[In the excerpt below, Styan examines the polarisation in the stage history of All's Well That Ends Well between romantic and realistic approaches to the narrative. The critic further discusses the handling of such issues as the characterization of Helena, Bertram, and Parolles and the conflict between youth and age.]

Romance or realism?

There will, of course, never be a definitive way to present the play, and it is helpful to recognise the range of styles seen in production. In its comparatively short life-span, all of the play's dramatic and theatrical ingredients have been perceived differently, whether setting, character, costume, mood or atmosphere. The play has been a vehicle for a tale of romantic love or for a more realistic psychological study, a polarisation usefully advanced by Joseph Price in his book [The Unfortunate Comedy, 1968] No matter whether the emphasis was on woman's role in society, honour between men and women, the sexual double standard, the effects of class differences or the conflicting view-points of youth and age, it could be treated either romantically or realistically. A realistic production tends to see Bertram as his own man and honest according to his lights, and Helena as less maidenly, a woman prepared to break the conventions of courtship and female modesty. The romantic view finds Bertram at fault, but worthy of redemption, and implicitly applauds the commitment and steadfastness of Helena's love as it endures all vicissitudes.

For many years the romantic interpretation dictated the decoration of the stage, its scenery and costumes, probably in response to the scholarship which identified the play's sources as those of the folk-tale. In Samuel Phelps's production at Sadler's Wells in 1852-3, a 'picturesque' presentation made it possible for John Bull to find Helena's 'a love-sick fool' doting on a 'scoundrel' (4 September 1852). Bridges-Adams's Bertram of 1922, Maurice Colbourne, looked 'exactly like an armoured knight from a Burne-Jones window—a figure too beautiful to be taken seriously' (The Birmingham Mail, 24 April). Michael Benthall's 1953 production at Edinburgh and the Old Vic went as far in this direction as the mirthlessness of Helena's story would allow, setting the stage with Osbert Lancaster's pretty castellations and flowery gardens, brightly coloured like a child's picture-book. Encouraged by the element of fantasy in the plot, Benthall's Countess (Fay Compton) appeared like an ancient crone, and the King of France (Laurence Hardy) wore his crown awry and had comic fainting fits. To match Claire Bloom's lovely blonde Helena, John Neville's Bertram was a debonair young rascal whose gaiety made seduction fun.

By contrast, the most solemnly realistic setting yet seen was that of David Myerscough-Jones for television in 1981. It suited the medium well. Rousillon and Paris were depicted after the fashion of a warm seventeenth-century painting by Vermeer, suggesting a quiet domestic interior or a simple royal antechamber, with a Dutch kitchen for the Florentine Widow and a Dutch alehouse for the soldiery on campaign. Reviewing the production for Drama, Michael Ratcliffe ransacked the Caravaggiesque paintings of Holland and France for comparisons ('glowing with light and rich in darkness'): Pieter de Hooch and Georges de la Tour ('all busy women's heads against candle-light'), the great burgher-groups of Rembrandt and Hals for the courtiers round the King's bed, and 'Celia Johnson's delectable Countess, a lovely wise old face framed by a white ruff, was Margareta van Tripp sprung to life'. … The camera found sly and unusual perspectives, and looked intimately through real doorways and windows. Mirrors gave extra depth to the scene, so that Rousillon became a labyrinth of rooms and corridors. Faces caught in closeup, and the glow of flickering firelight emphasised the personal relationships between members of the family, suggested their unspoken thoughts and lent a shadowy realism to the scene.

The Guthrie productions seemed to have it both ways. Working with the impersonal wooden columns and steps of the architectural stage at Stratford, Ontario, he and his designer, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, chose the fin de siècle of Edwardian England, the Kaiser's Germany and Merry Widow Paris, the twilight years before the Great War. The period was not so modern as to deny the play its timelessness, and just modern enough to take it out of the category of a costume piece. Alec Guinness as the King was elegant in a quilted dressing-gown, pushed in a wheelchair and surrounded by a dashing court of exquisitely turned-out young men in dinner dress or formal regimentals, a court that was romantic and at the same time threatened. The world of Renaissance honour translated well into one of twentieth-century monocles and boiled-shirt formality, and Guthrie's characters were real people conscious of class and propriety. Helena (Irene Worth in Canada and Zoe Caldwell at Stratford-upon-Avon) was first seen in austere black, her hair done in a bun, suggesting the urgency and seriousness of the part: she was the Shavian new woman.

The theatre had waited half a century to take up Bernard Shaw's idea of Helena's modernity as a 'lady doctor' not too squeamish to cure a fistula. In Our Theatres in the Nineties, he reported that he had seen only a travesty of the play when it was produced by the Irving Dramatic Club at St George's Hall in 1895, a production which had omitted anything that might offend: 'the whole play was vivisected, and the fragments mutilated' (vol. I, p. 29). Shaw wrote of 'the exquisite tenderness and impulsive courage' with which Helena replaced the patience of a medieval Griselda, and she seemed to speak for the feminist cause. She is of course too rich in feeling to be a Shavian predator, for her chief thought when Bertram goes to war is for his safety; but Shaw was looking for the more incisive, sweet-and-sour mixture found in the play.

This flavour was tested again in Noël Willman's production of 1955. In spite of the peacock silks and slashes, and the fine white lace collars of Mariano Andreu's Louis XIII costumes, this stately production newly emphasised the sexual issues and social pressures in the play, presenting a solemn Helena in Joyce Redman as a vulnerable middle-class girl in a male environment. More pain was felt by the two Helenas of the Barton productions of 1967 and 1968, Estelle Kohler more brazen in the former and Lynn Farleigh more smitten in the latter. Timothy O'Brien caught a mood of melancholy in the tones of his Caroline costumes and décor, and, confined by the small wooden stage erected on the main stage, the eye took in a less decorative image of the action: in The Birmingham Post J. C. Trewin reported that the director 'let the play speak unhampered in as simple and as gravely dignified a framework as I remember' (2 June 1967). It appeared to belong to no particular place or time, and the scene was set for a stark confrontation between Helena and Bertram, and for an unromantic analysis of sex and class in the explicit spirit of a Strindberg. Peter Lewis of The Daily Mail asked, 'Who needs a wife because she has a magic touch with a fistula?' (2 June 1967).

The Trevor Nunn production of 1981/1982 worked to strike a similar balance between the romantic and the real. Set with much particularity in the Edwardian period, one of the scenes in the play actually suggested a World War I advanced dressing station not far behind the lines as the guns flashed and roared. Yet John Gunter's highly adaptable set, a glass conservatory supported by white pillars and white iron tracery, serving now for a palatial Rousillon in the country, now for a plush club in Paris, now for a Florentine café, managed to capture the twilight atmosphere of that idealised period too, while the nostalgic theme of Guy Woolfenden's Rousillon waltz tune returned repeatedly to hint at memories of the past and dreams of the future. The production thus moved on two levels, identified by Michael Billington in The Guardian Weekly as those of 'a realistic fairytale', a matter of 'pure theatrical alchemy' (29 November 1981).

In these later productions the weight shifted from Bertram's weakness to Helena's strength, and as long as Bertram had no need to be seen in some way heroically, the intensity at the heart of their relationship was felt. In Stratford, Connecticut in 1959, John Houseman had Nancy Wickwire play Helena as an older woman, thus emphasising her tragedy by raising the odds against a successful outcome. In Stratford, Ontario in 1977, also dressed in Louis XIII period, David Jones's anniversary production underlined the realities of war by displaying racks of weapons and equipping the forces of the Duke of Florence with 'sinister black breastplates and plumes', with his officers in 'the sombre furs of a bitter winter campaign' (Roger Warren's words in Shakespeare Survey 31 [1978], p. 145). All this set off the agony of Martha Henry's very particular psychological need for Bertram, and provided a most urgent reading of her part. Only television's Angela Down, drab and unsmiling, was in more pain throughout the play.

Nevertheless, the challenge of style in All's Well cannot be met by giving it over to tragedy, any more than it can be played merely for comedy: the cutting edge comes from whetting the one against the other. The broad, farcical elements which Guthrie's huge comic talent introduced into the Parolles scenes, for example, were in raw contrast with the pathetic story of Helena's unrequited love. These elements surprised and annoyed some by their frivolessness, but they delighted others by expanding the comedy and distancing the action of the whole play. Guthrie encouraged Parolles and the soldiery in a clown act which recalled the antics of Fred Karno's army. Alan Brien, who was strong in disapproval, described the effect in The Spectator:

The Duke of Florence is greeting the French lords who are to fight for him. Mr Guthrie manages to make this an enormous show-piece, fit centre for any Sunday night spectacular at the Palladium. The comic soldiers in baggy shorts, black socks and berets are lined up under a blazing sky by the side of a ruined desert viaduct. The Duke of Florence, a goateed parody of General Smuts, dodders along the Une with his officers falling over him every time he halts to peer at a mysterious medal. When he turns suddenly his sword becomes entangled between the legs of his staff officer. When he tries to make a speech from the top of an observation tower, the microphone gets a fit of metallic coughing. When he attempts to salute the flag, it slides slowly down the post again. (24 April 1959)

It was not that Guthrie saw the play as standing in need of additional comic business, but that the wit present in the original (and the Parolles plot is as outrageous as anything in Shakespearian comedy) should lift the tone of the play and work for a contemporary audience. In The Observer Harold Clurman considered that such Gargantuan clowning served Shakespeare well:

I cannot say which is the more impressive: Guthrie's mockery of the military (modern style) and his kidding of the court, or the atmosphere of glamorous shadow he has created, the opulent disease which seems to hover over the king's council and festivities. The figures at these moments, for all their comic absurdity, are made to appear part of a puppet world soon destined to crumble into dust. (26 April 1959)

As the play moved to its close, the comedy of catching out both Parolles and Bertram made the women of the play appear to redress the imbalance of the sexes and seem more wise than the men. Even the joyful humiliation of Parolles can become pathetic, and when Bertram is thoroughly put down, the irony must strike the audience as nicely tongue-in-cheek. Harold Hobson did not believe that Guthrie surrendered his respect for Shakespeare's rhythms, but mounted

certain phrases of the play, such as the terrible line about the dark house and the detested wife, so that they leap out from the background of his multifarious invention with more than the joy of recognition … Mr Guthrie's elaborate decorations of the text work with the play, and not against it. They do not assail, but reinforce the effects implicit in the words. (The Sunday Times, 26 April 1959)

All's Well is neither Gilbert and Sullivan, nor Ibsen and Strindberg, but mature Shakespearian comedy, in which the painfully human side of the story of Helena's unrequited love and Bertram's inadequacy emerges along with the comedy inherent in their situation.

Sensitive topics

In All's Well the hero does not chase his wife; he runs away from her—a reversal of expectations, and not altogether a pleasant one. Moreover, Shakespeare introduced some provocative changes when he took up William Painter's Palace of Pleasure and its story of Giletta and Beltramo. Giletta was wealthy, but Shakespeare reduced Helena to poverty, making the difference in social status between herself and Bertram more stark. Giletta had many suitors for her hand in marriage, where Helena had none, thus making her seem far more single-minded in the chase. Painter's King of France did not want Giletta to marry Beltramo, considering that she was aiming too high above her rank; Shakespeare had his King order Bertram to marry Helena, thus showing him caught in the trap. When Giletta returned home after curing the King, she managed Beltramo's estate for several months, but Shakespeare had Helena pursue Bertram immediately and reveal herself as a much more determined girl.

The story of the play itself offers a series of moral shocks and challenges to its audience, even the Elizabethans, as a bare summary of the plot reminds us. The orphaned and penurious daughter of a doctor is brought up by a Countess, and has the misfortune of falling in love with her son the Count: the difficulties of the female unable to convey her intimate feelings are immediately apparent, and differences of social class serve only to aggravate them. When the King is known to be dying of a fatal disease, the girl offers to cure him if he will grant her the husband of her choice: can even her skill in medicine excuse such a request in our eyes? Be that as it may, she succeeds in curing the King and chooses the Count for her husband: he must marry her under protest. In return for the trap she set him, he makes an ugly condition of his own: he will not accept her as wife before she gets a ring from his finger and bears him a child—seemingly impossible since he promptly leaves the country. Even granted the provocation, is this any way to treat a wife? Nothing daunted, she follows him in disguise and arranges to sleep with him in place of another girl he intends to seduce: she may be his wife, and therefore taking only what is hers by right, but is this any way to treat a husband? When she conceives the required child, she gives out that she is dead in order to bring her husband home. So he is outwitted, and, confronted by his wife in a suitably pregnant condition, he capitulates. The pair may be presumed to live uncomfortably ever after.

The emphasis in this tale is strongly on 'a woman's place', and All's Well is unusually rich in female parts and all-female scenes. W. W. Lawrence's argument in Shakespeare's Problem Comedies was that early folk-tales which tested female devotion assumed that there was virtue in a woman's single-mindedness. Shaw took a less historical view and found evidence of a very modern treatment of women in the story of Helena and her motives. In Our Theatres in the Nineties he not unexpectedly drew upon Ibsen for a comparison:

Among Shakespeare's earlier plays, All's Well That Ends Well stands out artistically by the sovereign charm of the young Helena and the old Countess of Rousillon, and intellectually by the experiment, repeated nearly three hundred years later in A Doll's House, of making the hero a perfectly ordinary young man, whose unimaginative prejudices and selfish conventionality make him cut a very fine mean figure in the atmosphere created by the nobler nature of his wife. That is what gives a certain plausibility to the otherwise doubtful tradition that Shakespeare did not succeed in getting his play produced. (vol. I, p. 27)

Shaw had found a counterpart for Ibsen's A Doll's House, to which he was also drawn because of 'the ruin and havoc it made among the idols and temples of the idealists' (vol. III, p. 129). Kenneth Muir resists this in part when in Shakespeare's Sources he points out that 'the way Helena releases the King from his promise, her quiet submissiveness when Bertram repudiates her, and her wish to save him from the dangers of war all prevent us from feeling that she is merely a Shavian heroine who hunts down her prey' (p. 101). Nevertheless, it is hard to shake off the idea, once proposed, of a certain correspondence between the Nora/Helmer and the Helena/Bertram relationships.

The role of woman in society is impossible to consider without reference to that of the man, and the role of the wife must be understood by reference to the role of the husband. The double standard, which implies one law for the female and another for the male, is certainly a post-Ibsen concept, but its implications have existed from the beginning. If, as G. Wilson Knight suggests in The Sovereign Flower, honour between the sexes is at the heart of this play, with Helena a 'supreme expression of a woman's love, a humble medium for the divine power' (p. 106), she and Bertram will define such honour. The conventions of behaviour between the sexes display a duality by which men may flout their marriage vows, especially in the name of soldiering, while women must condone their conduct even as it diminishes them. Honour among Elizabethan men is, as Wilson Knight argues, martial; for the women it implies chastity and can never evade the strictures of female propriety. But when Bertram rushes off to the war to save his honour, it seems more as if he does it to save his face.

The so-called 'bed-trick', which here derives from Boccaccio and is used in many Elizabethan plays, raises the issues of the double standard most effectively on the stage. The idea of substituting one woman for another in bed in order to deceive the man may reduce the degree of modern psychological realism established in the characterisation, but in the context of comedy it did not necessarily raise moral eyebrows. In his introduction to his New Arden edition of the play, G. K. Hunter goes so far as to say,

There was little sense among Shakespeare's contemporaries that this was a degrading and unsatisfactory way of getting a husband, either in real life or on the stage. No doubt an age which saw matrimony as a matter of social convenience rather than personal emotion accepted such means of obtaining a husband or wife as a smaller violation of the spirit of marriage than we can today. (p. xliv)

At all events, the bed-trick may at least be seen as a theatrical way of pointing up the male and female roles within the world of the play, and the fact that it works well for comedy need not lessen the importance and interest of the problem of the double standard in the real world of the audience.

The relationship of the sexes is of wide social interest, and yet in life it is finally a personal matter. Drama is ideally suited to explore the relationship, dealing as it must with general issues in terms of the peculiar behaviour of individuals, and in All's Well the distinctions between the male and female role emerge sharply in the realistic mixture of motives found in Helena and Bertram. In this play Shakespeare no more chose to stereotype his principals than he did Troilus and Cressida or Antony and Cleopatra. But if Helena represents the female principle, she also displays an individual subtlety of mind and feeling that can hardly represent all women. It may be that she is, in Milton Shulman's view in The Evening Standard after watching Noël Willman's production in 1955, 'the most ruthless single-minded man-hunter in Shakespeare', but the playwright works to confuse Helena's severest critics. Shulman went on to express the contradiction thus: 'Having created a heroine with the brash moral standards of an ambitious strumpet, Shakespeare proceeds to belie this interpretation in the dialogue. The incongruity between what Helena does and what she says could not be matched by the most cynical politician at election time' (27 April).

Shakespeare also chose to make Helena poor and low-born, and so All's Well is also about the snobbery of one's station in life, a subject only slightly less prickly. It is one designed to emphasise the problems that Helena faces. Yet although the differences in social rank between Helena and Bertram raise barriers between them, her poverty and birth paradoxically enable the play to speculate on the nature of her virtue independently of class. This aspect of the play attracted William Poel in 1920 when he directed it in one of his 'vocal recitals' in the Ethical Church, Bays-water. In William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival, Robert Speaight reported of Poel that 'Just as he had detected a plea for pacificism in Troilus and Cressida, so in All's Well he saw a plea for the removal of class barriers where the affections between men and women were in question' (p. 233). The presence of a restrictive social code which inhibited the expression of love not only appealed to Poel as a cause, but the modernity of the idea seemed to cry out for expression on the post-Ibsen stage. When Nunn set his production in the Edwardian period, he was able to affirm the play's sharp distinctions of class: Helena wore the house keys at her waist while Bertram spent time at the officers' club in Paris. The theme of class was arguably not essential to the play, but it in part explained the unmannerly behaviour of Bertram, and added a fine cutting edge to the image of Helena.

A third, perhaps more subtle, thread runs through the play, and also serves to accentuate the social issues in both individual and general terms. Shaw had remarked on the presence in the play of 'the most beautiful old woman's part ever written', that of the Countess of Rousillon. In performance it is apparent that the youth of the leading characters, Helena, Bertram, Diana and Parolles, is in each case precisely balanced by the greater age of their counterparts, the Countess, the King of France, the Widow of Florence and the old counsellor Lafeu. This distinctive and unusual patterning was early observed by A. W. Schlegel in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808), although he had not seen the play on the stage. In performance the differences in age are vivid and provocative, and have the effect of inviting every member of the audience, whatever his or her age, to see the situation from the alternating perspectives now of youth, now of age, so fashioning a more complete human experience, and adding considerably to the piquancy of the action. The young protagonists of the play learn their lessons by hard experience, while the audience is repeatedly granted an objective view of their thoughts and actions. If Shakespeare makes old age somewhat too reverend for its realistic context, so that it seems too gracious beside the general boorishness of the young as they suffer 'the staggers and the careless lapse / Of youth and ignorance' [II. iii. 163-9], it helps us recognise that young Helena may be able to cure the old King without being able so readily to cure Bertram and herself. Similarly, young Bertram may be a loyal son and faithful subject without knowing how to be a good husband.

The spectrum of a character: Helena

Now that All's Well is being performed more frequently, we are beginning to recognise the range of possible responses to it. The outrageous situation that Shakespeare creates for Helena and Bertram can be seen as cynically amusing or on the edge of tragedy, and today's actors and directors are legitimately searching out those points of dramatic power and interest with which they can reach their audience. Yet if the situation in the play continues unpredictable in its impact, so it is also with the characters. When a character has been committed to paper, it is not a finished creature, since the lines are only the occasion for the actor's interpretation. The text places limitations on his or her work, but it also provides for a spectrum of possibilities for performance, and while the actor may be faithful to the words, what is perceived in the theatre as the 'character' will be variable. Certainly, to judge from the Helenas seen in this century, her role is far from defined.

In the eighteenth century, Helena was played and seen as virtuous and long-suffering. In his Dramatic Miscellanies of 1783, Thomas Davies found that 'the passion of this sweet girl is of the noblest kind' (vol. II, p. 27). In this vein, it was possibly John Philip Kemble's revival of the play at Drury Lane in 1794 that prompted Coleridge to pronounce her Shakespeare's 'loveliest character'. The famous dictum on Helena in this period is Hazlitt's in his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays of 1818: 'The character of Helena is one of great sweetness and delicacy … the most scrupulous nicety of female modesty is not once violated. There is not one thought or action that ought to bring a blush into her cheeks, or that for a moment lessens her in our esteem' … In our own time Wilson Knight in The Sovereign Flower has been the strongest advocate of this view, and sees Helena as 'loving, humble and good', 'the supreme development of Shakespeare's conception of human love' (p. 131). Knight goes on to assert that 'love such as Helena's is, at its best, a great aspiration, and yet one born of humility; in her, pride and humility are unified' (p. 139), and this becomes part of the proposition that she is a divine representative, working miracles by heavenly inspiration, so that 'religious values … cluster round her as the values of war cluster round Bertram' (p. 144).

In this century, some still lean towards the pathos in the part. Benthall's sweetly yearning and impulsively innocent Claire Bloom was a conventionally simple heroine of romantic comedy 'who never stops to think of the ethical implications of things', according to The Times (16 September 1953). Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times thought she wore 'a look of childlike innocence, a clear and unashamed gaze', and by J. C. Trewin in The Observer was consequently dubbed 'like the play, a problem child' (both 20 September). Zoe Caldwell also escaped censure for her cunning by exuding simplicity and innocence, and her decision to heal the King and chase her husband clearly arose from the depth of her love for Bertram. Also sympathetic, Irene Worth's request for Bertram as a husband seemed mature, reasonable and even endearing; such honesty could give no offence. Benson's Helena, Florence Glossop-Harris, aimed at saintliness, and Nancy Wickwire under John Houseman's direction played her with a tragic seriousness: prompted by the speech in which she acknowledges the help of heaven, 'Of heaven, not me, make an experiment' [II. i. 154], she became a providential Helena, descending a staircase slowly and quietly as if an angel had been sent from above.

However, the ambiguities in Helena's character have also been explored more fully. Her grief and her shyness can still be present, but so also are her wit and determination. The banter with Parolles about virginity is nowadays restored to its rightful place between the two moving soliloquies, 'O, were that all! I think not on my father' [I. i. 79] and 'Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie' [I. i. 216], and today we sense the balance of realism and romanticism in her character and acknowledge the mixture of criticism and sympathy in our reactions to her. Some part of the image of a grave and gentle heroine must persist: Mary Coleridge felt that 'she may be reckoned as one of the few women who have ever proposed for men and yet kept their charm' (quoted by George Gordon in Shakespearian Comedy, p. 30), and Kenneth Muir believes that she 'never loses our sympathy, especially when the play is performed' (Shakespeare'sSources, p. 101); but Helena's less ethereal, practical side, her comic aspect, has provoked a more interesting portrait.

Some early Helenas aimed at ambiguity. She appears to be a poor judge of men—the world of the court and the army are quite alien to her, a doctor's daughter. In Shakespeare's Problem Plays, E. M. W. Tillyard also paired her with Parolles as an adventurer (p. 106), and in her essay, 'Virtue Is the True Nobility', M. C. Bradbrook thought of her as a 'social climber', so that she can also embody something of the designing female and the unscrupulous opportunist. Robert Atkins's first Helena, Jane Bacon, bravely rejected popularity and appeared to be more of a 'raffish, scheming, and hypocritical adventuress' (The Sunday Times, 4 December 1921), a girl who seemed to be mourning for her father when she was using the occasion only to supply a mask of grief for her love of Bertram. This Helena was a chameleon who could be merry with Parolles, shy with the Countess and confident with the King. Bridges-Adams's very pretty Helena, Maureen Shaw—slender, graceful and with masses of dark auburn hair, a figure who might have stepped out of a painting by Rossetti—solved the problem of being two-faced by assuming a charming girlishness, even if the charm was achieved at the expense of womanliness. In Going to Shakespeare, J. C. Trewin reported Bridges-Adams as saying, 'Molly was the prettiest thing in the world with an elfin wisdom; you forgave her everything' (p. 185). Payne's lovely Jean Shepeard, though a more modest Helena, also leaned towards youthfulness, and in the words of The Daily Mail presented the image of 'a disturbing and disturbed young blue-stocking' (24 April 1935). In this comic view of the part, we may have come closer to the Elizabethan idea of love as a mixture of courtly feelings and physical sickness awaiting cure, so described by Lawrence Babb in The Elizabethan Malady, p. 154.

Recently we have seen a more businesslike Helena, a study in practical feminine wiles with or without an accompanying charm. In 1955 Joyce Redman played her like a Victorian miss just out of finishing school, hiding her ruthlessness behind coy smiles and adopting the playfulness of a kitten. The effect of this was so disagreeable that the audience could not help but feel that she and Bertram deserved each other. In 1967 Estelle Kohler endowed Helena with a 'little girl' voice and, dressed in pale primrose, gave us a frighteningly clear-headed, slightly wicked, schoolgirl with an eye to the main chance. B. A. Young of The Financial Times decided that she was 'an ordinary inconsistent person' who knew quite well that she was playing a dirty trick on Bertram. This Helena turned the whole play round and established a realistic basis for the action. In The Evening Standard Milton Shulman wrote, 'Behind those wide-open, round eyes and that perky-pretty face one can almost hear the ticking of a mind cunningly coiled into an efficient man-trap. It's quite clear that Bertram never had a chance.' Alan Brien capped this in The Daily Telegraph: 'Estelle Kohler plays her as a very young, mophaired tomboy with gob-stopper eyes and a crooked grin who enjoys teasing the King, cracking dirty jokes with Parolles, rehearsing charades with other girls, dressing up as a pilgrim and spoiling her runaway husband's dirty weekend in Florence' (all 2 June 1967).

It may be that the haunting performance of the American actress Martha Henry, in David Jones's Canadian production of 1977, has most precisely struck the balance between selfless wife and predatory female. It was a performance of restless high spirits and earnest feeling, and as a result of it John Fraser of The Toronto Globe and Mail pronounced Helena to be one of Shakespeare's most captivating characters, describing her as.

bluntly forward and loving in her manner, with a spirituality and grace left largely to any actress who dares take her on to define. … Helena is a complete woman who knows her own mind and pursues her own ambition. That her love for Bertram is not reciprocated is both a challenge to her constancy and a test for her vision … A woman, sure of her mind and her body—even today or perhaps especially today—who is in touch with both wonder and alienation. By evoking this and transmitting it through a loving nature, this great actress accomplished something profound and unique. (9 June)

When the Countess discovers that Helena loves her son, she says to her, 'Now I see / The myst'ry of your loneliness' (I. 3.161-2), and this line delicately touched the source of life in the character as Martha Henry presented it.

The tendency towards revealing a more realistic Helena continued with the 'serenely unstoppable' Angela Down (the phrase is Jeremy Treglown's in The Times Literary Supplement, 9 January 1981) for the BBC TV production, a very mature and sober Helena. Miss Down came to a very human understanding of the contradictions in Helena's character. Everyone speaks of her honesty, while at the same time she appears to be an opportunist, and in the introduction to the BBC edition of the play, Henry Fenwick reported Miss Down as saying.

In Act III scene 2 she says, 'Oh, what have I done, isn't it awful? Now he's going off, possibly to get killed, and it's because of me, so the best thing I can do is leave so he can come home.' But the next thing she does is go to Florence—the very place where he is. She doesn't go to Alaska or Scotland or anywhere out of reach; she doesn't absent herself from the scene entirely, she gets right back into the heart of where the action is, so you think: 'Well, that's a funny place to go if what you want to do is get out of his hair!' But you often find in life, don't you, that you're saying and meaning one thing—and you do really mean it—but you find that you're doing something that is facilitating an event which might turn the tables. You think: 'Well, I won't actually tell him who I am, perhaps I'll just go and be near him' or whatever. But it so happens that in Florence she meets up with another opportunity that she then takes full advantage of. I think that's what I mean when I say she's an opportunist—not necessarily in a derogatory way. I simply mean that she puts herself in the way of opportunities and then when they arrive she takes full advantage of them. Nothing wrong with that! But it isn't by any means just a total innocent abroad! (p. 20)

The character grows richer as the part is filled out. It now seems important that in performance she should not only demonstrate a will of her own, but also be fired by some genuine sexual need, so that the audience may feel a maximum of tension in the character and her situation. Yet it is also essential she should retain her femininity, and even her maidenly modesty. For the force of her character, and indeed that of the whole play, lies in the very ambiguities and contradictions that make up the 'mingled yarn' of its Ufe and challenge its audience.

The trouble with Bertram

The initial strength of Bertram's uncompromising character is one of the problems of this problem comedy. It has been hard for playgoers and critics not to think of him as a cad and a bounder, if not a snob and a prig, a cheat and a liar, and a boor and a coward. In spite of the blessing of his match with Helena by the King and the Countess themselves, Bertram's vanity quite blinds him to her finer points. So he begins by insulting and deserting his wife, goes on to play a rotten trick on his best friend, and ends by slandering the girl (Diana) who resisted his advances. For audiences, he has proved to be as big a source of disaffection with the play as Helena herself, and Samuel Johnson's early judgement sums the matter up as well as any:

I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen 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. (The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. VII, p. 404)

Shakespeare has sharply defined the role and carefully blackened his character, and we must accept this as a premise of the play. Some years ago in Shakespeare Quarterly, X. 1 [1959], Francis Shoff wrote, 'It is not until we say, "No decent man could do to a girl what Bertram does to Helena and tries to do to Diana", that we run into trouble. In All's Well a decent man can and does' (p. 19).

It is true also that Bertram is a relatively unshaded, uncomplicated, character beside Helena, playing second fiddle to the heroine as Orlando does in As You Like It, but in the male/female relationship upon which the interest of the play is built, he must reflect some of her colour, and be the source of light in her. The chief quality the actor must justify in performance is Bertram's huge and unfeeling indifference to her, so that his rejection of his new wife must seem defensible. So, too, from the beginning he must disclose some of the reasons why Helena should love him enough to choose him for a husband, and, folk-tales notwithstanding, in the end he must find a sensible reason for the repentance which will bless their future together. Otherwise, she will seem to waste herself on him.

Helena admired Bertram's 'arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls' [I. i. 94], and on the physical level an actor's good looks and dashing figure can to some degree justify an infatuation with him: W. A. Darlington observed of Ian Richardson's performance of Bertram as a wild young spark that he was very attractive to women, 'the kind that women want to marry aginst their better judgment' (The Daily Telegraph, 2 June 1967). The Countess thinks of her son as 'an unseason'd courtier' [I. i. 71], and his youthfulness may also go some way towards explaining and compensating for his moral defects. If he is played as a young gallant who is a little green, his behaviour can smack of youthful vanity, and his profligacy can seem to be a forgivable slip rather than an ingrained vice. Certainly Bertram's youth would excuse his unwillingness to become a bridegroom at command, and the limited circle he moves in, that of Rousillon, the French court and the army, could explain some of the shock he receives when Helena traps him. Coleridge had no difficulty, it seems, in accepting him as a wayward young aristocrat: 'He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so circumstanced' (Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 1930). … And in his essay on 'The Structure of All's Well That Ends Well' [Essays in Criticism X, No. 1 (January 1960)], S. Nagarajan has summed up the case for Bertram's immaturity: 'It palliates his rejection of Helen, explains his trust in Parolles and softens the enormity of his affair with Diana,' as well as giving 'a dramatic significance to his wardship' (p. 24). Guthrie's audiences accordingly saw him very much as a boy, with Edward de Souza playing him in 1959 as 'a stuffy, dirty-minded schoolboy', according to The Spectator of 24 April.

However, a balance of approval and disapproval of Bertram is not easily achieved, and may not even be desirable. If he is played for sympathy, as he was when Raymond Raikes played him in 1935, Helena runs the risk of seeming less pure. It has been more usual for him to seem remote, as he was in Benthall's production, in which John Neville was merely Claire Bloom's unattainable Prince Charming. In 1922, Maurice Colbourne was positively Byronic in his noble pride and scorn, and struck attitudes on every occasion, so that Helena's virtues shone more brightly and Bertram seemed insufferable in his patronising, 'a pure jackanapes' who left the critic of The Daily Telegraph 'speechless with rage' (25 April). In 1981, Mike Gwilym's Bertram was 'a savage Strindbergian monster' (Michael Billington).

Some degree of realistic motivation for Bertram has occasionally been attempted. Ian Richardson, playing for John Barton with an icy correctness of demeanour, presented a very proper young nobleman whose resentment at being forced into marriage was perfectly understandable. Guthrie's Canadian Bertram, Donald Harron, was a young fool. He had grown up in a household dominated by women and consequently idolised someone of his own sex, Parolles. When Bertram found himself tricked into marriage, he naturally turned to Parolles for consolation. But this Bertram grew up, and when he was disillusioned with his friend, he was ready for a girl of his own choice. In Renown at Stratford, Robertson Davies commented, 'At last, when he is ready for the kind of woman that Helena is, Helena is waiting for him. It needs no psychoanalyst, surely, to understand this entirely normal pattern of a young man's development?' (p. 75). The Bertram who grew up was lucky, of course, to find himself still loved by a woman of unusual understanding.

The question remains whether the ugly side of Bertram's character should be obscured. A. P. Rossiter pointed out in Angel with Horns that Bertram's lack of heroic qualities is characteristic of the problem comedies, arguing that in this part 'Shakespeare produced something more psychologically plausible, more complicated—and disagreeable', for All's Well was not to be a fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast (p. 88). The final scene of the play is perhaps the test.

Bertram's problems as a character come to a head in the last scene, when he must convince the audience that his contempt for his wife has finally turned to love. Shakespeare delays the reunion of the two to some purpose, and Diana stage-manages an expert coup de théâtre by concealing the truth that Helena is still alive for as long as possible. In the realistic perspective on the play, it is again a question of balance: since Bertram behaved badly at court, the trick played on him must fit the crime; since he taunted Helena with her poverty, he must be taunted no less with his irresponsibility. His blustering and his disclaimers of the last act must shame and ridicule him for his former pride, and if the audience wanted to kick him in the first half of the play, the last act does it for them. The doubts about Bertram felt by the audience finally need the satisfaction of seeing him treated as harshly as possible.

Youth and age

In All's Well the young tend to disregard their elders, and in his 1967 production John Barton actually based the theme of his programme notes on the idea that 'crabbed age and youth cannot live together'. A glance at the dramatis personae of the play will show that distinctions of age are explicit: among the principals four are young and four are old, and Elijah Moshinsky had even the Countess's steward Rinaldo played as an old man. In performance, the differences in age clarify for the audience its questioning of what is proper or improper behaviour: we are urged to distinguish between experience and inexperience, between wisdom and folly, and modify our judgements accordingly.

David Jones's production at Stratford, Ontario in 1977 emphasised the contrast strongly. Richard Eder reported in The New York Times that the play was directed 'without flamboyance and with an acute sense of where the play's real strength lies. It is not in the young people, despite all their activity, but in the old ones.' For Rousillon, Tanya Moiseiwitsch designed an autumnal scene, and the clown Lavache opened the play like a gardener, 'sweeping dead leaves away from a sundial. He chews on a green leaf. Time is the setting for the appearance of the Countess.' And as the Countess, Margaret Tyzack especially helped to place the emphasis on gracious age. She had lived through her own years of passion, and although at first Helena's love for her son seemed unthinkable, 'she sees that new life must replenish old power, and she embraces her daughter-in-law long before her son does' (9 June). When the King directed Bertram to abandon his social prejudices, he and the Countess appeared to be more liberal than the young, so that, as the play proceeded, the Countess seemed to grow young herself, and the autumnal years hung lightly on her person.

The Countess of Rousillon is the maternal grande dame of the play's events and Helena's fortunes, the still centre which gives the audience faith that all will yet be well. This gracious part has never failed any actress in the distinguished line of those who have played her in recent times: Catherine Lacey, Eleanor Stuart, Fay Compton, Rosalind Atkinson, Edith Evans, Margaret Tyzack, Celia Johnson, Peggy Ashcroft. Together with Lafeu and Lavache in this play, she was wholly of Shakespeare's own invention.

Her dominant trait is one of charm and compassion, although her gravity has on occasion seemed at odds with the activities of the younger set. Alan Brien in The Spectator thought that Edith Evans looked like 'an exiled queen locked away in a madhouse' (24 April 1959) because of the un-Elizabethan surprises of Guthrie's production. But her quiet role need not necessarily be monotonous: when she persuades Helena to confess her love for her son (I. 3), and when she condemns Bertram for scorning Helena (III. 2), the Countess also betrays a sharp, autocratic temper. Peggy Ashcroft added a sense of humour: when Helena announced that she was going to Paris to cure the King, she raised her eyebrows for 'This was your motive for Paris, was it, speak?' [I. iii. 230] Even when the Countess sometimes seems composed in her demeanour, she must also feel the stress of loving both her unworthy son and the forsaken Helena at the same time, for she is mother to both.

The King of France is no less compassionate, a father to the orphaned Helena. His part, however, is less rewarding, since he is confined by his sickness for some of the play and stereotyped by his throne for the rest. The sternly judgemental bent of his scenes has nevertheless in practice admitted a few variations that have extended the role.

For television, Donald Sinden played him fiercely, a man dying an angry death. When Helena comes to cure him in II. 1, Lafeu's little joke about being 'Cressid's uncle' suggested that a man suffering from a fistula may also be playfully aware of her sex, and encouraged Sinden to play the King like an old lecher on his deathbed. However, Jeremy Treglown in The Times Literary Supplement deplored the overt introduction of sex into a scene which he thought should carry only spiritual overtones: 'His miraculous cure, in this interpretation, looks as if it will involve Helena in some kind of health-farm sauna activities—a plan she seems to go along with, kissing the repellent old satyr compliantly at the end of a gropy II. 1 which both goes against her performance of the character otherwise and steals attention for the hammy Sinden' (9 January 1981). For the defence, Stanley Kauffmann in The Dial considered that 'it becomes clear that Helena's womanliness is having as much effect on the monarch as her promise of a cure. With no scintilla of vulgarity, Down and Sinden tell us that the King is regaining vigour because of his response to her, and the scene ends with a gentle kiss. Thus the action buried within the lines sustains the scene' (June 1981, p. 10).

When the King has been cured, Shakespeare evidently intends him to prove it by showing that he is 'able to lead her a coranto' [II. 43]. This is an arresting moment on the stage, as Guthrie demonstrated when Alec Guinness came waltzing in with Irene Worth in his arms. He had substituted a waltz for a coranto, of course, but the key to the effect lies in the Elizabethan coranto itself, as lively a dance as Shakespeare could command, with its 3/4 time, its running and jumping steps, and the balancing and bowing: all to persuade us that the King is not only cured, but positively rejuvenated. When Bertram thwarts him in this scene, the King's new strength and anger are unmistakable: 'My honour's at the stake' (line 149). Laurence Hardy played the part as a buffoon who expected his court to laugh at all his jokes, so undermining the importance of the injunctions upon Bertram and Helena: in his essay 'Plays Pleasant and Plays Unpleasant' for Shakespeare Survey 8 [1955], Richard David reported that on his sickbed Hardy 'was attended by a couple of comic doctors, one fat, one thin, and by a friar who kept up a running Paternoster in a high monotone. His speeches were punctuated by sudden grimaces and yowling cries as his ailment griped him' (p. 134). This King of France could not strike the sobering note of his speech on honour, nor establish the contrast between wisdom and folly designed to prompt our sense of the outrageous in what Bertram and Helena then proceed to do.

The Folio of 1623 has 'old' Lafeu, and after Rowe designated him 'an old lord', he has been an elderly courtier ever since. He is a rather caustic counsellor, but everybody's confidant, a wise old man who may be comic to a degree, but no fool. Rupert Harvey was honest and blunt for Robert Atkins in 1921, and when Atkins came to play him himself in 1940, he was 'a kind of grave Sir Toby'. When played by William Squire for Benthall in 1953, he was 'an amiable pippin', and Guthrie's Michael Bates in Canada and Anthony Nicholls in England played him as an aristocrat with a salty tongue, able to make jokes with the ladies that only his rank and age could allow. On television Michael Hordern introduced a melancholy note that suited the sober quality of Moshinsky's production. But Lafeu has wit enough to enjoy the wit in Parolles, and wisdom enough to show him mercy at the end.

Lavache presents more of a problem. Teste's wry smile has turned to a leer in Lavache', writes Robert Goldsmith in Wise Fools in Shakespeare (p. 58). He enjoys more bawdy than any other clown in Shakespeare; he shares with Touchstone of As You Like It his realistic attitude to marriage, and his relationship with Isbel ('I am driven by the flesh; and he must needs go that the devil drives', [I. iii. 28-9]) echoes Touchstone's with Audrey ('As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wed-lock would be nibbling', As You Like It, [III. iii. 79-82]); but in his need to satisfy his drives, Lavache is an unhappy man.

He is the ageless clown turned sour, but he remains the company's funny man whose humour, like Touchstone's, must reside as much in the actor as in his lines. Payne's Kenneth Wicksteed succeeded in milking them for laughs, although he failed to please the correspondent of The Birmingham Mail, who found his wit out-of-date and pointless to the modern ear (24 April 1935). But is he the rustic clown like old Gobbo, or is he a dry and rather cynical chorus figure like Thersites? Production has inclined towards the latter. The part has regularly distressed critics and reviewers because of the coarseness of his dialogue with the Countess, and, as played by Edward Atienza as a hunchbacked dwarf in 1955, or as Geoffrey Hutchings's hunchbacked comedian in a bowler hat flirting with all the ladies (1981), he can add a disturbing note which would darken the darkest of dark comedies. A misanthropic Paul Brooke played him mirthlessly for television, and Guthrie simply left him out.

From his source material in Painter's The Palace of Pleasure Shakespeare carved out a single character from Helena's hostess in Florence and the mother of Diana. The Widow of Florence is a surrogate for the Countess in foreign parts, standing up nobly for the two girls, Diana and Helena. Her daughter Diana is described by one of the French lords as 'a young gentlewoman … of a most chaste renown' [IV. iii. 14-15], and she has chiefly been played as a virtuous maiden in a difficult predicament, the innocent object of Bertram's attentions. But Bertram pronounced her to be 'a common gamester to the camp' [V. iii. 188], and this slander has encouraged another interpretation. Beginning with Payne's Rosamund Merivale in 1935, she has also been played as an impudent minx, a jolly girl full of the tricks sometimes prompted by her mother. Nunn went so far as to have Cheryl Campbell sing a café song like Piaf, which Stanley Wells considered to have diminished her: 'the role loses some of the symbolical aspects hinted at in the name. It is not impossible that an attractive girl who sings seductive songs, dances and shows her petticoats to soldiers in a café should take pride in her chastity, but it is difficult to believe that she should be 'of a most chaste renown in the camp' (The Times Literary Supplement, 27 November 1981). In 'Dramatic Emphasis in All's Well' [Huntington Library Quarterly XIII, No. 3 (May 1950)], Harold Wilson considers her, indeed, to be Helena's alter ego, intended to show the audience what Helena might have been.

In characterising the Widow and her daughter, Guthrie saw the need of few restrictions. Having seen the Canadian production, Robertson Davies argued in Renown at Stratford,

The social distinctions of the Renaissance are not familiar to us, and even distinctions indicated by costume may escape us … But in a modern dress production we have no trouble at all in placing the characters. We see in what ways this Florentine Widow differs from the Countess of Rousillon; the difference is approximately that between a woman who looks forward to the Old Age Pension, and one who must make provision against the Death Duties. And when Diana at last appears at court, in her charming frock, we can see at a glance how this frock differs from the gowns of the ladies to whom court is an accustomed place. (p. 94)

So in Canada Amelia Hall and Beatrice Lennard assumed strong Northern Ontario accents and became the keepers of a Canadian Tourist Home, specialising in pilgrims bound for the shrine of St Jacques le Grand. They were ladies of good family but reduced circumstances, so that, however good a girl Diana might be, she would be sufficiently flattered by the attentions of an army officer.

Guthrie continued to be attracted to the idea of the inferior class of the Widow and Diana. In England he went a step further, and in The Spectator Alan Brien reported that Priscilla Morgan played Diana as 'a wartime factory tart who sits on the doorstep in nightgown and housecoat, with a turban on her head and a lollipop in her mouth, giggling the lines in coffee-bar Cockney'. As her mother, Angela Baddeley was 'an old bag of tricks from a Giles cartoon swathed in a purple knitted dress, strangled in Woolworth beads, and choking over her nightcap of gin' (24 April 1959). That production evidently did not see the Widow as an extension of the Countess, and certainly not a further embodiment of 'aged honour'.

Elijah Moshinsky could not accept this treatment of the Widow when he cast Rosemary Leach for the part in the television production. In the introduction to the BBC edition of the play, Henry Fenwick records the director's decision:

'I didn't want a comedy actress to do a cameo,' Moshinsky says. 'What would Helena learn from a comedy turn? I wanted the Widow to be someone Helena would learn from.' Rosemary Leach's Widow, a fully-rounded character fleshed out from the hints in the text, is a rather gossipy, perhaps slightly flighty woman, frightened by the precariousness of her position, but fundamentally honest, tough and no one's fool. The character has become a very strong presence. (p. 18)

Parolles and his plot

Shakespeare also added Parolles (usually pronounced with three syllables (paro'lis) in order to regularise the iambic verse line) and his story to Painter's original, and an extraordinary amount of the play is given over to him, the scenes which ridicule him falling largely in the second half: the loss of the drum (III. 6), the ambush (IV. 1) and the interrogation (IV. 3).

This emphasis on Parolles may account for the curious detail of history that for many years the success of All's Well on the stage depended on his performance. He was the braggart of ancient and popular tradition, a man who is all word and no deeds, and something of a fop as well ('The soul of this man is his clothes', says Lafeu in his ready wisdom, II. 5.43). History records that a succession of notable comedians, Joseph Peterson, Theophilus Cibber (son of Colley Cibber) and Charles Macklin, helped the play through the early eighteenth century. In his Letters William Shenstone describes how a swaggering Cibber played him in 1742 as a 'shabby gentleman' and a 'bully character' in a rusty black coat and gloves, adding 'and a face!—which causes five minutes laughter' (ed. Marjorie Williams, p. 42). Then in 1756 Garrick arranged the text to make sure that Parolles was right at the centre of the play, and put the comedian Henry Woodward at the top of the bill at Drury Lane: 'Capt. Parolles by Mr Woodward'.

For many years, therefore, Parolles overshadowed the story of Helena and Bertram, and as late as 1935 he could steal the show in Payne's production, as played by the massive Falstaffian figure of Roy Emerton. Nevertheless, he had faded in importance in the previous century. In 1793 John Philip Kemble had cut back his scenes, and at Covent Garden in 1811 John Fawcett was hissed in the part: the comedy was missing. In 1852 Phelps played him briefly at Sadler's Wells without success, in spite of the popularity of this actor. And in this century Parolles has often had to struggle to find his rightful place in the play. Benson's performance in 1916 was considered to be artificial and forced because it depended on too much by-play. In The New Age John Francis Hope reported that Ernest Milton in the part in 1921 was 'like someone skating on very thin ice, as though he were trying to spare Helena's blushes instead of provoking them' (15 December).

These last instances may also indicate that the braggart part was losing its traditional force in the eyes of the public. The conventional thinking was that, as a soldier, he occupied a position between the Falstaff of Henry IV and the Pistol of Henry V, although traits from Dogberry, Sir Toby Belch and even Malvolio were recognised in him. Ernest Milton was surly and burly, 'a Falstaff with all the red blood taken out of his body' (The Sunday Times, 4 December 1921). The most famous in this line was Baliol Holloway, swaggering in cloak and gauntlets for Bridges-Adams in 1922. Holloway was a 'rough-cut gem', 'a mixture of Hindenburg [the ex-German Marshal] and Falstaff', 'a Pistol translated to higher society' (The Birmingham Mail, 24 April).

More recently, the characterisation of Parolles has been diversified and given a slightly more realistic treatment. In Barry Jackson's modern dress production of 1927 with the Birmingham Repertory Company, Laurence Olivier played him as a smart young man. Douglas Campbell, also prompted by more modern costuming, caught the exuberance of Guthrie's production of 1953, and wore his khaki battle-shorts with a flair. Walter Kerr in The New York Herald Tribune thought him 'a small masterpiece of comic dishonesty' who invented imaginary exploits on the field of battle 'with a sham reticence that is infinitely funny' (16 July). Cyril Luckham, playing the part in Guthrie's English production in 1959, however, seemed to Philip Hope-Wallace in The Manchester Guardian to be 'a fugitive from the Army Game' and more a caricature of 'a certain well-known bogus major type' (23 April). Muriel St Clare Byrne found this quite acceptable, and in Shakespeare Quarterly for that autumn decided that 'in our time he has again become a propper-up of bar counters … He will always manage to eat at somebody's expense' (p. 562). At the Old Vic in 1953, Michael Hordern played him as a scruffily theatrical type trying to keep his dignity with Lafeu and 'tremendously man-of-the-world', according to J. C. Trewin in The Observer, a Parolles who found 'the right stab' for the lines which drop him from farce to reality, 'Who cannot be crush'd with a plot?' and 'Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live' (20 September). In an interview with Robert Speaight, reported in Shakespeare Quarterly for winter 1976, Jonathan Miller said that Parolles was 'the kind of young man whom the Countess wished her son would not bring back to the house' (p. 22), and consequently cast him in his Greenwich production of 1975 to be the same age as Bertram, disconcertingly dressing them both in identical Elizabethan costumes.

Whatever character Parolles adopts, however, there are two problems that confront him in performance. The first is his personal relationship with the principals, Helena and Bertram. If he plays an out-and-out villain, as in John Houseman's production, it is easy to see that he warms us towards them. He is hardly a good friend to either, but such simple stereotyping does not help the actor who must play him with any degree of conviction. He may survive the early 'virginity scene' with Helena, which shows him unsympathetically enough, but he must exercise a powerful influence over Bertram, for which the strongest clue is found in Lafeu's lines,

No, no, no, your son was misled with a snipttaffeta fellow there, whose villainous saffron would have made all the unbak'd and doughy youth of a nation in his colour. Your daughter-in-law had been alive at this hour, and your son here at home, more advanc'd by the King than by that red-tail'd humble-bee I speak of. (IV. 5.1-6)

In performance the two men must be shown to be close friends who are very much in harmony with one another, but Benthall made Parolles wholly responsible for Bertram's behaviour, giving him his cue at every step by a nod or a beck, and even thwarting the parting kiss to Helena with whispered advice. Unless Parolles is afforded a degree of humanity, this treatment reduces the strength and integrity of Bertram's part and may make puppets of both of them.

The second problem concerns the trick played upon him by Bertram and his friends. How far is Parolles finally a figure of pathos, like Malvolio and Falstaff? The test comes when he has been teased to distraction and his blindfold at last taken off; he looks about him at the faces he knows so well and speaks the line, 'Who cannot be crush'd with a plot?' [IV. iii. 325], faintly echoing Malvolio's 'Madam, you have done me wrong, / Notorious wrong' (Twelfth Night, [V. i. 328]). How those lines are spoken and received decides whether we feel contempt or sympathy. When he utters his next lines, 'Yet I am thankful. If my heart were great, / 'Twould burst at this' [IV. iii. 330-31], he can be nearly as moving as the rejected Falstaff of Henry IV, Part II. Nevertheless, Parolles need not sink into absolute disgrace. In his essay, 'The Life of Shame: Parolles and All's Well', Robert Hapgood made an issue of Parolles's vitality, and criticised Michael Hordern's deflation of the Falstaffian line, 'Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live'. [IV. iii. 333-34] by approving Charles Taylor's production at the Ashland, Oregon Festival in 1961, when Parolles delightfully vaulted to his feet to face the world again.

The question remains why Parolles is in the play at all. In his introduction to the new Cambridge edition, Quiller-Couch thought him 'about the inanest of all Shakespeare's creations', and that he could be 'cut out of the story, like a wen, without the smallest detriment to the remaining tissue' (p. xxiv). In Shakespeare's Problem Comedies W. W. Lawrence more circumspectly observed about the sub-plot that it was 'singularly independent of the main action; much more so than is usual with Shakespeare's mature work' (p. 33). The argument has even been advanced separately by Harold Wilson and Kenneth Muir that by placing so much emphasis on Parolles, Shakespeare was simply trying to obscure the unpleasantness of Helena's activities in the last two acts. But is Parolles merely introduced for 'comic relief ', a foil to set off Helena's story?

In the New Arden introduction, G. K. Hunter offers a strong set of reasons why Bertram's story would not be the same without Parolles:

There is a continual parody of the one by the other. Parolles and Helena are arranged on either side of Bertram, placed rather like the Good and Evil Angels in a Morality. His selfish ostentation balances her selfless abnegation; both are poor people making good in a world open to adventurers, but the magical and romantic actions of Helena are in strong contrast to the prosaic opportunism of Parolles—the contrast perhaps working both ways, staining the career of Helena with the imputation of ambition as well as showing up the degraded mind of Parolles. Parolles wins (temporarily at least) the battle for Bertram's soul (it is he who ships him off to the war), and is himself an index to the world of lust and lies into which Bertram is falling. (p. xxxiii)

We would like to believe this, and after watching the Guthrie production of 1959, Muriel St Clare Byrne believed she saw how Parolles contributed to the balance and symmetry of the play, 'the music of the whole composition', as she called it, for Parolles not only helps to separate Helena and Bertram, he actually helps to bring them together: 'As go-between for Bertram and Diana, Parolles, in his ignorance, becomes the go-between for the wife and husband whom he has helped to separate, and the way for virgins to "undermine" men is discovered when the realism of consummating his own marriage, unawares, undermines Bertram's would-be romantic seduction of Diana' (p. 565).

The comedy of Parolles is more complicated than has commonly been supposed. It is successful because the role, a little like Falstaff's, exhibits many contrary masks. He is a choric philosopher, a stand-up comedian, the traditional comic coward and traitor, and, finally ostracised, a rather pathetic victim. Through the comedy of Parolles and his drum, soldiering is seen less gloriously, just as it is when Bertram, the off-duty officer, makes his attempt on the virtue of Diana. And when Parolles is cut down to size in the scene of his unmasking, he brings down with him the companion in arms who had shared his courtly world of false gallantry, the very man who had unmasked him, Bertram. Finally, in performance the presence of Parolles serves powerfully to juxtapose the careless activity in which he and Bertram sport themselves with our more thoughtful concern for the hard moral issues that surround Helena and all she represents.