[In the following excerpt, Neely argues that as a "problem play, " an often corrupt sexuality, rather than romantic love, drives action and informs imagery, language, character, and plot of All's Well That Ends Well.]

In the problem plays, . . . there are no male disguises for the heroines, no green worlds, no fairies, no parody couples to express desire and protect the main couples; even the bawdy is changed in tone. Sexuality is now frequently dissociated from marriage and procreation. It finds expression in seduction (Troilus and Cressida and All's Well), aggressive lust (Measure for Measure), prostitution (Measure for Measure, Othello), promiscuity (Troilus and Cressida), and, perhaps, adultery (Hamlet). Instead of being connected with imagery of growth and fertility, sexuality is associated with corruption, loss, disease, death.¹⁰ It also plays a larger part in the language, imagery, characterization, and plot of these plays than it did in the comedies. Meanwhile, romantic love, which is less pervasive than it was in the comedies, no longer controls desire and, suitably qualified, engenders the mutuality that brings about happy marriages. In the problem plays, romantic love is easily manipulated and easily shattered. Troilus and Bertram use its rhetoric to seduce Cressida and Diana. Hamlet and Othello manifest its corruptibility. Women withdraw from idealizing love. Helen and Mariana come to pursue romantic desires in practical ways; Ophelia, in madness, hallucinates seduction and betrayal and Diana anticipates them; Cressida seems to eschew ideals altogether and Isabella, sexuality.

Stripped of the adornments of romantic love and no longer a guarantee of controlled or satisfied desire, marriage is put under even more pressure as its social and institutional complications are emphasized. In the romantic comedies the external social impediments to marriage were conventional and conventionally flimsy: male disguise, easily removed; the father's will, easily complied with; the father's veto, easily canceled. But in the problem plays, marriages are beset with tangled social, economic, and legal problems: the coercive power of wardship, the radical incompatibility of race and social class, the absence of dowries, the intricate legalities of contracts and precontracts, the sin of incestuous second marriage. There are, of course, other kinds of social and moral problems in the plays besides marriage—the deflation of heroism and honor in Troilus and Cressida, for example, or Hamlet's inability to act to avenge his father's murder. But even in these two plays the dissociation of sexuality from marriage and the disruption of marriage underlie other sorts of corruption.

As sexuality becomes more central and more debased in the problem plays and as marriage becomes legally and socially more difficult, the protection of virginity, an underlying assumption in the festive comedies, becomes a matter for debate. On the one hand, virginity is seen as a value and a virtue; on the other, as a commodity to be exchanged. Ophelia and Diana are lectured on the necessity of the vigilant defense of theirs. Isabella values hers over her brother's life. Hamlet urges abstinence upon Gertrude even in marriage. But Parolles argues that Helen should lose her virginity expeditiously, and she and Cressida do so. Mariana, likewise, loses her virginity under deceitful circumstances to achieve the marriage she desires. But the loss of virginity, while enabling the women in these plays to achieve their goals, also endangers them: they lose the kinds of power they could take for granted in the romantic comedies.

The inevitable virginity of the heroines of the festive comedies generated desire, tempered it, and constrained it within the context of marriage and procreation. In the problem plays loss of virginity constricts or compromises women's power in three ways. First, at the crudest level, virginity is power, seductive power, as Angelo learns, and bargaining power, as Cressida knows. Her well-known expression of this—"Men prize the thing ungained more than it is; . . . Achievement is command; ungained beseech" (I.ii.296-300)—is validated in all the problem plays. Her value falls precipitously after she is won, as does that of Diana and Isabella. After apparent seductions they are vilified as whores—as are Gertrude and Desdemona even within marriage. Second, when women lose their virginity, they lose their position as idealized beloveds and hence their ability to inspire male adoration and mitigate male anxieties, to keep men "amiable" (the virtue of the handkerchief in Othello). In the problem plays, even when participating in loving and faithful marriages, the women trigger male fears of female sexuality and wantonness, of male impotence and degradation. Invariably they are "bewhored" by the men in the plays. Third, women's loss of virginity is the emblem of their social transformation from beloved to wife and of the changed status this entails. "Ay, so you serve us / Till we serve you" (IV.ii.17-18), Diana's wry retort to Bertram's protestations of eternal service, has implications beyond sexual ones for courted beloveds who become wives. The consequent loss of independence, initiative, and control is apparent in the submission of Desdemona to her husband, and in the partial, potential, or pretended submissions of Helen and Diana, Mariana and Isabella.

Like the romantic comedies, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure specifically dramatize broken nuptials that culminate in achieved marriages. In these problem comedies, romantic love, sexual union, and social accommodation are again examined, but arranged in a different balance, put under more pressure, and brought more profoundly into conflict with one another than in the romantic comedies. In the earlier plays, love provides the crucial link between the personal imperatives of desire and the social imperatives of marriage and procreation. But in the problem comedies love is peripheral and unrequited, sexuality is corrupted and divorced from love and marriage, and the social pressures enforcing marriage are enormous. Hence the reconciliation between the couple's desires and society's demands is more difficult to achieve than in the earlier comedies. In All's Well That Ends Well, I shall argue, a precarious reconciliation is achieved with full acknowledgement of its cost. The marriages that conclude Measure for Measure, however, are enforced, joyless, and without promise. All's Well transforms the motifs of the comedies, while Measure for Measure anticipates the themes, attitudes, and conflicts of the tragedies.

All's Well dramatizes fully all of the strains in courtship and marriage that were potential or muted in the festive comedies: the older generation's attempt to control marital choice, the men's corrupted views of women and sexuality, the women's consequent powerlessness and conflicting need to pursue their desires aggressively. In this play the older generation is prominent and authoritative. More fully drawn than in the romantic comedies, it is more emphatically in decline and hence dependent on the marriages of youth for its own rejuvenation. But parent figures in the problem comedies endanger nuptials more by insisting on them than fathers and rulers in earlier comedies did by impeding them. Because the apparently dying king and Bertram's mother are implicated in the broken nuptials, they must participate directly in their restoration. This intervention by the elders is necessary partly because the young couple is unable to negotiate marriage themselves as the couples of the romantic comedies could. Helen's¹¹ anxieties are more deeply rooted and less easily dispelled than was the proud resistance to love of earlier heroines. Her sense of personal unworthiness and social inadequacy are reinforced by Bertram's rejection. In him, the witty misogyny of the heroes of comedy deteriorates into revulsion against women, and erotic desire turns into irresistible lust seeking satisfaction outside of marriage. Bertram's attitudes are reinforced by the military environment to which he flees (one never central in the romantic comedies) and by his relations with Parolles, a bond more corrupt and corrupting than earlier male friendships.

In order to counter Bertram's misogyny and lust and his flight from social responsibilities, Helen must combine the roles of chaste beloved (through her idealizing rhetoric, her pilgrim's disguise, and her mock death), of sexual partner (through the bedtrick), and of wife (through her legal betrothal, marriage ceremony, and pregnancy). She must cooperate with other women, change places and identities with Diana, and undergo the losses and gains which are the consequence of her mock death and of the bedtrick. Bertram must, however perfunctorily, undergo sexual initiation, the exposure of Parolles, the loss of his wife, and submission to the authority of his elders. The marriage that is ratified at the end of the play is presented not as a joyous lovers' union but as a compromised bargain, not as a happy ending but as a precarious beginning.

Although All's Well ends as vexed comedy, it begins as attenuated tragedy. The themes of its first scene are those of Hamlet: the death of fathers, the power and impotence of kings, and the future of a young son, an "unseasoned courtier" (I.i.72). Like Hamlet, Bertram is urged to heed platitudinous advice, assume the virtues of his dead father, and submit to the authority of his king, ensuring in this way the stability of family and state. Bertram, like Hamlet and other tragic heroes, is the focus of a variety of demands; unlike these others, however, he does not make demands of his own. Bertram remains throughout most of the play "evermore in subjection" (I.i.5) to his elders. Unlike both the heroes of the comedies, who are usually parentless,¹² and those of tragedy, who often struggle with fathers or father figures, Bertram either submits or flees.

Although All's Well opens by sketching dilemmas that might be enlarged to full tragic dimensions, this enlargement emphatically does not happen. Early in the first scene the play denies expectations¹³ by its abrupt shift of attention from Bertram to Helen, who, as a poor female orphan, is not likely to be the repository of familial or social expectations. Her first soliloquy transfers the focus of the play from education to love, from social demands to personal desires, from the dead and dying to the living: "I think not on my father" (I.i.82). Throughout the rest of the first act Helen establishes herself as the protagonist, the play's subject as marriage, and its genre as comedy.

The first scene, moreover, reveals sharp differences from the romantic comedies as well as from Hamlet and the tragedies. Helen's soliloquy is characteristic of the tragic heroes; exactly like Hamlet's first soliloquy, it reveals that it is not only her father's death that is upsetting her. In it, surprisingly, she, like the heroes of the romantic comedies, is a Petrarchan lover, idealizing Bertram as a "bright, particular star" (89), providing a conventional blazon of his beloved parts, and humbly lamenting her inadequacy and the unattainability of her beloved. But she is more self-conscious about the excessiveness of her posture than an Orsino or an Orlando—"My idolatrous fancy / Must sanctify his reliques" (100-01)—and her lament is grounded in the real difference in social status between her and her beloved. Her hopelessness is therefore realistic as well as conventional; precisely this blend of romantic conventionality and shrewd realism characterizes Helen throughout the play.

One means of overcoming the distance between Helen and Bertram is obliquely implied by Parolles in his dialogue with Helen on virginity. Demystifying chastity, the virtue honored by romantic love, he defines it as a valuable commodity that can be spent for personal and social gain: "Within ten year it will make itself ten which is a goodly increase and the principal itself not much the worse" (Li. 149-51). Under Parolles's tutelage Helen rapidly comes to recognize her own desires and potential and moves from vowing to die to protect her virginity to wishing to "lose it to her own liking" (152)—from worshiping distant stars to finding "remedies" within herself. Her two soliloquies are not, however, simply opposites; both contain Helen's characteristic ambiguousness. The first soliloquy testifies, however humbly, to "Th' ambition in my love" (93), while the second voices its assertions only tentatively in a couplet sonnet composed of obscure images and nervous questions: "Who ever strove / To show her merit that did miss her love?" (I.i.237-38). In both soliloquies, as throughout the rest of the play, Helen is paradoxically proud and humble, self-assertive and self-effacing, passionate and chaste, vigorous and passive. Her particular blend of idealized virtue and urgent desire differentiates her from the comedy heroines and accounts for the critics' sharply contrasted responses to her.¹⁴ Her actions are, however, the result not only of her complex character but of the complex situation in which she finds herself. Unlike most of the heroines of the romantic comedies, she is not the pursued but the pursuer; the shape her pursuit takes is in part forced on her by her constricted social role, by the interventions of the elders, and by the fragmented and paradoxical attitudes toward women held by the men in the play.

Helen's dialogue with Parolles on virginity reveals some aspects of this attitude and provides the impetus for Helen to conceive her strategy of pursuit. It also introduces the play's emphasis on the sexual component of marriage, sets the subject and tone of its extensive bawdy, and manifests its central thematic paradox—loss in gain and gain in loss. The dialogue's subject is the loss of virginity—intercourse; its metaphors are martial and commercial, and its tone is realistic, crude, somewhat funny; this tone is neither as good-natured as the bawdy in the romantic comedies nor as bitter as that in Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. Sexual encounters are imaged as mutual aggression with mixed victory and defeat on both sides.

Parolles. Man, setting down before you, will undermine you and blow you up.

Helen. Bless our poor virginity from underminers and blowers-up! Is there no military policy how virgins might blow up men?

Parolles. Virginity being blown down, man will quickly be blown up; marry, in blowing him down again, with the breach yourselves made you lose your city.

[Li.121-29]

The dialogue's reiterated image of tumescence and detumescence encapsulates a central pattern of the play. An alternation of fullness and emptiness characterizes the plot with its gaining, losing, and regaining (the general theme of Boccaccio's Third Day, present in the source tale¹⁵ but expanded here), the development of the characters with their alternating potence and impotence, confidence and collapse, and the verse with its alternating compression and slackness.

The scenes in which Helen proposes her cure to the King and chooses Bertram manifest her blend of virtuous modesty and sexual energy, of self-confidence and self-deprecation. The sexual innuendo that imbues both scenes is not, I think, intended to undermine the audience's sympathy with Helen or to impugn her motives, but to reveal the mixed nature of both her motives and her power, the result of the mixed nature of the love that drives her and of the goal she seeks.¹⁶ The combination of Helen's high-minded virtue and seductive sexuality is apparent in comments made about her by others, in her own language, and in the structuring of the two scenes. When Lafew announces Helen to the King, he praises her "wisdom and constancy" (II.i.87) and later refers to the cure as a "miracle" (II.iii.1). However, his innuendo as he describes her as one "whose simple touch / Is powerful to araise King Pippen, nay, / To give great Charlemain a pen in's hand, / And write to her a love-line" (II.i.78-81), his allusion to Pandarus as he leaves her alone with the King, and his lecherous jests in the choosing scene about the frigidity of the young courtiers, all call attention to her rejuvenating sexual appeal rather than to her intellectual or spiritual powers. As the scene with the King progresses, Helen, although restrained and moderate at first, gains warmth and passion.¹⁷ Significantly, the King is moved to consider her services not when she appeals to the power of her father's art or to the possibility of divine aid, but when she asserts her confidence in her own art to effect his cure: "But know I think, and think I know most sure / My art is not past power, nor you past cure" (II.i. 160-61). He is persuaded to attempt her remedy only after she has associated her cure of his "parts" with the renewing forces of nature as well as of faith—"The greatest grace lending grace, / Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring / Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring" (II.i. 163-65)—and has promised to risk for him her chaste reputation, or even her life. She will venture: "Tax of impudence, / A strumpet's boldness, a divulged shame, / Traduced by odious ballads; my maiden's name / Seared otherwise; ne worse of worst, extended / With vilest torture, let my life be ended" (II.i. 173-77). In the first of the play's many agreements, the King and Helen agree to risk death together, to serve each other's "will" with their "performance" in couplets that are both hieratic and sexually suggestive:

Sweet practicer, thy physic I will try
That ministers thine own death if I die.

[II. i. 188-89]

Here is my hand; the premises observed.
Thy will by my performance shall be served.

[204-05]

The choosing scene manifests still more explicitly the erotic energy that has rejuvenated the King. The scene is framed by Lafew's innuendos and his description of the King as "Lustig" and "able to lead her a coranto" (II.iii.42, 44). Helen commences her choice by an explicit leave-taking of "Dian's alter" and each of her rejections of the lords is more sexually explicit than the one before, as she refers to her "suit" (77), to "great Love" (86), to "your bed" (92), and "mak [ing] yourself a son out of my blood" (98). This series emphasizes the modesty and submissiveness of Helen's final offer of herself to Bertram. Her extraordinary seductiveness mitigates our sympathy with him in his violent rejection of her and focuses attention on the sexual as well as the social basis for it.

Bertram is not yet even at the beginning of the journey toward sexual maturity that Helen is already embarked on. Hence, he is an utterly recalcitrant beloved, aptly characterized by Parolles's definition of narcissistic virginity: "Peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love which is the most inhibited sin in the canon" (I.i. 144-48). Self-love leads to Bertram's rejection of Helen and of all three components of marriage: love, sex, and social union. His first response to her choice—"I shall beseech your Highness / In such a business, give me leave to use / The help of mine own eyes" (II.iii.107-09)—shows the absence of romantic "fancy"; its necessary subjectivity is often symbolized by eyes in the earlier comedies. The bawdy innuendos of his second exchange with the King manifest Bertram's revulsion from Helen's sexuality, his sense of his own sexual inadequacy, and his understandable refusal to be a surrogate for the King, repaying his debts and acting on his desires.

King. Thou know'st she has raised me from
my sickly bed.
Bertram. But follows it, my lord, to bring me down
Must answer for your raising.

[II.iii.1 12-14]

Bertram's anxieties are emphasized by Lafew's commentary, which associates the imagined rejections of the other lords with the unnatural frigidity of "eunuchs," "boys of ice," and asses. Finally, articulating and disguising his sexual recoil, Bertram expresses contempt for her social class: "A poor physician's daughter; my wife! Disdain / Rather corrupt me ever!" (II.iii.116-17). The King futilely fixes on the third component of the refusal, the only one he has control over, and agreeing to "create" social eminence in Helen, enforces the marriage.

The nature of Bertram's capitulation only confirms the sexual roots of his aversion. He submits to the social disgrace of the wedding ceremony but evades love and sexual consummation. Although he weds Helen, he emphatically refuses to "bed" her—or even kiss her. Parolles encourages and articulates his distaste for sexual union, warning: "He wears his honor in a box unseen, / That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home / Spending his manly marrow in her arms" (II.iii.282-84). His perversity in the matter is highlighted, too, by Shakespeare's alteration of Boccaccio's story, in which the count, Beltramo, seems to find Giletta, the heroine, attractive but rejects her for social reasons.¹⁸ And there is in the source none of the emphasis on the seductiveness of Helen, which Shakespeare includes in both the cure and the choosing scenes. The impossible condition under which he would reestablish his marriage—"show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband" (III.ii.59-61),—both expresses his sexual loathing and suggests that if Bertram could desire Helen and prove himself with her, the marriage would be acceptable. But before this can happen, Bertram must escape the suffocating authority of his mother and the King. He must prove his manhood as a warrior before risking it as a lover—as do Claudio, Benedick, and Othello. He must be sexually initiated not in a marriage sanctioned by his elders but in an illegitimate liaison in which he appears to act as the seducer.

Bertram must begin his education anew in the "nursery" (I.ii.16) of the Italian wars. But it is Helen who brings it to completion through her flight, her mock death, her doubling with Diana, and the bedtrick. She puts to use literally now the erotic power that metaphorically played a part in the King's recovery, but at the same time she mutes the expression of it. She wins Bertram by both submitting to his commands and actively fulfilling her desires. Her ambigous self-effacement permits Bertram's growth:

Nothing in France until he has no wife!
Thou shalt have none, Rousillion, none in France;
Then thou hast all again.

[III.ii.100-02]

This is a prophecy of her flight from France, but (by virtue of the parenthetical, "none in France") also of the play's end.

The witty overtones of Helen's mock death connect it, by means of the familiar Renaissance pun, with her sexual death in the bedtrick and embody the double role she must play to win Bertram. Both the bedtrick and the "death" combine aggressiveness and humility in a constructive deceit that is characteristic of Shakespearean mock deaths. Helen's pilgrimage and her mock death acquire double meaning in her sonnet letter to the Countess, through the confusion about the destination of her journey, and by the precise placing of the bedtrick in the structure of the play. Having soliloquized that she would rather die herself than be the cause of Betram's death (III.ii.99-129), her letter to the Countess declares that she will relinquish Bertram and make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Jaques; however, its sonnet form and its Petrarchan rhetoric imply that she will pursue him and hint at the means she will use. Helen presents herself in the conventional image of a lover as pilgrim—humble ("Ambitious love hath so in me offended"), penitent ("Barefoot trod I the cold ground upon"), in search of forgiveness and death. She does not, however, plan to renounce love: "Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far / His name with zealous fervor sanctify" (III.iv.4-17). The sonnet, in fact, seems as much metaphorical as expository, rendering futile debates about whether Florence is really on the way to Spain, just which Saint Jaques's shrine is meant, what Helen's real intentions are. Perhaps these matters are as unclear to her as to the audience; she only knows that she wants to die for Bertram. The Countess's response ignores geography. Discounting the literal meaning of the sonnet, she hopes it may promise the couple's reconciliation.

The "death" Helen seeks may likewise be metaphorical. The sonnet's couplet, viewed in the context of the play as a whole and of the sonnet tradition, may hint that the death will be sexual, not literal: "He is too good and fair for death and me, / Whom I myself embrace to set him free." The fuzziness of its pronouns (whom and him), usually straightened out in glosses, suggests deliberate confusion about whether Helen will embrace death or Bertram. In fact she will do both, and the letter wittily hints that Helen's passion will be fulfilled, not renounced. The suggestiveness is comparable to the clever overtones the tale of Giletta gains when read in the context of the other stories of the Decameron's Third Day, in which religious strategems are repeatedly used to further sexual gains, in which bedtricks are less high-minded than Giletta's, and in which religious and courtly language is ripe with sexual innuendos.¹⁹ The ambiguity of Helen's "death" is further emphasized by its timing. The announcement of her "death" by the Lords occurs (without preparation or explanation) at precisely the moment of her assignation with Bertram.²⁰ This death, then, is a clever "unmetaphoring," to use Rosalie Colie's apt term, of the conventional pun on die.²¹ Helen is a passionate pilgrim who dies for love. Her double "death" is not merely a nasty trick but a rich metaphor expressing her loss of virginity and identity and her gain of a new identity for Bertram and for herself.

The bedtrick's success requires the presence of Diana, Helen's "Motive / And helper to a husband" (IV.iv.20-21). The chaste virgin and the whore embody men's polarized fantasies of women. But the play, through the women's names, their role reversals, the substitution, and their identification with each other, controverts the fragmented views of the men and affirms the reconciliation or potential reconciliation of sexual partner and loving wife in both.

Helen's name carries implications of wantonness; Diana's implies militant virginity. These associations are emphasized in the play. The clown's song links Helen with her famous predecessor, mocking both: "Was this fair face, the cause, quoth she, / Why the Grecians sacked Troy? / Fond done, done fond, / Was this King Priam's joy?" (I.iii.71-74). Shakespeare's audience may have connected her especially with the silly and sensual Helen of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, probably written and produced at about the time of All's Well.²² More generally, Helen of Troy was, for the Renaissance, the exemplum of a bad wife. But this Helen, belying her name, begins the play as a virgin resigned to unrequited and unconsummated love. In contrast, Diana, namesake of the goddess of chastity, seems, when we first see her, ripe for seduction by the "handsome," "gallant," and "brave" gentleman Bertram (III.v.51, 78-79), as the caustic warnings against him by Mariana and her mother suggest. But soon the two switch places to move into roles more consonant with their names. Helen's persuasion of the king and her choice of Bertram are both presented as metaphorical seductions. When Bertram flees her, she must, in effect, prostitute herself in the bedtrick, engaging in an anonymous sexual encounter and receiving his ring as payment. Diana, meanwhile, becomes a militant virgin, defending herself adamantly against Bertram's advances, wittily attacking his protestations of love, and expressing generalized distrust of men, which leads her to vow, "To live and die a maid" (IV.ii.74), Helen's original resolve. In the last scene yet another reversal occurs, as Diana assumes, for Helen, "a strumpet's boldness" (II.i.174) and accepts the slander that Helen had once risked; Helen assumes her desired role as a chaste wife. If Diana were to accept the King's offer of her choice of husband, the identification between the two would be complete.

Not only does the play identify Helen and Diana, but all the women also identify with each other, feeling sympathy and offering help where hostility and rivalry might have been expected. The Countess warmly supports the affection of her poor ward for her son and heir, remembering the passions of her own youth. Diana's attraction to Bertram is qualified by her sympathy for his unknown wife even before she meets Helen, and her private and public attacks on Bertram are on Helen's behalf as well as her own. The Widow, seeing Helen's plight, plants the idea of the bedtrick: "This young maid might do her / A shrewd turn, if she pleased" (III.v.66-67). Helen has only to extend the Widow's suggestion, recognizing that she might shrewdly turn Bertram's unlawful purpose into "lawful meaning" (III.vii.46). Following the bedtrick the bonds of sympathy between the women deepen. The Widow and Diana become pilgrims with Helen, and Helen, in her reflections on the experience and in her remark, "When I was like this maid . . ." (V.iii.309), acknowledges her connection with and dependence on Diana. The three women are "maid, widow and wife" (MM.V.i.177) illustrating the marriage paradigm and comprising the socially acceptable roles for women in the period. Though Diana is Helen's rival and Helen makes use of her, there is no envy or hostility between them. Intimacy, mutual aid, and instinctive sympathy are characteristic of most female relationships delineated by Shakespeare. Women's sympathy for and identification with each other cross boundaries of age, class, role, and value, existing between Julia and Sylvia, Beatrice and Hero, Desdemona and Emilia, Cleopatra and her waiting women, Hermione and Paulina. But at the same time, female friendships consistently support and further women's bonds with men. Unlike male friendships, they are not experienced or dramatized as in conflict with heterosexual bonds.

Bertram and Parolles, like Helen and Diana, are parallel and contrasted figures whose friendship serves as a defense against women and sexuality far more explicitly than did the male friendships in the comedies. Parolles's attitude toward sexuality as a degrading commodity influences or perhaps merely reflects and supports Bertram's. He looks to sex for profit—either money or children—and so he instructs Helen in the market value of her virginity, encourages Bertram's decision not to "spend" his "manly marrow" (II.iii.284) by bedding her, gratuitously uses or invents the sexual exploits of his companions to please his imagined captors. As a hypocritical pander in his truncated sonnet letter to Diana, he urges her to be paid in advance for the loss of her virginity:

When he swears oaths, bid him drop gold, and take it;
After he scores, he never pays the score.
Half won is match well made; match and well make it;
He ne'er pays after-debts, take it before.

[IV.iii.228-31]

At the same time, he woos her himself in a parody of the bargain Bertram wishes. Self-interest rather than desire motivates his wooing, for, as Parolles knows, Helen and Diana see through him; a relationship with either would end Parolles's easy exploitation of his "sweetheart" (II.iii.271).

The friendship of Bertram and Parolles is as hypocritically self-serving on both sides as their heterosexual relationships. Instead of bailing each other out, as Helen and Diana do, each attempts to sell the other out to save his own skin. Nor is there any hint of identification or sympathy between the two for their parallel predicaments. Although the exposure of Parolles's hollow martial rhetoric is placed to emphasize the parallel with Bertram's similarly hollow amorous rhetoric, and although each is exposed, asks pardon, and embraces shame, they acknowledge no connections with each other. Diana is a conscious, willing scapegoat for Helen; Parolles is an unwitting and unwilling one for Bertram.

As Parolles attempts to protect himself by condemning his comrades and Bertram, so the characters and the play seek to exonerate Bertram by attacking and exposing Parolles. A number of characters blame Bertram's faults on Parolles's influence, although, as many critics note, these faults are in fact not created by Parolles. The contrasts between the two do, however, have the effect of making Bertram look better than he otherwise might have.²³ Parolles's cowardice makes Bertram's lauded courage the more impressive, and Parolles's willingness to embrace shame if it will help him to survive perhaps turns Bertram's arrogance into a kind of virtue. Most importantly, Parolles's "fixed evils" (Ii. 105) underline Bertram's malleable immaturity, his potential for growth. The comic setpiece of the exposure of Parolles distracts attention from Bertram's treatment of Diana, and Parolles's attacks on Bertram there and in the last scene engender some sympathy for the Count. His dissociation from Parolles at the end of the play serves as a manifestation of Bertram's reform—which is not much dramatized in other ways.

Bertram's final severance from Parolles and Helen's enduring bond with Diana are both essential to the completion of the marriage that culminates an extended series of separations and affiliations. Comic action characteristically weakens or breaks old bonds to make way for new ones. In the romantic comedies the younger generation easily loosens its ties with the older: benignly, as through Rosalind's disguise; cruelly, as through the elopement of Jessica and Lorenzo; or inevitably, as through the death of the King in Love's Labor's Lost. All's Well recapitulates these separations. At the beginning of the play, Helen's father has recently died, and she has put aside remembrance of him to dote on Bertram. She symbolically rejects the Countess as a mother (desiring her as a mother-in-law) and, after her marriage, she leaves the Countess and the King to seek Bertram. Bertram, too, forgets the memory of his father's virtue and flees his mother and his King.

But whereas in the romantic comedies heterosexual bonds begin forming early in the plays, Helen and Bertram are isolated from each other throughout most of All's Well; they have only three curt exchanges, and none between the fifth scene of act 2 and the third scene of act 3. Apart, they associate themselves with separate male and female communities that function as a prolonged respite between their participation in a family as children (the role each emphatically plays at the start) and their creation of a new family as husband and wife and as parents (the project they embark on at the end). But the communities are joined for different reasons and function differently for the two protagonists. Bertram flees to the brotherhood of military life to evade love, marriage, and responsibility, and he gives up the ring that symbolizes his father's heritage. In contrast, Helen uses the skill inherited from her father to cure the King and later joins the Widow and Diana in an association which encourages her marriage and her own growth. Bertram must be separated from Parolles and military life, whereas Helen's cooperation with the Widow and Diana continues to the end of the play. Diana enacts seduction and betrayal and absorbs shame for Helen in the last scene. Her presence allows Shakespeare to mute in Helen's characterization the polarized traits—aggressive manipulation and degraded submission—required of the protagonists of the tales on which the play draws.

In all the variations on the motifs of the Fulfillment of the Tasks and the Substitute Bride examined by W. W. Lawrence,²⁴ the huband's flight and the tasks imposed express the husband's fears of female sexuality and marital responsibility along with his contradictory desires for illegitimate satisfaction and the achievement of family continuity through an heir. The central task requires the production of an heir by the wife, and the supplementary tasks all involve obvious symbols of male and female sexuality—the obtaining of rings, swords, or the husband's stallion, the digging of a well, construction of a hall or throne, the filling of a trunk. The entire burden of sexual union is symbolically placed on the woman, who must contrive to fulfill both halves of it. In order to do so, she must be both aggressive and submissive, both "clever" and a "wench." In several of the tales, the wife in fact disguises herself as a man, gains access to her husband, beats him at cards, and offers to provide him with a woman, displaying traditional male qualities of ingenuity, stamina, and courage. But to fulfill the female part of the bargain and to put to rest their husbands' sexual anxieties, the women must be helpless, seduceable, whores. The wives hence take on the roles of lower-class, powerless, or degraded women—a cowherd's daughter, a slave, an imprisoned princess, a poor Florentine maid—women who, like whores, can be used contemptuously to supply sexual satisfaction and abandoned with ease without concern for consequences or heirs. In this connection, it seems significant that Diana's mother is a poor widow; the daughter's lack of paternal or financial protection puts her in an especially vulnerable position in a patriarchal society. In these tales the women must be still more manipulative and ingenious than Helen, whose stratagem presents itself to her accidentally. And while the sexual component of Helen's achievement is emphasized in her cure of the King, the presence of Diana allows it in certain ways to be deemphasized, as she does not directly seduce nor is she seduced by Bertram.

At the same time, however, the bedtrick by which Bertram is won is presented so as to be more troubling and richer than those in the folktale sources, in Boccaccio's tale, or in other analogues. This irregular nuptial both completes and further complicates the marriage of Helen and Bertram. It is the center of the "mingled yarn" of the play, the point where good and ill, loss and gain are most intricately intertwined. The encounter is, in numerous ways, a "death" for both Bertram and Helen, culminating their isolation, humiliation, and loss of identity but also commencing their union. To achieve his desires, Bertram must give up his ring, the emblem of his social rank and family connections. We learn later that Helen, too, has given up the King's ring, emblem perhaps of her dependence on him as a surrogate father. It also symbolizes her honor, which, Diana argues, has a social value for women equal to the male heritage embodied in Bertram's ring: "mine honor's such a ring; / My chastity's the jewel of our house / Bequeathed down from many ancestors" (IV.ii.45-47). Both embark on the sexual encounter without the sanctioning contexts of family, rank, secure marriage. But the loss of virginity is riskier and more irrevocable than the loss of the ring, and Helen has nothing else to bargain with. The nature of the bedtrick necessitates that Bertram, in accord with his wishes, be bereft of all connections with his beloved other than the sheerly sensual one and that Helen, against her wishes, be a substitute body in the dark who gives up name and speech and employs nakedness as a disguise. She is unaccommodated woman at the place where divine aid, the King's authority, rank, role, and identity have been cast off. The bedtrick both depends on and expresses the radical anonymity of sexual union, its separation from love and marriage. And the union itself, as the bawdy in the play graphically shows, means a physical loss for both—the loss of Bertram's "manly marrow" and Helen's virginity.

But from these losses come gains—or at least the promise of gains. First at the physical level with Helen's pregnancy, which the play has anticipated through Lavatch's and Parolles's witticisms: "The danger is in standing to't; that's the loss of men, though it be the getting of children" (III.ii.41-42) and "Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost" (I.i.130-32). Their marriage and the getting of a child reunite sexuality with family. There are more immediate gains as well. Bertram's seduction of the "wondrous cold" Diana (III.vi. 116) completes his rebellion against the authority of his mother, the King, and Helen: "he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honor; he hath given her his monumental ring, and thinks himself made in the unchaste composition" (IV.iii.16-18). His cheerful dispatch of "sixteen businesses" (IV.iii.86) in conjunction with the encounter manifests the energizing effects of his sexual initiation and adolescent rebellion. These accomplished, perfunctory reform follows; he is able to claim to have loved his dead wife and mourn for her, to ask forgiveness of his elders and reconcile himself with them, even to agree to marry a woman of their choosing.

But if the impersonal nature of the encounter satisfies Bertram, its deceitful anonymity disillusions Helen in her extraordinary reflection on the event:

But, O strange men,
That can such sweet use make of what they hate,
When saucy trusting of the cozened thoughts
Defiles the pitchy night! So lust doth play
With what it loathes for that which is away.

[IV.iv.21-25]

The fact that Helen seems alone among the perpetrators of bedtricks in expressing her humiliation and defilement emphasizes the cost of her stratagem, not its success. But she also acknowledges the sweetness of her pleasure and the growth that will ensue: "the time will bring on summer, / When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns, / And be as sweet as sharp" (IV.iv.31-33). This affirmation by Helen of the ordinary fruition that will accompany her painful initiation qualifies the cynicism of Diana's anticipation of deflowering: "Ay, so you serve us / Till we serve you; but when you have our roses, You barely leave our thorns to prick ourselves / And mock us with our bareness" (IV.ii. 17-20) and corroborates the Countess's realistic and parodoxical memory of youthful desire: "Even so it was with me when I was young; / If ever we are nature's, these are ours; this thorn / Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong" (I.iii.129-31). All three women use the image of the thorn in the flower to express the mingled pain and pleasure of sexual experience. Only Helen imagines not just the antitithetical rose and thorn but the development of sustaining leaves as the consequence of sexual experience.²⁵

The bedtrick is a sexual and psychological death and rebirth for both Bertram and Helen. It is also a symbolic prostitution and the central bargain of All's Well That Ends Well. Like the many other agreements in the play, it is both fraudulent and fair, both corrupt and restorative. Helen uses her erotic potency to cure the King, and he in return agrees to satisfy her desires (and sublimate his) by granting her a husband: "If thou proceed / As high as word, my deed shall match thy deed" (II.i.212-13). Bertram eventually complies with the match in order to retain the King's favor: "As thou lov'st her, / Thy love's to me religious; else does err" (II.iii. 183-84). Bertram in turn enters into an agreement with Helen: "When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of my body that I am father to, then call me husband" (III.ii.58-60). To meet Bertram's conditions, Helen strikes a bargain with the Widow: "Take this purse of gold, / And let me buy your friendly help thus far, / Which I will over-pay and pay again / When I have found it" (III.vii.14-17), providing Diana with a dowry in return for her help in the consummation of Helen's marriage. In the bedtrick, there are three layers of agreement which, like the other bargains, involve deceit. Bertram falsely promises marriage to Diana in return for her loss of honor; Diana falsely promises the loss of her honor in return for marriage and Bertram's ring. Helen deceives Bertram in order to fulfill his conditions and transform sin into law, creating the paradoxes of the bedtrick which "Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed, / And lawful meaning in a lawful act, / Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact" (III.vii.45-47). The deceitfulness of Bertram's deal is mocked by Parolles's warning to Diana: "He ne'er pays after-debts, take it before" (IV.iii.231).

The two rings participate in all these contracts. They become associated with chastity and sexuality, with betrothal and consummation, and with the commercial flavor of the transactions. They embody the sexual, social, and emotional aspects of marriage and symbolize their fragmentation and degradation. The King gives one ring to Helen as reward for her cure. Helen gives it to Diana to give to Bertram in return for his ring; he, in turn, tries to send it to Maudlin as an "amorous token" in preparation for the "main consents" (V.iii.68-69) of their betrothal, which he agrees to in return for his reconciliation with his elders. The recognition of the ring by the King and Lafew precipitates the entrance of first Diana and then Helen, Bertram's two wives. The ring and the series of contracts lead to the reestablishment of Helen's and Bertram's marriage at the play's end; this marriage itself is viewed as a conditional bargain, an agreement in which each party pays something and receives something, and one that has consequences that spread beyond the couple to others who both contribute to the nuptial and benefit from it. The final benefit (and final bargain) of the play is potentially Diana's, as the King offers to repay her contribution to the fulfillment of his bargain with Helen by entering into an identical one with her and providing her with a husband. . . .

The socially conventional, parentally arranged nuptial is, however, disrupted by its antithesis—Diana's claims on Bertram as a result of their (supposed) sexual coupling. She asserts (falsely) that Bertram has completed all of the nuptial requirements with her and demands that their union be confirmed by the King:

If you shall marry,
You give away this hand, and that is mine;
You give away heaven's vows, and those are mine;
You give away myself, which is known mine;
For I by vow am so embodied yours
That she which marries you must marry me,
Either both or none.

[V.iii. 169-75]

Bertram denies Diana's claims by vicious denigration of her as a "common gamester" (188) and by his cowardly characterization of their union as prostitution, a commercial transaction instituted by her:

Her infinite cunning with her modern grace
Subdued me to her rate. She got the ring,
And I had that which any inferior might
At market-price have bought.

[V.iii.216-19]

This denigration reveals Bertram's lust for the whore beneath the goddess he praised, manifesting yet again his polarized view of women.

The King and Lafew echo Bertram's attitude as they join him in his attack on Diana: "This woman's an easy glove, my lord; she goes off and on at pleasure"; "I think thee now some common customer" (V.iii.277, 286). Her maddening equivocations delineate the fragmented roles that rigid social expectations and uncontrolled male sexual fantasies impose on women: "Great King, I am no strumpet; by my life / I am either maid or else this old man's wife" (292-93). Diana, through her identification with Helen, both is and is not a maid and a wife and hence must accept the title of whore. A woman, the extended scene suggests, is not acceptable as a wife if she is a whore who serves men's lust, but cannot be accepted as a wife without risking whoredom. This last rupture of nuptials, however, has the power to generate completed ones.

Both Bertram and Helen are now ready to transform their views of each other and marriage. Bertram's nasty clarification of the nature of his encounter with Diana seems cathartic and may prepare him for a fuller and more permanent sexual relationship. His false avowal of love for the dead Helen suggests that he may be able to learn to love a live Helen. His humiliation in the final scene reciprocates hers in the bedtrick. But Helen, at her entrance, testifies to her irreconcilable roles, her fragmented identity: "'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see, / The name and not the thing" (V.iii.307-08). She has the name of wife conferred by the marriage ceremony and the shadowy sexual death in the pitchy dark, but these remain separate. They are potentially mediated, however, by the child that kicks within her, and Bertram, finishing her line, affirms the reconciliation of her hitherto mutually exclusive roles of wife and sexual partner: "Both, both, O, pardon!" (308), acknowledging her as fully his wife before the fulfillment of the tasks is proved.²⁸ Helen, in turn, alters her view of their sexual encounter, tenderly describing Bertram as "wondrous kind" (310). . . .

Notes

¹⁰ Dover Wilson talks about "the strain of sex-nausea in the plays after 1600" (Essential Shakespeare, p. 118);Rossiter emphasizes the importance of the "sex-theme" in the problem plays (Angel with Horns, p. 125); Wheeler explores the "anxious mistrust for the sexual dimension of living" that "pervades All's Well and Measure for Measure" (Shakespeare's Development, p. 19).

¹¹ Muriel Bradbrook, in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), pp. 162-70, summarizing her article, "Virtue Is the true Nobility," Review of English Studies, n.s. 1 (1950): 289-301, calls the heroine of All's Well, "Hellen," which she did not do in the original article. She explains, in n. 2, that "Her name is so spelt throughout the Folio text" (p. 264). The heroine of All's Well does indeed seem to be named "Hellen" or "Helen" (both spellings are used, apparently indiscriminately, throughout the Folio text). So she is named in 16 of the 17 references in the Folio text and in 9 of the 12 references in Folio stage directions. She is "Helena" only in the first stage direction, in the text of act 1, scene 1 (one reference, in prose, by the Countess), and (after intervening stage directions use "Helen") in two other stage directions, in act 2, scene 4, and act 2, scene 5. From this point on, the heroine is consistently "Helen" (or "Hellen") in both text and stage directions. The early indecision about Helen's name is perhaps not surprising in a text which has many puzzling features about names and speech prefixes, most notably a tendency for names to be established late: e.g. "Rinaldo" for "Steward" (III.iv.19), "Lavatchi" for "Clown" (V.ii.1), and brothers "Dumaine" for First and Second Lords (IV.iii.187). In the first edition after the Folio, Nicolas Rowe, The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709), the heroine's name is regularized as "Helena" in the Dramatis Personae, the text, and the stage directions. So she has been called in all subsequent editions. I call her Helen throughout, restoring her Folio name.

¹² None has a mother except for the twins in Comedy of Errors, whose mother does not appear until the last minutes of the play; only they, Lucentio in Taming, and Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona have fathers, who play small and not very influential parts.

¹³ R. G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 109 and following. Hunter discusses the ways in which the play repeatedly disappoints the audience's expectations.

¹⁴ The spectrum of critical opinion on Helen ranges from the view that she is ambitious, scheming, unappealing (see, for example, Dover Wilson . . . and Clifford Leech, "The Theme of Ambition in All's Well," English Literary History 21 [1954]: 17-29) to the view that she is an admirable representative of virtue or heavenly grace (see, for example, G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower [New York: Macmillan, 1958], pp. 95-160). Joseph G. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of All's Well and Its Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), chapters 5, 6, and 7, traces the critical fortunes of the play and of its characters. G. K. Hunter, in his Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1959), implies that the divided opinion on Helen reflects the divided nature of her role (pp. xxx-xxxii).

¹⁵ The source is the ninth tale of the Third Day of Boccaccio's Decameron, translated and included by William Painter as Novel 38 in his Palace of Pleasure (1575). The tale is told by Neifile, who herself has set the day's topic, tales of "Such persons as have acquired, by their diligence, something greatly wanted by them, or else recovered what they had lost." Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 's Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 2:377. Bullough reprints Painter's translation of the tale; all subsequent references to the source will be to this edition and will be indicated in the text.

¹⁶ Arthur Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 134-37, discusses the "creativeness as well as the procreativeness of [Helen's] erotic energy" (p. 135) and the paradoxes of her love. Kirsch's essay, which I first read when mine was already drafted, focuses on the theme of sexuality in the play and illuminates its paradoxical, tragicomical complexities, seeing the play, as I do, as a blend of realism and romance, sadness and wit. His detailed comparison of All's Well with Montaigne's essay "Upon Some Verses of Virgil" is especially useful.

¹⁷ Isabella's scene with Angelo in Measure for Measure (II.ii) has similar dynamics, a similar rhythm of advances and retreats, and a similar increase in its erotic energy as it proceeds, heightened by Lucio's suggestive urgings: "You are too cold" (lines 45, 56). But Isabella does not control the movement of the scene and engenders not a cure but a disease.

¹⁸ "The Counte he knew her wel and had already seen her, although she was faire, yet knowing her not to be of a stocke convenable to his nobility, skornefully said unto the king, ' Will you then (sir) give me a Phisition to wife?'" (Bullough, 2:391).

¹⁹ For a detailed discussion of ironic relationships among the tales of Boccaccio's Third Day, see Howard Cole, "Dramatic Interplay in the Decameron," in The All's Well Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), pp. 12-32.

²⁰ Helen's death is announced by the First Lord in IV.iii.55-59. The beginning of the Lords' conversation has emphasized that Bertram has left for his assignation with Diana (lines 16, 30, 31, 36), and, at the end of the conversation, Bertram enters directly from it: "the last [of the sixteen completed businesses of the night] was the greatest, but that I have not ended yet" (96-97).

²¹ Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), chapter 3, passim. "One of the most pleasurable, for me, of Shakespeare's many talents is his 'unmetaphoring' of literary devices, his sinking of the conventions back into what, he somehow persuades us, is 'reality,' his trick of making a verbal convention part of the scene, the action, or the psychology of the play itself (p. 145).

²² The dates of both plays are conjectural. There is no external evidence for the date of All's Well. Although first published in the First Folio, it is usually assumed, on the basis of internal thematic and stylistic evidence, to have been written after Hamlet (1600—01) and before Measure for Measure (1603-04). The February 1603 Stationers ' Register entry for Troilus and Cressida suggests that it was completed and acted in late 1602. See G. K. Hunter, Arden edition, All's Well, p. xviii-xxv, and Kenneth Palmer, Arden edition, Troilus and Cressida (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 17-22.

²³ Kirsch, Shakespeare, discusses the intricate relationship between the two: "But the erotic significance of [Bertram's] role is also indirectly represented through the subtly modulated character of Parolles, who at once intensifies the implications of Bertram's behavior and dilates our response to him" (p. 128).

²⁴ W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, pp. 39-49.

²⁵ This insight is Janet Adelman's. . . .

²⁸ Michael Shapiro, "'The Web of Our Life': Human Frailty and Mutual Redemption in All's Well That Ends Well, " Journal of English and Germanic Philology 71 (1972): 522, similarly stresses the positive implications of Bertram's words.