SOURCE: “When Women Choose: All's Well That Ends Well,” in Women's Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays, Associated University Presses, 1997, pp. 35-63.

[In the following essay, Dash discusses the subject of women's sexual options within the patriarchal society of All's Well That Ends Well.]

How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?

I.i.150-51

Although the phrase “catch 22” had not yet entered the language, Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1898 described the concept with precision—as it applies to women's lives. She noted that even though the young girl “is carefully educated and trained to realize in all ways her sex-limitations and her sex-advantages” with the ultimate aim of marriage,

she must not even look as if she wanted it. … What one would logically expect is a society full of desperate and eager husband-hunters, regarded with popular approval. Not at all! (emphasis added, 581-82)

And the irony is compounded, for our hypocritical society practices a “cruel and absurd injustice of blaming the girl for not getting what she is allowed no effort to obtain” (582). The writer thus describes the contradiction immediately facing young women, contrasting their support system with that of young men, who are encouraged to pursue their goals. Moreover, she distinguishes between the aims of boys and girls, again attributing the differences to societal training: “Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain” (emphasis added, 582). Because of the “sexuo-economic relation” of our society, the girl's objective is immediately linked with another person, a husband.

Although written at the end of the nineteenth century and meant for her own time, Gilman's statement may also be applied to the lives of women in the Renaissance. Ruth Kelso, too, in her classic study of this subject defines wedlock as the only possible career: “Only one vocation, marriage, was proposed for the lady” (78). While not exploring Gilman's idea of “pursuit of vocation” and limiting her study to middle- and upper-class women, Kelso's words suggest that the goal of marriage well predates the nineteenth century and speaks to much earlier limitations on women's worlds.¹

In All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare personalizes Kelso's notion of “vocation” and dramatizes Gilman's observation. Concentrating on the interaction of characters, the dramatist opens his play with a glimpse of Helena, a young woman at first dedicated to merely “thinking about” the man she adores. The play then shows her altering her ideas after she becomes involved in a discussion on “virginity” with a boastful friend of her hero's. In the two soliloquies that frame the dialogue, the dramatist unfolds her amazing transformation. In fact, Helena addresses the fundamental contradiction pointed out by Gilman: the illogical concept of pursuing one's vocation by not pursuing it. The soliloquies reveal the mental and emotional turmoil that lead Helena to rethink her attitude and actively pursue the young man of her choice. But Shakespeare does more than merely develop the portrait of a young woman of brains and drive, characteristics of Helena: he also turns to paradigms and reworks them. Deviating from his sources, he emphasizes this woman's strength, creativity, wit, and courage while, at the same time, he demonstrates her idol's weakness and dishonesty, creating a sharp dichotomy between them. Developing an unconventional heroine and making the object of her affection an antihero, the dramatist turns the action into an even more unconventional situation, which points up the truth of Gilman's thesis. Even as she protests that she would rather not upset the status quo, Helena, quite deliberately and dramatically, does so.

Like Gilman, Shakespeare also introduces economics into the relationship. A social schism exists between the two young people: Count Bertram is heir to Rossillion—an adored and handsome only son; Helena is the orphan of a physician and in the care of the Countess of Rossillion, Bertram's mother. Along with everyone around her, Helena too idolizes Bertram. When later the Countess asks, “Do you love my son?” (I.iii.186) Helena's answer, “Do not you love him, madam?” (187) reveals her evasiveness at this moment but also the logic of her choice of this young hero of Rossillion. Indeed, he is the one, to use Charlotte Gilman's language, “for whom” Helena would “achieve and attain” and “through whom” she would reach the woman's ultimate goal of marriage.

Unfortunately, however, her success has caused many critics to find All's Well That Ends Well a problem. They fault Helena's determination or aggressiveness. Reflecting the relevance of Gilman's words, such critics still frown on young women pursuing the goal for which they have been highly “trained.” As recently as 1980, Richard A. Levin writes of Helena's “guile” and “cunning”:

The romantically inclined reader will accept the image of patience that Helena projects. Another reader sees only an elaborate facade, concealing an aggressive and self-centered nature. Supporting the latter view, I will show that Helen's success depends on guile; later, I will discuss how her cunning affects the play's comic form. (131)

The intensity of this criticism indicates a hostility to the young woman that goes beyond the text. While this critic attributes to Helena an almost Iago-like nature, I hope to show how to view her sympathetically and understand what is driving the hostile criticism of her.

From the first scene, where she is introduced as a person of education and promise, to the closing scene, when she wins her husband for a second time, Helena has the endorsement, love, and sympathy of most of the characters in the play. The dramatist develops a complex portrait of a young woman orphaned and left to her own resources who comes to realize that she cannot merely pine away for a young man, but must act. Shakespeare gives her an unusual number of soliloquies for a woman, and through these she reveals this shift from passive to active. For example, in the first scene her closing soliloquy begins:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

(I.i.216-19)

This decision to take action marks a change from her first soliloquy, which sounds very much like the lament of an unrequited lover:

                                        My imagination
Carries no favor in’t but Bertram's.
I am undone, there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away.

(82-85)

Speaking of him as her “bright particular star” (86), the man she longs to “wed” (87), she enumerates his attractive physical features, “arched brows, … hawking eye,” and “curls” (94), concluding with an almost overwrought “But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy / Must sanctify his relics” (97-98). Here surely is an exaggerated example of passivity. This concept of treasuring and worshipping as “relics” the memories and the mementos surrounding her in his mother's home illustrates the stereotypical portrait of the young woman who patiently waits. Thus Shakespeare establishes at the start the norm from which Helena will deviate to grow into a self-sufficient person.

Between these two soliloquies occurs that unusual conversation on virginity. Parolles, a braggart soldier and Bertram's closest companion and adviser, engages Helena in the dialogue. The topic is central to the theme of the play but, like Helena's subsequent aggressiveness, considered inappropriate for a woman to discuss, even in jest, with a man. Acting as a catalyst, this conversation appears to alter Helena's self-perception and leads her to take action.

“Are you meditating on virginity?” (110), asks Parolles, bursting in upon her and interrupting her melancholy mood. “Ay,” she answers honestly. Then, allowing him to distract her by expounding on the topic he had introduced, she poses her own question: “You have some stain of soldier in you; let me ask you a question. Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricado it against him?” (111-13). Suddenly, a scene formerly marked by the tearful parting of mother and son sparkles with humor. Parolles's answer to Helena, “Keep him out” (114), leads to further verbal parrying. “But he assails, and our virginity though valiant, in the defense yet is weak. Unfold to us some warlike resistance” (115-17). When the wordy Parolles concedes, “There is none. Man setting down before you, will undermine you and blow you up” (118-19), Helena refuses to accept such a direct answer. “Is there no military policy how virgins might blow up men?” she queries (121-22). He then offers a dissertation on virginity, on its ultimate uselessness, noting that “Virginity, by being once lost, may be ten times found” (130-31), and exclaims triumphantly, “’Tis too cold a companion; away with’t!” (132) Continuing this banter, Helena adamantly claims, “I will stand for’t a little, though therefore I die a virgin” (133-34). Once again she prompts a long speech by Parolles, this one on the increase in population bred by loss of virginity.

Still “meditating,” she then poses the crucial question, “How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?” (150-51). But Parolles fails to give a clear answer. “Let me see. Marry, ill, to like him that ne’er it likes” (152-53), he asserts, seeming to reverse what she says. Speaking of “her own liking,” Helena in this conversation has indicated a woman's determination to have a say in the final outcome. Parolles, however, counters with a generalization implying that men do not like women to remain virgins and would seduce them rather than give them the choice of partner. The ambiguity of his comment, however, allows for a range of interpretation. Whereas Helena's reference, “to lose it to her own liking,” clearly refers to “virginity,” Parolles's response could be understood as “Marry, ill, to like the man who doesn’t like you.” Samuel Johnson chose to understand the comment as a play upon the word “liking.” He interpreted the line as: “She must do ill, for virginity, to be so lost, must like him that likes not virginity” (7:376-77). The wit combat extends for one hundred and seventy-four lines, terminating only when a page summons Parolles to join Bertram.

Despite the substantial length of the exchange, its exploration of a subject relevant to the play, and its insight into Helena's thinking, it has seldom reached the stage in full. In the Bell edition, which probably reflected what was acted at Drury Lane under David Garrick's management, everything after Helena's “ay” was excised.² Kemble adopted many of these changes although he often altered the text further in later editions. For example, although his 1793 and 1811 versions differ slightly, the conversation between Helena and Parolles appears in neither. Nor is it found in most of the basic acting texts of the nineteenth century since they derive from Kemble. Thus the Cumberland edition of 1828, the Lacy edition, and, late in the century, the French edition all excised this section of text. William Poel eliminated it at the century's close, and even in the twentieth century most of the lines frequently disappeared. It was cut from the Lillian Baylis production in 1922 and as late as 1953 from Michael Benthall's for the Old Vic. Price (24) notes that the Garrick and Kemble texts differ in their emphases, the one on farce the other on sentimentality. However, neither adaptor retained the verbal jousting of Shakespeare's text that contributes to the portrait of a vibrant Helena and illuminates an important theme in the play: the right of a woman to do her own choosing.

The fact that the characters speak of sexuality—illustrated by this outspoken conversation between Helena, a respectable young woman, and Parolles—partially explains the disappearance not only of these lines but of the play itself from the stage, as I detail below. As for the question of sex, even at mid twentieth century it was common for critics to have reservations about this topic in the context of the play. John F. Adams, in 1961, for example, observed that three interrelated ideas permeated All's Well That Ends Well. However, he found the major, or “ground,” theme the subject of sex and procreation. “Essentially this … problem is that of understanding sex within civilized institutions. Paradoxically, sex can be a significant sin or a significant virtue, circumstances determining which” (261). Deciding whether sex is a sin or virtue, however, may depend on the perceptions of the character speaking or the person being addressed. For Helena, the conversation on sex evidently affected her subsequent action. To adaptors, however, the thought of it as sinful influenced their treatment of the text. Writing of the Samuel Phelps production in 1852, Shirley Allen notes that it was an “almost unknown comedy” by then and that despite its extreme abbreviation, a reviewer called the plot “indelicate, even beyond the limits usually conceded to Elizabethan dramatists” (222). In 1920 Odell in his Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving seems no more enlightened in his comments:

All's Well that Ends Well has ever been a problem on the stage; the story is revolting, the heroine incapable of awakening sympathy, and the comic scenes either disgustingly low (to use an Eighteenth-Century expression) or mere reminders of earlier (?) successes in the Falstaff plays. Who would cut must needs wield an heroic axe. (2:21)

The conversation on virginity would surely fall before such an ax, for Odell calls it “the filthy talk of Parolles to Helena in the first scene” finding its equal only in the lines of “the Clown to the Countess throughout” (2:21).

But that first scene reveals Shakespeare's artistry as he develops the portrait of Helena and raises questions explored throughout the play: to what extent may a woman determine her physical self-ownership, and can a woman choose her husband or must she be passive? Ancillary to these is another question: what hazards must she expect to confront? This scene, which offers a sharp contrast between Helena's two soliloquies, opens with the Countess of Rossillion bidding farewell to her son, Bertram. His father's death requires that the young man depart for Court to be the King's ward. Standing by silently, Helena is introduced to us primarily through the Countess, who identifies the young woman as a famous physician's daughter. “This young gentlewoman had a father. … Would for the King's sake he were living! I think it would be the death of the King's disease” (I.i.17-23), observes the older woman having heard of the inability of the king's physicians to cure the monarch. This challenge Helena will herself undertake later on. Here, however, she remains quiet as the Countess continues: “Her dispositions she inherits, which makes fair gifts fairer” (40-41). During that conversation Helena merely listens, almost like an object that is spoken of but has no voice. When, finally, she does break her silence, it is with a single line, an aside, addressed to no one in particular, but reflecting her own deep feelings at the moment “I do affect a sorrow indeed, but I have it too” (54). What is the audience to think hearing this line? Obviously, Helena's thoughts are not perceived by the others in the drama. Moreover, her statement sounds ambiguous, confusing, and provocative. As soon as the stage is cleared however, Shakespeare enlightens his audience by giving Helena that first soliloquy, establishing her character at the start. Visually and verbally, she embodies the shy conforming young woman, illustrating the training Gilman described centuries later.

Thus Parolles's entry and their subsequent conversation initiates a new mode of thinking for Helena—a new sense of self. It is generally accepted that the main plot of All's Well That Ends Well derives from Boccaccio's Decameron, Day III, and that Shakespeare added three major characters: the Countess, Parolles, and Lafew—adviser to the king—as well as several minor characters (Bullough, 2:375-81). There is less agreement, however, about the function of Parolles in the play. Because of his similarity to Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, the tendency has been to evaluate Parolles in terms of his influence on Bertram, noting the contrast between Hal's awareness of Falstaff's weaknesses and Bertram's blindness to Parolles's shortcomings. Writes Bullough, for example, “Parolles was invented to help us explain—and excuse somewhat—Bertram's offences, and to afford a baser parallel to those offences themselves” (2:387). Attaching great importance to the Parolles-Bertram relationship, W. W. Lawrence finds the “subplot … singularly independent of the main action” (33). G. K. Hunter in the Arden edition, disagreeing with Lawrence, emphasizes Bertram's role as central and considers both Parolles and Helena as subsidiary:

… [T]he Bertram story would not mean the same without the Parolles story. There is continual parody of the one by the other. Parolles and Helena are arranged on either side of Bertram, placed rather like the Good and Evil Angels in a Morality. (xxxiii; emphasis added)

For this editor, Parolles and Helena illuminate Bertram's character.

On the other hand, although the plot links the two men, Parolles and Helena have the longest and most important roles in the comedy. In addition, he plays a major part in revealing her character.³ His lines catalyze her into action. No other character so clearly serves this function. She herself hints at this before their lengthy dialogue in the first scene. Observing him approach, she forgives him his weaknesses in advance because of his friendship with Bertram:

                                        Who comes here?
One that goes with him. I love him for his sake,
And yet I know him a notorious liar,
Think him a great way fool, soly a coward;
Yet these fix’d evils sit so fit in him,
That they take place when virtue's steely bones
Looks bleak i’ th’ cold wind. Withal, full oft we see
Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.

(I.i.98-105)

Having itemized his weaknesses, she then concedes the possibility of learning even from “superfluous folly.” Although I believe that the rationalization was meant to apply to the companionship between the two men, by the end of the scene, Parolles's “superfluous folly” has influenced her thinking. Like Hal with Falstaff, she recognizes Parolles's weaknesses, and like Hal she listens to the advice, transforming it to her own uses and endowing it with new qualities.

Parolles in this first scene connects with the overall conflict of the play, the one voiced by Helena: “How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?” Their conversation illuminates the different perceptions of virginity by men and women. A word often used in humorous conversation, it also defines the standards of a woman's life, as we see later in the play in the scene between Helena and the King. Moreover, virginity and its loss, with proof of progeny, are central to the work. And it is to Parolles, that character who is later unmasked as a coward, losing his position and prestige with Bertram, to whom Shakespeare assigns the task of opening a not quite conventionally acceptable subject to the audience: virginity and women's perception of it.

The construction of the first scene also illuminates not only Helena's forthrightness and quick wit but also Parolles's insight. In contrast with the Countess and others in the first half of the scene who had simply assumed, hearing Helena sigh, that she was thinking of her father, Parolles makes no such mistake. “Are you meditating on virginity?”—his opening line—meets an immediate “Ay.” Had he been wrong, she might easily have said no. Although before his arrival she had confided to the audience her intention of humoring Parolles because he was dear to Bertram, no such deception was necessary. Her arguments on behalf of the virgin fail to mask that immediate “Ay.” And though she listens to Parolles's long-winded discourse on the subject, she does follow up her own query of losing one's virginity to one's “own liking” with the lengthy, wistful reference to Bertram at court. “There shall your master have a thousand loves / … with a world / Of pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms / That blinking Cupid gossips. Now shall he—” (166-75). Then almost catching herself, she continues, “I know not what he shall” (176). Stychomythia ensues, “The court's a learning place, and he is one—” (177). Her hesitation quickly prompts his “What one, i’faith?” “That I wish well. ’Tis pity—” “What’s pity?” (178-80). Regaining self-control, she once more distances herself from that “bright particular star” at the center of her world and speaks in general terms to Parolles, wishing both men well.⁴

His parting words, “Get thee a good husband, and use him as he uses thee” (214-15), precede her closing soliloquy where she determines to act. She will pursue the objective for which, as Gilman observes, women have been trained. Helena jettisons the lovelorn self of the scene's opening and opts for extraordinary action. “The king's disease—my project may deceive me, / But my intents are fix’d, and will not leave me” (228-29). She has decided to use the knowledge of medicine bequeathed her by her father to cure the King. She will follow Bertram to the French court.

Such decisiveness wins neither societal approval nor that of the play's adaptors, actor-managers, or directors. The Bell text cut this soliloquy, as did Kemble's. There the earlier passive, worshipful speech on her “bright particular star” closed the scene, after the briefest of conversations. No quips on virginity survived. Transposition combined with excision remolded Helena into a passive, quiet, modest young woman. Modifications in the rest of the text reinforced this portrait. The stereotype prevailed over Shakespeare's characterization.

For audiences today, the Helena-Parolles conversation on virginity is hardly offensive, although some critics decry it. The exchange indicates Parolles's tendency to speak of a subject he thinks amusing yet appropriate to Helena, a young unmarried woman. And it might show his awareness of her interest in Bertram, an interest inimical to his own. Shakespeare's choice of Parolles for this early unmasking of Helena's feelings suggests a desire to pair these two characters who stand on the fringes of the society of the play and have the two longest roles—almost equal in length.⁵ Their encounter also stresses Helena's lack of reserve (despite her early silence), her intellectual vigor, and her tendency to consider herself the equal of men—a point that will become for some her major problem throughout the drama.

Nor is Helena alone in this confident sense of self, expressed through an easy, unself-conscious exchange with a man on the subject of sex. Two scenes later, the Countess of Rossillion engages Lavatch, her servant-clown, in a similar conversation. Again the subject is virginity and again a woman crosses class lines, ignoring the demands of decorum to question a crude character who revels in his own down-to-earth observations. When she wonders at his rationale for marrying so late in life, he explains, “My poor body, madam, requires it. I am driven on by the flesh, and he must needs go that the devil drives” (I.iii.28-30). This leads to a debate on the relationship of marriage to evil, Lavatch freely admitting that “I hope to have friends for my wive's sake … for the knaves come to do that for me which I am a-weary of. He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to inn the crop. If I be his cuckold, he’s my drudge” (39-46)—an admission of fatigue, but also a brash statement on his willingness to be cuckolded. Again, perhaps, Shakespeare is turning tradition upside down—the tradition of male possessiveness of women. Occasionally the Countess interrupts Lavatch with a reprimand. However, such interruptions seem more like dramaturgic devices to terminate a monologue rather than real expressions of shock or anger. For Lavatch then continues his biting observations using a new approach, story, or song.

The conversation between Helena and Parolles presented two views on easy loss of virginity, suggesting a virile, youthful perception; the exchange between the Countess and Lavatch betrays the speakers' age—they are tired, wistful, philosophic. Both debates contrast men's and women's thoughts on sexuality and illustrate women's moral stance challenged by men's flippancy. The fact that both conversations occur early in the play suggests the dramatist's intention of showing the women's awareness of the male point of view when they later attempt to deal with Bertram, the beloved of the younger and the son of the older. But the conversations do more. They introduce us to two strong, attractive women who, unlike later audiences, appear unperturbed by men's rowdy humor.

In this scene as in the opening, past productions have excised, transposed, and inserted new material in an effort to alter the woman's portrait. Again, these changes date back to the earliest promptbooks—of 1773—and, with only some slight variations, continue through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. For example, the Countess's lines with Lavatch are reduced to directives to call Helena while his talk of marriage, losing its cynicism, centers on a wish to have “issue a’ my body” (25) and an admission, “I have been, madam, a wicked creature, as you and all flesh and blood are, and indeed I do marry that I may repent” (35-37). Indeed, by the twentieth century, Lavatch disappeared completely from Tyrone Guthrie's (1959) production, seriously affecting audience perception of the Countess. His absence helps diminish her portrait to that of a conventional, gentle, old woman, her vigor in Shakespeare's text fading into quiet conformity.

The general embarrassment and dissatisfaction with these conversations of the two women and the desire to mask the nonconformist aspect of their portraits have a long history. As early as 1773 the John Bell acting text, which purports to record the play “as performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane,” presented the following complaint:

From the appearance of several pieces Shakespeare wrote, we cannot but think he catched at some single idea, or character, without considering what other materials there might be to work upon. Hence we find him frequently capital in a few scenes, where he is very trifling in others; of this observation, we think All's Well that Ends Well is no slight instance; tho’ a little attention might certainly have made even this slight plan much better; as it is, this play can never live on the stage, and hardly in the closet; yet we are of opinion, that by judicious alterations and additions, it might be made much more tolerable, both in public and private. (Prompt AW 3, Introduction)

In 1793 Kemble introduced “judicious alterations” into scene 3—the scene between the Countess and Lavatch—that glorified the mother who mourns her son's departure, injecting a note missing from Shakespeare's text.

The adaptation offers insight into the deeper understanding of women that emerges from the original. As occurs so often in Shakespeare's plays, adjacent scenes contrast with one another, sometimes to illuminate character, sometimes to establish the passage of time, and sometimes to heighten suspense. Shakespeare's scene 2, wafts us away from Rossillion for a brief sortie at the court of the sick King of France, showing his despair and the hopelessness of his illness.⁶ Back at Rossillion in scene 3, we are conscious of a new time frame when we listen to the Countess first with Lavatch and then in a wonderful dialogue with Helena. The scene's first lines, “I will now hear. What say you of this gentlewoman?” (iii.1-2), reflect the Countess's concern for Helena. The lines also indicate the scene's artistic unity since the opening question will be answered at the close, when Helena, with the Countess's blessings, departs for the court of the King of France. Unified around the concept of women bonding together and supporting one another, the scene as constructed reveals little concern or weeping of a mother for a departed son.

Kemble, who moved scene 3 so that it immediately followed scene 1, lost the indeterminate time gap as well as the sharp contrast between the two older people—the King and the Countess. The actor-manager did, however, establish a pattern for later adaptors and created a more acceptably sad mother. Kemble changed the scene's opening lines, inserting a brief soliloquy before the query about Helena. Rather than referring to the future, it dwells on the past: “He’s gone; and ’t is weakness, to mourn over his departure,” the Countess reflects (1793 ed., p. 3; 1811 ed., p. 8). The stereotypical mother, suffering silently and waiting patiently, replaces Shakespeare's activist older woman supportively encouraging the younger female. Ironically, Kemble borrowed the word gone from another context, the Countess's directive to Lavatch to “be gone, sir knave” (85), a command rather than a wistful recollection of her son.

Memories of her own youth and the sexual stirrings the Countess then felt—not thoughts about her son—characterize the soliloquy Shakespeare gives her. Considering Helena's plight, the older woman reminisces:

If ever we are nature's, these are ours. This thorn
Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong;
Our blood to us, this to our blood is born.

(129-31)

Meditating on virginity and sexuality, she reveals a warm, sympathetic, and basically optimistic perception of the heat and passion of youth. She has known it, and it has been good. Her lines contrast with the weariness of life and the jealousy of youth expressed by the King in the previous scene. He speaks of “haggish age” stealing on him (even giving it a feminine persona), then quotes his deceased friend's wish as reflecting the King's own desire:

… “Let me not live,” quoth he,
“After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff
Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses
All but new things disdain.”

(I.ii.58-61)

The fear of youth's disdain of age characterizes the sick King, contrasting his point of view with the Countess's healthy perception of herself and sexuality.

In comparing men's and women's lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the sense of hopelessness, “the inevitable fatalism … the almost lust for death” that “creeps into all womanhood” as compared with the excitement that dominates men's lives (445). In this play Shakespeare reverses Fitzgerald's equation despite the adventures of Bertram at the front. In fact, the text here reveals the vibrancy of women's worlds as they differ from those of men. By transposing the sequence of scenes, however, Kemble diminished the contrast between the Countess's vitality and the King's languor and illness. Earlier, the Bell text blurred the distinctive differences between the two older people's ideas on sexuality by eliminating the Countess's lines on the warm blood of youth beginning, “If ever we are nature's, these are ours.” Kemble reduced the Countess's lines of reflection to their simplest essentials—a brief reference to the resemblance between the two women followed by a description of the approaching younger one:

E’en so it was with me, when I was young:
Her eye is sick on’t; I observe her now.(7)

The full speech emphasizes the naturalness of sexuality and the sense of human identification with nature. It has an outspoken joyousness. Interestingly, although the lines reappeared towards the end of the nineteenth century, they were again cut in 1935 by B. Iden Payne and in 1953 by Michael Benthall. Rather than representing the cultural responses of one period, the excisions seem instead to reflect patriarchal ideas about women that have persisted well into the twentieth century.

Shakespeare continues to offer conflicting perspectives on stereotypes about women in the second half of scene 3. There his dialectic method undercuts prevailing views that see women as competitive and lacking mutual support. Aware of Helena's plight, the Countess tries to show her concern for the young woman by proposing: “You know, Helen, / I am a mother to you.” The simplicity of the language contrasts with Helena's formal “Mine honorable mistress.” The dramatist then explores various interpretations of “mother”:

                    Nay, a mother,
Why not a mother? When I said “a mother,”
Methought you saw a serpent. What’s in “mother”
That you start at it? I say I am your mother,
And put you in the catalogue of those
That were enwombed mine.

(I.iii.139-44, emphasis added)

Six uses of the word in seven lines heavily emphasize the concept. Although she is also teasing Helena here, the Countess is rejecting the belief in the superiority of natural to adoptive parents. Yet her son, in contrast, will later insist on verification of his role as natural parent as the price of becoming Helena's husband in more than name.

“You ne’er oppress’d me with a mother's groan, / Yet I express to you a mother's care” (147-48), the older woman reminds the younger. Again the word mother surfaces. And again the stage direction in the speech clearly delineates Helena's actions:

God's mercy, maiden! does it curd thy blood
To say I am thy mother?

(149-50, emphasis added)

We, as audience, know the purpose of the Countess's insistence—to elicit Helena's confession of love for Bertram, to offer sympathy, and ultimately to help the young woman. Nevertheless, the rhetorical pattern, the repetition of mother, has deeper resonances in this play. For although the King has spoken to Bertram of his father, we will discover that mothers, mother surrogates, mothering, and the proof of motherhood take precedence over fatherhood. To the Countess, motherhood means care, love, concern, and nurturing without mandating pregnancy. Here the dramatist seems to question conventional patriarchal ideas about mothers or the strong ties of blood that they must feel for their children. Rather, the Countess's choral repetition of mother to Helena affirms close ties with this “adoptive” child.

Excisions in this section abound in stage adaptations. These cuts straddle the centuries. They reflect societal opposition to the ideas expressed by the Countess rather than squeamishness regarding language, an argument often used to explain textual excisions in earlier periods. Neither eighteenth-century refinement nor nineteenth-century bowdlerization account for them since they persist into our age. For example, the 1773 text excises parts of the Countess's soliloquy before Helena's entrance, but so does the 1953 text. Again, the lines “Adoption strives with nature, and choice breeds / A native slip to us from foreign seeds” (145-46) disappear from the 1888 as well as the 1953 versions. In contrast the following passage has always survived intact:

What, pale again?
My fear has catch’d your fondness! Now I see
The myst’ry of your loneliness, and find
Your salt tears' head, now to all sense ’tis gross:
You love my son.

(169-73)

Unlike descriptions of motherhood and mothering, these lines contain all the push-button words associated with women and love: pale, fear, fondness, mystery, loneliness, and salt tears. The excisions undercut Shakespeare's remarkable portrait of an outspoken, attractive upper-class woman, one who defied acceptable cliches.

Tyrone Guthrie, who had eliminated the Lavatch section in his 1959 production, retained this particular encounter between the two women in full. Perhaps the stress on intimacy between mother-surrogate and potential daughter-in-law had a contemporary relevance; or perhaps references to birth and pregnancy by two women alone on stage no longer shocked audiences. Undoubtedly the presence of two remarkable actresses, Zoe Caldwell as Helena and Edith Evans as the Countess, also influenced the director, who tempered the language elsewhere. According to stage directions, Helena kneels, the Countess lifts up the young woman's face, the Countess then holds Helena's hand and slowly turns her so that they are looking at one another. Warmth and trust exist between them. Photographs suggest the scene's visual influence on the 1981 BBC TV production of All's Well. There the two women meet before a fireplace; the lights and shadows in the room and on their faces capture the fluctuations of mood as Helena moves from kneeling on the floor to rising with the older woman's blessings:

Why, Helen, thou shalt have my leave and love,
                    and be sure of this,
What I can help thee to, thou shalt not miss.

(251-56)

Helena, the activist, will go to the French court. Convinced that she can cure the King, she wishes to gamble her life on her medicine, explaining, “I’d venture / The well-lost life of mine on his grace's cure” (247-48)—a gamble she will repeat with greater vehemence to the King himself when he challenges, “Upon thy certainty and confidence / What dar’st thou venter?” (II.i.169-70). Her final offer comes late in the conversation, only after she has failed to convince him of her skill. For the audience, that last proposal is linked to her earlier conversation with Parolles where she speaks with such directness about sex.

At first, despite Lafew's strong introduction of her as the daughter of her famous physician father, the King rejects Helena's proposal. He assures her that others, far more skilled than she, have finally admitted defeat. There is no cure for his illness. “We thank you, maiden, / But may not be so credulous of cure, / When our most learned doctors leave us” (II.i.114-16), he protests. As she presses on, he warns her of her naivete, “But what at full I know, thou know’st no part, / I knowing all my peril, thou no art” (132-33). It is only when she offers her life, and perhaps more persuasively, her reputation, that he listens. It is her willingness to have her name bandied about as a strumpet that finally convinces him. The obverse of Isabella's unwillingness to sacrifice her virginity for her brother's life (Measure for Measure), Helena's proposal rests on a similar awareness of the price expected of women—one linked with sexuality. Because her eventual goal is marriage to Bertram, Helena gambles that combination—her life and her reputation:

                                        Tax of impudence,
A strumpet's boldness, a divulged shame,
Traduc’d by odious ballads; my maiden's name
Sear’d otherwise; ne worse of worst—extended
With vildest torture, let my life be ended.

(170-74)

The above passage is one of the play's cruxes, its punctuation challenging editors. However, the general references to being called a strumpet, celebrated as such in ballads, having her name disgraced, and finally meeting death through torture, seem clear, especially the direct connection between loss of virginity and loss of reputation. Helena knows that this is the sharpest criticism a young woman can face, coupling sexual disgrace with death. As a result of the extremity of her personal risk, the King agrees to try her cure.

And then, once again she deviates from the expected behavioral pattern for women: she asks for a reward. Rather than being satisfied with the King's thanks or her own sense of accomplishment at having cured a seemingly incurable man, she sets a specific price on her labor. Although her story parallels Shakespeare's source and is said to have prototypes in early folk tales (Lawrence, Ch. 2), her request for marriage to the man of her choosing is clearly unconventional. And yet, she asks for neither money nor wisdom nor any more esoteric reward, but rather for the prize which young women have been trained to seek: marriage. Helena's bargain with the King reflects her directness; she will chance her life:

… not helping, death's my fee,
But if I help, what do you promise me?
King. Make thy demand.
Helena. But will you make it even?
King. Ay, by my sceptre and my hopes
of heaven.

(189-92)

The challenge for Helena, however, goes beyond winning a husband; it lies in overcoming the shift in values when women succeed in a patriarchal society. Suddenly the rules of the game change. Helena cures the King and wins the hand of Bertram in marriage only to discover that the highly acclaimed achievement loses its luster when performed by a woman. Because such success so surprises men, as Margaret Fuller observes, the term miracle then replaces success:

Wherever she has herself arisen in national or private history, and nobly shone forth in any form of excellence, men have received her, not only willingly, but with triumph. Their encomiums, indeed, are always, in some sense, mortifying; they show too much surprise. “Can this be you?” he cries to the transfigured Cinderella; “well, I should never have thought it, but I am very glad. We will tell every one that you have ‘surpassed your sex.’” (43)

The critical word in the above quote is mortifying. Fuller then goes on to explain it as revealing men's inability to comprehend women's success when competing in men's sphere. In Shakespeare's play, Parolles's lines reverberate with the same incomprehension as those of Fuller's typical man: “Mort du vinaigre! is not this Helen?” (II.iii.44), he exclaims in shock when he discovers that she is the person who has cured the King's illness and is dancing a coranto with him. If she has surprisingly “surpassed her sex,” Helena's problem is that the reward she has asked for expresses the traditional expectations of her sex—a husband—but it casts her as the active pursuer rather than the passively wooed.

After Parolles's exclamation, the King wastes no time in honoring his pledge. He calls the young men of his court to him and directs:

Fair maid, send forth thine eye. This youthful parcel
Of noble bachelors stand at my bestowing,
O’er whom both sovereign power and father's voice
I have to use. Thy frank election make;
Thou hast power to choose, and they none to forsake.

(II.iii.52-56)

Shakespeare uses a sensitively tuned artistic device—a series of young nobles whom Helena will query—to show that not merely Bertram, but societal attitudes, conspire against her. She moves from one young man to the next: “Sir, will you hear my suit?” (76) she asks. “And grant it” (77), he replies. The words seem to imply acceptance. Helena, however, moves on to the next potential suitor. Here her opening observation offers a clue to what she sees: “The honor, sir, that flames in your fair eyes, / Before I speak too threat’ningly replies” (80-81). Nevertheless, she asks and he accedes. Rejecting him, she moves on. As David Haley observes, “The young lords' icy politeness masks a contempt of which Helena is quite sensible” (49). Although there has been some critical disagreement as to the young men's reactions to Helena, the dramatist provides a first-hand observer in the King's trusted adviser, Lafew. Because verbal meanings may be colored by tonal inflections and even contradicted by body language, his indignant comment should be recognized as summarizing those young bachelors' responses: “Do all they deny her? And they were sons of mine, I’d have them whipt, or I would send them to th’ Turk to make eunuchs of” (86-88). On the page, the men's lines may not appear cold; Lafew's speech, acting as a stage direction, tells us just how they must be spoken on stage. A third and yet a fourth “noble bachelor” is approached and then rejected by Helena. We know, just as she does, that Bertram is the man, right from the start. Surely part of the reason for this movement from one young man to the next is the laughter it can provoke. Through the double vision possible in the theater, audiences may watch the contradictory impulses driving Helena and, at the same time, keep an eye on Bertram.

This important scene illuminating her character, however, frequently changes shape on stage. Records of the omission of the other young men date back to 1773. Once more, excisions reduce her role. The audience may no longer observe her dramatic flair as she moves from one young man to the next. Nor may they hear her keen evaluation of each prospect and her sense of humor. Even worse, the cuts deny audiences the opportunity to witness Helena's timidity as she shies away from naming Bertram at once, perhaps in the wild hope that he may find her attractive and step forward. The scene, which emphasizes the fate of a woman who wins in a society where she is not even supposed to compete, becomes instead another example of Helena's unfeeling forwardness since she moves immediately to Bertram.

Shakespeare's insight into this catch-22 for women, personalized and made specific in Helena in this scene, echoes in our own time. In her article “Fail: Bright Women,” Matina Horner documents the decision of intelligent college women to sacrifice intellectual excellence for sexual appeal to men (36-39). In fact, in Tyrone Guthrie's 1959 production, this dichotomy between brains and beauty is clearly established by the introduction of additional lines in a ball scene preceding the entrance of the cured King with Helena. The guests are speaking. One guest refers to the “Wise Woman” in the King's chamber; another to the “good old King”; still another gives the impression that the King himself will not appear that evening. Then one of the guests says, “quite a young girl, quite young. Your age or less”—obviously addressing a woman—who responds, “Would I had her skill.” “Or she your beauty,” is the quick reply. Giving the conversation a too-modern twist, the woman then chides, “Nay sir, none of that. My husband will be angry.” Helena's triumphant waltz from one young man to the next hardly wins applause. She has not learned to fail. But productions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries refrained from showing the scene Shakespeare wrote. Instead they reduced it to a single, undeviating choice, emphasizing her single-minded devotion, without humor, to Bertram.

As written, Shakespeare's scene has a complexity that questions some accepted stereotypes. It confronts us with the weaknesses of our social system and the cost to women of a limited perception of sexuality, one stressing a dichotomy between intelligence and physical beauty. The play seems to accept the possibility that these two qualities along with assertiveness can belong to one woman character. Many adaptors, however, failed to link these characteristics in Helena. Guthrie's production characterizes one of the problems: the influence of contemporary culture on staging the play. Nineteen fifty-nine belonged to the post-World War II period, marked by women's return to the kitchen and child-raising; normalcy was defined as treasuring the home life.⁸ Betty Friedan had not yet completed The Feminine Mystique although women were living it. As she says, she “wasn’t even conscious of the woman problem” (1) until she started writing the book in 1957. To give some idea of just what the period was like, and how, therefore, it could have influenced this production, even though Guthrie was working in England at the time, I quote:

By the end of the nineteen-fifties, … the proportion of women attending college in comparison with men [dropped] from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar. (12)

In such an environment, responses to Helena, but more important perhaps, projections of her in the theater were distorted.

By omitting the other young men, or by creating a portrait of the brainy if sexually unattractive woman, adaptors and directors failed to hear the text's complexity in Helena's selection speech. Perhaps they found her movement from one young man to another painful or unladylike. Nevertheless, this withholding of her choice of Bertram appears in the text. Although her lines to Bertram sound submissive, her final four words—addressed to the King—do not:

I dare not say I take you, but I give
Me and my service, ever whilst I live,
Into your guiding power.—This is the man.

(II.iii.102-4)

She has employed neither seduction nor tricks. In a society that rewards achievement, she has won honestly, gambling her life. But she has defied the conventions. Although innumerable examples exist in fiction probably known to Shakespeare's audience of the wise woman who, given a seemingly impossible task, achieves it, this drama also illuminates the immediate and specific obstacles a woman character, no matter how wise, must face.

When Helena says, “This is the man,” Shakespeare creates an explosive situation to move his audience. Although Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes of “what one would logically expect” as a result of a girl's training, she also knows that such logic is irrelevant. At this point in the action, All's Well That Ends Well illustrates that absence of logic. Helena has followed logic in pursuing marriage to Bertram. He, however, scorns her; he would choose for himself and not be the one chosen. As we later discover, he insists on initiating the choice. Although his training, unlike a woman's, may not have focused on the “vocation” of marriage, the social structure endorses him. The play, however—because of its sympathy for Helena and its alteration of the character of Bertram from the prototype in the source—questions that position.

Shakespeare's play also reveals how a “logic” based on power governs patterns of courtship in a patriarchal society. Responses to Helena's being the wooer or pursuer depend in part on the staging and in part on evaluation of the validity of her action. George Bernard Shaw cheered her as the precursor of the modern woman, calling the play “an experiment repeated nearly three hundred years later in A Doll's House” (Our Theatres 1:27). Others have condemned her.⁹ Writing of Othello, Helen Gardner noted that passions are still strong concerning the play's subjects—among them jealousy, fidelity, and chastity—and considers this one reason why a “conflict of views about the play and its hero” exists (5).¹⁰ The same may be said about All's Well That Ends Well. A conflict of views exists about one of the primary subjects in this play: the right of a woman to pursue a man with the objective of marriage. Implicit here is the pejorative accusation of “aggressiveness” applied to women for characteristics praised in men as “strength” and “self-confidence” (Broverman 34:1-7). Despite her success in curing the King and her right to a reward, Helena herself feels the social pressure and retreats to the expected womanly role, “That you are well restor’d, my lord, I’m glad. Let the rest go,” a line never excised (II.iii.147-48). But it is too late, the contest has become one between the honor of two men; the elder and more powerful, the King, triumphs.

Married to Bertram, Helena discovers the irony of that first debate with Parolles, so relevant to the play and so often omitted. Once again virginity is the topic. Paradoxically, the challenge she faces is not that of protecting herself from a man who would “blow her up” but of legitimating her marriage through pregnancy by her husband. Having returned to Rossillion at his request, she receives his letter: “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.’” She recoils at its finality. “This is a dreadful sentence” (III.ii.58-61). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century actor-managers also recoiled. They found his conditions tasteless and therefore reduced the letter to Bertram's first demand: the ring.

Like variations on a motif, the pattern of this scene recalls the play's opening at Rossillion. Again the Countess dominates the conversation. This time, however, her praise for Helena is linked with disapproval of Bertram. “I do wash his name out of my blood, / And thou art all my child” (67-68), she exclaims to the young bride, condemning Bertram's defiance of a good King and “misprising of a maid too virtuous / For the contempt of empire” (31-32). Reacting with scorn to the closing line of his letter, “Till I have no wife, I have nothing in France” (74-75), she labels him a “rude” (82) boy, exploding, “There’s nothing here that is too good for him / But only she,” (80-81). Meanwhile, the parallel to the earlier pattern continues as Helena listens in comparative silence. Again, she reveals herself only in soliloquy after the others have left the stage. This time, however, she speaks as a wife reacting to her husband's letter. Nor does her soliloquy capture the tone of passive adoration or exuberant confidence in the value of action heard at the beginning of the play. Despite reward, action had not brought the anticipated happy ending. The naive young woman who believed “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie” has discovered that societal conventions subvert the self's achieving its goal. Feeling guilty at depriving Bertram of the right to come home and fearing that he may be killed in battle, Helena's adoration of him cannot be passive—as it was at the play's opening. More in despair than hope, she decides to leave Rossillion that night.

Shakespeare's modulations of the portrait of Helena continue, revealing his insight into women's lives as they seek to adjust and readjust to the restrictive rules of a patriarchal society. Disguised as a pilgrim, she arrives in Florence disconsolate and feeling defeated. Although critics have questioned her motives for going to Florence—some believing she is further plotting to “snare” Bertram—her reflections in soliloquy before leaving Rossillion, her subsequent letter informing the Countess of the decision to depart, and even Helena's later comments to the Florentine women all reflect her sense of defeat. At this moment in the play, she believes she has overstepped the boundaries of proper behavior and therefore deserves her fate.

Meeting three women who identify her at once as a pilgrim recently come from France, she accepts their invitation to join them in watching the parade of passing French troops. She listens to their talk of Bertram. “Here you shall see a countryman of yours / That has done worthy service” (III.v.47-48), says the eldest, the Widow. When told that according to reports the King “married him / Against his liking” (53-54) and that Parolles speaks “but coarsely” of the wife, Helena agrees, “O, I believe with him” (56-57). Disagreeing with Helena, these women show more compassion for Bertram's wife than she does for herself. Observes the Widow's daughter, Diana:

                                        Alas, poor lady,
’Tis a hard bondage to become the wife
Of a detesting lord.
I would he lov’d his wife. If he were honester
He were much goodlier.
’Tis pity he is not honest.

(63-65, 79-80, 82)

She expresses her sympathy in three separate speeches, while Helena regains confidence after the Widow's comment, “This young maid might do her / A shrewd turn, if she pleas’d” (67-68). The disguised wife's quick response, “How do you mean?” (68), differs from her resigned acceptance of Parolles's unflattering comments earlier in the scene.

Providing comfort and support for her, these women also introduce still another perspective on virginity, one less concerned with “choosing to one's own liking” than with defense against the manipulative male. Before Helena's appearance, their conversation establishes the standards governing their actions. Diana's praise of “the French count” (Bertram) who had “done most honorable service” (III.v.3-4) is quickly interrupted by the warning, “The honor of a maid is her name, and no legacy is so rich as honesty” (12-13). The speaker, Mariana, then details men's methods of seduction:

[T]heir promises, enticements, oaths, tokens, and all these engines of lust, are not the things they go under. Many a maid hath been seduc’d by them, and the misery is, example, that so terrible shows in the wrack of maidenhood, cannot for all that dissuade succession, but that they are lim’d with the twigs that threatens them. I hope I need not to advise you further, but I hope your own grace will keep you where you are, though there were no further danger known but the modesty which is so lost.

(18-28)

All but the last sentence of this was excised from the 1773 Bell text and both Kemble adaptations. Benson, in 1888, printed the entire section in small type—indicating omission—and Bridges, in the 1922 production, deleted these lines. What remains is a brief “Beware of them [Parolles and Bertram] Diana” (18) followed by the response “You shall not need to fear me” (29). The specificity of the warning has been eliminated along with Mariana's hopelessness about women heeding her.

At the beginning of the play, Helena had asked in jest if there were a way to “barricado” oneself against the invading male; she had been assured there was none. Her conversation had concentrated on the physical aggression against a woman's virginity. Mariana includes the emotional and psychological, oaths and flattery, noting that women themselves cooperate in breaking down their own defences. Paradoxically, Shakespeare, here as elsewhere—in Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet, for example—illustrates the ability of young women to perceive men's deception through oaths and flattery.¹¹

Crossing social and intellectual lines, Helena gains a new sense of herself as a woman through this chance meeting with others who identify with “Bertram's wife.” The Widow's comment about Diana leads the disguised pilgrim to further speculate, “May be the amorous count solicits her / In the unlawful purpose” (69-70). Her choice of words shows how carefully Shakespeare has developed the portrait of a woman who knows the man she has married. The texts “amorous,” “solicits,” and “unlawful” also seem to contradict one critic's theory that Bertram “must be educated to accept … sexuality,” or that his initial rejection of Helena included a “recoil from sexuality itself” (Parker, 100, 102).

Conferring with the Widow in her next scene, Helena asks for help in fulfilling the demands of the letter. She establishes her identity, then reveals, again, her knowledge of Bertram, a flawed man. Referring to the ring on his finger that she must acquire, she counsels:

                                        This ring he holds
In most rich choice; yet in his idle fire,
To buy his will, it would not seem too dear,
Howe’er repented after.

(III.vii.25-28)

More than anyone else, she spells out his weaknesses. He is accustomed to getting what he wishes, then weighing the cost afterwards. According to her evaluation, her “bright particular star”—now her husband—is spoiled. In the first scene, she tolerated Parolles—“a notorious liar”—because of Bertram—“I love him for his sake.” Here she offers more specifics. Although critics have tended to ask flippantly why someone as gifted and bright as Helena would want a cad like Bertram, the play emphasizes the irrelevance of that question. Rather, Shakespeare asks why a woman superior to a man in intelligence, ability, and moral strength may not choose to her own liking. He then explores the close relationship between power and sexuality. Helena has competed and won by society's rules. And yet she has not been able to claim her reward. Kate Millett writes: “Sexual dominion obtains … as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power” (25). Bertram's power supersedes the King's.

From the opening to the closing of this play, we hear the contrast between the way men and women “meditate” on virginity, noting its direct relationship to power. Helena opens with thoughts of Bertram. Parolles expounds on the philosophic reasons why women should hurry and lose their virginity. Helena decides actively to pursue Bertram at court. The Clown talks of his need for a woman and marriage; the Countess soliloquizes on falling in love, then shares her thoughts on childbearing with Helena. The King speaks of the girls of Italy, jestingly warning his young nobles against them. Helena at court chances being called a strumpet and disgraced as a whore if she fails in her cure. Meditating on virginity for her means winning Bertram. For Bertram, meditating on virginity means setting impossible standards for consummating a marriage. It also means deflowering Diana. For Diana, meditating on virginity means learning to distrust men's vows.

Diana's delightful scene with Bertram when she bargains for the ring and sets the time and place of the rendezvous illustrates her skepticism about the truth of men's vows:

’Tis not the many oaths that makes the truth,
But the plain single vow that is vow’d true.
If I should swear by Jove's great attributes
I lov’d you dearly, would you believe my oaths
When I did love you ill?

(IV.ii.21-27)

Reminiscent of Juliet's lines to Romeo, this speech gives insights into Diana's wit and sharpness. Often, however, merely a few lines remain, the scene's primary emphasis being on a comparison of his ring—“an honor ’longing to our house” (42)—and Diana's chastity—“the jewel of our house” (46). Gone too in many versions is most of her closing soliloquy, beginning “My mother told me just how he would woo, / As if she sate in's heart” (69-70) and ending, “Only in this disguise I think’t no sin / To cozen him that would unjustly win” (75-76).

Since she and the Widow are important supports for Helena in the closing scenes, the audience needs to have some hint of their humanity and sense of values. Too often excisions blur the picture. Occasionally staging alters the intention of the text. Guthrie, for example, introduced a musical duet between Diana and Bertram at the scene's opening:

Bertram. Pray thee take these
flowers, maiden fair.
Diana. Thank you sir for me they’re
blossoms rare.
Bertram. Tho’ they fade and
wither yet stayeth green,
Both. In my heart, forever my love
unseen.

This was only part of the overall shift in characterization. According to Price, Guthrie also presented Diana as “a wartime factory tart who sits on the doorstep in nightgown and housecoat” and the Widow as an older version of her daughter (58). No longer is Diana a moral young woman supporting another woman's cause. She becomes, instead, someone involved in a trick because of possible reward, thus distorting the text.

The substitution of one woman for another in a man's bed has often troubled critics, who label it “the bed trick.” Diana, after winning Bertram's ring, promises to meet him. Instead, her rendezvous becomes Helena's. Applying the test of realism to such substitution, some critics find the play deeply flawed. But realism does not affect the underlying truth expressed in the work. Nor is it relevant that Helena becomes pregnant after one encounter with a man—the complaint of one critic who called it “an extremely lucky hit” (Parker, 112). Shakespeare's portraits of women in All's Well That Ends Well, of their relationships with one another, of their perceptions of the male world, and of their sense of themselves have a validity that overshadows any realistic questions of plot—just as the presence of a ghost does not disqualify the insights in Hamlet. The women, particularly Helena and the Countess, are remarkable and complex. This comedy seems to ask, “What if men and women were equal?” It answers with a variation on Virginia Woolf's words, that “Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation” (41). Then women, like men, may choose to their own liking and make their own mistakes.

Moving into the Illyria of adulthood for women and chancing sexual disgrace, Helena discovers constantly new unanticipated obstacles even after achieving the “vocation” of marriage. While fulfilling the requirements of comedy, the play's ending, where she finally wins Bertram for a second time, seems hedged about with ambiguities. It includes his rejection of Diana, lying and accusing her of being a camp follower, and then, when confronted by Helena, who has fulfilled all the seemingly impossible tasks listed in his letter, he begins his speech with the word If. “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, [that she is pregnant by him] / I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (V.iii.315-16). While Bertram's concession in these closing moments may sound like a reprieve, his actions offer little support for an unconditional change of heart. As the King's final lines suggest, “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet” (V.iii.333-34). This is hardly a strong affirmative statement. Shakespeare presents a portrait of a woman unloved by her husband. Audiences and readers recognize the irony of Helena's rejoicing in this momentary triumph since she surpasses Bertram in knowledge, skill, and virtue.

Helena's acceptance by Bertram, however, must be considered against the larger landscape of women's sexual options—no matter what their talents—when they come of age in a patriarchal society. Shakespeare's heroine has successfully challenged the pattern. Not only has she planned “for whom she will achieve and attain,” but she illustrates the “eager husband hunter” regarded with approval in the world of the play. The problem for those in the world outside the play—audiences, adaptors, and critics—is that they still look with disapproval on such logical behavior.

Notes

1. Kelso discusses her use of the term lady as follows:

   … there was no such thing as the lady so far as theory went … distinguished either from the gentleman or from any other woman. … [M]any books of a theoretical sort were written for and on the lady … but beyond the dedications to ladies, duchesses, or queens, the contents … apply to the whole sex rather than to any favored section of it. The lady, shall we venture to say, turns out to be merely a wife. (1)

   See chapter 1, note 3 for further discussion of Kelso's book. See also Renaissance conduct manuals such as Juan Luis Vives's A Very Fruitful and Pleasant Booke, called the Instruction of a Christian Woman, which went into many printings during the sixteenth century, and William Whately's A Bride-Bush, or A Wedding Sermon (1617). See chapter 3, note 1 for excerpts from Whately's work. For a selection of the writings as well as a discussion of them, see Joan Larsen Klein's Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640.

2. According to George Winchester Stone, Jr., we do not know whether Garrick “supervised any revisions of the texts. … However that he was closely concerned with their production cannot be doubted” (“Garrick's Handling of Shakespeare's Plays. …” I:320). According to Pedicord and Bergmann, Garrick “produced but did not act in All's Well That Ends Well” (3:xiv). No specific Garrick version exists. I will therefore refer to changes in All's Well That Ends Well at that time as the Bell text, the Drury Lane production, or the 1773 text, since the Bell text records the play “as performed at the Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane (London: John Bell, 1773).” Folger prompt AW3 uses this edition although it is marked with later changes by an unknown hand (n.d.).

3. In Love's Labour's Lost, a similar kind of error in coupling of characters occurs. There, we tend to parallel characters because they are love-matched couples, for example, Berowne and Rosaline. In reality, however, the primary intellectually and verbally matched couple is Berowne and the Princess of France. For a full discussion of this, see chapter 2 of Irene Dash's Wooing, Wedding, and Power.

4. In some ways Helena's lines, with their hesitation and emotional intensity, resemble Leontes's in I.ii of The Winter's Tale when he is tormented by thoughts of his wife's unfaithfulness (108-46, 185-206 continuing intermittently to 333). As Susan Snyder observes, the exact meaning of this passage has been debated. Some scholars even believe that lines have been omitted and “recent textual work has uncovered signs of authorial second thoughts” (68). Snyder offers a detailed analysis of various interpretations of this section.

5. According to the Concordance, Helena and Parolles have an almost equal number of speeches, lines, and words, thus dominating the action. Whereas Helena has more lines and words (15.8 percent of each) than Parolles (12.8 percent and 13.25 percent), he has the greater number of speeches (15.0 percent to her 11.6 percent). Spevack, Concordance 1:1015-1121.

6. See David Haley's discussion of the role of alchemical medicine in this play, especially 58-101, 224-37.

7. These lines appear in the Kemble 1793 acting text (5). However, after having reduced the soliloquy to these two lines (121 and 129 in Shakespeare's text), Kemble then found them sequentially weak and transposed them in his 1811 version (10).

8. See, for example Farnham and Lundberg's Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), a popular work of the time.

9. See Joseph Price's excellent book for a review and analysis of the criticism.

10. See chapter 5, “A Woman Tamed,” on Othello in Wooing, Wedding, and Power for a discussion of the problems in criticism of the play and the frequent failure of critics to recognize Desdemona as a complex woman character entering an unorthodox marriage.

11. When the Princess of France warns the King of Navarre, “your Grace is perjur’d much, … / Your oath I will not trust” (LLL V.ii.790, 794), she is saying in a comedy what Juliet says in a tragedy when she warns Romeo “Do not swear at all (Rom II.ii.112). The dramatist in each case is illustrating the ease with which men swear and the skepticism of women. For further discussion, see chapters 2, 4, and 8 in Wooing, Wedding, and Power.

Bibliography

Dash, Irene G. Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare’s Plays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

Farnham, Marynia, and Ferdinand Lundberg. Modern Women: The Lost Sex. New York: Harper, 1947.

Haley, David. Shakespeare’s Courtly Mirror: Reflexivity and Prudence in “All’s Well That Ends Well.” Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993.

Kelso, Ruth. Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1956.

[Kemble, J. P.] Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, with Alterations by J. P. Kemble, As … Performed … [at] the Theatre-Royal, Drury-Lane. London: J. Debrett, 1793.

Klein, Joan Larsen, ed. Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men About Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1604. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Pedicord, Harry William, and Frederick Louis Bergmann, eds. Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare. Vols. 3 and 4 of The Plays of David Garrick. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981.

Price, Joseph. The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of “All’s Well That Ends Well” and Its Critics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968.

Snyder, Susan. “All's Well that Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object.” ELR 18 (1988): 66-77.

Spevack, Marvin. A Complete Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. 6 vols. Hildesheim, Germany: George Olms, 1968-70.

Stone, George Winchester, Jr. “Garrick’s Handling of Shakespeare’s Plays and His Influence upon the Changed Attitude of Shakespearean Criticism During the Eighteenth Century.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1940.

Vives, Juan Luis. A Very Fruitful and Pleasant Booke, called the Instruction of a Christian Women. Translated by Richard Hyrde. London: Printed by Robert Walde-grave, 1585.

Whately, William. A Bride-bush, or A Wedding Sermon: Compendiously describing the duties of Married Persons: By performing whereof, Marriage shall be to them a great Helpe, which now finde it a little Hell. Printed at London by William Jaggard, for Nicholas Bourne, and are to be sold at his shop at the entrace into the Royall Exchange, 1617.