[In the following essay, Levin argues that Helena accomplishes her goals in All's Well That Ends Wellthrough guile and deceit, thus contributing to the play's categorization as a “problem comedy.”]

Critics have offered two very different assessments of Helena, and hence of All's Well That Ends Well.¹ Some regard her as a genuine romantic heroine—resourceful, yes, but also virtuous, feminine, charming, and modest. She never behaves cynically, and her motives are above reproach. She cures the king's physical ailment and later brings Bertram to spiritual health. This daughter of a middle-class physician is rewarded, like patient Griselda, with a man of high degree. The alternative view is that Helena mercilessly pursues Bertram. Whether she is at first motivated by love, sex, ambition, or, in Tillyard's fine phrase, “the humour of predatory monogamy,” she suffers “degradation” as she “passes from dishonour to dishonour on her path to final victory.”² She sets out to trap Bertram, succeeds, and—when he flees her—captures him again. She gets the husband she deserves, a spoiled aristocrat.

These two accounts of Helena and of the play could not be more different; and yet, despite innumerable attempts, no one has accounted for the dilemma, nor solved it.

Can it be that Shakespeare planned to create the controversy? When, for example, Helena reaches Florence at the moment Bertram passes on parade, the coincidence makes us wonder whether she has not secretly plotted. The play, almost alike a Rorschach test, reveals our predispositions. The romantically inclined reader will accept the image of patience that Helena projects. Another reader sees only an elaborate facade, concealing an aggressive and self-centered nature. Supporting the latter view, I will show that Helen's success depends on guile; later, I will discuss how her cunning affects the play's comic form.

When All's Well opens, Helena (along with others) wears black and supposedly weeps for her father. Left alone, however, she explains the tears differently. She is pining because Bertram, the young count, shows no interest in her and is leaving for the French court. Though this candid revelation disposes us in her favor, we must be careful. She may deceive us, as her weeping has deceived others. Helena speaks as if she passively accepted the fate of a love that crosses social bounds: “The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love” (I.i.89-90). But a closer look at her soliloquy reveals that she chafes at the cultural restrictions placed on a young woman. Previously she has lived a protected life and has not needed greater freedom. But now that her father is dead, she is left alone to take care of an old countess (I.i.73-74). The hours she has spent daydreaming of Bertram seem like an indulgence. “Th’ ambition in my love thus plagues itself” (l.88), she concludes, saying, in effect, that ambition is ludicrous if one is without the will to realize it. Helena has reached a moment of transition.

Her thoughts are interrupted by Parolles, Bertram's worthless servant-companion. She has taken his measure: he is “liar,” “fool,” and “coward.” She has observed how such creatures get on in the world: sometimes “fix’d evils sit so fit” in a man that they serve him well, while another man's virtues may leave him out in the cold (ll.100-03). Can she learn something from Parolles—and make use of him?

When he greets her by asking, “Are you meditating on virginity?” she replies “Ay” (ll.108-09). The confluence of their thoughts startles; so, too, does Helena's willingness to discuss her virginity with “this impertinent,” as Quiller-Couch calls him.³ Both she and Parolles seem to regard virginity as a commodity that a woman markets. The two of them differ only about the value Helena should attach to her maidenhead. Parolles is a “fool” who can see no further than his nose. He is on his way to court, while she must remain at home. He thinks therefore that she might just as well agree to become Bertram's mistress. Helena, however, sets her sights much higher. She seeks tactics that will reverse the odds in the war between the sexes: “Is there no military policy how virgins might blow up men?” she asks (ll.119-20). Parolles refuses to pursue her question, and inquires one last time whether she will relinquish her virginity: “Will you anything with it?” Helena's reply hints at a counter proposal, as well as a threat. Although she is losing Bertram to the court, Parolles may lose him at the court, where a mistress will replace him as “friend” and “counsellor” (ll.163, 166). Helena thinks to make an ally of Parolles, who could watch Bertram and keep her informed. But Parolles does not bite, even when she adds that were she successful, she would then be able to reward her friends (ll.177-81). She makes one last attempt. “You were born under a charitable star,” she begins, but Parolles interrupts her with male bravado, “Under Mars, I.” Although he is corruptible, Helen is too poor to bribe him. He will live to regret that they do not strike a bargain.

For the present, Helena must be self-reliant: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie” (l.212). She repudiates female passivity and “slow designs,” resolving to bridge the vast social gap that separates her from Bertram (ll.216-19). She alludes darkly to a “project” she has in mind, one somehow connected with “the king's disease.” “My intents are fix’d,” she says; she is determined to marry Bertram.

Helena must get to the royal court; but, not being our contemporary, she cannot merely announce her decision and leave. Even if she could, she would avoid sacrificing the countess's good wishes. Coming up with a plan, she suborns the steward. When he appears before the countess, we may at first forget Helen's “project” and think the steward really did accidentally overhear her. Or, if a little more suspicious, we may think she has let herself be overheard. But careful attention to the steward suggests that Helena works with greater precision. Just before she enters, the steward must elicit maximum sympathy from the countess. After testifying to his impeccable record of service, he asks that Helena be called. He has come (he says) because the countess loves Helena so “entirely” (I.iii.96). When the countess confirms the fact, he continues. He is certain that Helena was unaware of his presence when she revealed how “surpris’d” she was by the power of first love and how she regarded herself as “without rescue.” “This she delivered,” the steward adds, “in the most bitter touch of sorrow that ere I heard virgin exclaim in” (ll.113-14). The countess thanks him twice for his “honest care” (ll.117, 122) and has only a moment to reflect before Helena arrives.

The countess deeply pities the helpless girl: “Even so it was with me when I was young” (l.123). But that girl wonderfully calculates the image she projects—a fact that Anne Barton misses, even while noticing that “Helena … is prized by the older generation [as] a living example of the attitudes of the past.”⁴ Helena enters prepared to take advantage of her sympathetic interrogator, who begins by saying, “You know, Helen, / I am a mother to you” (ll.132-33). Helena, amid tears, hints that she wants the countess as her mother-in-law; Count Rossillion must be something closer than a brother. Under the circumstances, she is about as explicit as she can be. Silently concluding that the steward was correct, the countess hints at her own intentions: “I charge thee, / As heaven shall work in me for thine avail, / To tell me truly” (ll.178-79). Helena, seeing she is near the goal, admits her love in well-chosen terms. Surely the countess in her “virtuous youth” also felt chaste wishes:

                                        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!

(ll. 208-12)

As on so many other occasions, Helena claims to be passively awaiting death, but on this occasion the countess detects a contradiction.

She remembers that Helena “lately” expressed a desire to go to Paris. When asked about it, Helena confesses, giving as her motive a desire to cure the king. Questioned more closely, however, she admits that, indeed, the idea would never have occurred to her if Bertram were not at court. Such engaging candor wins the countess' heart. She not only sends the girl off with her “blessings” but gives her an entree at court: Helena shall convey greetings to friends of the countess.

Before Helena's arrival in Paris, we learn that the king has been suffering not only from a physical ailment but from despair. He has lost hope of his recovery, and he feels isolated. Today's youth are overly given to “jest”; they are preoccupied with their “garments” and “fashions” (I.ii.33, 62, 63). No sooner does Bertram arrive than the king begins to reminisce. “It much repairs me,” he says, “to talk of your good father” (I.ii.30-31). That father lived a full life and died, as he wished, before becoming a useless drone (ll.55-67). The young courtiers try to reassure the king. But they are about to leave for battle. As a neglected old man, ready to die, the king gives them parting advice: “Those girls of Italy, take heed of them; / They say our French lack language to deny / If they demand” (II.i.19-21). The king, as we shall see, might well heed his own advice.

And so might Lafew. We must infer that Helena, upon arriving at the court, brought him the countess's greetings. When at Rossillion, he had cast an eye on the “pretty lady” (I.i.75), and now, before very long, he is charmed into doing her a favor. He goes to assure the king of Helena's curative power:

                                        I have seen a medicine
That’s able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With sprightly fire and motion; whose simple touch
Is powerful to raise King Pippen, nay,
To give great Charlemain a pen in’s hand
And write to her a love-line.

(II.i.71-77)

Helena herself is the medicine! The sexual overtones in this and several other passages have not escaped detection. Robert G. Hunter finds that Lafew “imitat[es] the encomium of a pander.”⁵ Indeed, comparing himself to Pandarus, he leaves Helena alone with the king (II.i.94-97). He is joking, of course, for the king is as old as he, and neither will have an explicit sexual encounter with Helena. But Lafew is also knowing: he comprehends the sublimated pleasure that both men experience in Helena's presence. I therefore cannot agree with Robert Hunter and G. K. Hunter that, as the latter puts it, the spiritual “association of virginity with magic power” complements the physical association. We must choose between contrasted explanations of Helena's power.

Alone with the king, Helena goes quickly to work. She introduces herself as the daughter of Gerard de Narbon and alleges that the “dearest issue” of her father's practice is a medicine designed specifically for the king's illness. Convincing though she sounds, the king has already tried too many remedies. After feigning the willingness to depart, Helena adopts a new approach. She is only God's agent, and the king should trust in heaven's power to perform miracles (ll.133-43, 147-57). Interested at last, the king asks the length of the cure. In answering, Helena employs elaborate periphrasis to say “two days”; and although other critics have heard “priestess-like incantations,” I find only the jargon of a montebank.⁶ Even the king responds by asking for firmer evidence of her sincerity: “What dar’st thou venture?” (169). But he examines as poorly as his contemporary, the countess, and Helena has an answer ready—if she fails, she can be branded with:

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

(ll. 169-73)

Though the language is comically exaggerated the king swallows it—hook, line, and sinker: “Methinks in thee some blessed spirit doth speak.” Ready for treatment, he starts to close the scene with a couplet (ll.184-85). When she surprises him by asking how he will reward her for a cure, the king replies, “Make thy demand.” After making him swear he will grant her wishes, Helena asks to choose a husband!

Shakespeare cunningly leaves us to guess at the nature of the cure, which takes place offstage. Lafew announces the king's recovery:

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

(II.iii.1-6)

As this speech counterpoints Parolles' scepticism, we are no doubt inclined to think that Lafew is in earnest and that the play endorses his account of Helena's success. Neither assumption is correct. The pander, perceiving the nature and effect of the cure, says of the restored king, “he’s able to lead [Helena] a coranto,” a lively dance step (ll.42-43). Lafew also wittily suggests that the same medicine would be good for his own old age: “I’ll like a maid the better whilst I have a tooth in my head” (ll.41-42). He chuckles, enjoying Helena's good fortune while needling her opponent, Parolles, who is beside himself at her sudden rise at court. If we do not at least suspect the irony in Lafew's description of the cure, we shall miss a great deal of what follows.

Helena's defenders find that her virtue is rewarded—the king functions as a “divinely allowed arbiter of destiny.”⁷ One can instead conclude that she has mastered him and contrived a trap for Bertram. Presented with her pick among the young lords, she appears overcome with blushes, but makes her choice. Her words to Bertram are marvelously self-effacing:

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

(ll.iii.102-04)

Despite these words, she herself retains the “guiding power,” as the rest of the scene confirms. The king, responding to the young count's silence, moves forward: “Why, then, young Bertram, take her; she’s thy wife” (l.105). Although Bertram in rejecting her displays grossest snobbery, his words resound with deep feeling, which deserves some respect: “I cannot love her,” he tells the king (l.145). Helena could hardly speak and wisely does not. She knows the king will plead her case. In exalted terms, he defends intrinsic honor over social rank; in reality, he is just a lonely old man manipulated by a young charmer. When Bertram still refuses, the king becomes angry, and Helena finally intervenes: “That you are well restor’d, my lord, I’m glad / Let the rest go” (ll.147-48). We should not imagine that she is actually giving up. She has always known that Bertram would never choose her of his own free will; in backing down, she relies on the king, who has sworn in open court that Helena has the power of choice and the men no power of refusal (l.56). The king brooks no opposition, finds that his “honour's at the stake” (l.149), and virtually forces the marriage on Bertram.

Although Helena now seems to have prevailed, Bertram imagines he can take the offensive. He decides to go through with the marriage but to depart for the wars in Italy without consummating it. His anger, however, overcomes his ingenuity. First Parolles, then Bertram himself, inform Helena in a tone of mock regret that the count must leave on “serious business” (II.iv.38). To Parolles, the bride says that in “everything” she waits upon her husband's will (l.52); facing Bertram, she infuriates him by calling herself his “obedient servant” (II.v.73). She is unperturbed, and she hardly seems surprised. Perhaps she isn’t! Suspicion focuses on Lafew, in whose presence Bertram and Parolles talk freely about their plans (II.v.14-26). Lafew may be working on Helena's behalf when he tries to persuade Bertram not to trust Parolles as a soldier (II.v.1-13). But more of Lafew's alliance with Helena later.

Following Bertram's instructions, Helena returns to Rossillion and receives a message from him swearing that he will not live with her until she has a ring from his finger and is pregnant with his child. Otherwise, he will return to France only when she has left. While the countess is present, Helena says nothing; but in soliloquy, she expresses sympathy for Bertram and remorse for exposing him to the dangers of battle. She intends to leave so that he can return, as she explains in a letter to the countess:

I am Saint Jaques' pilgrim, thither gone.
Ambitious love hath so in me offended
That barefoot plod I the cold ground upon,
With sainted vow my faults to have amended.
Write, write [she instructs the countess], that from the bloody course
of war
My dearest master, your dear son, may hie.
He is too good and fair for death and me;
Whom I myself embrace to set him free.

(III.iv.4-9, 16-17)

James L. Calderwood describes the passage as “a recoil from sexual aggressiveness,” and concludes that Helena sincerely seeks “atonement.”⁸ But Helena sings to the old tune; she is patient and even prepared to die for love. The heightened, or (one might say) exaggerated moral tone makes us ask: is Helena pious or a pious fraud? To put the question in another way: does she cross paths with Bertram in Florence by chance or design? Traditionally Helena's defenders have contrasted her with Giletta, the heroine of Shakespeare's source (in Painter's Place of Pleasure), who sets out with a secret purpose in mind.⁹ Certainly Helena acknowledges no project, nor do other characters detect one. But because the meeting in Florence would be an astonishing coincidence, we should wonder whether this journey, like her previous one to Paris, is contrived. Many a critic, disposed to see, here, only Providence rewarding a virtuous lady, nevertheless adds a cautious “seems” before asserting coincidence and hastily going on to other matters. I can find no grounds for any “reasonable doubt” that Helena has planned every move. In the latter half of the play, character is revealed by plot, and plot is uncovered by detective work.

Helena never dreams of letting her hard-won husband escape. She did not trust him alone at the French court, and she certainly does not trust him in Italy. She knows as well as the king that French soldiers cannot resist “those girls of Italy.” In due course Bertram will succumb, and if she is there at the time, she can substitute herself for an Italian maiden susceptible to bribery. And so Helena, resolving upon a course of action, disguises herself as a pilgrim, travels to St. Jaques's shrine, writes letters about an illness, and bides her time. Meanwhile, others are working on her behalf. No doubt Helena had thought of enlisting the support of her affectionate mother-in-law. But when Helena returned to Rossillion, the countess counselled “patience,” that traditional female virtue (III.ii.47), and Helena dared not admit to aggression. The countess announces, however, that she will send her son a letter of sharp rebuke. Since this letter, if delivered promptly, might bring Bertram scurrying home too soon, Helena must control the mail leaving Rossillion. She therefore announces her departure in a letter which the steward postpones delivering until she is far away. The countess, annoyed that the steward has let Helena leave, instructs him to frame a letter for Bertram and to arrange for its delivery (III.iv.29, 34, 40). Helena needs one other ally, in Florence.

The Two French lords of the play present an unsolved textual problem.¹⁰ In all of the scenes discussed, I follow the Folio's distribution of lines between them. Since all editors introduce changes, the identification of the First and Second Lords does not always correspond with my own. For this reason, I will identify the lords as E and G, a method also sanctioned by the Folio. The two are brothers, with a name and a military title in common: Captain Dumaine. When Helena arrives in Rossillion, she talks offstage with the two lords, before entering with them (III.ii.44). What has happened among them? From several subsequent events, which I shall discuss in turn, we may infer that she spoke with Lord E alone and bribed him.

The lords leave Rossillion with a letter from the countess for Bertram (III.ii.94-95) and, via the French court, return to Florence. There Lord E renews his acquaintance with Bertram (II.i.35-36) and becomes his confidant. Finally, after two months (IV.iii.45), Bertram mentions his attempt to seduce Diana, a reluctant maid (III.vi.106-07). Helena certainly seems to obtain this information, for at just this time she hastens to Florence and falls in among the three women (including Diana and her widowed mother) who are discussing Bertram while they wait for him to pass on military parade. When the women, not surprisingly, have identified Helena as French, their conversation returns to Bertram and to the gossip, mysteriously spread, that he has forsaken his wife. Helena (disguised of course) indicates she knows the wife, whom she indirectly praises, saying that she is of “mean” station, with only “honesty” to her credit (III.v.60, 61). Diana (another maid of that sort) puts in a predictable kind word, while her mother thinks of the “shrewd turn” that her daughter might do the count's wife (l.68). Helena virtually finishes the mother's thought—as if she herself had arrived fully informed about Bertram's overtures to Diana. She soon treats the other women to a dinner.

Helena sets up the “bed trick” with no difficulty whatever. Though Diana lacks shrewdness, Helena finds a useful ally in the widow. The two of them express scrupulous regard for the morality of the scheme, but they also strike a firm bargain. Helena offers a “purse of gold” (III.vii.14), then vaguely promises more money (l.16), and finally pins down the additional sum at “three thousand crowns” (l.35)! W. W. Lawrence inaugurated an era of criticism by claiming that as a folklore motif the bed trick raised no moral issues.¹¹ But we hardly need Lawrence if we credit the cloak these two women put on the deal. “Doubt not,” Helena adds later, “but heaven / Hath brought me up to be your daughter's dower” (IV.iv.18-19). I suggest that the holier Helena's language becomes, the less we should believe her.

So smoothly does her planning go that she has time for another project, the destruction of Parolles. Whatever the thematic relevance of this subplot, most critics regard it as technically independent of the main plot. Helena, however, is the secret mastermind. Lafew had once foreseen a future drubbing for Parolles (II.iii.222-26). When the two French Lords travel to the court after speaking with Helena at Rossillion, they hear Lafew on the subject of Parolles (III.vi.99-100), but in Florence they take no action. Then Helena arrives and hears that Parolles has been the “go between” in Bertram's attempt to seduce Diana. As he passes on parade, Diana says to Helena: “Were I [Bertram's] lady, I would poison that vile rascal” (III.v.83-84). And poison him Helena does! Lord E, without confiding in his brother, gains his cooperation; and in the very next scene, the two urge on Bertram a plan for exposing Parolles' true nature. Lord E carefully insists that Bertram be present at the “examination” (III.vi.25-26; IV.iii.34-35), for Parolles' punishment must also teach the young count a salutary lesson.

The bed trick takes place offstage. Helena's mastery is nevertheless exhibited in the performance of her chosen ally, Lord E, who (at the beginning of IV.iii) tells his curious brother he has only now delivered the countess' letter. He has surely delayed at Helena's instructions. Now, in order to ascertain that the letter is taking effect, he asks whether Bertram will “again return to France” (ll.39-40). Lord G replies that word has come of Helena's death—which she has also arranged to have announced—and that Bertram will proceed homeward in the morning. All goes according to plan until a hitch develops when Bertram, coming in, says that he leaves Italy with some “nicer” business unfinished (l.88). Lord E encourages him to complete whatever remains undone, but it turns out that the tryst has already taken place (ll.86-94). Parolles is brought in and exposed as a turncoat. And we must infer that still later that night, Lord E informs Helena of all he has learned, for next morning she departs for France, knowing that she is “supposed dead” and that her husband “hies him home” (IV.iv.11-12). Bertram wears her ring, and she has his. If she is pregnant as well, or at least can make others believe she is pregnant, Bertram is hers.

If my readers, having gone with me this far, agree on calling Helena a master of intrigue, they will not be surprised that for the denouement she leaves little to chance. The first clue comes when Parolles' blindfold is removed. Lord E, rather than leaving him to shift for himself, makes the surprising suggestion that Parolles go to France and seek the help of Lafew. Since Lafew, though his archenemy, does take him in, we can infer that Helena and her allies have a use for Parolles. We discover their plot by watching Lafew. He waits until he learns that Bertram has left for Rossillion and Helena for the court. Lest the nostalgic old king quickly forgive Bertram, returning with “letters of commendations” (IV.iii.75-76), and offer him a new wife, Lafew proposes his own daughter. He has no intention of marrying her to Bertram; she never appears in the play, nor does Lafew let her speak with Bertram (V.iii.28-29). His proposal accepted, Lafew goes to Rossillion so that when Bertram returns there, he can be led off to Paris, where Helena should by then have arrived. Suddenly Lafew gets “intelligence” that the king has left Paris for Rossillion (IV.v.79-80). Lafew immediately sends out a messenger, who finds Helena; but as she is with a group of friends, he does not openly confide in her. Instead, this messenger obligingly takes a letter from her and casually lets drop the king's change in plans.

Act V, scene iii, opens with the king at Rossillion, in a forgiving mood and eager for Bertram's remarriage. Then—a stroke of luck for Lafew—the king orders Bertram to send an “amorous token” to Lafew's daughter (l.68). Lafew looks down at Helena's ring on Bertram's finger; and the king, recognizing the ring as his gift to Helena (how well she has planned), immediately suspects Bertram of murdering her and orders him arrested. Lafew, having completed his work, can enjoy Diana's performance, knowing that when the time comes, Parolles will appear and betray Bertram by crediting Diana's accusations against him. And when the time comes, Helena herself will appear.

I will discuss the final events of the play with the aim of deciding the shape of this “problem” comedy. Critics have explored the alternatives.¹² Some find that the play has a genuine comic resolution. Bertram comes to appreciate Helena; their marriage demonstrates that the younger generation has at last found itself. The opposite view is that Helena entraps a husband, that he and she deserve each other, and that the key to their marriage can be found in their courtship. A compromise account has had some currency—one that finds in the play a qualified Christian optimism. Helena and Bertram, although not romanticized, do gain spiritual insight. In the words of the play, “the web of our life is of a mingled yard, good and ill together” (IV.iii.68-69). Since this pious moralizing does not penetrate very deeply, I side with the more cynical account of the play.

Helena has come a long way! Until the last thirty-odd lines of the final scene, others do her work for her. She plans meticulously, with flawless judgment. The countess proves ineffectual; the king, a faulty investigator; Lafew is loyal to the end. In my opinion, the role Helena casts for Bertram shows her cruel and effective. From the time he receives his mother's letter, he suffers from conscience and fears the consequence of his misdeeds. But when he arrives home, the promise of a clean slate gives him hope. Then Helena's ring is discovered on his finger, and Diana appears. Suddenly he is threatened with total exposure. To defend himself, he notoriously slanders Diana. Unknowingly he digs himself in deep. Helena miraculously appears. Before, she merely cured the mortally ill; now, she herself returns from the dead. Others gasp and are grateful. It is her moment of triumph and Bertram's moment of darkest humiliation. What can he do except beg her “pardon”? She stands before him, humbly presents evidence that his demands have been met, and asks him to be hers. Though he cannot understand how she has succeeded, he cannot uncover her plot, and so he submits (V.iii.309-10).

The text does little to establish the significance of the marriage. We can interpret Bertram's acceptance of Helena as a sign of his moral growth and this growth as a product of her solicitude. On the other hand, we should beware of the habit of mind caught in the play's title, All's Well That Ends Well. When the end looks satisfactory, the road along the way is remembered as straight, not crooked. But the Panglossian phrase, used in the play only by Helena, can cloak moral cynicism. Perhaps the means do not justify the ends, and perhaps unsavory ends are called means and justified by ends that never come about. At the conclusion of All's Well, we look around the stage and see that a real reckoning has not taken place. We see what the characters do not; like Bertram and Helena, they have succumbed to temptation, some knowingly and with profit, some in ignorance. The countess, reliving her youth through Helena, has betrayed her son. Lafew and the king have enjoyed an indirect romantic involvement with Helena. Lord G, led by his brother, has enjoyed debunking Parolles, a scheme from which Lord E gained both pleasure and profit. And, as a final warning against complacency, history starts to repeat itself. Like Helena earlier, Diana has passed herself off as a poor helpless maid. Although already well rewarded by Helena, she is now invited to choose a husband; the king promises her a royal dowry (l. 322). Even that dull king qualifies the note of celebration: “All seems well.” Seems, but is not!

A society so willfully self-ignorant as the one pictured here needs a scapegoat, and it has one in Parolles. He alone suffers, though many are as corrupt as he. After discovering that the lords and Bertram have trapped him, Parolles says, “Who cannot be crush’d with a plot?” (IV.iii.314). Another undetected traitor is present. When Parolles informs on Bertram, Lord E points the moral: “This is your devoted friend, sir” (l. 227). But Lord E is himself disloyal to Bertram. For a moment, he fears discovery, for his brother asks whether Lord E, like himself, could be corrupted with “well-weighing sums of gold.” Parolles answers “yes” but has no evidence (ll. 174, 273-79). Lord E is a minor character; Bertram and Helena are not. As critics have shown, Bertram is wrongly exculpated by those who would say that Parolles leads him astray.¹³ They are two of a kind. Both have pretensions to honor; on the same evening, both are exposed as willing to deceive and betray others. Critics have also suggested, although more cautiously, the parallels between Parolles and Helena, viewing both these characters as adventurers who follow the count to the royal court. Helena is no less ambitious than Parolles, although she is far more intelligent and shows “inf’nite cunning” (V.iii.215). “Who cannot be crush’d with a plot?” The answer is—Helena. No one is clever enough to uncover Helena's deception.

Notes

1. Among Helena's earlier supporters is Samuel T. Coleridge, who in one place calls her Shakespeare's “loveliest character,” although elsewhere he is more critical (Coleridge's Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor [London: Constable, 1930], I, 113; II, 357). George Bernard Shaw admires Helena's “exquisite tenderness and impulsive courage” (Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson [London: Cassella, 1962], p. 12). In our century, G. Wilson Knight, in The Sovereign Flower (London: Macmillan, 1958), p. 146, calls her “a semi-divine person”; and many critics follow him in finding her virtually a symbol of grace. Among the recent defenders of Helena, and of the play as comedy, are James L. Calderwood, in “Styles of Knowing in All's Well,” Modern Language Quarterly, 25 (1964), 272-94; Anne Barton, in her introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974); and Sylvan Barnet, in his introduction to All's Well in The Complete Signet Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972). More cynical accounts of Helena and the play are offered by E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1925), pp. 200-07; Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in All's Well,” ELH, 12 (1954), 17-29; and W. L. Godschalk, “All's Well and the Morality Play,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1974), 61-70. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 145-66, offers the fullest account of Helena's perhaps unscrupulous maneuvering. G. K. Hunter's “Critical Introduction” in the New Arden All's Well (London: Methuen, 1967) is a sophisticated defense of Helena as a heroine and of the play as comedy. I have studied his argument closely and tried to answer it; I also quote from his text throughout.

2. E. M. W. Tillyard mentions Helena's “humour” in Shakespeare's Problem Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), p. 112. The description of Helena's journey is from Chambers, p. 205.

3. Introduction to the New Shakespeare All's Well, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1929), p. xxv.

4. Riverside, p. 501.

5. Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 115, 253 (n. 12). The quotation below is from G. K. Hunter, p. xlii.

6. New Arden All's Well, p. xlii.

7. Ibid., p. xxxi.

8. Calderwood, p. 282.

9. See Riverside, p. 502; Complete Signet, pp. 1054-55; and the New Arden All's Well, p. xxvii.

10. The best summary of the textual problem is in the New Arden, pp. xv-xvii. In a note on the two French lords (Notes and Queries, NS 26 [1979], 122-25), I follow Hunter's solution to the problem except that I emend the designation of speakers only in IV.i. I believe that Lord E, at the end of III.vi, feigns an exit (l. 103), only to be called back by Bertram, who wishes to share further confidences concerning Diana. Lord G then exits (l. 105). All editors wish to give both apparent exit lines to the same lord, and in order to do so substantially alter the designation of speakers either in this scene or in IV.iii. May I also suggest that I.ii establishes the lords as purveyors of secret information, that in III.i the Duke of Florence sifts them for information which they withhold, and that on a mission back to France, Lord E picks up another assignment from Helena—but not one that puts him in serious jeopardy, since he knows that both the king and the countess favor Helena over Bertram.

11. William Witherle Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 39-54.

12. For critics on either extreme, see n. 1. The “compromise” case is argued by Michael Shapiro, “‘The Web of our Life’: Human Frailty and Mutual Redemption in All's Well,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 71 (1972), 514-26, and by Frances M. Pearce, “In Quest of Unity: A Study of Failure and Redemption in All's Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1974), 71-88.

13. See especially R. Hunter, pp. 119-22. Several critics make brief mention of parallels between Helena and Parolles: Tillyard, p. 106; Leech, p. 19; G. K. Hunter, p. xxxiii; and, somewhat more fully, R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 15-17.