’s action and it is clear that men and women are engaged in sexual combat, in which women must “barracado” themselves against the male inclination to blow them up (1.1.112, 118). Mariana, too, solemnly warns against the “wrack of maidenhood” (3.5.22). There is a distinction, of course, between the illicit seduction feared by Mariana and a marital sexual union. All’s Well’s women regard sex as a procreative responsibility. In his attempts at seduction, Bertram urges Diana to “be as your mother was/ When your sweet self was got” (4.2.9–10). Diana corrects Bertram’s conflation of sex and pleasure and responds that her mother “did but duty” (4.2.12). Helena’s appetite for her Count would seem to contradict Diana’s dutiful constraints for sex; Helena certainly seems to enjoy what she can of her night with Bertram, referring to his “sweet use” (4.4.22). But Helena’s achieved desire does have a distinctly reproductive purpose. Bertram’s challenge to Helena to “show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to” (3.2.57–8) makes procreational rather than recreational sex her goal. Helena chooses to “lose it to her own liking” (1.1.149), but her actual loss is motivated by desired increase. The speed with which Helena conceives demonstrates that she is more successful as a mother than as a lover, and it is maternity that defines Helena in recent criticism of this play. Adelman, McCandless and others describe Helena as a kind of “mother surrogate” to Bertram.9 Adelman argues that it is this maternal edge that drives Bertram from her. Critical perception of Helena as a maternal figure is undoubtedly rooted in the maternal posture she herself adopts.10 At court, she gently rejects one of the King’s wards in maternal terms: “You are too young, too happy, and too good/ to make yourself a son out of my blood” (2.3.95–6). Helena’s association of sex with motherhood appears in her early banter with Parolles on virginity. In response to his inquiry, “Will you anything with it?” Helena replies: Not my virginity. Yet . . . There shall your master have a thousand loves, A mother, and a mistress, and a friend, A phoenix, captain, and an enemy, A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear . . . (1.1.161–7)

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These lines have puzzled editors. Snyder argues that the first part of Helena’s response does not “lead naturally” into the lines that follow because

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Helena would not confess her love to Parolles. And yet, the line’s detailing of the consequences of lost virginity does make sense in light of the play’s events and characters’ perceptions of them. In possession of Helena’s virginity, Bertram will find a presumed mistress, potential traitress and enemy. In her orchestration of the bed trick Helena will become a captain, a guide; the final scene alludes to the presence of a divine figure. Helena intends for Bertram to find a dear, a friend, and, definitely a mother. That Helena first predicts herself a mother as the upshot of lost virginity foreshadows the play’s action and her mastery of it. Maternity is featured in All’s Well both in Helena’s designs to become a mother and in her reliance on mothers throughout her campaign. Diana lures Bertram to bed only with her widowed mother’s approval: “Instruct my daughter how she shall persever” (3.6.37). The Countess offers her support of Helena’s activities and roots this in her maternal affection for the girl: “I say I am your mother,/ And put you in the catalogue of those/ That were enwombed mine” (1.3.137–9). Dash writes feelingly of the “vibrancy” of the women’s worlds in All’s Well, and attributes this in part to the maternal bonds fashioned throughout. Maternity is, the Countess reminds us, “a bond whereof the world takes note” (1.3.184). In the world of Shakespeare’s play such notes are taken most effectively by daughters. The Countess is fond of her son but, as Dash writes, is most often seen “supportively encouraging the younger female.”11 It is perhaps because of the earnest and uncomplicated affection between the Countess and Helena that the reunion of mother and daughter provides the play’s emotional close. Helena’s final line on stage shifts focus from her regard for Bertram to her feeling for her mother-in-law: “O my dear mother, do I see you living?” In an astute argument, John V. Robinson suggests that Helena’s final line is actually two and that the phrase “do I see you living” should be ascribed to the Countess who has reason to believe the other woman dead (424). If this is the case, the heroine’s final exchange is with her mother (in-law), and the older woman escapes her conspicuous silence in the play’s end to match Helen’s emotional joy. It is in immediate response to this reunion that prompts Lafew’s “My eyes smell onions, I shall weep anon” (5.3.318). The reunion of the two women closes the play with duel representations of female power: one in the anticipation of maternity, the other with maternity thoroughly restored (see Figure 10.1, p. 177). The intensity of the bond between Helena and the Countess prompts its association with another biblical narrative. The Book of Ruth, which directly acknowledges Tamar’s grace in its final essay, celebrates the loyal bonds between a daughter- and mother-in-law. The closeness of the female relationship is emphasized in the observation made to Naomi that Ruth “is better to [her] than seven sons” (4.15). Equally clear, however, is the older woman’s invaluable service to Ruth. Like the Countess, Naomi wants to

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help her daughter-in-law to a husband. She instructs Ruth to “go down to the threshing floor” in active pursuit of Boaz (3.3); Naomi encourages that, in an even more direct approach than that demonstrated by the elder woman in Shakespeare. The sexual manipulation in play in Ruth is considered a part of the bed trick tradition, further tying it to the action in All’s Well. Doniger reads Boaz’s surprise when he finds Ruth in his bed to suggest that he anticipates a visit from the elder Naomi. Naomi’s act of substitution reiterates Tamar’s experience that motherhood is of greater value than marriage; the older woman abstains from the physical act of intercourse, but she achieves maternity nonetheless. At the birth of Ruth’s son, the biblical narrator states: “Naomi took the child and held it to her bosom. She became its foster mother, and the women neighbors gave him a name, saying, ‘A son is born to Naomi’ ” (4.17). The shared maternity between Naomi and Ruth reinforces female unity and the transformative effects of motherhood. Prior to the child’s birth, Naomi describes herself as empty, (1.11), bitter (1.20), hopeless (1.12); the narrative offers a biblical chronicle of the riddle in which “one that’s dead is quick” (5.3.303). The Book of Ruth, in fact, offers a series of riddles. Here, too, a heroine engages in sexual manipulation that results in celebrated virtue. The Ruth narrative self-consciously honors the histories of women whose maternal drives lead to sexual deceptions. Ruth is blessed with the wish that her house be like those of Rachel, Leah and Tamar (4.11–12). Ruth is united with an ancestry of female craft and cunning. As Doniger observes, this blessing is an allusion to “bedtricksters.”12 Such tricks become increasingly significant with the narrative’s insistence on Ruth’s ancestry. Ruth is repeatedly identified as a Moabite. The description, which appears seven times in the book’s four essays, associates Ruth with a sexually aggressive and deviant woman. The Moabite people sprang from Moab, the son of Lot by an incestuous union with his elder daughter. Both of Lot’s daughters engage their drunken father in intercourse to prevent what they fear will be the extinction of humankind.13 Sexual initiative is first taken by the mother of Moab. The narrative makes clear that agency is hers; Lot “did not know when she lay down or when she rose” (Genesis 19.33). And yet, while the elder daughter’s acts are despicable, her motives are good. Her son becomes the forebearer of kings. Lot’s daughters represent the first women in the Bible to choose for themselves their sexual partners. The choice is unforgettable and unsettling, and resonates in the aggressive behavior of woman facing similar threats to propagation. Some of the disquieting elements of the story of Lot and his daughters surface in the Ruth and Tamar narratives, and in All’s Well. All of these women assume the burden of regeneration. Their conceptions— however dubiously got—prove vital because these would-be mothers prevent the extinction of their family lines. Ruth and Naomi are faced with

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Figure 9.1 The pregnant Helena greets the Countess (5.3). Purchase Repertory 2005, David Bassuk (director). Diana Hoyt (Helena), Mindi Dornaus (Countess).

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such extinction and Ruth’s distinctive origin prepares us for her boldness. Her quiet approach to Boaz recalls her ancestress’s narrative since the women’s partners are unaware of their engagement, at least for a time. In Tamar’s story, Judah ironically thwarts the continuity of the male line he would promote—by withholding his youngest son from Tamar, he withholds him from marriage and children. Tamar’s election to seduce the father-figure rather than her deserved spouse echoes the choice modeled by Lot’s daughters—a sexual relationship with a father-in-law is considered incest according to Leviticus 20.12. The blurring of generational boundaries in the seductions by these biblical mothers marks the urgency of procreational situations. Menn notes that Tamar’s bed trick occurs only after the death of Judah’s wife. She chooses for herself a partner once both the younger and elder reproductive couples have been “shattered.”14 Helena makes a similar choice in Shakespeare’s play, pursuing an older man once the younger has been (at least temporarily) removed. There is an undeniable sexual quality to Helena’s restoration of the King; she willingly risks a “strumpet’s boldness” (2.1.169) to cure him. Lafew promises that Helena’s “simple touch/ Is powerful to araise King Pepin, nay,/ To give great Charlemain a pen in’s hand” (2.1.74–6). Once cured, the King is described as lustier than a “dolphin” (2.3.26), and publicly proclaims that she hath “raised” him from his sickly bed (2.3.110). Though the King’s delivery from his sick bed does not correspond with the delivery of a child, his illness urges the curative powers of “issue.” Helena presents her father’s remedy as “the dearest issue of his practice,/ And of his old experience th’only darling” (2.1.106–7). “Issue” is presented as a physical and spiritual restorative. The clown confesses to the Countess “I think I shall never have the blessing of God till I have issue o’ my body” (1.3.24–25). Helena is herself blessed issue, described as the “sole child” of a man “whose skill was almost as great as his honesty” (1.1.38, 18–9). Like her biblical forbearers, Helena is responsible for the Narbonne line. The king does not directly propagate the Narbonne family, but he does provide the means by which propagation might occur. Once Helena has worked her cure, the King assumes a parental role toward her: providing a dowry, assigning honor to her name, and approving her marriage. Their pseudo-incestual union is emphasized with the discovery of a gift. We learn in Act Five that the King has given Helena a ring. We do not see the transfer of the item, but the play clearly demonstrates the circumstances in which men and women exchange these things (literal and metaphorical). Bertram gives Diana his ancestral ring, and she promises one in return, having described her maiden honor as a ring: “on your finger in the night I’ll put/ Another ring, that what in time proceeds/ May token to the future our past deeds” (4.2.62–4). That the King would prove the source of the ring Helena confers upon Bertram—a ring she swore to keep until she gave

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it to Bertram in bed—is fitting. The King’s ring has a place in seduction, but his enabling of Helena’s gifted ring also marks him a surrogate father. Adelman argues that Helena’s assumption of the King’s ring marks her ability to “command [his] help.”15 Her appropriation of his agency distances the King from action and completes the detachment representative of fathers in this play. The Countess begins the play with reference to Bertram’s deceased father; Helena’s father is also dead and the Countess’s lamentations on his loss emphasize his distance. Bertram is an unwitting participant in his own son’s (or daughter’s) conception. The disconnection of fathers is further suggested by Lafew’s unfriendly remark that the young men of the French court are “bastards” of the English (2.3.93). This distancing of fathers is unavoidable to a degree with the use of the bed trick. It is an unmistakable feature of Tamar’s narrative. Genesis 38 removes Judah from childbirth even before Tamar’s trick by including the early detail that Judah “was at Chezib” when his youngest son was born (1.5). Judah’s literal distance from his youngest son’s birth prepares us for his figurative distance from the regeneration of his family. The denial of male procreative agency is common in biblical stories tracking women’s conceptions. A woman’s pregnancy is attributed to God, not her husband. God is said to “remember” the intended mother while she is sexually engaged (see Hannah’s conception of the prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 1:19). A striking difference in Tamar’s story is that this heroine does not seek the aid of God, nor are we told that he facilitates her pregnancy. On the contrary, God repeatedly eliminates Tamar’s husbands making her pregnancy all the more remarkable. “Tamar,” Menn writes, “effectively replaced God in his role of facilitator of birth.”16 Helena similarly replaces divine agency with her own: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie/ Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.212–3)—though as a pilgrim she will have no difficulty manipulating the appearance of holy behavior. This pilgrim’s progress leads to Bertram’s stolen affection. The sexual initiative Helena, Tamar, and Ruth demonstrate is warranted in their texts, even vital. The characters’ engagement in deception and manipulation is clear; so, too, are their narratives’ endorsements of their acts. Helena’s return urges the King’s acceptance of her deeds with the promise that: “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,/ The bitter past more welcome is the sweet” (5.3.330–1). Tamar’s bits of sweetness include the birth of twins, her place in Ruth’s blessing, and a tribute in verse. This mother’s honor is confirmed in a psalm of King David in which he foretells that “the righteous shall bloom as tamar” (92.13). The verse is generally translated as “the righteous shall bloom as a palm”—tamar is the Hebrew word for palm tree. However, the use of the very term sadiyq, righteous, in the poem makes this a clear tribute to the biblical heroine. David has cause for such appreciation; Tamar is his ancestress and her name was

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given to his daughter. Tamar’s is considered “the foundational story of the Davidic dynasty.” Of course the greatest validation of the actions of Tamar, Ruth, Naomi, and even Lot’s daughter lies not in David’s words but in David’s actions. Each of these biblical mothers contributes to the lineage of “Israel’s most celebrated king.”17 Tamar’s and Ruth’s names are also joined in another impressive biblical genealogy important for All’s Well. The New Testament’s Gospel of Matthew presents only four women in a history of Jesus prior to naming Mary: Tamar, Ruth, Rahav, and Bathsheba (Matthew 1.3, 5, 6). Matthew’s choices are startling, joining the sexually exploitative Tamar and Ruth are a prostitute and an adulteress. These four women have strong sexual histories; all are involved in extreme deceptions. But the narrative’s attentions appear to legitimize—if not sanctify—their behaviors. The association of highly sexual and deceptive women with Mary complicates the merit of virginity. The genealogy as it is presented here obscures sexual deviance as though Mary’s virginal maternity was built on the backs of other women. Matthew’s presentation of the mothers behind Mary’s untainted delivery suggesting that the idealized mother relies upon the activity of the sexual, deceptive mother. The biblical echoes of this problematized maternity are keenly felt in the final scene of All’s Well. The play’s allusions to the highly sexualized narratives of Tamar and Ruth facilitate Helena’s entrance in Act Five as a type of Holy Mother. Adelman argues Helena’s role as a secular Mary given Bertram’s demand that his wife “prove herself in effect a virgin mother.”18 Because Bertram has no knowledge of intercourse with Helena, her pregnancy appears a “miraculous conception.” But Helena’s appearance as a pregnant virgin in the final scene cannot eclipse her penetrating likeness in previous acts to eager, more deceptive mothers. The play forces the complexities of the tradition from which these biblical mothers emerge. Helena’s “resurrection” at the play’s end—maternal, forgiving, adored—does invite her association with a divine mother. And yet, as in Matthew’s genealogy, a mother’s virginity relies upon another’s apparent loss of it; Neely writes, “Diana, through her identification with Helena, both is and is not a maid and a wife and hence must accept the title of whore.”19 Of course, Diana, goddess of chastity, is no whore; Helena is no virgin. The challenge is to know this. Knowing is at the heart of All’s Well and this, too, is biblical in nature. Jagendorf comments on the Bible’s ironic use of the word “know” in its relation to the bed trick: “A man may know a woman (physically) and be mistaken about her identity” Women’s use of the bed trick is not destructive but comedic, he argues, because male authority is overturned and “the formal syntax of male knower and female known is famously subverted.”20 The Tamar narrative and All’s Well certainly depict the impressive scope of male ignorance. Judah mistakes his daughter-in-law for a zona/prostitute, though it is clear none may be

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found when sought. Bertram accuses the chaste Diana of being “a common gamester” (5.3.188). The heroines of both texts are physically known, but are unknown. Moreover, they are women who would be known—their success depends upon the whetting of man’s dull perception. Bertram draws attention to the woman’s task to enlighten: “If she can make me know this clearly . . .,” he says (5.3.315, emphasis mine). Helena does her best. She greets her husband in the final scene with the peculiar remark, “When I was like this maid, I found you wondrous kind” (ll. 309–310). But Helena is no longer like this or any maid; she forces Bertram to see her sex, her pregnancy, her slyness. In true biblical fashion, the “infinite cunning” (l216) for which Bertram previously condemned Diana is transformed into maternal virtue. Bertram’s grasp of Helena’s cunning will compel his love everlasting, or so he says. Tamar more directly commands Judah, instructing him to haker “discern, recognize” (Genesis 38.25). She directs him not only to his forfeited staff but also to her pregnant self, her entitlement, her turned trick. Tamar and Helena are complex heroines, appreciation of their virtue reliant upon keen perception. They are women of unusual valor and unusual methods, but their virtues are recognized within their narratives. Tamar’s history and All’s Well demonstrate the challenges of such recognition, the difficulties of it. It is only once Tamar insists upon his discernment that Judah can regard her “in the right.” The knowledge to which Tamar prompts Judah is a kind of self-knowledge in which he must confront his indulgence and failed responsibility. Bal writes that Tamar “forces him to see the truth,” and certainly part of that is his deficiency of perception.21 Who can find a virtuous woman? One wonders if the question posed in Proverbs 31 in fact laments a lack of discerning men. The proverb is, after all, presented as a scrap of motherly wisdom. The bulk of the text is devoted to identifying specific ways a good woman may be recognized. It is the least a mother can do, especially one who has learned that men may not know virtue when they see it.

NOTES 1

This and all biblical translations are taken from the Tanakh/The Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985). 2 Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 227; Joseph G. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of All’s Well that Ends Well and its Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 99. 3 Marliss C. Desens. The English Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama: Explorations in Gender, Sexuality, and Power (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 20.

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All’s Well, That Ends Well Peggy Muñoz Simonds, “Overlooked Sources of the Bed Trick,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 433. See Deuteronomy 25.5–6. Snyder, Susan, ed., All’s Well that Ends Well (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 79. Mieke Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 86. The prominence of the color red in the story of the twins’ births and the question of who will emerge first from Tamar’s womb recalls the struggle between Rebecca’s twins, Jacob and Esau. Esau is associated with the color red (both in his ruddy complexion and in the color of the porridge for which he will sell his birthright). Rebecca is told that her sons will sire two nations, suggesting Tamar’s will do the same. See Genesis 25.21–34. Neely, 70. Biblical wives also appear as surrogate mothers. Rebecca clearly fills a maternal need for Isaac, whose mother’s death is reported in Genesis 23:1, immediately following the Akidah (binding of Isaac). When the grown Isaac sees Rebecca for the first time, the narrative reveals that he “brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent” (Genesis 24.67). David McCandless, “Helena’s Bed-trick: Gender and Performance in All’s Well That Ends Well” Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), 458; Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays: From Hamlet to The Tempest (NY: Routledge, 1992), 79, 80. Irene G. Dash, Women’s Worlds in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 48, 49; John V. Robinson, “Helena’s Living Mother: All’s Well That Ends Well V.111.314,” English Studies, 80 (1999), 423–7. Doniger, 260. They escape with their father from the events at Sodom and Gomorrah and believe that “there is not a man on earth to consort with” (Genesis 19.32). Esther Marie Menn, Judith and Tamar (Genesis 38) in Ancient Jewish Exegesis: Studies in Literary Form and Hermeneutics (NY: Brill, 1995), 27, 22. Adelman, 82. Menn, 95. Menn, 85, 101. Adelman 83, 85. Neely, 86. Jvi Jagendorf, “In the Morning, Behold it was Leah: ‘Genesis and the Reversal of Sexual Knowledge,’ ” in Biblical Patterns in Modern Literature, ed. David H. Hirsch and Nehama Aschkenazy (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984), 51, 52. Bal, 192.

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“The credit of your father” Absent Fathers in All’s Well, That Ends Well DAVID M. BERGERON

As the initial group leaves Helena alone on the stage for a few moments, Lafew offers these parting words: “Farewell, pretty lady. You must hold the credit of your father” (1.1.77). I think that this statement can serve as a kind of motto for the play, and it certainly applies to Helena and to Bertram. These characters must sustain and uphold the reputation and legacy of their fathers. The play exacerbates the difficulty of this task because the play “is haunted by dead, aging, and inadequate fathers.”1 The absence, death, or unavailability of father figures certainly complicates Bertram’s task of developing his own masculine identity, as Adelman has observed: “But the achievement of manhood is notoriously problematic in a world of dead and dying fathers.”2 Unless a sufficient surrogate father appears, one remains dependent on memory. In this and in many other ways, All’s Well may remind us of Hamlet. Bertram’s and Helena’s memories hold in them idealized versions of their fathers; and their struggle becomes, at least in part, to come to terms with those absent fathers. How they do or do not succeed helps shape our understanding of these principal characters. The play’s circular movement from Rossillion to Florence back to Rossillion, with side trips to Paris and Marseilles, implies a geographical, narrative, and spiritual dislocation. This movement intersects the struggle of familial relationships. From The Comedy of Errors with the father Egeon, who is for all practical purposes “absent,” to The Tempest and its overwhelmingly “present” father, Shakespeare explores the various shades of absence and presence of fathers. I suggest that All’s Well offers an ambiguous and challenging perspective on this issue, situating itself between Errors and The Tempest, lacking the conventional “blocking” fathers of some of the early comedies. The moral and psychological search for a father defines one of the play’s serious narrative issues and helps delineate the difference between Helena and Bertram. His failure to find a father

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accounts in part for his vexing position in this play. I think, therefore, that All’s Well stands between tragedy and romance, raising a familial issue that grips most tragedies but without offering a resolution that romances typically provide. Neely has imaginatively suggested that All’s Well begins as an “attenuated tragedy” but ends as a “vexed comedy.”3 Shakespeare follows the basic outline of the story from Boccaccio’s Decameron, filtered through William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure. But he makes deliberate changes in order to develop and underscore familial relationships. For example, Shakespeare invents the Countess of Rossillion, Bertram’s mother and surrogate mother to Helena. Painter does not mention Beltramo’s father except to say that he is dead, thus making Beltramo “fatherless.” The source provides no extended treatment of the King of France other than the episode of his curing; he does not figure in the story’s conclusion. Nor does the source provide a Duke of Florence. About the ancestral ring that becomes so important in defining Bertram’s familial regard the source only says that Beltramo loved the ring and thought that it had a certain virtue but makes no connection to his family. The play’s opening scene underscores the matter of death, absence, and fathers in compelling ways. The stage direction, quite unusual in Shakespeare, states: “Enter young Bertram, Count of Rossillion, his mother, and Helena, Lord Lafew, all in black.” They mourn the death of Bertram’s father and soon mention also the death of Helena’s father. Few comedies begin in such a seemingly unpromising way, strongly reminiscent of the early moments of Hamlet. All’s Well immediately provokes a fundamental question: how to revitalize a dead or dying world. Indeed, the opening sixty or so lines enunciate recurring words associated with death, reinforcing the costume. The Countess, whom Shakespeare has invented, speaks the first line (and she is the only female character to open a Shakespeare play, except for the Witches in Macbeth): “In delivering my son from me I bury a second husband.” Shakespeare interweaves terms of birth and death in this somewhat ambiguous and curious statement which seems to blur the distinction between husband and son, raising the specter of potential incest that some critics have found in the play. The sorrow experienced by the Count’s death expands with the expected departure of Bertram, who comments: “And I in going, madam, weep o’er my father’s death anew.” We assume that the death is recent, given the black dress; and Bertram’s leaving triggers more grief for him also. But, one notes, Bertram’s statement remains strangely dispassionate and detached; indeed, this statement becomes his only personal statement about his father in the play. And he turns to his immediate task: “but I must attend his majesty’s command, to whom I am now in ward, evermore in subjection.” I suggest that Bertram’s relationship with the King never moves much beyond wardship. Lafew offers a possible means to overcome this current grief, a way to translate

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sorrow into hope: “You shall find of the king a husband, madam; you, sir, a father” (1.1.1–7). If this indeed came to pass, we would be in the Hamlet situation. Shakespeare seems to be providing a way out, a narrative strategy with the King of France becoming the Countess’s husband and Bertram’s surrogate father. In fact, this possibility suggested by Lafew becomes one of many false starts in All’s Well. I will be observing how the King of France does not become Bertram’s father, thus creating additional difficulties for Bertram. But no sooner has Lafew offered this perfectly reasonable idea—at least at this early moment in the play—than the Countess asks in her second pivotal statement: “What hope is there of his majesty’s amendment?” (11–12). The King is dying, rendering him suspect as a potential husband/father. The early moments move then from Bertram’s father to the possibility of the King as father; and then the Countess turns to a recollection of yet another father, Helena’s: “This young gentlewoman had a father—O that ‘had,’ how sad a passage ’tis. . . . Would for the king’s sake he were living! I think it would be the death of the king’s disease” (17–18, 21–23). Shakespeare gives the Countess the turning, defining remarks or questions in the first 18 lines of the play, reinforcing her prominence. The famous physician, Gerard de Narbon, Helena’s father, might have saved the King. Even the King, Lafew says, “very lately spoke of him admiringly and mourningly” (27–28). Alas, within the play’s opening 20 lines, we learn that Bertram’s father has died, the King is dying, and Helena’s father is dead—he who might have saved the King. Shakespeare busily closes doors, as we have to wonder how this play will proceed. Lafew’s observation about moderate lamentation serves as the prelude to the Countess’s instructions to Bertram, which begin: “Be thou blessed, Bertram, and succeed thy father/ In manners, as in shape” (59–60). That in a nutshell constitutes one of the play’s major narrative problems, the understandable hope of a mother who wants her son to resemble the father. Bertram never comes close. In fact, by 3.2, the Countess bitterly says: “He was my son,/ But I do wash his name out of my blood” (65–6). Instead, the Countess adopts Helena as daughter. But in the play’s opening scene Bertram comes across as perfectly respectable, says the right things, and encourages us to believe that the absent/dead father will live in him, providing a model for Bertram to emulate. And what about Helena and her absent/dead father? Ironically, in the opening scene she comes off worse than Bertram, seeming at moments somewhat insensitive about her father’s death. Shakespeare thus sets in motion the beginning of a series of intersections and moral and narrative reversals for Bertram and Helena, which depend in part on their reaction to absent fathers. Helena does not speak until line 78 when she responds to the Countess who has observed: “The remembrance of her father never

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approaches her heart but the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood from her cheek” (47–9). To this Helena says cryptically, probably in an aside, as the Penguin edition indicates: “I do affect a sorrow indeed, but I have it too” (52). This enigmatic statement may disappoint in light of all the preceding comments about the Count’s death, her father’s death, and the dying King. We do not quite know what to make of Helena’s comment that separates appearance from inward reality. After the Countess has instructed Bertram on behavior (most of which he will violate) and the desire to “succeed” his father in all ways, Lafew turns to Helena and says in the line cited earlier: “You must hold the credit of your father.” Shakespeare thus lowers into the play the measure of the absent/dead father for both Bertram and Helena. In the soliloquy that follows Helena seems less the dutiful child than had Bertram. She begins: “I think not on my father,/ And these great tears grace his remembrance more/ Than those I shed for him. What was he like?/ I have forgot him . . .” (76–9). Instead, all her attention focuses on Bertram in her “idolatrous fancy” by which she would “sanctify his relics” (99–100). One might have expected such sentiments to have been directed toward her father. Garrett Sullivan observes: “Helena has forgotten her father, who emblematizes her social identity, and has reconceived herself in terms of her desire, the object of which is Bertram.”4 Helena’s perspective swerves even farther away from her father with the entry of Parolles and the bawdy conversation about virginity that follows. Procreation serves as the “answer” to death, the play suggests. But how to get to that possibility? In her final soliloquy of the opening scene, Helena opens a new narrative route as she underscores a determination to shape her own future: “The king’s disease—my project may deceive me,/ But my intents are fixed, and will