SOURCE: “Imperial Love and the Dark House: All's Well That Ends Well,” in Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn, University of California Press, 1981, pp. 45-56.

[In the following excerpt, Wheeler examines the comic patterns of All's Well That Ends Well, claiming that they “radically change the comic spirit of All's Well from that of earlier comedies.”]

lavatch That man should be at woman's command, and yet no hurt done!
(I.iii.87-88)

Northrop Frye, in “The Argument of Comedy,” called attention to the unusual turn Shakespeare gives the typical comic pattern in All's Well:

The normal comic resolution is the surrender of the senex to the hero, never the reverse. Shakespeare tried to reverse the pattern in All's Well That Ends Well, where the king of France forces Bertram to marry Helena, and the critics have not yet stopped making faces over it.¹

In Shakespeare's comedies, however, the senex is rarely a competing suitor, and never is this role of central importance. Although the aged and wealthy Gremio courts Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio has his future wife's father—a more typical role for old men in Shakespearean comedy—on his side in courting Kate. Shakespeare regularly takes pains to see to it that loving couples will not have their love excessively obstructed or compromised by the jealous claims of fathers on their daughters. Once, with Oberon's help, love has worked itself out in the forest of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the obstructive Egeus is superseded by higher authority when Theseus sanctions the marriage of Hermia to Lysander. Egeus's role, though essential to the plot, is of minor significance in the drama of discordant love. When Bassanio solves the riddle of the caskets in The Merchant of Venice, that obstacle to marriage reveals itself as a symbol of protective paternal wisdom rather than unwarranted intrusion. Often the heroines have dead and esteemed fathers, like Portia or Viola or Beatrice, or loving and compliant ones like Rosalind, who in As You Like It succinctly expresses the liberation from paternal ties that facilitates romantic triumph in the comedies: “But what talk we of fathers when there is such a man as Orlando?” (III.iv.34-35). Villainous fathers, when they are central to comic plots, do not stand directly in the way of the principal loving union, nor do they effectively block the marriages of their own daughters. Shylock, for all the power he exerts in The Merchant of Venice, is easily evaded by Jessica; in As You Like It Celia marries a man whose lands have been seized by her father, the usurping Duke Frederick.

Comic heroes, like Orlando in As You Like It, also often have dead and esteemed fathers—when their parentage is mentioned at all. Living fathers of heroes appear on stage only in the first three comedies Shakespeare writes (Egeon in The Comedy of Errors; Vincentio, Lucentio's father in Shrew; and Antonio, father to Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), where the indebtedness to Terentian and Plautine models is strongest. Dead fathers who are mentioned do not reach out from the grave to obstruct the love plot. Indeed, Petruchio seems to feel liberated by his father's death in Shrew; Sir Rowland de Boys not only lives in spirit in Orlando, but his past friendship with the duke is instrumental in sealing Orlando's match with Rosalind in As You Like It.

But perhaps more significantly for understanding All's Well in relation to earlier comedies, no comic hero or heroine has a mother whose presence, either as memory or as living person, is of central importance (a curious exception occurs when the mother of the twin Syracrusians appears in the final scene of The Comedy of Errors). The mother, often the “son's ally” in New Comedy (Frye, “Argument,” p. 58), is virtually omitted from Shakespearean comedy, until she becomes a significant figure, first Bertram's ally, then Helena's, in All's Well. In those comic actions that dramatize the renewal of the family and the transmission of family heritage, Shakespeare, through the virtual elimination of mothers and the minimization of roles traditionally played by fathers in New Comedy, carefully plays down the potential for disruption in relations across generations.

With what Frye calls the reversal of the usual comic pattern in All's Well, such disruptions are introduced directly into the play. Conflict in All's Well invariably occurs in contexts that include a parent or surrogate parent, the countess, the king, or Diana's mother, all of whom are present and important in the final scene. All's Well begins with a potential loosening of family ties as Bertram prepares to leave home for the court. Like many comparable characters in the festive comedies, both Bertram and Helena have recently lost to death worthy fathers. The value of each of them is understood in relation to that father; Helena “inherits” her father's disposition, Bertram his “father's face,” and, the king hopes, his “moral parts” as well. Like Viola and Olivia in Twelfth Night, each has the task of going beyond mourning to find his or her own place in life, and each has a plan for doing this. But the movement outward into adult identities is greatly complicated in All's Well by developments that relate the younger generation to the old.

These complications consistently redefine the young characters in their roles as children—Bertram as promising then as rebellious son, Helena as virtuous and increasingly beloved daughter. Bertram will find at court a “father” in the king, who will also serve, in Lafew's explanation, as a “husband” to the countess. The countess also becomes a mother to Helena: “If she had partaken of my flesh and cost me the dearest groans of a mother, I could not have owed her a more rooted love” (IV.v.9-11). Family bonds are not severed by death, but reconstructed and rescued from death. The countess, who often talks about dying, is greeted by Helena in the final scene: “O my dear mother, do I see you living?” (V.iii.316). The king, rather than die from his fistula, becomes through Helena's cure “of as able body as when he numbered thirty” (IV.v.75-76). This play, which begins with the separation of children from parents, ends when Diana's mother brings Helena on stage, to be presented to the king and the countess as well as to Bertram. The final union of the young couple is defined, not by its liberation from ties of family, but by parental sanction retrieved from the threat of parental repudiation and punishment.

These altered conditions radically change the comic spirit of All's Well from that of earlier comedies. But perhaps they represent less a reversal of Shakespeare's usual comic pattern than a forcing into the action of conditions latent in previous plays. Shakespearean comedy, like New Comedy, dramatizes the cultural crisis perpetually reenacted when bonds of family and friendship must yield to sexual passion and the bond of marriage. The movement through and beyond friendship plays a prominent role, often more visible than the movement beyond family, in these plays. In The Merchant of Venice, Bassanio must be freed from the binding power of Antonio's love, as in Much Ado About Nothing Benedick must be freed from his self-identification as soldier and comrade, if the key marriages of these plays are to be completed. In Merchant, a crisis in the friendship of Bassanio and Antonio temporarily disrupts the marriage of Bassanio and Portia; the disrupted wedding of Claudio to Hero forces a crisis in Benedick's friendship with Claudio in Much Ado. In As You Like It, Rosalind exploits her disguise as Ganymede by forming a friendship with Orlando. As Ganymede, and as Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind, Rosalind uses the familiarity of friendship Orlando grants her as a boy to bring his naive love a step closer to an awareness of the human properties of his exalted beloved. In each case, a liberation from or a movement through and beyond friendship is performed that is consistent with the capacity Bertram develops to free himself from Parolles, although this friendship is unusual among the comedies in being presented as a bogus relationship in and of itself. More important, however, for understanding All's Well in relation to earlier comedies are complications in the comic movement beyond family ties.

Frye suggested that New Comedy dramatizes a “comic Oedipus situation” in which a young man (the son in the Oedipus triangle) outwits a father or father-figure to win the love of a young woman (“Argument,” p. 58).² Such a heroine presents an image of the youthful mother that a son loved and thought himself to possess as a child. In this framework, the comic movement toward marriage builds on fantasies of triumphant return to a time in which a boy thought himself in complete possession of a mother's love, and the father could still be regarded as an unwelcome intruder, susceptible, at least in the child's imagination, to magical exclusion. The cunning slave, so often the young hero's ally in New Comedy, and the “efficient cause” (p. 59) in Frye's analysis, perhaps represents an extension of this magical resourcefulness, serving the son's sexual aspirations, and yet independent enough of him to preserve his innocence in the contest with the father. The “material cause,” Frye argued, is the “young man's sexual desire,” which may be fulfilled when “it turns out that she [the young woman, “usually a slave or courtesan”] is not under an insuperable taboo after all but is an accessible object of desire, so that the plot follows the regular wish-fulfillment pattern” (pp. 58, 59). In Shakespearean comedy, however, the young man rarely seems to be driven by overpowering sexual longing, and the women are typically high-born daughters of noble fathers, suggesting that the Oedipus situation stands in a very different relation to the comic action than in Plautus or Terrence.

Freud has shown that a typical result of the incest barrier formed by repression is to deflect the feelings of young men for women along two different paths: toward sexual relations with women who are in some way degraded, and toward idealized and sexually inhibited relations with women chosen after the model of the mother.³ The device in New Comedy by which the sexually desired young woman often turns out to be nobly born after all is a way of synthesizing in drama these two separate paths, so that they ultimately converge on the same woman. But in the two comedies that seem most closely to resemble All's Well, particularly in the characterization of the heroine, Bassanio's love for Portia and Orlando's love for Rosalind follow the idealization pattern from the beginning. Bassanio loves a Portia of “wondrous virtues” (I.i.163), Orlando the “fair, the chaste, and unexpressive” (III.ii.10) Rosalind; neither expresses nor demonstrates compelling sexual ardor. And very little happens in these plays to suggest that either Bassanio or Orlando has been liberated significantly from the “aim-inhibited,” idealizing trends in their loves.

Orlando and Bassanio are less driven by a desire to possess their women sexually than to be possessed by them, and the possession they long for seems to exclude or minimize sexual desire. Orlando, for instance, associating Rosalind with the chaste goddess Diana, longs to surround himself with a forest in which every tree will bear “thy huntress' name that my full life doth sway” (III.ii.4). The heroines seem to be attractive to these men because of their susceptibility to idealization and their practical strength and resourcefulness in creating conditions that make the marriage arrangements possible.

Sexual desire for men in such comedies tends to be deflected away from the hero into the language, and sometimes the actions, of secondary figures, especially clowns or fools. Touchstone, for instance, wittily deflates romantic love to mere sexual desire, both in his bawdy recasting of Orlando's poetry and in his pursuit of the country wench Audrey. C. L. Barber catches exactly the dramatic purpose Touchstone serves in relation to the “play's romance”: “the fool's cynicism, or one-sided realism, forestalls the cynicism with which the audience might greet a play where his sort of realism has been ignored.”⁴ But the separation of “instinct” in Touchstone from idealizing sentiment in Orlando suggests psychological necessity as well as dramatic strategy in As You Like It. Orlando fills perfectly the role Shakespeare gives him, but that role reflects constraints essential to Orlando's relation to the psychological base of comic form in the festive comedies, which demands that ardent sexual longing and idealizing love be kept separate. Touchstone's function is not only to counterpoint the hero's idealizing love, but to protect it. The force of sexual degradation and the threat of sexual anxiety are released through the fool's bawdy wit without invading the hero's love; but the full integration of sexual desire and serious love remains a promise, not an achieved dramatic reality, at the play's end.

Bassanio and Orlando pursue an image of the beloved that builds on a child's need to inhabit a world presided over by a benevolent, powerful mother, a need strong enough that a boy sacrifices his sexual claim on a mother to it when desire and dependence come into conflict with each other. This need is vital particularly at those moments when a child relinquishes his precarious autonomy for a reassuring maternal presence able to supplant threatening reality with magically protective intimacy. The dramatic resolutions of Merchant and As You Like It are curiously akin to such moments. Portia presides over the end of Merchant, teasing and generous, seductive and aloof, furnishing from within her position of complete control a wife for Bassanio and “life and living” for Antonio. Rosalind, as she accepts in the last scene of As You Like It her womanly positions as daughter and wife, provides magical dispensations of happiness through union and reunion that suggest the intervention of a generous mother to put things right. Indeed, Rosalind has overseen the boyish tribulations of Orlando, and of Silvius as well, with the playful, semi-indulgent patience of a confident mother observing and directing the games of children. Lorenzo's closing remark to Portia and Nerissa assimilates them to the need for loving nurture that forms the first bond of love an infant experiences: “Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starvèd people” (V.i.294-95). Each of these plays culminates in a gesture of submission before the magical, maternal presence of a strong, wise, loving woman. In these plays, Shakespeare must deemphasize the potential for parental conflict and with it the sexual dimension of desire, because the hero's love includes within itself a need for maternal presence potentially disruptive of the movement into the sexual bond of marriage.

Bertram closely resembles such heroes as Bassanio and Orlando. All are young, inexperienced, eager, ambitious; each has less depth of characterization than the woman he marries. Each is intent on a course of self-fulfillment, which Bassanio and Orlando are able to achieve because of the actions of Portia and Rosalind. But Bertram is unable to achieve what he wants because of the actions of Helena. With the formidable backing of the king and the countess, characters who have no very exact predecessors in the festive comedies, Helena presses the comic hero for the first time to come to terms with a sexual bond within the play itself. Dramatically, the presence of the older generation intensifies the stress brought on by this alteration of the comic plot. Psychologically, however, the presence of the king and countess does not so much engender conflict as represent the unconscious association of sexuality and family ties forced into the action in All's Well when the marriage is pushed forward into the second act.

The clown's role in All's Well reflects the changes that occur in the main plot. Lavatch, whom Frye calls “the most mirthless even of Shakespeare's clowns,”⁵ and who is often regarded as a rather desperate departure from his predecessors,⁶ can behave much like earlier clowns, as when he wittily exposes Parolles as a fool (II.iv.) or plays on the sexual connotations of his “bauble” (IV.v.). When he first appears, Lavatch seems to be a nearly direct descendant of Touchstone, who in As You Like It justifies his marriage to Audrey as a necessary accommodation to the constraints and liabilities of sexual drives: “As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling” (III.iii.69-71). Lavatch would marry Isbel because “my poor body, madam, requires it.” Like Touchstone, he is “driven on by my flesh,” though he introduces a rather darker association than Touchstone's analogies from the animal kingdom: “he must needs go that the devil drives” (I.iii.28-30). But instead of resigning himself to cuckoldry in marriage (like Touchstone: “As horns are odious, they are necessary” [III.iii.45-46]), Lavatch welcomes it,

for the knaves come to do that for me which I am aweary of. He that ears my land spares my team and gives me leave to in the crop; if I be his cuckold, he’s my druge. (I.iii.40-43)

By the time he returns from court, bringing Bertram's letter instead of Bertram himself, “your old ling and your Isbels o’ th’ court” have led Lavatch to forgo sexual desire altogether: “The brains of my Cupid's knocked out, and I begin to love, as an old man loves money, with no stomach” (III.ii.14-16).

When he declares that he has lost his stomach for passion, Lavatch parodies and generalizes Bertram's response to marital sexuality; each response serves, in a different way, a common purpose. Lavatch makes the connection between the two when he comments on Bertram's flight. Since her son has run away, Lavatch tells the countess, Bertram “will not be killed so soon as I thought he would. … The danger is in standing to’t; that’s the loss of men, though it be the getting of children” (III.ii.36-37; 40-41). Lavatch here identifies sexuality and emasculation in precisely the way Bertram identifies them when he rejects his marriage to Helena. Bertram's flight from marital sexuality, from “the dark house and the detested wife,” is matched by his flight into licentious sexuality apart from marriage; both flights reflect his vulnerability in relations to women, and both are related to the more general rejection of sexual desire expressed by Lavatch.

“A shrewd knave and an unhappy,” Lavatch remains at Rossillion by the authority of Bertram's dead father, who “made himself much sport out of him” (IV.v.59-61). Although he is not a member of the Rossillion family, part of his role is to articulate tensions generated by the pervasive concern with family bonds in this play. Lavatch is like a child who endures all the inhibiting force of parental constraints, and who exchanges the right to grow beyond them into manhood for the clown's privilege of expressing with witty aggression the child's anxieties in an adult world that is both his home and his confinement. When he recounts his withdrawal from sexual desire, Lavatch expresses the most primitive, infantile level of Bertram's response to marriage with Helena. But that response, like the sexual anxiety that engenders it, threatens the effort to affirm a masculine identity. Bertram's compulsive effort to seduce Diana in Florence suggests that his seductive ardor is a means of defending himself against complete surrender to sexual inhibition so that he may prove to himself that his potency has survived the threat aroused by the incestuous dimension of his marriage.

Earlier, when Lavatch is accused by the countess of corrupting a song, he claims to have accomplished a “purifying” of it, for he has sung the prospect of “one good woman in ten. … Would God would serve the world so all the year! … An we might have a good woman born but or every blazing star, or at an earthquake, ’twould mend the lottery well; a man may draw his heart out ere ’a pluck one” (I.iii.78-84). Here Lavatch does not speak the bawdy raillery of earlier clowns but an ironically detached version of the misogyny that torments Hamlet and Iago. All's Well belongs to a phase of Shakespeare's development when the forceful presence of a woman is often perceived, or misperceived, as a deep threat to a tragic hero's manhood. Lavatch gives comic voice to a mistrust of women as potential destroyers of manhood tragically present in Hamlet and Othello. When the countess commands him to “be gone,” Lavatch responds: “That man should be at woman's command, and yet no hurt done!” (I.iii.85; 87-88). Lavatch's droll, ironic astonishment, if expressed in a more desperate vein, would indicate that point at which Bertram's experience breaks with that of earlier comic heroes and links up with the world of Hamlet and the tragedies. When Parolles counsels flight for Bertram, he speaks to a center of anxiety in the young count analogous to the vulnerability Iago exploits when he urges Othello to “be a man” (IV.i.65) by destroying the unsettling sexual presence of Desdemona. Bertram's flight, indeed, is a comic version of such destruction, completed symbolically by Helena's apparent death, by Bertram's relief that she is dead, and by the king's suspicion in the last act that Bertram may have been directly responsible for killing her.

In both Bassanio's high-spirited journey to Belmont and Orlando's venture to find “some settled low content” (II.iii.68) in Arden, the young hero's effort to set out for himself is inseparable from his effort to court the heroine. Each of these young men pursues his own ends within relationships that come under the pervasive control of the heroine, until his own adventure of self-definition is absorbed into a comic movement that culminates when the heroine puts every one in place, including the hero, in the festive community she has created. The ready compliance of earlier comic heroes gives way to recalcitrance in All's Well when Bertram encounters the demand that he submit himself sexually to a woman he sees as part of his family, and who is backed by a king whose manhood nullifies his own. But when the force behind his aversion to Helena is acknowledged, Bertram's actions seem less those of a uniquely reprehensible character than those of a typical comic hero who finds himself at the center of deep psychological conflict from which his predecessors have been carefully protected.

Bertram's response to Helena creates for Shakespeare an unprecedented conflict between the inner dimension of Bertram's experience and the demands of comic form. This conflict expresses the tension between comic form as Shakespeare has used it up to this point and developments that have recentered his art in tragedy. Bertram's flight from Helena and his quest for autonomous selfhood develop in embryonic and ultimately aborted form psychological issues dealt with masterfully and sympathetically in the tragedies; the form of the play extends the movement toward marriage, often presided over by a strong, active woman, which works out happily in the festive comedies. This tension between the play's design and its psychological content can only be intensified by efforts to resolve it. Helena can meet Bertram's mocking conditions for accepting the marriage only by becoming more powerful and sexually aggressive. But her efforts exaggerate conditions responsible for his initial flight. Whatever Bertram's accomplishments in Italy (and no other comic hero can offer comparable achievements), from the perspective of his home and the French court Bertram becomes increasingly boyish and dependent, Helena increasingly a woman of exceptional strength and virtue, until they almost seem to parody the subtler mismatches of Bassanio with Portia, Orlando with Rosalind.

It could be argued that the completion of their sexual union in Florence exorcises incestuous associations that have interrupted their marriage; Bertram does have intercourse with Helena, and makes her pregnant, even though he thinks she is someone else. But the play does little to suggest that the bed trick, which allows the comic plot to be completed, significantly alters the psychological conditions that have made it necessary. The integration of sexuality and the marriage bond thus accomplished seems to be almost purely contractual, a near fulfillment of the terms Bertram has expressed in his letter to Helena:

When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never.’

(III.ii.56-59)

When Bertram receives news that Helena is dead, he tucks his hasty grief among the “sixteen businesses” he transacts in his busy last night in Florence, including his apparent seduction of Diana and his witnessing of Parolles' exposure. Helena's death fulfills a wish generated by his position in the play; as the king later says, “thou didst hate her deadly, / And she is dead” (V.iii.117-18). With Helena dead, Bertram can return home to “my lady mother.” But the strongly developed movement toward illicit sexuality for Bertram is never countered by a comparable movement toward acceptance of the marriage to Helena. The brief exchange between Helena and Bertram when they are united in the final scene, though it can be bolstered by theatrical production, hardly seems substantial enough to provide a fully dramatic resolution of the complex psychological conflict that has led into it. Bertram briefly acknowledges that Helena is a wife both in name and substance: “Both, both; O, pardon!” (V.iii.304). When presented with his ring and his letter, “doubly won” Bertram responds with this rather dismal and curiously conditional couplet—addressed not to Helena, but to the king: “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / I’ll love her dearly—ever, ever dearly” (V.iii.312-13).

Bassanio is not much more, and Orlando even less, loquacious when, the complications of their plays finally resolved, these men are united with their spouses. But in both Merchant and As You Like It, these inevitable unions, unobstructed by any reluctance on the part of the comic heroes, are carried by the sweeping force of festive celebrations of marriage and community. Instead of dramatizing conditions that facilitate a completed union between Bertram and Helena, the last scene of All's Well emphasizes Bertram's place in the social and moral world of the king—first by the effort to find a marriage that the king can newly sanction and then by the considerable energy expended in showing how badly Bertram has behaved, and continues to behave, as his new beginning in France inaugurates a new set of lies on his part. …

Notes

1. English Institute Essays 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 59.

2. For a more rigorously psychoanalytic consideration of this comic pattern, see Ludwig Jekels, “On the Psychology of Comedy” (1926), tr. I. Jarosy, in Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lautner (New York: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 424-31.

3. “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 11 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 179-90.

4. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 232.

5. A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 105.

6. Lawrence found Lavatch “a thoroughly unsavory fellow” who ordinarily provides “rather poor comic relief”; like Parolles, he has “none of the geniality with which Shakespeare often endows his depraved characters” (Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, pp. 64-65, 66). E. M. W. Tillyard saw in Lavatch “the Clown who hates being such” (Shakespeare's Problem Plays [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949], p. 111).