SOURCE: “An Ill Marriage in an Ill Government: Patterns of Unresolved Conflict in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, Vol. 120, 1984, pp. 97-102.

[In the following essay, Bassnett-McGuire suggests that All's Well That Ends Well reflects post-Reformation views of the marriage contract and also comments on the individual's relationship to the state.]

All's Well That Ends Well occupies one of the minor positions in the Shakespeare canon, and the map of its critical history reveals a text often held to be problematic, described variously as incomplete or inadequate, and perhaps dismissed most tellingly by Logan Pearsall Smith who declared that “it reads like hack-work.”² Overall, critical opinions of the play have tended to see it as a flawed text in which disparate element sit uneasily together.

In the eighteenth century a resolution was found by placing emphasis on the farcical elements within the text, and after Garrick's 1756 adaptation for the stage the figure of Parolles acquired central status and was frequently seen as a comic figure rivalling Falstaff in stature. By the end of the eighteenth century the emphasis had shifted to focus this time on Helena, described by Coleridge as Shakespeare's “loveliest character”³, a pattern that was to continue with the advent of an acting style based on concepts of psychological realism. The sentimentalization of the play in the early nineteenth century moved away from the earlier farcical reading, a process further compounded by the views of A. W. Schlegel who saw the play as linked to the traditional fabliaux of the triumph of woman's patience against all odds.⁴

More recently All's Well That Ends Well has been re-evaluated somewhat more favourably. Muriel Bradbrook has seen it as a moral play that undertakes “a grave discussion of the question of what constituted true nobility and the relation of birth to merit”⁵, while Clifford Leech has considered the play as a satire on the Elizabethan duality towards love and ambition⁶, but it remains less frequently performed than most of Shakespeare's other comedies and far less frequently discussed.

Yet as soon as we move away from a reading that lays undue emphasis on story-line or characterisation of protagonists, patterns begin to emerge in the play that compel us to consider it more seriously and to look more closely at the society it depicts. The settings are aristocratic—the court of the king of France, the court of the Countess of Roussillion and the court of the Duke of Florence, with the sole exception of the Widow's house in Florence and the scene in the soldiers' camp. Moreover, all these courts are stricken with some kind of pestilence—the King of France is sick with an apparently incurable malady; the Court of Roussillion has suffered the double loss of the Count and the youthfulness of Bertram the heir, who cannot succeed his father directly but “must attend his majesty's command,” to whom he is now “in ward, evermore in subjection” (I, 4 f.) and the Duke of Florence is at war with the Siennese. The action of the play is set against this background of death, and the opening lines, spoken by the widowed Countess remind us that all is set in motion by the loss of her husband: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.” (I, 1, 1) The private loss is followed immediately by a second loss, one dictated by the terms of feudal law, under which the son inherits but is bound to the overlord until his majority and then by an oath of realty, unable to act for himself without his Lord's permission.

Against this dark background, the story line follows the fortunes of two figures: Helena and Parolles, who move across class lines in diametrically opposite ways. Helena, in love with Bertram whom she perceives as hopelessly above her socially, achieves preferment from the King through her magical healing powers. Having cured the incurable, she is then granted the impossible—the right to choose her own husband regardless of his status or inclination. She chooses Bertram, who rejects her and flees from both wife and Lord to the Florentine wars, pausing only before he leaves to issue her with a seemingly hopeless task to fulfill: “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which shall never 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, 2, 56-60)

Miraculously, just as Helena cures the incurable King, so she succeeds in tricking Bertram to give her both his ring and a child, and after all her trials is restored to the King's protection at the end of the play.

There are no miracles in the Parolles story line, however, which charts his fall from a position of arrogance to rejection and degradation where he can state of himself that “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live” (IV, 3, 322 f.) The insecurity of social status of anyone who is not part of the hereditary aristocracy reveals a society in turmoil, where one turn of the wheel of fortune can make or unmake an individual irrevocably.

Weaving through the rise of Helena and the fall of Parolles is the Florentine-Siennese war. In I, 2 when we first meet the King, he is despatching Gentlemen to observe “either part”. Later, in II, 1 when the Gentlemen meet the Duke of Florence, they are at pains not to give a precise opinion as to the rights and wrongs of the conflict, but note that

                    the younger of our nature
That surfeit on their ease will day by day
Come here for physic.

(III, 1, 17-19)

And of course this is precisely what Bertram does, when he flees from the French King's court. Arriving in Florence, he is given a command and becomes a military hero. There is therefore a clear contrast between the relationship of fealty to the Overlord on the one hand and the idea of foreign wars as places of entertainment and self-trial for bored young aristocrats, deprived of any significant power by their oath of fealty. What emerges from this contrast is a view of two worlds in opposition—the pre-Machiavellian world of the old King and the post-Machiavellian world of young Bertram. The thrust of the play is therefore to show two ideologies in conflict and the lack of clear cut resolution at the end only reinforces the sense of crisis and tension within the aristocratic world.

The image of Bertram as military hero, described by the women in III, 5 is in contrast to that of the sullen young husband in the earlier part of the play. Readings of Bertram's character have been greatly influenced by Dr. Johnson's famous dismissal of him as “a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helena as a coward and leaves her as profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.”⁷ A major problem for directors of All's Well That Ends Well is indeed presented by the figure of Bertram, for if Dr. Johnson's view is shared, the question must be asked as to what a woman so virtuous, beautiful and noble-spirited as Helena could ever find to love in such a man? It would seem that his rashness and extravagance should be conceived of as virtù in Machiavelli's sense of the term so that when he appears at the head of the Florentine army, he comes as the conquering hero, the Renaissance Prince, a dominant stage figure described by Diana as a “most gallant fellow”. In V, 3 it is hard not to admire the skill with which Bertram tries to argue himself out of his increasingly complicated predicaments, when he lies about the ring, blackens Diana's name and rejects Parolles, and finally only concedes defeat when Helena appears, that is, when dealt a blow by fortune that individual cunning cannot counter. Even at this stage, however, Bertram is by no means unequivocal. Challenged directly by Helena with “Will you be mine now you are doubly won?” (V, 3, 308), he replies not to her but to the King, in a weak couplet hinging on a conditional clause:

If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly
I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.

(V, 3, 509 f.)

Helena retorts immediately, in a strong rhyming couplet, with another conditional, addressed directly to Bertram:

If it appear not plain and prove untrue
Deadly divorce step between me and you.

(V, 3, 511 f.)

It is interesting to note that Helena talks about divorce at this point in the play, the moment when seemingly all wrongs are righted and husband and wife are united at last under the king's protection. It is also somewhat curious, since divorce has been notably absent from the play up to this moment. Bertram, when lamenting his fate to Parolles in II, 3 talks about the indissolubility of his marriage.—“Undone and forfeited to cares forever” (II, 3, 263) and chooses flight from France as his only hope of avoiding a wife he does not want. Helena's reference to “deadly divorce” in her final lines carries a weight that cannot be overlooked.

Divorce in Reformation England was by no means a clear cut issue. The Church recognized divorce on grounds of consanguinity or affinity within the prohibited degrees of marriage or for permanent impotence. It also recognized separation a mensa et thoro, for cases of adultery or extreme cruelty, but in both categories remarriage was forbidden.⁸ In this respect, the Anglican Church differed from most of the other Protestant churches, which allowed remarriage for the innocent party following a divorce, and the divorce debate reached a climax in 1604, (N.B. George Hunter dates All's Well tentatively as being produced in 1603-04)⁹ when No. 107 of the Canons finally forbade the remarriage of divorced persons conclusively.

In her essay on Arden of Faversham, Catharine Belsey sums up the political significance of the divorce issue in Elizabethan England: “The importance of the divorce debate lies in its polarisation of conflicting definitions of marriage. Broadly, the Anglican position was that marriage was indissoluble, that couples were joined by God for the avoidance of fornication and the procreation of children, and that there was no remedy for marital disharmony and discontent … Equally broadly, the Puritans held that marriage was a civil covenant, a thing indifferent to salvation, that it depended on consent, and that where this was lacking the couple could not be said to be joined by God, and could therefore justly be put asunder. … The contest for the meaning of marriage cannot be isolated from the political struggles which characterize the century between the Reformation and the English Revolution.”¹⁰

Reading All's Well That Ends Well in the light of that divorce debate and the political implications of dissolubility of marriage throws the supposedly fairy tale world of the play into different focus. Throughout the play, a major structural feature is the contract-oath, and this binding nature of marriage is explored together with the bond between Lord and subject. Both relationships come together in Bertram, the new self-willed aristocrat, recently come into his inheritance but blocked from expressing his will either in public or in private by his overlord, the King. In II, 3, ordered by the King to take Helena as his wife, Bertram accepts in a speech of bitter irony, professing subjection to the King's will while at the same time questioning the basis of the King's power over him:

Pardon, my gracious lord; for I submit
My fancy to your eyes. When I consider
What great creation and what dole of honour
Flies where you bid it. I find that she, which late
Was in my nobler thoughts most base, is now
The praised of the king; who, so ennobled
Is as 'twere born so.

(II. 3. 167-173)

At this moment of supposedly bowing to the King's wishes, Bertram chooses to talk in terms of his own subjection to the power the King exercises over him, and, again describing Helena as “she”, refers to the social gulf between them both. She, Helena, being the favoured of the King, is as good as ennobled, is the surface message of Bertram's speech, but the deep structure reveals the irony beneath his words. His very acknowledgement of the relationship of fealty between himself and the King is an assertion of his belief in the binding nature of that contract, a contract made by virtue of his aristocratic birth alone, and that belief negates any statement he may make about the ennobling of Helena through actions rather than through blood. Even while appearing to accede to the King's wishes, he is challenging the fundamental premise on which the King's command is being made.

The relationship between King and subject is presented as being based on the subject's acceptance of the King's absolute power, and in the same way the relationship between husband and wife is shown as an indissoluble contract. Bertram enters into two such contracts—publicly, with Helena, and privately, through the exchange of rings with the woman he thinks is Diana. The validity of that private marriage is not called into question—when she sees the ring on Diana's finger, the Countess declares

Of six preceding ancestors, that gem
Conferr'd by testament to th'sequent issue,
Hath it been owed and worn. This is his wife:
That ring's a thousand proofs.

(V. 3. 195-198)

The value conferred on the ring by heredity becomes a sign to the Countess of Bertram's sincerity, and again the link is made in the text between the inherited power system of the aristocracy and marriage, regardless of whether that marriage has been celebrated before a priest or not. The marriage contract is presented as having an intrinsic value of its own, like the blood relationship of father and son, that cannot be challenged.

It is significant that neither of the marriages are presented on stage. We hear about them both, post facto but do not see them take place. Instead, what we do see is the exchange of vows between Helena and the King, when she promises healing and he promises to allow her to choose a husband “from forth the royal blood of France,” (II. 1. 196) and this scene is strongly reminiscent of a marriage. Helena swears an oath that has both a temporal and spatial dimension, showing her total commitment to her task in the following lines:

If I break time, or flinch in property
Of what I spoke, unpitied let me die,
And well deserv'd.

(II. 1. 186-188)

This oath is the only one that is actually kept. Bertram allows his private passions to continually over-ride public declarations of loyalty, hence in his marriage to Helena he has no qualms about declaring his contract before a priest but then refusing to consummate the pact and likewise he is willing to consummate but not publicly acknowledge his contract with Diana.

In the decaying courtly world of this play, the whole question of public and private contract is thrown into confusion. What we have is a picture of a society in turmoil, self-destructive, as the old moral idealism of the feudal hierarchy is threatened by the new opportunistic ethos. Bertram struggles to reject feudal authority when it extends into his private life, but fails because his opposition is rooted in an equally hierarchical conception of the world. All he can do is take flight to another court and play at being a military hero. In the end he is forced to accept the authority of his overlord and publicly acknowledge not only a wife but the heir she presents him with, who offers him the possibility of consolidating his own social position in time future. It is a compromise, but an inevitable one if the courtly class position is to be maintained.

Likewise, Helena's final solution is also a compromise. She has pushed through a contract in spite of the other partner's opposition and in the process has replaced the pre-Reformation idealisation of virginity with a marriage that ensures her a high social status as she is accepted into the aristocracy. What she does not get is commitment from her partner, and at the end of the play is as far away from a marriage as a union of equal minds as she has ever been. She is bound to Bertram in a power relationship, quite unlike Milton's idealised vision of marriage as “a covenant, the very being whereof consists not in a forced cohabitation, and counterfeit performance of duties, but in unfeigned love and peace.”¹¹

Helena's reference to “deadly divorce”, seen in terms of the inter-relatedness of public and private contracts in All's Well That Ends Well, and set against the ongoing debate in England about the social basis for divorce is therefore a crucial moment in the play. The Anglican orthodoxy feared divorce as leading to disorder, and as setting a dangerous precedent that might cause other types of contract to be questioned, most particularly that existing between prince and subject. Divorce, in short, was dangerously revolutionary, and it is hardly surprising that Milton should have argued for liberty within marriage as reflecting man's right to liberty within the state: “He who marries intends as little to conspire his own ruin, as he that swears allegiance: and as a whole people is in proportion to an ill government, so is one man to an ill marriage. If they, against any authority, covenant or statute may, by the sovereign edict of charity, save not only their lives but honest liberties from unworthy bondage, as well may he against any private covenant, which he never entered to his mischief, redeem himself from unsupportable disturbances to honest peace and just contentment.”¹²

At a time of growing disquiet and economic crisis, with the passing of Elizabeth and the accession of James bringing sharply into focus the relationship between Monarch and religious groups, Shakespeare wrote a play that offers both an analysis of the complexities of the post-Reformation views of the marriage contract vis-à-vis the State and is also a warning to a class that has grown too complacent in its demands for absolute power. All's Well That Ends Well is a signpost on the road to the English Revolution.

Notes

1. Beitrag zum Kolloquium der Shakespeare-Tage in Weimar, vorgetragen am 23. April 1983.

2. Logan Pearsall Smith, On Reading Shakespeare, London 1933, p. 58.

3. T. Middleton Raysor (ed.), Coleridge's Shakespeare Criticism. London 1930.

4. Cf. A. W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art. London 1883.

5. Muriel Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry. London 1951, p. 162.

6. Cf. Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in All's Well That Ends Well'”, in: English Literary History 21 (1954) 3, pp. 17-29.

7. Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare, London 1765.

8. Cf. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. London 1977, p. 37.

9. Arden Edition. London 1967, Introduction p. XXV.

10. Catherine Belsey, “Alice Arden's Crime”, in: Renaissance Studies No 13, Spring 1983. I am indebted to Catherine Belsey for first drawing my attention to the political significance of the divorce debate in the sixteenth century in a version of this article presented at the University of Southampton in 1982. Without the inspiration of her paper, mine would not have been written.

11. John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In: Milton's Prose Writings. Ed. by K. M. Burton. London 1958, pp. 247-319.

12. Milton, ibid.