SOURCE: “‘Adoption Strives with Nature’: The Slip of Patriarchal Signifiers in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State, Associated University Presses, 1995, pp. 127-48.

[In the following essay, Hall investigates Helena's “upwardly mobile” desire in All's Well That Ends Well, contending that “her actions restore the very patriarchy which she seems to threaten.”]

In this chapter I want to examine the way in which the romance narrative of All's Well That Ends Well (1599), together with the archaizing representation of the feudal court of France, in fact addresses the anxieties of the centralizing kingdom of England of Shakespeare's time, for this play is by no means a merely idealizing or escapist fantasy. The archaism itself is the locus of a contemporary breakdown, and the mobile heroine, Helena, emerges as the agent of an extremely precarious restoration.

The plot of All's Well That Ends Well is taken from Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 1350), though the immediate source may well have been Painter's version, “Giletta of Narbona,” in The Palace of Pleasure (1556). The story is of a bourgeois heroine, Helena, who is adopted into a noble family, and falls in love with the son, Bertram, whom she pursues to the court in Paris. There she cures the dying King with healing powers learned from her father, and earns for herself thereby the right to choose a husband. She chooses Bertram, who only acquiesces under pressure from the king and flees from her love to war and illicit love in Italy. There, in pilgrim dress, Helena arranges to substitute herself in bed for a noblewoman whom he plans to seduce, and is consequently recognized by him as his wife.

In one sense this plot represents the fulfillment of Helena's upwardly mobile desires and a successful assault upon the caste barriers guarding the nobility, from which her lack of the right paternal “blood” excludes her. But, in another sense, which also needs to be traced out, her actions restore the very patriarchy which she seems to threaten. The crucial questions turn on the recognition and legitimation of her desires by two apparently incompatible figures. These are firstly Bertram's mother, the countess of Rossillion, and secondly the king of France. Shakespeare invented the former matriarchal figure, and vastly expanded the importance of the latter patriarchal one, whom Helena restores to life. He also introduces a third major figure, Lafew as spokesman for the “true” patriarchal order.

The play opens with a strange death which is also a birth and a marriage. The death of Bertram's aristocratic father by “blood” means, according to Lafew, that his true father is now the king. Similarly, the king is also (equally truly, i.e., metaphorically), the husband of the countess:

Countess. In delivering my
son from me I bury a second husband.
Bertram. And I, in going, madam,
weep o’er my father's death anew; but I must attend his majesty's
command, to whom I am now in ward, and evermore in subjection.
Lafew. You shall find of the King
a husband, madam; you, sir, a father.

(All's Well That Ends Well, 1.1.1ff.)

Bertram's departure is like the second breaking of a “natural” bond in two senses: firstly the bond of a child to the mother's body, which is indeed natural and is broken at birth, and secondly the “blood” bond of aristocratic patrilineal descent. This second, supposedly “natural” bond, is destroyed on the death of the father, not by nature however, but by royal power. The aristocratic heir becomes the ward of the king “evermore in subjection.” Lafew's metaphors are recognizably in the service of royal ideology and of the law making aristocratic orphans wards of court, which the English Crown vigorously enforced where it could.

The underlying historical issue is the struggle between central power and the independent nobility. Centralizing authority is actually being constrained to replace “blood” bonds with more modern forms of state power, but in so doing it unwillingly exposes these supposedly natural relations to a potentially disastrous recognition of what they are: that is, mere signifiers in a discourse of power. The point is that royal power also depends crucially on the ideology of “blood” inheritance, but it is forced to usurp the place assigned by aristocratic filiation to the natural father in order to assert central control. The generalized crisis of this feudal signifier arises from the ineluctable translation of its formerly unquestioned “natural” status into its status as sign. My argument is that the discourse of the “natural,” associated with the heroine in this play, is mobilized to restore substance to this important feudal signifier: the patriarchal “blood.” But first it is necessary to attend to its crisis and its displacement into essentialist and moralizing misrecognitions. These issues are first sounded in the countess's farewell blessing to her son:

Countess. Be thou blessed,
Bertram, and succeed thy father
In manners as in shape. Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright. Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none.

(1.1.57ff.)

The farewell blessing is traditionally a paternal function, and the countess here stands in for the authority of the dead father. There is a suggestive ambiguity in the notion of contention when she says: “Thy blood and virtue / Contend for empire in thee.” Clearly, her words express a wish for the triumph of “blood” and “virtue” in unison, but they also portend the central conflict of the play, where the dissociation of virtue and caste (“blood”) becomes a major issue. Similarly, the king's first greeting to Bertram notes his resemblance to his father, and goes on to wish, like the countess, that the resemblance will have a moral correlate:

King. Youth, thou bear’st
thy father's face.
Frank nature, rather curious than in haste,
Hath well composed thee. Thy father's moral parts
Mayst thou inherit too.

(1.2.19ff.)

To point to the flaws in Bertram's character is to labor the obvious. Less obvious is the chain of associations established later in this scene between Bertram's flaw, the contemporary loss of values, and the king's resignation to his own death. The sight of Bertram brings up a nostalgia in the king for lost youth and strength, and that in turn leads to a comparison of two epochs:

King. It much repairs me
To talk of your good father. In his youth
He had the wit which I can well observe
Today in our young lords, but they may jest
Till their own scorn return to them unnoted
Ere they can hide their levity in honour.
So like a courtier, contempt nor bitterness
Were in his pride or sharpness; if they were
His equal had awaked them, and his honour—
Clock to itself—knew the true minute when
Exception bid him speak, and at this time
His tongue obeyed his hand.

(1.2.30ff.)

For the king, the lost “honour” of the generation of the fathers depended upon a virtuous sense of due measure, and modern “wit” is its undoing. The metaphor of the accuracy of the clock denotes the lost adequation of words to occasion, of action to words, and of person to rank. In that remembered epoch, sign and self corresponded. The lamenting King goes on to quote the “good melancholy” of Bertram's dead father verbatim. This repetition of the melancholy words indicates a controlling structure of nostalgia or regressive desire, for the King's present wish to die repeats explicitly the same wish expressed by Bertram's father:

King. ‘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, whose judgements are
Mere fathers of their garments, whose constancies
Expire before their fashions’. This he wished.
I after him do after him wish too,
Since I nor wax nor honey can bring home
I quickly were dissolved from my hive
To give some labourers room.

(1.2.58ff.)

The indirect reproach to Bertram from the King sees fashion, like the younger generation's verbal wit, as a metaphor for a contemporary loss of adequation of word to being, and beyond this the metaphor hints at a loss of paternity itself. The courtier's wit fathers not sons but garments, a situation in which even changing fashion is more constant than judgment. Bertram's physical attractiveness inherited from his father (which everyone notes), also threatens to function as a sign of emptiness. It may turn out that even his own father has fathered a rich but empty garment. Fashion, which turns clothes from being reliable signs of social identity (status) into a proliferation of empty signifiers and mobile identities, was precisely what Elizabethan Sumptuary Laws sought to counteract. The association of fashion with wit (Much Ado About Nothing is full of examples) is by no means fortuitous, but is itself the sign of a far-reaching anxiety. Here it is also striking that the king, hostile as he is to this new world of signs, feels death-bound (even desiring “to be dissolved from my hive”) because he is no longer the source of riches. What is failing here, and what the king nostalgically clings to, is that effect of encoding which Deleuze calls “miraculation,” through which the despot is perceived as the true origin of collective riches. The dying king is actually protesting against the generalized cultural “decoding” taking place all around him, through which former identities and certainties are now being revealed as nothing but arbitrary, empty signs. His own imminent death is the central metaphor of this crisis of decoding. Thus the “medieval” romance is concerned with the killing power of mercantilism, which it does not represent, but to which it responds as its absent cause. (Parenthetically for the moment, I would add that it is uncertain whether it is Shakespeare or the king alone who thinks that the collective production of the honeybee is organized around a king. In the end, it scarcely matters: in either case, the certainties of the male-centered discourse itself are surreptitiously undone by the alliance between the countess of Rossillion and Helena. In the background of the patriarchal crisis, there is a “natural” order where the queen bee reigns. Of that, more anon).

The relationship of Bertram's personal conduct to the more general crisis in values does not come to the forefront until Helena's cure of the king has led on to Bertram's refusal of her. But the key issues of this plot development are already anticipated in the representation of the dying patriarch at the center of a dying system, and therefore wishing to die himself. Where Boccaccio and Painter utilize the folkloric motif of the dying king purely instrumentally to further Gilette of Narbonne's desires, Shakespeare puts those active desires in a very significant context of cultural dislocation. Helena's rescue of the dying king is an incompleted action, in the sense that the cultural crisis associated with that imminent (and immanent) death is not really overcome until Bertram too is rescued from his betrayal of patriarchal values, to become integrated into the law. This connection between the two “tasks” fulfilled by the heroine is entirely absent from Shakespeare's source plots. In developing the restorative function of active female desire in a scene of fallen patriarchal values, Shakespeare transforms a socially and sexually disruptive figure into a cultural heroine.

Shakespeare follows Boccaccio and Painter, but with greater emphasis, when he establishes the strict upper limit to the disruption represented by Helena's desires. As in the prose narrative sources, Helena specifically reassures the king that her choice of husband will not touch the royal blood:

Helena. Exempted be from me
the arrogance
To choose from forth the royal blood of France,
My low and humble name [sic] to propagate
With any branch or image of thy state;
But such a one, thy vassal, whom I know
Is free for me to ask, thee to bestow.

(2.1.194ff.)

“Blood” and “name” are synonyms, since both are the signifiers of patrilineal descent. In Boccaccio, Helena's disclaimer is merely mentioned. Even in a romance fantasy, a king could not accept Helena's choice if that would jeopardize the royal blood. Shakespeare develops this theme. The king, freed from the potential threat to the royal blood, reproaches Bertram for overvaluing “blood” and preferring the sham of title to the reality of virtue:

King. ’Tis only title
thou disdain’st in her, the which
I can build up. Strange is it that our bloods,
Of colour, weight, and heat, poured all together,
Would quite confound distinction, yet stands off
In differences so mighty.

(2.3.117ff.)

The king belittles aristocratic “title,” except the titles that he bestows, because (it goes without saying) titles bestowed by himself are recognitions of virtue and merit. More forcefully, he attacks the idea of the value inherent in blood, denying that the differences which it signifies have any basis in nature. But this is only within the understanding that the value inherent in the royal blood remains inviolate. Clearly the issue is political. It is a politics in which key words like “blood,” “honour,” “virtue,” and “father” mediate the historical confrontation of feudal values and a centralizing but still inescapably feudal monarchy. The crisis of the play should be understood as the slippage of some very important feudal signifiers under pressure. The King's desire is a desire that these signifiers be reattached to the signifieds for which he is nostalgic. Hence his lament for the lost epoch. But at the same time, in asserting his power over Bertram, he is driven to demystify the principal signifier of the order which he yearns to restore. The point is not to display yet another text deconstructing itself, as is the wont of texts under the modern critical gaze. It is rather a matter of demonstrating that the king's speech negotiates a historical contradiction and its related anxieties.

The assumption by the king of paternal rights over Bertram raises a crisis in the social myth. In the second scene of Act 1, the king has remembered an epoch exemplified by Bertram's father, when nobility of birth corresponded exactly to nobility of word and conduct. Virtue, therefore, inhered in social rank and was at the same time grounded in “nature.” This act of memory is, of course, a present dramatic act in Shakespeare's plot. The king constructs a nostalgic myth in accordance with his anxiety and his desire. The past world, constructed on the pattern of romance literature, which mends in fantasy the rifts that are beginning to appear too clearly in ideology, is unattainable except through a miracle. It is in marked contrast to the actual world, where the noble has become the courtier; now “wit” no longer corresponds to a man's “nature” as shown by his deeds (though to say “no longer” is to fall within the terms of the mythical version of history), and the metaphor for this rift between word and being is that of the changing clothes of fashion.

The normally unproblematic function of the monarch in romance tales is to recognize virtue and confer the appropriate title. Rewards are by definition deserved. And Helena in this play undertakes a romance quest, which means to undergo a series of legitimizing recognitions. Her noble “nature” is recognized by the countess, Lafew, and then by the king himself when she restores him to health. Her paternal heritage is her healing virtue. Her test in healing the king involves putting her life and honor at stake to prove her given word. Her deed, therefore, has the trial quality of the combats of epic and romance, normally reserved for men, and the reward has the same quality of recognition. But Bertram's refusal to recognize her is, within this reinvented world of the romance, a refusal to recognize the power of the king.

This opens a breach in the nostalgic myth. When the king replies to the challenge to his authority by locating “honour” in “nature” (to be revealed by deeds), he is obviously reasserting the medieval ethics of the romance, but he is also unwittingly confessing to a breach in them:

King. The property by what
it is should go,
Not by the title. She is young, wise, fair.
In these to nature she’s immediate heir,
And these breed honour. That is honour's scorn
Which challenges itself as honour's born
And is not like the sire; honours thrive
When rather from our acts we them derive
Than our foregoers. The mere word's a slave,
Debauched on every tomb, on every grave
A lying trophy, and as oft is dumb
Where dust and damned oblivion is the tomb
Of honoured bones indeed.

(2.3.130ff.)

What the king strenuously asserts is that deeds underwrite the paternal inheritance by establishing that inheritance in “nature.” But, in order to say that, he also has to say that by itself the inheritance from our “forgoers” is nothing. Even worse, it becomes a sham (a “mere word,” a “lying trophy”) if it is no longer supported by deeds.

This is partly a royal criticism of feudal rights inherent in the paternal blood, but developed in terms of the crisis of the sign. Royalty had always tried to assert that rights or titles of tenure were the king's rewards for service. The usually futile attempt to prevent these hardening into hereditary “blood” rights was the constant preoccupation of feudal monarchies throughout Europe. The political issue is the independent will of the aristocratic family, and the king's claim to control has clear affinities with the policies of the monarchs of England. Thus the dismissal of “blood” or caste in the name of “virtue” is part of the discourse of Royal power:

King. If thou canst like this
creature as a maid,
I can create the rest. Virtue and she
Is her dower; honour and wealth from me.

(2.3.142ff.)

The king's restored power will be manifest in the “creation” of “honour and wealth.” Deleuzian “miraculation” is to be recovered, but at the expense of the independence of aristocratic “blood.” A small but important detail in Boccaccio's story, namely that the orphan girl is a rich heiress, is reversed. Here Boccaccio appears more modern than the later Shakespeare in identifying merit with the social mobility of money in the overcoming of rank. In Shakespeare's play, rank continues to imply wealth. The problem turns on whether both are within the gift of the king. When the latter talks of himself as the source of “honour and wealth,” this involves issues that are much more important for the centralizing monarchies of Northern Europe than for the mercantile city state. The removal of caste barriers to mobile desire in the body politic must be counterbalanced by the reinforcement, or rather reinvention, of respect for feudal myths at the center. But the reinvention brings up the old fissure. The audience may well recognize virtue with the king. But the inability of male erotic nature to obey patriarchal commands is also recognized. The “blood” rebels, and Bertram's personal rebellion mediates a historical crisis in the nature and source of power. “Honour” becomes a problematic concept here. For the king, the idea that deeds express nature and earn honor is not so much a claim for upward social mobility as for the central monarchy to recognize and bestow. Nonetheless, a new social alliance is implied in his championing of non-noble blood. So Bertram's protestation over the dishonor to his family in marrying the lower born Helena is a provocation to the king:

King. My honour's at
the stake, which to defeat,
I must produce my power. Here, take her hand

(2.3.149ff.)

It is one version of patriarchy against another. But at the same time, an open confrontation with the absolute arbitrariness of the signs of rank and social identity, (which haunts the king and, reportedly, Bertram's father) has to be avoided. Helena does not just restore the king. In pursuit of her own desires, she becomes an instrument of royal ideology against an independent nobility. She represents a “natural” virtue that the king can recognize and invoke against the myth of the aristocratic, paternal “blood.”

The problem that emerges at this point cannot be reduced to a question of individual character psychology alone. The display of royal power produces an acquiescence from Bertram, but this will quickly be revealed as a simulacrum, and the hollowness of words, lamented by the king, becomes a cover for rebellion:

Bertram. Pardon, my gracious
lord, for I submit
My fancy to your eyes. When I consider
What great creation and what dole of honour
Flies where you bid it, I find that she, which late
Was in my nobler thoughts most base, is now
The praised of the King; who, so ennobled,
Is as ’twere born so.

[emphasis added] (2.3.168ff.)

The king claims for his word a power to replace the patrilineal signifier, “blood.” And it is this claim that Bertram resists here, while pretending to accept it. The completion of Helena's second “task” has a redemptive character, because, when Bertram is brought to recognize Helena as his legitimate wife, bestowed by his new father, the internal split is healed and this also ends his state of rebellion against the king. The “true” alignment of his desire in accordance with the king's will also signifies an acceptance of the king's paternal authority within his own subjectivity. He submits to the national law of the father in place of his feudal independence, which is characterized as anarchic desire in this play. In order for this to come about, his “recantation” (as Lafew in the next scene calls his false submissive speech) must become true. The plot which enables this is engineered by Helena, and leads to a public clarification before the monarch, and before Bertram himself, of how much he had earlier become a traitor to his own values of blood and honour. This gratifying “clarification,” however, is contrived by Helena, and is the product of her desire in the service of centralism.

THE MOBILE HEROINE

Helena's “virtue” is recognized by the king because it is a figure for wider magical restorative properties, overcoming the divisive sickness at the center of the patriarchal order. But at the same time she is also a disruptive figure, in the sense that her desire, even when recognized as “virtue” by the king, is an upwardly mobile desire which contains a threat to the values of the “blood.” But there is another issue too. The threatened “blood” is a paternal signifier. But in the case of Helena, “nature” provides a connection between outward sign and inward being. The opening of the play deals not only with Bertram's second birth but also with Helena's. As Bertram changes fathers, Helena enters his aristocratic family. The countess explains to Lafew that she is “bequeathed to my overlooking” by her father, Gerard de Narbonne. She cites the father's name as though the “de” designated aristocracy, and not mere geography, tactfully obscuring the social difference of “blood.” But this distinction is crucial for Bertram who refuses to marry the “poor physician's daughter.” Like Lafew, and the king himself, the countess attaches nobility to virtuous conduct, not to blood.

Helena declares her love for Bertram in open soliloquy before she is made to confess it as a guilty secret by the countess. In this soliloquy, it is recognized as overreaching, and even seems to borrow from Cassius's celebrated speech to Brutus in Julius Caesar (“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves that we are underlings,” Julius Caesar, 1.2.141ff.). Helena's virtue is likewise touched with that Republican threat, insofar as “nature” serves a desire set against the twin pillars of fate and feudal hierarchy:

Helena. 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.
What power is it which mounts my love so high,
That makes me see and cannot feed mine eye?
The mightiest space in fortune nature brings
To join likes and kiss like native things.
The King's disease—my project may deceive me,
But my intents are fixed and will not leave me.
[emphases added]

(1.1.212ff.)

“Nature” also provides a very important link with the countess. When she is informed by the faithful Rynaldo that Helena is in love with Bertram, her reaction is one of sympathetic identification with the “faults” of youthful feminine desire:

Countess. Even so it was with
me when I was young.
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;
It is the show and seal of nature's truth,
Where love's strong passion is impressed in youth.
By our remembrances of days foregone,
Such were our faults—or then we thought them none.

(1.3.124ff.)

This feminine solidarity between generations, grounded in “nature's truth” born “to our blood,” is in striking contrast with the previous scene, which deals with the king's patriarchal reproach to the young males of his court for falling away from their truth. The king sees in the young men a historical degeneration and disobedience, whereas in the countess' speech, women are not, as it were, separated from “nature” like men. Their history is therefore a narrative of continuity, not one of repeated degeneration. At the same time, this “nature” is a challenge to patriarchal hierarchy.

The countess' soliloquy, quoted above, develops a leading motif when she goes on to subject Helena to an interrogation by reiterating that she is not merely Helena's “mistress” in the social order (as Bertram says in his curt farewell to Helena) but a true “mother.” Her insistence that she is Helena's “mother” recurs as a motif throughout the play, and contrasts significantly with Bertram's relationship with his official adoptive “father,” the king. This introduction of a “natural” matriarchy, and the expansion of the crisis centered on the king, is a major shift in Shakespeare's rewriting of the story. It is comic here but nonetheless the pleasure depends upon the evocation of a serious anxiety in Helena:

Countess. 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. ’Tis often seen
Adoption strives with nature, and choice breeds
A native slip to us from foreign seeds.

(1.3.135ff.)

The countess playfully subjects Helena to an equation of her desire with incest. Since Helena has been adopted into the family, the incest anxiety arises from a forbidden affinity and not from consanguinity. But there is more here. The patrilineal “blood” is the principal signifier of the social order, and the countess says that, as a mother, she is not subject to that order. Her “choice” can change “nature” itself. To use her own metaphor, her “recataloguing” can transform the order of succession. She jokes darkly that a woman's “choice” is the true natural source of any bloodline, and that the claims of patriarchy to control the womb's products are based purely on conventional signifiers. In effect, then, Helena's “adoption” by the countess is itself a transgression against caste, a quasi-incestuous assault on the “blood” of patrilineal descent. In rejecting Helena, Bertram maintains a loyalty to his father and the independent nobility. But the countess is subverting this. At first Helena protests in the name of social hierarchy, but she is protesting against her own desire:

Helena. Pardon, madam.
The Count Rossillion cannot be my brother.
I am from humble, he from honoured name;
No note upon my parents, his all noble.
My master, my dear lord he is, and I
His servant live and will his vassal die.
He must not be my brother.

(1.3.150ff.)

Under pressure again, she protests in terms that display more clearly the incest anxiety invoked by the Countess:

Helena. You are my mother
madam. Would you were—
So that my lord your son were not my brother—
Indeed my mother! Or were you both our mothers
I care no more for than I do for heaven,
So I were not his sister.

(1.3.157ff.)

There is, of course, a solution to this entanglement of desires, but Helena can only hint at it obliquely because she considers it too as forbidden. It is the countess who voices it, and Helena's reaction is further guilty confusion:

Helena. … Can’t
no other
But I, your daughter, he must be my brother?
Countess. Yes, Helen, you might be
my daughter-in-law.
God shield you mean it not! ‘Daughter’ and ‘mother’
So strive upon your pulse. What, pale again?

(1.3.163ff.)

In this comic interrogation scene staged by the Countess, Helena expresses obliquely what she is trying to hide. Even when she finally confesses her transgressive love, she still shields the truth of her transgressive intentions.

Helena. I follow him not
By any token of presumptuous suit,
Nor would I have him till I do deserve him,
Yet never know how that desert should be.
                                        O then give pity
To her whose state is such that cannot choose
But lend and give where she is sure to lose,
That seeks to find not that her search implies
But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies.

(1.3.193ff.)

The inexorable countess, however, is not fooled; she shows that she has solved the “riddle” when she goes on to question Helen on her motives for going to Paris. Helena persistently denies her intentions, because although her desires are not literally incestuous, they have a socially disruptive value for which even she herself considers incest to be the appropriate metaphor. Because this whole scene of comic crisis is itself a small play provoked and managed by the countess, it ends with a permission and legitimation of Helena's desire by the matriarch:

Countess. Why, Helen, thou
shalt have my leave and love,
Means and attendants, and my loving greetings
To those of mine in court. I’ll stay at home
And pray God's blessing into thy attempt.
Be gone tomorrow, and be sure of this:
What I can help thee to, thou shalt not miss.

(1.3.250ff.)

In formal narrative terms, the potential opponent to Helena's project has become a helper or sender. But the comedy staged by the benevolent countess, is not just the removal of the external restraints of guardianship upon Helena. There is a detour through the highly charged metaphors of incest, in order for the countess to grant permission to desire what is in fact already desired. In granting this permission, the countess does indeed play false to her dead husband, as she jokes, but Lafew's opening remark about her finding a new husband in the king acquires a certain metaphorical truth. She becomes an agent in the restoration of the king and, more markedly, in the restoration of her son to proper subjection to his new father. Although she has darkly suggested that women are closer to “nature” and can therefore subvert the claims of the patriarchal signifiers to be grounded in nature, in the end this discourse of the natural proves its loyalty to the Royal order.

THE RESTORATION OF BERTRAM

The process by which Bertram is brought to recognize how his actions have betrayed his “self” is prefigured by the lords' revelation of the truth of his follower Parolles to Bertram. In effect, in the second part of the play, there are two plots and two sets of manipulators running in significant parallel. The First Lord Dumaine makes the parallel explicit when he expresses the hope that Bertram's disillusionment with Parolles will lead on to Bertram's reassessment of himself:

First Lord. I would gladly
have him see his company anatomiz’d, that he might take a measure of
his own judgements, wherein so curiously he had set this counterfeit.

(4.3.32ff.)

Parolles's name (“Words”) clearly indicates the nature of the unreliability that he represents. “Words” are corrupters and agents of destabilizing desire. At the very beginning he is accurately “anatomised” by Helena when she balances his evils against the pleasures of wit:

Helena. [And yet] I know him
a notorious liar,
Think him a great way fool, solely a coward.
Yet these evils sit so fixedly in him
That they take place when virtue's steely bones
Looks bleak i’th’ cold wind.

(1.1.98ff.)

When Helena goes on to joke with him about losing her virginity in accordance with her desires, her libidinal investment in verbal mobility against the fixities of virtue and social caste is quite apparent. Parolles's wit serves desire, and that is why in the end he must be controlled and reduced to the status of “licens’d fool” like Feste in Twelfth Night.

Parolles is a clown, or what Feste calls a “corrupter of words,” but he is also a miles gloriosus. Traditionally the braggart soldier figure exfoliates language as a cover for fear, and the underlying fear is unequivocally displayed by cowardly actions. But it is Shakespeare's peculiar achievement in Parolles to problematize the relationship between a fixed being (presumed essentially cowardly) and his language. Such is the power of Parolles's rhetoric that it even engages him in actions that contradict the cowardly being detected by the lords. The Second Lord Dumaine observes this paradox:

Second Lord. Is not this a
strange fellow, my lord, that so confidently seems to undertake this business,
which he knows is not to be done? Damns himself to do, and dares better be
damned than to do’t?

(3.6.81ff.)

And Parolles himself confirms the opacity that arises when words do not simply express or conceal character:

Parolles. What the devil should
move me to undertake the recovery of this drum, being not ignorant of the
impossibility, and knowing I had no such purpose? Tongue, I must put you in
a butter-woman's mouth, and buy myself another of Bajazet's mute,
if you prattle me into these perils.

(4.1.34ff.)

No previous miles gloriosus figure finds his own activity perplexing like this. If it were not for the confident knowledge of Parolles's essence, demonstrated by Lafew and reconfirmed by the Lords Dumaines' plot, this perplexity would get out of hand and Bertram's blind trust in Parolles would contain a worrying insight. After all, if a bombastic rhetoric can truly involve the “coward” in heroic exploits, can one really be confident of a cowardly essence after all? Furthermore, is it not the function of all heroic rhetoric to outweigh a real fear? If the rhetoric which defeats fear (and this is the psychological mechanism operative in all the braggart soldier figures) is so effective as to engender heroic deeds, where are the criteria distinguishing cowardice from heroism? What Parolles raises as a problem for a value system that recognizes deeds as reliable signs of an essence is that there can be a rhetoric of deeds. (Prince Hal in 1 and 2 Henry IV knows and uses this theatrical truth too: see chapter 12.) In that case Parolles's power with language is a threat to the proper hierarchy of appearance and reality. When he is restored to his essentiality by the Lords' plot, the threat disappears. His immediate reaction to his exposure is:

Who cannot be crushed with a plot?

(4.3.314)

This may just seem like characteristic cynicism in its assumption that all resemble him. But the point is that Bertram too will be “crushed with a plot.” (In his case too it will be beneficial, but inwardly fissured by what it claims to resolve.) The most remarkable part of Shakespeare's handling of this scene of the crushing of Parolles is that Parolles himself finds a relief in the recognition which restores him to an essential character:

Parolles. Yet am I thankful.
If my heart were great
’Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more,
But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live.

(4.3.319ff.)

This mythical return from the falsity of signs to the reality of his body makes way for his reintegration into the social and metaphysical order too, and this is explicitly confirmed later by Lafew as providential super-patriarch:

Parolles. O my good lord,
you were the first that found me.
Lafew. Was I in sooth? And I was
the first that lost thee.
Parolles. It lies in you, my lord,
to bring me in some grace, for you did bring me out.
Lafew. Out upon thee, knave! Dost
thou put upon me at once both the office of God and the devil? One brings
thee in grace, the other brings thee out. … Sirrah, enquire further
after me. … Though you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat.

(5.2.41ff.)

The romance plot engineered by Helena achieves a similar Providential hierarchization of human nature into appearance and reality, but through a much more problematic encounter with the uncontrollable metonymic substitutions of desire. Helena bravely moralizes her plot to the Widow in terms of Providence:

Helena. Doubt not but heaven
Hath brought me up to be your daughter's dower,
As it hath fated her to be my motive
And helper to a husband.

(4.4.18ff.)

Here we have the assertion of a Providential structure underlying the romance plot in general. As Leo Salingar writes about the “exemplary romance”:

Fortune, seemingly hostile or capricious, acts at the end in concert with the latent powers of Nature and obeys a hidden Providence.

But then Helena, who is playing the role of hidden Providence, goes on to a disturbing reflection upon what it is that her plot both utilizes and overcomes:

Helena. But O, strange men,
That can such sweet use make of what they hate,
When saucy trusting of the cozened thoughts
Defiles the pitchy night; so lust doth play
With what it loathes, for that which is away.

(4.4.18ff.)

Helena's speech momentarily confronts a truth of “strange men,” an ambiguity which she calls “lust” where “sweet use” and “hatred” merge, and one body is substituted for another through “cozened thoughts.” In other words, the plot in which she is an agent of Providence delivers Bertram from a state of desire where opposites intermingle and where imagination supplies the desired object in its absence. But what Helena calls “lust” is simply a truth of desire, namely its inseparability from signs, which the traditional comic deception of the bed trick always utilizes. And her naming of the unacceptable truth of desire as “lust” is part of her providential role. Thus she asserts that the blind desire called “lust,” can be separated from a controlled, self-knowing desire free from error. Helena's deliverance of Bertram abolishes this “lust” to the realm of appearances and unreality, in order to permit the emergence of a prior but previously unrecognized “true” desire. And so, thanks to this mythical operation, Bertram's repentant recognition of his wife at the end is allowed to be a gratifying moment of self-recognition too. Helena's plot is important because through it, Bertram's rebellion, feudal independence, and erotic anarchism can all be (mis)recognized as a betrayal of the true “self.” This stabilizing construction of a self through a narrative ordering is what, in Freudian terms is known as “secondary revision.” The coherent narrative allows the chaos of desires, characteristic of the metaphoric displacements of dreams, to become misleadingly comprehensible. Helena's redemptive unmasking of the false Bertram to his “real” self depends upon a certain construction put onto the nature of “lust.” According to this, lust is not constitutive of Bertram's “nature,” but a self-betrayal from which he can be rescued by a crisis of recognition. “Lust,” in Helena's ultimately triumphant discourse, is a misprision of the truth of desire, which is itself a product of rebellion. That is why lust has no part in the characterization of Bertram until he betrays himself and his caste together by rebelling against the king. And the king makes this same assumption in his tirade against Bertram's rejection of Helena:

King. Proud, scornful boy,
unworthy this good gift,
That dost in vile misprision shackle up
My love and her desert.

(2.3.152ff.)

The removal of the “vile misprision” requires a self-recognition by Bertram, and the installation of the hierarchical truth of the clearly separated levels of illusion and reality in the place of the metonymic substitutions of desire, which Helena fleetingly alludes to as the nature of “strange men.” She does not dwell on it excessively, because it is a truth of desire that her whole redemptive activity is there to overcome.

This ideological significance of Bertram's erotic waywardness is registered quite explicitly through the shock expressed by the Lords Dumaine at Bertram's projected seduction of a chaste gentlewoman, Diana. No one could suppose that such delicacy was in any way typical of the conduct of the warrior class in a foreign land. But the point is to establish that caste, self, and royal centralism are all of a piece. The lords' shock links moral and religious terms to a self-betrayal which is also betrayal of caste:

First Lord Dumaine. Now God
delay our rebellion! As we are ourselves, what things are we.
Second Lord Dumaine. Merely our own
traitors. And as in the common course of all treasons we still see them reveal
themselves till they attain to their abhorred ends, so he that in his action
contrives against his own nobility, in his proper stream o’erflows himself.
First Lord Dumaine. Is it not meant
damnable in us to be trumpeters of our unlawful intents?

(4.3.18ff.)

Diana also brings up the betrayal of caste, when she repeats his own words on the value of the ring which he refuses to give up, and makes the claim that she too is defending her aristocratic lineage:

Bertram. It is an honour ’longing
to our house
Bequeathed down from many ancestors,
Which it were the greatest obloquy i’th’world
In me to lose.
Diana. Mine honour's such a
ring.
My chastity's the jewel of our house,
Bequeathed down from many ancestors
Which were the greatest obloquy i’th’world
In me to lose. Thus your own proper wisdom
Brings in the champion Honour on my part
Against your vain assault.

(4.ii.42ff.)

The ring, a material signifier of his patrilineal concept of honor, is what she demands in exchange for the ring of her own inherited “honour.” The ring of female honor is a quasi-natural symbol, of course, but the signified “honour” is patriarchal. Ultimately, after the revelation of the bed trick substitutions to the king and Bertram, the exchange of rings will retrospectively acquire a true value through a comic secondary revision. In this process, the two signifiers of value, which have seemed to be merely arbitrary are gratifyingly revealed to be rooted in “nature.” Helena's comic plot restores a content to the simulacrum of the exchange between Bertram and “Diana.” That is to say, Helena's natural ring gives a grounding to the material signifier which is exchanged for Bertram's. Now this signifier, the ring surrendered by Helena impersonating Diana, was in fact given to Helena as a pledge of support from the king. Unknowingly, then, Bertram has again received Helena's natural/symbolic ring from the king! The solidarity of the patriarchal signifier and the “natural” order asserts itself miraculously within what has seemed to be a mere exchange of signs.

Bertram's recognition of Helena as his wife bears on a whole discourse rescued from crisis: a content is restored to words and signs. Helena recognized is not just the Helena as individual living body, but also a dramatic metaphor for the resolution of the crisis which has opened up between sign and thing:

King. Is there no exorcist
Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?
Is’t real that I see?
Helena. No, my good lord,
’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see,
The name and not the thing.
Bertram. Both, both. O, pardon! [emphasis
added]

(5.3.299ff.)

Ann Righter claims that it is Helena who is restored to life: “Only Bertram's ‘Both, both! O, pardon’ … can confer a palpable existence upon Helena, freeing her at the same time from illusion and nonbeing.” But actually Helena is never perceived as particularly lacking in “palpable existence” (not more than other characters, that is). And the audience sees clearly that her death is a mere rumor which she manipulates and prolongs as part of her plot. She is the creator of plot (“palpable” if one wishes to utilize the critical metaphors of the concrete) manipulating the fiction of her death in order to display a fictional rebirth, without any claim being made to the audience offstage that it is anything but a fiction. But there is indeed a rebirth brought about by her plot, and not just represented in it. Bertram is resurrected, in a much more complex manner than the king earlier. Helena emerges as a therapist again. But what is saved (only because it is earlier put in jeopardy) is the system of patriarchal signifiers. They are saved, by being grounded in a new myth of “nature.” Shakespeare departs significantly from his sources by having Helena initially become a pilgrim as a disinterested act of love. Like Julia's love in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Helena's love is underwritten as pure by the gesture of renunciation, though it remains active sexual love. The comparison with Julia and her role is useful because it focuses attention on the differences between the early romance comedy and this later return. The heroines are very similar. Both are active in desire and metaphorical pilgrims, who restore errant male desire to its “true” object. But there is a difference.

Helena has been the focus of greater unease, and even hostility from critics. Occasionally this hostility consists in denouncing her as a hypocrite, but in my view this is reductive, and probably arises from an anxious desire for clarification. At first Helena is not disguised as a pilgrim as part of a strategy, as she is in the sources. She takes up the role of pilgrim out of self-denying love for Bertram, so as not to be the cause of his self-exile and possible death. Although she is not a “real” pilgrim, she is not definitely a “false” one either. She is a metaphorical pilgrim. Christianity furnishes the language linking renunciation and self-denial with active devotion in her letter to the Countess:

I am Saint Jacques' pilgrim, thither gone.
Ambitious love hath so in me offended
That barefoot I plod the cold ground upon
With sainted vow my faults to have amended.

(3.4.4ff.)

In the renunciation of “ambitious love” she recognises her earlier conquest of Bertram as disruptive, and imposes her own banishment in order that Bertram may return and live. Her letter to the countess concludes:

He is too good and fair for death and me;
Whom I myself embrace to set him free.

(3.4.16ff.)

The assumption of guilt and the ultimate degree of self-denial as an act of disinterested love here mark this pilgrim out as a fair follower of Christ. Yet there is no religious vocation, and her actual itinerary is not to Santiago de Compostela but in the exactly opposite direction, to Florence. It is love proving itself, but not in the self-denial, for which religious mortification provides the metaphor. Some of this can also be said of Julia, including the restorative function. The significant difference lies in the relationship of the character to the plot. Julia is an active agent, but she does not produce the romance plot. It requires her to follow her lord, to faint and then to reveal the truth of her identity, but Providence is located elsewhere. Helena, by contrast, is the producer of the redemptive plot. She makes Bertram's “truth” appear, and is therefore a figure of power, like Prospero, and, for that matter, Iago, or the duke in Measure for Measure. Like the latter too, she pretends to be somewhere else. But she is unique in being a female plotter, and perhaps that makes her doubly shady for those who accept Prospero's assumed divinity without qualms. Her role as producer of a revelatory plot to disambiguate appearance from reality in the psyche of the unknowing participant in her puppet show, means she herself remains beyond its clarifications. Helena is the potential source of continuing audience anxiety, for her clarification which restores identity and rescues the patriarchal order, may be deeply desired, and yet to witness its contrived production is to undo all possibility of believing that patriarchy is truly produced out of “nature.” There is also the more threatening possibility, represented through Helena's control of the plot even though it restores the patriarchy, that a “natural” order might plausibly be matriarchal. In the end, however, only contrivance remains, and, witnessing the contrivance, one can never completely forget that, after all, there is no “natural” filiation, male or female to return to: Helena was “adopted” into matriarchy no less arbitrarily than Bertram into the reinvented patriarchy. All the rest is signs in the service of desire.