SOURCE: "Why Does It End Well? Helena, Bertram, and The Sonnets," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespearian Study and Production, Vol. 22, 1969, pp. 79-92.

[In the following essay, Warren maintains that the personal emotions found in Shakespeare's sonnets provide some explanation of the puzzling conclusion of All's Well That Ends Well.]

An extreme version of the general modern reaction to All's Well occurs in a review of Tyrone Guthrie's 1959 production: 'the tone of the play and its confusion of values . . . raises a dozen issues, only to drop them all with a cynical, indifferent 'all's well that ends well'. No wonder Shaw liked it so much'.¹ Now I am convinced that whatever else the ending of this play may be called—puzzling, unsatisfactory, even bungled—Shakespeare was by no means 'indifferent' and certainly not 'cynical'. I think that his own personal poetry, in the Sonnets, sheds an interesting light on exactly why he thought the play ended well, and accounts, especially, for his uncompromising treatment of Helena and Bertram. G. K. Hunter rightly calls it a 'peculiar' play, but he emphasizes 'the peculiar force' of both the idealism and the satire.² Forceful writing does not reflect 'indifference'; and E. M. W. Tillyard, in finding the play 'full of suffering',³ isolates the most important characteristic of Helena's love and Bertram's reactions, upon which the Sonnets provide an illuminating commentary.

I

First, though, certain general problems require clarification, not least the choice of the story in the first place. What meaning did Shakespeare wish to convey through dramatizing Boccaccio's story of Giletta of Narbonne? M. C. Bradbrook tries to explain it. That the ending is 'neither hypocritical nor cynical, can be granted only if the play is seen as a study of the question of "Wherein lies true honour and nobility?"'⁴ But she has to account for the fact that Shakespeare 'found himself saying more, or saying other, than his purely structural purpose could justify' and so in her terms 'all did not end well'.⁵ But what if the debate on virtue and nobility is purely subordinate, achieving forcible expression to place the Helena-Bertram story in perspective? For the incontestable fact is surely that the play cannot adequately be called a morality or a debate, because the extraordinarily vivid characterization of both Helena and Bertram force us to share in their fortunes. It is basically a play about them, not about a moral theme: and the ending stands or falls as it relates to them.

The gnomic passages and stiff, odd outbursts of rhyming couplets led G. Wilson Knight into an extravagant mystical interpretation: Helena functions 'almost as Christ .. . as a medium only'.⁶ But surely nothing else in the play suggests that Helena has so symbolic a role. On the contrary, what is so striking about her is the human intensity of her love, and her capacity for all-too-human suffering. Still, I think the formality of the verse in the healing scene is meant to suggest some sort of faith healing, in the limited sense that the King must be persuaded that she can cure him. It has the further effect of establishing how Helena's love strengthens her courage and determination. The King explicitly makes the point: she has

Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage—all
That happiness and prime can happy call.
Thou this to hazard needs must intimate
Skill infinite, or monstrous desperate.

(II, i, 180-3)

In fact, she has both: she can heal the King by her father's prescriptions and has the courage to risk all for her overpowering, and in that sense 'desperate', love. Elsewhere, the formal and gnomic elements, though admittedly odd in what is otherwise so 'realistic' a play, may be explained by Shakespeare's anxiety to underline matters which seemed to him to be important:

Who ever strove
To show her merit that did miss her love?

(I, i, 222-3)

and, even more,

All's well that ends well; still the fine's the crown.
Whate'er the course, the end is the renown

(IV, iv, 35-6)

seem to be placed at strategic moments to emphasize the story of Helena and her love. The awkward or (to us) worrying aspects of the plot are scarcely glossed over, and in the finale especially they are dwelt upon. This manner of writing, together with the apparently perplexing blackening of Bertram's character, which, as Hunter says, 'a historical understanding of Bertram in an Elizabethan context cannot remove',⁷ bring us back to the question, 'What was it in the story that so interested Shakespeare?'

The clear-eyed, merciless presentation of Bertram supports Tillyard's suspicion that Shakespeare's 'personal feelings, unobjectified and untransmuted'⁸ have slipped into the writing. Bradbrook, too, notices that not only is 'the figure of Bertram, so radically changed from that of Boccaccio's Beltramo, . . . drawn with a . . . kind of uncynical disillusion',⁹ but that Helena 'is a voice of despair breaking into the play'; and although she rightly warns against too 'crude and direct [a] personal equation . . . ; Shakespeare would certainly not wish to unlock his heart on the public stage', she brings us to the heart of the matter:

In All's Well the juxtaposition of the social problem of high birth versus native merit and the human problem of unrequited love recalls the story of the Sonnets; the speeches of Helena contain echoes from the Sonnets . . . The way in which Bertram is condemned recalls also the plain speaking which is so unusual a feature of the Sonnets.¹⁰

By the standards of ordinary romantic heroes, Bertram is a 'failure', but as a consistent character he is brilliantly successful, so much so that I think we must assume that Shakespeare meant him that way, and that the worrying effect is intentional. Wilson Knight stresses the play's Sonnet affinities which argue a peculiarly 'personal'¹¹ interest in the story. By developing these suggestions, and noticing the resemblances and verbal echoes between play and poems, I hope to account for much of the 'peculiarity' of All's Well, including the effect of its finale, and to suggest the reasons why there is so much intensity and heartbreak—but not 'indifference' or 'cynicism'—and, in the end, perhaps, a curious worrying uncertainty.

II

However the play is interpreted, the centre must surely be Helena's passionate love and the power of its expression. In her speeches there is an extremity of utterance which is so powerful that it goes far beyond conventional compliment in its attempt to express an emotional intensity which is almost inexpressible, as Shakespeare himself so often strives in the Sonnets.

Better 'twere
I met the ravin lion when he roar'd
With sharp constraint of hunger; better 'twere
That all the miseries which nature owes
Were mine at once.

(A.W., III, ii, 116-20)

But in the onset come; so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might;
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compar'd with loss of thee will not seem so.

(Sonnet 90)

There could be few better mottoes for Helena's love than

Such is my love, to thee I so belong,
That for thy right myself will bear all wrong.

(Sonnet 88)

And Wilson Knight¹² notes the same intense suggestion of devotion in Shakespeare's loving his friend 'next my heaven the best' (Sonnet 110) and Helena's loving Bertram 'next unto high heaven' (I, iii, 188). But he takes this as another proof that Shakespeare is examining sainthood in Helena, while I take both as similar attempts to suggest an overwhelming human passion by hyperbolical means—hyperbolical, that is, in the intense, exclusive, serious manner of the tragedies rather than in the witty, half-amused manner of the earlier comedies.

Helena's first soliloquy plunges us into that uncompromising obsession with her beloved that many of the Sonnets show:

my imagination
Carries no favour in't but Bertram's.

(I, i, 80-1)

This is paralleled, in a simple way, by the disturbed rest with which the friend's 'shadow' torments Shakespeare:

my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.

(Sonnet 27)

The preoccupation with Bertram has an intensity, in words like 'plague', which is reflected in the Sonnets by the vivid impression of an overpowering obsession, especially in words like 'surfeit' and 'gluttoning', or

Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starved for a look
(Sonnet 75, italics mine)¹³

The desperate fervour of Helena's

I am undone; there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away

(I, i, 82-3)

has a very similar ring to the 'You are my all the world' and

You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world beside methinks are dead

of Sonnet 112. When Helena says 'my idolatrous fancy/ Must sanctify his relics' (I, i, 95-6) she uses an image which aptly describes both her love and Shakespeare's own. Shakespeare's denial, 'Let not my love be call'd idolatry' (Sonnet 105) only serves in fact to stress that element of 'religious adoration' which is so strong in them. Both he and Helena devote the whole of their praises 'To one, of one, still such, and ever so' (105). J. B. Leishman, calling Shakespeare the lover 'indeed a worshipper',¹⁴ says that many of the Sonnets are 'religiously idolatrous'; and though Helena makes only a single comparison, she echoes that particularly Shakespearian idea that the old loves are reincarnated in the friend, as well as the 'holy' tears and image of the beloved.¹⁵ Helena returns to phrases of religion in her next scene:

Thus, Indian-like,
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun that looks upon his worshipper
But knows of him no more.

(I, iii, 199-202)

Helena's combination of unhappiness and abject devotion is echoed in the two Sonnets 57 and 58, which perhaps more than any others seem to be very close to Helena's expression of her love:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?

(Sonnet 57)

Those Sonnets, moreover, in their almost heartbreaking simplicity of statement, remind us that passionate hyperbole is not the only style in the sequence. That simplicity which is so marked a feature of Shakespeare's undeceived lovers in the earlier comedies (the finale of Love's Labour's Lost, Beatrice and Benedick in the church, above all Viola's 'sister' speech to Orsino) and which suggests so much emotion and awareness of potential unhappiness makes a powerful impression both here and in Helena's language too. What J. W. Lever calls Shakespeare's 'extreme capacity for self-effacement'¹⁶ in the Sonnets, the simple quietness and lack of self-display, 'painting', or 'ornament' in much of the language, is clearly shown in

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,
When you have bid your servant once adieu.

(Sonnet 57)

The same humility which conceals anguish, the same reticence in proclaiming a bond between the beloved and the speaker is evident in all Helena says to Bertram (''I am not worthy of the wealth I owe', 'Sir, I can nothing say But that I am your most obedient servant', ''I shall not break your bidding, good my lord'). There is a marked contrast between the 'ornament' of Parolles's deceitful remarks about Bertram,

Whose want and whose delay is strew'd with sweets,

Which they distil now in the curbed time,
To make the coming hour o'erflow with joy
And pleasure drown the brim

(II, iv, 42-5)

and her utter simplicity ('What's his will else?', 'What more commands he?', 'In everything I wait upon his will'). Her fear of being 'refused' is typical of her humble, fearful approach to Bertram, reflected in her actual words to him:

I dare not say I take you, but I give
Me and my service, ever whilst I live,
Into your guiding power.

(II, iii, 102-4)

The statements of service here are closely paralleled, again in Sonnets 57 and 58 ('Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure', 'O, let me suffer, being at your beck') and in Sonnet 87 ('My bonds in thee are all determinate').

Against her own simplicity or intensity is Helena's picture of a more superficial kind of love which Bertram may meet at the court, expressed in the conceited language of flattering Elizabethan love poetry such as is also used by the muddled lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream (cf. II, i, 220-6; III, ii, 58-61, 137-44, etc.):

His humble ambition, proud humility,
His jarring-concord, and his discord-dulcet,
His faith, his sweet disaster; with a world
Of pretty, fond, adoptious Christendoms
That blinking Cupid gossips.

(I, i, 167-71)

The conventional oxymorons and the 'blinking Cupid' are so superficial, so different from Helena's powerful self-expression, that Hunter must be right in taking all this to refer to the courtly lovers: 'Helena's refusal to trade on her virginity leads to the sense that others elsewhere may be less scrupulous, which leads directly to her evocation of the amorous dialect of the court.'¹⁷ And the point of such an evocation is that it leads to a fear about Bertram himself:

Now shall he—
I know not what he shall. God send him well!
The court's a learning-place, and he is one—

(I, i, 171-3)

Hunter notes that 'What is suppressed must be something like "all too apt to learn courtly ways'". This realistic fear, even while she adores Bertram, is very similar to Shakespeare's own saddened awareness that his beloved was by no means a paragon:

But why thy odour matcheth not thy show,
The soil is this—that thou dost common grow.

(Sonnet 69)

And when Bertram actually justifies Helena's fears, he woos Diana in conventional complimentary phrasing like 'Titled goddess; And worth it, with addition' and 'holy-cruel' which have a very different ring from Helena's statements of her love and service: Bertram will love

By love's own sweet constraint, and will for ever
Do thee all rights of service . . .
Diana: Tis not the many oaths that makes the truth,
But the plain single vow that is vow'd true.

(IV, ii, 16-22)

Such a vow is Helena's

I will be gone,
That pitiful rumour may report my flight
To consolate thine ear

(III, ii, 126-8)

or Shakespeare's own

I am to wait, though waiting so be hell.

(Sonnet 58)

Helena emphasizes that her love depends upon a real concern for desert; it is this which is proper to a servant:

Nor would I have him till I do deserve him;
Yet never know how that desert should be.

(I, iii, 194-5)

An exactly similar feeling of unworthiness underlines several of the Sonnets, all of them very sad, as when Shakespeare guards 'Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass':

Against that time do I ensconce me here
Within the knowledge of mine own desert,
And this my hand against myself uprear,
To guard the lawful reasons on thy part.

(Sonnet 49)

The final couplet,

To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws,
Since why to love I can allege no cause,

parallels Helena's strikingly sympathetic use of 'poor' elsewhere ('poor lord', 'poor thief).¹⁸ If the similarities between her language and that of the Sonnets indicate anything, it would seem to be that Shakespeare intends Helena's passion to have an all-consuming, overpowering intensity which makes descriptions like 'cynicism' and 'man-hunting' very unsuitable.

III

The most extraordinary feature of All's Well, surely, is the curiously unsympathetic portrait of its hero. Tillyard comments:

The irony and the truth of Helena's situation are that with .. . so firm a mind she can be possessed by so enslaving a passion for an unformed, rather stupid, morally timid, and very self-centred youth.¹⁹

As well as the irony, though, Tillyard stresses the 'truth' of the situation. For Shakespeare, the source seems to have provided a story of essential truth: and it seems to have been a peculiarly personal response to it which suggested his notorious alterations to Boccaccio's Beltramo, which, as Bradbrook notes, consistently show 'greater dependence, humility, and enslavement on Helena's part and greater weakness and falsehood on Bertram's'.²⁰ Bertram stands universally criticized, and what is so interesting is that this criticism corresponds with even the details of the suggested 'fault' of the friend of the Sonnets. Though the friend is praised for his outward show, his 'sensual fault' provokes criticism as well: others

In other accents do this praise confound
By seeing farther than the eye hath shown.
They look into the beauty of thy mind,
And that, in guess, they measure by thy deeds.

(Sonnet 69)

So Bertram's own mother condemns the deeds of this 'rash and unbridled boy', and suggests that his 'wellderived nature' is being corrupted (III, ii, 26-31, 88). Helena herself had feared what Bertram would 'learn' from the court. Bertram is shown sinking lower and lower into unworthiness, and is presented much more harshly than Shakespeare's love will allow him to present his friend. Though the friend lives 'with infection', he graces 'impiety' (Sonnet 67).²¹

Far more central to the play is the constantly emphasized contrast in rank between Helena and Bertram. This is the cause of some of the most harsh utterances in the play and it has a strong parallel with some of the most deeply felt and unhappy Sonnets. Helena's feeling of utter social separation from Bertram:

My master, my dear lord he is; and I
His servant live, and will his vassal die

(I, iii, 153-4)

is closely paralleled by the 'vassalage' shown to Shakespeare's own 'Lord of my love' (Sonnet 26). The image of the star is used by both:

'twere all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And think to wed it, he is so above me.

(I, i, 83-5)

The 'comfort' sought by Helena from Bertram's 'bright radiance' is echoed in Shakespeare's personal hope for some 'good conceit' of his friend,

Till whatsoever star that guides my moving
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tattered loving,
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect.

(Sonnet 26, italics mine)

Bertram emphasizes the social gulf in violently humiliating terms:

But follows it, my lord, to bring me down
Must answer for your raising? I know her well:
She had her breeding at my father's charge—
A poor physician's daughter my wife! Disdain
Rather corrupt me ever!

(II, iii, 112-16)

In Sonnet 49, Shakespeare feared that time

When I shall see thee frown on my defects, . . .
. . . that time when thou shalt strangely pass,
And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye.

The insulting aspersion cast on the 'physician's daughter' is paralleled in Shakespeare's emphasis of his 'fault' which seems to depend chiefly on his being 'a motley to the view', an actor who depends on

public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand.

(Sonnet III)

Shakespeare's saddened awareness of the social gulf leads him to the admission that, love or no love, he cannot be acknowledged in public:

I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame;
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name.

(Sonnet 30)

But Shakespeare will not put his lover in this position:

But do not so; I love thee in such sort,
As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

Similarly, Helena, discovering too late that Bertram cannot show 'public kindness' in any way, tries to save him:

Bertram: I cannot love her nor will strive to do't. . , .
Helena: That you are well restor'd, my lord, I'm glad.
Let the rest go.

(II, iii, 145-8)

Shakespeare's Sonnets stress the unhappiness stemming from the friend's public behaviour, and, especially, some kind of rejection of the poet as is suggested in the near-bitter anguish of Sonnet 87:

Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.

Though there is giving as well as taking back here, the actual suggestion of taking back on a question of legal ('patent') worth is chilling, as is the suggestion of utter deception in the conclusion:

Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter:
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

The implied rejection of the poet seems to have been a shatteringly humiliating one: and something of the same discomfort is surely felt by any audience as it hears Bertram speak of his 'clog' whom he will not 'bed', or, worse:

Wars is no strife
To the dark house and the detested wife.

(II, iii, 287-8)

And one of the most disturbing scenes in all Shakespeare (disturbing not because it is horrifying or tragically shattering, but because it is so coldly formal) is that in which Bertram refuses Helena a kiss. His clipped language reminds us of such sad phrases in the Sonnets as the suggestion that the friend will 'strangely pass', 'frown on my defects' and speak with 'settled gravity'. If ever there was 'settled gravity' it is in Bertram's denial to Helena of

The ministration and required office
On my particular. Prepar'd I was not
For such a business; therefore am I found
So much unsettl'd.

(II, v, 60-3, italics mine)

Those abstract nouns have the coldly legal ring suggested in Sonnet 87 by 'the charter of thy worth', 'my bonds', 'my patent', and 'misprision'. That sonnet touches a bitterness which Shakespeare never shows elsewhere in the sequence, and which Helena does not show in her reply. Indeed, she reaffirms her service—'Sir, I can nothing say But that I am your most obedient servant'—in terms which recall the absolute selfeffacement of 'Being your slave, what should I do but tend' (Sonnet 57).²²

The icy unpleasantness of Bertram's curt 'Come, come; no more of that', 'My haste is very great. Farewell. Hie home' and 'What would you have?' is so unavoidable as to suggest something like the 'wakened hate' which Shakespeare so feared from his own beloved (Sonnet 117). But not even this can destroy Helena's love, though the suffering as well as the passion emerges as she begs the kiss:

I am not worthy of the wealth I owe,
Nor dare I say 'tis mine—and yet it is;
But, like a timorous thief, most fain would steal
What law doth vouch mine own.

(II, v, 79-82)

The verbal echoes of Sonnet 40 serve to underline, not an exact parallel, but a similarity of devotion between Helena and Shakespeare himself:

I do forgive thy robb'ry, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty.

Her terror of calling Bertram hers echoes the disenchanted 'The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting' (Sonnet 87) and the simple hesitation of

Something, and scarce so much; nothing indeed.
I would not tell you what I would, my lord

(II, v, 83-4)

and

I shall not break your bidding, good my lord

(II, v, 88)

are closely parallel to the utterly simple, unaccusing misery of

And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check,
Without accusing you of injury.

(Sonnet 58)

And Bertram's heartless refusal, 'I pray you, stay not, but in haste to horse' is the kind of remark which seems sufficiently brutal to provoke such a reaction as Sonnet 58. The scene is a masterly one. It is horrifying in human terms, but it is not cynical or indifferent. There seems a confident, open-eyed realism about the portrayal of both characters that suggests that Shakespeare knew exactly what he was doing. The parallel with the Sonnets is intended to suggest no more than that it was a personal awareness of this kind of unequal relationship that made him believe that he could convincingly bring Giletta's story to the stage. Whether he in the end succeeded depends on how the final scene is interpreted; but the kiss scene is so unflinchingly presented, that to play it with Bertram almost giving the kiss until recalled by a 'psst' from Parolles, as happened in two recent productions, is a piece of cheap sentimentalism which only serves to remind us how searingly painful the original writing is.

IV

The complex turns of the finale, both here and in Measure for Measure, seem intended to twist the tension so that the key moments—Helena's reconciliation and Isabella's plea for Angelo—may be almost unbearably poignant. Neither case is wholly successful. Though Shakespeare attempts to maintain the unyielding realism of Bertram to the end, there is just too much weight of honesty for the romantic situation to carry. There is, indeed, no other description than Hunter's 'cryptic fustian'²³ for Bertram's

If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly
I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.

(V, iii, 309-10)

Determined not to falsify, and to maintain Bertram's shallowness to the end, Shakespeare has imperilled the impression of reconciliation he needs at this point. I believe that his determination stemmed from his conviction that, from his own experience, Bertram's story was a meaningful, possible one.

The mature, melancholy poetry with which the King sets the tone of this scene echoes those images in the Sonnets by which Shakespeare conveys his sense of loss and hence of love,²⁴ and especially the very intense Sonnets 33 and 34. The King's

I am not a day of season,
For thou may'st see a sunshine and a hail
In me at once. But to the brightest beams
Distracted clouds give way

(V, iii, 32-5)

strongly recalls the imagery of those two Sonnets of disappointment at—and forgiveness of—the friend's fault: after the glorious sun has flattered the mountain tops, and kissed the meadows, he will

Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face 

(Sonnet 33)

but then, in the next Sonnet, the 'rotten smoke' of the 'base clouds', as in the King's image, gives way:

through the cloud thou break
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face.

(Sonnet 34)

At first, this is 'not enough' to Shakespeare 'to dry the rain'. In this impressively honest Sonnet, Shakespeare gives his disappointment rein:

For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace.
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss.

Helena never reminds Bertram of her earlier humiliation before the court; but as Bradbrook notes, 'her devotion (is) tinged for the first time with bitterness'²⁵:

O my good lord, when I was like this maid
I found you wondrous kind.

(V, iii, 303-4)

When she says

'Tis but a shadow of a wife you see;
The name and not the thing

(V, iii, 301-2)

one is reminded of the constant recurrence of the word 'shadow' in Shakespeare's presentation of his relationship with his friend; of the suggestion of deception and uncertainty in 'Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter'; and of implied sexual betrayal:

For thee watch I, whilst thou doth wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near.

(Sonnet 61)

Helena surely refers back to that remarkable speech made after sleeping with Bertram:

But, O strange men!
That can such sweet use make of what they hate,
When saucy trusting of the cozen'd thoughts
Defiles the pitchy night.

(IV, iv, 21-4)

It is an extraordinary statement of her awareness that this act, 'strange' and 'defiling' the darkness of night in a 'saucy', not a 'tragic' way, is oddly insignificant.

It is dismissed ('But more of this hereafter') to give place to her confidence in the future:

But with the word: 'the time will bring on summer'—
When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns,
And be as sweet as sharp.

(IV, iv, 31-3)

The freshness of this speech has to be set against the 'pitchy', defiling night: that is over, and in itself has not been intensely important. What Helena relies upon is the power of her own love. In this play, love is a matter both of 'pitchy' night and 'sweet' leaves; both thorns and flowers are used to evoke the complex experience of love:

this thorn
Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong.

(I, iii, 124-5)²⁶

Yet, however much his vices may be stressed, it is made clear that Bertram is not wholly beyond redemption,²⁷ and it is because Helena is aware by the end of his whole personality that she may redeem him. So, to return to Sonnet 34, after Shakespeare has given full vent to his 'wound', as Helena does less sharply, he concludes on a totally forgiving note:

Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.

So Bertram's direct 'Both, both. O pardon!' gives hope. That, at least, is not 'cryptic fustian': yet perhaps it is even more convincing because combined with the fustian, suggesting that the direct outburst is real because he speaks like his former self as well. If Helena had a speech at this point like her Rossillion one in III, ii, we might be fully convinced that her love is enough to make the marriage work; but the problem is that in front of the court this just cannot be said. M. C. Bradbrook is quite right: the emotional situation does require 'another mode of expression than the last dozen lines allow',²⁸ something like that final couplet of Sonnet 34. But such intensely personal feeling cannot be spoken in public. What we long for her to say she cannot say—but not because Shakespeare did not know how to say it; the Rossillion soliloquy expressed her love perfectly. But in this formal finale the situation is too intense for Helena's (as opposed to Bertram's) emotion to be made clear. To this extent, the King's cautious, slightly uneasy 'All yet seems well' and his wistful epilogue have to close the play, and leave us dissatisfied. We have to refer back to Helena's earlier speeches, and though this does not excuse flawed stagecraft, it explains, I think, why Shakespeare felt that it ended well. Sonnet 34, because it states grievance as well as passion, convinces in its reconciling couplet. If the Sonnets in general state anything, it is surely Shakespeare's conviction that to love, and to forgive, is what is important, not necessarily to receive. For, as Leishman says,

nowhere . . . is there unmistakable evidence that Shakespeare really believed that his friend, in any deep and meaningful sense of the word, loved him at all. At most, perhaps, his friend 'quite liked him'. Saddest of all . . . are those sonnets where Shakespeare speaks of their difference in rank . . . as an insuperable barrier between them, for they suggest that he may actually have had to endure (and to forgive) . . . slights and insults.²⁹

And the poignant unhappiness of such a relationship is the basic situation Shakespeare found in the story of Giletta of Narbonne.

Shakespeare's problem was to transform Boccaccio's wit into serious emotion, presumably because he did not want to tell Helena's story wittily, since it contained emotions he understood and could express in powerful poetic terms. Helena, in the end, survives her humiliations, not through resilient, witty gaiety, but through a completely clear-eyed view of herself and Bertram. Shakespeare invests her with a near-desperate fervour to communicate unmistakably that her love is sufficiently powerful to enable her to overcome all humiliations: and the key is the 'Rossillion' soliloquy. The most impressive writing occurs at the most crucial moment of the play when the strength of Helena's love must be made unforgettable. And unforgettable it is. The tone of mingled sadness and tenderness in

Poor lord, is't I
That chase thee from thy country, and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event
Of the none-sparing war?

(III, ii, 102-5, italics mine)

recalls the self-effacement of

That god forbid that made me first your slave
I should in thought control your times of pleasure.

(Sonnet 58)

Helena's sad, simply-expressed resolve,

I will be gone,
That pitiful rumour may report my flight
To consolate thine ear. Come, night; end, day;
For with the dark, poor thief, I'll steal away

(III, ii, 126-9)

has the same immensely quiet but immensely unhappy note as

I'll myself disgrace, knowing thy will . . .
Be absent from thy walks.

(Sonnet 89)

The whole speech is crowned by the memorably intense hyperbole of

Shall I stay here to do't? No, no, although
The air of paradise did fan the house
And angels offic'd all

(III, ii, 124-6)

which has an eloquent grandeur similar to Shakespeare's great manifesto of what he understood by 'love':

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.

(Sonnet 116)

Helena's love is sorely tried; her suffering and her hint of reproach, though it is barely perceptible, in the finale, do not however destroy it. Shakespeare's love in the Sonnets seems to have undergone similar trials and overcome them. He seems to convey both Bertram's cruelty and Helena's ecstasy and anguish in the kind of language which he had used to express his own passion and his friend's behaviour. If in the finale he failed to provide a powerful and reassuring speech for her, he may have felt that it was not necessary; that what he had already given her to say would convince his audience that despite—maybe because of—everything, her single-minded love would ensure that all ended well.

All's Well, it must be admitted, is not a complete success; if it were, it would not have worried so many, nor have taken so many words here. But since so much of it is very impressively written, it can tease the mind. The uncompromising power with which Bertram is drawn and the memorable intensity of Helena compel attention and, because of the last scene, explanation. In suggesting that the Sonnets cast a revealing light on Shakespeare's attitude to Helena and her story, I have tried not to excuse dramatic weaknesses. The play remains a 'peculiar' one; but Helena's passion, which always emerges as the centre-piece in performance, has so much in common with the Sonnets that this may indicate why Shakespeare chose the story. I think that he made Helena so intense, and presented her beloved with such relentless honesty, because he had something especially personal to say about the power of love to prevail over all 'alteration' and humiliation, even if it proved less easy to show matters ending well in dramatic than in non-dramatic terms.

Notes

¹Leamington Spa Courier, 24 April 1959.

²All's Well That Ends Well, The Arden Shakespeare (1959), pp. xxix, liii. All quotations from All's Well are from this edition; those from the Sonnets are from Peter Alexander's 1951 edition of the Complete Works.

³Shakespeare's Problem Plays (1951), p. 104.

⁴ 'Virtue Is the True Nobility', R.E.S, XXVI (1950), p. 301.

⁵Ibid. p. 290.

⁶The Sovereign Flower (1958), pp. 146, 154.

⁷ Hunter, op. cit. p. xlvii.

⁸ Tillyard, op. cit. p. 106.

⁹Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (1951), pp. 169-70.

¹⁰R.E.S, XXVI (1950), p. 290.

¹¹ Wilson Knight, op. cit. p. 132.

¹² Wilson Knight, op. cit. p. 136. Cf. also A. W., I, i, 8990, and Sonnet 92, lines 2-4.

¹³ Cf. A.W., I, i, 93-4, and Sonnet 113, lines 9-12.

¹⁴Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets, 2nd edn. (1963), p. 133.

¹⁵ Cf. A.W., I, i, 77-81, and Sonnet 31, lines 5-8.

¹⁶The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (1956), p. 185.

¹⁷ Hunter, op. cit. pp. 13-14.

¹⁸ Cf. also A.W., I, iii, 196-9, and Sonnet 87, lines 4-8.

¹⁹ Tillyard, op. cit. p. 112.

²⁰R.E.S, XXVI (1950), p. 291.

²¹ But cf. A.W., I, i, 97-103.

²² Cf. also A.W., II, V, 73-6, and Sonnet 58, lines 9-12.

²³ Hunter, op. cit. p. lv.

²⁴ Cf. A.W., V, iii, 38-42, and Sonnets 77, line 8, and 65, lines 11-12.

²⁵R.E.S, XXVI (1950), p. 301.

²⁶ Cf. Sonnet 35, lines 1-4.

²⁷ Cf. A.W., IV, iii, 68-71, and Sonnet 35, line 5.

²⁸R.E.S., XXVI (1950), p. 301.

²⁹ Leishman, op. cit. p. 226.