[In the following excerpt, Zitner examines the contemporary social conventions that underscore the action of All's Well That Ends Well.]

All's Well opens with a social thunderclap which has been muffled by the passage of social history. It is doubtful that historical reconstruction alone will enable a modern audience to feel at once, though it may help us to 'appreciate', the intensity that hovers about the speeches at the very beginning of the first scene of All's Well, a moment in any case subject to neglect because of the audience's yet unfocused attention. The Countess is losing her son, not because in the ordinary course of the life of a peer he must go off to the kind of civil finishing school constituted by court attendance, but because his father has died. What adds to her grief at the loss of her husband is that the Countess is being treated as a non-mother, for purposes of law an unperson, and her son—foolish as she knows him to be—made a kind of artificial orphan. When she says that her son is an 'unseasoned' courtier, the Countess is concerned with Bertram's particular limitations, but she is also stating that he is simply not ready to leave the nest. This accounts for the gracious warmth of Lafew's reassurances. It accounts, too, for the very presence of Lafew, an old comrade of the King's, as the King's agent. Sending him is a royal compliment also intended as reassurance to the Countess.

The seriousness of the occasion—which Elizabethan audiences would have grasped as modern audiences do not—somewhat mitigates the petulance of Bertram's first speech. Bertram, too, in going mourns again his father's death because of its effect on his future; if only the old man had lived until Bertram was twentyone! (Like Helena he overlays mourning with a more selfish reflexive grief.) The old Count of Rossillion should have died hereafter, when Bertram was twentyone and could have inherited, and had the management of himself and his estates. Now Bertram 'must attend his majesty's command', to whom he is 'now in ward, evermore in subjection'. The rhythm of the clause, three almost equally long units, parallel in the speaking and hence cumulatively emphatic, each unit ending on a significant word, 'command', 'ward', 'subjection', conveys its heavy tone. What an actor does with the phrase 'evermore in subjection' will depend on his sense of Bertram's virtual age. A Bertram of twenty saying 'evermore' is petulant; a Bertram of seventeen, with four years of fending off authority ahead of him, might be excused the phrase.

What sort of treatment lies ahead of Bertram as ward is evidenced almost at once. 'What is it, my good lord, the King languishes of?' Bertram asks Lafew, taking care that the honorific term of address is extended by the deferential 'my good' and emphasised by its interruption of the typical flow of syntax. Lafew answers considerately but laconically and with the minimal term of politeness. 'A fistula, my lord.' But Bertram persists in this line of questioning, which has rather inconsiderately interrupted the exchange between Lafew and the Countess concerning Helena's late father, the great physician Gerard de Narbon. Not only has young Bertram breached etiquette, but he has intruded on a subject of particular import to old people—health. When Bertram goes on with this breach, commenting on the King's fistula that 'I heard not of it before', he gets a smart flick of the lash. Turning briefly to him, Lafew responds with 'I would it were not notorious', which is as much as to say, 'You, young man, are one of the outsiders I hoped would not be gossiping about the King's intimate affairs'. And then without pause, addressing the Countess, Lafew compounds the slight by actually noticing the lowly Helena. Bertram is triply rebuked. This seems to promise that at the Court his interruptions will get no motherly indulgence; his concern that as a figure of importance he be kept au courant will be treated as presumption, and he will discover that a mere doctor's daughter can be at least as much an object of polite interest as the ward-heir to Rossillion. After the Countess has satisfied Lafew's question and the audience's about Helena, Bertram speaks again, in what may be taken as a further interruption. Lafew again turns on him: 'How understand we that?' The Countess prevents a reply by granting Bertram her blessing, but in a form that initially is also a half-implied rebuke, bidding Bertram succeed his father in manners as he does in appearance. The Countess hopes for her son precisely that character she has just attributed to Helena, but where her description of Helena is hopeful, her wish for Bertram is stated in terms of a struggle unresolved. She follows her blessing with a few practical rules that seem irrelevant in view of the larger unresolved problems she sees in Bertram's character, and the passage ends with a gloomy plea to Lafew: 'good my lord/Advise him.' Lafew's answer, hardly reassuring, is a cryptic prediction that the Count Bertram will get the best he deserves.

Bertram's exit speech, a rather condescending instruction to Helena to be 'comfortable' to his mother, underlines his insistence on her inferior rank in the unnecessary reminder that the Countess is 'your mistress'. The tirelessly alert Lafew makes Bertram's snobbery unmistakable by immediately and graciously addressing Helena: 'Farewell, pretty lady; you must hold the credit of your father.' Both Lafew's epithet and his redefinition of Helena's task as not that of a servant, but an inheritor, and one who must hold, that is continue rather than, as Bertram must, achieve a reputation, are subtle compliments. In this first part of the scene Bertram does not escape Lafew's scrutiny for a moment. His wardship has indeed begun, and we now learn that 'evermore in subjection' can also mean subjection every moment. The BBC All's Well showed Bertram at the Court in Act 2 carrying a large flask evidently filled with the King's urine. The image is a striking visual correlative of Bertram's status as royal ward.

The most telling exercise of the King's power is, of course, his enforcing of Bertram's marriage to Helena. Helena's preparation for her choice is carefully presented. In Painter the King promises Giletta a husband 'of right good worship and estimation', which accurately renders Boccaccio's equally modest and general phrase 'bene e altamente'. As she negotiates her reward for curing the King, the terms she employs indicate that Shakespeare is precisely aware of the King's powers over his wards. Helena will request as husband only 'such a one, thy vassal, whom I know/Is free for me to ask, thee to bestow'. She is careful to eliminate from her choice any of the King's children or 'other of your blood'. Here Shakespeare follows both Painter and Boccaccio. That he can follow his fourteenth-century original so closely on this point and be clearly understood in early seventeenth-century terms is due to a historical anomaly: the long persistence of medieval land-tenure in England. Hence the importance of Helena's use of the triggering phrase, 'thy vassal'. As a tenant-in-chief, Bertram inherits Rossillion in exchange for military service, hence his wardship and his vulnerability to the King's wishes. Helena's, and Giletta's, exclusion of members of the royal house from her choice is a reasonable precaution against 'disparagement'. But is the King free to bestow any of his wards on Helena without risking the objection of misalliance? To pursue the question is not to forget that these are fictive creatures but to consider Shakespeare's imaginative alteration of Boccaccio's materials.

Giletta was rich, an heiress, something of a 'catch' if we are to believe the solicitude of her kinsfolk, her many suitors and the description of her setting off on pilgrimage 'well furnished with silver and precious Jewels, with her maide, and one of her kinsemen'. Giletta may content 'her selfe, with the state of a poor pilgrime', but this is a matter of policy. Helena, however, is heiress only to a set of medical prescriptions. Her 'friends' (i.e. relatives) 'were poor, but honest', as she protests to the Countess. When she sets off to Paris she requires, and receives, 'Means and attendants' from the Countess, on whom she is completely dependent. Helena proclaims herself 'wealthiest' in her modest chastity. Bertram's phrase 'A poor physician's daughter' is echoed by the King, who determines to add honour and wealth to the virtue that is Helena's dowry. In short Shakespeare is at great pains to alter his source in this detail of Helena's wealth—with all its implications for social status—while keeping much else as it is in Boccaccio.

To reinvent the heiress Giletta as a poor physician's Helena was to alter what was marginally conceivable as a marriage in early seventeenth-century England to what was imaginable only in fiction; to alter a social curiosity into something close to a fairy-tale. Around 1604 the terms 'poor physician' and 'poor physician's daughter' would have been almost as much an oxymoron as today. . . .

The scene in which Helena proposes the cure is full of invocations of the spiritual. The introduction of rhymed couplets at II. i. 129 underscores the other-worldliness of the scene. Through several long speeches full of references to the deity, writ and miracles, Helena's argument is that the King's cure must be the work of heaven: 'Of heaven, not me, make an experiment.' We are never told Helena's medical procedure, but it is surely as extraordinary as its result. Giletta's plan goes forward in mechanical fashion; Shakespeare allows for an illusion of providential reward. In Boccaccio the King takes the initiative; in Shakespeare the King grants the initiative to Helena. The cure itself is announced in the next scene but one in Lafew's often-quoted speech:

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern [everyday] and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

(II. iii. 1-60)

The speech is a crystallisation of the allusions to providence that cluster round Helena's curative powers and her further progress, her fortuitously immediate encounter with the Widow, for example.

This strain of the supernatural distinguishes All's Well from its source; mentions of divinity in Boccaccio are fleeting and bromidic. In All's Well the supernatural has the effect of softening and deflecting Helena's activism from calculating bustle to a more elevated risk-taking. If the social gap between Bertram and Helena opened up by Shakespeare's impoverishing her, seems to cry out for providential intervention, her appeal to it and indeed the very idea of the providential in the play make it possible to suggest a refinement of mind, at least a freedom from bourgeois calculation that justifies her impoverishment as a stroke of dramaturgy. Helena's Hamlet-like self-doubts and self-accusations increase rather than lessen the effect. More important, however, is the transformation in the whole story effected by the presence of the supernatural. Boccaccio's tale, for all its unusual bridging of class disparity, is 'modern and familiar', 'ensconcing' us into 'seeming knowledge'. Once the force of love is set in motion by habitual childhood proximity it is irresistible, using any means as it moves toward its inevitable triumph. That is not quite how Shakespeare wanted to tell his tale. Complicating characters and obscuring motives (why is Parolles obsessed with that drum?), Shakespeare creates a world less easily reduced to a monolithic force that is the sole cause of all effects. To say that 'all's well that ends well' is to give up the pretence of predictable behaviour and outcome that follow from the seeming knowledge of secular law, and instead admit a variable, problematic fortune. For Helena, animated by love and trust in providence, all must end well, as it does with the King's cure. But Lafew is right in thinking that a commitment to secular rationalism tends to make (statistical?) trifles of terrors, and that rejecting it is a submission to an unknown fear, to forces beyond human understanding.

This opens the possibility of some curious happy endings indeed.

An unknown fear seems precisely what Bertram faces in the highly theatrical scene in which he is chosen by Helena and cowed by the King. Helena's choice cannot be staged as it is told in Boccaccio, weightlessly brief and with Beltramo absent. As with the three caskets and the choice of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, the playwright stretches out the act of choosing, ritualises it for emphasis and gives us not only the act itself but commentators with opposite viewpoints.

The King's first words after entering, 'Go, call before me all the lords in court', suggest for a moment the breath-taking possibility that he will offer Helen every unwed courtier in the kingdom. The Folio stage direction reads—fortunately—'Enter three or four lords.' 'This youthful parcel/Of noble bachelors stand at my bestowing, / O'er whom both sovereign power and father's voice / I have to use.' Here is power doubly derived, and perhaps a faint condescension. 'Parcel' is mostly used by Shakespeare of the inanimate or the small detail. When Portia speaks of 'a parcel of wooers' in The Merchant of Venice (I. ii. 97) she does so with tongue in cheek. 'Thou hast the power to choose,' the King tells Helena, 'and they none to forsake.' Helena deals graciously with the inevitable embarrassment of the situation by making a small joke. Lafew, however, greets the occasion with enthusiasm. There follows a small dancing out of what has already been decided. Helena approaches each of the four bachelor lords in turn, making a self-deprecatory and complimentary rhymed rejection of each until at last she comes to Bertram. Him she does not 'take'; rather she gives herself. Helena, despite her power, never forgets her social status.

How shall the scene be played? Joseph Price one of the most acute commentators on the play, has ingeniously proposed (pp. 155-7) that we see the King's parcel of noble bachelors as far from enthusiastic about the possibility of marrying Helena: hence their laconic speech; hence Lafew's annoyance at them. Lafew, Price argues, 'vocalises our feelings [of sympathy] for Helena' and 'tempers our shock' by preparing us for Bertram's rejection. Why would a young courtier want such a marriage in any case?

With a director's ingenuity and an actor's expressiveness, almost anything may be done on stage. Their initial unison response to Helena's reference to the King's cure, 'We understand it, and thank heaven for you', has reduced the bachelor lords to royal cogs, as unison in Hamlet reduced Cornelius and Voltimand. This and their presence in the first instance is designed not only to give weight to the choice-scene, but to serve as concrete evidence of the King's power and to deny Bertram the possibility of special pleading. After their choral self-presentation, the First Lord speaks three words, the Second five, the Third nothing and the Fourth six. In one sense, it hardly matters whether the words are spoken with an intent to ingratiate the speakers with the King and so make a marriage that is bound to be attended by wealth and favour, or—though this would be more difficult for the actors—spoken in bitterness or anger between clenched teeth to convey their unwilling subjection to their royal guardian. If ingratiatingly, Lafew's annoyance can be made to seem directed at the brevity and hence apparently tepid enthusiasm of their statements, an implied rebuke to manhood. If they speak reservedly or ironically, as Price would have them do, Lafew's anger (as before) is directed at a snobbish, milk-and-water generation that has neither ardent loyalty to the King nor a manly yen for a beautiful girl who has done a magnificent deed. Both stagings can convey the misfortunes of wardship and are consistent with the character of Lafew, who has entered the garrulous twilight of male potency. Either interpretation can prepare the way for Bertram's rejection of Helena. But the traditional interpretation is far easier to act, and so preferable. Playing the scene so that Lafew does not hear the young wards and thus misinterprets as rejection Helena's moving on from one to the other avoids the textual questions. How it would avoid audience confusion is hard to imagine. This, however, was Dr Johnson's suggestion. Yet why would Shakespeare have invented such a scene? Freestanding, Lafew's remarks would become a comic distraction occasioned by stage blocking whose one rationale is to permit them. They are significant only in relation to the speech of the wards, and not having Lafew hear them seems an unnecessary complication. Although the difficulty was apparently overcome in Tyrone Guthrie's 1959 production of All's Well, the effect was one of arbitrary comedy with no relevance to the rest of the scene. Willing or trapped, the wards bend to the King's power, and however they say it, nothing the wards say—for they say so little—will please Lafew. His enthusiasm and Helena's little dance of deferential eliminations heightens our expectation of Helena's choice. Perhaps the crucial problem in the scene for the director is Bertram. However the Lafewward relation is staged, the director is faced with slanting it so as to locate Bertram's rejection as either more courageous or more mean-spirited than the responses of the wards.

As Brian Parker has observed, the grounds on which Helena excuses the four young lords are precisely those that should also lead her to excuse Bertram. They suggest another basis for Bertram's conviction that he has been treated unjustly. Helena excuses the First Lord with only thanks for his willingness to hear (and grant) her suit. To the Second Lord she makes a difficult answer whose sense is that he is too high-born and deserves a fortune twenty times better. Helena promises the Third Lord that for his own sake she will never wrong him and hopes that he will find 'fairer fortune' if he weds. The Fourth Lord, she says, is too young, too happy, too good for her to marry. The main argument of Helena's kind dismissals is the difference in honour and fortune between herself and the lords. To overlook it, she says, would be a 'wrong'. Helena is clearly thinking of disparagement. Her other reasons; youth, happiness (good fortune), goodness—spoken to the Fourth Lord—are an odd mixture of the shrewd, the realistic and the idealising typical of Helena. Bertram does seem too young for any sort of intimate heterosexual bond; his circumstances are—or have been—too easy for his own good. Whether Bertram himself can be thought 'good' Helena will discover to her cost. Having given such strong reasons against doing so, Helena humbly offers herself to Bertram.

Bertram's outburst is unpleasant but not wholly unjustified. A plea to use his own eyes in choosing a wife would have found wide agreement in an Elizabethan audience, if not with parental peers of the realm. Romantic union was an idea gaining currency. That the King proposes to 'bring [Bertram] down' with his misalliance is also a valid objection. Bertram's disdain for a 'poor physician's daughter' who was a household dependant is another matter—a reasonable objection to some, vicious to a few. Shakespeare tips the balance and tries to direct judgement with the ironic last sentence of Bertram's speech: 'Disdain / Rather corrupt me ever!' The Arden editor reads this as 'I choose that my disdain of her should ruin my favour in your [the King's] sight rather than that I should be brought down by marriage to one beneath me.' As predictive irony the phrase is simpler, with Bertram choosing a snobbery that will set in train a course of self-destructive lies and deceptions. Perhaps he speaks more accurately than he knows.

The King's response to Bertram has been much admired as having 'a complex and bitter music' and expressing a humane and liberal outlook on the issues of class and power so obviously important in the play. The King states eloquently the commonplaces of the running argument over the relation between status and merit typical of deference societies: the irrelevance of status to essential humanity, the natural nobility of merit, the emptiness of rank without it, the likelihood of merit reproducing itself, the emptiness of ancestral title inherited without current merit. To these abstractions Bertram gives the heart's concrete answer, 'I cannot love her nor will strive to do it', and the King the only effective reply: 'My honour's at the stake . . . / I must produce my power.' Bertram sues for pardon.

The King's arguments are solid and reasonable. Who would deny them? Not one but has its counterpart in proverb and its illustration in social history. But upon inspection it appears that Shakespeare has made the solid slippery. Key terms are used too often for clarity: seven instances of 'honour' in some form; five of 'virtue'/'virtuous', each time employed somewhat differently, with virtue as a moral quality contending with virtue as power; honour as a moral quality contending with honour as title or respect given. And in the course of the King's attempt to redefine the idea of status he is forced to appeal to the axiom of identity, 'good alone is good; vileness is so', which makes definition futile. We know well enough what the King is saying: Helena is a marvel, worthy of all the terms of praise and acceptance going. But to say this when and how the King says it, and to whom he says it, is to call into question the validity of the whole apparatus of social distinctions he is trying to rationalise and renew by finding in them a place for Helena. Bertram's unmoved response reveals the arguments as misdirected to callowness, if not to the reason. The King, now livid, uses the word 'honour' twice again in ways that strip the camouflage from the others. When the King declares his honour at the stake he is speaking of his personal reputation (i.e. his claim to absoluteness in rule). To maintain it, he must use his power, the power that enables him 'to plant thine [Bertram's] honour where/We please to have it grow'. The locution occurs again in Macbeth when King Duncan, after loading him with praise and honour, tells Macbeth 'I have begun to plant thee, and will labour/To make thee full of growing.' The whole apparatus of honour, revealed by the logic of the narrative rather than by the logic of argument, is that honour is, finally, what is bestowed by the King in the course of maintaining his own status. This narrative relation between the realities and the rationalisations of power and status is neither inadvertent nor merely a dividend from the Sonnets and the earlier political plays. All's Well provides a fuller and more detailed account of the character and limitations of power and status. But here they are tellingly defined. Bertram picks up the King's ultimate meaning of 'honour' and appears to submit. 'When I consider/ What great creation and what dole of honour/Flies where you bid it,' Bertram allows that Helena is to the manor born. Shakespeare employs a splendidly outrageous pun. Of the six uses of the word 'dole' in Shakespeare's plays five of them mean extreme woe (dolour). Editors struggle with alternatives, toy with an emendation to 'deal', but Bertram is right: the King has given him a great misery of honour. Yet for all his exercise of power, the King cannot quite marry Bertram to Helena. Bertram refuses to consummate the marriage.

Immediately afterward Bertram's resistance is played out as comedy in Parolles' elaborately irritated denial of Lafew's description of Bertram as Parolles' 'lord and master'. 'Well, I must be patient' he says after Lafew exits; 'there is no fettering of authority', and like Bertram he resolves to have it his own way, were Lafew 'double and double a lord'. When Bertram, now suddenly married, re-enters, yet another camouflage meaning of 'honour' reappears in Parolles' ribald assertion that 'He wears his honour in a box unseen/That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home,/Spending his manly marrow in her arms'. Bertram agrees, and the two set off for the wars. There is no avoiding the sexual equations honour = penis, box = vagina after the reference to spent marrow. But should one attribute to the playwright a sexual ultimate at the core of the King's politically ultimate understanding of honour as the creation of power—an understanding of status as finally an expression of the gender-based and gendernurtured system of power? Perhaps, but not on this evidence alone. . . .

Bibliography

Parker, R. B., 'War and Sex in All's Well That Ends Well', Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984), pp. 99-113.

Price, Joseph G., The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of All's Well That Ends Well and Its Critics, Toronto 1968.