SOURCE: “‘That Your Dian / Was Both Herself and Love’: Helena's Redemptive Chastity,” in Essays in Literature, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Fall, 1990, pp. 160-78.

[In the following essay, McCandless sees Helena as a compelling romantic heroine whose chastity and sexual passion are inseparable elements of her character and important components of the play's theme of redemption.]

Any discussion of chastity might well start with the simple assertion that, while often mistaken as a synonym for virginity, chastity actually connotes a kind of achieved purity, an absence of sexual corruption rather than an abstinence from sexual experience. Indeed, sexuality and chastity are not necessarily antithetical. Theoretically, at least, one might lose one's physical virginity and still remain spiritually pure. As Juliet Dusinberre explains, this was precisely the point that the humanist reformers of Shakespeare's era endeavored to make.¹ They opposed to the Catholic ideal of monasticism the Protestant ideal of marriage, defining chastity not as an exaltation of cloistered virginity but as a sanctification of marital union. According to this view, one attains the loftiest spiritual state through the wholesome integration of spirit and flesh rather than through their fanatical segregation.

This notion of chaste sexual love is, I believe, crucial to an appreciation of the lamentably under-appreciated All's Well That Ends Well or at least suggests a solution to one of the play's most obstinate problems: Helena's prodigious combination of passion and chastity, her perplexing dual roles of scheming man-hunter and saintly heroine. These seemingly contradictory identities are, critical opinion tells us, unassimilable, or, at best, imperfectly, uncomfortably assimilated.² Which is the real Helena? scholars have wondered. Clear-cut answers seem to come only at the cost of denying the character's complexity. Thus A. P. Rossiter insists that we take for granted Helena's status as a traditional fairy-tale heroine since “analysis only results in confusion.”³ At the other extreme, Bertrand Evans and Richard A. Levin take pains to dispute Helena's virtue, claiming that her “patient Griselda” persona is merely a conveniently pious cover for wanton conniving.⁴

In a different vein, some feminist scholars have also addressed the hiddenness of Helena's motives, attributing either to Shakespeare or to Helena herself a need to purify or mystify her sexual aggressiveness in order to make it more acceptable to a patriarchal mind-set (whether Bertram's or the audience's). As Susan Snyder puts it, All's Well enacts the “difficulties and conflicts of imagining a woman as active, desiring subject.”⁵

Yet the problem of incompatibility between Helena's chastity and sexual passion begins to recede if one admits the possibility of chaste sexual passion. In fact, I will argue, Helena's chastity and sexuality are not only compatible but inseparable: her desire is chaste and her chastity sexually charged, generating a redemptive force that goes a long way toward resolving the play's seemingly irresolvable crises. Thus All's Well may be legitimately read as a vindication both of chastity and of female sexuality: a young woman may be possessed of sexual desire, pursue the man she loves and yet be neither a frightening virago nor a shameless hussy. She may also be chaste without inviting censure as a frigid coward or unctuous fraud. Indeed, once chastity is freed from its monastical, puritanical associations, we may see that Helena's chastity, far from falsely prettifying her desire, actually empowers it.

That Helena's assimilation of passion and chastity has proved so difficult to accept reflects the larger problem of accepting the play's melding of romance and realism. Helena's passion, her status as desiring subject, suggests a realistic self, contrived to look life-like, while her chastity, her status as innocent virgin, seems part of a romanticized self, endowed not only with an unlife-like allotment of virtue but with other-wordly power as well. Helena is not simply a virtuous maid, recipient of her elders' admiration; she is a redemptive agent, recipient of heaven's favor.

It is a mistake, however, to interpret Helena's collusion with the divine as Shakespeare's mystification of her morally dubious course or his evasion of her daunting female subjectivity. As in the romances, Helena's sexually charged chastity becomes a spiritual, redemptive force. Shakespeare is not so much mystifying her sexuality as suggesting its regenerative potential, giving it mystical properties because its life-giving effects partake of a kind of grace. As in the romances, Shakespeare turns a folk tale into both human drama and spiritual allegory and the allegory does not encumber or falsify the drama but ramifies and enriches it. The clever wench fulfilling impossible tasks becomes both a resourceful, desirous woman defeating her husband's seemingly intractable disdain and an agent of grace rescuing a seemingly unregenerate man. Shakespeare aims to take folk-tale wish-fulfillment out of the realm of convention (the festive comedies) and into the realm of human experience (the romances), with what degree of success we will of course want to inquire. But the play's link to the romances seems to me crucial.

Indeed, regenerative chastity such as Helena's plays quite a prominent role in the romances. I would like to begin my consideration of Helena's chastity by briefly assaying the uses and images of chastity in Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale in order to contend that Helena resembles Marina and Perdita far more than she does Cressida and Isabella and that All's Well That Ends Well ought to be considered a kind of early romance rather than a defective festive comedy.

Chastity appears impossible to achieve within the world of Troilus and Cressida. Cressida has little concern for sexual purity. Her preserved virginity is simply a source of power (“achievement is command; ungain’d, beseech” [1.2.293]),⁶ the surrender of which subjects her to precisely the sort of male tyranny that she had feared. Troilus, by contrast, in raptly wishing for a “winnowed purity in love,” seems to aspire to chastity (3.2.158-70). The plighted, constant love that he so grandiloquently extols, however, is greatly at odds with the precipitous, secretive liaison that he actually offers. Troilus is essentially a panting voluptuary with delusions of grandeur. His call for chastity in love is as suspect as his call for infinite glory in war. Both ideals are false glamorizations of destructive appetites.

Chastity in Measure for Measure is of a fanatical, monastical, asexual sort shown to be dangerously limited, inducing Isabella to denounce her own brother with ferocious self-righteousness, rendering Angelo incapable of wholesomely assimilating his sexual passions, and so disabling the Duke that he proves both an ineffectual governor and a maladroit regulator of the chaos that ensues from his absenteeism.⁷ Marriage emerges as the only means of reconciling the extremes of unfeeling chastity and unruly sexuality, the only way of humanizing the former and sanctifying the latter. But while the multiple pairings-off at the end of the play may appear to promote the Protestant ideal of chaste marriage over a discredited Catholic ideal of monasticism, the Duke's hasty match-makings seem less the realization of an ideal than the desperate implementation of a last resort.

In Pericles, Marina bears some resemblance to Isabella. Both are innocent girls forced to defend their chastity against the lecherous designs of a corrupt governor. Marina's chastity is, however, of an altogether different sort, representing not simply spiritual purity but spiritual potency, a mystically revitalizing force that partly draws on the sexual passions that she attracts as the prize offering of the Mytilenean brothel. She assimilates the sexual energy of would-be corrupters into a spiritual energy that, returned to them, proves redemptive. Lysimachus, who wishes to despoil her, ends up chastely loving and wedding her, a clear instance of achieved purity. Marina, whose wisdom dumbfounds the most learned scholars and who becomes a kind of spiritual mentor to the entire citizenry is, at fourteen years old, clearly a prodigy. Her masculine double is the mystical healer Cerimon, who is praised throughout the play as a god-like agent of heaven (3.2.44-45; 5.3.57-60, 62-63). Just as he cures physical illness, so she remedies moral disease. Just as he revives Thaisa from death, so she revives Pericles from a death-in-life.

The Winter's Tale similarly presents the redemptive prodigies of a sexually energized virgin. Compared to Marina's, Perdita's chastity is more naturally and less mystically a revitalizing force. Distributing the flowers of spring, presiding over a folk celebration brimming with primitive vigor, she becomes a fertility-figure like Flora and Persephone. Unlike Marina, she longs from the outset to lose her virginity chastely. So too does her chaste suitor Florizel. Their mutual avowals of desire (4.4.31-35, 130-32) prove that their pastoral love, while absolutely pure, is not prettily abstract but potently sexual. Indeed, their harmonious unification of spirit and flesh helps rectify Leontes's deranged polarization of them, his crazed obsession with preserving an ideal of chastity by killing the chaste wife he imagines to have befouled it. At the end, the lovers complete their redemptive mission by retrieving both Leontes and Hermione from a barren chastity, a monastical death-in-life. Leontes ceases to be an unmarriageable self-mortifying penitent and Hermione a withdrawn monument of Patience smiling at grief. A passionate chastity returns them to each other.

All's Well That Ends Well portrays the trials of two chaste women: Helena, who, like Perdita, longs to lose her virginity lawfully to the man she loves, and Diana, who, like Marina, strives to protect it from a man who wishes to ravish her. That the two men are one and the same, Bertram, is the hinge upon which the play's resolution turns. Actually, in plotting to debauch Diana, Bertram bears enough of a likeness to Troilus and Angelo to give the play a superficial resemblance to Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. He is, like Troilus, a young, hot-blooded, glory-mongering military hero whose self-regarding masculine fancy demands the seduction of women. As in Troilus and Cressida, virginity confers power on the unyielding virgin and the imploring inamorato becomes as a military champion laying siege to the fortress of chastity. Indeed, the equation of courtship and military conquest persists from Helena's and Parolles's debate on virginity through the multiple references to Diana as “armed” against Bertram's “assaults” (3.5.73-74; 3.7.18-19; 4.2.50-51). Bertram, however, is neither as complex nor as dangerous as Troilus. The war in Troilus and Cressida is a grotesque, gruesome affair that extends the ill effects of Troilus's incontinent romanticizing, while the war in All's Well That Ends Well is of the distanced storybook sort that leaves no blood on Bertram's hands and serves to elevate him in the audience's eyes rather than to diminish him.⁸

Moreover, Bertram looks remarkably unmenacing compared to the treacherous Angelo, who has power sufficient to place his intended victim in genuine peril. Bertram never threatens Diana. She has the upper hand throughout the scene and simply sets him up for the bed-trick that Helena has already devised. In Measure for Measure, by contrast, Isabella seems defenseless against Angelo's depredations. Only later does the Duke learn of her dilemma and improvise a bed-trick.

If Diana the imperilled virgin is but a distant cousin of Cressida and Isabella, Helena the desirous virgin claims something more like sisterhood with the romance heroines Perdita and Marina. Indeed, Helena shares Perdita's plight of loving a man whose superior social rank seems to make him unattainable. Although Perdita's beloved ardently returns her devotion, she repeatedly vents the fear that his vows will prove hollow in the face of his father's certain disapproval. Thus a strange poignancy attains to her impersonation of Flora: this goddess of fertility may never bring her own love to fruition.

In her first soliloquy Helena sounds like Perdita in lamenting, “’twere all one / That I should love a bright particular star / And think to wed it, he is so above me” (1.1.85-87). Seemingly reposing in the hopelessness of her love, Helena consigns herself to a chastity synonymous with barrenness and renunciation. In her scene-ending second soliloquy, however, she delivers herself of radically different sentiments: far from passively accepting the fate of unfulfilled love, she boldly vows to bring about its fulfillment (“Who ever strove / To show her merit that did miss her love?” [1.1.226-27]). Here we see the conversion of chastity from static fruitlessness to pulsating fertility. The agency of conversion is an exceptionally unlikely one: Parolles. His case against virginity, although scandalously over-stated, nonetheless imposes on Helena an important truth: sexual desire is natural and necessary for the renewal of life (“there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost … virginity murthers itself and should be buried on highways out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate offendress against nature” [1.1.128-29, 139-41]).

I cannot agree with Lisa Jardine that Helena “is a match for Parolles in equivocating on virginity” or that her willingness to address sexual matters in public indicts her as unchaste.⁹ In fact, she begins to banter with Parolles as one would with a fool—which is precisely how she describes him upon his entrance—and seems to do so out of loyalty to the man she loves (“Who comes here? / One that goes with him; I love him for his sake” [1.1.98-99]). Helena is a match for Parolles only in the sense that she briefly descends to his level in order to indulge his waggish salaciousness. She actually speaks sparingly in the scene, principally confining herself to posing questions that serve as cues for his facile ribaldries. Helena, one might say, plays straight man for Parolles.

While Jardine may be correct in asserting that the audience connects this raillery to Helena's own plight, what strikes me as crucial about the scene is that Helena herself does not, at least not at first. If her first words to Parolles were truly a reflection of her immediate crisis, we would expect a response to his question, “are you meditating on virginity?” much different from the one that she offers: “Ay … Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricado it against him?” (1.1.110, 112-13). Surely advice on protecting her virginity against male aggression is irrelevant to her needs. Indeed, only after Parolles has expounded at some length on the unnaturalness of virginity is she moved to solicit the appropriate counsel: “How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?” (1.1.150-51). She begins to take seriously what had seemed a frivolous joke. She trades the role of straight man for that of surprised pupil. In the course of his trivial disquisition on virginity she begins to grasp the truth that leads to the heady optimism of the second soliloquy. Parolles functions here as a kind of covert promoter of Helena's sexual passion. Just as the sheep-shearing festival surrounds Perdita's virginal yearning with earthy sensual rumblings, so Parolles surrounds Helena's with a similarly primitive libidinal eruption, offering the rhetorical equivalent of a fertility rite.¹⁰

Resolved to pursue Bertram to Paris, Helena implores the Countess to understand her predicament:

                                        if yourself …
Did ever in so true a flame of liking
Wish chastely, and love dearly, that your Dian
Was both herself and Love, 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 not to find that her search implies,
But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies.

(1.3.209-17)

Faced with the equally impossible alternatives of illicit sexual dalliance with Bertram (“lend and give where she is sure to lose”) or consignment to celibacy (“lives sweetly where she dies”), of fruitlessly expending her virginity or fruitlessly preserving it, Helena opts for a third course: marriage, in which Dian is both “herself” (the goddess of chastity) and “Love” (Venus, the goddess of passion), in which one may fulfill her sexual desire yet remain chaste, surrender her virginity yet retain her virginal purity.¹¹

Once at court, then, Helena grows both more sexually vital and more vitally chaste, combining Perdita's fertile natural passions with Marina's supernatural powers. When presenting Helena to the King, for instance, Lafew makes unmistakable allusions to her sexual allure, calling himself “Cressid's uncle” and extolling her touch as “powerful [enough] to araise King Pippen, nay, / To give great Charlemain a pen in ’s hand / And write to her a love-line” (2.1.76-78). At the same time, he proclaims her a Marina-like miracle-worker, a young woman “able to breathe life into a stone” who, “in her sex, her years, profession, / Wisdom, and constancy, hath amaz’d me more / Than I dare blame my weakness” (2.1.83-85).

Similarly, left alone with the King, Helena explicitly identifies herself as a vessel of divine grace: “He that of greatest works is finisher / Oft does them by the weakest minister. … Dear sir, to my endeavors give consent, / Of heaven, not me, make an experiment” (2.1.136-37, 153-54). The initially skeptical King falls under her spell: “Methinks in thee some blessed spirit doth speak / His powerful sound within an organ weak” (2.1.175-76). Yet Helena's effect on the King may be physical as much as spiritual, an arousal of sexual feeling as well as an awakening of faith. The King's vow, “sweet practicer, thy physic I will try, / That ministers thine own death if I die” (2.1.185-86) registers metaphorically as an assent to sexual union. Similarly, Helena characterizes failure to cure the King as a sexual transgression, warranting a “tax of impudence, / A strumpet's boldness, a divulged shame, / Traduc’d by odious ballads; my maiden's name / Sear’d otherwise” (2.1.170-73).

The proposed terms of punishment match her hidden sexual motive: if her attempted cure fails, then the desire that impelled it may be branded unchaste, as if the potency of the physic were dependent upon the purity of the physician. The King of course knows nothing of Helena's desire for Bertram but could conceivably have grounds for questioning her purity, since her claim to special power makes her a potential witch, whose healing touch is derived from a wicked rather than a chaste sexuality. The penalty that she proposes is thus an implicit denial of witchcraft, underscoring her claim to be heaven's agent, to traffic in white rather than black magic. Indeed, Helena takes a position somewhat similar to that of Paulina, who disavows “wicked powers” in promising to animate Hermione's statue and urges, “those that think it is unlawful business / I am about, let them depart” (5.3.96-97). Helena, too, means to escape suspicion of wickedness, portraying her cure—and hence her amorous designs on Bertram—as “lawful business.”

The exact nature of the cure Shakespeare keeps mysterious in order to portray Helena as the principal healing agent. Certainly Lafew lends credence to this view, characterizing the remedy as neither a potion nor a powder but a person—“Doctor She,” Helena herself (2.1.72-79).

Yet Helena is clearly no qualified doctor, nor does she claim to be. Early in the play, the Countess praises her education (1.1.36-42), but the acquisition of medical skill does not appear to have been part of it. Indeed, the Countess wonders, how can a “poor, unlearned virgin” like Helena hope to cure the King when the “school” of learned physicians has pronounced his disease incurable? Helena, in reply, portrays herself as the minister of an essentially supernatural cure:

                                        There’s something in ’t
More than my father's skill, which was the great’st
Of his profession, that his good receipt
Shall for my legacy be sanctified
By th’ luckiest stars in heaven.

(1.3.242-46)

Helena later underlines the cure's mystical properties in telling the King that her father “bade me store [it] up, as a triple eye, / Safer than mine own two” (2.1.108-09). The equation of the cure with the third eye, which, in occult tradition, is a source of extra-sensory perception and power, ballasts the impression that Helena is not a learned physician but a Marina-like mystical healer, innocent of medical knowledge yet able to revive a dying King, able to breathe life into a stone. Moreover, Helena's father, Gerard de Narbon, bears a close resemblance to Marina's spiritual father, Cerimon. Both are miracle-workers rather than mere physicians, turning natural substances into transcendent remedies in a manner reminiscent of the alchemists.¹² Indeed, Helena may be considered a kind of soror mystica—the “mystical sister” of the alchemical tradition who served as the adept's female helper or disciple and was, in fact, often his wife or daughter. The soror mystica supplied the feminine energy essential to the miraculous transformation of matter.¹³ Similarly, Helena's feminine energy—her passionate chastity—is indispensable to the miraculously transformative effects of her father's cure.

Helena's association with the soror mystica and reference to the third eye help drive home the point that her skill is less medical than magical. Indeed, while assuring the king of her healing graces, she begins speaking in cryptic rhymed couplets that sound like a sorcerer's spell:

Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring
Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring,
Ere twice in murk and occidental damp
Moist Hesperus hath quench’d her sleepy lamp,
Or four and twenty times the pilot's glass
Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass,
What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly,
Health shall live free, and sickness freely die.

(2.1.161-68)

Thus, while Nicholas Brooke discerns four rival explanations for the king's recovery—“drugs,” “miracle,” “magic,” and “sexual response”—the true remedy is Helena herself who unifies all of these into a single feat of healing.¹⁴ That Helena's libidinal drive has spiritual force does not mean that Shakespeare feels compelled to mystify female sexuality in order to neutralize its provocations. Even on a “realistic” level, Helena's chaste passion is a kind of burgeoning regenerative force, a stored creative potential primed for the renewal of life, a power at once miraculous and natural. On the romantic level, Helena functions as both a Marina-like virgin priestess, chaste enough to serve as a conduit of divine energy, and a Perdita-like fertility figure, sexually potent enough to convert that energy into a revitalizing physical force. As Barbara Everett asserts, “as a character, Helena has power”—a power derived from both “grace” and “nature.”¹⁵ Lafew, who has the final word on the King's revival, is quick to declare it a miracle but equally quick to discern in the King, who celebrates his recovery by dancing a lively coranto with Helena, an increase in “lustiness” (2.3.26, 41). The simultaneous heightening of Helena's sexuality and chastity is not then a conundrum. The two forces are not opposite but complementary. They are, in fact, the same force.

The dual emphasis on passion and purity continues in the husband-choosing scene. On the one hand, Lafew's initial desire to trade places with the prospective husbands and subsequent impugning of their masculinity reinforces Helena's sexual allure. Helena herself, who previously wished Dian “both herself and love,” now resolves to quit Dian's altar and dedicate herself to “imperial Love.” On the other hand, she soon reveals that yielding to sexual love has an ultimately chaste purpose: as she moves from one courtier to the next, she employs a succession of key words—suit, love, bed, son—that suggest that marriage and procreation are foremost in her mind.

In addition, her singular position as public female wooer, like her unique status as female physician, requires a disavowal of “forwardness.” Her progress through the ceremony is thus marked by abashed hesitations, self-deprecations, and protestations of modesty. When she finally claims Bertram, as Snyder observes, “she does her best to deny her role as aggressive, desiring subject and to recast herself properly as object.”¹⁶ Yet Helena's self-effacement seems to me not simply a female's conditioned retraction of a threat to male autonomy—although it is surely that—but an honest affirmation of the chaste purpose empowering her untoward tactics.

The pilgrimage that Helena undertakes in the wake of Bertram's emphatic rejection strikes some critics as simply a ruse for pursuing Bertram. Such a reading affirms Helena's chastely indomitable sexual drive, to be sure, but overlooks key textual evidence and undersells the play's romantic dimension. Construing the pilgrimage as a ruse requires reading Helena's farewell sonnet either as a veiled disclosure—which the Countess fails to decode—or as an extravagant lie. While Helena may have reasons for hiding her true purpose from the Countess—although they are difficult to fathom given the happy effects of her earlier confession—it seems decidedly odd that Shakespeare would deceive an audience that, by virtue of Helena's soliloquies, confessions, and confidings, has consistently been made a party to her plotting.

In fact, Helena's pilgrimage tallies precisely with the content of a previous confession to the audience. In the soliloquy that ends 3.2, she resolves to flee France in the hope of retrieving Bertram from the war and vents a grief and guilt so extreme as to make a penitential trek psychologically plausible and give grounds for taking the later letter at face value. Only the “death” that Helena proposes to “embrace” seems to me a metaphor, not for sexual union (an interpretation that requires reading the entire letter metaphorically) but for sexual renunciation. In preparing to do penance for her “offensive” ambitious love, Helena trades a chastity empowering sexual desire for a chastity disclaiming it. She imposes upon herself a “tax of impudence” for her sexually aggressive ways and embraces the death-in-life of monastical withdrawal.

Certainly the Countess seems to regard Helena as engaged in an exclusively spiritual quest. Responding to Helena's intention of “sanctifying” Bertram's name, she cries incredulously

                                        What angel shall
Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive,
Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear
And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath
Of greatest justice.

(3.4.25-29)

Just when Helena appears to devote herself to a Catholic ideal of chastity, the Countess attributes to her the same intercessory power as the ultimate female redeemer in the Catholic tradition—the Virgin Mary. Just when Helena seems intent on spurning the ways of the flesh, the Countess's words have the effect of etherealizing her.

Helena's sexual resignation ends in Florence, however, when she hears of Bertram's overtures to a young Florentine woman, Diana, and undertakes to turn them to her own advantage. Florence may seem too much out of Helena's way for her discovery of Bertram to be unintended, but geographical improbabilities and fantastic coincidences are the stuff of romance. Helena, it seems, is the lucky recipient of a providential boon: Fortune smiles on her desire for Bertram by facilitating a design favorable to its fulfillment. At the same time, Helena's own human initiative—her determination and ingenuity—combined with the sympathetic ministrations of Diana and the Widow, ensure that this singular chance is readily exploited.

Diana is well-qualified to be Helena's accomplice, for she too combines passion and chastity. Like her namesake, the Roman goddess, Diana proves a champion of chastity, offering to die an “honest death” in Helena's service (4.4.28-30) and declaring, in the wake of Bertram's perfidy, that she will “live and die a maid” (4.2.73-74). Yet evidence of Diana's sexual avidity also abounds, as Brooke affirms in calling her, rather cheekily, “a virgin more in fact than spirit.”¹⁷ Certainly her interest in Bertram is unmistakable. Her acclaim of his handsomeness and valiancy, and the reprimands and warnings that it elicits from her mother and Mariana, provide compelling evidence of sexual attraction. More to the point, in order to set Bertram up for the bed-trick and secure his ancestral ring, she flirtatiously incites the very lust that she chastely shames. Her success in bamboozling Bertram bespeaks genuine desire as well as genuine virtue. This Dian is both herself and love, just as this Helen is both herself and chastity.

For the second time in the play, Helena ends a bereaved acceptance of barren chastity and concocts a scheme for winning Bertram that prodigiously reconciles chastity with sexuality: the bed-trick. Generations of critics have blanched at Helena's recourse to sexual subterfuge as unbecomingly conniving and tawdry, if not downright unchaste.¹⁸ While Helena herself makes no attempt to gloss over its unsavory implications, she does insist, in securing the Widow's support, that her purpose is chaste: she calls the bed-trick “wicked meaning in a lawful deed,” clearly describing Bertram's activity, and “lawful meaning in a lawful act,” clearly describing her own, “Where both not sin and yet a sinful fact” (3.7.45-47). Bertram's “deed” may be legalistically chaste since it inadvertently fulfills his marriage vows. But only Helena's “meaning” is “lawful.” Only her passion is chaste. While she fulfills a sexual love, he gratifies a blinding lust. Indeed, Bertram's sinlessness seems less important than his intended sin. The bed-trick may save Bertram from infamy but it also marks him as only marginally worth saving.

The event itself has the effect of confirming and extending Helena's indictment of male “wickedness”:

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

(4.4.21-25)

Helena wonders at a desire so disabling that it makes the dark night darker and obliterates the distinction between desired and despised. As Carol Thomas Neely observes, the bed-trick depends upon “the radical anonymity of sexual union, its separation from love and marriage.”¹⁹ Indeed, if from one angle Helena is the contracted wife who consummates her marriage, from another she is the sexual plaything who facilitates her own betrayal. She can win her husband only by posing as a woman whom he uses as a whore.

It would be oversimple, however, to read the bed-trick as a distasteful charade proving Bertram's perfidy and Helena's desperate masochism. It is also a potentially transformative event, aiming, as Neely observes, to “cure or transform male fantasy through its apparent enactment.”²⁰ The reference to male fantasy is crucial, it seems to me, for Bertram appears to be possessed of a pornographic consciousness, at least as Susan Griffin and Andrea Dworkin define it: a fear of the feminine that induces fantasies of sexually mastering a substituted female image.²¹

The point obviously requires some elaboration. In the opening scene, Bertram takes leave of his mother and sets off to become a ward of the King. “In delivering my son from me,” says the Countess, “I bury a second husband” (1.1.1-2). The child dies and the man is born. The son affirms his separateness from his mother and ends his “marriage” to her. He prepares to take his place in patriarchal culture, to uphold, in Lacanian terms, the Law of the Father—to become, in fact, a kind of surrogate son to the Father of the Land.

For Bertram, this initiation into manhood requires not simply leaving his mother but rejecting the feminine altogether, as seems evident from his outrage at being excluded from the wars:

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

(2.1.30-33)

The imagery here registers Bertram's fear of female domination. He equates exclusion from the all-male enterprise of war, crucible of masculine “honor,” with an emasculating, dishonorable consignment to the company of women. In such company, the sword that he wears can only be a flaccid appendage, not a weapon but a toy, not an agency of power but an insignia of impotence. More strikingly, he imagines himself the “forehorse to a smock,” a woman's beast of burden, an animal that she drives and whips. This nearly sadomasochistic image suggests that his fear of female domination encompasses dread of sexual enslavement.

Bertram's paranoid fantasy seems to be almost instantly fulfilled: Helena chooses him as mate and, implicitly at least, commands him to become the slave of her desire, to submit permanently to her dominant sexuality. While Bertram is primed to resent any imposed responsibility that keeps him from going a-soldiering, marriage to Helena is the very worst of fates, restricting him to the status not simply of untried boy or gelded warrior but lawful male prostitute whose pimp is the king. Having ended the constrictive “marriage” to his mother, he falls under a more menacing form of “woman's command” (and, unlike Lavatch, he sees nothing but “hurt” in it).

This menace must seem all the more acute for its utterly unexpected source: Helena, a young woman effusively admired by her elders who “had her breeding at my father's charge” (2.3.114), a kind of goody-two-shoes-girl-next-door. When this Pollyanna turns sexual predator and threatens to emasculate him, he escapes and enters the all-male military world, proving his manhood with a vengeance, becoming a military conqueror and aiming to become a sexual one as well. Shrinking from the image of woman as dominatrix, Bertram turns dominator and enacts a common pornographic fantasy: despoiling an idolized virgin.²² He worships and supplicates Diana as a goddess but only in order to turn her into a whore. As he later testifies, much of Diana's attractiveness lies in her unattainability:

She knew her distance and did angle for me,
Madding my eagerness with her restraint,
As all impediments in fancy's course,
Are motives of more fancy.

(5.3.212-15)

Her chastity—or “restraint” as he insists—is for Bertram a provocation, an invitation to defilement. Her inaccessible, unspoiled loveliness gives her a power over him that he must subdue. Diana thus dominates him in a manner different from Helena: by afflicting him with desire and withholding satisfaction. Beneath his gilded entreaties, Bertram essentially asks Diana to stop playing “hard-to-get” and implies that her chastity is mere prudery or frigidity (4.2.3-10). The irony of course is that Diana is indeed playing “hard-to-get” but only in order to secure from Bertram the ancestral ring that is integral to Helena's plot. Thus Shakespeare effectively de-familiarizes the male fantasy of the “girl-who-says-no-but-means-yes.” Indeed, Bertram is such an easy mark for Helena's scheme precisely because of his ready belief in this patriarchal myth.

The bed-trick sets in motion a series of substitutions that ultimately corrects Bertram's original substitution of image for person, his transformation of Diana into “Diana,” the pornographic image, the madonna/whore. First, Helena substitutes herself for “Diana,” assuming the role of debauched goddess in Bertram's erotic fantasy. Next Diana substitutes herself for “Diana”/Helena, refusing, in the final scene, to accept the status of disposable plaything (“Diana”) and presenting herself as wronged wife and formidably desirous woman (Helena). Indeed, from Bertram's perspective, Diana re-enacts Helena's original threat of female domination through coercive marriage. Diana's rendition of Helena's aggressive sexuality draws the “tax of impudence” that Helena has adroitly dodged at every turn, as the King and Lafew join Bertram in abusing her, calling her “easy glove” and “common customer” (5.3.277-78, 286). Finally, Helena substitutes herself for her own disparaged double, vindicating her beleagured sexuality and combatting Bertram's objectifications by revealing that she is “Diana.”

The effect of this ending is intriguingly analogous to that of The Winter's Tale. When Leontes confronts Hermione's statue, he is, in effect, confronting the consequences of his own objectification of her, his imprisonment of her in image, first as treacherous whore, then as recollected, idealized madonna. Her descent from the pedestal, facilitated by his rapt yearning for her return, signifies the achievement of subjectivity, the replacement of image with person.

In All's Well That Ends Well, Bertram, having used Diana as a whore, insists that she remain one. She thus functions as woman-as-object, woman-as-statue, the constructed, substituted image through which Bertram means to dominate the feminine. Yet “Diana,” woman-as-object, gives way to Helena, woman-as-subject. “Is’t real that I see?” asks the King, stupefied by her seemingly miraculous re-appearance. “No, my good lord,” she replies, “’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see; / The name and not the thing.” Bertram instantly corrects her: “Both, both. O pardon!” (5.3.306-08). He instinctively welcomes her as his wife and implores her forgiveness even before she has recited her fulfillment of his conditions or alluded to the means employed. In declaring her both the “name” and the “thing,” in effecting the integration of the previously polarized roles of wife and sexual partner, Bertram authorizes Helena's emergence from the limbo of objectification. The shadow achieves a substance. The statue stirs and descends from the pedestal.

“This is done,” Helena proclaims, after giving evidence of having passed his test. “Will you be mine now you are doubly won?” Bertram's ensuing use of the conditional—“if she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (5.3.314-16)—has struck some critics as an alarming demur. As Alexander Leggatt puts it, “the penitent himself is not cooperating; his repentance still depends on certain conditions.”²³ But Bertram's espousal of Helena is so unhesitating and unequivocal as to make an instantaneous retraction decidedly improbable. Moreover, Bertram does not, as before, demand the performance of some near-impossible feat but merely solicits clarification of a story that has quite naturally bewildered him—a condition, if we can call it that, that Helena will surely have little trouble fulfilling.²⁴ Thus the emphasis in Bertram's lines seems to fall on the reward that awaits her: “I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly”—which sounds very much like a pledge of devotion. Indeed, their brief exchange of lines amounts to a renewal of vows in a second, extemporized marriage ceremony, complete with presentation of ring.

To our amazement, the bed-trick turns out to be an experience to build on rather than transcend. “When I was like this maid,” Helena tells Bertram, “I found you wondrous kind” (5.3.309-10). This single line has profound implications. It cannot but radically alter our perception of the bed-trick, our image of Bertram as a frenzied brute “fleshing his will” (4.3.16) and violating a woman whom he has sworn to love, and of Helena as a passive receptacle of Bertram's blind passion, masochistically submitting to humiliating, anonymous “use.” We now discover that Bertram was “wondrous kind” to her. Indeed, if before she marvelled at the “sweet use” men could make of “what they hate,” she now accentuates the sweetness and downplays the use. The line excuses the conjecture that Helena might actually have felt more loved than used. The bed-trick begins to seem less a degrading accommodation of lust than a mutually gratifying foretaste of conjugal love.

The precedent of enjoyed intimacy gives the marriage an unexpected foundation. Attributing tenderness to Bertram imparts hope for his permanent reform. In sum, Helena gives grounds for granting Bertram the benefit of the doubt just when he needs it the most. The way is clear for him to accept and assimilate the feminine, which he previously abjured as inimical to manhood. He has unwittingly serviced the woman whose sexuality he so abhorred, finds himself under her “command” just as he had feared. But her “use” of him proves “sweet,” yielding an experience of consensual pleasure rather than unmanly subjugation. In the final scene, Bertram must again perceive Helena as a sexual being, but as once and future lover, not castrating predator. The undesirably desirous woman may now become desirable. Griffin asserts that, for the pornographer, “the mystery of the female body is revealed to be nothing more than flesh.”²⁵ For Bertram, the potentially reformed pornographer, the mystery of the female body—the body to which he made love in the dark—is revealed to be nothing less than a person. The object becomes a subject, the erotic fantasy a wife.

Or does she? To what extent does Bertram recognize Helena's subjectivity? To what extent can we consider him truly reformed? Certainly Helena positions him to undergo a genuine regeneration, see the error of his ways, experience remorse and contrition, and commit himself to a loving marriage that reconciles passion and chastity, masculine and feminine. But the play's ending leaves room to doubt that such a radical transmutation has, in fact, taken place. That Bertram is now prepared to marry Helena can scarcely be doubted. That he speaks words indicative of shame and repentance seems clear enough. But the brevity of his apology, the suddenness of his supposed conversion, the cumulative evidence of his incorrigibility, have incited some critics to doubt his rehabilitation and to declare the play's title perversely ironic.

These critics prinicipally complain that Bertram spoils the happy ending by failing to verbalize his repentance with adequate eloquence and expansiveness or to effuse a new-found love for the woman whom he has so deplorably abused. This complaint loses much of its force, I think, if we imagine the sort of scene requested: Bertram, in a long, torrentially penitent speech, flays himself for his mistreatment of Helena and pledges to love her unconditionally and eternally. Would such rhetorical extravagance really give satisfactory assurance of his sincerity? Bertram, after all, is a prolific liar. Indeed, his two previous abashed embracings of Helena—his eagerness to marry her when the King furiously commands it, his readiness to praise her when she is assumed dead—are self-serving dissimulations designed to appease the King. If Bertram were to launch into yet another self-reproving penitential jag, would the likelihood of his lying not be greater, would we not then be inclined, in the Countess's words, to “tax him for speech” even more than we would “check him for silence” (1.1.67-68)?

Clearly, given Bertram's character, his words, whether plentiful or sparse, could never suffice to confirm his sincerity. What clearly matters in the final moments of the play are his actions. The concision of his speech may signify that Shakespeare shrewdly recognized the impossibility of penning a convincing confessional for Bertram and, eschewing poetry, left the scene deliberately underwritten, asking the actors to effect an emotionally satisfying resolution. Thus, if Bertram were to cease his macho posturing and do something unprecedented and uncharacteristic—shed tears, physically embrace Helena, or give some other evidence of searing shame and feverish gratitude to her—then his penitent words could gain credibility—and indeed, have gained credibility in performance. One thinks of Tyrone Guthrie's 1959 production—or at least of Muriel St. Clare Byrne's famous account of it, which testifies to the actors' success in enacting a stirring, compelling reconciliation. Indeed, alleges St. Clare Byrne, “there was no need for Bertram to speak, and if his words had been adequate, they would have been out of character.”²⁶

In two other respects Bertram's quick and uneloquent conversion seems fitting. First, it sustains the play's pattern of youthful resurgence. While All's Well That Ends Well may be considered a precursor of romance, it is also, in one crucial sense, a typical comedy: it belongs to the young. And the young people in this play are resolutely forward-looking. Helena weeps in the opening scene and is presumed to be mourning her father's death. In fact, she has already moved on from that lamentable event and mourns her unrequited love for Bertram. In no time, however, she conceives a plan for achieving its requital. Parolles, too, adopts an attitude of “don’t look back” when exposed as a dissembling coward: “Rust, sword; cool, blushes; and Parolles live / Safest in shame; being fool’d, by fool’ry thrive. / There’s place and means for every man alive” (4.3.337-39). Similarly, at the outset of the final scene, the King urges Bertram to “take the instant by the forward top,” to forego confessions and pleas for forgiveness, even to forget Helena: “all is whole; / Not one more word of the consumed time” (5.3.38-40, 67). Perhaps Bertram emits such a brief mea culpa upon Helena's return in deference to this earlier injunction.

Second, the quickness of Bertram's conversion conduces to the final scene's effect of underscoring Helena's regenerative power. She stages her return to Rossillion as a resurrection and seems once more to cast a spell on the King (“Is there no exorcist / Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?” he asks [5.3.305-06]) and, in all likelihood, on all the scene's witnesses. She unveils herself, almost emblematically, as pregnant wife, as successful unifier of passion and chastity. The child and the ring that she offers Bertram in fulfillment of his conditions become not only the sacramental tokens of a second wedding but the proofs of her redemptive power: the unborn child, fruit of passion, represents the creative assimilation of the destructive lust that Bertram sought to unleash against Diana, the ring, symbol of chastity, the preservation of the honor that he would all too readily have surrendered.

In addition, as generations of critics have noted, Helena's regenerative capacities turn her relentless pursuit of Bertram into an image of irresistible grace pursuing unregenerate man. While few people would be willing to read the play as a spiritual allegory or to accept Bertram as an “eleventh-hour” penitent instantaneously transformed by his acceptance of grace, the concluding scene does, in fact, function as a secularized morality finale, yet another instance of the play's commingling of realism and romance. Bertram repeats Mankind's mistake of securing worldly favor at the cost of his soul—or at least of his honor. Having achieved, through his military exploits, an enviable worldly standing, confirmed by the King's forgiveness of his misdeeds and the honorable marriage that he is poised to make, Bertram instantly loses it and comes face to face with utter ruination—with censure, disgrace, and possibly even death. He stands as an exposed sinner facing damnation, doing everything in his power to save himself but finding that power pitifully limited. Like Mankind, he requires a miraculous deliverance. And that is precisely what he gets—or at least what he must feel that he gets. Desperate and helpless, he is disposed to experience Helena's wholly unexpected, unaccountable return as the wondrous intervention of grace.

To imagine a Bertram capable of coolly feigning repentance amidst these tumultuous events is to imagine a young man more megalomaniacally imperturbable than the play gives us. That his mother's earlier recriminatory letter “stings his nature” and leaves him a “changed man” proves that he has a conscience (4.3.1-5). That his intended debauchery turns into “wondrous kindness” discloses an unsuspected emotional sensitivity. Indeed, Bertram may have so few words to say precisely because Helena's re-appearance overwhelms him, returns him to the realm of pure feeling last visited during the bed-trick, when he and Helena spoke to each other in purely physical terms. Thus Barbara Hodgdon finds Bertram's speechlessness more expressive of “the possibility of kindness and love” than “extravagant speech or romantic gestures.”²⁷

Even if Bertram simply clings to Helena as a drowning man to a life-preserver, the profound gratitude that he must feel might at least engender a new appreciation of her. The disdainful husband seems capable of loving the once “detested wife,” the woman-fearing male of assimilating the feminine, the wayward sinner of accepting grace. Not only does Helena appear to possess a regenerative power capable of reforming Bertram; he himself shows signs of reformability.

Although performance can enhance the credibility of Bertram's repentance, one must concede that the play offers no assurance of his permanent amendment. Such assurance could result only from the depiction, possibly through a “wide gap of time,” of a process of moral and spiritual maturation that repentance inspires. As Neely observes, the play's ending is only a beginning.²⁸ It is, however, a happy beginning. All's Well That Ends Well may indeed be provocatively open-ended, but it is a provocatively open-ended romance, I think, and not a fractured comedy.

Indeed, like The Winter's Tale, All's Well That Ends Well submits the intractable data of life to the ameliorations of romance, as if to transport idealization from the realm of myth to that of experience. If The Winter's Tale succeeds in making idealization real, All's Well at least makes it appear possible. Certainly the seams show a good deal more. Its artifice is more evident and its magic rougher. Its closure consequently depends, to an even greater degree, on the audience's imaginative complicity. The awakened faith that Paulina solicits in the final scene of The Winter's Tale—the faith essential to the conversion of art to life, symbolized by Hermione's reanimation—seems even more in demand at the climax of All's Well. In the epilogue, the actor/king declares: “The king's a beggar, now the play is done; / All is ended well if this suit be won, / That you express content” (Epi.1-3). Within the conventional appeal for the audience's applause lies an appeal for their acquiescence in romantic wish-fulfillment. The proposition that the play ends well if the audience believes that it does Thomas Cartelli calls “one of the strongest appeals commanded by drama—theatrical appeal, the invitation to participate in a fantasy fulfilled.”²⁹

The fantasy of course is Helena's, her means of fulfillment the regenerative drive of her passionate chastity which reconciles, in a manner reminiscent of Pericles and The Winter's Tale, the seemingly irreconcilable forces of purity and desire. This reconciliation distances the play from the other “problem comedies.” Troilus's attempt to wed chastity to sexuality through voluptuous idealization of desire ends in ignominious failure and the Duke's arranged marriages are too precipitous and ill-prepared to recommend themselves as models of chaste sexual love. The mystical Marina's marriage to the once-reprobate Lysimachus and the fertile Perdita's attainment of a seemingly unattainable love are much more obviously analogous to Helena's achievement.

Helena is both romance heroine and compellingly “real” woman who, in the course of pursuing and winning an initially unwilling husband and providing the means for his redemption, validates the ideal of female as desiring subject by virtue of an achieved purity, a chastity empowering rather than negating sexuality, a chastity wedded to experience rather than divorced from it, a chastity that signifies neither frigidity nor repression and commends a desire neither corrupt nor corruptive. If we must inevitably admit that the play does not end unambiguously well, we might at least take comfort from Lavatch's definition of “wellness” as a state of grace beyond human experience (2.4.1-12). Given the play's engagement with that calamitous experience, perhaps we may admit that it ends as well as it can.

Notes

1. Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975) 20-63.

2. See, for example, Michael Taylor, “Persecuting Time with Hope: The Cynicism of Romance in All's Well That Ends Well,” English Studies in Canada 11 (1985): 284; G. K. Hunter, All's Well That Ends Well, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1959) xxxi; Alexander Leggatt, “All's Well That Ends Well: The Testing of Romance,” Modern Language Quarterly 32 (1971): 41; W. L. Godshalk, “All's Well That Ends Well and the Morality Play,” Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974): 66; and Lisa Jardine, “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare's Learned Heroines: ‘These are Old Paradoxes,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 11.

3. A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns (New York: Theatre Arts, 1961) 99.

4. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960) 145-66; Richard A. Levin, “All's Well That Ends Well and ‘All Seems Well,’” Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 131-44.

5. Susan Snyder, “All's Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare's Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 77.

6. Quotations from all Shakespearean plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton, 1974).

7. It is important, I think, to recognize that the Duke is as much an exemplar of a monastical chastity as Angelo and Isabella. A man who loves the “life removed” and shuns the assemblies of “burning youth” (1.3.6,8), who protests to Friar Thomas and Lucio alike that he is immune to sexual temptation (1.3.1-3, 3.2.121-22), the Duke is, like Angelo and Isabella, a reclusive ascetic whose chaste life leaves him ill-equipped to deal with the unchaste ways of the world.

8. This point is arguable, I realize, but the play provides no anti-war perspective from which to challenge his heroic status. On the contrary, Bertram's valor wins him admiration and renown: the Duke proclaims him “general of our horse” (3.3.1) and Diana and the Widow extol his exploits while rushing to the city's walls to hail the returning soldiers (3.5). In addition, Bertram cannot be accused of sullying his heroism—as he is by the younger French captain (4.3.68-70)—without first becoming a hero.

9. Jardine 8. I do not wish to dispute Jardine's point that Helena reveals herself as “sexually knowing” in this scene, only the corollary assertion that Helena is “too knowing for the innocent virgin she professes to be.” One can be sexually knowing and still be an innocent virgin as long as “innocent virgin” means “chaste woman” and not “guileless ingenue.” Also, Helena does not “profess” to be anything. Certainly, in the opening scene, our perception of her keeps shifting. She appears a grieving daughter, reveals herself a despairing lover, and finally emerges a resolute wooer. These perceptual shifts do not, however, make Helena herself shifty. We discover in this scene that she is avidly sexual—and to a degree that perhaps surprises us given her opening gestures of disconsolate withdrawal—but not that she is unchaste.

10. Helena finds incentive to pursue Bertram not only in Parolles's lusty exhortations but in her own dread of courtly rivals who may well render Bertram unpursuable (1.1.165-77).

11. The line “lend and give where she is sure to lose” does not prove that Helena has actually contemplated becoming Bertram's paramour, only that such a sorry option is one of the few open to her. As Parolles later confirms, the way that a gentleman loves “a woman”—a social inferior like Helena or her proxy Diana—is to “love her and love her not” (5.3.248)—to take her as a mistress or use her as a whore.

12. Cerimon claims an ability to cultivate the divine properties of natural substances and so transform them into supernatural cures (3.2.31-38). Gerard similarly, if less explicitly, facilitates a process by which a naturally-constituted cure attains supernatural force. The mention of Paracelsus expands the play's alchemical dimension (2.3.11). Indeed, inasmuch as Helena's rehabilitation of the King is spiritual as well as physical, her cure is clearly more Paracelsian than Galenic. For a consideration of Helena's application of Paracelsian magia naturalis, see J. Scott Bentley, “Helena's Paracelsian Cure of the King: Magia Naturalis in All's Well That Ends Well,” Cauda Pavonis 5 (Spring 1986): 1-4.

13. My understanding of the soror mystica comes from various of C. G. Jung's studies of alchemy. For a brief description see Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970) 153.

14. Nicholas Brooke, “All's Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 82.

15. Barbara Everett, All's Well That Ends Well, New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 20.

16. Snyder 74.

17. Brooke 79.

18. For an indictment of Helena's recourse to trickery, see Evans; Levin; Godshalk 65; Leggatt 35-36; and Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in All's Well That Ends Well,” Journal of Literary History 21 (1954): 26.

19. Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985) 79.

20. Neely 94.

21. Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence (New York: Harper, 1981) and Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women's Press, 1982). My pat definition of course risks oversimplifying these exceptionally challenging works and perhaps implies too close a kinship between them. However, as “anti-pornography feminists,” Griffin and Dworkin do, in fact, share a fundamental perception of pornography as patriarchy's most brutal mechanism for subjugating women. Linda Williams, an “anti-censorship feminist,” contests the Griffin-Dworkin position in the opening chapter of Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989).

22. Griffin 22: “Over and over again, the pornographer's triumph, the piece de resistance in his fantasy, occurs when he turns the virgin into a whore.”

23. Leggatt 40.

24. Since the full disclosure of schemes and telling of secrets invariably takes place off-stage in Shakespearean comedy, Bertram's use of the conditional could also be considered an early exit-line, a request to commence the business of unravelling and revealing, a cue for the King's conventional summons: “Let us from point to point this story know, / To make the even truth in pleasure flow” (5.3.325-26).

25. Griffin 33.

26. Muriel St. Clare Byrne, ‘“The Shakespeare Season of the Old Vic, 1958-59 and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1959,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 558.

27. Barbara Hodgdon, “The Making of Virgins and Mothers: Sexual Signs, Substitution Scenes, and Doubled Presences in All's Well That Ends Well,” Philological Quarterly 66 (1987): 67.

28. Neely 92.

29. Thomas Cartelli, “Shakespeare's ‘Rough Magic’: Ending as Artifice in All's Well That Ends Well,” Centennial Review 27 (1983): 134.