SOURCE: “New Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 23-43.

[In the following essay, Miola studies Shakespeare's adaptation of Latin New Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well.]

We are all familiar with the traditional understanding of sources: a source is a previous text that shapes a present one through authorial reminiscence and manifests itself in verbal iteration. As the seminal works of Baldwin, Muir, and Bullough amply demonstrate, this definition has served us long and well, but every element in it has undergone intense scrutiny and reevaluation. Scholars now recognize the potential limitations of a linear, author-centered, and largely verbal approach and have become attuned to the likelihood of intermediation, the encodings implicit in genre and language, the more oblique and more satisfying evidence of configuration—both rhetorical and dramatic. Within the spacious perspectives provided by scholars like Leo Salingar, Emrys Jones, Gordon Braden, Harry Levin, Alan Dessen, and Louise George Clubb (who has coined the term “theatergram” for certain kinds of configuration), we may well reexamine the sources of Shakespearean comedy. I shall study here the influence of New Comedy on All's Well, particularly the shaping presence of stock situations and characters including the important and enormously flexible traditions associated with the miles gloriosus, the braggart soldier.¹

Joseph G. Price has documented critical dissatisfaction with All's Well That Ends Well, particularly with Helena's trickery, Bertram's callowness, and the constrained reconciliation. Noting affinities with Measure for Measure, readers have usually labeled All's Well a “problem play,” one that imperfectly mixes realism and romance, characterization and convention.² Commentators have analyzed the mix by examining various ingredients—the folk tale, morality play, contemporary drama, and Italian novelle, especially the ultimate source, Boccaccio's Decameron, day three, novel nine, the tale of Giletta of Narbonne.³ Despite Shakespeare's pervasive indebtedness throughout his career to Plautus and Terence, no one has yet considered fully the contributions of Latin New Comedy to the shaping of this play. This neglect seems all the more striking when we recall that Boccaccio studied New Comedy well (he copied out by hand all of Terence) and that Hecyra is a well-recognized antecedent of the tale of Giletta.⁴

All's Well is a sophisticated recension of New Comedic themes, conventions, and characters, which draws upon Shakespeare's earlier adaptations of Plautus and Terence.⁵ Like the Errors plays—The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night—it features in its end false accusation, arrest, and mistaken identity. The humiliation of Malvolio prefigures in salient ways that of Parolles. Like the Intrigue plays—The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing—All's Well features tricky deceptions and, as a focal point, a broken nuptial which the action works to mend.⁶ As in Shrew the mending coincides with the taming of one partner, here Bertram. And Shakespeare reveals in this young man, as he had in Claudio, the theatrical and moral limitations of the Plautine adulescens. Moreover, All's Well bears interesting similarities to Shakespeare's Merry Wives, his earlier exploration of the miles gloriosus. Both plays blend Roman comedy and folk tale; both balance the exposure of the braggart with an inset Plautine love affair, namely, the wooings of Anne Page and Diana Capilet. And, most important, both plays scrutinize the miles gloriosus. All's Well, however, divides the military and amorous aspirations of the character into separate but related incarnations—Parolles and Bertram. Injecting Parolles into Boccaccio's tale, Shakespeare creates a perspective that clarifies the ordeal and exposure of Bertram. Like classical amorous soldiers, Bertram displays the characteristic folly of overestimating himself and underestimating another, particularly a woman. All's Well represents a more complex treatment of the miles than does Wives and, whatever its shortcomings, shows a more purposeful matching and balancing of braggart soldiers. In fact, its construction according to the Andria five-act formula,⁷ its use of the double action and rhetorical argument (the discussions of virginity and honor), its daring and skillful handling of traditions and its knowing inversion of New Comedic elements make it Shakespeare's most Terentian comedy.

Discussing an archetypal comic pattern “in which a senex iratus or other humor gives way to a young man's desires,” Northrop Frye, in passing, brilliantly observes: “The sense of the comic norm is so strong that when Shakespeare, by way of experiment, tried to reverse the pattern in All's Well, in having two older people force Bertram to marry Helena, the result has been an unpopular ‘problem’ play, with a suggestion of something sinister about it.”⁸ Though many variations appear in New Comedy and Shakespeare, there are still enough irate fathers in both to validate Frye's perception of the comic norm. (We think of Theoproprides, Mostellaria, Demea, Adelphoe, Egeus, Leonato, Page, Capulet, and others.) Here Shakespeare seems to have gone out of his way to violate the norm, to portray a different older generation, one sympathetic to young love, at least to Helena's.⁹ He introduces the Countess and Lafew, without precedent in Boccaccio or Painter, and expands greatly the role of the king. Remembering her own youthful fancies—“this thorn / Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong” (1.3.124-25)—the Countess comforts the lovelorn Helena and promises aid. This sympathetic portrayal, it should be noted, is not wholly without precedent in the ancients. Plautus and Terence occasionally depicted parents indulgent of the amorous young. Compare, e.g., the reaction of Philoxenus on hearing of his son's adventures: “Minus mirandumst, illaec aetas si quid illorum facit, / quam si non faciat. Feci ego istaec itidem in adulescentia. (Bacchides, 409-10). “It’s less surprising to have a youngster up to something of that kind than not. I’ve done the same sort of thing myself in my younger days.”

Still, the countess becomes irata later in the play, recovering and inverting the wrathful energies of the stereotype. After learning of Bertram's flight to battle, she declares: “He was my son, / But I do wash his name out of my blood / And thou art all my child” (3.2.66-68). This extraordinary threat echoes the sentiments of many other angry parents in comedy: it is, in Terence's words, “vi et via pervolgata patrum” (Heautontimorumenos, 102), “the violent line that is common with parents.” Reproaching himself for having taken this line with his son, who had fallen for a poor foreign girl, Menedemus remembers his exact words: “Ego te meum esse dici tantisper volo, dum quod te dignumst facies; sed si id non facis, ego quod me in te sit facere dignum invenero” (ibid., 106-8). “I am ready that you should be called my son just so far as you do what befits you; if you act otherwise you will see me find the fitting way to deal with you.” In Shakespeare, however, the parent makes the threat of dissociation for precisely the opposite reason: the countess is angry not because her son loves a lower-class woman but because he fails to.

The old Lafew, also without precedent in the source tale, likewise reverses conventional expectations, supporting poor maidenly virtue against titled arrogance. He praises Helena's “wisdom and constancy” (2.1.83), shows his admiration in the selection scene (2.3), and, supposing Helena dead, praises her, “Whose beauty did astonish the survey / Of richest eyes; whose words all ears took captive; / Whose dear perfection hearts that scorn’d to serve / Humbly call’d mistress” (5.3.16-19). The king, old friend of the dead count, formally and legally (1.1.4-5) acts as Bertram's father. In exchange for the miraculous cure he accedes to her choice of husband and responds generously to Bertram's indignant hauteur:

Bertram. But follows it, my
lord, to bring me down
Must answer for your raising? I know her well:
She had her breeding at my father's charge—
A poor physician's daughter my wife! Disdain
Rather corrupt me ever!
King. ’Tis only title thou
disdain’st in her, the which
I can build up. (2.3.112-18)

Here the building humor, a headstrong and prideful concern with title and social status, originates in the son, not the father. Helena's virtues, the king goes on to argue, “breed” the very honor that Bertram thinks she lacks; besides, as king, he can bestow wealth and name.¹⁰ This scene reverses the common configuration of New Comedy, where fathers frequently oppose the marriage of their sons to lower-class women. We recall the situations in Mostellaria, Bacchides, Cistellaria, Andria; the senex amans variations—with the father blocking because he wants the girl for himself—in Casina, Mercator; and the complex handlings of Terence in Heautontimorumenos and Adelphoe. We may also remember a Shakespearean example that reverses the genders: Page plays angry father to his daughter, blocking Fenton's hopes because of his reputation: “He kept company with / the wild Prince and Poins” (3.2.72-73).

Shakespeare carefully plans his inversion of the New Comedic paradigm. Making Helena poor, unlike the noble Giletta, he focuses on internal honor not on social status. As Clubb observes, Shakespeare creates a spiritualized innamorata, the “woman as wonder” who often manifests in Italian comedy the workings of divine providence. Part untitled virgo, part wondrous woman, part simple serving maid, part religious sermonizer (2.1.133 ff.), part incantatory folk-tale sorceress (160 ff.), Helena persuades the king and audience of her good intentions and power. Undertaking the cure, she names the punishments that may befall her for failure: “Tax of impudence, / A strumpet's boldness, a divulged shame, / Traduc’d by odious ballads; my maiden's name / Sear’d otherwise; ne worst of worst, extended / With vilest torture, let my life be ended” (169-73). Even though Helena has an ulterior motive, the willingness to risk all is an impressive act of faith. And it is no accident that Helena's alter ego Diana will suffer the tax of impudence while Helena herself is counted dead—these two ordeals recalling this pledge and linking Helena's curing of the king with her curing of Bertram. Helena's willingness to risk differentiates her from the classical virgo, often mute, passive, and off-stage, sometimes pathetic (Palaestra in Rudens), rarely spirited (Saturio's daughter in Persa), but never a complex woman capable of self-sacrifice. Unlike them, Helena is equally unlike the devious meretrix many critics make her out to be, the passionate schemer relentlessly serving selfish desires.¹¹ Helena trusts in her dead father's art and depends on circumstances and on Providence throughout the play, her actions, as she says, “sanctified / By th’luckiest stars in heaven” (1.3.240-41). “Heaven hath through me restor’d the king to health” (2.3.64), she declares, and the play repeatedly insists on the formulation (2.1.150-51, 153; 2.3.23, 31, 65; 3.4.27). The word “grace,” like “heaven,” also comes to suggest the greater power aiding Helena: she swears “by grace itself” (1.3.215), invokes “the greatest Grace lending grace” (2.1.159), gets eulogized by Lavatch as “the herb of grace” (4.5.16). Helena is far from a determined schemer. When Bertram rejects her, she backs down and abandons the whole plan, saying to the king, “That you are well restor’d, my lord, I’m glad. / Let the rest go” (2.3.147-48). And when she receives the cruel conditions for marriage with Bertram, she undertakes a pilgrimage. She does not, as does Giletta, immediately purpose “to finde meanes to attaine the two thinges, that thereby she might recover her husbande” (Bullough, 2: 392). Neither overly ingenuous (as portrayed in many sentimental adaptations, beginning with that of John Philip Kemble, 1793) or overly ingenious, Helena makes one with Shakespeare's other Plautine heroines—Bianca, Hero, Anne Page, and especially Viola—those adapted virgines who make their own occasions mellow, who show sweet passivity as well as a capacity for independent action and intrigue that any callidus servus might admire.

Cast by others in the role of the adulescens, Bertram pointedly refused to play the part. Unlike those impetuous young men in New Comedy, the yearning Philolaches (Mostellaria), Alcesimarchus (Cistellaria), Chaerea (Eunuchus), or Pamphilus (Andria), he is cold, unmoved, and slow to temptation. To use Harry Levin's terms, this playboy is a killjoy. He rejects Helena not because he loves someone else or does not love her, but because he, like Beltramo, knows her “not to be of a stocke convenable to his nobility” (Bullough, 2: 391). Subscribing to an inflated notion of himself and the worth of his aristocratic blood, he refuses to look upon Helena, to regard her much-praised virtue and beauty and her near-miraculous powers. He never sees the woman herself, but only “a poor physician's daughter” (2.3.115). Bertram's objection to Helena's social status contrasts with the ardency of classical youths, who fall for every species of the unprivileged—lowly flute girls, courtesans, foreigners, and foundlings. So too does his desire for death or exile—typically the desperate options of the unrequited adulescens, not the requited one.¹² Bertram's overestimation of himself and underestimation of Helena, here contrasted to the courteous responses of the other nobles, evidence the same folly that will prize Parolles and misprize Diana. This folly, as the king immediately perceives, springs from delusions about human worth, phrased as delusions about the nature of honor. In both amorous and military endeavors, Bertram values too highly external trappings and pays too little mind to that within which passeth show.

Shakespeare initiates the processus turbarum of All's Well by declining and recombining both the characters and situations of New Comedy. At the heart of Shakespeare's new creation is the miles gloriosus, whom both Greek and Latin New Comic dramatists portrayed with dual aspect—that of braggart warrior and boasting lover. An Italian descendant, Della Porta's Martebellonio neatly illustrates both aspects of the traditional figure: …

I believe it’s no less a sign of power and greatness to wound a body with one's sword than a soul with one's glances: well may I deem myself glorious among men, for I’m as powerful in the one way as in the other; for no man, no matter how hardy, can stand up to me when I have my sword in hand, nor any woman, no matter how chaste and unbending, can resist the onslaught of my glances; and if with the sword I can pierce to the heart, with my eyes I make the deepest wounds, which penetrate to the very soul. (Porta, 198-201)

In All's Well Shakespeare embodies the military and amorous aspects of the stereotype in separate characters, Parolles and Bertram, and sets up parallel ordeals and recognitions. So doing, he anatomizes the braggart's vice of overvaluing the self and undervaluing others. Accolti's Virginia, Cole (128-29) observes, may supply some precedent for the invention of Parolles as an ironic counterpart; there Ruffo's humiliation parallels and prefigures his master's. In All's Well Parolles's expedition for the lost drum parallels Bertram's affair with Diana Capilet, and one exposure serves as prelude to the next. Striking a balance (however precarious) between moral satire and romantic comedy, Shakespeare shows himself here a perfectly orthodox neoclassicist. For such a balance, Smith (134-98) has well demonstrated, characterizes Renaissance (and later) productions of Plautus and Terence in England, whether academic, courtly, or popular.

As Nicholas Rowe recognized in 1709, Parolles combines two New Comedic types: “The Parasite and the Vain-glorious in Parolles, in All's Well That Ends Well, is as good as any thing of that Kind in Plautus or Terence.”¹³ In his own words, Parolles is a “braggart … found a ass” (4.3.325), a miles gloriosus, one whom audiences have delighted in at least since the time of Theophilus Cibber's performance in the role (1742). Blustering descendant of the archetypal Lamachos (Aristophanes' Acharnians), kin to Armado, Pistol, and Falstaff, Parolles speaks the magnifica verba (Eunuchus, 741) of Thraso or Pyrgopolynices, boasting of past exploits like the wounding of one Captain Spurio (appropriately named) (2.1.41), patronizing the younger nobles, “Mars dote on you for his novices!” (2.1.46), carrying on preposterously about his lost drum. Shakespeare prepares for the grand humiliation of Parolles by using two popular stage routines that characterized and exposed the braggart. The first, amply documented by Boughner (84 ff.), is the rationalized retreat, the invention of some absurd excuse to avoid confrontation. When Helena mocks him for his cowardice, Parolles lamely responds, “I am so full of businesses I cannot answer thee / acutely” (1.1.202-203); he hastily changes the subject and exits. The second is the entrance of the adversary immediately after the braggart makes empty threats.¹⁴ Miles enters to bash and abash the blustering Thersites in an early Tudor play (Thersites [1537]); in a later one Downright arrives to beat Bobadill, who has just vowed to “bastinado” him (Every Man in His Humour [1598], 4.5.94 ff.). After Parolles declares “I’ll / beat him and if I could but meet him again” (2.3.236-37), Lafew reenters and continues his abuse: “If I were but two hours younger I’d beat / thee” (249-50). The strutting Hercules becomes the quivering Aguecheek. Like his classical forebears, Parolles fools very few. Helena taunts him for retreating from battle (1.1.194 ff.); Lafew mocks him mercilessly, calling him a “window of lattice” (2.3.212), thus recalling Pistol's “red-lattice phrases” in Wives (2.2.27); the Clown knows him for a “knave” (2.4.28); Diana calls him “that jackanapes with scarfs” (3.5.85); the French lords think him a “hilding” and a “bubble” (3.6.3, 5). Only Bertram considers Parolles “very great in knowledge, and accordingly valiant” (2.5.7-8). So thinking, he is much less perceptive than the others in the play, not to speak of Palaestrio and Gnatho, the slave and parasite who serve their boastful masters only to serve their turns upon them.

Bertram's misperceptions are precisely at issue throughout the play, and they stand for stringent correction as Parolles reveals his true nature. In the company of the lords Bertram goes from gull to intriguer, inveigling Parolles to go fetch his drum, participating fully in the false capture. First there is the eavesdropping, then the elaborate masquerade. Like Falstaff at Gadshill, the blindfolded Parolles shows his mendacity and cowardice spectacularly; he, too, carries an incriminating paper in his pocket, not a bill for sack but the letter to Diana. This letter speaks truly of Bertram as “a fool, and full of gold,” as one who “ne’er pays after-debts” (4.3.202, 218). It also betrays Bertram's friendship, a betrayal that appears even worse in light of Parolles's function as ring-carrier and the hint of his own amorous intentions, “Men are to mell with, boys are not to kiss,” “Thine, as he vow’d to thee in thine ear, / Parolles” (4.3.220, 223-24). Parolles's exposure is thoroughly Plautine. Like Pyrgopolynices, Parolles stands admist a group of hostile, jeering persecutors and begs for mercy. The Roman boaster loses permanently his tunic, military cloak and sword, “de tunica et chlamyde et machaera ne quid speres, non feres” (1423); Parolles will lose his scarves and bannerets, symbols of his vanity. “The soul of this man,” Lafew well observes, “is his clothes” (2.5.43-44). Boughner (80 f.) notes, Italian comedy reappropriates and refines such stripping, often depicting the soldier in woman's clothing or the rag-clad poverty of the bravo. Shakespeare here adopts the second alternative, later portraying Parolles as a wretched beggar (5.2). Thus he reveals the parasite in the miles gloriosus, that core of predatory self-interest also displayed in the ignoble and impecunious ends of Pistol, Nym, and Falstaff.¹⁵ Both ancient and Renaissance braggart are thankful to escape with their lives: Pyrgopolynices: “Gratiam habeo tibi” (1425); Parolles: “Yet am I thankful” (4.3.319).

Parolles's exposure reveals Bertram's capacity for misjudgment. And though the audience may profit from the knowledge, Bertram, as his behavior in the last two acts shows, seems no wiser for the experience. He does not, as the first lord hopes, “take / a measure of his judgments wherein so curi- / ously he had set this counterfeit” (4.3.31-33). Shakespeare does not conceive of comic character according to modern expectations, which would have Bertram learn from his mistakes and travel a well-marked path to self-knowledge; the play is not a Bildungsroman.¹⁶ Instead, in the manner of classical comedy, Shakespeare creates a comic action which exposes errors of mind …¹⁷ He presents Parolles and Bertram as characters subordinate to this action, as soldier-lovers who complement each other in significant ways and in small details. Praying to Mars, Bertram declares himself, like Parolles, “A lover of thy drum” (3.3.11). Parolles, we have seen, is a would-be suitor of Diana.

How carefully Shakespeare interweaves the two dupings in Italy is clear even from cursory examination. The night of Parolles's imprisonment coincides with Bertram's rendezvous. Shakespeare presents the two comic actions in alternating scenes, beginning with 3.5, Helena's arrival and the procession, followed by 3.6, the hatching of the plot against Parolles, 3.7, the hatching of the plot against Bertram, 4.1 the springing of the first plot, 4.2, the springing of the second, 4.3 the exposure of Parolles, 4.4, preparation for the exposure of Bertram. What is more, Shakespeare unites the two actions by use of military imagery such that Parolles's solitary expedition in quest of the lost drum, the “instrument of honour” (3.6.62), parallels Bertram's expedition to Diana, questing after “the spoil of her honour.” (4.3.15). Bertram uses “engines of lust” (3.5.19) to lay down a “wanton siege” (3.7.18); Diana, however, prizing her “tender honour,” “is arm’d for him and keeps her guard / In honestest defence” (3.5.72-74). The word “honour” and its cognates echo throughout the play, notably in the language of the king (16 times in 87 speeches), who articulates the ideals of both military and amorous behavior. Bertram's prowess on the field is “most honourable service” (3.5.3-4), but “his sword can never win / The honour that he loses” (3.2.93-94) in love, as the countess observes. The word “honour” suggests the military standard Bertram upholds and the amorous one he violates, unmarking and marking him as a comic butt like Parolles.

The double comic action reveals the falseness of swaggering language, be it military bluster or romantic blarney. The lords show Parolles to be “an infinite and / endless lair, an hourly promise-breaker” (3.6.9-10); the ladies prove that Bertram's extravagant protestations and “oaths / Are words, and poor conditions but unseal’d” (4.2.29-30). Early on, Mariana warns Diana of both Parolles and Bertram: “Beware of them, Diana: their promises, enticements, oaths, tokens, and all these engines of lust, are / not the things they go under” (3.5.18-20). Here she rightly perceives the disjunction between rhetoric and reality; Parolles and Bertram are moral identical twins, frauds infatuated with self-love who seek to deceive others. Consequently, they suffer similar punishments. Parolles's exposure, Dessen (124-46) has argued, foretells Bertram's, the two linked together by many suggestive parallels.¹⁸ Parolles's lost drum becomes Bertram's lost ring. Parolles, blindfolded, stands trial under the judgment of three figures, just as Bertram, with velvet patch, stands in front of the king, the countess, and Lafew. Both are taken off guard; both slander present witnesses; both get deeper into trouble.

In order to expose Bertram's folly Shakespeare again reworks a New Comedic situation familiar, e.g., from Mostellaria or Cistellaria. The passionate adulescens ardently woos with money and gifts a meretrix, who lives with an older and more worldly woman. In Florence, Bertram takes on precisely the role he refuses to play earlier with Helena—that of importunate adulescens. Like Philolaches or Alcesimarchus, he courts the lady, earnestly imploring mercy, willing to disappoint family and friends, eager to pay any price for sexual favors. The widow acts the role of the older woman, Scapha or Syra, for example, attentive to her charge and to harsh economic realities, experienced in the sinister ways of men. (“My mother told me just how he would woo / As if she sat in's heart. She says all men / Have the like oaths,” 4.2.69-71.) Helena plays the role of the clever slave who uses a purse of gold (3.7.14) and masterminds the intrigue; like Tranio (both Plautus's and Shakespeare's), she writes the script, casts the characters, directs the play. Diana plays the Plautine courtesan who has her price, Bertram's ring. Never in fact the “common gamester” (5.3.187) whom he reviles, she turns out to be a chaste and resourceful virgo who uses her sexual attractiveness to her and Helena's ends. Diana makes the youthful lover a dupe very like the miles gloriosus, Pyrgopolynices, who likewise thinks himself beloved only to find himself befooled.

The flexibility of the New Comedic configurations and the dazzling fluency of Shakespeare's handling must give us pause. Especially noteworthy is Helena's role, which resembles also that of the wives in Menander's Epitrepontes and Terence's Hecyra, likewise made pregnant by unwitting husbands-to-be. Neither Pamphile nor Philumena take an active part in the process of resolution, however; they are, for the most part, helpless victims, off-stage. Shakespeare here follows Boccaccio's lead who inserted a folk-tale wonder-worker into the New Comedic plot to expose her husband.

This exposure, this finding of Bertram as fool, toward which the entire play tends, has a prelude in the short scene with Lafew and Parolles, now a chastened beggar to whom Lafew finally says, “Though you are a fool and a knave you shall eat” (5.2.50). The curve of action in Parolles's story, from earlier confrontation through humiliation and loss of honor, to present forgiveness and new life establishes a pattern for the upcoming scene with Bertram.¹⁹ Parolles makes a brief but telling admission that may guide our response later: “O my good lord, you were the first that found me” (5.2.41). This “finding” is crucial to the play, where “find” and its cognates occur some forty times. The aim of the intrigue against Parolles is “finding,” i.e., exposure, not the forced acquisition of self-knowledge or internal reformation. This finding discovers for all the true identity of a person. It is, in Aristotle's terms, anagnorisis … (Poet. 11.4), “a change from ignorance to knowledge,” accompanied by peripeteia, a reversal of fortune, in this case, from good to bad. Just as in Twelfth Night, Ado, and other comedies this discovery reveals moral character not merely social status.

The finding of Bertram is likewise the aim of his exposure scene; but the discovery of him as liar and cheat coincides with the discovery of him as husband and of Helena as wife. His peripeteia effects a change in his fortune for the better. Such changes, coinciding or closely associated with exposure, are frequent in New Comedy. Menander's boasting soldiers, we recall, though exposed, often wind up with the girl—Thrasonides (Misoumenos), Stratophanes (Sikyonios), and Polemon (Perikeiromene). Terence's Thraso, at the end, is permitted to enter Phaedria's house as a mock-rival for Thais. Della Porta's Martebellonio gets more than he bargained for, winding up with the insatiable serving maid Chiaretta instead of the expected and beautiful Callidora. In the raucous world of comedy there are worse punishments than such humiliation.

Furthermore, the ending of All's Well recalls other New Comedic conclusions wherein virtuous woman often becomes citizen wife. Here vicious man becomes citizen husband—a variation worthy of Terence, who probably provided some suggestion for it directly, or indirectly through Boccaccio. In Hecyra, Pamphilus rapes an unidentified girl, agrees to a forced marriage with another (so he believes), and leaves his new wife without consummating the union. Discovering his wife to be pregnant, he casts her off for unchastity. A courtesan Bacchis to whom he had given the unidentified girl's ring appears at the end to identify her as the wife. All are reconciled. In this play, as Donatus observes, Terence presents res nouae, “new things,” that overturn conventions and expectations: “Inducitur enim benevolae socrus, verecunda nurus, lenissimus in vxorem maritus, et item deditus matri suae, meretrix bona.” “He introduces kindly mothers-in-law, a truthful nurse, a husband very gentle to his wife and at the same time devoted to his mother, a virtuous courtesan.”²⁰ Leaving aside for now the obtuse description of Pamphilus, we can see that Donatus, like later commentators, recognizes Terence to be a bold innovator in this play.²¹ But, as Goldberg observes, Terence departs from Menander's example in Epitrepontes, forcibly subordinating moral issues to the exigencies of comic plot. Like Shakespeare, he focuses attention on the older generation, portrays the women fully and sympathetically, and creates an unappealing hero.²² Partially recovering Menander's interest in the morality of the adulescens, however, Shakespeare tentatively shapes the action according to the familiar contours of Terence moralisé. As Turner and Beck suggest, Bertram dimly embodies the sin-and-repentance paradigm of contemporary prodigal-son drama and Helena appears, if fitfully, as comic heroine and an agent of God's miraculous—the more so because unexpected and undeserved—grace.

The final scene differs materially from the end of the source, where Beltramo at dinner listens patiently to the revelations and humbly accepts his wife. False, cold, and arrogant, Bertram lies about his involvement and slanders Diana's good name. Rejecting Diana, huffing about the absurdity of sinking his honor so low, Bertram replays in significant ways the earlier rejection of Helena. His actions render untenable his earlier prattle about freedom of choice (we have seen him, after all, choose Diana) and show him a liar and a snob in need of exposure. “It is worth remembering,” writes Kenneth Muir, “that all Bertram's worst traits were added by Shakespeare—his friendship with Parolles, his rejoicing at the death of his wife, his promise of marriage to the girl in Florence, the parting with the ancestral heirloom, his smirching of the girl's character. The blacker his character, the greater the miracle of his redemption.”²³ Like Parolles, Bertram loves himself too much and others, especially women, too little. Parolles may joke cynically about virginity, but Bertram denies Helena consummation (and even a kiss) and tries to undo Diana. Like Parolles, he endures a humiliating discovery.

To portray this discovery Shakespeare draws on his Errors plays and on past experience with Plautus. As in Menaechmi, Errors, and Twelfth Night, the playwright winds up the epitasis to its height before the resolution. In Shakespeare's Errors plays, an authority figure tries to resolve the confusion, but is baffled by the escalating din of claims and counterclaims. The Duke hears Antipholus of Ephesus, falsely arrested, and his accusers in the “intricate impeach” (5.1.270). Orsino hears Antonio, also arrested, as well as Olivia, who, like Diana, claims a husband on stage. So the king in All's Well hears and arrests Bertram and Diana in angry confusion. The resolution in Errors and Twelfth Night, as well as in the Plautine archetype, Menaechmi, comes at a single stroke in the form of a dramatic entrance.²⁴ The appearance on stage of Menaechmus of Ephesus, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, and Sebastian cuts the knots and resolves the difficulties in each play. It also substitutes life for death, which looms for Egeus and Antonio and has, in yet other variations, reportedly claimed Hero as well as Helena. So Helena's entrance here clarifies the confusions and creates new life, instilling in all an appropriate sense of humility and wonder.

The daring strategy that casts a comic butt as romantic lead is not without risks, as the history of dissatisfaction with Bertram for failing to be Romeo or even Demetrius, Posthumus, or Claudio shows. Johnson's evaluation rings throughout the ages: “I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.”²⁵ Shakespeare's care to endow Bertram with some admirable qualities, his attractiveness and courage in battle, has not much influenced critical disaffection. But it is not, after all, essential that we like Bertram for Helena to love him. And this love—a complex mixture of sexual desire and selfless devotion—does not abide question.²⁶ It is constant even as it ripens from lyrical adoration to knowing acceptance, from youthful infatuation to marital love.²⁷ Helena exposes Bertram's vanity and routs the forces that would demean or undervalue her, as do the merry wives with Falstaff; but unlike them, she rewards the offender with her devotion. The final scene balances the discovery of Bertram with the discovery of Helena, alive, faithful, forgiving, and loving. Returned from the ranks of the dead, Helena again seems a miraculous restorative figure, one who, like Hero, redeems past wrongs with present love. Bertram's discovery of Helena here is certainly an Aristotelian anagnorisis, a change from ignorance to knowledge; and, as Aristotle prescribed, it conduces to friendship or hatred … (Poet. 11.4). Aristotle's illustrations of this change, Else (350) explains, show in such changes the crucial ingredient …, a bond between two people such that one finds a) in an enemy the loved one (Oedipus and father) or b) in a loved one the enemy (Clytemnestra and son). Bertram, having found in Parolles a traitor, now experiences a comic variation of Aristotle's first type, discovering in the detested clog his loving wife.

To complete this complex resolution, Shakespeare transforms two ubiquitous motifs from New Comedy, pregnancy and a recovered ring. Helena's pregnancy not only fulfills one of Bertram's demands, but, as in Hecyra, summons him to the real world of work, responsibility, and marriage. (We may also recall the similar effect of Jaquenetta's pregnancy on that other boaster Armado.)²⁸ And there are rich symbolic associations here as well, missing from Giletta's delicate presentation of bouncing twin boys. Helena carries in her the promise of new life, not only for herself but for her child and husband, who promptly asks forgiveness: Helena. “’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see; / The name and not the thing.” Bertram. “Both, both. O pardon!” (5.3.301-2). Recognition by artificial tokens like rings or necklaces was an old stage device by Aristotle's time, one that drew his censure as unartistic and incompetent … (Poet. 16.1-2). This judgment notwithstanding, Plautus and Terence make good use of artificial tokens (e.g., Cistellaria, Rudens, Hecyra) as do many later playwrights. In All's Well, Shakespeare doubles the device as found in Boccaccio, providing two rings and introducing Helena's as a surprise which begins the process of exposure. Bertram's ring symbolizes the family honor he stands so haughtily on but, in the heat of passion, proves unworthy of. As David Bevington (58) aptly observes, “The ring of the husband suggests a journey of self-betrayal leading to repentance, while that of the wife tells a story of maligned virtue forced to disguise itself until at last truth is revealed.” Bertram's ring also suggests the marital love and fidelity he owes to Helena, who appropriately collects and returns it to him in a new wedding ceremony. These rings are not mere proofs from the past but symbols of selves lost and found, of identities formerly created, now claimed, and always to be honored.

All's Well shows a sophisticated mastery of New Comedic conventions, themes, and characters, one that raises and upsets audience expectations, creates and dissolves Plautine fictions. Fluently incorporating elements from Shakespeare's other comedies, the play owes most to Shakespeare's earlier miles gloriosus play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. There, as here, two tricky women conspire to lead on the amorous captain bedazzled by the prospect of sexual pleasure. The wives merely tease Falstaff, while Helena and Diana, through the bed-trick, actually satisfy Bertram's desires. In both plays, however, the women control the male libido, transforming their attempts at illicit sex into a ratification of existing marriages. Ford comes to accept Mrs. Ford as faithful wife; so, too, does Bertram come to accept Helena. The action proceeds in each play by embodying traits of the miles gloriosus in several characters, who illuminate—fitfully in Wives and clearly in Ado—character and theme. Both actions expose the vanity of the principals and then provide for forgiveness and reintegration—slightly in Page's invitation of Falstaff to dinner and hugely in Bertram's reconstituted marriage. All's Well draws much from the intrigue plays, especially from Much Ado, where Claudio comes repentant to a new marriage only to find his former wife resurrected. In him and Bertram, Shakespeare struggles with the moral and theatrical limitations of the adulescens whose youthful impetuosity, both times inverted into a cold regard for honor, seems inadequate to the demands of love. Hero and Helena, to varying degrees, supply such deficiencies. And their miraculous reappearances—suffused with love and forgiveness—look ahead to the restorations in Shakespeare's New Comedic romances, especially Pericles and The Tempest.²⁹

Notes

1. On these traditions, see Boughner; Hanson.

2. See Hunter, xliii ff.; Leggatt; Brooke. Doran, 251, has salutary advice: “Sometimes we are troubled by lack of motivation in character when an Elizabethan audience would take the story for its own sake without expecting motivation at all. Our oversophistication in fiction leaves us disconcerted by the methods of pure story so often operative in Elizabethan romantic comedy. The motives are often the non-individualized motives of fairy tale, which are taken for granted. They reside in a conventional problem, whose terms have to be literally met, as a riddle's terms are met. One of the best illustrations of this technique is in All's Well That Ends Well, a play that post-Romantic critics turn into a ‘dark’ or ‘bitter’ or ‘problem’ comedy, and wholly falsify. The only ‘problem’ in it is Helena's problem in getting the man she wants for a husband.”

3. On the folk tale, see Lawrence, 39 ff.; on the morality play, Godshalk, Dessen, 113-33; on contemporary drama, Wilson, Neuss, and Turner's illuminating discussion of “Prodigal Son” plays, wherein a well-born young man spurns a virtuous lady for illicit pleasures, only to come finally to exposure and union with her; on Boccaccio and Painter's translation, Hunter, xxv-xxix; Smallwood; Bullough, 2: 375-88; Muir, 1978, 170-74; Cole, 12 ff., 72 ff.

4. See Lee, 102; Branca, 4: 1185. On Boccaccio's copying Terence by hand, see Hutton, 226n. References below to Painter's translation of the tale of Giletta, Shakespeare's probable source, are cited to Bullough, 2: 389-96.

5. Coulter, 82, however, observes one relatively unsophisticated classical device in the play, the clown's repeated “O Lord, Sir!”, which “corresponds to the Censeo and I modo of Plautine slaves (Rud. 1269-78; Trin. 584-90).”

6. Salingar, 301 ff., groups together Mer., Ado, All's Well, and Meas., which all come from Italian novelle. They all have, he argues, a grave tone, an emphasis on trickery and disguise, the aiding of a heroine by fortune, the presence of a serious opponent, the recourse to law, a trial scene, a predominantly urban setting, the problem of a broken or incomplete nuptial in the middle of the play.

7. On this construction, see Baldwin, 1947, 728-36. Baldwin also points out some interesting parallels with TGV, where the heroine in disguise likewise wins back an unfaithful lover, but he believes All's Well the prior play.

8. Frye, 1957, 180. Noting the sympathetic older generation, the callow Bertram, and the complex Helen, Riemer, 50, likewise declares: “The play is, therefore, a network of contradictory suggestions, strange turnings, odd reversals of expectations and attitudes. It is, in other words, a series of variations on the conventions of a popular [form] of Renaissance comedy. It is Shakespeare's most surprising and most thorough experiment with comic form.”

9. This reading of the elder and younger generations differs substantially from that of John Edward Price who thinks that the play opposes the vital, witty world of the young and the moribund, platitudinous one of the old. More perceptive on this subject, I think, is Hill; also interesting is Styan, 23-29.

10. Bradbrook argues that the king's judgment about virtue and nobility is at the heart of the play.

11. For a survey of reactions to Helena, ranging from Shakespeare's “loveliest character” (Coleridge) to a “keen and unswerving huntress of man” (Chambers), see Champion, 217-18; J. G. Price. More recent derogations include those of R. A. Levin; Ornstein, 175: “Helena's attraction to the callow Bertram must necessarily be merely physical, just as her pursuit of him must be calculated and covert.” Such an account reads purposeful intrigue in the pilgrimage and lust in Helena's youthful attraction to Bertram's good looks, just as it ignores the theatrical power of the magical cure, and of Helena's modest devotion viz. Bertram's arrogant rudenesses. Nor will it do to argue with Shapiro, 519: “Helena violates the ethos of Shakespearean love comedy in failing to understand that love must be freely and voluntarily given, not extracted by force, even force of merit.” What ethos? Consider the forcible extraction of Demetrius's love by Puck's potion, of Katherina's by Petruchio's taming, of Benedick's and Beatrice's by the deceits of their friends, and of Angelo's by the bed trick, to name only the obvious counterexamples.

12. Duckworth, 239.

13. Vickers, 2: 195. (See also the praise of Parolles by Charles Gildon [1710] and Arthur Murphy [1757], Vickers, 2: 244; 4: 295). On this point Rowe is right against Hunter, xlvii, who says that Parolles is “not essentially a miles gloriosus (in many ways he is nearer to the classical parasite).” The combination of the two types was common, as evidenced by Falstaff, Pistol, and Quintiliano (Chapman's May-Day). See also Vandiver, 423. Inattention to classical and Renaissance background has weakened modern interpretations of Parolles, e.g., those of Huston, Rothman.

14. Recognition of this convention resolves the so-called problem of character consistency first noted by Arthur Murphy: “Yet one Thing I have observed in it [Parolles's character] which I never could answer to myself: it is when, after one of his Scenes with Lafeu, the Bragart in a Soliloquy talks of wiping off the Disgrace put upon him by that old Lord by fighting his Son, and a good Deal more to that Purpose. Every where else Parolles is thoroughly sensible of his Cowardice: why then should he just at that Instant lack that Consciousness and strive, as it were, to cheer himself into a Notion of his being brave?”, Vickers, 4: 295.

15. Boughner, 168-69, notes the similar fate of another braggart, Idleness, in The Mariage betweene Witt and Wisdome (1579).

16. These expectations largely account for critical disappointment in the play. See, e.g., Parrott, 354: “It takes the complete revelation of the cowardice and treason of Parolles to open Bertram's eyes, and it seems a pity that this recognition of his error was not somehow causally connected with Bertram's final reunion with his wife.”

17. Janko, 36, 208 ff.

18. Charting the territory from a different perspective, Parker, 99, avers that “the conflict of the play is resolved by having each ideal—war and love—modify the other, so that the conclusion takes the form of a wry accommodation between them in which the purity of both ideals has had to be abandoned.”

19. Noting this curve of action in the stories of the king, Helena, and Diana, as well, Hapgood discusses the peculiar qualities of the new life, animated by joy in survival, diminished by painful experience. On the theme of honor, see Hunter, xxxix ff.; Adams.

20. Terentius, 616.

21. On Terence's innovations, see McGarrity: Konstan, 130-41. Konstan, 140, remarks, interestingly: “Indeed, a remarkable feature of the Hecyra is that the blocking character is identical with the lover himself—a feature which strangely anticipates some comedies of Shakespeare.”

22. Goldberg, 150-52. Frye, 1965, 44 ff., also discusses the tension between characterization and plot in Hecyra, Ado, All's Well, and Measure.

23. Muir, 1979, 132.

24. Salingar, 321: “The chief precedent for the complicated and surprising judicial climaxes in Shakespeare's problem comedies must have been the dénouement he had already devised himself for The Comedy of Errors.” Salingar doesn’t note the Plautine entrance but discusses other parallels—the disclosing of “successive identities in a judicial hearing,” the mending of broken marriages, “the emotional theme of the judge and the nun.” Riemer, 117 ff., points out, in addition, similarities between Helena and the Abbess of Errors, who both project an aura of magic, miracle, and Providence and appear at the end to mend broken family bonds.

25. Vickers, 5: 114.

26. The selfless Helena has been well appreciated, even to excess by Knight, 146, who calls her “a semi-divine person, or some new type of saint.” On the implicit sexuality of Helena's love, see Calderwood. Anti-Helena critics who think Helena lustful show the same attitude toward healthy physical attraction as those early editors who made Rosalind's hopeful reference to Orlando as “my child's father” (1.3.11) into a reference to herself, “my father's child.” Helena actually acts out Rosalind's wish.

27. Warren sketches this movement.

28. See Baldwin, 1947, 735: “The braggart Parolles pairs more closely with the braggart Armado than does any other character in Shakespere, and Shakespere himself is aware that they are both of a particular type, since they are both labeled as ‘monarchos.’”

29. On the play's relationship to the late romances, see Hunter, lv-lvi; Wheeler.

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