[In the following essay, Berkeley and Keesee study the treatment Shakespeare gives to the cross-class marriage in All's Well That Ends Well, and suggest Helena's position may reflect circumstances in Shakespeare's own life. ]

All Shakespeare's plays exhibit more distancing between his classes—there are but two, armigerous and base—than do his primary sources, and in no play does he present a cross-class marriage such as that between base John Shakespeare and gentle Mary Arden of which he was a product. All's Well That Ends Well is an oddity in that it presents an enforced marriage between armigerous persons, Bertram of the high nobility and Helena, a "mean poor" gentlewoman. But the rule holds even here, as Helena bizarrely describes her yearning for marriage to Bertram as "The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love" (I.i.93-94)¹ and in general behaves more submissively toward Bertram than her prototype, Giletta of Narbona² (whose exact rank we do not know) behaved toward Count Beltramo in William Painter's translation (1579) of Boccaccio's story. This marriage is dramatized in All's Well with overflowing authorial approval seen in the touting of Helena's virtue by the King of France, the Dowager Countess of Rossillion, and Lord Lafew. But young Count Bertram, who represents nobility "native," is very reluctant to marry Helena, gentry "dative" in the language of the time.³ Critics in their democratic egalitarianism have not seen fit (so far as we know) to bestow their attention on Bertram's blood-based reasons—most have instead bespattered him with epithets⁴—for not wishing to commingle Rossillion with "a poor physician's daughter." To an Elizabethan this classification says it all; there is no need for explaining. Bertram objects to Helena's poverty and to her want of a dower; he objects even more (and is so understood by the King) to her being a physician's daughter ("poor" is adjectival; "physician's daughter," a noun phrase). In effect, he abominates the thought of mingling his rich blood with her poor blood in the production of offspring: two fine strains make fine children. Bertram subscribes to Andrew Boorde's dictum concerning "good blode, in the whiche consysteth the lyfe of man."⁵ (His objections to poverty and to blood could flow together in that Helena, because of her father's lowly circumstances, has not always enjoyed the state of being "highly fed," to use the Clown's words [II.ii.3]: when at her father's table she presumably has not had her blood enriched with hot foods and wines.)⁶

Although Bertram, perhaps because of his youth, is not doctrinaire on the mingling of bloods (in this matter unlike the King in All's Well [II.iii.117 ff.] and Polixenes in The Winter's Tale [IV.iv.89 ff.]), and although he makes many mistakes on his own,⁷ he has much (though not all)⁸ conventional wisdom for his rejection of Helena. In this Bertram is realistic; the King, the Countess, and Lord Lafew are romantic: blood-consciousness was (and still is in some quarters) a realistic approach to fruitful marriage; marrying upwards under virtually impossible conditions was (and still is) "romance," an eloquent but improbable lie. Bertram speaks for the usual Shakespeare in regulating his behavior by the dictum that "there are severall degrees in Blood,"⁹ and in his declining to obliterate these degrees. It is in this sense (as well as in prestige and for economic reasons) that Bertram upholds the honor of Rossillion; contrary to John F. Adams¹⁰ and a great many others, Bertram does possess (in a Renaissance context) an adequate concept of internal worthiness, and he is in some important senses internally worthy. But Shakespeare, perhaps for personal reasons, arranges the play to show Bertram's realism to be wrong, and France's romanticism to be right.

Bertram is, so far as we know, the only legitimate son of his father and, as Count Rossillion, the present link between six generations (V.iii.195) of noble ancestors and the noble posterity of which he is to be father. It is quite wrong, albeit the error is endemic amongst critics, following the bias of our times, to judge Bertram simply as an individual. His family ring is a visual symbol of his ancestral honor from "the first father" (III.vii.25). Bertram's duty of begetting a noble heir makes his choice of wife a delicate matter. He chooses, apparently before Helena is thrust upon him, to consider the daughter of Lord Lafew as the mother of his offspring (V.iii.45 ff.) although he does not use these words. Bertram's freedom to reconnoiter the field is severely limited by his being a ward of the King of France, who has the right to name Bertram's wife so long as Bertram is not "disparaged"—the word was technical—by the King. But the King does indeed disparage Bertram's blood and berates him in very severe terms for no reason except that the King is in Helena's debt: Bertram is required to pay for the curing of the royal fistula. To prevent the "staining" of his blood, Bertram takes three extraordinary steps toward annulment of the marriage: 1) he refuses consummation unless virtually impossible conditions are fulfilled; 2) he deserts Helena with apparent intention to stay outside France long enough for an annulment (three years in English law); 3) he lives in a place beyond the reach of an ecclesiastical court that could compel cohabitation.¹¹

Bertram, although he knows Helena well, judges the girl by her class, and he knows her to be near-base. His appraisal is correct. Helena is repeatedly said to be "honest." The Countess observes, "she derives her honesty" (I.i.44-45); and Helena declares of her kinfolk, "My friends were poor but honest" (I.iii.192). Honest, to be sure, as applied to a female meant "chaste"; and we must believe that Helena is virginal because there is no evidence to the contrary. Honest also, in a sense especially applicable to the two quotations above, meant integrity of life. But a subaudition of honest in the Shakespearean plays and elsewhere (see Sheridan's The Rivals) imports the peasantlike quality of artlessness and particularly the inclination to discharge upon all and sundry the vast miscellany of one's mind: it was especially applied to the base, persons like Verges, "honest as the skin between his brows," rather than to the gentle, who in the troublous sixteenth century cultivated reserve in speaking and writing. Honest, then, is an indicator of Helena's base origins. More obvious is her rank—"a poor physician's daughter." Her father is Gerard de Narbon, an eminent practitioner; but this man was gentled, like Baldock in Marlowe's Edward II, one gathers, by virtue of his university diploma. Gerard must have been the first of his family to bear a coat of arms; otherwise, Helena, who often contrasts her low birth with Bertram's nobility, would certainly have pointed out that she is descended from many or several generations of gentlemen. Physicians in the sixteenth century did not always derive from gentry or marry into gentry. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, possessor of a medical degree (in addition to his other doctorates) and famous enough to have his prescriptions made public monuments, was born "base of stock." The father of Ambroise Paré was a barber, a cabinet maker, and valet de chambre to a local nobleman.¹² Andreas Vesalius, physician to Charles V, married Anne van Hamme, a bourgeoise.¹³ These remarks are not intended to suggest that sixteenth-century physicians were invariably base of birth—the great Paracelsus was born into a noble family—but rather that to be a physician did not necessarily signify unquestionable gentility. Shakespeare's physicians are generally seen in a positive light, betokening their gentle status (the French Doctor Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor being somewhat of an exception) but there is no reason to believe any of them to possess noble blood or even necessarily to be sons of gentlemen. Bertram judges Helena by the stereotype of "a poor physician's daughter," and he is right to do so: lineally she is near baseness.

Near-baseness of social status intimated that Helena's blood was of tainted or very near tainted condition. The conception of stained or tainted blood inhered in Aristotelian and Galenic conceptions. All parts of the human body—bone, artery, vein, nerve, cartilage, fat, gland, membrane, and marrow—are not blood, Galen states in On the Natural Faculties, but are derived from it.¹⁴ Semen, according to Aristotle in Generation of Animals, is concocted blood (I.xix, p. 91), a position often reflected in Renaissance medical literature.¹⁵ Both men and women had their sperma to contribute to conception. F.S. Bodenheimer, in The History of Biology, clarifies the matter:

The wisdom of Aristotle describes the male semen as the formative principle, the Causa efficiens, of generation, while the female semen (read: the menstrual blood) is the nutritive principle for growth and development of the embryo. . . . Aristotle's theory of heredity is a pangenesis, wherein the whole organism takes part in the generative act. Minute representative particles from all parts of the body migrate into the semina. Male and female particles mingle and they both exercise their influence, according to their relative strengths, transmitting characteristics of structure, of function, and of behaviour in the developing young.¹⁶

Thomas Vicary, a Renaissance physician, summarizes Aristotle's essential position: "the which seede of generation commeth from al the partes of the body, both of the man and the woman."¹⁷ Indeed, Giovanni Nenna holds the unusual view that children have more blood from mothers than from fathers.¹⁸All's Well recognizes that wives are not simply vessels for moulding and fostering the male element in conception but contribute something to the essential nature of children: the Countess says, "I do wash his [Bertram's] name out of my blood" (III.ii.67), and Helena says to a young lord, "You are too young, too happy, and too good, / To make yourself a son out of my blood" (II.iii.96-97). Galen as a physician does not describe human class structure on the basis of blood, but inferences from humoural physiology, which he does teach, were made a basis of class distinctions. Galen states, "Now, there is certainly to be found in the veins both thick and thin blood; in some people it is redder, in others yellower, in some blacker, and in others more of the nature of phlegm" (On the Natural Faculties, II.viii.169). Lucrece in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, after having been "stained" by Tarquin, a degenerate gentle, is found thus after her death: "Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd, / And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd" (lines 1742-43). The phenomenon of stained blood, however meaningless (especially to Americans) now, was in Shakespeare's time generally recognized, as may be seen in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi wherein the Cardinal and Ferdinand comment on their sister's marriage to her base steward, Antonio:

Cardinal. Shall our blood?
The royal blood of Aragon and Castile,
Be thus attainted?
Ferdinand. Apply desperate physic,
We must not now use balsamum, but fire,
The smarting cupping-glass, for that's the mean
To purge infected blood, such blood as hers.

(II.v.22-26)¹⁹

By possessing darker blood, Helena, if married to Bertram, has the potentiality of "attainting" his children physically and mentally. In The Winter's Tale Polixenes refuses to permit his son Florizel to marry the supposedly base Perdita, despite her beauty and intelligence, because, it is to be presumed, he is thinking of what will happen to his posterity through the mixture: Perdita's blood, despite appearances to the contrary, hereditarily and recessively harbors staining qualities if she is assumed to be the Shepherd's daughter.²⁰ Consequently, Polixenes strictly forbids his son's marriage to Perdita. In Lodge's Rosalynd, the main source of As You Like It, old Adam Spencer offers the greatly fatigued Rosader the possibility of recruiting his blood-supply by sucking Adam's opened veins: Shakespeare exhibits his usual aversion to mixing base and gentle bloods by excising this matter from As You Like It even though his Adam is for a base preternaturallly virtuous. That base blood was black in the flexible Elizabethan sense of "black" was well known: Edmund Spenser's Malbecco in The Faerie Queene, for example, has portentously "filthy bloud" (III.x.59) in part related, one understands, to his diet of frogs and toads. According to Alexander Read, in The Chirurgical Lectures of Tumors and Ulcers, "Good bloud is discerned by colour, taste and consistence: In colour it is red . . . and consistence mean, between thicke and thin."²¹ "Unnatural" conditions Read perceived if blood appears "Black . . . unequal, of diverse substances" (p. 55). One may safely postulate that Helena's blood is darker, less sweet, and thicker than Bertram's. Bertram, to be sure, through repeated copulation with Helena would improve her blood. They would become "one flesh" (I Cor. 6:16), therefore,²² one blood (in Renaissance context)—just as Claudius, nine times branded by Hamlet "villain" (then interchangeable with "villein") and damned as "vile King" to his face by Laertes, nightly "villeinizes" Gertrude's blood, formerly enriched by Hamlet père.²³ Although Bertram's semen would by common expectation prevail over Helena's in conception, her semen might master his if he were at something less than his physical and mental best through the wounds of war, accident, illness, or age: the result would be that his children would not resemble him or his ancestors—a very embarrassing situation for a nobleman (albeit common amongst the base) because it suggested that his sons were not his sons,²⁴ and favored Helena's nongentle ancestry, thus corrupting the House of Rossillion. The physiological basis of primogeniture rests upon this notion. In the main source of All's Well Giletta was "brought a bedde of twoo sonnes, which were very like their father," and in the play Bertram of course favors his father (I.ii.19). Shakespeare evidently felt so secure in his insistence on Helena's honesty (in the senses of chastity and integrity) that he did not need to include this point. Indeed Helena herself may be baseborn. As that adulator of royal blood Belarius says in Cymbeline, "Base things sire base," a remark that directly applies to Helena if she was conceived before her father was gentled. Her tainted background and hence her tainted nature would also influence Bertram's children if she nursed them herself as noble mothers were urged to do, mother's milk being then regarded as blood in a whitened form.²⁵

Helena's tainted blood variously shows itself. Indeed, she is very calculating, and never does anything for anyone unless she stands to profit. Herein she differs markedly from Bertram who, like Hamlet (Horatio), Sebastian (Antonio), Valentine (Proteus), and Antonio (Bassanio), is involved in the Renaissance cult of male friendship with Parolles, which, because Parolles is unworthy and unequal to Bertram, amounts to parody. Helena herself is in some respects like Parolles. The cult stimulated its devotees to great deeds in order to be worthy of friendship. Bertram by his incredible soldiership bears up his end, and Parolles strives to win honor and to deserve Bertram's love by hazarding his life and honor to recover a drum. But Parolles's ambition is only to seem to deserve well: "I'll no more drumming; a plague of all drums! Only to seem to deserve well, and to beguile the supposition of that lascivious young boy the Count, have I run into this danger" (IV.iii.301-304). This cult involved, among other things, a willingness of one friend to die for another, seen in Horatio, Antonio of The Merchant of Venice, and Antonio of Twelfth Night. But Parolles is a villein by class as well as by ethic, and the Renaissance cult of male friendship in theory (Plato's erotic dialogues), ancient example (David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroklos) and in the Shakespearean plays never involves the base. Parolles bears some resemblance to Helena in class and in ethic: one cannot imagine Helena's offspring, if her blood secured mastery over Bertram's in conception, as being any less self-serving than their mother and her peasant ancestors. Indeed, one cannot imagine either Parolles or Helena as dying for anyone either out of agape or friendship: interêt is at the root of their nature. Bertram appears to share these class-originated thoughts of Helena because, when leaving Rossillion, he bids her "Be comfortable to my mother, your mistress, and make much of her" (I.i.76-77): if Bertram thought that Helena would be tenderly solicitous toward the aged Countess, this remark would be redundant, not to say patronizing. Helena, if she follows ancestral stereotype, would bear the class-characteristic through her blood (not necessarily in her own character) of being highly egocentric and destitute of love toward family members. When Oliver in As You Like It tells Duke Frederick, "I never lov'd my brother in my life," the Duke (though no brother-lover himself) responds, "More villain thou" (III.i.14-15). Helena, although at least once charged with being undutiful toward her father's memory,²⁶ never really does or says anything that she needs to repent of—some of Shakespeare's most eugenic and nondegenerate characters practice remorseless deceit as does Helena—but she might bear offspring who, like Shakespeare's villeins as a class, do villainy and are unable to repent: Iago, styled "Villain" in the Dramatis Personae of Othello, never repents; and the Clown in The Winter's Tale, another villein, feels no need to repent of his being merely an interested spectator at the dismemberment of Antigonus by a bear. Bad blood could not be cured by repentance, and bad blood would not permit repentance. Another sign of Helena's lowered blood-quality in her inability to laugh: she is in this respect not like Portia, Beatrice, and Rosalind. She does not appear to be put in good humor by the family Clown. Bertram, on the other hand, although deceived (unlike Helena) by Parolles, seems attached to him in part by reason of Parolles's free mouth and his rich humor.

Not only does Helena show certain affinities with the base, but as an upstart gentle she would possess a tendency to atavism that Bertram and the young lords fear and that the common wisdom raises as a bogeyman to a marriage like that of Walter and Griselda in Chaucer's highly Christianized "Clerkes Tale." Atavism, besides being based on observation, had theoretical support in Aristotle's Generation of Animals. Writing of the "tainting" that is recessive in the first generation, Aristotle states: "There was at Elis a woman who had intercourse with a blackamoor; her daughter was not a black, but her daughter's son was."²⁷ It would be difficult to deny that such thoughts haunt Brabantio's mind in Othello. On analogy with Shakespeare's other base, one may surmise that Helena's physiological system carries a degree of "villainous melancholy" (King Lear I.ii.138), and that it is in some sense a vessel of cold, sluggish, thick, dark-colored, ill-smelling, bad-tasting blood, given these qualities by the semi-excremental (and unexpellable) lees of Galenic melancholy. Helena, though virtuous herself, has the potentiality, if her blood should prevail over Bertram's blood in conception,²⁸ of "villeinizing" Bertram's children, who would resemble neither Bertram, his ancestors, nor even herself, but favor her base progenitors, uncomfortably close to her and her late father. In other words, dishonorable and disgusting qualities are recessive in her blood and may spring forth in horrid life in her children. And what then would happen to the House of Rossillion? Helena is not simply (and naively) an atomistic individual but the present representative of many generations of her base family. Bertram and the young lords presumably know this—it was an idea in the Renaissance air and required no book learning. The King and the Countess must know this also, but choose to ignore the common wisdom that Bertram would stain his blood by marriage to Helena. Lawrence Stone observes that marriages of nobles with rich merchants' daughters, especially widows, were sometimes undertaken in the period 1558-1641 "after the successful production of a male heir by a first well-born wife had ensured that the hereditary line was saved from any taint of contaminated blood."²⁹ Since Bertram rejects Helena on the basis of her class, he must have class-reasons for so doing, stereotyping the expectation of bad blood: the institutional typing of classes on an economic basis developed after Shakespeare's time as the nineteenthcentury origin of "middle class" (see OED) suggests.

Marriage with Helena, allowing for recessiveness, might villeinize Bertram's children in various ways. Long generations of her ancestors, being base peasants, would not have known or could not have afforded to observe the rules for the production of fine and towardly children.³⁰ Carrying some "villainous melancholy" in her veins, Helena for all her fine appearance might possess and/or transmit body odor as happens to Cloten's body (Cymbeline II.i.17), Cloten being the son of an apparently base father and a gentle mother. Although Helena has a rosy complexion (I.iii.166), her offspring, following the pull of long generations, might be swarthy. More importantly, they might develop delusions: Helena's dream of marrying Bertram is realized under the compulsions of a plot "romantic" in the seventeenth-century sense; had she failed, her dream would have been regarded as a delusion although she certainly would not have been committed to the oubliette like Malvolio for dreaming of marrying the Countess Olivia. A tendency to delusions she could impart to her offspring. From her peasant background her blood would carry ineptitude in social relations and a reduced amount of intuitive awareness: she might beget a Cloten or even an Audrey. Some of Helena's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren might not possess their mother's bravery and intelligence—both gentle qualities—but revert to peasant type with cool, thick, dark, foul-smelling, evil-tasting blood bringing cowardice, lack of honor, foolishness, bastardy, sickliness, ugliness, and many other undesirable qualities.³¹ And her offspring, like the common people, might not be marked by "generous" (L. generosus, well-born) impulses.

The King of France's offer to ennoble Helena cannot nullify these atavistic liabilities. When France commands Bertram on pain of drastic penalties to marry Helena, he acts in defiance of the common view that it takes generations, perhaps three from the first father, to produce a gentleman: the King in Boccaccio's story "was very loth to graunt him [the Count Beltramo of Rossiglione] unto her [Giletta]."³² The King in All's Well seems to offer nobility to Helena: "I can create the rest. Virtue and she / Is her own dower; honor and wealth from me" (II.iii.143-44). And, of course, in a noble family there must be the first creation; more comprehensively, in a gentle family there must be the first gentleman. But the King does not in fact ennoble Helena. Even if he did, his act might activate the proverb that "The King cannot make a gentleman."³³ Helena's paternal grandfather and her ancestors before him were base; her father was base before he was gentled; and Helena may have been born like Shakespeare himself. The young lords whom Helena views with marriage in prospect show no eagerness at all to be married to her, a point made by Lafew, "These boys are boys of ice, they'll none have her." Who can doubt that the young lords are thinking Bertram's thought—"a poor physician's daughter"? And after Helena's supposed death Lafew as a representative of nobility native offers his daughter as a second wife to Bertram, nobility native (V.iii.68-74), and conventionally realistic thinking returns at this point to the play.

In spite of all these possibilities Bertram is wrong in terms of this play. Here Shakespeare departs from his obvious dislike of cross-class marriage, sustained everywhere in his plays, and from his aversion to upstarts, which appears everywhere except in the gentling, enforced by tradition, of Henry V's surviving base soldiery on the eve of Agincourt. In All's Well That Ends Well Shakespeare comes down on the side of Chaucer, Marlowe, Dekker, Webster, and Milton (although not necessarily for their reasons), all of whom depict characters of low degree performing virtuously in leading roles. Perhaps there is a special reason for the poet's departure from his norm. All's Well, as has been observed, several times echoes the sonnets.³⁴ Shakespeare's position in the sonnets with respect to the nameless nobleman he is addressing is exactly the same, that is, the son of a father born base but made a gentleman (in 1596) as Helena's (daughter of a man presumably born base but made a gentle) or, assuming sonnets 1-126 to have been written before John Shakespeare's gentling, almost the same (a base addressing a nobleman). Shakespeare appears to desire to involve himself in the current cult of male friendship with a nobleman who is conscious of and rather rejects the poet's social inferiority, primarily meaning his blood (his essential nature), and secondarily his position as actor and mercenary playwright. Shakespeare, despite his class-bias, was not about to condemn Helena's atten pt to rise from mean gentry to high nobility by mai ying Bertram: her endeavor is almost the same as his own, to establish a friendship, a friendship to be sustained until death (indeed, perhaps to be the cause of death), with a young man greatly his superior in blood, class, title, and estate. Both All's Well and Sonnets 1-126 are appeals of inferior blood to be accepted on the basis of supplicating merit by superior blood, made reluctant by risk.

Notes

¹ Lineation and quotations from Shakespeare follow The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1980).

² M.C. Bradbrook, "Virtue is the True Nobility," RES 1, 4 (October 1950): 289-301, 291.

³ Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1929), p. 22.

⁴ Bertram has attracted one all-out defender, Albert Howard Carter, "In Defense of Bertram," SQ 7, 1 (Winter 1956): 21-31. Jay Halio, "All's Well That Ends Well," SQ 15, 1 (Winter 1964): 33-43, is somewhat sympathetic to him.

⁵ Andrew Boorde, A Compendyous Regyment or a dyetary of Helth (1542), EETS, Extra Series 10, chap. 3, p. 235.

⁶ Cf. David Shelley Berkeley, Blood Will Tell in Shakespeare 's Plays, Graduate Studies, Texas Tech University No. 28 (Lubbock: Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 16-17.

⁷ Cf. Jules Rothman, "A Vindication of Parolles," SQ 23, 2 (Spring 1972): 183-96.

⁸ Bradbrook, pp. 289-301, sets forth historical matter supporting the view of the King and the Countess in All's Well.

⁹ Francis Markham, The Booke of Honour or Five Decads of Epistles of Honour (London, 1625), p. 46.

¹⁰ John F. Adams, "All's Well That Ends Well: The Paradox of Procreation," SQ 12, 3 (Summer 1961): 261-270, 265.

¹¹ Margaret Loftus Ranald, "'As Marriage Binds, and Blood Breaks': English Marriage Law and Shakespeare," SQ 30, 1 (Winter 1979): 68-81, 80.

¹² Kenneth Walker, The Story of Medicine (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), p. 110.

¹³ Charles Donald O'Malley and J.B. de CM . Saunders, "Andreas Vesalius Imperial Physician" in Science, Medicine and History, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood, 2 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), 1: 390.

¹⁴ Claudius Galen, On the Natural Faculties, II.iii, trans. Arthur J. Brock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 131.

¹⁵ Thus Jacques Ferrand, Ἐρωτομανια; or A Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Cure of Love or Erotic Melancholy (London, 1640), p. 261: "The seed is nothing else but Blood, made White by the Naturall heat." See also Eucharius Roesslin, The Byrthe of Mankynde (London, 1560), The First Book, chap. 10, "The transmutacion of bloudde into sparm"; Alexander Read, The Manuali of the Anatomy or dissection of the body of Man (London, 1638), p. 208.

¹⁶ F.S. Bodenheimer, The History of Biology (London: Dawson and Sons, 1958), p. 55.

¹⁷ Thomas Vicary, A Profitable Treatise of the Anatomie of Man's Body (London, 1577), EETS, Extra Series 53, pp. 78-79.

¹⁸ Giovanni Nenna, A Treatise of Nobility, trans. W. Jones (London, 1595), pp. 7 ff.

¹⁹ John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), p. 38.

²⁰ David S. Berkeley and Zahra Karimipour, "Blood-Consciousness as a Theme in The Winter's Tale," Explorations in Renaissance Culture 11 (1985): 89-98.

²¹ Alexander Read, The Chirurgical Lectures of Tumors and Ulcers (London, 1635), p. 45.

²² Cf. All's Well V.iii.168-74.

²³ An argument for Claudius's bastardy is set forth in David S. Berkeley, "Claudius the Villein King of Denmark," Hamlet Studies 11, 1 and 2 (Summer and Winter, 1989): 9-21.

²⁴ See Paulina's defense of Perdita's legitimacy by her detailed likening of the infant's face and figure to Leontes, The Winter's Tale II.iii.99-108; Richard II V.ii.94. The only time Prince Hal hits Falstaff occurs, according to the Hostess, "when the Prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor" (2 Henry IV II.i.87-88), an imputation, of course, of bastardy.

²⁵ Jacques Guillemeau, The Nursing of Children (London, 1612), p. 1: "Thought it were fit, that every mother should nurse her owne child: because her milke which is nothing else, but the bloud whitened (of which he was made and wherewith hee had beene nourished the time hee staide in his Mothers wombe) will bee alwaies more naturall and familiar unto him, than that of a stranger." Mother's milk conveyed dispositions such as tyranny (Titus Andronicus II.iii.144-45) and valor (Coriolanus III.ii.131).

²⁶ R.B. Parker, "War and Sex in All's Well That Ends Well," ShakS 37 (1984): 99-113, 109.

²⁷ Aristotle, The Generation of Animals, I.xviii, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 55.

²⁸ On mastery in conception see Hippocrates, Regimen, I.xxviii, Hippocrates, trans. W.H.S. Jones (London: Heinemann, 1931), IV, 267-269.

²⁹ Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 628.

³⁰ Berkeley, Blood Will Tell in Shakespeare's Plays, pp. 11 ff.

³¹ Ibid., pp. 45-58.

³² William Painter, "The Thirty-Eighth Novell" in The Palace of Pleasure, ed. os. Jacobs, 3 vols. (1890; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 1:171-79, 173.

³³ Bradbrook, p. 296.

³⁴ Bradbrook, p. 290; Roger Warren, "Why Does It End Well? Helena, Bertram, and the Sonnets," ShakS 22 (1969): 79-92.