SOURCE: “The Political Effects of Gender and Class in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves, University of California Press, 1991, pp. 57-73.

[In the following essay, Erickson examines Helena's disruption of the patriarchal order in All's Well That Ends Well.]

One of the most striking features of All's Well That Ends Well is its full rendering of specifically male frustration in the person of Bertram, a besieged and recalcitrant Adonis writ large.¹ But the problem of Bertram cannot be adequately discussed at the level of individual character, as though our response hinged exclusively on the question of his personal defects and of his capacity to overcome them in the end. The analysis must rather be extended to the larger cultural forces operating on, and embodied in, Bertram. This latter approach can be opened up by noting the cultural overlap between Bertram's situation and that of the Essex-Southampton group: in both cases an emphatically military definition of masculinity is placed under intense pressure and ultimately frustrated. Yet the equation of Bertram with Southampton in G. P. V. Akrigg's reading of All's Well That Ends Well constitutes a methodological obstacle to this interpretation.² Treated as literal topical allusions, such connections are impossible to prove and are readily dismissed by a stringently factual account such as Samuel Schoenbaum's: “Shakespeare did not again dedicate one of his writings to a noble lord. Southampton now departs from the biographical record.”³ However, by responding at the same level as the critics he rejects, Schoenbaum remains within the framework of a limited historical mode now challenged by new historicists, among others.

For a cultural analysis of All's Well That Ends Well, Mervyn James's essay “At a Crossroads of the Political Culture: The Essex Revolt, 1601” provides a more promising and substantial starting point than Akrigg's narrowly conceived work.⁴ Two elements in James's study of the cultural formation of the Essex-Southampton group have a strong resonance with Bertram's predicament. First, this historically specific male identity had its source in a military subculture, creating a concept of manhood that was potentially volatile, destabilizing, and anachronistic.

But what gave the Essex connection its special tone, and many of its cultural characteristics, was its strongly military orientation. … Moreover, the military relationship had been given a special aura, of a traditionalist and chivalric kind, by the lavish way in which Essex, in spite of the queen's protests, had used his military prerogative to confer the honour of knighthood on those who distinguished themselves under him on the field. … To those who received it [as Southampton did], knighthood implied a special relationship with Essex himself.

(pp. 427-28)

As the clause “in spite of the queen's protests” suggests, this male bonding and solidarity is defensive—a defiant assertion of threatened male privilege:

Yet the sense of ancestry, in the Essexian context, strikes a special note: often self-confidently arrogant, but marked by a nostalgia for past glories, and a sense of being, as it were, under siege. … The sense of political frustration, of being unjustly slighted and so their honour defaced, was an experience shared with the leader by many courtier Essexians also, including such peers as … the earl of Southampton.

(pp. 433-34)

Second, the gendered quality of this thwarted masculinity was accentuated by the mutually suspicious relationship between the cult of male military honor and the cult of Elizabeth. The latter appeared to place men in a double bind because the queen both stimulated chivalric heroism and curbed it—a bind which made graphically clear the queen's female rule and against which Essex bridled in sexual terms:

Yet his relationship to the queen nevertheless became progressively charged with a tension which contained the seeds of violence. The tension, rooted in political failure and exclusion, was related to his view of their respective sexual roles. … Essex never wavered in the conviction that, when important decisions had to be made, the weaknesses of the queen's femininity must be overwhelmed by a rough masculine initiative. … The so-called “great Quarrel” of July 1598, the point of no return in relations between Essex and the queen, generated so much bitterness precisely because of the earl's assessment of their respective sexual roles in terms of honour. For by striking him in the course of a Council meeting at which he had rudely turned his back on her, the queen had shown an unnatural male aggressiveness, and had thus submitted Essex to the unbearable dishonour which a publicly administered woman's blow involved. … He himself replied with a violent gesture, clapping his hand to his sword, and equally violent words, till the other councillors separated them.

(pp. 443-45)

Even before Helena's action has transformed the king into a vehicle for her power, Bertram has already figured the obstruction of his military drive as female:

I shall stay here the forehorse to a smock,
Creaking my shoes on the plain masonry,
Till honour be brought up, and no sword worn
But to dance with.

(2.1.30-33)

The contrast with Henry V is instructive. The military aspirations of Hal as Henry V are given wide scope. The new king's qualms of conscience may create residual complications, but there are no external impediments to stop the forward movement of his nationalist enterprise.⁵ Bertram's heroic ambition is sharply circumscribed, his military adventure accorded only abbreviated and truncated dramatization. Military achievement is discounted and devalued in advance by being presented as a delaying action, an escapist diversion from the central issue—Helena's strongly registered claim: “his sword can never win / The honour that he loses” (3.2.93-94); “The great dignity that his valour hath here acquired for him shall at home be encount’red with a shame as ample” (4.3.65-67).

Like Essex, Bertram uses military service as a cultural escape route that enables him to establish a field of male action in a remote location whose distance from the female-dominated central court temporarily affords a measure of protection. But Helena invades this space, thus intensifying the conflict between male prerogative and female rule. While Helena may not match the queen's “unnatural male aggressiveness” as experienced by Essex, her determined pursuit of Bertram is nevertheless sufficiently forceful and relentless to constitute aggression.⁶All's Well That Ends Well thus hits a sensitive cultural nerve, and the open question announced in the title is less one of aesthetics than of sexual politics: can all end well if female power undercuts male heroism?

Mervyn James, citing the Chorus that begins act five of Henry V (5.Cho.29-35), attributes to Shakespeare a strictly orthodox attitude supporting the queen's position with regard to Essex: “So Shakespeare had seen. … It was as ‘the general of our gracious empress’ that the earl's heroic image as the embodiment of lineage, arms and honour acquired validity” (p. 452).⁷ However, in the larger context of Henry V, the effect of this circumspect, correct statement of Essex's subordination to Elizabeth is complicated and counteracted by the appeal of Henry V's male prowess, which runs roughshod over Queen Isabel and Princess Kate in the final scene. In order to make the parallel with Elizabeth-Essex work, Henry V has to occupy both positions: he is both chivalric warrior and monarch, and his dual role displaces Elizabeth as a specifically female ruler. This effect is confirmed by the way subsequent dramatic events assert male domination in Henry V's high-handed appropriation of Katherine: Henry V in the most decisive manner reverses Essex's subordinate position. The uneasy coexistence of two quite different models of male-female relations—the Choric acknowledgment of female authorization of male chivalry and the dramatization of male self-authorization—creates an impression of ambivalence.⁸

This ambivalent response to female authority is pronounced in All's Well That Ends Well, where female bonds are strengthened as male bonds are correspondingly weakened: the Countess displays “a more rooted love” (4.5.12) toward Helena than is possible for Queen Isabel toward her daughter in Henry V, while the chivalric ties glorified in Henry V (4.7) are denied outright by the satiric exposure of the Parolles-Bertram relationship in All's Well That Ends Well (4.3.79-311).⁹ The Countess's extraordinary readiness to renounce her son Bertram provides a reminder of Queen Elizabeth's ability to sever relations with her male courtiers.

I

One way of minimizing Helena's effect is to deny the full impact of her power by portraying it as narrowly and exclusively channeled against Bertram as an individual rather than against the social structure as a whole. This version presents Bertram as an isolated target by stressing Helena's alliance with the older generation. But Helena's interactions with the King of France cannot be characterized as cooperation or service. Rather, her rescue of the king calls attention to his ongoing weakness as nominal head of government while dramatizing, by contrast, her own achievement of power to be used for her own ends. The image of male order is vulnerable not simply because Bertram is a weak link in an otherwise solid chain but also because there is no convincing, living embodiment of the ancestral “first father” (3.7.25) elsewhere in the play as the king himself conspicuously demonstrates.

The opening lines of the play focus attention on the King of France as the center of a patriarchal social system, raising high expectations about his capacity to repair breaks in the family network. According to the extended family metaphor developed by Lafew, the king will restore the loss of Bertram's father by offering himself as a paternal equivalent. Thus Bertram is encouraged to see the king as “a father” (1.1.6-7). The first encounter between the king and Bertram in act 1, scene 2, reinforces this logic. The king begins the meeting by recognizing the link between Bertram and his dead father: “Youth, thou bear'st thy father's face” (1.2.19).¹⁰ He ends the session by confirming his ability to serve as a paternal substitute and by this mediation to preserve the potential for the continuity of male heritage: “Welcome, count; / My son's no dearer” (75-76). Yet the smooth functioning of this father-son framework is jeopardized by the irritation aroused in the king by the prospect of his replacement by the younger generation. The king's nostalgic identification with Bertram's father leads to a heightened contrast between older and younger generations at the latter's expense that threatens to forestall the larger momentum of generational continuity: “Such a man / Might be a copy to these younger times; / Which, followed well, would demonstrate them now / But goers backward” (1.2.45-48).¹¹ Pursuing this invidious comparison between the noble past “when thy father and myself in friendship / First tried our soldiership” (25-26) and the unsatisfactory present of the new generation, the king rehearses a set of highly charged emotions: rage over his aging and demise (“But on us both did haggish age steal on, / And wore us out of act”—29-30), resistance to yielding control, defensive antagonism toward his eventual successors, desire for reassurance and appreciation.

The feelings released in the king by Bertram's presence are by no means unprecedented. From the perspective of the Henriad, the unstable mood created by the king's critique of male youth can be seen as a standard feature of the generational tension fathers and sons must negotiate. Like the King of France in All's Well That Ends Well, Henry IV is a sick king who initiates contact with his youthful counterpart by lashing out against him:

                    See, sons, what things you are,
How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object!
For this the foolish over-careful fathers
Have broke their sleep with thoughts,
Their brains with care, their bones with industry;
For this they have engrossed and pil’d up
The canker’d heaps of strange-achieved gold;
For this they have been thoughtful to invest
Their sons with arts and martial exercises;
When, like the bee, tolling from every flower
The virtuous sweets,
Our thighs pack’d with wax, our mouths with honey,
We bring it to the hive; and like the bees
Are murder’d for our pains. This bitter taste
Yields his engrossments to the ending father.

(2H4, 4.5.64-79)

Henry IV's accusation registers the combined explosive pressure of self-pity and anger to which the King of France gives vent. In particular, citing the “good melancholy” (1.2.56) of Bertram's father, he employs the same despairing image of the beehive:

                                        “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 judgments are
Mere fathers of their garments; whose constancies
Expire before their fashions.” This he wish’d.
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.

(58-67)

The sarcastic play on the term father—“mere fathers of their garments”—is reminiscent of Henry IV's challenge to Hal's apparent contempt: “Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought” (2H4, 4.5.92).

But there is a striking difference in the operation of the bee metaphor that the two kings share. In Henry IV's case, the image conveys richness and abundance: “Our thighs pack’d with wax, our mouths with honey” (2H4, 4.5.76). The language suggests, even during his momentary despair, a conviction about Henry IV's power and desire to give the crown. The King of France, however, confesses utter depletion and inadequacy, as though he were completely lacking in resources: “Since I nor wax nor honey can bring home” (1.2.65). The contrast between fullness and emptiness is emblematic of larger differences in the two situations.

Henry IV's angry outburst is quickly followed by reconciliation, the transmission of royal authority, and the commitment to military action. Henry IV and Hal manage their conflict by themselves without outside interference. The erotic force suggested by the image of Henry IV's “full thighs” is fulfilled in the intimate emotional exchange between two powerful men. The political resonance of the honey image is later realized in Henry V in the “sweet and honey’d sentences” (1.1.50) which the Archbishop of Canterbury attributes to the new king and in Canterbury's own elaboration of the male state as a beehive (1.2.187-204).

In All's Well That Ends Well decisive action comes from outside male relations. Helena's intervention is what interrupts the sense of drift. She provides the energy and direction needed to overcome the impasse created by the king's listlessness. In the transaction between the king and Bertram, Helena is “this good gift” (2.3.151), the object of exchange parallel to the crown which Henry IV gives to Hal. But Helena herself determines the terms of this gift giving. Not only does Bertram receive for his inheritance something he does not want but also the king gives him something which he did not plan and to which he has been forced to agree by the bargain that revived him. The king tries to transform his test of wills with Bertram into an exclusively man-to-man confrontation, but Helena's prior organizational role is too strong. The occasion will not compose into the standard pattern of male traffic in women who serve as incidental tokens by which men determine their relations of power to one another.

Helena's role as a woman who disrupts the normal procedures of patriarchal power can be registered only by a thorough examination of the extent of the king's—and hence the system's—weakness, for this weakness creates a political vacuum that helps to make Helena's control possible. From the outset, the King of France exudes an overall spirit of lassitude and exhaustion consistent with the specific emptiness communicated by his use of the honey motif in his first appearance. Lafew's idealized encomium invoking the king's “abundance” (1.1.10) is no sooner pronounced than it is undercut by the Countess's abrupt leading question about the king's health (1.1.11), which shifts the emphasis to his incapacity. The king toward whom Lafew directs reparative hopes is himself an empty center in need of restoration. Moreover, his debilitated condition is not merely a physical problem, but is symbolic of a more general malaise.

Even before Bertram's arrival at court, the king's handling of the business of the Florentine-Sienese war raises doubts about his leadership. His decision to avoid committing the state seems less a matter of sound judgment than of abdication because the policy of noninvolvement is compromised by his further decision to endorse private actions whose effect is random and in principle self-canceling since individuals are free to fight on either side. The contradictory nature of the king's policy is underlined by the strained language of his subsequent farewell to the two separate—and opposed—groups of young French nobles: “Share the advice betwixt you; if both gain all, / The gift doth stretch itself as ’tis receiv’d, / And is enough for both” (2.1.3-5). What is being stretched here is the king's logic: the phrase “both gain all” tries unsuccessfully to deny the division that he himself has introduced.

The cynical aspect of this approach is brought out by the attendant lord's observation: “It well may serve / A nursery to our gentry, who are sick / For breathing and exploit” (1.2.15-17). The allusion to sickness generalizes the king's personal ill health, suggesting wider cultural malfunction. The patent inability in a subsequent commentary to explain the king's rationale retroactively exposes the hollowness of the king's decision making:

The reasons of our state I cannot yield,
But like a common and an outward man
That the great figure of council frames
By self-unable motion; therefore dare not
Say what I think of it, since I have found
Myself in my incertain grounds to fail
As often as I guess’d.

(3.1.10-16)

The king appears to sponsor an ideal of heroic honor, but this honor is vitiated in advance. Through the lack of coherent and principled policy, the king contributes to the conditions for the youthful drift which he goes on to complain about in his initial meeting with Bertram: the king is thus responsible for what he criticizes.

Moreover, the king's attitude toward women exhibits the callousness for which he will later so vigorously prosecute Bertram. Like Polonius's tolerance of his son's “wanton, wild and usual slips” (Hamlet, 2.1.22), the king's gratuitous final bit of advice to the departing French nobles gives permission for sexual adventure after military service, if not before:

Those girls of Italy, take heed of them;
They say our French lack language to deny
If they demand; beware of being captives
Before you serve.

(2.1.19-22)

Bertram's engagement with Diana conforms to this set of priorities, and his later excuse that he “boarded her i’ th’ wanton way of youth” (5.3.210) fits with the winking spirit of the king's initial formulation. Furthermore, the king's sly generalization about “Those girls of Italy” licenses the contemptuous attitude which Bertram exhibits—she “was a common gamester of the camp” (5.3.187)—and to which the king himself momentarily succumbs—“I think thee now some common customer” (280).

What convinces the king to undergo Helena's treatment is her willingness so emphatically to differentiate herself from the dangerously seductive foreign women the king has warned against (2.1.169-73). But this distinction becomes insecure, blurred by the sexual overtones of the power by which Helena performs the king's rejuvenation. Helena's success confirms her control: she gains the initiative and the king loses it. In designating Bertram as her choice, Helena tries to mitigate her power by moderating her language: “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” (2.3.102-4). But the “guiding power” is all too clearly neither Bertram's nor the king's. Helena's negotiation with the king has already unmistakably established her primacy through the decisive phrase “I will command”: “Then shalt thou give me with thy kingly hand / What husband in thy power I will command” (2.1.192-93). By his consent to this proposition, the king shows that he too “lacks language to deny / If they [women] demand” (20-21).

Despite the king's cure, he remains exceedingly vulnerable, truculent and ineffectual for the rest of the play. In between his two meetings with Bertram the king's confidence has been recovered through Helena's agency. His earlier despair gives way to renewed conviction in his “sovereign power and father's voice” (2.3.54). But the second encounter with Bertram in act 2, scene 3, demonstrates the king's continuing weakness because circumstances draw the king into an overreaction that reveals his insecurity, making the restored self seem defensive and unstable. Forced to “produce my power” (150), the king resorts to a harsher version of his earlier tendency to blame the younger generation for all problems when he threatens Bertram: “Or I will throw thee from my care forever / Into the staggers and careless lapse / Of youth and ignorance” (162-64). This outburst dramatizes the king's own flaws as much as Bertram's, for the king's need to apply pressure so heavy-handedly to Bertram stems from the pressure of the king's prior submission to Helena's intervention. Bertram's resistance calls attention to the king's own ongoing dependence on Helena: “But follows it, my lord, to bring me down / Must answer for your raising?” (112-13). By his refusal to cooperate, Bertram upsets the smooth operation of a scenario that would allow the king to deflect his dependence by passing it on to the younger man and making him share it.

Helena's relations with the king and with Bertram form parallel actions: in both cases, she meets with resistance which she successfully overcomes by manifesting her superior power. Uneasiness about the triumph of a woman's demand is by no means confined to Bertram. The king's psychological and institutional discomfort is suggested by the lengths to which he goes in his coercion of Bertram. It is as though the king is constrained to deny his own doubts by aggressively suppressing them in Bertram. Yet the completion of the process in which Bertram is “crush’d with a plot” fails to satisfy the king because it does not bring relief from the fundamental problem of his own dependence on a woman. The king's offer to Diana at the end of the play—“If thou beest yet a fresh uncropped flower / Choose thou thy husband and I’ll pay thy dower” (5.3.321-22)—is not a simple repetition. Rather, it represents a compulsive effort to redo the plot to make it come out right: this time he, not the woman, seizes the initiative. If the proposal is his, then the male control that he has lost can be reasserted. The irony of this logic is that his proposal is so closely modeled on Helena's original proposition that it testifies to her power rather than to his. But the irony is not a lighthearted one. Though brief, this moment signals a deep and continuing uneasiness with female control.

II

The course of Helena's love in All's Well That Ends Well has the effect of reconstituting a combined image of Venus and Diana;¹² she therefore reconnects the female attributes that the poetic sequence from Venus and Adonis to The Rape of Lucrece had split apart. Helena succeeds, where Venus spectacularly failed, in the conquest of a resistant male. Moreover, Helena also recuperates Lucrece's humility and passivity; for Helena's occasional hesitation and submissiveness, which seem to compromise her assertiveness, act rather as a sign of the virtue that sanctions and strengthens her position. The difference between Venus's and Helena's ambition is that the latter is more difficult, virtually impossible, to fault. Venus's violation carries with it a suggestion of illegitimacy that permits us to label her action as in some sense wrong. Helena's triumph is licensed by a moral justification akin to the merry wives' riddling self-defense that they “may be merry and yet honest too” (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.2.96):

                                        Why then tonight
Let us assay our plot; which, if it speed,
Is wicked meaning in a lawful dead,
And lawful meaning in a lawful act,
Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact.

(3.7.43-47)

Two critical formulations lead to an underestimation of Helena's disruptive social significance. The first, exemplified by G. K. Hunter's introduction to the New Arden edition, diminishes the threat of Helena's initiative by stressing her personal submissiveness and her religious reliance on divine agency. Too neatly dividing the play into two parts, Hunter sees Helena's pilgrimage—“a journey of contrition and abnegation” (p. xxxi)—as the turning point and confines her active role to the first half: “In the second half of All's Well, Helena is a ‘clever wench’ only in the sense in which Griselda is—clever enough to be virtuous, pious, and patient till Destiny and Justice work things out for her” (p. xxxii). Recent feminist critics have challenged and refuted this characterization of Helena by noting that the consistent forcefulness of her actions impressively outweighs her occasional recourse to passive language or diminutive tone. While acknowledging Helena's mixture of “aggressive initiative and passivity,” Susan Snyder convincingly argues that upon arrival in Florence Helena “takes forceful control of the action, persuading the Widow to agree to the bed-substitution, instructing Diana, pursuing Bertram back to France, seeking audience with the king, and through her agent Diana manipulating the final revelation-scene to expose Bertram, prove her fulfillment of the impossible tasks, and claim her reluctant husband all over again.”¹³ Helena's oxymorons—“humble ambition, proud humility” (1.1.167)—apply to her actions at the end as well as the beginning; she is never humble without also being ambitious and proud. There is no mistaking the crisp energy with which Helena manages Bertram's taming: “But let’s about it” (3.7.48).

A second formulation by which Helena's dominance is tempered is to treat it as a temporary and transitional anomaly whose resolution can be found in the late romances. This motif of the postponed resolution is represented by G. K. Hunter's use of a larger developmental perspective retroactively to solve the problems of All's Well That Ends Well: “Viewed in this context [of the romances], much that seems perverse in All's Well begins to fall into focus”; “much of the perversity of the denouement disappears if we see it as an attempt at the effects gradually mastered in the intervening comedies, and triumphantly achieved in The Winter's Tale” (introduction, New Arden edition, p. lv). This approach creates difficulties, however, because it leads in my view to an inaccurate account of The Winter's Tale¹⁴ and because it mutes the effect of All's Well That Ends Well by recuperating it in terms of another play and thereby reducing our ability to see its own terms. What is lost when All's Well That Ends Well is redirected toward and transposed onto the late romances? One answer is that Helena's power is discounted, since the gender dynamic of the romances requires her transformation into an enabling, cooperative heroine. But the Helena of All's Well That Ends Well cannot be easily translated and assimilated into the sublime female comfort exemplified by The Winter's Tale. In the distinctive play she dominates, Helena makes her own demands and, however cautiously, advances her own power.

The force of Helena's challenge is illustrated by the change in the king's rhetoric about class. Prior to Helena's arrival at court, the king evokes an ideal of hierarchy based on the behavior of Bertram's dead father:

So like a courtier, contempt nor bitterness
Were in his pride or sharpness; if they were,
His equal had awak’d them, and his honour,
Clock to itself, knew the true minute when
Exception bid him speak, and at this time
His tongue obey’d his hand. Who were below him
He us’d as creatures of another place,
And bow’d his eminent top to their low ranks,
Making them proud of his humility
In their poor praise he humbled.

(1.2.36-45)

The witty reversal of “proud” and “humbled” in the final two lines depends on the firm, fixed distinction between ranks that admits no ambiguity between “His equal” and “Who were below him.” What is striking about this image of clear-cut class structure is that it has no room for Helena. Neither Bertram nor the king can follow this decorum because Helena refuses to accept her position as one of the “creatures of another place.”

After Helena's decisive intervention in the court world, the king projects a very different image of class relations, now adjusted to reflect the situation into which he has been maneuvered by the pressure of Helena's upward initiative:

’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, pour’d all together,
Would quite confound distinction, yet stands off
In differences so mighty. If she be
All that is virtuous, save what thou dislik’st—
A poor physician's daughter—thou dislik’st
Of virtue for the name. But do not so.
From lowest place when virtuous things proceed,
The place is dignified by th’ doer's deed.

(2.3.117-26)

In shifting from his earlier image of “creatures of another place” who remain in “their low ranks” (1.2.42-43) to this more positive version of “lowest place” (2.3.125), the king legitimizes social mobility instead of ordered stability. In so acting on Helena's behalf, however, he inadvertently names the danger that her advancement as a lower-class woman may “quite confound distinction.”

The king emphasizes his own agency—“the which / I can build up”—but he is Helena's creation more than she is his. With Helena as prime mover and the king as the figurehead through which she pursues her own ends, the play's action confounds the conventional organizing distinctions both of class and of gender.¹⁵ The intertwined gender aspect remains pertinent because while the king enunciates a philosophical endorsement of class flexibility, Helena's practical realization of her aspiration depends on strong support from female sponsors, one of whom, the Florentine widow, suggests an experience of class that validates Helena's enterprise. The Widow provides a living example of class fluidity, though in the reverse direction (“Though my estate be fall’n, I was well born” [3.7.4]), and thereby serves as a mediating figure who breaks the barrier between high and low.

Following J. Dover Wilson's suggestion that the class disparity expressed by Helena's view of Bertram as “a bright particular star / … so above me” (1.1.84-85) is equivalent to “the social relationship between Shakespeare and his patron,”¹⁶ C. L. Barber develops a parallel between the poet and the young man of the sonnets and Helena and Bertram. According to this analysis, All's Well That Ends Well represents an aggressive disengagement from the bourgeois poet's paralyzing deference to the aristocratic youth in the sonnets. Feelings about the youth, who is now recast as Bertram, are released in two ways. The first exorcises the poet's adulatory stance by self-critically parodying it in the form of Parolles's empty words of affection for Bertram. The satiric treatment of Parolles is a relatively routine replaying of issues more deeply expressed in the rejection of Falstaff. The second attempts to enact the poet's vindication through Helena's highly charged conquest of the young aristocrat, despite his efforts to ignore and resist her. But this wished-for triumph is secured by a psychological shortcut: since “Helena's project culminates in the moral aggression expended on Bertram before he accepts marriage to her, we can feel … that the play is being used, rather than that its full human implications are being worked out into the light.”¹⁷

This interpretation presupposes an alignment between Helena and Shakespeare, who share the same “moral aggression” against Bertram. I want to modify this version of the balance of forces by emphasizing the structural ambivalence of Shakespeare's position. Helena's gender makes impossible any one-sided identification with Helena against Bertram. However enthusiastic Shakespeare's participation in the discomfiting of Bertram, there is also an undertow of residual sympathy for Bertram's plight and concomitant anxiousness over Helena's power.¹⁸ However substantial Shakespeare's promotion of Helena's enterprise, there is no total, unimpeded, unqualified cross-gender identification on his part.¹⁹ Helena's aggression against Bertram is different from Shakespeare's; the latter is more limited than the former, creating a boomerang effect that pulls Shakespeare's investment in Helena up short and makes his ambivalence run both ways, toward Helena as well as toward Bertram. In this sense it is possible to reverse Barber's formulation and say that the play uses Shakespeare.

Reacting against Helena's triumph, Shakespeare remains in part sympathetically bound to the besieged male positions of both Bertram and the king; the play thereby gives voice not only to the two male characters' discomfiture but also to Shakespeare's. The authorial division that blocks a convincing resolution is significant because it dramatizes a much larger cultural quandary: the society's inability to accommodate, without deep disturbance, decisive female control. If the underlying restiveness of All's Well That Ends Well gives way in Hamlet to open misogynist attack, this shift is made possible in part by the drastic decrease in female power and control. Deprived of the delicate balance between sexuality and purity by which Helena wins her position as wife, the wife in Hamlet is left isolated, exposed, and vulnerable.

Notes

1. The date for All's Well That Ends Well is uncertain. G. K. Hunter gives “a tentative dating” of 1603-4 in the New Arden edition of the play (London: Methuen, 1959), p. xxv; Anne Barton specifies 1602-3 in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 502; David Bevington indicates a range of 1601-4 in his Bantam edition (1988), p. 263. Given the uncertainty, it may be possible to view the play both in Elizabethan and in Jacobean terms. My goal, however, is to place the play in its Elizabethan context.

2. G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 255-56.

3. S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, rev. ed. 1987), p. 179. Schoenbaum similarly denies any significant connection between Shakespeare and Essex. Reviewing the circumstance of the staging of Richard II prior to Essex's revolt, Schoenbaum finds no involvement on Shakespeare's part (Documentary Life, pp. 217-19; “Richard II and the Realities of Power,” Shakespeare and Others [Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1985], pp. 86-90).

4. Mervyn James, “At a Crossroads of the Political Culture: The Essex Revolt, 1601,” Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 416-65. Also relevant is James's earlier essay on honor culture, “English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485-1642,” pp. 308-415, which shows how in response to “the facts of social mobility” a redefinition of honor occurred that tended “to present honour, virtue and nobility as detachable from their anchorage in pedigree and descent” (p. 375). The struggle between Helena and Bertram is in part a conflict between new and old ideas of honor.

5. I do not discount the critical perspective on Henry V built into the play, which I have discussed in “‘The fault / My father made’: The Anxious Pursuit of Heroic Fame in Shakespeare's Henry V,” Modern Language Studies 10, 1 (Winter 1979-80): 10-25, and in chapter 2 of Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 39-65. My concern here, however, is to emphasize the relative contrast between Henry V and Bertram.

6. There is a line of criticism—from Clifford Leech's “The Theme of Ambition in ‘All's Well That Ends Well,’” English Literary History 21 (1954): 17-29, to Richard A. Levin's “All's Well That Ends Well, and ‘All Seems Well,’” Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 131-44—that provides ample testimony to the perception of Helena's ambition and power. However, in the absence of a feminist perspective, the cultural significance of her ambition is lost and this criticism amounts to a restatement of male complaint. Feminist interest in the reversal of customary gender roles whereby Helena becomes the active pursuer rather than the pursued leads to a wholly different emphasis on Helena as the center of the play's action. See Carol Thomas Neely, chapter 2, “Power and Virginity in the Problem Comedies: All's Well That Ends Well,” in her Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 58-104; Carolyn Asp, “Subjectivity, Desire and Female Friendship in All's Well That Ends Well,” Literature and Psychology 32, 4 (1986): 48-63; Lisa Jardine, “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare's Learned Heroines: ‘These are old paradoxes,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 1-18; Susan Synder, “All's Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare's Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 66-77.

7. The expected comparison would be the one between Henry V and Elizabeth with which R. Malcolm Smuts begins his “Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The English Royal Entry in London, 1485-1642,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 65-93:

   Thus when Henry V returned from Agincourt, the Lord Mayor and
   Aldermen in scarlet robes, and 300 mounted citizens dressed in coats of murrey
   (dark purple) with gold chains around their necks, rode out to meet him at
   Blackheath and accompanied him back to Westminster. More than a century and
   a half later, in 1584, Elizabeth returned from a progress to an essentially
   similar welcome.

   (pp. 68-69)

   Shakespeare's reference to Essex disrupts the continuity by marking the difference between a male king's military campaign in Agincourt and Elizabeth's domestic progresses. Annabel Patterson's discussion of the fifth Chorus, which became available only after I had completed this chapter, overlaps with mine on several points: see “Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V,” chapter 5 in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 71-92.

8. The political tensions between Elizabeth and Essex, which Mervyn James excludes from Shakespeare's presentation, are discussed in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 206-27, especially p. 219.

9. Carol Thomas Neely develops the contrast between the efficacy of female solidarity and the emptiness of male bonds in Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays, pp. 74-78.

10. This motif also occurs, for example, in As You Like It when Duke Senior performs a similar act of recognition for Orlando. Senior reconstitutes the father-son bond by testifying both to the son's and to his own connection to the deceased father.

11. The age/youth conflict is also enacted in a simplified, one-sided form in the encounter between Lafew and Parolles (2.3.184-260), but the interaction between the king and Bertram is not reducible to this version. Nor is it accurate to portray Helena as siding with and supporting the older generation: her alliance with the older group serves her interests and values, not theirs.

12. In “Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman H. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 151-74, Janet Adelman discusses the psychological tension epitomized by the Venus/Diana motif in All's Well (pp. 160-61). I would add that an undercurrent of associations with Queen Elizabeth's female power accentuates this tensions.

13. Susan Snyder, “All's Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare's Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object,” pp. 66-67. Of the four feminist critics cited in note 6, only Lisa Jardine finds Helena's power sharply diminished: “in the second half of the play, Helena acts out an atonement for her ‘forwardness’” that implies a “ritual return to exemplary passivity” (“Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare's Learned Heroines: ‘These are old paradoxes,’” p. 11). Jardine contrasts Helena with Portia of The Merchant of Venice: the latter “does not resolve the actively knowing heroine into passively tolerant wife” (p. 12). I agree with Jardine's basic point that the traditional marital terms of Helena's quest set limits to her exercise of power, but I want to complicate the comparison by suggesting that Portia's power is also qualified. Her dominance is ensured by her withdrawal to the private sphere of Belmont, her intervention in the social action of Venice having been temporary. Portia does not directly challenge the male power structure invested in the position of the Duke of Venice and she leaves it intact. By contrast, Helena's actions place the already questionable authority of the King of France into further question. Moreover, while the compliant Bassanio presents very little opposition to Portia's designs, Bertram offers determined resistance to Helena's. From this standpoint, Helena appears the more powerful figure: she triumphs over greater opposition. Finally, because she lacks the upper-class status that Portia takes for granted, Helena has to traverse a greater social distance to reach the levers of power; by this measure, Helena alters the balance of power to a degree that Portia does not and her victory is consequently more socially disruptive. This view helps to account for the comparatively more strained ending of All's Well That Ends Well.

14. I present an alternative, critical account in chapter 5, “The Limitations of Reformed Masculinity in The Winter's Tale,” in Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama, pp. 148-72. In “T. S. Eliot and the Creation of a Symbolist Shakespeare”—Twentieth Century Literature in Retrospect (Harvard English Studies 2), ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 191-204—G. K. Hunter criticizes Eliot's treatment, influenced by G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire (1930), of the late romances. However, Hunter's own method recapitulates Eliot's view. Hence the romances demonstrate “the power of a new poetic vision,” “allowing the recognition scene to be human without infringing the symbolic power of the event” (introduction to the New Arden edition of All's Well That Ends Well, p. lvi). Reading back from this view of the late romances projects an ideal of harmonious resolution that mitigates and distorts the experience of gender conflict in All's Well That Ends Well. Moreover, the ultimate assurance of Perdita's high birth in The Winter's Tale eliminates the problem of class difference that Helena presents so sharply.

15. Because of this doubling effect, I would rephrase Muriel Bradbrook's claim that “by making his social climber a woman, Shakespeare took a good deal of the sting out of the affair” (“Virtue Is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All's Well That Ends Well,” The Review of English Studies 1, n.s., no. 4 [October 1950]: 289-301, quotation from p. 297). Helena's combined lower-class and female status, on the contrary, increases the sting. Technically Helena's power is derived from her father's medical expertise, but her own female initiative quickly outstrips the paternal derivation. Moreover, Helena's spectacular success in curing the king is noteworthy because in England the male Royal College of Physicians in effect excluded women from the medical profession.

16. J. Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare: A Biographical Adventure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), pp. 58-59.

17. In The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler discuss All's Well That Ends Well on pp. 15-18, 161, 190-91, and 196; quotation from p. 17.

18. It is indicative of the ideological power of norms—and of Shakespeare's implication in them—that Petruchio's handling of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew can appear humorous and beneficial, while the reversal of gender roles results in a mood that is strained and unpleasant: the motif of the dominant woman and the resisting male forbids similar comic treatment. The potential tragic cast of Bertram's situation can be suggested by reference to Coriolanus, whose aristocratic military identity is broken not only by his mother's manipulations but also by vulnerability to a lower-class threat. The difference is that Bertram faces this double gender and class threat combined in the single person of Helena.

19. In “The Third Eye: An Essay on All's Well That Ends Well,” in his The Sovereign Flower (London: Methuen, 1958), pp. 93-160, G. Wilson Knight assumes a trouble-free continuity between Helena and Shakespeare by positing a “creative bisexuality” (p. 156) that they share. Thus Shakespeare's androgynous capacity gives him a direct, unobstructed connection with women: “Shakespeare's women lovers may be said to have been created from the female element in his own soul” (p. 132). Opposing this line of approach, I argue against an authorial androgyny that enables Shakespeare to transcend gender conflict and in favor of his problematic involvement as a male author in the sexual political struggles he stages. It is symptomatic of Knight's thinking that he can so easily find the “new form of society where the female values will be in the ascendent,” which he sees prefigured by the play, “darkly symbolized in the queenship of Shakespeare's age” (p. 160). This concluding bit of idealism ignores complicated questions about Elizabeth's status in a patriarchal culture and about Shakespeare's dramatization of this dilemma.