SOURCE: “All's Well That Ends Well as Noncomic Comedy,” in Acting Funny: Comic Theory and Practice in Shakespeare's Plays, edited by Frances Teague, Associated University Presses, 1994, pp. 40-51.

[In the following essay, Free maintains that despite its conformity to comic formulae, comedy is thwarted in All's Wells That Ends Well through the play's representation of the power dynamics of marriage and metalanguage.]

The title of All's Well That Ends Well suggests potential for mistaken identity, intrigue plot, thwarted romance—the stuff that makes comedy and the comic—and in its way the play fulfills those potentials. All does end well at least in the sense that girl does get boy despite all obstacles.¹ In gross structure and plot, All's Well That Ends Well also conforms to comedy's basic outlines as they appear in other Shakespearean plays. Bertram's flight from authority figures—King, Countess, Helena—and their rules and dictates to pursue the Florentine wars echoes flight to the saturnalian green world. His abandoning the woman he scorns along with his later pursuit of one who scorns him has precedent in both The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Proteus and Demetrius forswear their former vows (“In number more than ever women spoke” as Hermia prophetically reminds us, 1.1.176)² to woo Silvia and Hermia respectively. Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a worthy predecessor to Diana in All's Well That Ends Well; the dogged devotion that Julia (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), Hermia (A Midsummer Night's Dream), and Helena (A Midsummer Night's Dream) display toward the sometimes unworthy objects of their adoration anticipates Helena's in All's Well That Ends Well. This late play's conclusion also fits the comedic prototype by bringing together those admired with those shamed; everyone reenters the community—even Parolles with his “scurvy” curtsies—which creates “a movement towards harmony, reconciliation, happiness: the medieval idea” (Nelson 1990, 2).

These conformities to formulae notwithstanding, All's Well That Ends Well provides less pleasure, amusement, or even laughter than either the relatively weak The Two Gentlemen of Verona or the comedically superior A Midsummer Night's Dream. Throughout All's Well That Ends Well’s progress we, as theater-goers or critics, become aware—to our growing discomfort—that “ending well” does not in and of itself guarantee the presence of the comic within comedy. Two factors help to hold the comic at bay in this play: first, the placement and use of marriage as an expression of power; and second, the metalanguage of power that distinguishes the marked hierarchies of noble/commoner, public/domestic, and maturity/foolishness that the play presents.

MARRIAGE AS AN EXPRESSION OF POWER

Marriage is a central element in the construct of Renaissance comedy. In the Shakespearean canon, a number of the comedies include marriages, placing them (or implying that they impend) close to or at the plays' ends as a reaffirmation, restoration and promise for the continuation of society.³ Other comedies deal with married women as in The Comedy of Errors and The Merry Wives of Windsor; or they move the marriage forward, thus foregrounding it and making it precipitate further action in the main plot as in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing. What makes All's Well That Ends Well’s foregrounded marriage unique is the undeniable fact that Bertram does not want Helena regardless of how much she wants him or how much the members of the nobility—most notably the King, the Countess, and Lafew—want him to want her. Further, in its institution, its mixing of high personages with low, and the alliances between social groups, the foregrounded marriage in All's Well That Ends Well subverts the comic by creating discomfiting inversions in the play's social spheres. While the concept of marriage as regenerative force via Helena's pregnancy obtains in principle at the end, when the “broken nuptial” comes together,⁴ no wonder we, along with the King in the epilogue, feel little if any delight: things but “seem” well; we have no guarantees. We cannot be certain even there that Bertram truly wants her.

A distinction that contributes to my thesis is that All's Well That Ends Well stands apart from the Shakespearean comedic mainstream in that Helena and Bertram, however estranged their relationship, remain the single couple in the play.⁵ Elsewhere Shakespeare provides us with sets of couples: twins who marry and woo in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, two men in pursuit of one woman in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night's Dream, two married women who plot to outwit one man and teach another a lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Rosalind and Celia with their loves in As You Like It, and a triad of lovers in The Merchant of Venice. Even Measure for Measure, the play most often closely linked to All's Well That Ends Well, provides us pairings. All's Well That Ends Well gives us two widows, a virgin, and a wife in name only. While all these pairings deal with power in relationships, they do not constitute the exact marked hierarchies of power that All's Well That Ends Well presents to us.

The foregrounded marriage in All's Well That Ends Well differs from those in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing in origination and ordination. While Kate in The Taming of the Shrew has no more choice than does Bertram about whom each marries (Baptista and Petruchio merely strike a bargain as do the King and Helena), Petruchio and Kate as a pair remain this play's focal point. We observe the battle of wit and will between them, and the entire fourth act centers on them. Whether we grant or disallow the concept of mutuality of consent,⁶ whether the production relies on Zefferellian horseplay or a more restrained production concept, The Taming of the Shrew provokes laughter⁷—the sine qua non of the comic—because of the physical and verbal interaction between the principal characters. The same holds true for Much Ado about Nothing. Like Kate and Petruchio, Beatrice and Benedick command our attention, their wit and wordplay amuse and distract us, and they are more interesting to us than the play's other couple Claudio and Hero. Even in that relationship, the comedy of Much Ado about Nothing remains more comic than does All's Well That Ends Well. Claudio and Hero agree to marry, an important distinction between their relationship and that of Helena and Bertram. The distasteful circumstances of the broken nuptial notwithstanding,⁸ the separation between Claudio and Hero fails to disrupt wholly the play's overall comic spirit for two reasons: first, we know Dogberry and the Watch hold the key to reconciliation; second, as well as more important, the comic Beatrice and Benedick remain our primary focal point.

Helena and Bertram appear on stage together in but five scenes. Their exchanges generally indicate the dynamic of power in their relationship as Helena oozes subservience to her lord and master, while Bertram, until the final scene, plays his superiority, both of class and gender, for all it’s worth. In three scenes where they appear together, they speak to or about one another but engage in no dialogue. In 1.1 Bertram in one and a half lines commands that Helena, “Be comfortable to my mother, your mistress, / And make much of her” (76-77). In 2.3 she subserviently offers herself to him in two and a half lines:

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

(2.3.102-104)

The remainder of this scene has them each talking to the King, but not to one another. In a third scene (3.5), Helena merely views Bertram from a distance as the army passes and asks about him. Only two scenes have them exchanging dialogue. In 2.5, comprising thirty-five lines, Bertram, without having consummated the marriage and refusing Helena's modest request for a departing kiss, dismisses his bride by sending her back to Rossillion. His language is primarily in the command form, hers acquiescent. She comes “as [she] was commanded from [him]” (2.5.54). She declares herself Bertram's “most obedient servant” in a scene that allows for no possible irony (2.5.72). Even when she musters the courage to hint at a parting kiss, she hesitates and stumbles as a young woman very much in love and unsure of herself. In 5.3, the reconciliation, they exchange two lines each, and arguably Bertram's “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly / I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” is addressed more to the King than to Helena. These two encounters comprise but thirty-nine lines all told.

All's Well That Ends Well remains a comedy in structure, yet Helena's agency in the enforced marriage, as well as the subsequent separation and ploys, distances us from the comic. Other elements distance us as well. When the Countess learns that Helena loves Bertram, we have the perfect occasion for a traditional blocking figure, but no. The Countess not only enjoys, but also encourages Helena in her aspirations. No witty bantering about sex, love, fidelity in wedlock—that which might create the comic within the matrix of comedy—takes place between Helena and Bertram, the play's only couple. Certainly some comic playfulness occurs within the play. No one will deny its presence in the virginity dialogue between Helena and Parolles, nor in the choosing scene as Helena walks from budding youth to budding youth before “giving” herself to Bertram, nor in Parolles's humiliation. Nevertheless, what lightness exists remains apart from the focal couple. Of added significance is how little of the playfulness associated with earlier comedies takes place among the women. Beyond the Countess' hope for Helena's love, her brief acknowledgement of her own past, and her teasing in the “I say I am your mother” dialogue (1.3), women's dialogue as they assess man's fecklessness has a more brittle edge than do similar assessments given in the earlier comedies.

Helena's actions set her apart from her Shakespearean sisters. Other independently-acting heroines—Viola, Rosalind, Portia—play at their love-games and are, in some cases, willing to leave Time to fadge things out. They also employ masculine disguise to effect the amount of control or empowerment they enjoy. Helena does what she does without disguise. In some respects Helena and Portia are the most closely akin. Portia is willing to comply with her father's will; Helena is willing to submit herself to Bertram's.⁹ Both work purposefully to achieve their goals. However close that kinship, differences obtain. Allies from the play's outset, Portia and Nerissa plot to test true love's faith; Helena, who must create her allies, has yet to gain mere acceptance as wife. To achieve her goals, she acts with what Western culture sees as male prerogatives. As A. P. Riemer has said, she acts with a “male purposefulness” (Riemer 1975-76, 54). In order for her to succeed undisguised, she must perform these actions in a way that the empowering male structure (i.e., the King and Lafew as members of the ancien régime) fails to recognize as violating sex or class differences.

In All's Well That Ends Well Helena follows Bertram to Paris. There she originates the marriage by striking a bargain with the King and curing him. Unlike the other pairings and marriages in the comedies, however, no tacit nor overt mutuality exists between this nuptial pair. Here the King must ordain an enforced marriage of his ward Bertram to comply with the terms of the bargain. Such ordination violates the usual circumstances that we find in the festive comedies.¹⁰ In those comedies, ordination, directed against a woman, may initiate the flight from authority into the saturnalian world of comic license.

Bertram's response to the King's command is like that of Silvia or Hermia: forced into marriage ordained against his will, a marriage that is originated by a spouse who is not loved, he runs away, as do the heroines. Bertram's running away to Florence offers a different kind of escape from that of the heroines. Not only is his escape to a city but to one associated with sexual licentiousness. The King himself warns his courtiers against “Those girls of Italy.” When Helena discovers Bertram in Florence,¹¹ she entraps him by means of the bed trick, which inverts predicated male-female sex roles just as “girl gets boy” inverts what we would recognize as the clichéd phrasing. Her action substitutes the legal for the licentious. Helena entraps Bertram a second time as well in 5.3 by her further employment of Diana before the King. Even the King becomes confused as Helena employs her skills. What allows everyone to escape prison is Helena's ability to use the language of empowerment without disturbing the status quo.

METALANGUAGE OF POWER

Since Renaissance cultural and sexual politics determine that only males have the possibility of an unbounded (or “unmarked”) scope of action, Helena's behavior—both her actions and linguistic powers—marks her. Marking is a means of classifying, of categorizing differences that exist within orders. To be marked is normally negative because a marked group is set apart to be evaluated on a special scale, one generally lower than the universal scale of the unmarked whole. Hence critical study often uses a lesser scale to evaluate minority authors or marginalized works (such as the problem comedies).¹² The group that is unmarked thus controls the discourse used to evaluate; that group establishes the hierarchical ranking. To reproduce a marking system is to reproduce a form of hierarchy under the guise of “natural” reality. Significantly, to maintain a classification scheme, we learn to believe that principles of difference are natural principles inherent in given structures. This naturalization is a social process effected by a particular discourse that reproduces structures in a consistent manner. When something violates these classificatory principles, it disconcerts. As a problem comedy, All's Well That Ends Well provides a case in point. Comedy by its classification should be comic. When it’s not, we begin marking it, setting it off from its parent class. As we do so, we find ourselves referring to an anomalous work negatively and mask, or “background,” its historical provenance, making the work lie beyond normal reflection.¹³ Hence what doesn’t fit takes precedence over what does. But understanding the process does more than just clarify how the work is marked vis-à-vis the canon. That understanding also offers a way of accounting for what happens within the play.

All's Well That Ends Well works on three pairs of well-known marking distinctions. First, writers from Engels on have stressed the importance of the distinction between the domestic sphere of marriage and family, the main arena of women (and the structural principle of comedy), and the public sphere dominated by males (the world of tragedy). The public sphere activities of production are the activities that maintain social institutions defined as important by leaders and politicians—“to busy giddy minds with foreign wars,” and by merchants and businessmen—to have “argosies [that] overpeer the petty traffickers.” At the same time they appear routine and relatively empty of interesting human drama, save when they become disrupted by such male passions as revenge (Hamlet), ambition (Macbeth), and violence (Coriolanus), when they become the stuff of tragedy. The activities of reproduction in the domestic sphere are always marked by human drama even if often trivial drama. To oversimplify, in the domestic sphere the “image” of public legitimacy does not have to be maintained, so the discordant details of human relations can be revealed. From Shakespearean comedy to modern sitcom, the domestic sphere and its activities, because they are marked, are routinely more entertaining, even comic, than public activities, but they are also less “real,” less significant in their impact than the activities of the male-dominated sphere. The extra information that makes domestic activities more interesting also assures us that they are in the less important domestic sphere. In All's Well That Ends Well the major concerns are about the domestic institutions of marriage and sex; public institutions of power and war are in the background.

Second, in All's Well That Ends Well the characters divide into fools—Bertram, Parolles, Lavatch—and sincere, mature people—the King, Lafew, and all of the female characters. The marking of fools is analogous to the marking of the domestic sphere in that the fools are more interesting (or perhaps irritating is a better choice of word in Bertram's case), but are less involved in important things. The Florentine wars as war, after all, figure little in the plot, and Parolles's loss of the drum parodies heroic action. Because most of the play's fools are male and most of the sincere, mature people are female, the things attended to by the serious people are things of importance to women, in this case, principally marriage. Significantly, this fact places the King as an ally with the women in their concern for marriage, a fact especially crucial in understanding the King's decision to help Diana to a husband at the play's end. Despite the Renaissance prohibition that comedy should not mix King with commoner, this alliance not only establishes the play as comedy, it reinforces the King's role as “father” (with its implications for marital status) and the dominant patriarchal figure in society—a role Bertram must also learn to play in order for society to work.

Third, the characters are divided into nobility versus commoners. The latter group includes Helena and Parolles along with Diana and the Widow. In All's Well That Ends Well noble/common fits the same unmarked/marked pattern as the other two distinctions (i.e., public/domestic, mature/fool). The Widow alludes to having lost a former higher status and states her aspirations for Diana. Helena's common birth makes her love for Bertram appear hopeless, something she strives to overcome. Both Helena and Parolles seek to climb the social ladder, yet nothing in the text supports a reading of her as mere social climber. She is no would-be Count Malvolio. Parolles, by way of contrast, is the play's true social climber who gets his just deserts in public humiliation. Helena is marked because the normal marriage arrangements among the nobly born, public spectacles and often dynastic alliances, are unavailable to her. Thus, she must undertake a series of interesting but unusual activities (travel, linguistic magic, the bed trick) if she is to gain the ceremony of formal marriage, which in turn posits comedy, and the domestic intimacy of consummation, which in the play's inverted sexual manipulation denies the comic.

Helena's decision to leave Rossillion to go to Paris and her later decision to become Saint Jaques's pilgrim indicate her independence and self-reliance. Those attributes do not guarantee her success. To achieve her goals, she must insinuate herself into the world of power, the world of the nobility that figures so importantly in this play. Her means is linguistic. (Arguably that linguistic skill in the sense of language of power is part of the legacy her father has left her and facilitates her success with the King.) Other heroines control language as game, as play; Helena does not often play at comic wit. She dominates Parolles in the dialogue on virginity; she wins the Countess's favor and the King's trust on the basis of language. As the play builds her power in allying her with the King, so Helena uses that power in allying Diana and the Widow with herself. At the same time that the play allows Helena power via language, Helena's professed view of herself calls attention to her subordinate position in the domestic sphere. As Joan Larsen Klein argues for Lady Macbeth as a good huswife, so could we for Helena in her desire to wed, bed, produce offspring, and be subservient to her lord.¹⁴ Unlike Lady Macbeth, Helena becomes the embodiment of power via her pregnancy.

Helena's skill in language will not work with Bertram, however, because he fails to understand it, as his alliance with Parolles suggests. Parolles also attempts to violate the noble/commoner distinction but fails. His attempts to move into the public world end in cowardice and shame, for Parolles lacks the linguistic superiority associated with other Shakespearean rogues. The ultimate irony of the unmasking scene lies, I believe, in the language of command the lords choose: doubletalk. Unlike Helena and the King, Parolles—despite his name—never controls language and, therefore, remains powerless: a victim easily undone by a plot concocted by those who do control the language of power. His final line, “I will not speak what I know,” underscores that powerlessness. In contrast, however much humiliation Falstaff suffers at the Windsorites' hands, he maintains his comic dignity by recognizing his folly. Lafew may take Parolles home to sport, but the latter's curtsies remain “scurvy ones.” While the unmasking action comprising Parolles's comeuppance is the most comic in the entire play, it remains unsuccessful because he has never mastered the original linguistic game and because it profits nothing for Bertram. Bertram must undergo his own linguistic education before an even higher court.

The (mis)alliance between Bertram and Parolles differs from earlier dramatic models. The play never convincingly shows Parolles misleading Bertram in the classic morality or prodigal son format. Were he to do so, the action would empower him. Instead Parolles tends to parrot Bertram's views. Parolles as parrot helps to point out that Bertram doesn’t know how to control language either. Bertram offers clichés or denies the significance of the language of power when the King says that “I can create the rest” referring to his ability to bestow a title on Helena (2.3.143). Such a failure suggests an inability to understand the larger game wherein the words signify, a failure potentially far more dangerous than the Florentine wars. Because of that lack of knowledge, Bertram mistakenly chooses commoner—in his alliance with Parolles, or his haste to the Florentine wars—an inversion that cannot obtain ultimately in the world of comedy. Only through his humiliation, as he is caught in a linguistic trap of Helena's devising, can Bertram fulfill the comedic formula of reconciliation. Although Diana speaks the riddling verse, Helena originates it, and it bears similarity to her incantatory charming of the King. Helena's inventions work, but Bertram's fail. While the aspirations for Helena, Parolles, and Bertram differ in degree, these inversions, given the construct of this play, strike the audience as illegitimate and unpleasantly manipulative be they male or female. As such the inversions violate and deny the comic.

It might appear that the dramatic structure of All's Well That Ends Well would be a parallelism of these three distinctions: public/domestic, mature/fool, and noble/commoner. But what is dramatic about the play is its inversion of public/domestic and mature/fool. This inversion takes place because the power of the king/subject distinction supplants that of the more generic noble/commoner one. The King can write new rules for the game. He can alter the standards at will to ordain the marriage of his unwilling ward, raise Helena in status, condemn and forgive both Diana and Bertram, promise yet another female commoner one of “This youthful parcel / Of noble bachelors [who] stand at [his] bestowing” (2.3.52-53). The language of power is almost always unobtainable for those in the marked class because the holders of power can change the language at will, thus changing the rules. Helena is an exception.

The play still fundamentally does not oppose male hegemony and the marked nature of the domestic sphere, however. What Helena wants—along with her Shakespearean sisters—is marriage (that she actually wants Bertram remains a disappointing reality for most of us). She wins in the end through her use of intelligence and through the inversion that places her in the serious moral and linguistically-sophisticated sphere and Bertram in the arena of the foolish and verbally inadequate. But the inversion takes place initially because Helena cures the King. From then on the King, the ultimate symbol of male controlling power, is on her side. What the play's end restores is marriage and the domestic sphere “the way it should be” in a comedy.

Viewed dialectically, both the King and Helena have different roles from the other characters in the play. For the others, distinctions such as male/female, noble/commoner are givens (preattentive distinctions); they assume that these distinctions are normal and thus cannot manipulate them or even understand why they are so. The King, on the other hand, understands and can manipulate the metalanguage of power. After Helena cures him, the King cancels for her not only the effect of commoner birth, but also female lack of power in the prerogative of marriage choice by means of the foregrounded and ordained marriage. Helena does not have the King's power, but she does have (perhaps) an even greater understanding of the metalanguage. What she understands is that when a woman can mobilize the solidarity of other women, as she does with the Countess, Diana, and the Widow, she can succeed—if the males do not notice any sex or class differences being violated; hence Helena's acquiescing to a subservient role. It is thus fitting that Bertram is such a weak character; in the dialectic of the play the King is Helena's true partner. And it is no wonder that he, along with us, is left trying to puzzle this comedy out in the Epilogue.

Notes

1. The fact that “girl gets boy” reverses the usual phrasing. What that reversal encompasses in the play's action helps to contribute to the noncomic atmosphere in All's Well That Ends Well, a point I take up later in the body of the essay.

2. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare.

3. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, or C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy for extended consideration of the function of marriage in comedy.

4. The phrase is from Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) and Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

5. Robert Ornstein comments on the implications of this feature, which Shakespeare appropriated from his source, Boccaccio's tale of Giletta and Beltramo; see his Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 173-78.

6. I agree with Irene Dash that while the play “throws both ideas [forced marriage vs. ‘good consent’] out to the audience … the comedy offers a remarkably mature affirmation of the potential for understanding between a man and a woman” (Dash 1981, 35, 64). The Taming of the Shrew’s plot contains that potential, while All's Well That Ends Well ends with a series of conditional “ifs” and “seems.”

7. Notable exceptions are Charles Marowitz's 1975 adaptation and the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1978 production; cf. David Bevington, “The Taming of the Shrew in Performance,” in Shakespeare: Four Comedies (New York: Bantam, 1988), 12.

8. Certainly one could argue that Claudio and Bertram are close kin in rejecting their brides. Claudio's accusation, however, breaks that nuptial before the ceremony is complete. Bertram must perforce go through the rite. He then vows not to consummate the marriage, which means it will remain a marriage in name only until Helena can meet his demands. Furthermore, in Much Ado about Nothing Hero remains offstage until the reconciliation while we must attend to Helena's actions in All's Well That Ends Well.

9. The question of Portia's and Helena's “submission” is beyond the focus of this study. Richard A. Levin's recent Love and Society In Shakespearean Comedy (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985) examines Portia's motivations while Bertrand Evans's Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960) and Howard C. Cole's The “All's Well” Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981) remain classic statements on Helena's assertive behavior.

10. For the way in which enforced marriage of a ward violates the guardian's responsibilities, see the discussion of All's Well That Ends Well in Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 59-64, or the analysis of what such considerations meant to women in Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 79-85.

11. I am not concerned here whether her arrival is by plan or happenstance.

12. Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983) is relevant here.

13. My discussion is grounded in the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor, 1967).

14. See Joan Larsen Klein, “Lady Macbeth: ‘Infirm of Purpose,’” in Carolyn Lenz, et al., eds., The Woman's Part (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 240-255.