In “All’s Well That Ends Well”, a virtuous woman, acclaimed by all, is rejected by the suitor she has chosen because he regards her as insufficiently well born. Callow youth that he is, he runs off to war and is won back only by a stratagem whereby his true bride deceives him into going to bed with her and making her pregnant and giving her a ring his mother gave to him. The denouement consists of the revelation of this scheme and his surrender to her love. That interpretation, however, has to elide many of the problems the text provides for it. Bertram, the runaway bridegroom, must be made into a total cad if he is to give up a ring his mother gave him so that he can bed someone who is no more to him than a whore. He is so obstinate and cold to Helena, the doctor’s daughter who chooses him as a husband, that one wonders what she saw in him in the first place. Stage business has to be worked in if the two “lovers” are to reconcile. In one production, Helena puts a toy hobby horse between them after the last line of dialogue has been spoken to suggest that the child she will have will bind the two together. The interpretation also posits the notion that Shakespeare thought upward mobility was a reward for merit and that warfare was a silly calling, something not apparent in his great plays, and only a grand irony in “Troilus and Cressida”.
Think again before reading into Shakespeare sentiments that he would not have had, such as that it was acceptable for a woman to run after a man, and before making sense of plots only by consulting some parts of them, such as the praise regularly heaped on Helena. The trajectory of the plot is not as bizarre as the standard interpretation makes it and is in keeping with themes to be found across Shakespeare’s plays. Moreover, as is usually the case, Shakespeare provides a trenchant comment toward the beginning of the play which clues the audience in as to how to interpret it. (Remember Marcellus reminding Horatio that something is rotten in Denmark?)
In this play, a user’s manual is provided in turgid prose, as is appropriate to a play more rhetorical than poetic in that its images illustrate points rather than elaborate a verbal conceit that becomes associated with the play as its meaning: Desdemona’s handkerchief, Brutus’ honor. The opening line of “All’s Well” shows something amiss with the Countess. She says: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.” She is over the top in describing her son leaving home as a kind of death or, to use another meaning of “delivering”, she is over the top for thinking that childbirth is a kind of death. She then reports the King of Paris as having written himself off because of his illness, and Lafew, the Countess’ courtier, reduces death to the appropriate emotions to be shown by those who grieve. These three characters are established this soon as morbid. And so, already having demonstrated her lack of good judgment, the Countess offers up the following evaluation of Helena:
Her dispositions she inherits, which makes fair gifts fairer;
for where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities, there
commendations go with pity—they are virtues and traitors too.
In her they are the better for their simpleness. She derives her
honesty and achieves her goodness.
(I, i, 39-44)
What is this, other than the overly fulsome praise that it is intended to be and for which it is taken? The content is a very strange form of approval. Helena’s abilities are inherited, which is just as well, the Countess claims, because a sophisticated person might use those gifts badly, and because Helena comes from common stock, her gifts, including her character, are transparent, and so not threatening. Helena inherits, therefore, her trustworthiness, though her goodness, which is some other thing, what in others would be taken as the basis for trustworthiness, is accomplished, a result, presumably, of her having been at court, a place only the Countess would think is a place to learn moral character. So her common origins are a good thing.
This is a strange commendation partly because it belittles the recipient of the compliment by treating her as pliable, which is not the way things turn out to be. It is also counter-intuitive, certainly to any of Shakespeare’s contemporary auditors. How can goodness be a thing achieved, while honesty is a matter of one’s nature, even should such a forced distinction be entertained in the first place? Goodness is a state of being, and so inherent in the soul, whatever one’s actions, and so properly thought a matter of nature, while honesty, to the extent that it is different from goodness, is a behavior, and so capable of being learned through following examples and being subject to exhortations in favor of honesty. The Countess has thus reversed the natural order of what is social and what is essential, and so is available to be taken in by Helena, whose nature is not so good, however much Helena may protest how honest she is.
Helena, like Helen of Troy, is a witch. She is able to enchant people into doing what she wants. Like other Shakespearean witches—Joan of Arc, named as such in “Henry VI”, and the witches who predict Macbeth’s fortune—Helena uses wordy rituals to deceive her interlocutors, and so is unlike a ghost— Banquo or Hamlet’s father—which is a spirit that speaks the truth. Her character as a witch is gradually revealed through the course of the play as she is ever bolder in the ways she turns someone into being loyal to her.
Her first triumph is over the Countess, a naïve woman who thinks she has outsmarted Helena by having gotten her to admit that she loves Bertram, her son, through some clever wordplay about how Helena would agree to be her daughter were Bertram not her son. Allowing this admission to be slowly drawn from her puts Helena in a good light because she is shown as aware of what is not properly allowed to someone of her social standing, however much she might want it. The Countess is won over, though this production of the play does not have her pause to acknowledge how great a concession it is to allow the daughter of a doctor, not a very honorable position in Renaissance society, to be in love with nobility. The countess, caught up in Helena’s spell, now sends Helena off to cure the King of Paris, and so willing to accept that Helena will woo Bertram. The Countess and the audience and perhaps even Helena are not aware that Helena is nervy enough to use whatever opening she can find to get Bertram to marry her, whether he wants to or not.
Helena’s next conquest is the King of Paris. He is given over to melancholy about his declining health, though he resists her offer to cure him out of fear that he will be seen as having been treated by a quack. That is a weird misgiving in that one might have thought his main concern was whether Helena had a procedure that would work, especially in that previous “cures” had left him weaker, though the audience can well decide that he is putting himself into the hands of someone who is a quack, for all the King knows. The production is right to indicate that the procedure is surgery, which would have been quite painful. Surgery might have done some good for an ailment pointedly identified as a fistula. Shakespeare, ever up on his reading, might well have known that war surgeons of the time were able to operate in this way, one of those benefits of war that segues nicely into the material about war that will follow, which is about how war builds character, or at least distinguishes those who have character from those who do not. To the King, however, there is something witchlike in Helena’s ability (an office unnatural to her sex, as was Portia’s) to exorcise his ailment, to perform a procedure that makes the specter of an impending Death go away.
Then the king makes an offer that can seem magnanimous only to those given over to Helena’s magic—which, by the way, includes much of the audience, who are given over to the combination of charm and baloney Shakespeare has provided. Helena can choose whom she will as a husband. This too is an upending of what is natural, an overreaching by the king. Shakespeare’s other kings (or authoritative figures), such as the Duke in “As You Like It”, bless romantic pairings rather than insist upon them. The King of Paris, however, does not know his place. He makes the offer to Helena just after having been notably inelegant in his speech to the departing troops, saying little more than that they should not leave the battle in the bedrooms of Italy. It is a far cry from the speech at Agincourt, where Shakespeare has Henry V bully his men into taking pride in the fact that they are outnumbered. Parolles has already pointed out to Bertram that a lack of eloquence will get in his way. Helena, on the other hand, will use her gift of gab to her profit.
It is right, whatever its reasons, to have Helena so quickly accept the King’s offer to grant her a wish, and her speech to him that she will not choose someone from his family indicates both what she has in mind and that she knows not to reach too far or for someone, however elevated, she doesn’t want anyway. It is as if Cordelia conditioned a declaration of her love for her father on some detail of his will, rather than the principle that she should not have to declare her love. Helena is careful to show she will not ask too much—at least not of the King.
The third enchantment cast by Helena is over Bertram himself so that he will relent—though, mind you, not to her charms, but to the forces of circumstance that she, like other witches, can rearrange to provide the future she has forecast. It is the most audacious and elaborately staged of the three enchantments, though the audience should know by now what she is up to. As if that weren’t enough to frame what is about to unfold, Shakespeare provides a very overt clue. Parolles has been found out to be a coward who gives away positions to what he supposes is the enemy out of fear for his life and, perhaps even worse for his reputation, gives an accurate account of what the officers in his army are like. Parolles may be only a man of words, but the words are correct descriptions and painful because of that. Parolles says that he, at least, lives, whatever his shame, and there is something to be said for this defense of cowardice, a more serious one than ever was offered by Falstaff. Parolles also says that anyone can be defeated by a stratagem, which is true enough, when said so bald facedly, and should be enough to explain what will happen in the next scene when Bertram is defeated by a stratagem of Helena’s.
Helena has set her trap carefully. She became pregnant by Bertram and got him to surrender his mother’s ring, and sent Diana to act as the bait in the trap in that she would reveal part of the truth and so set the King, who was ready to forgive Bertram for his rejection of Helena, against him again. Then comes the core of the illusion Helena constructs. In a kind of ritualistic self-flagellation, Helena spells out the particulars of her deceit, which might be thought to discredit her or at least show her capable of abasing herself to suit her willfulness. She is clever enough to present her actions in a way that allows others to read them as showing Bertram broke his oaths to her, the King, and his mother, and so unworthy of any reward—except being wedded to her, which seems less and less of a reward to the audience and, indeed, may seem less and less so to the court, which would be rid of her haggardly nagging. Let her have what she wants.
That the misery of a bad marriage is Bertram’s just reward, however, is an interpretation which gives too much credit to the King and his conventional court. Helena’s accusations would not stand up to close scrutiny, were the King and his court at all judicious. Bertram had left Helena, who was reported as dead before he consummated his relationship with the person he thought was Diana, not to speak of the fact that his wife had been dead to him even while he pursued the young Italian woman. Shakespeare is making it doubly clear that he was morally free to pursue another. That courtship also undercuts the idea that Bertram rejected Helena because of her social class. Here he is giving his mother’s ring to a woman in exchange for her virtue, which comes close to making it a kind of marriage, were he to have taken his loyalty to his own family at all seriously. Only a wife can prove more important than a mother, something the Countess did not understand because she wanted him to select her favorite, Helena, his family an incestuous hotbed from which he had escaped by going first to Paris and then to Italy. Bertram cares for Diana and then Diana, even though knowing that, joins the plot against Bertram, which suggests that she is a witch in training. (The play is saved from misogamy only by its treatment of men as for the most part stupid and vain.) And then, to make matters still worse, Diana is rewarded for her deception and betrayal by being given the same choice Helena was given: to take a man of her own choosing, even after that has been shown to be a very bad policy. But this king is a fool, given to clichés rather than wisdom, while his fools take the world as it is.
Why would the King have been willing to forgive Bertram before Helena worked her magic? Perhaps because, after the heat of the moment subsided, not to want to marry a doctor’s daughter seemed not particularly silly. Bertram, moreover, had proven himself in battle as a person of worth. Diana’s story should not have upset a king of any gravity. She presents herself as the woman wronged, though why a woman who serves as a dalliance for a soldier during wartime should be so much the object of righteous indignation also goes against a sense of the way things are for the common folk. There is something very wrong with the moral values of the nobility. The elite are, as a rule, taken in by flim flam. But, then, nobody died in Monicagate while many have died in Iraq, and who was the President impeached?
How does Bertram know Helena is a witch? He shared a household with her, like a brother, and so could witness her character. He is not willing to accept an at least metaphorical incest with his mother’s ward, whether or not his mother has been charmed into allowing it. We have here the reversal of the situation in “Mansfield Park”, where Jane Austen’s “heroine” has been raised as a sister to Edmund, and when his father comes to suspect that Fanny is interested in marrying his son, he puts the thought out of his mind as too insulting to her, though she is willing to mind and manage her silences till she gets her way, even if the whole family is destroyed in the process.
Indeed, it is a reasonable guess that Austen got her plot for “Mansfield Park” from “All’s Well” because Shakespeare was the great model in her attempt to turn the novel into a dramatic rather than an epic art. It is also reasonable to think that Verdi had “All’s Well” as the source for “La Forza del Destino”, where an accidental shooting destroys an elopement and sends the two lovers off, one to war, and the woman to be hidden away at a monastery, also allowing it to be supposed that she is dead, and so provoking her brother to pursue his revenge. Initial decisions badly made are compounded across time, and Verdi, at least here, intimates that they are bad decisions, and that both religion and war get caught up in their different but twisted logics.
Shakespeare, not to be outdone by those who follow upon him, fills “All’s Well” with allusions to and turns on his other plays. “All’s Well“ is structured as a rearrangement of the materials in “Hamlet”. Helena is an aggressive Ophelia who has an interest in the young prince she ought not to care about because he will have his way with her and leave her to her fate, so caught up is he in his own preoccupations, never mind that he may have sometimes cared for her. This time, Helena/Ophelia gets her way, partly through the contrivance of the Prince’s mother, who meddles too much for her own good, and partly through the King, who this time acts arbitrarily rather than, as John Updike makes plausible for Claudius, perhaps for the good of the kingdom. The Countess doubles as Polonius, giving sound advice to the young man who would be soldier and courtier at another, far grander, palace. And the friends of the young hero, for that is what Bertram is, are considerably worse than those around Hamlet (or Hal). They playing a dangerous practical joke on Parolles for sport and so as to reveal that Parolles, like Falstaff, is better than they are because he knows he is a coward while they reveal about themselves that they are not loyal to one another but only nasty and mean, even as the Prince is off courting someone who he thinks is, deep down, a lady.
The point of Shakespeare’s allusions to himself, of course, is not to recycle material; it is to reflect on the grander and the tragic themes that are traduced in this play by the words and deeds of people far more petty and simple than those who walk about in Shakespeare’s grander plays. Shakespeare is asking how ordinary people will deal with heroic challenges, and his answer is that they will not do very well. They will be caught up in a muddle of ordinary life, displaying confused and mean emotions, and will misread one another, and will act nobly only in that they think that is what they are doing. They play at tragedy but are part of the melodrama of social conflict—the desire to rise above one’s station, or to satisfy only selfish instincts, or to escape it all—without that being turned into comedy, as it is in “Twelfth Night”, so as to leaven the harshness of the materials with an acceptance of the mere humanity of the characters. Instead, “All’s Well” reveals its characters to be the crude, unaccomplished and ignorant people that are found in all the problem plays. Shakespeare’s audience is to this day befuddled by why “All’s Well” is neither clearly a tragedy nor clearly a comedy, when the uniform tone, more correctly, is that of Nabakov and Beckett and the other great authors of what is known, for want of a better term, as tragicomedy.