SOURCE: “All's Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare's Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 66-77.

[In the following essay, Snyder probes the characterization of Helena as a sexually aggressive woman through instances of indirect and suppressed speech in the play.]

I'm going to move into my speculations from two different directions. One point of departure is a set of gaps, disjunctions, and silences in All's Well, places where we lack an expected connection or explanation in the speeches or actions of the main character, Helena. The other is, on the contrary, an unexpected coincidence, a connection between that somewhat mysterious Helena and a character in another play which on the face of it is quite unlike All's Well.

Helena's career strangely mixes aggressive initiative and passivity. She begins All's Well in a state of social and psychological constriction: a physician's orphaned daughter silently in love with a young nobleman who cares nothing for her and is about to leave Roussillon for the court. Helena can only grieve passively. She is interrupted by Parolles, who engages her in a joking conversation, advancing the standard arguments against women retaining their virginity; and by the end of the scene she is suddenly resolved to go to Paris herself and offer a medicine of her father's to cure the desperate illness of the King. The initiative is a success, and brings the reward she dared to stipulate for her service, a choice of husbands from among the King's wards. But the chosen Bertram refuses to play his part in the fairy-tale match; he rejects her in outrage, and after the King terrorizes him into going through with the marriage, runs away with Parolles to the wars in Italy rather than consummate it. Bundled off to Roussillon at his order, Helena there receives by letter his cruel farewell: he will never accept her as his wife until she can get possession of his ancestral ring and conceive a child by him. He means the setting of impossible tasks as a total dismissal: “in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never”’ (3.2.58).¹ She recapitulates her initial despair, blames herself for exposing him to danger on the battlefield, and vows to get out of the way so that he can come home. But almost immediately we find her as a pilgrim in Florence, where Bertram is, where she meets Diana, the girl whom he is trying to seduce. Helena again takes forceful control of the action, persuading the Widow to agree to the bed-substitution, instructing Diana, pursuing Bertram back to France, seeking an audience with the King, and manipulating the final revelation-scene to expose Bertram, prove her fulfillment of the impossible tasks, and claim her reluctant husband all over again.

The gaps and disjunctions I want to examine are associated with these shifts between assertion and self-abnegation. One of them occurs in the center of that early, apparently extraneous banter with Parolles about virginity. What moves Helena from hopeless assent to fate to the contrary proclamation that “our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven?” (1.1.212-13). Why should some bawdy conversation with a coarse braggart convert her from despairing withdrawal—“the hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love” (89-90)—to an energetic plan to follow Bertram to Paris and use this suddenly remembered medical remedy to win favor with the King? The answer is probably a complicated one, but we might look particularly at an odd break in the text at the very center of the conversation. Listening to Parolles' exuberant arguments against virginity, Helena has answered first, “I will stand for't a little, though therefore I die a virgin” (131-32); and after some more, “How might one do … to lose it to her own liking?” (147). Parolles argues further:

Off with't while 'tis vendible; answer the time of request … your virginity, your old virginity, is like one of our French wither'd pears: it looks ill, it eats drily; marry, 'tis a wither'd pear. It was formerly better; marry, yet 'tis a wither'd pear. Will you anything with it?

Helena's response is disjointed, tangential:

Not my virginity yet:(2)
There shall your master have a thousand loves,
A mother, and a mistress, and a friend.
A phoenix, captain, and an enemy,
A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign,
A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear

(150-66)

And so on through several more lines of epithets for the beloved lady familiar from the love sonnet tradition. Some textual commentators have denied any break here, reading something like “In my virginity, which is far from a withered pear, Bertram will find everything he ever wanted in a mistress.”³ But why should she suddenly reveal her love, kept secret from everybody, to this insensitive blabbermouth? And the epithets of the sonnet-lady tyrannizing over her enslaved lover—captain, enemy, goddess, traitress—are violently at odds with her habitual attitude to Bertram, expressed before and after this speech, which is the self-abasing devotion of one who feels herself inferior. It seems more likely that “there” means the court, where Bertram will find some all-consuming love. But what unenunciated pressure has brought up this powerful new mental vision?

Editors have speculated that the rest of the short line 161 has dropped out here, some reference to the court. Perhaps. The Folio copy for All's Well seems to have been especially messy, and recent textual work has uncovered signs of authorial second thoughts.⁴ Yet even if we hypothesize a few missing words (Hanmer adds “You're for the court”; Gary Taylor conjectures “yet at the court”), Helena's transition from her maidenly defense against Parolles to imagining love-life at court is still abrupt, and it seems likely that the emotions suppressed here may figure in her larger transition in this scene from quiescent grief to active pursuit.

Textual corruption is not an issue in my second example. At court Helena has a hard time persuading the King, who has lost all hope of being cured. She argues professional skill (her father working through her), and the possibility of a miracle (God working through her). But the King maintains his steady resistance until he asks what she is willing to risk if she fails. He gets a strange reply:

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

(2.1.169-73)

As in the Boccaccio story from which Shakespeare drew his plot, she risks death. That is what convinces the King. What he does not respond to, what is not in the source, is the kind of punishment she first feels compelled to propose: versions of public shame for immodesty and sexual boldness. Failure might convict her of professional or religious presumption, but why of being a strumpet? There is something operating here that she leaves unsaid.

In my next example, it is Shakespeare who leaves something unsaid, something very important. We are never told whether Helena deliberately pursues Bertram to Florence in order to fulfill his impossible demands or rather arrives where he is by accident and acts only on fortuitous opportunity. This is a deafening silence, all the more noticeable because the early acts have been so firmly centered in Helena's subjectivity: her soliloquies and her confidings in the sympathetic Countess, her foster-mother, keep us close to her feelings and motives. That centering is reasserted in the latter part of the play, when Helena finds new confidantes in Diana and the Widow. But at the crucial point Shakespeare opens a gap which prevents full understanding.

Helena's soliloquy after she hears of her husband's defection to Italy is all shame and withdrawal:

                              And is it I
That drive thee from the sportive court, where thou
Wast shot at with fair eyes, to be the mark
Of smoky muskets? …
Whoever shoots at him, I set him there;
Whoever charges on his forward breast,
I am the caitiff that do hold him to 't;
And though I kill him not, I am the cause
His death was so effected. …
                              I will be gone …
                    Come night, end day.
For with the dark, poor thief, I'll steal away.

(3.2.105-29)

Bertram's own mother and friends have just condemned his conduct, but Helena locates all the guilt in her own action: pursuit of Bertram is equated with theft and murder. The new “action” she proposes is really a form of self-effacement: she will go away not with any particular destination but just to remove herself as an obstacle. Soon afterward we hear that she does have a destination, one that accords with her feelings of guilt:

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.

(3.4. 4-7)

At this point, however, we are not given Helena's direct speech but a letter she has left behind for the Countess; and we are further distanced from her thoughts by the letter's highly wrought sonnet form. As G. K. Hunter remarks, “by its various inversions and alliterations [it] produces an effect more archaic and formal than anything in The Sonnets or the early plays.”⁵ Purpose is conveyed to us without intimacy, at two removes. And in the next scene there is Helena—in Florence. Saint Jaques, later called Saint Jaques le Grand, is Saint James the Great, and Florence is considerably off the road from Roussillon in southern France to his shrine in northwestern Spain. Is the whole pilgrimage scheme simply a pretense, then, to cover her pursuit of Bertram? It is interesting that later one of the French Lords actually uses that word in describing her action.⁶ Alas, the apparently pointed term doesn't point clearly in one direction: it could mean “false pretext” all right, but in Shakespeare's English it could equally well mean just “intention,” with no deception implied (OED 3). In the same ambiguous way, while Helena's route to Santiago may raise suspicions in the audience, no one in Florence finds it odd. In fact, there are several pilgrims bound for the same place lodging there. Why this deliberate mystification, and how are we to fill in the gap it creates?

And now for my second point of departure. This mysterious Helena in All's Well is highly unusual among Shakespeare's comic heroines in that she not only loves before she is loved but actively, overtly, chases the man she wants. Even Rosalind and Portia, however spirited and ready to take control, wait to be wooed; in love, theirs are strategies of reception, not initiation. There is really only one other exception, in A Midsummer Night's Dream: a young woman who loves without response, who, after beginning in as passive and despairing a mode as the heroine of All's Well, turns to active pursuit and continues it even when pained and shamed by the rebukes of the man she pursues. And her name of course is Helena. The repetition of name and situation is striking, especially since as far as we know Shakespeare chose the names in both cases. He seems to have invented the Midsummer lovers and their story; and for All's Well, he deliberately rejected the name supplied by his source, Giletta, and substituted that of Helena or Helen.

We can't know what private associations the name Helena had for Shakespeare, if any, but the public one is unavoidable: Helen of Troy, the fought-over woman, the archetypal desired object in his culture's myth of origins. Did this legendary Helen influence Shakespeare's naming? It's not clear in A Midsummer Night's Dream, although the Helena there is of course Greek. In the play's one allusion to the legend, Theseus' scoff at the lover who “sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt” (5.1.11), Shakespeare could well be glancing at Demetrius' earlier rejection of Helena's fairness for the dark complexion of her rival (Hermia, when out of favor, is called an Ethiop and a tawny Tartar). In All's Well it may be significant that, after first introducing his heroine as Helena, Shakespeare settled into a notable preference for the shortened form of her name, the form he always used for the archetypal queen.⁷ But the play provides direct evidence for associating the two:

Steward: May it please you, madam, that he bid Helen come to you; of her I am to speak.
Countess: Sirrah, tell my gentlewoman I would speak with her—Helen I mean.
Clown: Was this fair face the cause, quoth she,
Why the Grecians sacked Troy?

(1.3.63-68)

The Countess' “Helen I mean” is doubly superfluous: the Steward has just named Helen, and in any case she has no other attendant gentlewoman to confuse us. The name thus accented highlights the Clown's response, which is to sing a ballad of the Trojan War that had Helen's fair face as its object. This undoubted association may throw retrospective light on Parolles' first greeting to Helena, “Save you, fair queen”—a title she emphatically denies (1.1.104-07). Not only is she far from a queen in her social rank, so much lower than Bertram's, but she is an anti-Helen: not the desired one but the desirer. Shakespeare's own representation of Helen of Troy in Troilus and Cressida, a play probably near in time to All's Well, only sharpens the ironic contrast. She is argued about and fought over, but seen as an actual character only briefly, as a totally passive object.

I am suggesting, then, that the Helenas of the two comedies are linked by the name chosen for them, a name that ironically contradicts its prototype and thus underlines their peculiar situation as subject, the locus of active desire, rather than the usual “woman's part” as pursued object. Because the implications of this situation are clearer in Midsummer than in All's Well, for reasons I'll suggest later, I'm going to try the first play as a kind of subtext for the second, using what is manifest there to fill in the silences and suppressions surrounding the second Helena.

Helena in the first scene of All's Well goes from the threat of “old virginity” as a withered pear to a sudden sharp anticipation of Bertram in love with a court lady who has all she lacks, to the active quest for Bertram. Helena in the first scene of Midsummer is mopingly jealous of her rival, the favored Hermia: “Demetrius loves your fair … Your eyes are lode-stars” (1.1.182-83, emphasis mine). What spurs her to unwonted action is the news that Hermia is running off with Lysander to consummate her love, leaving her behind. Her course illuminates that of the second Helena, impelled by Parolles' reminder of time's passage and the fear of being left to wither, to the sharp realization that Bertram will find fulfilling love elsewhere, and to an answering urgency that propels her to act on her desires.

So Helena in Midsummer sets Demetrius in pursuit of the lovers and herself pursues him into the wild forest, beyond the walls of Athens and the accepted cultural constructions the city embodies. When Demetrius denounces her, the deeply rooted code of sexual difference speaks clearly:

You do impeach your modesty too much
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not,
To trust the opportunity of night
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity.

(MND, 2.1.214-19)

Helena herself feels the deep unease of her reversal of cultural roles—“We should be woo'd, and were not made to woo”—but she persists in the radical venture:

                    the story shall be chang'd:
Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase;
                    … the mild hind
Makes speed to catch the tiger.

(230-33)

The Helena of All's Well also leaves home to venture into alien territory. While she too has called herself a retiring hind, at court she “unnaturally” chases her lion instead of pining quietly away. The exchanges between Demetrius and Helena in Midsummer spell out her own unvoiced conflict as the shamed but persistently pursuing Daphne. She knows that healing the King is not her ultimate purpose but a means to achieving her sexual desire: she has already admitted to the Countess that but for loving Bertram she would never have thought of offering her father's medicine to the King.⁸ Failure to win his gratitude would fully expose her cultural transgression. What should follow more inevitably than her public branding as an unwomanly woman, a shameless strumpet?

Success is shaming enough. She is embarrassed and self-denigrating when choosing among the King's wards, and almost can't go through with it.

I am a simple maid, and therein wealthiest
That I protest I simply am a maid.
Please it your majesty, I have done already.
The blushes in my cheeks thus whisper me:
“We blush that thou should'st choose; but, be refused,
Let the white death sit on thy cheek for ever” …
Now, Dian, from thy altar do I fly,
And to imperial Love, that god most high
Do my sighs stream.

(2.3.66-75)

If refusal of her self-offering would be the ultimate humiliation, she has to blush for the public choosing itself as a deep contradiction to the accepted image of “a maid.” We might also remember that when Helena's love seemed hopeless she could claim to the Countess that “Dian / Was both herself and love” (1.3.207-08). But now that she has acted, chastity and love split apart. Helena's name, of course, associates her through the myth of Troy with Venus, the source of “imperial Love” and in Shakespeare's own most notable presentation the quintessential female pursuer of a reluctant Adonis.⁹ But where Venus as a goddess can simply be desire, the socially conditioned human Helena is abashed by her public exposure as wooer. When she finally addresses Bertram, she does her best to deny her role as aggressive, desiring subject and to recast herself properly as object: “I dare not say I take you, but I give / Me and my service, ever whilst I live, / Into your guiding power” (2.3.102-04). Reshaping the situation with words, however, fails to disguise for either Bertram or Helena herself the radical reversal of male and female. He bitterly protests being the chosen rather than the chooser; and even before his desertion, she sees her act as illicit. She cannot claim her husband's kiss by right, because her marriage feels like a kind of robbery:

I am not worthy of the wealth I owe,
Nor dare I say 'tis mine—and yet it is;
But, like a timorous thief, most fain would steal
What law does vouch mine own.

(2.5.79-82)

When Bertram runs off to the wars, escaping his unwanted wife and reasserting his threatened status as active male, the same sense of having usurped a role not rightfully hers shapes her self-reproaches: “with the dark, poor thief, I'll steal away.” In her exaggerated guilt, Helena enacts on herself a form of the penalty for failure which she enunciated to the King, the “tax of impudence” for chasing her Apollo like a bold strumpet instead of withdrawing like a chaste nymph. The deeply imbedded, internalized story by which we are constituted in terms of sexual difference is not so easy to change.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream the story is in fact not changed. When Oberon observes the Athenian Daphne pursuing her Apollo, he intervenes forcibly to reconstruct the traditional pattern. It is not enough to make Demetrius reciprocate Helena's love. Puck must apply the love-juice so that their roles are truly reversed: “Fare thee well, nymph: ere he do leave this grove / Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love” (2.1.245-46). “Nymph” in this context implies a whole sexual ideology. As Louis Montrose points out, Oberon is enacting another version of his reassertion of patriarchal control over Titania.¹⁰ Under his magic ministrations, Helena becomes an object with a vengeance, wooed furiously by both Demetrius and Lysander. Yet this does not make her happy. Instead, she feels used by the men, and she especially resents Hermia's perceived defection from their old sisterhood to support the men in objectifying her. In a long, moving passage (3.2.198-219) she recalls their self-mirroring girlhood friendship, a support of subjectivity now lost to her. The play sorts out its love-tangles into neat unions, but it never reinstates that close bond between Hermia and Helena. Rather, the passage marks what must be left behind in the process of growing up and being fully inscribed in the patriarchal order.

No so in All's Well. In that play Helena, as desiring subject, drives its plot onward. She inserts herself uninvited into Bertram's bed, and acts as her own Oberon to bring about her own order. No wonder Bertram has so little to say at the close, and no wonder that the ending in general has made critics so uneasy. Shakespeare was following his source, of course, but in giving an internal life to Boccaccio's externally-conceived characters, he created something much more subversive.¹¹ Did it make him uneasy too? He apparently revised the central husband-choosing scene in such a way as to underline Helena's feminine shame.¹² At the conclusion he gave Bertram no speech of full endorsement, and caused even the authoritative King to amend the play's affirming title into a more doubtful “All yet seems well” (5.3.327).¹³ And he deliberately mystified the middle, leaving the thrust of purpose undefined.

Indefinition opens space for multiple interpretations, an especially useful effect for an unorthodox play. Fill in the gap with your own assumptions and needs, as you like it. Without claiming to be exhaustive, I shall propose two of interpretations, a “safe” one as well as a subversive one. For the first, I resort once more to A Midsummer Night's Dream, which questions culturally constituted sexual identities only to replace male subject and female object in a fully reaffirmed patriarchal system. Indeed, just because of that reversal the earlier comedy can voice more directly the conflicts that must remain half-submerged in the more problematic later one. The central actor in Midsummer is Oberon, who achieves his purposes by magic means unrecognized by those he works on. This godlike dominance may seem to offer no relevant subtext for All's Well, with its all-too-human Helena apparently in charge. Yet the characters there keep alluding to an offstage operative power, a supernatural manipulator who is as invisible to us as Oberon was to the lovers. When Helena's initiative in curing the King succeeds, everyone hails her, not as a good doctor, but as a channel of divine purpose. “A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor … the very hand of heaven … in a most weak minister great power, great transcendence” (2.3.1-37). The age of miracles is not over, proclaims Lafew. Helena herself, when persuading the King to try her cure, dwells at length on scriptural examples of great deeds done by God through agents without power in themselves (2.1.135-40), and when successful presents herself as a tool of God: “Heaven hath through me restored the King to health” (2.3.64). In her pilgrimage to Saint James, proposed at the crucial juncture of blurred motivation, it is not hard to see her yielding to divine direction, which then guides her to Florence and the means of consummating her marriage. When it turns out that the money she can give for Diana's help will enable a poor girl to marry well, that is another providential sign, as she assures the Widow: “Doubt not but heaven / Hath brought me up to be your daughter's dower, / As it hath fated her to be my motive / And helper to a husband” (4.4.18-21). Helena's purpose must be God's purpose, since he has already signally intervened in the natural course of events to bring it about. The action is propelled by God's desire, not Helena's. Doubt not.

That's a safe way to fill in the silence. But Helena herself has pointed in a different direction when she said, “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.212-13). The text also invites a riskier reading, grounded in psychology rather than religion. Suppose Helena is drawn to Florence by Bertram's presence. We may still think something more than mere opportunity is needed to re-empower her as desiring self against the crippling guilt and shame that followed on her first action of pursuit. And in this respect we may notice different aspects of the scene (3.5) that introduces the Florentine women. Diana's mother and her neighbor Mariana discuss thoroughly Bertram's wooing of Diana, sizing him up realistically and counseling Diana in resistance, with her considered agreement. The female integrity of self they support, being predicated on Diana's chastity, is far more conventional than the kind Helena has earlier acted on; but there's a clear emphasis on it, and on the mutual support of women in maintaining it. What Helena walks into, and quickly joins, is a version of the kind of self-confirming female friendship that was so notably denied to the Helena of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In confirming the illicit nature of Bertram's own sexual initiative, this friendship allows her to project the felt guilt of her own different kind of transgression onto him, and makes renewed activity psychologically possible. But there are no fewer than three additional scenes of conference and mutual assurance among the women to remind us how important their solidarity is. Solidarity strengthens Helena; it empowers Diana to take complete control of the last scene, manipulating not only Bertram but even the King, who is nominally in control. The connection seems clear between the strength of a woman and the strength of women.

Does All's Well really “change the story?” I don't know. What it does do, I think, is to enact—by disjunction, indirection, and suppression as much as speech and action—the difficulties and conflicts of imagining a woman as active, desiring subject. It doesn't end unambiguously “well,” and has trouble ending at all. That shouldn't surprise us.

Notes

1. Quotations from All's Well that Ends Well and A Midsummer Night's Dream are from the New Arden editions of G. K. Hunter (London, 1959) and Harold F. Brooks (London, 1979).

2. Folio punctuation; later editors have variously repointed according to their interpretations of the textual crux.

3. First advanced by Steevens in the 1773 Johnson-Steevens edition of the plays.

4. Fredson Bowers, “Shakespeare at Work: The Foul Papers of All's Well that Ends Well,” English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1980), pp. 56-73.

5. Arden ed., p. xx.

6. “Sir, his wife some two months since fled from his house. Her pretence is a pilgrimage to Saint Jaques le Grand” (4.3.45-47).

7. “The heroine of All's Well that Ends Well is called Helena four times in the Folio; three of these occurrences are in stage directions, only one in dialogue, a prose passage in the opening scene. … The occurrences in stage directions are in the opening direction and in two others in Act Two, Scenes Four and Five. … The short form of her name—Hel< l =en—occurs twenty-five times, sixteen of them in dialogue, both verse and prose. It seems that Shakespeare was initially rather inconsistent but that he eventually abandoned the long form”: Stanley Wells, Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader (Oxford, 1984), p. 47.

8. Countess: This was your motive / For Paris was it? Speak. Helena: My lord your son made me to think of this; / Else Paris and the medicine and the King / Had from the conversation of my thoughts / Haply been absent then (1.3.225-30). Even here she cannot fully enunciate her plan to win Bertram in marriage through service to the King. Similarly, as Bertrand Evans has observed, her soliloquy of determination at the end of 1.1 “does not make even her incidental purpose explicit—the cure of the king—let alone the deeper purpose to be served by that cure”: Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), p. 151. For him this is an early hint of the drive and duplicity of a “relentless hunter,” which the text only gradually reveals. Evans' obvious distaste for a woman in this role is a good example of the critical unease with All's Well I mention on p. 75 and the constructions of sexual difference that underlie it.

9. I am indebted to Professor Donald Cheney of the University of Massachusetts for calling to my attention the relevance of Venus and Adonis to Helena's situation. Among several points where play resonates with poem, we might notice especially Adonis' accusing Venus of immodesty (53), Venus' persistent plea for a kiss, his disdain of love in favor of manly exercise, and her lament when these pursuits lead to his death: “Love's golden arrow at him should have fled, / And not death's ebon dart to strike him dead” (947-48; cf. All's Well 3.2.106-07). The traditional opposition between Venus and Diana may have figured in Shakespeare's naming of the Florentine Diana who will be “most chastely absent” (3.7.34) while Helena takes her place to conclude the rites of love with Bertram.

10. Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations, 1:2 (1983), 82-83.

11. The Third Day of the Decameron is devoted to tales of those who gain what they desire by their wits; and the telling of Giletta's story stresses her clever methods of achieving her aim rather than what it feels like to be the desirer.

12. Bowers (p. 61) speculates on the basis of a misplaced stage direction that lines 66-73, which I discuss above, pp. 73-74, were added to 2.3 after the first writing.

13. Emphasis mine; cf. his less than confident appeal to the audience in the epilogue, “All is well ended if this suit be won, / That you express content.”