SOURCE: “Sacred and Sexual Motifs in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 33-59.

[In the following essay, Simonds examines several matrimonial texts that were available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries in order demonstrate how Shakespeare's audience might have reacted to the characters of Bertram and Helena.]

Whatever scholars may think of its value as a work of poetic literature, Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well is remarkably entertaining in the theater. Perhaps this is so because it fulfills the fundamental generic responsibility of comedy; it overcomes the death of the fathers through a bawdy emphasis on youthful sexuality and love, and it manipulates mythical plot elements that are subconsciously familiar to any audience in Western civilization. The play skillfully diverts our attention from death and burial to the “little death” of sexual orgasm, from age, illness, and the destruction of war to marriage and the joy of new life. Above all, it is not so much a “problem play” in the Shavian sense as it is a typical work of Renaissance comic art that attempts to unite both the physical and the spiritual elements of human existence within a single structure of the imagination.

In this essay, I shall examine certain intertextual relations concerned with the subject of matrimony that may help to shed some light on the play's meaning or meanings to a Renaissance audience. Specifically, I shall compare certain aspects of All's Well with: (1) the so-called “Greek Epithalamium” by Catullus; (2) the colloquy “Proci et Puellae” by Erasmus; (3) the text of the 1559 marriage liturgy we may presume was used in the offstage wedding of Helena and Bertram; (4) an important scriptural use of the bed-trick to fulfill the obligations of the marriage contract; and (5) a sermon by a leading Anglican divine of the period. Of course, I am not concerned here with proving that any of these texts was a direct source for the comedy. All of them were familiar to literate men and women of the English Renaissance; they all formed part of a common cultural context for the work of William Shakespeare and other creative artists of the period.

My thesis is that All's Well That Ends Well ought to be experienced in the theater and in the study as a play that is not so much ambivalent in meaning, as is often suggested, but simultaneous in its thematic implications. Among its many themes—and I will consider only the marriage topos in this paper—the play simultaneously discusses both sexual and sacred matters without essential conflict between them; therefore, any final thematic statement about All's Well must include the two elements, not simply one or the other. My purpose here is to attempt a Renaissance rather than a modern reading of the play, even though such a reading may seem remote from contemporary interests and socio-political doctrines.

It seems to me that what primarily disturbs the modern reader of All's Well (dated 1602-3 by Anne Barton) is the intimate relation we note between the language of sexuality and the language of spirituality or Protestant theology within the text. Since many modern readers are offended by the pervasive Renaissance tendency to see constant analogies between the everyday physical life of men and women and the hope for a spiritual life to come, we usually focus on Shakespeare's bawdry and thus overlook certain eschatological elements in the comedy, i.e., the poetic references to “last things,” to humanity's final destiny after death. But even Shakespeare's title, All's Well That Ends Well, would have immediately evoked thoughts of death and the Last Judgment in the minds of his audience. Of course, we do not know what Shakespeare personally thought about the quarrelsome Christianity of his age and culture. We do know, however, that he earned his livelihood by writing plays for a Christian audience. This audience could be expected to understand and respond to any theological resonances they heard in the theater, especially since open discussions of religious doctrine were forbidden on the public stage by the political authorities. I believe it is precisely the subversive presence of sacred concerns running parallel to, and often interpenetrating, the lusty sexuality of the play that makes All's Well seem “dark” to us, but that might well have ensured a commercial success for the playwright in early seventeenth-century England. Furthermore, in discussing this play, we must always keep in mind that England was then governed by a childless and elderly Protestant queen, who might have recently died by the time the play was first performed. All this provides an “interesting” context for a serious comedy, or tragicomedy, on sex, forced marriage, reproduction, illness, apparent death, and joyful resurrection.

Morris P. Tilley has already called our attention to the proverb that may lie behind the sexual implications of the title: “All shall be well, and Jack shall have his Jill.”¹ And, since the continuity of physical life on earth does indeed depend on Jack's having Jill and vice versa, one entire level of the comedy is definitely concerned with coaxing the younger generation into bed—within a socially acceptable context—in order to fulfill its reproductive duties, which England's Virgin Queen had refused to do. At no point, however, is sexuality romanticized or glorified in this comedy; it is simply taken for granted as a necessary element of human life and a duty for married people. That the tempting pleasures of sex outside of marriage may lead the young morally astray is taken for granted as well, so that most of the bawdry in this play is notably rough and cynical in nature. Indeed, there is a dark Augustinian cast to the sexual jokes throughout All's Well (“so lust doth play / with what it loathes,” IV.vi.24-25) in subtle opposition to Helena's personal promise of curative beauty, love, and fruitfulness, thus suggesting a typical Protestant viewpoint keyed to the beliefs of an Anglican audience. But the value of marriage itself as a mysterious source of purification and regeneration is emphasized again and again within the structure of the play, and this too is typical of sixteenth-century Protestantism.² According to Mary Beth Rose, “The fact that romantic comedy, a dramatic form which celebrates erotic love and marriage, flourished in the environment of a new sensibility which embraced marriage both as the spiritual foundation of society and as the repository of hope for personal happiness, strongly suggests a parallel development between the increasingly complex, optimistic comic representations of eros that followed Lyly's plays and the more positive moral conceptions of sexual love and marriage that were beginning to be articulated in Protestant conduct literature.”³

Since All's Well That Ends Well is the most eschatological title in the entire Shakespearean canon, the play must also have something to do with sacred love, or salvation on a cosmic level, as G. Wilson Knight and others have argued.⁴ But, as I have previously suggested, the modern mind seems to find it difficult to consider sex and salvation at the very same time, since—unlike the Elizabethans—we strive to keep Saturday night and Sunday morning carefully apart.

In contrast to our own lingering Puritanism, the use of erotic religious metaphors was a commonplace for the Renaissance. We need only recall, for example, Titian's erotic painting entitled Venus and Cupid With Organist (Madrid, Museo del Prado), which depicts a musician playing an organ while staring fixedly over his shoulder at a reclining and naked Venus, whose infant son's arms are twined about her neck from behind the couch.⁵ The organ is both a sexual reference and the most divine of musical instruments because it can sound all the chords of “World Harmony.”⁶ Significantly, Titian also portrays two different worlds in the same picture plane on his canvas (indeed, sharing the same couch)—the human world of the musician dressed in his fashionable Renaissance clothes and the divine world of the nude Venus and Cupid.⁷ He suggests thereby a marriage between heaven and earth, between historical specificity and eternal values, within the same work of art.⁸ It seems to me that Shakespeare employs a similar Renaissance aesthetic in All's Well That Ends Well.

.....

Ordinary human marriage requires sexuality—the physical loss of virginity and the spiritual loss of innocence for both sexes in order to bring fertility into the wasteland. Although usually advertised as pleasurable, this loss can be frightening and indeed painful for young people, especially for girls. But in All's Well, the loss of virginity appears rather surprisingly to disturb Bertram even more than Helena, who is willing to give all for the love of her childhood playmate. In contrast, Bertram runs away from a marriage he has religiously sworn to consummate, and later he pursues not a camp follower but an honest Florentine lady named after the pagan goddess of virginity and marital chastity, Diana. Apparently he worships this goddess, as did Hippolytus, perhaps because he is still too young to face the challenge of Venus, or of her mythic priestess, Helena. We must remember that only Parolles, “a notorious liar” (I.i.100) and traitor, accuses Bertram of being “a foolish idle boy, but for all that very ruttish” (IV.iii.215-16), and then he clearly libels the master he knows has run away from a virgin by announcing that, “I knew the young Count to be a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds” (IV.iii.219-21).⁹ At this point, Bertram himself protests the lie, although it might be expected to enhance his masculine reputation in a military camp. He calls Parolles a “Damnable both-sides rogue” (IV.iii.222). It should be noted that Helena, as well as Parolles, uses the word “idle” in respect to Bertram, but she seems to confirm his continued virginity when she calls his awakening sexuality so far an “idle fire” (III.vii.26). What Bertram wants at this point is “To buy his will” (27), that is, to gain sexual experience his own way, without any emotional or social commitment whatsoever.

At the same time, the audience can only feel sympathy with Bertram's rebellion against the notorious ward system that allows his king to force him to marry against his will. Lawrence Stone states that “up to 1640 the landed classes continued to endure, although with increasing discontent, the practice of wardship, by which the marriages of young fatherless heirs and heiresses of landed property were put up for sale by the Crown. The Court of Wards was tolerated as long as the society upon which it levied its tribute had itself little respect for individual freedom of choice, and treated its own children with as little consideration for personal feelings as did the Court itself.”¹⁰

In All's Well, the king rather cynically uses Bertram to pay off his medical bill, even after the physician Helena withdraws her request for the young man as her husband once she sees his distaste for the match. Nevertheless, Bertram's social snobbery and subsequent dash for freedom on his wedding night reveal him to be a spoiled adolescent unworthy of our sympathy and of the bride his mother approves for him.

Helena, of course, is far more mature. Just before her famous virginity debate with Parolles, the heroine tells us in a soliloquy of her very physical love for Bertram, for “His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls” (I.i.11). She admits her desire to “die” for him, in both senses of the word, since “The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love” (91-92). Helena understands sexual intercourse to be—in terms of a popular medieval topos—the culmination of a cruel hunt, but she accepts it willingly as the price of love. Thus, Shakespeare clearly means us to catch the irony of Parolles's impudent question as he strides onstage: “Are you meditating on virginity?” (110). The very opposite is true. Where Bertram seems to fear sexuality until he has proved himself as a soldier, after which he makes conventional and boyish attempts to seduce the impoverished maiden Diana (a common appellation for the Virgin Queen), Helena is now ready to fly from the altar of divine Diana and to dedicate herself “to imperial Love” (I.iii.74-75).

The virginity debate that follows between Helena and Parolles seems politically daring in Elizabeth's England, although it is based on an ancient topos in marriage songs. One of the oldest literary examples of it we have today appears to be the “Greek Epithalamium,” Carmen LXII, by Catullus, and this is the first intertextual relationship I wish to discuss.¹¹ In this song, Catullus introduces a group of maidens who debate with a group of youths on what Peter Demetz has called “the gains and losses of marriage.”¹² Much as Helena in All's Well initiates the Shakespearean discussion with her complaint that “Man is enemy to virginity; how / may we barricade it against him? (I.i.12-13), the Roman maidens in Carmen LXII compare the bride's virginity to a city that can no longer defend itself against enemy attack:

Hesperus, what more cruel fire than thine moves in the sky? for thou canst endure to tear the daughter from her mother's embrace, from her mother's embrace to tear the close-clinging daughter, and give the chaste maiden to the burning youth. What more cruel than this do enemies when a city falls?

(87)

Parolles in All's Well tells Helena bluntly that the only defense against man is to “Keep him out” (I.i.114), to which she replies:

Hel. But he assails, and our virginity though valiant, in the defense yet is weak. Unfold to us some warlike resistance.
Par. There is none. Man, setting down before you, will undermine you and blow you up.

(I.i.115-19.)

Although the profanely sexual military analogy continues throughout the virginity debate in All's Well, the Roman maidens of Catullus then shift to vegetation imagery in their lament for the bride's imminent defloration:

As a flower springs up secretly in a fenced garden, unknown to the cattle, torn up by no plough, which the winds caress, the sun strengthens, the shower draws forth, many boys, many girls, desire it; when the same flower fades, nipped by a sharp nail, no boys, no girls desire it: so a maiden, whilst she remains untouched, so long is she dear to her own: when she has lost her chaste flower with sullied body, she remains neither lovely to boys nor dear to girls.

(89)

But the chorus of youths answers with a similar plant analogy that points out the need for husbandry to make a vine fruitful:

As an unwedded vine which grows up in a bare field never raises itself aloft, never brings forth a mellow grape, but bending its tender form with downward weight, even now touches the root with topmost shoot; no farmers, no oxen tend it: but if it chance to be joined in marriage to the elm, many farmers, many oxen tend it: so a maiden, whilst she remains untouched, so long is she aging untended; but when in ripe season she is matched in equal wedlock, she is more dear to her husband and less distasteful to her father.

(89)

Each verse concludes with the refrain, “Hymen, O Hymenaeus, Hymen, hither, O Hymenaeus!”—a formal evocation of the god of marriage. The young men obviously win the argument with their claim that a husband is like a tree (the family tree) to which a delicate maiden, like a tender vine, may cling and become fruitful with his support. But if a virgin does not marry, she will be forgotten and die unknown. The main reason for marriage is therefore fruitfulness, according to Catullus, and not the romantic love of golden lads and lasses. Demetz (527-28) calls our attention to the almost literal translation of the epithalamium by Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson in his 1606 Hymenai, or The Solemnities of Masque and Barriers at Marriage.

Although in All's Well Parolles lures Bertram away from fruitful marriage to the destruction of war, he also makes a witty personal attack on Helena's virginity in I.i, just as he later tries to win Diana for himself in Florence. In answer to Helena's defense of her chastity until she can offer it to the man of her choice, Parolles replies with the argument of the Roman youths that it is “against the rule of nature,” to which he adds some Christian elaborations:

He that hangs himself is a virgin; virginity murthers itself, and should be buried in highways out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate offendress against nature. Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese, consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding [its] own stomach. Besides virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the canon. Keep it not, you cannot choose but lose by't. Out with't!

(I.i.138-46)

Curiously enough, Parolles personifies virginity here in male as well as female terms. Indeed, what better description do we have of Bertram than that of a young man who is “peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love”?

After Helena assures Parolles that she will do nothing with her “virginity yet” (I.i.165), she makes a speech that has been widely interpreted as a list of conventional poetic references to the loves Bertram will find at court. I tend to agree, however, with those who believe Helena is referring here to the gifts Bertram will receive when she relinquishes her virginity to him as his wife. The first word, “There,” is the source of her sexual powers, the city she continues to defend against others. She tells Parolles prophetically that

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;
His humble ambition, proud humility;
His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet;
His faith, his sweet disaster, with a world
Of pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms
That blinking Cupid gossips.

(I.i.166-75)

Lines 171-73 appear to be subtextual allusions to the varying pleasures of sexual intercourse for the male, followed by the fruitful results for the female. To “gossip” once meant to “godparent”; thus Cupid himself godparents the results of a union between Bertram and Helena. The apparent discrepancy between the words of superior power and command in these lines referring to the privacy of sexual dominion (“captain,”“sovereign,”“traitress,”etc.) and Helena's humble attitude toward Bertram in public merely reflect the unfortunate social realities of an Elizabethan marriage in which the wife was indeed a “clinging vine,” a legal dependent of her husband and lord, although equal to him as the “heart” of a household in which he was the “head.”

Helena accepts a certain loss of dignity and independence through her marriage, but Bertram angrily struggles against his own legal subservience as a mere “ward” to the king. He announces petulantly, “I cannot love her, nor will strive to do't” (II.iii.145), which then forces the king to “produce [his] power” (150). In the security of the home, a loving woman may indeed offer the variety of experience for which Bertram is not yet sufficiently mature, as Richard P. Wheeler has convincingly argued in terms of modern psychology.¹³ Until the virginal Bertram is ready for the delights that the virginal Helena wishes to offer him, he is much like the equally immature Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who—pursued by another determined, aggressive Helena—finally admits that

… all the faith, the virtue of my heart,
The object and the pleasure of mine eye,
Is only Helena. To her, my lord,
Was I betrothed ere I [saw] Hermia;
But like a sickness did I loathe this food;
But, as in health, come to my natural taste,
Now I do wish it, love it, long for it,
And will evermore be true to it.

(IV.i.169-76)

Similarly Bertram—called a “boy” by his mother, Parolles, and the king, who considers him too young to go to war—admits that his assault on the chaste Diana is based on “sick desires” (IV.ii.35), or on a boyish need for forbidden and irresponsible sex. At the same time, he has carefully chosen as the object of those desires a lady most unlikely to be bought. Fortunately, Shakespeare's Helena is a healer, one willing to risk her reputation and her life in order to cure the sick king and her equally sick beloved.

.....

In the early sixteenth century, Catullus's Carmen LXII was wittily Christianized by the humanist priest Desiderius Erasmus in his Latin colloquy “Proci et Puellae” (“Suitors and Sweethearts”), and G. K. Hunter briefly footnotes in the Arden edition of All's Well some striking similarities between this humanist dialogue and the virginity debate in the play.¹⁴ Erasmus's “Proci et Puellae” was translated into English by “N. L.” (thought to be Nicholas Leigh) in 1568. Like the Catullus epithalamium, this colloquy is concerned with the contradiction between the value of virginity in itself and the necessity of losing it in a fruitful marriage, which is to say that both texts are concerned with the paradoxical nature of marriage itself. Matrimony exchanges the value and power of virginity for the value and power of fecundity. As Parolles so crudely explains of bartered virginity, “Within t' one year it will make itself two, / which is a goodly increase, and the principal itself not / much the worse” (I.i.147-49).

“Proci et Puellae” is an ironic dialogue between the lover Pamphilus and a witty virgin named Maria. Like Erasmus's more famous The Praise of Folie, this charming colloquy has both profane and sacred levels of meaning. Even the names of the characters are suggestive. The eager Pamphilus, much in love with Maria's outward appearance, first attempts to seduce her by a rhetorical “appeal to pity,” insisting that her beauty has murdered him and that only she can raise him up to life once more. Hunter first notes the similarity of the greeting between Parolles and Helena, who address each other as “fair queen” (I.i.106) and “monarch” (I.i.107), and Pamphilus's promise to Maria that “I shall be to you a King, and you shall be to me a Queene.”¹⁵ Just as Maria first refuses Pamphilus's invitation to royalty in return for her body, so Helena and Parolles jokingly refuse one another's proffered crowns.

Pamphilus in A Modest Meane to Marriage informs his reluctant sweetheart that she should be called Martia rather than Maria:

Mar. And why so I beseech you? what have I to doe with Mars?
Pam. For as that God counteth it but a pastime to murther and kill me, even so doe you. Herein yet more cruell than Mars, for you murther him that hartily loveth you.

(Erasmus, sig. Avi)

Shakespeare also refers to the god Mars in All's Well I.i, but he changes the application for ironic purposes to a jest on cowardice. This allows Helena to “undermine” Parolles rather than vice versa:

Hel. Monsieur Parolles, you were born under a charitable star.
Par. Under Mars, I.
Hel. I especially think, under Mars.
Par. Why under Mars?
Hel. The wars hath so kept you under that you must needs be born under Mars.
Par. When he was predominant.
Hel. When he was retrograde, I think rather.
Par. Why think you so?
Hel. You go so much backward when you fight.

(I.i.190-99)

Helena's insult foreshadows Bertram's later sexual cowardice in respect to marriage, backward behavior that is directly analogous to Parolles's cowardice on the battlefield and possible homosexuality. Indeed, the King later comments ironically on Bertram's sexual backwardness when he says, “I wonder, sir, [sith] wives are monsters to you / And that you fly them as you swear them lordship, / Yet you desire to marry” (V.iii.154-57); and Parolles assures Helena that she can lose her virginity “to her own liking” if she will “Marry, ill, to like him that ne'er it likes” (I.i.151-53). Much of the malaise of the present court seems to consist of such fearful backwardness, as the king points out in his eulogy of Bertram's father: “Such a man / Might be a copy to these younger times / Which followed well, would demonstrate them now / But goers backward” (I.ii.45-48). In contrast to Bertram's cowardice, a normal adult male must imitate Mars when in bed with his bride and courageously storm the city gate, for as Erasmus's Maria reminds us, “virginite would seeme alwayes to be taken with violence, yea though sometime we love the partie most earnestly” (sig. Ciii).

But while Shakespeare's Parolles uses the military metaphor to explain to Helena how men “undermine” the city gates and “blow up” virgins, Pamphilus in A Modest Meane instead complains to Maria about virgins triumphing over the dead bodies of their suitors slain by unrequited love:

Mar. Oh queint handsome, nice dead body: when shall your funerals be prouided for?
Pam. Sooner than you thinke ywisse, except you remedie in time.
Mar. I remedie good Lord? am I able to do such a cure?
Pam. Yea surely: all were I deade, it lyeth in you to rayse me up againe to life, and that with a light thing.

(sig. Bii^v)

There are obviously both sexual and eschatological insinuations in this teasing exchange, which may remind us of Helena's poignant plea to the Countess:

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.

(I.iii.213-17)

The motif is eventually literalized through Helena's own later resurrection (in a state of pregnancy) from supposed physical death. Not only is she restored to her reluctant husband, but new life also proceeds from the “little death” of the bed-trick which has finally joined her with Bertram.

The resurrection motif is literalized as well when Helena raises the king of France from his sickbed with her beauty, her faith, and her medicine—a miraculous cure that leads the Clown to call her “the herb of grace” (IV.v.17), or that rue which restores life to the soul. On the sexual level, however, Lafew claims that Helena's youth and beauty are powerful enough medicine in themselves to “araise King Pippen” and to “give Charlemain a pen in's hand / And write to her a love line” (II.i.76-78).

In A Modest Meane, when Maria is asked to revive Pamphilus, she replies, “As you say, peradventure I might doe it, if some bodye woulde helpe me to the herbe Panaces, whereunto they ascribe so great a vertue.” But Pamphilus will not be lured into medical discussions at this point. He tells her that “There needeth none herbes to doe it, only vouchsafe to love againe, what is more easie to be perfourmed? nay rather what is more due and just? otherwise you shall never acquite your selfe of manspilling” (sigs. Bii and Bii^v). When he is unable to persuade Maria to have an affair with him, however, Pamphilus proposes marriage with equal enthusiasm. But Maria is still unconvinced since “that thing requireth long deliberation, and much advisement, which when it is done cannot be undone againe” (sig. Bv). For the Renaissance, marriage was a serious commitment that men like Shakespeare's Bertram violated at their own peril.

Pamphilus then assures Maria in A Modest Meane that he does love her, and for all the right reasons, in the kind of speech we would wish Bertram to make to Helena: “… I have knowne for the space of certain yeares the verteous and honest behauior of your parents, that is a birde [sic] not least to be regarded (I think) to come of good stock. Moreover, I am not ignorant with what wholesome instructions, and verteous examples you haue bene traded and brought up by them. And truely good education is of more effect than good parentage” (sig. Bv^v). Not surprisingly, however, the “boy” Bertram must first “breed” his personal honor and courage through victory in the battlefield before he can successfully encounter Helena's female perfections in the marriage bed.

The young people in A Modest Meane to Marriage discuss the paradox of virginity in vegetation imagery that clearly echoes the “Greek Epithalamium” of Catullus. For example, Pamphilus asks Maria “whether is it a better sight for a Vine to lye uppon the grounde and rot, or the same to embrace a poale, or an elme, and lode it full with purple grapes?” (sig. Bvii). But Maria, like the Roman maidens, sees only the moral paradox of virginity, which she is still reluctant to lose even by way of an honorable marriage:

Mar. … for all your saying, virginity is a thing much beloved and lyked with all men.
Pam. I graunt you, a young woman, a virgine, is a fayre, a goodly thing, but what by course of kind is more unseemly than an old wrinkled maide? Had not your mother been contented to lose that flower of hir virginitie, surely we had not had this flower of your beautie. So that in case (as I hope) our mariage be not barren for the losse of one virgine we shall paye God manye.

(sig. Bvii^v)

Parolles makes exactly the same points during his virginity debate with Helena in All's Well: “It is not politic in the commonwealth of nature of preserve virginity. Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost. That you were made of is metal to make virgins. Virginity by being once lost, may be ten times found; by being ever kept, it is ever lost” (I.i.126-32).¹⁶

If Queen Elizabeth were still alive when All's Well was first performed, we ought to be amazed at Shakespeare's political daring in allowing his comic character such pointed remarks on aging virginity. Parolles also criticizes “old wrinkled” virgins in language even more explicitly sexual than that of Pamphilus or the Roman youths: “Your old virginity, / is like one of our French wither'd pears, it looks ill, / it eats drily, marry, 'tis a wither'd pear” (I.i.160-63). Helena replies, nevertheless, that she will keep her virginity a little while longer.

Although Maria finally grants Pamphilus leave to address her parents in A Modest Meane, she also advises him to consider well what he is doing. She reminds him that marriage is not only a license for sexual pleasure but a serious religious contract as well, a sacrament that Christians believe has a bearing upon the afterlife:

Mar. And do not take into your counsaille, this blind affection borne towardes my person, but rather reason, for that which affection decerneth is liked for a ceason, but that which reason aviseth is never mislyked.
Pam. Certes, thou speakest like a wittie wench; wherefore I intend to follow thy counsayle

(sig. Ciii).

Although Maria counsels “reason” over sexual attraction as a basis for marriage, she also undoubtedly alludes to Saint Paul's often quoted reason for Christians to marry at all—“if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (I Cor. 7:9)—or Pamphilus would not otherwise call her a “wittie wench” and assent so cheerfully to her advice.

Shakespeare's Bertram, in contrast to Pamphilus, refuses to listen to the king's attempts to reason with him in All's Well, preferring war and sexual freedom to the lawful (and sacred) estate of marriage. His behavior is strikingly parodied in I.iii by the Clown, who asks formal permission from the Countess to marry her serving maid Isabel. Lavatch plays the part of the Christian fool as presented by Erasmus in The Praise of Folie when he does so.¹⁷ The allusion to Corinthians is of course very clear in this passage:

Count. Tell me thy reason why thou wilt marry.
Clown. My poor body, madam, requires it. I am driven on by the flesh, and he must needs go that the devil drives.
Count. Is this all your worship's reason?
Clown. Faith madam, I have other holy reasons, such as they are.
Count. May the world know them?
Clown. I have been, a madam, a wicked creature, as you and all flesh and blood are, and indeed I do marry that I may repent.

(I.iii.27-37; italics mine)

Some twentieth-century critics have been so titillated by the Clown's sexual pun on “holey raisings” (a not unimportant aspect of marriage) that they have failed to recognize the eschatological seriousness of this scene. The pun may also refer, after all, to the Elizabethan belief in the end of the world when all men and women shall be raised from their graves to stand judgment. Despite our modern skepticism about the afterlife, we have no reason to think that Shakespeare's Clown is anything but sincere when he proclaims that he wishes to marry “that I may repent,” thus implying that his marriage may lead to his ultimate salvation.

As Arthur Kirsh reminds us in a recent study of love in selected Shakespearean plays, the reference to “holy reasons” in All's Well is far more than a bawdy joke: “Even for Shakespeare the blend of obscenity and revealed truth in these lines is remarkable, but it is a mistake to conclude that the result is an ironic depreciation either of Helena's quest or marriage itself. On the contrary, the obscene point is also the theological (and psychological) one.”¹⁸ In fact, the sources of the Clown's argument for repentance through marriage can be found in Saint Paul's assurance that “the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now they are holy” (I Cor. 7:14). Paul also reminded the Corinthians, “For what knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? or how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?” Apparently the Countess recognizes these scriptural allusions in the Clown's reasons and grants his request to marry: “Thy marriage, sooner than thy wickedness” (I.iii.38).

On the other hand, I do not wish to overemphasize in turn the sacred or eschatological point of view, since the comedy of the scene is clearly based on a double entendre, and the Countess's reply is deliberately ambiguous. The sexual import of her remark is that the Clown will repent not his sins but his marriage, which even he admits will soon become little more than weary physical labor in a fallen world and which will probably end in his becoming a cuckold. Lavatch adds, however, a delightful encomium to the sacred brotherhood of cuckoldry, once again in a Bottom-like parody of Saint Paul: “He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to inn the crop. If I be his cuckold, he's my drudge. He that comforts my wife is the cherisher of my flesh and blood; he that loves my flesh and blood is my friend: ergo, he that kisses my wife is my friend” (I.iii.45-50). The relevant passage from Saint Paul forms part of the Elizabethan marriage ceremony in the Book of Common Prayer 1559: (“So men are bound to love their own wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his own wife, loveth himself. For never did any man hate his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord doth the congregation: for we are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones.”¹⁹

Because profane parody of the sacred intensifies audience response to that which is parodied, the Clown's foolery reminds us—within the context of a secular theatrical performance—that the marriage union itself is sacred and that it concerns both the physical and spiritual life of the community around us. “The mystery is great,” Paul adds, “but I speak of Christ and of the congregation.” So, I believe, does Shakespeare in All's Well That Ends Well, as I shall explain.

Pamphilus in A Modest Meane to Marriage agrees, as does Shakespeare's Clown, to follow the path of reason in order to gain his desire and to request Maria's hand in marriage. In this case, the maiden hastens to assure her suitor that he will have no cause to repent his decision.

Mar. You shall not repent you thereof, but howbe sirha there is now fallen in to my minde a doubt, which bereth mee fore.
Pam. Away with all such doubtes for Gods sake.
Mar. Why will you haue me marry myself to a dead man?
Pam. Not so, for I will reuive againe.

(sig. Ciii^v)

Here Erasmus permits us to smile at the lover's naughty allusion to sexual resurrection, but the eschatological significance of Pamphilus's assertion is clear as well. The lover's marriage to Maria involves participation in a sacrament that will eventually help him to achieve spiritual resurrection, as the Clown in All's Well also suggests.

Erasmus brings his ironic colloquy to a close with one last attempt by Pamphilus for extra-marital sex:

Mar. I pray God guie you a good night, why fetch you such a sigh man?
Pam. A good night say you? I woulde to God you would vouchsafe to giue me that, which you wish mee.
Mar. Soft and faire, I pray you, your harvest is yet but in the greene blade.

(sig. Ciii^v)

Not only does Maria's reference here to harvesting have an eschatological ring to it, but it reminds us as well of a similar line in Shakespeare's comedy. The Countess begs the King in the last act of All's Well to forgive Bertram's folly as no more than “Natural rebellion, done i' th' blade of youth” (V.iii.6). But the grim blade of the harvester Time will eventually cut down all such blades, whether still green or ripe with age.

Marriage, however, offers a defense against the harvester's blade, first through its physical promise of new life in this world, and secondly, through its sacramental promise of new life for the human spirit after death. For this reason, Kirsch correctly finds the text of the marriage liturgy in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer crucial to our understanding of many Shakespearean plays.²⁰ It is important to remember that in All's Well Bertram does actually marry Helena in a formal ceremony offstage. He then runs away from his sacred promise to worship Helena with his body, telling Parolles that “Although before the solemn priest I have sworn, / I will not bed her” (II.iii.268-70). We should note that Bertram does not describe his vow as “solemn” but the priest, thus indicating a disturbing failure to understand the ordinary patterns of language or of religion. In a similar inversion of convention, Bertram—rather than his bride—now becomes the virgin who murders his own posterity (in the sense of Parolles's previous warning to Helena) by refusing to have sexual intercourse with his wife in direct violation of his religious vows: “With this ring I thee wed: with my body I thee worship: And with all my worldly goods I thee endow. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (293). Thus he breaks divine law as well as the social law of the sixteenth century when he withholds his family ring, his body, and his seed from his bride. Bertram's refusal to consummate his marriage, even to kiss Helena, also has an important religious significance for the congregation which has just witnessed the ceremony.

First, the state of matrimony was deemed analogous by Renaissance Christians to the mystical union between Christ and his people or the Church. The Anglican marriage liturgy of the period includes the following prayer: “O God, which hast consecrated the state of matrimony to such an excellent mystery, that in it is signified and represented the spiritual marriage and unity betwixt Christ and his Church, look mercifully upon these thy servants, that this man may love his wife, accordingto thy Word (as Christ did love thy spouse the Church, who gave himself for it, loving and cherishing it even as his own flesh)” (296). Sexuality within the marriage bond thus becomes a religious “mystery.” As Christ died for his people or congregation in order to give them everlasting life, so a husband must be willing to “die” sexually for his wife in order to make her fruitful and to provide new physical life for both the family and the community. For this reason, the king formally exhorts Bertram, “As thou lov'st her. / Thy love's to me religious; else does err” (II.iii.182-83).

We should note here the curious fact that Renaissance males did indeed believe that they shortened their own lives each time they had intercourse, since they still held the classical belief that semen (thought to carry the family genius) originated in the marrow of the bones and was irreplaceable once spent. The belief is referred to in Emblem 77 of The Theater of Fine Devices, Thomas Combe's 1593 English translation of Guillaume de la Perrière's Le Théatre des bons Engins (1539). The incriptio of the emblem states that “All those that love do fancie most, / But lose their labour and their cost.” The pictura shows a young man pouring water from a pitcher through a sieve held out to him by a blindfolded Cupid. … According to the subscriptio or verse,

Fond love is chiefly likened to a sive,
In which the more you poure the water in,
The more is spilt, by letting thorow driue,
And you no neare then when you first begin.
Ev'n so for love when yong men frankly give,
Till oft they leave themselves not worth a pin:
When all is spent, and they live by the losse,
They turne againe at last by weeping crosse.(21)

Shakespeare refers to this belief twice in All's Well. First, Parolles encourages Bertram to risk his life bravely at war rather than to waste it slowly at home with his wife in bed:

He wears his honor 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 Mar's fiery steed

(II.iii.279-83.)

Later the Clown makes a similar statement when he suggests that marriage is more dangerous than war, which is why a man enters into such a union only for the most serious reasons. After hearing that Bertram has run away from his bride and his solemn vow, the Clown tells the Countess the following:

Clown. 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?
Clown. 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.

(III.ii.36-42)

Yet Bertram has in fact sworn before God and the congregation to imitate in sexual terms Christ's sacrifice of the flesh and to “die” for new life within his marital union. He religiously owes Helena the “great prerogative and rite of love” (II.iv.41). When he runs away, Bertram violates the sacred mystery of the covenant between God and man. The implied theological analogy would have been clear to a Renaissance audience. If a nobleman and a ward to the king refuses to give new life to his family and to his society, Christ may not keep his promise to provide an afterlife for the congregation which has witnessed Bertram's vows. As one prominent sixteenth-century English clergyman reminded the faithful, “A Household is as it were a little common wealth, by the good govarnment whereof, Gods glorie may be aduaunced.”²²

In striking contrast to Bertram's fear of losing a little life through the sexual aspect of marriage, Helena feels that her own love is inexhaustible:

I know I love in vain, strive against hope;
Yet in this captious and intenible sieve
I still pour in the waters of my love
And lack not to lose still.

(I.iii.201-04)

Thus Shakespeare uses the sieve image in All's Well not to symbolize the waste of youth through lust, as in Combe's emblem, but to reinforce the idea of love as a source of eternal replenishment of life, as “A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters …” (Song Sol. 4. 15). As far as Helena is concerned, however, the image of the sieve was also a popular symbol of chastity, a symbol deriving from the story of the Roman Vestal Virgin Tuccia. …²³

Secondly, in respect to the significance of the marriage liturgy, the priest reminds the congregation and the couple of Paul's commandment to all married men in Ephesians 5: “Ye husbands love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church, and hath given himself for it, to sanctify it, purging it in the fountain of water, through thy Word, that he might make unto himself a glorious congregation, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, but that it should be holy and blameless” (297). Let us recall once more Parolles's threat that if Helena remains a virgin, she will become “like one of our French wither'd pears.” The sacred significance of marriage implies that a husband's love has the important function of keeping his wife beautiful and blameless in the eyes of God. He helps her gain salvation, as she helps him in turn.

Thirdly, according to the Anglican liturgy of Shakespeare's time, the main purpose of marriage was “the procreation of children,” although the Church also agreed with the Clown's reasons for marrying as “a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication,” as well as a source of “mutual society, help, and comfort” (290-91). In denying Helena his bodily worship, Bertram obviously denies her children too. At the same time, Helena is enjoined by her marriage vows to submit to the will of her husband, to think of him as her lord in the sense that Christ is Lord over the Church.²⁴ Since Bertram wills not to love her, Helena must then find a way to make herself worthy. She therefore sets out on a pilgrimage to atone for her pride in desiring a noble marriage, striving as well to complete the impossible labors her lord has set for her in his letter: “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never’” (III.ii.57-60). While Bertram subsequently magnifies himself in pride by conquering the Sienese army, Helena conquers herself and her natural pride by religious penance. In addition, she accepts the total humiliation of playing the whore for her husband in the dark as the only possible means of consummating their marriage.

I shall not review here the many modern critical objections to the folkloric and “unbelievable” bed-trick which allows Helena to fulfill her tasks and thus her wedding vows.²⁵ In the play Diana tells us the correct moral response when she observes of her own part in obtaining Berram's signet ring and his seed for Helena: “I think't no sin / to cozen him that would unjustly win” (IV.ii.75-76). Moreover, the bed-trick has a very respectable precedent in the Judeo-Christian heritage, as I have shown elsewhere.²⁶ The story is told in Genesis 38, a chapter read aloud each January 21 in Elizabethan churches, of how the widowed Tamar tricks Judah into sleeping with her in fulfillment of his neglected patriarchal obligation to provide her with an heir to Israel. Disguising herself as a prostitute, Tamar demands of Judah his cloak, his staff, and his signet in pledge for the payment of her fee. The Geneva Bible indicates that Judah's failure to recognize Tamar at this time is an act of providence. The marginal gloss states that “God had wonderfully blinded him that he colde not knowe her by her talke,” although Judah finally admits the signet as his and the righteousness of Tamar's deed. She later brings forth twins from this union with the eponymous ancestor of Judea. His first-born son is Pharez or Perez, direct forebear of King David and thus of Christ (Matt. I).

In the biblical story, as in All's Well, a signet ring is the controlling token of a legitimate legal claim on the reluctant male who rebels against the rights of a female. First, Helena remarks that Bertram's ring comes to him from “the first father” (III.vii.25). Bertram himself then tells Diana that his ring “is an honor 'longing to our house, / Bequeathed down from many ancestors / Which were the greatest obloquy i' th' world / In me to lose” (IV.ii.42-45). Yet, paradoxically, tradition tells us that the ring must be given away (in The Merchant of Venice also); worldly honor must be risked for justice to be done. And in all such mythic cases, divine providence sees to it that the ring is given lawfully to the right person.

Thomas Malory also relates two important examples of the bed-trick in British legendary history, one perpetrated by a male, Uther Pendragon, and one by a female, the Lady Elaine.²⁷ The first results in the conception of King Arthur, savior of Britain, and the second results in the conception of Sir Galahad (Gilead), a knightly Christ-figure, who miraculously cures the maimed Fisher King, much as Helena mysteriously cures the King of France in All's Well. The bed-trick convention was thus a familiar symbol to the Elizabethans of providence at work in human affairs and was meant to be understood as necessary rather than as immoral. Certain children must be born into the world.

To be sure, by Shakespeare's time scepticism was already eating into earlier belief in supernatural miracles. The arguments of both the alchemists and—quite unintentionally—the Lutherans were causing this erosion of faith in miracles, a fact carefully brought to our attention by the dramatist in All's Well II.iii when Lafew remarks to Bertram: “They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear (II.iii.1-6). Lafew apparently refers here to the eschatological realm, to reverence for mysteries and possibly to a prudent fear of the Last Judgment. He then reads aloud the providential title of a current broadsheet: “A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor” (II.iii.23-24). Shortly after this, Helena enters with the King, whom she has just raised up from his sickbed and marvelously cured. We do not know exactly how she has done this, any more than we know how Paulina brings the statue of Hermione to life in The Winter's Tale. The miracle is to be accepted, not understood. As Helena and the King stand onstage together, they are a visual emblem of what Lafew calls the “very hand of heaven” (II.iii.31) still at work in Shakespeare's time—at least in the theater. After so pointedly dramatizing this example of a providential miracle, the playwright then assumes in all probability that his audience will accept the equally providential nature of the bed-trick.

Both the curing of the King and the bed-trick provide a familiar religio-mythic infrastructure for the plot of All's Well. The comedy begins with death and disease, continues with the offer of a cure for present illness in return for a marriage with all its sacred overtones, and ends with the unexpected appearance onstage of a pregnant woman previously believed to be dead. This woman—Helena, or love in all its most luminous aspects—is the physical and spiritual emblem of new life indeed, and her story resonates far beyond the structural confines of the comedy and of the theater itself in the best traditions of dramatic art. The chaste Diana, as “presenter” in act V, clearly states in a primitive poetic form the sacred-sexual paradox inherent in both the play and the marriage: “Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick. / So there's my riddle: one that's dead is quick” (V.iii.302-303).

At this point Helena reappears onstage, as if literally resurrected from the dead, which prompts the King to question her reality. She rather strangely replies, “No, my good lord, / 'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see, / The name and not the thing” (V.viii.306-08). Since Helena is seen by all to be pregnant and is about to prove by her possession of the signet ring that Bertram is the father of her child, she is presumably not just the shadow of a wife in the usual sense of the word. However, the Anglican minister Henrie Smith employed the very same term in a sermon to refer to the taking of a second wife or concubine: “another sayth, that the name of his second doth signifie a shadow, because she was not a wife, but the shadow of a wife: For this cause the Scripture never biddeth man to love his wives, but to love his wife, and sayth, They shall be two in one flesh, not three, nor foure, but onely two.”²⁸ It seems probable then that Helena is here reprimanding Bertram for making love to her when he thought her a concubine in Florence rather than fulfilling his duties on their true wedding night. The paradox is that, although the pregnant woman onstage is still Bertram's wife, Helena, she is also the second woman after his marriage to be taken by Bertram, in this case when—in the dark—he believed her to be Diana. She is therefore the shadow of a wife, or pregnant as his second wife or concubine. Confused, and already publicly shamed as a would-be adulterer, Bertram quickly promises to love Helena “dearly,” if she can make him understand the paradox and her trick, or “to know this clearly” (V.viii.315).

Helena then mischievously threatens him with “deadly divorce” if she cannot do so. If Bertram is not the father of her child, not only has he been unfaithful, but she also is guilty of adultery, which was the only ground for divorce accepted by the Church: “As God hath ordained remedies for every disease, so he hath ordained a remedie for the disease of marriage. The disease of marriage is adultrie, and the medicine hereof is divorcement.”²⁹ The play has indirectly circled back to the possibility of disease, but this time the cure lies in the hands of Bertram himself—if he chooses to exercise this means of escape from marriage and to be further shamed publicly as a cuckold. An Elizabethan audience would undoubtedly have caught the joke on the young rake bested in this way by his “clever wench” and have agreed that this marriage would indeed last, especially since the couple had evidently enjoyed the Florentine sexual consummation of their earlier enforced sacramental wedding.

Much as Greek and Roman comedy, a religious genre for the ancient world, always celebrated a wedding, or a resurrection, or both, so does Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well. The play is consistently evocative of the interaction between sexual love and sacred love in the lives of individuals and communities through their participation in the mystery of matrimony. At once obscenely physical and profoundly spiritual, a fruitful marriage represented for the Renaissance the central Christian mystery of the Incarnation, or the philosophical doctrine that humanity itself transcends the limitations of bodily existence and partakes of the divine nature. The strange enigmas of the marriage between spirit and body, of eternal redemption intersecting the waste of time, of life arising from sickness, loss, and death, all echo and re-echo throughout a play as provocative to an audience as is Titian's painting of Venus and Cupid with an Organist.

Finally, if Shakespeare's King will only say in the end that “All yet seems well” (V.iii.333; italics mine), it is not only because he feels concern for the marital happiness of Helena and Bertram, but because the final judgment is not his to make. In his own role as King, he too must face the Last Judgment by a higher authority. The Globe audience was very familiar with Juan Vives's analogy between the stage and the world, the audience and the gods, which gave their theater its name. It is for this reason that, in one of Shakespeare's most poignantly eschatological epilogues, the player king employs the familiar theater metaphor to remind us that even “The king's a beggar, now the play is done” (V.iii.I).

Notes

1. A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950) A 164.

2. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York, 1977) 135-36; Heinrich Bullinger, The Golden Booke of Christian Matrimony, trans. Miles Coverdale (London, 1560); Henrie Smith, “A Preparative to Marriage,” in The Sermons of Maister Henrie Smith, Gathered into one volume (London, 1594) 1-3; Thomas Becon, Workes, 3 vols. (London, 1560); and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government: for the Ordering of Private Families (London, 1598).

3. “Sexual Love in Elizabethan Comedy,” Renaissance Drama, 15 (1984): 1-29.

4. G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower (London; 1958) 131-57. M. C. Bradbrook notes that “the language of religion is used with particular frequency by Shakespeare in this play,” in her fine thematic study “Virtue is the True Nobility,” repr. in Shakespeare, The Comedies, ed. Kenneth Muir (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965) 131. See also the theological interpretations of Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York, 1965), and of Jay Halio, who rightly calls Helena a “Minister of Providence” in “All's Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1965):33-43. Much less convincing is David S. Kastan, “All's Well That Ends Well and the Limits of Comedy,” English Literary History, 52 (1985):575-89. Aside from ignoring the tragicomic precedent of Euripides' Alcestis in theater history, Kastan joins a long line of male critics, including Richard A. Levin, in finding the play unpleasant because he finds Helena's tenacity “predatory” (p. 579). One suspects that a similar tenacity in achieving his goal by a dramatic hero would be praised by this critic and others as commendable heroic determination. But Shakespeare seems to be more tolerant than his critics of women in love, and he makes the majority of his most attractive romantic heroines into notably aggressive man-chasers, which is about all they were allowed to chase in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: witness Rosalind, Viola, Imogen, as well as Hermia and Helena of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

5. Although Venus inspires music and the arts in her celestial form, the presence of Cupid in the painting accentuates as well her earthly fecundity. The dominion of Venus over the vegetable world and human sexuality is symbolized in the background of the picture by the garden with its satyr fountain, the leaping deer, and the pair of lovers strolling away from the viewer.

6. See Leo Spitzer's comprehensive study, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore, 1963). The organ is also an attribute of Saint Cecilia and thus can stand alone as a symbol of music and of the sense of hearing.

7. Edgar Wind emphasizes the manner in which Titian differentiates between the two types of beings which occupy the same couch: “In the Holkham Venus (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the corresponding paintings by Titian in Madrid and Berlin, the disparity between mortal and goddess is heightened by a paradox of posture. While the courtier plays music under the inspiration of love (cf. Erasmus, Adagia s. v. Musicam docet amor), he does not face the goddess directly, but turns his head over his shoulder to ‘look back’ at her; he thus enacts the Platonic … reversal of vision by which alone a mortal can hope to face transcendent Beauty” (Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (London, 1968) 143, n.7. See also the somewhat different views of Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York, 1969) 122-25.

8. Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origin and Character (Cambridge, MA, 1953) remains one of the best studies of Renaissance aesthetics with its meticulous surface realism in juxtaposition with elaborate symbolism and religio-mythic allusions. A recent essay by John N. Wall, Jr., has enlarged on Panofsky's insights by pointing out that the realistic style and iconographic content of pictures such as Jan van Eyck's Amolfini Wedding Portrait actually work together as a Renaissance proclamation that Christian “abstractions have significance only in their specific and particular manifestations.” As Christ entered into “historical specificity” in order to redeem fallen humanity, so the moral behavior of specific individuals in later time repeats the Fall and then does or does not merit the Redemption. See Wall, “The Amolfini Wedding Portrait as Christian Proclamation,” Renaissance Papers (1981):71-81.

9. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

10. Stone, Family, Sex, Marriage 182.

11. See The Poems of Catullus, trans. F. W. Cornish, Loeb Classical Library (New York, 1918) 85-89. Further references to this poem will be noted in the text.

12. Peter Demetz, “The Elm and the Vine: Notes Toward the History of a Marriage Topos,” PMLA, 73 (1958): 521-32. Further references to this article will be noted in the text.

13. “Imperial Love and the Dark House: All's Well That Ends Well,” in Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley, 1981) 35-91.

14. All's Well, ed. Hunter (London, 1959) 9 n. 104-105, 10 n. 126-27, 12 n. 148.

15. Erasmus, A Modest Meane to Marriage, trans. N. L. (London, 1568), sig. Ci^v. The sexual desires of Pamphilus can be summed up in the following line: “As for myselfe, if God so woulde, it were unto me a pleasure, even to end my life in your armes” (sig. Cii). Since the beloved is named Maria, the remark simultaneously evokes an image of the Pietà. All further signatures from this work by Erasmus will be noted in the text.

16. According to Hunter in the Arden ed. of All's Well 10-11 n. 126-27. “The idea probably goes back to Jerome's ‘Laudo nuptias, laudo coniugium, sed quia mihi virgines generant.’” Hunter also notes that the same argument that virgins bring forth virgins is used by Venus in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (lines 203-204) and by Ferardo in Lyly's Euphues.

17. For a persuasive study of Shakespeare's Erasmian ideas, see R. Chris Hassel, Jr., Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Athens, GA, 1980).

18. Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge, 1981) 140.

19. John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559 (Charlottesville, VA, 1976) 293. Further page references to this work will be noted in the text.

20. Kirsh, Experience of Love 10.

21. I have used the Huntington Library copy (STC 15230) of Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1614).

22. Cleaver, Godlie Forme, 13.

23. See Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Padua, 1611; New York, 1976) 74.

24. Smith, “Preparative to Marriage” 28.

25. See G. K. Hunter, introduction, All's Well, Arden ed., xliv.

26. See my note “Overlooked Sources of the Bed Trick,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983):433-34, and John E. Van Domelen, “Genesis, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare,” The Shakespeare Newsletter (May 1965):24, which unfortunately never appeared in the indexes.

27. For the story of the bed-trick as practiced by Uther Pendragon on the Duchess of Tyntagil, with the help of the enchanter Merlin, see Book I of “The Tale of King Arthur” in Thomas Malory, Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2d ed., (London, 1971) 3-6. Sir Lancelot is similarly enhanted into spending a fruitful night with Elaine, daughter of the Fisher King. According to the prophecy, the parents of Galahad (the perfect knight and a second Christ) were to be descendants of Joseph of Arimathea and the Fisher King, which meant Lancelot du Lac (who would sleep only with Queen Gwenyver) and the Lady Elaine. The story is told in “The Booke of Sir Tristram de Lyones” of how Sir Lancelot is shown a ring belonging to the queen “lyke as hit had com frome her” (480). He is told where to meet her, and then is given wine to prevent him from recognizing the substitution in the bedchamber of Elaine (479-80). Galahad is named after Gilead, whose balm was a universal “panacea,” like Helena's. In this case, the “balm of Gilead” is the blood of Christ, which Galahad later applies to the wound of the Fisher King to cure him.

28. Smith, “Preparative to Marriage” 6.

29. Ibid., 36.

My thanks to Susan Snyder, who kindly read an earlier version of this essay and provided many helpful suggestions, and to Richard P. Wheeler, who did the same on behalf of Renaissance Quarterly. The section on Erasmus and Shakespeare was previously read at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association meetings in Atlanta in fall 1984. The original version of this paper was presented at the Shakespeare Association of America meetings of 1983 in Ashland, Oregon.