All's Well That Ends Well (2 page)

Yet Helen is only a pretended pilgrim and the King has been cured not by a miracle but by the medical knowledge she has inherited from her father. Again and again the play takes a fairy-tale motif and turns it into something tougher, more earthly and open to philosophical debate. Lafew's generalization sets up the key scene in which Bertram rejects Helen. The idea of unquestioning obedience to the King's will is itself a thing “supernatural and causeless.” It depends upon an “unknown fear,” the mystique of monarchy, the idea that the King is God's representative on earth and that to challenge him will cause the entire fabric of the natural order to collapse. In a crucial rhyming couplet near the end of the play—often editorially reassigned to the Countess of Rossillion for no good textual reason—the King says that, since he has failed in his management of Bertram's first marriage, the second had better be a success, otherwise “nature” may as well “cesse” (cease).

Shakespeare's instinctive conservatism tips the balance in favor of the old order. The King, the Countess, and the old courtier are generous and ethically admirable, much more obviously sympathetic than Bertram, Parolles, and Lavatch. Bertram has to be tricked out of his sexual selfishness and Parolles out of his vainglory, but still Shakespeare the role-player and wordsmith invests huge dramatic energy in the darker characters. He uses them to open cracks in the established order. The King tells Bertram that Helen should be viewed for what she is within, not by way of the superficial trappings of wealth and rank: “The property by what it is should go, / Not by the title.” Yet his own authority depends on his title, and the “go by what it is” argument might be turned to say that if Bertram does not love Helen he should not marry her. The King moves swiftly from reasoning to the assertion of raw authority: “My honour's at the stake, which to defeat, / I must produce my power.” Shakespeare's intensely compacted writing style makes the point. By “which to defeat,” the King means “in order to defeat the threat to my honour,” but ironically the very need to produce his “power” itself defeats the code of honor. As so often in Shakespeare's darker plays, the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli lurks in the shadows, whispering that fine old codes such as honor and duty can only be underwritten by raw power.

He who asserts the new code of the self must live by that code. Both Bertram and Parolles are found out. The two lords Dumaine are not only mechanics in the double plot of ambush and bed trick, but also commentators upon how their victims are brought to self-knowledge: “As we are ourselves, what things are we! / Merely our own traitors.” The Dumaines too are young and modern in their recognition that we cannot simply sort our kind into sheep and goats in the manner of authoritarian religious dispensations. They propose instead that human life is shaded gray: “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.” This could be the epigraph for Shakespeare's dramatically mingled yarn of tragicomedy.

Parolles comes to acknowledge his boastful tongue. “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live,” he vows. What, though, can this mean, given that—as his name indicates—he is made of nothing but words? Bertram, meanwhile, only comes to realize how much Helen is to be valued when she has been lost. The fiction of comedy gives him a second chance to love her. But in the modern world where there are no miracles, “all's well that ends well”
is
a fiction. Along the way we have been promised on more than one occasion that all will end well, but when it comes to the climax the King says that “all yet
seems
well” and that “if it end so meet” then all bitterness will be past. Those little conditional qualifiers leave open the door to the tragic world.

Early critics regarded
All's Well
as a farce, then as a romance, then largely as a failure in psychological realism. In the nineteenth century, commentators highlighted a lack of poetry in the drama: “The style of the whole is more sententious than imaginative: the glowing colours of fancy could not with propriety have been employed on such a subject.”
²

At the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, George Bernard Shaw suggested that the problem of the play was its modernity: a part such as that of Helen was “too genuine and beautiful and modern for the public.”
³
In Shaw's view, Helen's independence of mind made her into a proto-feminist heroine, an anticipation of the female characters in the plays of Henrik Ibsen who sought to escape the doll's house. Shaw was reacting to the very mixed reception that had long been accorded to Helen, the fact that some had idealized her and others demonized her. Samuel Taylor Coleridge did both: on one occasion he described her as Shakespeare's “loveliest character,”
⁴
while on another he suggested that “Bertram had surely good reason to look upon the King's forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakespeare's consummate skill to interest us for her.”
⁵

For Anna Jameson, writing in the 1830s as the first female critic to reflect at length upon Shakespeare's women, Helen exemplified the virtue of patience in the face of adversity and male infidelity: “There never was, perhaps, a more beautiful picture of a woman's love, cherished in secret, not self-consuming in silent languishment … but patient and hopeful, strong in its own intensity, and sustained by its own fond faith.”
⁶
A couple of generations later, the great actress Ellen Terry begged to disagree, describing Helen as belonging to the “doormat” type: “They bear any amount of humiliation from the men they love, seem almost to enjoy being maltreated and scorned by them, and hunt them down in the most undignified way when they are trying to escape. The fraud with which Helena captures Bertram, who has left his home and country to get away from her, is really despicable.”
⁷

Bertram, by contrast to Helen, has always been roundly condemned by the great majority of critics. As already noted, Dr. Johnson set the tone of the debate with his remark that he could not reconcile his heart to Bertram. Coleridge tried to mount a defense, but resorted to special pleading on the grounds of status and alleged partial knowledge:

For twentieth-century critics, the main problem with the play was more a matter of genre and tone than of the morality of the central characters. It was suggested that there was an incongruity between the realistic characterization and the folktale or even fairy-tale plot:

The plot contains strong folktale motifs, such as those that have been described as the Healing of the King, the Fulfillment of Tasks, and the Clever Wench. Some critics have accordingly suggested that this gives primacy to structure and plot over psychology and interior life. The play can be read as a “romantic fable” in which

Yet at the same time, a much more hard-edged reading is possible:

So it is that “the characterization of the major dramatic persons is at odds with the final tendency of the action, in which a tone of irony and often satire conflicts with the ‘all's well' complacency implied by the fairy-tale elements, and in which a concrete, realistic presentation works at cross purposes with the romantic image of experience which the play seems trying to project.”
¹²

Such difficulties and variation in interpretation, and the perceived contradictions within both the action and the characterization, resulted in twentieth-century critics' identifying
All's Well
as one of Shakespeare's “problem” plays. This term was first used to describe the realistic dramas of the nineteenth century, those of Ibsen especially, that confronted controversial social issues by means of onstage debate, often with characters representing conflicting attitudes and points of view. The critic F. S. Boas, writing under the influence of Shaw, applied the term to
All's Well, Measure for Measure
, and
Troilus and Cressida
, three sex-charged plays that he thought shared an interest in social problems. Subsequent criticism applied the term more loosely, and corralled more Shakespearean plays within it, often emphasizing problems of form as well as content.
All's Well
and
Measure for Measure
in particular were seen as “problem comedies” because they did not conform to the supposed comic norm of a light touch and a happy ending. The related term “dark comedies” has also been used. So, for example, the ending was seen as a special problem. What
were
Shakespeare's intentions? Critics have fiercely debated “whether he meant Helena to be regarded as noble and admirable, or as a schemer and a harpy, why he blackened the character of Bertram and yet rewarded him at the end, and whether he meant the final reconciliation of Bertram and Helena to be taken as a prelude to future bliss, or ironically, as a union which must ultimately result in disaster.”
¹³

More recent criticism has continued to emphasize “problems” even as the terms of the debate have been converted into those of modern gender politics. The play has been especially amenable to analysis on these lines because it inverts the literary and dramatic norm whereby it is customarily the man who pursues the woman:

By this account, Helen becomes one of Shakespeare's most interesting comic heroines, not least because she is given genuinely introspective soliloquies:

The richness of her interior life makes it surprising that the role has not been taken on by more of the major female actors of modern times.

It has long been recognized that the parallel between Bertram and Parolles is central to the structure of the play:

With the advent of explicit feminism and the late twentieth-century war between the sexes, it became easier for critics and audiences to see not just the shadowing of Bertram in Parolles but also the broader parallelism between the sex plot and the war plot:

The play's explicit concern with social mobility seems equally modern in its application. Northrop Frye, one of the great twentieth-century critics, argued that
All's Well
is almost the only Shakespearean play in which there is an explicit social promotion in the foreground of the action: “It is emphasized that Helena is below Bertram in social status, and that it takes direct intervention of the king to make her marriage possible. Such a theme introduces the conception of one's ‘natural place' in society, the position for which one is fitted by one's talents and social function.”
¹⁸
Shakespeare perennially pitted old values and structures against new, perhaps especially so in the changed world of the first years of King James' reign, after old Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603. Northrop Frye again: