SOURCE: “Helena versus Time's Winged Chariot in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4, Summer, 1980, pp. 391-411.

[In the following essay, Brennan discusses Helena in relation to the notion of time in All's Well That Ends Well, noting that she alone of the young people in the play has a strong connection with the older generation and that she actively struggles against the constraints of time to achieve her goals.]

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes.
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done. Perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honor bright; to have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mock'ry.

(III, iii, 145-153)

These opening lines of Ulysses' great speech in Troilus and Cressida are the locus classicus of Shakespeare's constant preoccupation with the nature of time. The politician endeavours to arouse the lethargic Achilles by characterizing Time as an insatiable cannibal looming over us who can only be appeased by fresh deeds, fresh meat from the battlefield outside the Trojan walls. This image of Time as an implacable tyrant is presented with endlessly varied ingenuity by Renaissance writers. Of all the extraordinary changes that took place in this period the gradual emergence of a new attitude to time is one that has had far reaching consequences for subsequent history. Throughout the entire medieval period two concepts of time were in conflict—the cyclic and the linear. Because of the powerful influence of astronomy and astrology scientists and scholars for a long while emphasized the cyclic concept. The linear concept, which was ultimately to become triumphant, was promoted by the mercantile class and the development of a money economy. When power was concentrated in ownership of land the concept of time was associated with the unchanging cycle of the soil, a natural, recurring, beneficent rhythm, in which time was plentiful. The circulation of money led to the unlocking of that stable, even static way of life, led to mobility of goods, of people, of careers and reputation. Hence the difference in views of Falstaff and Hotspur on the subject of honour, Cassio's agony over his lost reputation, the precipitous crash of Othello whose ‘occupation's gone.’ Men pursue reputation but know it is ‘a bubble.’ It was in the fifteenth century that public clocks in Italian cities for the first time struck all twenty-four hours of the day. Just before Shakespeare came to London the attempt to fix time much more precisely was made with the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in March of 1582. And at the time when Shakespeare came to dominate the London stage, Johannes Kepler, formulating his three laws which changed man's world-view for ever, used a new concept of time as the fundamental variable. In the words of Ernst Cassirer:

… the planets were dethroned as the ancient gods of time and fate, and the general view of time and of the temporal process was transferred from the image-world of the mythical-religious imagination to the exact conceptual world of scientific cognition.

(p. 140)

The tempo of life was increasing, and time was considered to be something valuable that was slipping away continually. The singular concept that has such devastating effect in our technological society—namely that ‘time is money’ and must be used economically—emerged in Shakespeare's lifetime.

Erwin Panofsky has pointed out that in classical art time is represented as fleeting opportunity (Kairos) or as creative eternity (Aion) but in the Renaissance time is a destroyer, equipped with an hour-glass and a scythe. Panofsky argues that no period has been so obsessed with the horror and sublimity of time as the baroque, “the period in which man found himself confronted with the infinite as a quality of the universe instead of as a prerogative of God” (p. 92). The evidence of this uneasiness is found throughout Shakespeare's work. In stanza 133 of The Rape of Lucrece we are given an image of an assassin:

Mis-shapen Time, copesmate of ugly Night,
Swift subtle post, carrier of grisly care,
Eater of youth, false slave to false delight,
Base watch of woes, sin's pack-horse, virtue's snare,
Thou nursest all and murder'st all that are:

Many characters in his plays lament their abuse of time or the pressure it puts on them. Anticipating Rilke's famous image we begin to get the impression that time is a bank deposit that must be withdrawn and wisely invested, otherwise we are subjected to cruel mockery—a position Richard II finds himself in when mewed up in Pomfret Castle:

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now, sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart
Which is the bell. So sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times and hours.

(V, v, 49-58)

There is a whiff of Samuel Beckett in this paralysis in face of the gorgon Time. But in solving the angst of ‘la condition humaine’ Shakespeare does not drift, as so many modern writers seem to do, towards catatonia. He has specific ideas on how to confront the assassin Time, and I want to look at those ideas in All's Well That Ends Well.

Mircea Eliade in Myth and Reality points out that “To cure the work of Time it is necessary to ‘go back’ and find the ‘beginning of the world’” (p. 88). He points out in many of his books the strategies adopted by primitive societies to achieve cycles of eternal renewal. To conquer time you have to repeal it or reverse it—go back to the roots of your society. By the Renaissance, formally organized ritual methods of renewal were disappearing. In All's Well That Ends Well, we have the sense of a world of solid, firmly rooted values in decay, or being eclipsed by the newer world of pragmatic, political action willing to pay only lip-service to the old ideals. The new generation, eager to bustle in the world, cares little for a rooted tradition. It will snatch up any branches that are to hand and stick them in the ground. That the leaves on the branches may wither, that the garden will be laid waste is of less moment than the advantage they might gain in the immediate present. In pursuing the bubble reputation, they cannot afford true honour and honesty, only a semblance of it. There is no time for concern with how they might appear in their own eyes or in God's. But instead of conquering time, they become ever more slaves to it. Our hope in Shakespeare's comedies usually resides in the ability of the younger generation to grasp and reaffirm enduring values.

Helena is the only member of the younger generation who has strong, continuing links with the older generation. She has no difficulty getting along with the king, the Countess, or Lafew. As child of Gerard de Narbon, she is inheritor of ancient skills. The king, dying of a fistula, has respect for the old values, and yet, in the decline of his body, we see the decline of his society. His doctors have no skill, and he has no faith in them. Critics have often commented on the decayed nature of this French court, the shallow, young courtiers, the brooding atmosphere of death. There is an echo here of John of Gaunt on his deathbed facing Richard II and his court of rash, bavin wits, the world of Duncan being replaced by that of Macbeth, or Antony by Octavius, or old Hamlet's heroic times by Claudius' pragmatism. The age of heroes, of the Count Rousillon and Gerard de Narbon, may seem as irrecoverable as that of the Black Prince, but in comedy there is room for one green shoot to survive the new wintry world of shifting values.

The lines with which the Countess opens the play: “In delivering my son from me I bury a second husband” (I, i, 1-2) underlines a contrast that the play explores in detail. Bertram may be called a second husband, but he is not yet worthy to step into the shoes of the dead Count, who embodied the true, courteous, aristocratic ideal. In those past times miracles were almost possible, as she indicates in commenting on Gerard de Narbon's skill which “almost as great as his honesty; had it stretched so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work” (I, i, 16-20). The parallelism of the two mighty ancestors of Bertram and Helena is important, for he betrays the memory of his father, while she inherits and practices Gerard's marvellous skills. That past age, however, was not inhabited by gods, as Lafew points out in his comment on Gerard: “He was skillful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality” (I, i, 26-28). Yet we retain the impression that, though mortality could not be denied, the older world was not one in which Time was so easily triumphant. The king indicates to Bertram that the old Count was not one to alter his principles to suit the times but the embodiment of more enduring values:

                              He did look far
Into the service of the time, and was
Discipled of the bravest. He lasted long,
But on us both did haggish age steal on
And wore us out of act. It much repairs me
To talk of your good father; in his youth
He had the wit which I can well observe
To-day in our young lords; but they may jest
Till their own scorn return to them unnoted
Ere they can hide their levity in honor.
So like a courtier, contempt nor bitterness
Were in his pride or sharpness. If they were,
His equal had awaked them, and his honor,
Clock to itself, knew the true minute when
Exception bid him speak, and at this time
His tongue obeyed his hand.

(I, ii, 26-41)

That wonderful final image indicates the defining quality of the lost golden age. The Count was like a self-regulating clock in that he responded only to his own interior standards of honour. The king goes on to say that the Count was able to show courtesy to those of humbler birth because of his security in his own honour and worth. Bertram, lacking any such rooted principles will respond with snobbery, and not with courtesy, to Helena.

We are not, of course, to assume that Shakespeare is totally in sympathy with this backward-looking lament, that the king's evaluation of the present decay is totally accurate. The king is a sick man, and his morbid distaste for the present is excessive. He is submitting to the power of death before he needs to do so. The action does indicate that things are pretty far gone at the French court, but the question Shakespeare attends to is the one he confronted all of his creative life—are they gone beyond redemption? In play after play he demonstrates that mere doting on that lost aristocratic world makes men vulnerable to the worst excesses of the new world that was so swiftly replacing it. To stem the tide and find a middle way before all is lost Shakespeare chooses Helena, who is not a born aristocrat, but who is, like so many other redeemers in Shakespeare, noble in spirit.

The new world she has to cope with is characterized most clearly by Lafew:

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

(II, iii, 1-6)

This scientific world resistant to mystery helps to make men vulnerable to time. If the world is a mechanism in which everything can be explained, the way is open for opportunists who understand the mechanism to work their way to the top. Such men act in feverish haste because the time at their disposal is limited. As Lafew asserts, this is a world of “Uncertain life and sure death” (II, iii, 23). And yet Lafew is, in fact, celebrating the miraculous recovery of the king by Helena's agency—an event which, in his view, makes scientific, mechanistic philosophies bankrupt. The king had had so little faith that he had not wanted to submit to the medicine, even though Lafew had claimed that it would bring King Pepin and Charlemain back from the dead—reminding us, perhaps, of the times when the raising of Lazarus was possible. The king asserted that nothing could “ransom nature / From her inaidable estate” (II, i, 118-119). Helena's cure is miraculous not merely because of the efficacy of her father's skill, not because it cures an illness, but because it recovers in the king a youthful vigour. In this reversal of time it seems, for a while, as if the irrevocable process of aging can be conquered.

Helena's revival of the king is an example of how faith (faith in her father's skill) can triumph. Her medicine is effective because she enlists God in her cause as the king's other doctors had not done:

Inspired merit so by breath is barred.
It is not so with Him that all things knows
As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows;
But most it is presumption in us, when
The help of heaven we count the act of men.

(II, i, 148-152)

The cure very specifically defeats time—it is accomplished in one day. But more than that, of course, Helena stakes her life on the cure. She asserts her faith by her disdain for death. In wrestling with Time's agent, Death, to release the king from its grasp, she willingly submits herself to its power. Like all of Shakespeare's heroines she asserts, in her aim to win Bertram, the transcendent power of love in her determination to hazard all for it: “If I break time or flinch in property / Of what I spoke, unpitied let me die” (II, i, 187-188). A world hag-ridden by time can be saved by enduring values of faith, hope, love, and the offer of self-sacrifice. We can see here a recovery on an archetypal level of the redemption of an aging Adam by a Christ-like willingness to sacrifice.

It is not the purpose of the play, however, to suggest that society can be saved by reviving old men, refurbishing those besmeared by sluttish Time. However firmly the old in this play may seem to have a grip on enduring values, they falter towards the end. True, their faltering is in the direction of compassion and forgiveness. When they decide to pull Bertram's chestnuts from the fire by marrying him off to Lafew's daughter, we are aware, as they are not, that he is not worthy of such an easy reprieve. Their decision is dotage not wisdom. The king is dangerously unstable, crotchety, all-forgiving, irascible, indulgent by turns. Society needs renewal not merely by miraculous reversals of time but by the infusion of new blood. It is necessary that those captivated by the temporal values of a fashion-conscious world be reclaimed or redeemed. Bertram's ill-angel, Parolles, is fired out, but the process of saving Bertram himself is not easy, and Shakespeare allows it considerable space.

It has often been noted that the career of Bertram bears some relation to the figure of an older morality drama, the prodigal son blundering into error by rejecting a complex of traditional values embodied in the elders of his society. Bertram is a figure who dashes here, there, and everywhere. The patience required in the extended series of inquiries to riddle out the truth about the rings is like that required in breaking a high-strung horse. The king makes a number of comments on how easily startled and frightened he is. Bertram spends most of the play darting away, rearing up against the idea of Helena as a mate, running abroad after glory and a mistress. There are moments, indeed, when he, too, seems to have reversed time by stumbling into Shakespeare's drama out of Peter Shaffer's play, Equus. To bring this runaway to a halt is no easy feat. Critics complain about the shallow, ill-defined quality of Bertram. It is that shallowness which is his defining quality. He is poorly developed; there is little stuff to him, for he is one of those young Renaissance bucks who pursue superficiality, mere fashion. One can often measure a man's solidity by the way he is capable of standing against the tide of time. Bertram simply bobs along like a cork with the tide. His snobbery leads him to sacrifice Helena, for he believes she would soil his reputation, and yet he persists in valuing Parolles, whose acquaintance brings him only dishonour, long after everyone else has seen through him.

Parolles figures as the polar opposite of the kind of courage embodied in the old Count Rousillon whom the king quotes:

          ‘Let me not live’, quoth he,
‘After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff
Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses
All but new things disdain; whose judgements are
Mere fathers of their garments; whose constancies
Expire before their fashions.’

(I, ii, 58-63)

The Count did not wish to live on into a world in which Parolles could offer Bertram advice on how to win friends and influence people:

Use a more spacious ceremony to the noble lords, you have restrained yourself within the list of too cold an adieu. Be more expressive to them; for they wear themselves in the cap of the time; there do muster true gate, eat, speak, and move under the influence of the most received star; and though the devil lead the measure, such are to be followed.

(II, i, 50-56)

All of Parolles' advice indicates that you have to be wide awake to keep up with the mad scramble of changing fashions, you have to know how to hit the market at the right time.

The play is full of vignettes of what happens when mere fashion reigns triumphant. The aging clown, Lavatch, is convinced that he has found a phrase, “O Lord Sir,” which will serve every occasion, freeing him from having to accommodate himself to, or even pay attention to, the different situations he finds himself in. He tries it out on the Countess in Act II, Scene ii, but finds that it will not endure all inquiries. She wears out the usefulness of the phrase causing Lavatch to admit, “I see things may serve long, but not serve ever” (II, ii, 53). In commenting on the frivolity of the exchange, the Countess uses a metaphor that could be applied to the various ways in which the characters in the play are married to time: “I play the noble housewife with the time, / To entertain it so merrily with a fool” (II, ii, 54-55).

Time can be a nagging shrew. But one need not simply be a victim of time; there are different ways of using it. One can use it to develop, to grow into full manhood, or one can refuse to grow up. Bertram's resistance to marriage is unnatural. Full maturity in Shakespeare involves sharing one's fate with another. Bertram's resistance in this matter is almost as foolish as that of Katharine the shrew. His closest companion, Parolles, has not used time well. When Parolles mocks Lafew for being old, he gets the tart reply, “I must tell thee, sirrah, I write man, to which title age cannot bring thee” (II, ii, 197-198). When Parolles brings Helena news of Bertram's departure, he phrases it most particularly in terms of his world-view:

Madam, my lord will go away tonight;
A very serious business calls on him.
The great prerogative and rite of love
Which, as your due, time claims, he does acknowledge;
But puts it off to a compelled restraint;
Whose want, and whose delay, is strewed with sweets,
Which they distil now in the curbed time,
To make the coming hour o'erflow with joy
And pleasure drown the brim

(II, iv, 37-45)

Helena may have won the battle against time in curing the king, but time claims back the prize that she won by that act. Bertram itches to be off to submit to fashion in pursuit of battle glory rather than submit to a more enduring relationship figured in love. He is thus little better than Parolles, who seeks to escape the enduring value of honour.

Like Falstaff, Parolles has no concept of eternal values. He pursues short-term gains. His proposal to recover the drum is rooted not in the real world but in the illusory world of play acting. He will be happy enough to gain glory even though it only last a week. The First Lord says, “Certain it is that he will steal himself into a man's favor, and for a week escape a great deal of discoveries; but when you find him out, you have him ever after” (III, vi, 81-85). It will cost him two or three hours' sleep in a field and a few convincing wounds, which by Parolles' business calculations is a reasonable investment of time. This precise calculation of time is important, for it is utterly opposed to the older concept of honour, which a man held not for passing advantage but for an eternal assertion of the worth of his name. Maintaining the honour of a family name is valuable exactly because it is a statement of defiance against time, because no matter how time wears out individual men, honour passes from generation to generation. But Parolles' view is different. Lafew says, “the soul of the man is his clothes” (II, v, 42-43)—all exterior and no essence. Besides being a particularly vivid image of the decay of values, Parolles has an even more important function. He helps us to see that those who surround and torment him are not as noble as they pretend. He may be a slanderer and an inventive liar, but some of the mud that he throws in his blindfolded state sticks. Shakespeare structures this action very carefully by making Bertram the first object of Parolles' attack.

Parolles' protestations that he tried to save the virtuous Diana are certainly lies, but he does see very accurately into Bertram's lascivious nature. Bertram is nettled by the accurate description of him as an irresponsible wastrel. After he has hit this mark, we are liable to suspect that Parolles' comments on Captain Dumain and his brother may not be simple invention. The essence of his criticism is that they are opportunists, liars, frauds. Behind their noble exteriors, they are captives of the tyrant appetite. We may take this seriously or not, but we must remember two things. These are the young noblemen that the king and Lafew lamented were mere shadows of their parents. And the behaviour of the courtiers when Helena made her choice of husband indicated that Bertram was not alone in the shallowness of his values. Certainly they are able to see through Parolles as Bertram could not, but the delight they take in setting up the exposure of the coward has a kind of adolescent nastiness about it that is far from the courtesy of true aristocrats, who would hardly demean themselves by indicating irritation at such scurrilous detraction. So Parolles is merely the most visible evidence of a general decay. And he does, of course, win a measure of forgiveness by being true to his own existential values. He is willing to live in a dungeon, in the stocks, anywhere, so he may live. He will suffer no deep scars of humiliation:

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

(IV, iii, 307-311)

Here he speaks the true voice of the new age in which a man carries none of the excess baggage of idealism and traditional values. Life is a day to day affair in which the tyrant, Time, makes everything but mere survival irrelevant. Shakespeare does not submit to such a view, but by allowing Parolles, like Pistol before him, to declare his philosophy unashamedly, he acknowledges that such a strategy of life is becoming increasingly widespread. The fact that it is Lafew who intends to help him is significant. To Parolles he says, “though you are a fool and knave, you shall eat” (V, ii, 51). He intends, perhaps, to undertake his reform, but his capacity to forgive is a touch of the older, true, aristocratic courtesy.

The basest view of the relations between men and women is voiced by Parolles early in the play when he debates the subject of virginity with Helena. That Helena is willing to match wits with Parolles disturbs all those critics who adopt Shakespeare's heroines as their daughters and wish to bring them up amid the proprieties of a nice, middle-class home. The scene surely is meant to signal to us resilient and urbane qualities in the girl that will be amply demonstrated by her later actions. The nub of the argument is a juxtaposition of two attitudes to time. There is, after all, a great deal of poetry in this period which offers advice to young virgins on how to make much of time and how coy mistresses are to be winkled out of their infuriating shyness. The argument always has to do with a view of life as a process of wearing out. You can defeat time only by accommodating yourself to the fact that it will triumph eventually. Women are like baked goods which soon go stale, or like fashionable garments soon out of style. Because flesh ages, its appeal is merely transient. Wisely used, it can keep the world well supplied with virgins for which there is always a plentiful demand:

Keep it not; you cannot choose but lose by't. Out with't! within ten years it will make itself ten, which is a goodly increase, and the principal itself not much the worse.

(I, i, 141-144)

There are no absolute values. In this world-view, everything—love, honour, loyalty, faith—is a commodity. “’Tis a commodity will lose the gloss with lying: the longer kept, the less worth. Off with't while ’tis vendible; answer the time of request” (I, i, 148-50). This is how the world cuts itself off from transcendent values. Man has only a limited time to enjoy the fruits of this world because his enjoyment comes through appetite, through the senses, and the senses decay or wear out, so he has even less time than he thinks he has. So a woman has no time for nice considerations; she must jump into the market and sell herself right away. Parolles puts his point of view plainly enough towards the end of the scene: “When thou hast leisure, say thy prayers; when thou hast none, remember thy friends” (I, i, 205-206).

Though Helena does not share Parolles' view that prayers are useful only to fill an idle hour, she does not intend to rely simply on prayers, as she points out immediately:

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

(I, i, 208-211)

Helena is an active agent, she will not be worn out by time. She aspires to one above her and yet uses the example of nature as her warrant. Critics have often found her too active in her own cause. Alarmed by what they seem to regard as a ‘pushy’ woman, they forget that that is a quality which defines so many of Shakespeare's heroines. Somebody has to push things in the right direction.

But we must not forget the crucial irony at the end of the play that relates back to this conversation with Parolles. Bertram, having refused to consummate his marriage, makes the loss of her virginity and a subsequent pregnancy a condition of his submission to the marriage he denies. Here we are in an upside down world—the woman who has chastely preserved her virginity for her husband cannot get rid of it. She did not offer it on the open market as Parolles counselled, but she cannot even make a lawful investment of it. Bertram, though married, is still free to range the market for maidenheads. The bed-trick that Helena plays on Bertram is appropriate payment for the unnaturalness of his behaviour. What he takes to be the sweets of an illicit union is lawful after all. Even as he supposed himself to be spreading his seed casually, in line with his submission to the urgency of the time, he was sealing himself into an eternal bargain—not a soldier's indulgence, but a husband's duty. That all this is validated with rings that are heirlooms passed down from one generation to another underlines the fact that Bertram, whether he knew it or not, was entering an enduring relation sealed by tradition and ending his submission to a life of ephemeral fashion.

When Bertram undertakes the assault of Diana, their debate echoes that earlier one between Helena and Parolles. Again we are focussed on that question of honour as it relates to time. Much of the behaviour involved in the courtly love code has to do with posing, a narcissistic self-regard, a pretence of eternal commitment to love as a way of gaining temporal advantage. Bertram, a married man, swears eternal faith in his adulterous designs, but Diana knows that he aims at only one night's pleasure. She asks for a marriage vow before God, the action of giving oneself ‘as long as ye both shall live,’ a bond which Shakespeare always asserts in face of the opportunism inherent in the courtly love code. Bertram's response is little better than the urgency of a little boy who wants to get to the bathroom: “Stand no more off, / But give thyself unto my sick desires” (IV, ii, 34-35). When asked for his ring as surety he offers to lend it, which indicates something less than long-term commitment. She can borrow his ring if he can borrow her body. Diana points out that she cannot lend since yielding up chastity is a permanent rather than temporary matter. Her chastity has to do with the honour of her family name, it is a jewel bequeathed down from many ancestors and so transcends time. Thus, Bertram is forced to yield up the ring which will ensnare him.

The definitive revelation of Bertram hag-ridden by time as he bustles in this busy world comes in the following scene:

I have tonight dispatched sixteen businesses, a month's length apiece. By an abstract of success: I have congied with the duke, done my adieu with his nearest, buried a wife, mourned for her, writ to my lady mother I am returning, entertained my convoy, and between these main parcels of dispatch effected many nicer needs. The last was the greatest, but that I have not ended yet.

(IV, iii, 80-86)

The eternal oaths sworn to Diana are reduced to this. She is a parcel, one item he has crossed off his checklist of business pending. The courtly lover commits himself to nothing beyond the satisfaction of his own body, trampling on the values of chastity, trust, honour, love, marriage. Shakespeare places this desecration of all values immediately before Parolles' breaking of trust with his friends. Bertram's outrage at this betrayal is, therefore, an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

At the beginning of this play, young love, as so often in comedy, was dammed up by Bertram's hasty departure. It has to find some subterranean passage, when Helena in the bed-trick pursues her deed of darkness, so that society, bound in submission to time and decay, can emerge into full daylight. In almost all the plays Shakespeare wrote in which women have to work hard to ensure that love finds a way, he gives them an important ally—the wisdom of nature. And this is a different interpretation of the effect of time. The enduring values are rooted in nature, which transcends the temporary aberrations of individual mortals. If we work in harness with what is natural, as Helena does in pursuing the sanctity of the marriage bond, then time becomes our ally, ensuring that by the process of maturing, things will turn out well. To make her point, Helena uses an image that underlines the inevitable cycle of nature:

                              the time will bring on summer
When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns,
And be as sweet as sharp. We must away;
Our wagon is prepared, and time revives us.
All's well that ends well; still the fine's the crown.
Whate'er the course, the end is the renown.

(IV, iv, 31-36)

However, the difficulty Helena has in catching up with the French court almost brings us to believe that Helena will be defeated by a mere accident of time as, say, Romeo and Juliet were. Time, it seems, will heal all in the wrong way. The marriage arrangement that is fadged up with Lafew's daughter at the end to save Bertram is deliberately disturbing. The older aristocratic figures seem not to have learned from the sacrifice Helena has made. They revert to type and intend to seal up the usual alliance of noble households. Everyone is willing to forget and forgive Bertram's misdeeds. His sins were “done, i' th' blade of youth” (V, iii, 6). “The time is fair again” (V, iii, 36). The king is eager to make the most of time:

                              All is whole;
Not one word more of the consuméd time.
Let's take the instant by the forward top;
For we are old, and on our quick'st decrees
Th' inaudible and noiseless foot of time
Steals ere we can effect them.

(V, iii, 37-42)

The attitude of not crying over spilt milk is a generous one, perhaps, but the haste is rather unseemly. Yet it is ultimately time itself that accomplishes Helena's purposes. It is their haste to bury the past that reveals the flaw in the design. Lafew asks for a favour to give his daughter, and Bertram yields up the ring that will unravel all his dark dealings in the past. By the time Helena arrives, Bertram's shame is public. But the miracle that Helena achieved in saving the king's life did not ensure a recovered state. The king may be vigourous, but he is prone to error still. He forgives Bertram; then he arrests him; he is sympathetic to Diana, and then he arrests her; he forgets Helena, and then he remembers her. He is a creature of caprice. Helena must effect another miracle. She must come back from the dead to claim her own, her blood must revive this decaying stock. She can do so because she is an amalgam of both the old and the new. She combines her father's almost magical skill and his sense of faith and sacrifice with a pragmatic ability to get what she wants.

In Shakespeare's comedies, the women, who usually have a much clearer perception than men of what is healthy and what is required to refertilize a sterile society, often have to go to extraordinary lengths to get what they want. The more devious are the means they have to use, the sicker is the society that they are trying to circumvent. Viola and Rosalynde have to go in disguise and take to the road to get what they want. But they do not have to get involved in bed-tricks as Isabella and Helena do. But then Illyria and the Forest of Arden are not as corrupt or decayed as Vienna or the French court. Horses for courses. And Helena is not simply a reincarnation of her father with his miraculous skills.

That world is gone. She wants marriage with someone who is above her social station. So that we may have no inclination to accuse her of social-climbing, she is endowed with near miraculous powers and with extraordinary tenacity. Her faith that Bertram, a decayed stem of a noble family, is not beyond redemption is admirable. But noble self-sacrifice, going on pilgrimages or down into death, would avail nothing. She has to bustle in the world. Is she then no better then the other young people in the play? Is she not merely an opportunist, no freer of the temporal, materialist philosophy than they? She is contrasted point by point with the others of her generation. She does not start off in all directions at once as Bertram does, she is not a prey to fashions. She pursues her goal undeviatingly and will never accept surface for essence. We can accept her opportunism because she is the only character in the play who exerts any energy to stop a bad situation from getting worse. At the end of the play we do not have the old world of the king's youth, of Count Rousillon and Gerard de Narbon recovered. But we do not have the shallow world of the feckless young courtiers or the ignoble Parolles triumphant. We have a new world achieved by a pragmatic determination to salvage some of the older values that men had once so easily taken for granted. The lengths to which Helena has to go to achieve a via media indicate that the world can not be set to rights by waving a magic wand. Indeed, if it could then when Helena cured the king, Bertram would have perceived her virtue, and the play could have ended right there. It does not help to say that Shakespeare found himself stuck with an awkward source story. He was no great respecter of his sources and altered them freely. What is, perhaps, significant is that at this point in his career he chose source stories, out of which he fashioned Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, that involve bed tricks. He did not have to choose those stories at all. He chose them, I suspect, precisely because he is at this point exploring how difficult it is for virtue to triumph in face of corrupt and decaying worlds. There is no twin brother who will show up at the appropriate moment to resolve all difficulties. Bertram, like Angelo and Isabella, is an inflexible figure who is changed not so much by persuasion but by being outflanked. The dark secret that he has buried is brought out publicly to shame him. Like Angelo, he has to recognize the tawdriness of his shameful attempts to deceive. Like Angelo, he tries to lie, bully, and brazen his way out of the situation to the very last minute. It takes considerable time and maneuvering for Helena to triumph, and when she disappears into the darkness, society almost manages to forget her. Quite clearly, all of these strategies are deliberate on Shakespeare's part, and they are designed to indicate how perilously close this world comes to a failure to achieve renewal. It is finally Helena's faith in marriage that provides stability in a shifting world of impermanent values and that allows her to triumph over “Time's winged chariot hurrying near.”

Bibliography

Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, Vol. II. New Haven, 1955.

Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. New York, 1968.

Panofsky, Studies in Iconology. New York, 1962.