SOURCE: “The Making of Virgins and Mothers: Sexual Signs, Substitute Scenes, and Doubled Presences in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1, Winter, 1987, pp. 47-71.

[In the following essay, Hodgdon examines the gender theme on a structural level, revealing how Shakespeare's use of the various instances of doubling and substitution—most notably in the bed-trick scene—help to bring about the marital compromises that conclude the action of the play.]

In All's Well That Ends Well, Helena stands, much like As You Like It's Rosalind, at the center of the internal drama as well as the critical drama—that is, its critical controversies concerning meaning and language.¹ Both plays share significant story elements; both are fictions of an ordinary woman who becomes extraordinary. Both Rosalind and Helena disguise their sexuality—the one by assuming a mask which permits her to explore male as well as female roles and attitudes through verbal wit and situational jokes; the other by foregrounding—even flaunting—her most vulnerable quality—her virginity. Both achieve their ends (Is it possible to talk of sexuality without creating a secondary sexual discourse?) by taking on the drive and ambition usually associated with males, by insisting on their intelligence, by using themselves (and their “magical” powers) in order to gain and to preserve their imagined loves.² And both dramas endow their heroines' explorations of desire with stature and conviction.

Critical discussions of both plays, however, often ignore if not erase such similarities and focus on the differences between the two, engaging enthusiastically with Rosalind's fabular androgyny but questioning—even condemning—Helena's motives as well as the “unlawful” means through which she “doubly wins” a husband. As You Like It may offer jibing critiques of Petrarchan ideals or the foolishness of love at first sight, may provide glimpses of alternative perspectives on sexual desire as a potential threat to individual relationships or to the community fabric; but its close places these features within an idealized construct that celebrates desire and mutuality. In All's Well, however, sexuality appears, on the one hand, as a blatant preoccupation of the play and, on the other, assumes the convenient disguise of plot and character conventions associated with fairy tale and romance. Much like the screwball film comedies of the late 1930s and early 1940s, All's Well conveys its concern with sexuality paradoxically by means of prohibitions of representation and language³—by what it does not say or show, by avoiding areas or topics to which it has access. And although All's Well journeys toward a celebratory ending similar to that of As You Like It, this paradox generates a complex of meanings that compromises the arrival. Whereas As You Like It bears us away, All's Well bears pondering.

Let this pondering take the form of a bricolage of at least three voices. One re-examines Shakespeare's transformation of Boccaccio's tale; another explores how sexual signs are articulated in character and event; yet another discloses how what I call substitute scenes and doubled presences function to sexualize its narrative structure.⁴ Although I will be moving somewhat freely among these voices or perspectives, my re-reading of All's Well approaches the play primarily from Helena's point of view. And because her virginity—and the “use” she makes of it—lies at the heart of both the drama and its critical history, I begin by raising that issue in conjunction with another, All's Well's re-naming of Boccaccio's heroine.⁵

Why does Shakespeare change Giletta's name? Rather than, as with Beltramo, simply anglicizing her name to Juliet or Julietta, thus suggesting comparisons to the heroine of his romantic tragedy (or tragical romance), Romeo and Juliet,⁶ he chooses to call her Helena, thus signalling particular sexual, as well as social and metadramatic, connotative possibilities. By association, her name evokes both the adulterous Helen of Troy and the lonely, virginal, left-out Helena of A Midsummer Night's Dream, strongly locked on a single object of desire. In name alone, then, Helena embraces a paradox, one insistently re-enforced by the text. Through extremely economical means, Shakespeare's renaming of his heroine encompasses her sexual awareness, her obsessive desire and her virginity. And this latter quality the playtext underscores further, first in her conversation with Parolles (1.1.104-211)⁷ and then by linking her to Diana, the name and symbol of chastity itself.

The dialogue Helena shares with Parolles separates two soliloquies. In the first, she declares that Bertram has replaced her father in her imagination and that she is “undone”—even dead: “there is no living, none, / If Bertram be away” (1.1.80-81); in the second, cued by Parolles' exit line—“Get thee a good husband, and use him as he uses thee. So, farewell” (1.1.206-7)—she exchanges her former sense of lifelessness for a fixed resolve, a “project” involving the King's disease which, although she avoids specific reference to Bertram, presumably will help to win him. Helena's initial position is comparable to that of Ophelia in Hamlet—if Hamlet had returned to Wittenberg or gone off to the Norwegian court. As others have noted, much about All's Well's opening recalls Hamlet; indeed, the entire first scene reads almost like Hamlet from Ophelia's point of view, although the advice Helena receives from Parolles is exactly opposite to that which Laertes gives Ophelia just as he leaves, coincidentally, for Paris. Helena, however, speaks not with a brother, a desired lover or even (as Rosalind does with Celia) a close friend but with a man she identifies as a liar, a fool and a coward—but nevertheless a substitute for Bertram, a man she will love for Bertram's sake. Their exchange represents the only sign of her willingness to engage in sexual banter, and the implicit questions raised here press Helena—and the narrative—on.⁸ Why is virginity humiliating, laughable—“a desperate offendress against nature,” “out of fashion,” “a wither'd pear?” Why worthless until used? Why, or to what extent, is marriage thought to justify its “use?” And, of course, Helena's own explicit question, “How might one do, sir, to lose it [virginity] to her own liking?” (1.1.147). Although Helena states the text's hermeneutic question directly, without metaphoric double entendre, thus placing her in a position of sexual power, from this point on the text consistently masks her sexual awareness with riddles or with language that betrays her deep mistrust, even fear, of sexuality. Only her actions express her desires frankly, moving her toward a husband as well as toward an initiatory sexual experience that is hurried, cloaked by night and silence and set up through deceit and trickery—however “lawful” that deceit may be. At the same time, the text represents her as a miraculous and virginal minister of healing grace, capable of restoring her King to sexual health and her future husband to (presumably) sexual wealth.

Helena herself, speaking to the Countess, outlines the paradox:

                              … but if yourself,
Whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth,
Did ever, in so true a flame of liking,
Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian
Was both herself and love—O then, give pity
To her whose state is such that cannot choose
But lend and give where she is sure to lose;
That seeks not to find that her search implies,
But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies!

(1.3.204-12)

To be both Dian and love; to give and to lose; to live and to die: the narrative process seeks to explore—and finally to integrate—these absolute oppositions. Toward this end, the play gives Helena two doubles—Diana and Lavatch. In linking her to Diana, the text again particularizes its narrative source: Boccaccio's substitute for Giletta in the bed trick remains nameless, plays her purely functional role, is rewarded with a dowry and leaves the city. Shakespeare's text not only highlights (ironically) notions of idealized chastity by naming her Diana but also firmly establishes her within a community of women as Helena's ally, not her possible rival; and the riddling language the two share further reinforces their correspondence. Thus Helena's “maiden pilgrimage” to Saint Jaques' shrine takes her “from Dian's altar” to “imperial Love” by way of the literal Diana; and Helena's loss (or giving “use”) of her own virginity preserves Diana's chastity, which becomes a crucial feature in the play's final revelations.

Helena's link to Lavatch, though less precise—comparable to the implicit relationship between Cordelia and Fool in King Lear in that, just as Fool replaces the banished Cordelia, so does Lavatch replace Helena as the Countess's companion—provides one means of sustaining a level of witty playfulness about sex that disappears, after her conversation with Parolles, from her role. Reading Lavatch as Helena's substitute, surrogate or double enriches both their presences: that his first appearance separates Helena's initial statements of her desire for Bertram and her confession of that desire to the Countess and that he speaks of what occupies her mind—marriage—further join the two. The Clown's persistent theological references, which parody, within a bawdy context, the court's pious sentiments on honor, virtue and fortune,⁹ also suggest Lavatch's correspondence with the religious aura surrounding Helena. His “holy reasons” for marrying—that he is “driven on by the flesh” and seeks to marry in order to repent—preface a sustained parody of the Epistle for the marriage service (1.3.44-53).¹⁰ This double, rather perverse, view of marriage as fulfilling male hopes and fears—giving sensual satisfaction but also leading to cuckoldry—suggests a potential register of Helena's suppressed discourse, one that critics, anxious to stress her selfless, saint-like perfection and humility (and thus aiding their defense of her forthright and devious “male” behavior), have themselves suppressed. And it is Lavatch who also evokes Helena's link to Helen of Troy, “corrupt[ing]” his ballad by juggling the proportion of good men in order to “purify” the number of good women (1.3.57-84). This rather backhanded compliment, as well as the words just preceding his exit—“That man should be at woman's command, and yet no hurt done!” (1.3.87-88)—surely suggest Helena's situation, which the Steward outlines for the Countess just before Helena enters.¹¹ I shall return to Lavatch, but now I should like to turn, as the narrative does, to the King's healing.

As many of its critics have noted, All's Well, like The Winter's Tale, falls into two halves: each contains a miraculous and sexually charged transformation, and each transformation is doubled—that is, each generates its own medium of exchange. Linked to death as well as to new or renewed life on both literal and metaphoric levels, transformation not only threatens the integrity of the individual but also becomes a means to register sexual events. In the first such transformation in the play, Helena restores the King's health in order to get the man she desires, Bertram. Yet, although Lafew's comments about Helena's ability to “araise King Pippen” and “To give great Charlemain a pen in's hand / And write to her a love-line” (2.1.75-77) preface their confrontation, the formal, rather distanced, riddling couplets articulating their exchange as well as Helena's presentation of herself as one possessed not only of purely natural healing properties (inherited from her father) but also of God's grace and the help of heaven strongly counter this particular level of sexual suggestiveness. And again, the playtext differs significantly from the source text.

In Boccaccio, the King, after deciding to permit Giletta to work her cure, asks her to set the terms of her failure:

“Damosel, if thou does not heale me, but make me to breake my determination, what wilt thou shal folow thereof.” “Sir,” said the maiden: “Let me be kept in what guard and keeping you list: and if I do not heale you within these eight dayes, let me be burnt: but if I do heale your grace, what recompence shall I have then?” To whom the kinge aunswered: “Because thou art a maiden and unmaried, if thou heale me according to thy promise, I wil bestow thee uppon some gentleman, that shalbe of right good worship and estimation.” To whom she aunsweared: “Sir, I am very well content that you bestow me in mariage: But I beseech your grace let me have such a husband as I myselfe shall demaund, without presumption to any of your children or other of your blood.” Which request the king incontinently graunted.¹² [my emphasis]

In All's Well's source, the idea of rewarding Giletta with a husband comes from the King; in Shakespeare's text, Helena sets the terms of the bargain herself, a change that foregrounds her sense of her own power. More remarkable, though, is how the playtext transforms Giletta's suggestion that she be burned (the fate of witches) if she fails to heal the King.

King. Upon thy certainty and confidence
What dar'st thou venture?
Helena. 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 torture, let my life be ended.(13)

(2.1.164-73 [my emphasis])

Shakespeare's playtext transfers the notion of burning (which looks back to the “flame of liking” in 1.3) to Helena's maiden name, adding the ideas of torture and death as circumstances which extend the other risks: impudence, boldness, shame, traduction. Helena foregrounds the threat to her virginity, links that idea to her worst fears, and places herself in a position of abjection, substituting the literal mention of death as a cover for its metaphorical sense.

That Helena's cure of the King as a means of forwarding her own desires and that her language—both consciously and subconsciously—reflects those desires seems clear enough. But what of the King? Lafew's remark, “I am Cressid's uncle / That dare leave two together” (2.1.96-97) suggests reading the scene as an illicit encounter; the exchange of vows, sealed with a handclasp, and the absence of a “love scene” so far in a play concerned with romance further invite reading at least an implicit current of sexual attraction between Helena and the King.¹⁴ Initially, however, he rejects Helena's aid until she evokes the help of heaven and repeats her vow to hazard her life: “Not helping, death's my fee” (2.1.188). And the only phrase he speaks that approaches double entendre—“Thy will by my performance shall be serv'd” (2.1.201)—gains a potential sexual resonance more from Helena's (and an audience's) hearing than from its literal context. The BBC-TV production pushed that potential by closing the scene with Angela Down's Helena bending over Donald Sinden's King, who sucked life from his restorer in a passionately consuming kiss, over which the camera lingered. Representing the King's cure as initiated by a shared sexual attraction anticipates and supports the courtiers' elliptical remarks when, fully recovered, he dances with Helena (2.3). Yet the playtext chooses other means—the first of several substitute scenes—to signal the King's reawakened sexual powers.

With this scene (2.2) the narrative returns to Rossillion and to some comic banter between the Countess and Lavatch. On the surface, their dialogue does little more than simply fool away the time: the usual thematic reading focuses on pointing the distinction between physical nurture and moral discipline and as Shakespeare's familiar commentary on the emptiness of courtiers. Read as a narrative substitute for the King's healing, however, its heavily suggestive double entendre not only articulates offstage events but also further supports the notion that Lavatch functions as Helena's double. Although the Countess opens the exchange with a line that glances at Helena's role—“Come on, sir: I will now put you to the height of your breeding” (2.2.1-2)—Lavatch's claim—“I have an answer will serve all men” (2.2.14)—puts him more directly in her position as “healer-virgin.” And the Countess's questions and comments evoke the King's earlier verbal behavior. At first she seems to ignore Lavatch's bawdy play on “it,” yet she does not reprimand him but, rather, repeats her questions.

Count. Have you, I say, an answer of such fitness for all questions?
Lav. From below your duke to beneath your constable, it will fit any question.
Count. It must be an answer of most monstrous size that must fit all demands.
Lav. But a trifle neither, in good faith, if the learned should speak truth of it. Here it is, and all that belongs to't; ask me if I am a courtier; it shall do you no harm to learn.
Count. To be young again, if we could, I will be a fool in question, hoping to be the wiser by your answer.

(2.2.27-38)

The Countess's wish here is exactly consonant with what is happening to the King in these moments. Moreover, she herself not only indulges in but seems to enjoy this juvenile wit play, encouraging Lavatch's riff on “O Lord, sir!” until he says, “Nay, put me to't, I warrant you” (2.2.45)—at which point she reminds him of whipping (Does Helena's mention of torture as an alternative echo here?). Although straining exact substitutions—Lavatch for Helena; the Countess for the King—risks overprivileging this exchange, the Countess's wish for youth and her momentary indulgence in sexually playful talk at this particular point in the narrative do function as verbal substitutes for unrepresented events.¹⁵ The next scene fulfills her wish: Helena's cure restores the King's youth. Although thought to be miraculous—“A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor” (2.3.23-24)—his cure also results from double entendre, from the text's own sexual play with the power of language as representation.¹⁶ Lafew first stresses the King's youthfulness—“Why, your dolphin is not lustier”; his next comment registers a more precise sexual connotation: “Lustique, as the Dutchman says. I'll like a maid the better whilst I have a tooth in my head. Why, he's able to lead her a coranto” (2.3.26-27; 41-43).

Once again, the playtext's stress on the King's sensual health transforms Boccaccio's details. In the tale, Giletta, once married to Beltramo, wins the love and affection of her husband's subjects for returning order to Rossiglione, for restoring “all the countrie again to their auncient liberties.” Her sociopolitical concern for the subjects' welfare prompts her to assemble the “noblest and chiefest of the country” to announce that she will leave Rossiglione for pilgrimages and devotion.¹⁷ In Shakespeare's playtext, ordering the social and political aspects of the state becomes linked to the reawakening of the King's sexual powers, thus foregrounding Helena's ability to restore a dying world to life. But the most important narrative results of the King's restoration are that it not only produces a couple, Helena and Bertram, but that Helena gains from the King the “honor and wealth” that make her Bertram's equal. Here, too, the playtext manipulates Boccaccio's details. Whereas Giletta is fatherless and rich and refuses many husbands with whom her kinsfolk would have matched her, Helena, though she is also fatherless, is neither rich nor sought after but, like the nameless gentlewoman in Boccaccio's tale who becomes her bed-trick substitute, “very poore and of small substance, nevertheless of right honest life and good report, who by reason of her poverty was yet unmaried.”¹⁸ And Shakespeare's playtext transforms Giletta's refusal of many husbands into a miniature occasion that foregrounds Helena's undesirability, not her eligibility, by surrounding her with a whole group of unwilling potential husbands (and sympathetic, if not willing, older men—surrogate fathers) from which Helena chooses (as we know she will but the King does not) the singularly unwilling Bertram. Further, the King assumes a father's role in granting Helena both a title and a dowry, which both validates her marriageability and transforms her virginity into a medium of exchange. And it is precisely through this exchange, through the King's “raising,” that Helena acknowledges her desire and effects her second miracle. But first, some talk of the happy couple.

Assuming that dialogue between lovers functions as a form of discourse that substitutes for sexual foreplay, the talk that Helena and Bertram share represents the confined and sexually constrained (or silent) nature of their relationship. As the King formalizes their marriage contract, Bertram and Helena speak only to him, not to one another. Here as well as in the next few scenes, they speak only through intermediaries—the King, Parolles—meeting (in 2.5) only to say goodbye, a point at which the text inscribes an acute lack of mutuality. Bertram rejects Helena's words, her obedience, her very physical presence; he ignores and/or turns away from her wish to “steal” a parting kiss: neither her body nor her language can transform his silence into either sexual discourse or gesture. Yet that silence functions in conjunction with what they do say to one another (and what other characters say, not only to them and about them but to others) as a structuring absence: in this text, avoiding access to sexuality constitutes a mode of paying heightened attention to it. In representing Helena and Bertram's relationship, the text articulates a tension between the obsessive frankness of highly playful double entrendre and a repressive discourse centering on ideal notions of love, virtue and honor. And the narrative structure further represents this tension between obsessiveness and restriction by masking heightened sexual events with substitute scenes which cover but do not silence their presence.

When with Parolles, Helena speaks straightforwardly of losing her virginity; when alone, she expresses her desire for Bertram in romantic metaphors, seeing him as “a bright particular star” and herself as “the hind that would be mated with the lion”; she talks of dying for love (1.1.84; 89-90). When with Bertram, however, she suppresses both modes of speech. Like Helena, Bertram would preserve his virginity—“lose it to [his] own liking”; also like Helena, he speaks most freely with Parolles, his double. Just as Lavatch's comments reveal the underside of Helena's sensuality, Parolles' remarks disclose Bertram's sexual preoccupations in the conventional bawdy glaze of locker-room juvenilia. At Parolles' urging, Bertram substitutes the romance of the Tuscan wars for the marriage bed—“Wars is no strife / To the dark house and the detested wife” (2.3.287-88)—later shifting that desire onto Diana. Ironically, his attempt to refuse the story scripted for him by the King and to introduce a new, and forbidden, sexual narrative leads him to legitimize Helena's desire.

As Helena and Bertram leave the stage to be married, the narrative parts them. That the text avoids the sort of bawdy substitute for Helena and Bertram's marriage that it provides for the King's cure measures the coldly contractual, nearly asexual nature of their union. Yet the moment does receive a substitute: Lafew's ridicule of Parolles masks the ceremony, and the text foregrounds the coincidental timing by Lafew's exit and immediate return with the news of Helena and Bertram's marriage. Parolles, by not even acknowledging the marriage but instead demanding “reservation” of the “wrongs” in Lafew's statement about his “lord and master,” mirrors Bertram's refusal to accept Helena, to be “mastered,” except by God (2.3.238-60). Their exchange functions doubly, exposing Bertram's unworthiness by showing Parolles' emptiness and self-concern and by preserving Bertram from immediate judgment by displacing that potential for judgment onto Parolles. When Bertram does enter, his absolute refusal of Helena, set against Parolles' ingratiating, almost nanny-like support of the wars as an alternative to marriage,¹⁹ locates honor in sexually explicit terms:

He wears his honour in a box unseen
That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home,
Spending his manly marrow in her arms,
Which should sustain the bound and high curvet
Of Mars's fiery steed.

(2.3.275-79)

In his willingness to exchange the use of his “manly marrow” in his wife's arms to pursue “honour” in the wars, Bertram, like Helena in her bargain with the King, views possible death as an alternative to consummating what he views as illegitimate desire. And when Helena next appears (2, 4), the text sets her concern for the Countess and her desire to conform to Bertram's will sharply against Bertram's hatred of the King's “present gift” and his resolve to send her to her “single sorrow”—a state she will share, if briefly, with his mother. Helena's exit with Lavatch, after hearing Parolles' flowery (and prophetic) excuses for Bertram's delay in consummating the marriage, strengthens the earlier suggestions of their doubling, equating their fool-likeness. Their shared silence here foregrounds the defeat of both verbal aspects of Helena's sexuality: against that of the man of words, Parolles, neither form of discourse has power. In Trevor Nunn's 1982 Royal Shakespeare Company production of All's Well, Helena's slow exit, holding hands with the stooped and limping Lavatch, movingly evoked their relationship as well as her extreme vulnerability.

Following a brief scene that sets up the war, the narrative now focuses on that vulnerability by further outlining the threatening territory of death and dying that Marjorie Garber suggests as a pervasive grounding for Shakespearean comedy.²⁰ Soon, Helena will begin to question both Bertram's sexuality and her own; but now, again in banter with the Countess, Lavatch glances at Helena's position. He thinks not of his desire, Isbel: “The brains of my Cupid's knock'd out, and I begin to love as an old man loves money, with no stomach” (3.2.14-16). Lavatch leaves for the reading of Bertram's letter, which tells the Countess of his “undoing” and his flight, returning to outline the life and death issues. In so doing, he links Bertram's vulnerability with Helena and identifies his “danger” specifically in terms of sexual encounters.

Lav. Nay, there is some comfort in the news, some comfort; your son will not be kill'd so soon as I thought he would.
Count. Why should he be kill'd?
Lav. So say I, madam—if he run away, as I hear he does; the danger is in standing to't; that's the loss of men, though it be the getting of children.

(3.2.35-41)

As Alexander Welsh points out, the play takes seriously the joke on “standing to't”: the only way Helena can call Bertram husband is to turn him into the father of her child.²¹ But as the play's first half ends,²² Helena's soliloquy expresses her fears of Bertram's death in battle; imagining herself as the potential cause of his death, she resolves to substitute her absence for his return to Rossillion. She sees herself, as when she earlier sought Bertram's farewell kiss, as “a timorous thief” who has stolen the title of wife. At this mid-point, closing (as it began) on notes of death and loss, of humiliation and self-sacrifice, Helena's sexuality has no potentially expressive means: denied as both virgin and wife, she is nothing.²³

The opening of the second half, by rhyming on the play's first scene, where Bertram leaves for Paris, initiates some expectation that the narrative will now follow his military career. Instead, the text explores his sexuality, exposing his faults and then betraying him to himself, thus confirming Helena's view of him as a worthy object of desire. Although the second part of the narrative analyzes Bertram's experience as well as the patriarchal conventions he attempts to put into play, its affective center affirms Helena's control and power as a counter to those conventions. The narrative overturns the vowed absences of both characters, transforming these lacks into presence.

After Helena leaves, her letter to the Countess, blessing Bertram and vowing to sanctify his name, concludes:

He is too good and fair for death and me;
Whom I myself embrace to set him free.

(3.4.16-17)

Most editors gloss “whom” as “death,” which limits the possible play in her phrase. The words riddle prophetically: she will embrace both herself (in the person of Diana) and death (literally, by forging her own, and metaphorically, by embracing Bertram). That embrace will free Bertram from literal to metaphoric death, which, in turn, will eventually free him to her. Strikingly, she betrays her suppressed preoccupation with sexual dying by positioning herself (as she had before the King) as a substitute for death.

Increasingly, Helena's language elides both the actors and the actions of desire, compressing her thought into cryptic phrases that mask self-revelation.²⁴ After arranging the bed trick, for instance, taut, riddling couplets formalize and cap her resolve:

Let us assay our plot; which, if it speed
Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed,
And lawful meaning in a lawful act,
Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact.
But let's about it.

(3.7.44-48)

Glossing Helena's phrases not only suggests their complexity but reveals her attempt to legitimize her “plot,” to transform “wicked meaning” (Bertram's intended adultery as well as, perhaps, her own ruse) to “lawful deed” (Bertram's marriage duty to Helena) and to enclose “lawful meaning” (Helena's rights as a wife) in a “lawful act” (marriage) which erases the “sin” of both. But Helena's argument, which reflects the intricate and delicate play between forbidden and legalized sexuality in purposefully antithetical absolutes, cannot so transform Bertram's attempted adultery; rather, “and yet” separates that “sinful fact” from the rest of her thought, signalling its transgressive nature. Nevertheless, her impersonal terms and strong end rhymes press toward action and aftermath: intent upon meaning, deed, act and fact, she seems distanced, apart, speaking more for the playtext's mechanism than for herself.²⁵

Although Helena's last words—“But let's about it”—anticipate that the bed trick will follow directly, the text elides it, substituting a noisy mask for the promised silence of the sexual encounter. Two scenes of foreplay introduce the centerpiece. Parolles' capture and blindfolding, where his captors taunt him (appropriately, with meaningless languages), repeat and intensify the earlier substitution for Helena and Bertram's wedding—Lafew's attack on Parolles (4.1). And again, the moments function doubly, to suggest Bertram's position by showing Parolles' blindness, his fear and his concern for his life; and to emphasize not only the artificiality of language but also its inability to convey meaning.²⁶ Diana's claims for true vows continue and extend this mockery, exposing and ridiculing Bertram's reliance on conventional sonnet epithets and on his carpe diem argument, recalling Parolles' earlier words to Helena—“Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost” (1.1.125-27). Prophetic in his “sick desires,” he gives Diana his ring and vows, “My house, mine honour, yea, my life be thine / And I'll be bid by thee” (4.2.52-53). Hearing Diana's “You have won / A wife of me, though there my hope be done” only through the immediacy of desire, he transforms her thought to his own sexual fantasy: “A heaven on earth I have won by wooing thee” (4.2.64-66).²⁷

The bed trick itself constitutes the most complex substitute scene in the narrative, linking betrayal, exposure and death. The first speakers, Bertram's fellow-officers, blame him for shaking off his worthy wife, for incurring the displeasure of the King and for perverting a young gentlewoman in Florence. Just at this moment, they say, Bertram “fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour” (4.3.15), an action the Lords condemn: “Now, God delay our rebellion! As we are ourselves, what things we are!” “Merely our own traitors,” replies the Second Lord (4.3.18-20). Again the time is mentioned, a precision Shakespeare's texts rarely employ except to emphasize its particular significance. The Lord's conversation turns briefly to Parolles' anticipated unmasking, then to the war's peaceful conclusion and finally to Helena's pilgrimage and the news of her death: “the tenderness of her nature became as a prey to her grief; in fine, she made a groan of her last breath, and now she sings in heaven” (4.3.49-51). Once more, as when double entendre masked the King's cure (2.2), the text articulates, on the level of social gossip, the progress of offstage events. The report of Helena's death coincides with the moment that Bertram consummates what he thinks is his desire for Diana and what we know is the “lawful act” of marriage.²⁸ The shrine of “imperial Love” blurs the distinctions between literal and metaphoric dying: it is both a kind of brothel and a heaven of peace.

The possibility of Bertram's honor being “used up” by his death at the hands of war becomes replaced by Helena's metaphoric death, by what she later refers to as the “sweet use” of her virginity. In All's Well the exchange is much less cruelly mechanical than the exchange of head for maidenhead in Measure for Measure.²⁹ Nevertheless, the moments produce a similarly problematic life and death context, tainted by betrayal. For Helena has surely “betrayed” Bertram into her bed under the cover of darkness, just as the Lords have lured Parolles to “betray[ing] us all unto ourselves” (4.1.92). Like Angelo in the final scene of Measure, and like Bertram and Helena in this play, Parolles is threatened with torture and death and then allowed to live. And, in another startling reminiscence of the earlier substitute scene, his “O Lord, sir, let me live, or let me see my death!” echoes Lavatch's riff on the answer of “fitness for all questions” (2.2).

However dazzling and satisfying this purge of Parolles/Bertram, Bertram's own responses to facing his doubled death seem puzzlingly muted. In cataloguing the “sixteen businesses” he has dispatched, he summarily dismisses Helena's death and his mourning and makes only an elliptical reference to the “business” of his sexual pleasure—“the last was the greatest, but that I have not ended yet” (4.3.88-89)—which yields almost immediately to his fear that Diana will claim him as her husband. Even when he hears himself described as “ruttish,” a “dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds,” and when Parolles' verse letter exposes his half-made oaths and inability to pay what he owes, he condemns Parolles only briefly (4.3.212-23). Like Helena in 2.2, who approaches the four Lords with a careful balance of rhyming wit and commonplace blessings that masks her feelings about choosing a husband publicly, Bertram's comments on Parolles' gulling cover the extent of his own exposure: of all the participants in this mass confessional, he remains most distant. Whereas the text might have given him either a long aside or a soliloquy,³⁰ instead Parolles, his double, speaks in self-acknowledgment—“Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live. … There's place and means for every man alive” (4.3.322-28)—delaying knowledge of Bertram's own awareness.

If this substitute for privileging Bertram's point of view frustrates rather than reassures, Helena's level of awareness is equally problematic. Although the easy trust among the play's community of women purposefully counters the men's betrayal of themselves and of Parolles, Helena's words reveal her distance:

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

(4.4.21-25)

She views her hour with Bertram not as giving sexual pleasure but, paradoxically, as a “sweet use” which prompts her to analyze the mental operations of hatred, wantonness and lust, producing a discomforting commentary on male sexuality. As before, she elides subject and object. But here, her thought process completely represses the female presence, transforming it into “what they hate,” “what it [lust] loathes,” “that which is away.” Finally, she masks the future with proverbial notions:

All's well that ends well; still the fine's the crown.
Whate'er the course, the end is the renown.

(4.4.35-36)

Both Bertram and Helena turn toward the results of their experience, toward endings. Bertram elides any analysis of his sexuality, suggesting both his deep privacy and his self-concern. Helena, puzzled by men's strangeness, tries to comprehend a male point of view; characteristically, she does so by denying self and without conveying specific blame. The strongest impression of both, however, is that their metaphoric death produces stillness and verbal silence: sexuality seems suspended, momentarily in a kind of limbo, following its “use.”

Lavatch's appearance following the bed trick reflects this suppression. His sexual wit play gone, his comments glance at both Helena and Bertram as he rues her death and professes himself “a fool … at a woman's service, and a knave at a man's” (4.5.1-22). His view of the world has shrunk:

I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always loved a great fire, and the master I speak of ever keeps a good fire; but sure he is the prince of the world; let his nobility remain in's court, I am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little for pomp to enter; some that humble make themselves may, but the many will be too chill and tender, and they'll be for the flow'ry way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire.

(4.5.44-52)

This apocalyptic glimpse glances precisely at how Lavatch views a world lacking Helena's redemptive presence.³¹ Although Lavatch's despair causes Lafew to dismiss him and the Countess to apologize for him, the text continues to support his link to Helena. Significantly, in his absence, Lafew introduces the idea of Bertram's marriage to his daughter, Maudlin, just before Lavatch returns to announce Bertram's arrival. And in the final moments of his role, he faces and insults his opposite double, the muddy (and smelly) Parolles, before leaving him with Lafew.³² His absence in the final scene signals the repression of his particularly incisive, misanthropically proverbial wit and his replacement with his now-transformed double, Helena. For one function of the closing scene is to remove the taint of Helena's deception, likening her to Bertram and Parolles, and to substitute another likeness.

The final scene recalls and reproduces the whole narrative, transforming each repeated event in a series of astonishing volte-faces. These features suggest its likeness to a play-within-a-play, yet it provides not just a contrapuntal inset mechanism but a full and tough-minded analysis of grief, confession, lies and accusations, justifiable anger and reconciliation. All of these mirror, though not in their precise ordering in the playtext's process, the stages Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identifies as those we pass through in accepting death.³³ That acceptance of literal as well as metaphoric death grounds one function of the sexual signs operating here. On another level, the text reconfirms and equates virginity with miraculous capabilities; further, elaborate doublings validate virginity as well as marriage. Although to some extent, metaphorical, mythical and miraculous constructs here displace those of actual human behavior, such fairy-tale signs have been integrated, throughout the play, with signs of the real, and the close continues that seeming paradox.

First, a summary of Boccaccio's ending. Having executed the impossible tasks—getting Beltramo's ring and a son begotten by him—Giletta appears at a feast Beltramo gives on All Saints' Day. Just as the company prepares to sit down at table, she enters, bearing her twin sons in her arms, identifies herself and asks (since she has fulfilled his conditions) to be received as Beltramo's wife. Beltramo, “greatly astonned,” recognizes the ring and “the children also, they were so like hym.” As she retells her story, Beltramo instantly knows that she speaks the truth and, “(perceiving her constant minde and good witte, and the twoo faire young boyes),” accepts Giletta as his lawful wife, honoring her and “abject[ing] his obstinate rigour,” not only in order to keep his promise but also to please his subjects.³⁴

Whereas Boccaccio focuses on Giletta's constancy and cleverness as a way to acknowledge and affirm the legitimacy of the social order, Shakespeare's text uses these emphases only as a frame to join the play's oppositions—virginity and marriage, giving and losing, life and death. Two of Boccaccio's most striking details, however, are foregrounded: the mention of All Saints' Day and Beltramo's twin sons. One has a limited “presence,” in that it acts as a pre-text only for some elements of the closing scene; the other pervades the entire play.

All Saints' Day, the festival celebrating the saints in heaven, becomes not only a possible antecedent for Helena's reference to herself as “but the shadow of a wife” but also lies securely behind an ending celebrating her return from the dead. All's Well certainly evokes the spirit, as well as a remembrance, of both the Epistle and the Gospel for All Saints' Day. The Epistle, from Revelation 7:2, concerns the appearance of a multitude standing before the throne of the Lamb clothed in white robes. When an elder asks who they are, he receives this reply:

These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.

Do Lafew's tears—and the Countess's—also recall this passage? And as a pre-text for the religious undertones here, the Gospel for All Saints' Day—Matthew 5:1, the beatitudes—prefaces Christ's call to perfect love.

All's Well transforms Beltramo's twin sons into a series of resonant doublings: Bertram/Parolles; Helena/Diana; Helena/Lavatch; Helena/Maudlin (a “shadowed” doubling prompting Bertram's avowal of Helena's worth); Helena's double cures of the King and Bertram; the doubled rings; doubled “deaths”; Bertram's double “winning.” In addition, the closing scene produces further doubles. In denying that the ring he gives to Maudlin was Helena's, Bertram prompts the King to accuse him of Helena's literal, not her metaphoric, death. Momentarily, then, he again faces consequences similar to those Helena was willing to suffer if she failed to cure the King. Further, Bertram's initial rejection of Diana repeats, with a difference, his earlier rejection of Helena. Diana, insistent on her “right,” vows “That she which marries you must marry me— / Either both or none” (5.3.173-74), words that introduce the equation of virginity with married chastity, which Helena's later appearance confirms. Pressed on all sides, but especially by the threat of exposure from Parolles, Bertram finally acknowledges that he “boarded her i' the wanton way of youth,” idealizing his own role in the encounter and blaming her “restraint” for “madding” his eagerness (5.3.210-12). These statements, together with Parolles' remarks that Bertram “Lov'd her, and lov'd her not” and that he, Parolles, “knew of their going to bed and other motions” (5.3.245; 257-58) are the most explicit sexual signs in a discourse where sexuality is confined to its symbols—the rings—and endowed with an ability, once openly recognized, to regenerate the past, heal the present and provide for the future.

Diana's forthrightness here, like Helena's as she proposed to cure the King, threatens her with death. Lafew assumes, from Diana's answers, that she is a whore: “This woman's an easy glove, my lord; she goes off and on at pleasure” (5.3.271-72), recalling Helena's similar positioning of herself if she failed to cure the King—either a strumpet (her “maiden name sear'd”) or a wife. Denying that she is a strumpet, Diana assumes Helena's magical qualities, sets up the riddle that solves her own riddling ambiguities and produces Helena. In turn, as Helena produces Bertram's ring and the letter, her double winning of her husband validates Diana's chastity. And Bertram faces, in his moment of revelation, not twin sons, replicas of himself, but doubled presences of chaste virtue. And, as the King promises to provide Diana with a dowry and the husband of her choice, she (as well as what she stands for) becomes additionally powerful—the means for the story to be repeated once again.

Throughout, Shakespeare's text complicates the characters' sexual psychology beyond Boccaccio's details, generating suggestions of Helena and Bertram's potential incest as well as creating the expectation that the King and the Countess may marry.³⁵ The close, however, evades both notions. The King, in accepting Bertram and providing Helena with a dowry, does become a surrogate father for both, but the text does not couple him with the Countess, thereby eluding the creation of a family joined by metaphorical, if not literal, incest. The final words of his role stress his presence as “lord” and “liege” to Helena and Bertram, and his fatherly function transfers from them to Diana, for whom—if she proves herself a virgin—he will provide a dowry.

These last-minute transfers and transformations suppress the Countess's verbal role: she functions as an observer, providing explanatory asides and confirming significant information, such as the ring's provenance. Although Bertram neither greets her nor acknowledges her commentary, Helena does respond: “O my dear mother, do I see you living?”³⁶ In Nunn's production, the Countess's weeping prompted Helena to embrace her, reaching beyond the formally achieved marital and social resolutions articulated by the text toward an emotional expression of reconciliation. Only Lafew's tears fill the silence that marks the text's final riff on doubled presence: one mother faces (and/or embraces) her replacement on the crowded, uncoupled stage, recalling Helena's early wish:

The mightiest space in fortune nature brings
To join like likes, and kiss like native things.

(1.2.218-19)

Finally, the play positions women either as virgins ready for marriage or as mothers. Implicitly and explicitly, the woman who acknowledges her own sexual desire becomes transformed into one or the other.

This transformation marks Helena's willingness to relinquish her independent identity for the dependency of marriage and motherhood, to (some would say) sacrifice herself to these institutions. Yet she has already passed through the sacrificial fire that would sear her maiden name; in winning through to her desire, she is, unlike her namesake from Troy, neither war booty, ransom, nor gift. Unlike many Shakespearean heroines, she does not lapse into silent consent at the close. Rather, the text displaces that potential onto Diana, who remains silent at the King's offer of a dowry if she proves to be a virgin—in other words, a substitute for what Helena was. Thus, although the close foregrounds conformist ideology by placing Helena as a socially and sexually legitimate wife and mother, it also generates another virgin who may attempt to use the patriarchal system in order to gain power—much as Queen Elizabeth used patriarchal codes by speaking a discourse of apparent abjection and vulnerability.³⁷ By articulating a cogent analysis of female (and male) sensibility, Shakespeare's text generates an incipient critique of patriarchal systems as well as a model of feminized power. But that is another essay.

I began this essay by saying that Helena lies at the center of the internal as well as the critical drama of All's Well. At the close, however, the critical emphasis shifts away from Helena to express widespread disappointment and dissatisfaction with Bertram's truncated and insubstantial replies to Helena, objections that level at what I read as signs of realism (albeit expressed through highly controlled artifice) in a non-realistic text and seem to be grounded in a romantic expectation that Shakespearean characters will not only say exactly the “right thing”—that is, that they will speak expressively, preferably at some length and with rhetorical fluency—but also that this particular character, Bertram, will finally accept Helena with a bit more enthusiasm.³⁸ Listen to their final exchange with the King:

[Re-]enter Widow [with] Helena
King. Is there no exorcist
Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?
Is't real that I see?
Helena. No, my good lord;
'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see;
The name and not the thing.
Bertram. Both, both. O pardon!
Helena. O my good lord, when I was like this maid
I found you wondrous kind. There is your ring,
And, look you, here's your letter. This it says:
When from my finger you can get this ring
And is by me with child, & c. This is done;
Will you be mine now you are doubly won?
Bertram. If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly
I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.
Helena. If it appear not plain and prove untrue
Deadly divorce step between me and you!

(5.3.299-312)

Helena first speaks to Bertram through the King, echoing her earlier inability to address him directly. Yet by completing her verse line, Bertram's response joins his thought to hers: in the compression and elision characteristic of his (and Helena's) role, he gives her the name of wife, acknowledges that she is no longer “nothing” but “the thing itself” and asks for pardon. Helena's words seek further surety, reminding him, first, of their encounter and then, more specifically, that the terms of her acceptance were his. Her question—“Will you be mind now you are doubly won?”—in its pun on won/one, recalls the twins of the source and invites Bertram to reconfirm her presence in terms of a unity that includes them both. And again Bertram cues his speech to hers, addressing her through the King in words that pick up, in his repetition of ever and dearly, her notion of “doubly won”—and thus acknowledge his willingness. Helena's response continues and confirms the paired notions that, alone, make their exchange noticeably extraordinary. Her thought first rests on plainness, on constancy. Now, she links divorce to death, rephrasing her initial oppositions—to be both Dian and love, to give and to lose, to live and to die. But she no longer bears death alone; she transfers it to divorce, to what may “step between me and you.” And she repeats Bertram's conditional preface, grounding her answer in negatives—“not plain,” “prove untrue”—that can transform into positive terms only through a similar operational instruction, a potential “if.” The exchange, sounding more like the terms of a bargain (and a fictional one at that) than the romantic language of our expectations, articulates—in this text, for these characters—a startling mutuality.

Finally, for Helena and Bertram, their commitment to their shared sexuality becomes hesitantly apparent, more in silence than through extravagant speech or romantic gestures, as the possibility of kindness and love. Trevor Nunn chose to open his production of All's Well That Ends Well with a couple waltzing in half-light to a haunting tune and to deny a similar image at the close but rather to have Helena and Bertram exit—after the King's epilogue and after the others had left the stage—slowly, together but without touching one another. His staging privileges those features of the close suggesting that all only seems well—for the characters as well as for the comedy—given the problematic “ifs” of Bertram, Helena and the King, which acknowledge the conditional nature of human sexual behavior in marriage and of fictions about marriage. This close celebrates compromise, the text's final real-izing of romance.

Notes

1. I borrow this construct from Jacqueline Rose, “Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 95-118.

2. For these notions of story elements, see Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974), see especially pp. 138-19, 160-61 and 230.

3. Brian Henderson, “Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?” Film Quarterly 31, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 11-23.

4. In reading the play's structure, I draw from the following: V. I. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928), trans. Laurence Scott (U. of Texas, 1958); A. J. Greimas, “Elements of a Narrative Grammar” (1969), Diacritics 7 (1977): 23-40; and Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).

5. Although some have not been cited, I should like to acknowledge a general debt to the following studies: Nicholas Brooke, “All's Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 73-84; James L. Calderwood, “Styles of Knowing in All's Well,” MLQ 25 (1974): 272-94; Howard C. Cole, The All's Well Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare (U. of Illinois Press, 1981); Ian Donaldson, “All's Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare's Play of Endings,” Essays in Criticism 27 (1977): 34-55; R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays (U. Press of Virginia, 1971); Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (Columbia U. Press, 1965); Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1981); Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (Columbia U. Press, 1965); Arthur C. Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge U. Press, 1981); G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower (London: Methuen, 1958), pp. 95-160; W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, 2nd edition (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960); Joseph G. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy (U. of Toronto Press, 1968); A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (London: Longman's, Green and Co., Ltd., 1961); R. L. Smallwood, “The Design of All's Well,” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 45-61; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (U. of Toronto Press, 1971); Roger Warren, “Why Does It End Well? Helena, Bertram and the Sonnets,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 79-92; Richard C. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies (U. of California Press, 1981).

6. All references to Boccacio's tale are from William Painter's version (1575) as reprinted in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 2:389-96.

7. All text references are to the Arden edition of All's Well That Ends Well, ed. G. K. Hunter (London: Methuen, 1962).

8. G. K. Hunter sees Helena's dialogue with Parolles as a “free and frothy play upon the ideas which are fermenting … in Helena's (or rather Shakespeare's) mind” and as “germane” to Helena's situation. (Arden Introduction, p. xlii.) Free and germane it certainly is, but that Helena confirms her determination to put her virginity to use through joking with Parolles seems more disturbing than frothy.

9. See G. K. Hunter, Arden Introduction, pp. xxxiv-xxxvi.

10. Arthur C. Kirsch notes the liturgical parody and provides a cogent analysis, p. 140. In discussing these moments, Joseph G. Price reminds readers that the Clown's parody must be seen in its overall thematic context and that we are not to take it seriously, for seeing him as a choral commentator on Helena's love ignores both the text and the role of the clown in Shakespeare's plays (Price, pp. 146-47). But by so limiting Lavatch's (or any clown's) verbal presence, he becomes simply an incidental figure whose role functions only to express a dramatic convention.

11. G. K. Hunter, the Arden editor, notes the glance at Helena's situation, p. xxxv.

12. Bullough, pp. 390-91.

13. I have adopted the Folio punctuation here, which, rather than making “extended / With vildest torture” parenthetical, suggests the rush of Helena's thought.

14. Like Angelo in a more avowedly perverse love scene in Measure for Measure (2.4), the King seems attracted to Helena's virtuous qualities.

15. For a full discussion of unrepresented events in The Winter's Tale, see Howard Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied our queen?’: The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter's Tale,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 3-18.

16. In Roland Barthes' view, from the pleasure of the text. The Pleasure of the Text (1973), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).

17. Bullough, p. 392. A similar concern for the country's welfare and for its misuse of “liberty” prompts Duke Vincentio to assume the disguise of a friar. Unlike Giletta, however, he tells no one except another friar where he is going or why. Measure for Measure may be indebted to All's Well's source for these details.

18. Bullough, p. 393.

19. Cf. Juliet's nurse advising her to marry Paris, Romeo and Juliet 3.5.214-27.

20. Marjorie Garber, “‘Wild Laughter in the Throat of Death’: Darker Purposes in Shakespearean Comedy,” in Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Maurice Charney (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980), pp. 121-26.

21. Alexander Welsh, “The Loss of Men and Getting of Children: All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” MLR 73 (1978): 17-28.

22. See Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford U. Press, 1971), esp. pp. 66-88, for a full discussion of two-part structure.

23. Cf. Mariana in Measure for Measure, 5.1.172-79.

24. Nicholas Brooke's essay, “All's Well That Ends Well,” gives extremely sensitive readings of the operations of language in the play.

25. As does Measure's Duke Vincentio at similar points in that play's narrative (3.2.254-75; 4.1.71-76). “Who is speaking here?” Barthes would ask. S/Z (1970), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 41-42.

26. Price, p. 163.

27. Several cruxes of language in 4.2 have long puzzled editors. First, Bertram's opening line, “They told me that your name was Fontybell.” G. K. Hunter reports Thiselton's conjectural reference to the fountain with a statue of Diana erected at Cheapside in 1596 but comments on the lack of evidence that it was ever called Fontybell or font bel. He adds, “Even if it had been, why should Bertram be told that his beloved had the name of a fountain?” (pp. 100-1, n.). Even though Bertram, a few lines later, calls Diana “no maiden but a monument” (which supports the statue reference), does not his question, in the situation literally an opening “line,” function as double entendre? Surely he knows Diana's name and is attempting to transform her into the “beautiful fount” of his imagined desire, testing her sexual willingness. If so, Diana will not play the game and silences Bertram's initial approach: “No, my good lord, Diana.” Refusing to be seen as an available object, she reminds Bertram that she has the name of chastity herself. Returning to Ovid's Diana, it is tempting to suggest that Actaeon's fate upon seeing Diana “naked in his sight,” bathing in “a lively spring with Christall streame” underlies this exchange. In Ovid, Diana sprinkles water on Actaeon's head and face and says, “Now make thy vaunt among thy mates, thou sawste Diana bare. / Tell if thou can: I give thee leave: tell heardly: do not spare.” And then she places the hart's horns on his head. Shakespeare's Ovid, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (Southern Illinois U. Press, 1961), Bk. 3, ll. 188; 220-30. It would, however, be a strain to push a full correspondence between the two situations and the two texts. Diana does not seek as thorough a revenge on Bertram (she is, after all, not seen naked but prevents that), and the usual threats of cuckolding are absent from the text.

    Second, I would like to add a new possibility to those offered by editors for the crux of 4.2.38: “I see that men make rope's in such a scarre.” Might “I see that men may rope's in such a scarf” make good sense? It certainly has the advantage of re-calling Parolles, whom Diana has described as “that jackanapes with scarfs” (3.5.85)—a further reminder of his position as Bertram's double, and sexual mentor, in this crucial scene.

28. Welsh also notes this conjunction, p. 20.

29. Jan Kott, “Head for Maidenhead, Maidenhead for Head: The Structure of Exchange in Measure for Measure,” Theatre Quarterly 8:31 (1978): 18-24.

30. Similarly, Helena, following Bertram's rejection in 2.4 or 2.5, might have spoken in soliloquy, as she did at the close of 3.2.

31. Northrop Frye overstates the case, I think, in calling this a vision of “the mass of humanity moving witlessly, like lemmings, to its own annihilation” that summarizes the “blind and deluded movement that sent Bertram out to the wars” and that anticipates the final action that brings him home (Frye, pp. 105-6).

32. Lavatch's final line, “I do pity his distress in my similes of comfort, and leave him to your lordship” (5.2.24-25), is not unlike Fool's last comment on the situation to his double, Lear: “And I'll go to bed at noon” (King Lear 3.6.83).

33. Garber, “Wild Laughter.” See also Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969) and Edwin S. Shneidman, “Death Work and Stages of Dying,” in Death: Current Perspectives, ed. Edwin S. Shneidman, 2nd. ed. (Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 305-11, in which he argues that the stages Kübler-Ross indentifies do not of necessity follow the exact progression she outlines.

34. Bullough, p. 396.

35. As Marjorie Garber points out, the play's first line is the Countess's ambiguous remark, “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.” Bertram, at once a newborn son and his mother's (forbidden) husband, leaves for the King (in whom, Lafew promises, his mother will find a husband and he a father) and male companionship in the wars, apparently fleeing a household dominated by women. Clearly, Bertram associates Helena with his mother, speaking to her as though she were a sister; Helena herself rejects this role when the Countess offers to be a mother to her by declaring that she desires not a mother but a mother-in-law (Coming of Age, pp. 41-42).

36. The moment has a parallel in As You Like It that can easily go by unnoticed, both on the page and in performance. Directly following Hymen's wedding song in 5.4, Duke Senior says, “O my dear niece, welcome thou art to me, / Even daughter, welcome, in no less degree!” (5.4.141-42). Juxtaposing the divine with a simpler emotional response translates what is universal to a particularized human intensity: enabling people to co-exist, honored, in families, is one lasting residue of the “blessed bond of board and bed.”

37. See Michael Calvin McGee, “The Origins of ‘Liberty’: A Feminization of Power,” Communication Monographs 47, no. 1 (1980): 23-45; Michael Calvin McGee, “On Feminized Power,” The Van Zelst Lecture in Communication, Northwestern University School of Speech, May 1985.

38. In Measure for Measure's final scene, the gender expectations are reversed, as the continuing debate over Isabella's consent or non-consent to Duke Vincentio's rather badly timed proposal demonstrates. The critical dramas surrounding both plays, however, are heavily weighted by individual critics' assumptions about (for examples) comic form, closural conventions, the sanctity (or non-sanctity) of marriage and gender-specific behavior.