All's Well That Ends Well | Bed-Trick/Marriage
Eileen Cohen, in the first excerpt, examines how Helena and Isabella in, respectively, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, use the bed-trick as a disguise, and in doing so, these characters "reverse traditional female behavior, invert stereotypes, and turn apparent lechery into the service of marriage."
In the second selection, Janet Adelman explores the male desire to sexually contaminate a pure woman (as played out in the character of Bertram in All's Well That Ends Well and Angelo in Measure for Measure), and how this is integral to the bed-trick and the unsustainability of marriage based on trickery.
In the last excerpt, Mary Free examines how All's Well That Ends Well is unlike Shakespeare's other comedies through its central coupling (marriage) of Helena and Bertram.
Eileen Z. Cohen
Western literature abounds in characters who have arranged bed-tricks—from Lot's daughters to Iseult, and by the seventeenth century the bed-substitution was a commonplace convention of English drama. Yet it is Shakespeare's use of the device in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure that disturbs us, doubtless because of the women who perpetrate it, Helena, a virgin-bride, and Isabella, a would-be nun. We seem unwilling to accept that Shakespeare deliberately intends to disrupt our sensibilities. Scholars have told us that we must...
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