All's Well That Ends Well (Vol. 38) | David S. Berkeley and Donald Keesee (essay date 1991)
David S. Berkeley and Donald Keesee (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: "Bertram's Blood-Consciousness in All's Well That Ends Well," in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 31, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 247-58.
[In the following essay, Berkeley and Keesee study the treatment Shakespeare gives to the cross-class marriage in All's Well That Ends Well, and suggest Helena's position may reflect circumstances in Shakespeare's own life. ]
All Shakespeare's plays exhibit more distancing between his classes—there are but two, armigerous and base—than do his primary sources, and in no play does he present a cross-class marriage such as that between base John Shakespeare and gentle Mary Arden of which he was a product. All's Well That Ends Well is an oddity in that it presents an enforced marriage between armigerous persons, Bertram of the high nobility and Helena, a "mean poor" gentlewoman. But the rule holds even here, as...
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