SOURCE: “Marriage as Destiny: An Essay on All's Well That Ends Well,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring, 1975, pp. 344-59.

[In the following essay, Hill explores how familial relations and marriage eventually enable Bertram to assume his proper role within the comic plot of All's Well That Ends Well.]

Shakespeare's plays persistently treat familial relationships. Neither Jonson's nor Marlowe's do, except incidentally, and from the perspective of Shakespeare, their avoidance is odd. The only characters in The Alchemist who are related to one another in ways prior to the gullings that summon all to the house of Lovewit are Kastril and Dame Pliant, and their relation as brother and sister remains essentially unexplored. The isolation of Faustus is defined by a lack of familial ties: he is a man without parents, siblings, spouse, or children—everyman, yes, but no man, too. By contrast, Webster's Duchess of Malfi, whatever her social isolation as a result of her marriage to Antonio, is seen relationally: the central conflict in that play is between rival family and marital relationships—marriage to her steward versus her sibling-tie to Ferdinand. The dramatist has every reason to exploit these ties, universal in occurrence and primal in strength; the critic finds in family relationships and their reconstitution in marriage useful differentiae for comedy and tragedy.

Tragedy, which ends in death, deals in familial relationships that have gone sour, become incapable of change, and hence destructive of the individuals that constitute the family unit. Comedy, which ends in marriage, argues the possibility of change through the agency of new and compensatory familial constellations. In tragedies the promise of marriage is characteristically frustrated or illusory. Othello's marriage to Desdemona, that archetypically romantic union of opposites—black with white, native with exotic, age with youth, military activity with domestic passivity—is destroyed by an agent of the old order of things, whose contempt for women, for authority, and for marriage is provoked by the new relationship that Othello has forged with Desdemona. In Hamlet there are two marriages, one in fact, the other in prospect; but Gertrude's with Claudius is at once incestuous and adulterous, the occasion if not the cause for murder, a retrograde step that blights the future hopes of Prince Hamlet and undoes the past accomplishments of his father; and Hamlet's own with Ophelia is undone by Polonius. In Lear, a classic instance of marriage as parental compensation goes forward in the first scene, as France accepts with gratitude the very daughter that Lear has just disowned in rage. But the exigencies of the political overplot banish France, and it is as the daughter of Lear that Cordelia returns to England, not as Queen of France. The death that concludes all in tragedy is thus the death of any possibility that conflicts intrinsic to the human situation—conflicts most intimately experienced within the context of familial relationships—shall be resolved through marriage.

Conversely, the marriages that conclude Shakespeare's comedies are emblems of hope, secular miracles, affirmations of the possibility of growth, yes, but precisely in those relationships where familial conflict is most acute. To take two especially symmetrical examples: in Romeo and Juliet, friendship (male-male loyalty) and marriage (male-female love) are presented as irreconcilable opposites; in The Merchant of Venice, the reverse is true. The marriage of Romeo and Juliet promises to end the traditional hatred of Capulet and Montague, but it is destroyed by Romeo's impulsive loyalty to Mercutio, for in the instant that Romeo determines upon the murder of Tybalt in revenge for the death of Mercutio, he irrevocably destroys the marriage he has just celebrated with Juliet. In the Merchant, however, the friendship of Bassanio with Antonio—Bassanio has no family but Antonio—subsidizes his courtship of Portia, whose father is dead and whose mother goes unmentioned, and the marriage of Portia and Bassanio saves Antonio's life and preserves his friendship with Bassanio. Characteristically, the change of venue common to so many of the comedies involves a removal of the participants from rigid and impacted social and familial situations, frequently associated with royal courts, to locales nearby (a wood near Athens, the Forest of Arden, Belmont, Bohemia, Bermuda) in which more symmetrical and more satisfying relationships may flourish. In the Forest of Arden, the fratricidal rivalry of Oliver and Orlando metamorphoses into parallel marriages to Celia and Rosalind, cousins. In Othello, the removal to Cyprus promises, but does not fulfill, the same expectation. The pattern is so familiar that it scarcely deserves note. Still, it is operative in plays that are formally comedies—that is, that conclude in marriage, not death—yet are neither obviously romantic nor particularly risible. Such generically are the so-called problem comedies, and in particular All's Well That Ends Well, of which the best that is said of it is that it was a staging ground for Measure for Measure.¹ An analysis of the familial basis for the marriage of Bertram and Helena, however, shows a play at once more coherent in itself and more of a piece with other Shakespearean plays than is commonly acknowledged.

II

Some bracketing definitions are in order. (1) Whatever the laugh-quotient, the play is a comedy by any Shakespearean standard. That is, it ends happily, in the marriage of its principals, though the dénouement is not so much the marriage itself, for that is concluded in II.iii, as it is the consummation of that marriage, its public acknowledgment, and the evidence of Helena's pregnancy. The essential movement of the play, then, is from a de jure to a de facto marriage, from social arrangement and dynastic continuity to sexual commitment and emotional fulfillment.

(2) The title suggests obliquely—as others of Shakespeare's comedies do directly—that the play has to do with the realization of wishes, desires, hopes, of which romantic love and its celebration in marriage are, respectively, the personal and social symbols. The theme of “what you will” is perfectly explicit for Helena, for whom marriage with Bertram is avowedly a matter of life and death—hers and the King's; it is less so for Bertram, for whom marriage with Helena is decidedly not “as you like it.” Bertram regards it as a death to him of his hopes: “Undone and forfeited to cares for ever!” (II.iii.263). Risking death he rushes off to war to avoid it: “I'll to the Tuscan wars and never bed her” (l. 269). Only after the convolutions of the plot have been worked out does he come to accept his marriage to Helena as—potentially, at least—the positive and self-fulfilling relationship that it is.

(3) The intellectual quality of the play links it equally with the happy comedy of As You Like It and the problem comedy of Measure for Measure. The themes of virtue, ambition, and nobility have each provoked extended commentary. But there are various other themes, drawn similarly from Renaissance conduct books and romance tradition, that inform the texture of thought and shape the action in the play. Like Hamlet, All's Well is concerned with the congruence of word and deed, intention and act. The twin themes of fortune (fate) and free will (nature) occupy the minds of Helena and Bertram in equal but asymmetrical measure. Helena is fated to love Bertram without apparently being able to marry him, and Bertram is fated to marry Helena without being the least in love with her. Youth versus age (Lafew and the King, Bertram and Parolles; the Countess and Helena), appearance and reality, wisdom and folly, nature and supernature, the individual and society—the list reads like a litany of Shakespearean themes. The problem for the critic, of course, is to see in the play the underlying pattern that animates it, that organizes the multiplicity of its intellectual motifs about a coherent and meaningful center of concern and urgency.

It is precisely here that the prior familial constraints that provoke the marriage are crucial. Bertram and Helena have each recently lost fathers: Helena so recently that her tears are mistaken as for him and not for Bertram; Bertram, that the household of the Countess is in mourning, “all in black” (I.i.s.d.). Both fathers are ideal figures. Whereas in Shakespeare's source, “the Counte of Rossiglione … was sickely and diseased” (Arden ed., p. 145), in the play he is “such a man [as] / Might be a copy to these younger times,” famous alike for his “moral parts,” his soldiership (“He did look far / Into the service of the time, and was / Discipled of the bravest”), and his social graces: “So like a courtier, contempt nor bitterness / Were in his pride or sharpness …” (I.ii.45-46, 21, 26-28, 36-37; cf. 38-45). Like Prince Hamlet, whom he resembles in ways more than adventitious, Bertram has the equivocal blessing, the good “fortune,” to have a father at once ideally virtuous and definitively distant, whose reputation serves as a spur to achievement, but whose absence in death renders him incapable of serving as the model his son needs for that achievement. For this reason, Bertram departs for the royal court at Paris, and for this reason, too, he falls under the influence of Parolles, who plays Falstaff to his Hal. Lafew, the Lord Chief Justice of the piece, early on disqualifies himself as paternal model by his put-down—“I would it were not notorious” (I.i.33)—the moment Bertram opens his mouth, and Bertram rejects the King precisely for his role in forcing Helena upon him. The obligation to live up to his father's example as his lineal successor, to show the nobility of his birth in virtue as well as virtù, in deed as in word, in fulfillment as in promise, rings again and again in Bertram's ears. The greeting of the King echoes his mother's parting advice: “Youth, thou bear'st thy father's face; … thy father's moral parts / Mayest thou inherit too!” (I.ii.19-22; cf. I.i.57-60). But in the event, self-affirmation and a virtuous conformity to paternal example are rival, not congruent, impulses in Bertram's mind and will.

III

The first line of the play abruptly and cryptically announces the theme. Entering in mourning, the Countess announces: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband” (I.i.1-2). Here it is not a marital union that compensates for a familial loss (as in France's grateful betrothal to a Cordelia whom Lear disinherits in his fury), but the other way around. It is the compensation of her son's presence, the now Count Rossillion, for her late husband that the Countess is here renouncing; and the separation, a rite de passage for the young Bertram, is as the death of a “second husband” to his widowed mother. Still, there are compensations. The King will substitute for the absent Count as both father and husband: “You shall find of the king a husband, madam,” says Lafew, and “you, sir”—addressing Bertram—“a father” (ll. 6-7). In departing, Bertram acknowledges his formal dependency upon the King: “I must attend his majesty's command, to whom I am now in ward, evermore in subjection” (ll. 4-5). But if Bertram has reason now to grieve the loss of a father—“weep o'er my father's death anew” (ll. 3-4)—we may suppose that he will later have cause to resent wardship to a man whose frailty and imminent death threaten a repetition of that abandonment. The King's precarious health thus becomes the topic of the dialogue that follows. We learn that Helena, too, has lost a father—one, too, of ideal stature, “whose skill was almost as great as his honesty,” that “had it stretch'd so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work” (ll. 17-20). Here is a potential countermovement to the “common theme” of the “death of fathers” (Hamlet I.ii.103-04). Like Bertram, Helena is “sole child” of her father, but unlike him, she is quite prepared to substitute a husband when she has lost a father. Her tears, we soon find out, are ambiguous: to others, they are for her dead parent; to her, for the departing Bertram. This she makes explicit in her soliloquy, which she speaks after the Countess has bid her son a ritual farewell, has given him, like Polonius to the departing Laertes, both blessing and advice (cf. ll. 57-66):

Helena. I think not on my father,
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him; my imagination
Carries no favour in't but Bertram's.

(ll. 77-81)

(Her confusion of pronoun reference, “his … him … he … him,” mirrors the conflation of the two men in her mind.) But the social disparity is too great, however vital the bond—“there is no living, none, / If Bertram be away” (ll. 82-83)—and Helena concludes: “Th'ambition in my love thus plagues itself: / The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love” (ll. 88-90).

As Bertram is ward of the King, so is Helena of the Countess, “bequeathed,” as the Countess says, “to my overlooking” (ll. 35-36). As her natural mother goes unmentioned, the Countess becomes one: “You know, Helen, / I am a mother to you” (I.iii.132-33; cf. ll. 134-49). Through familial intimacy quite as much as native virtue, Helena acquires the social promotion her birth has denied her. The nature of this relationship is made explicit in the interview in I.iii in which she confesses her love for Bertram when she rejects the maternal offers of the Countess, lest incest bar marriage. Indeed, the Countess is more maternal in her adoptive relationship with Helena than she is with her natural son. Him she can but “deliver” up to the court, but her maternal energies find a natural and needed outlet in her role as confidante and patroness of Helena. Its basis is the strong identification she feels for Helena, of age for youth, in Helena's apparently desperate love for the absent Bertram:

Even so it was with me when I was young;
If ever we are nature's, these are ours; this thorn
Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong;
Our blood to us, this to our blood is born:
It is the show and seal of nature's truth,
Where love's strong passion is impress'd in youth.
By our remembrances of days foregone,
Such were our faults, or then we thought them none.

(ll. 123-30)

It is a speech of conspicuous generosity of feeling, one that renders the niggardly behavior of her son all the more repellant. Her willingness to extend a merely formal wardship into a substantive and explicitly parental tie, to overlook the rivalry in love the two women have for Bertram, raises the naturally gifted Helena—“She is young, wise, fair; / In these to nature she's immediate heir, / And these breed honour” (II.iii.131-33)—to a position of familial and hence social equality with Bertram. It is a process that the King will continue and complete: “all that life can rate / Worth name of life in thee hath estimate: / Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage—all …” (II.i.178-80). In a testing of the genuineness of Helena's love, of which she has been earlier informed by her Steward (no mother wants her son vamped by someone merely ambitious to be the next Countess), she forces Helena to confess to the strength—and hopelessness—of her passion. She does so, in effect, by asking Helena to choose between the two of them. Helena's dilemma is that she wants the security of being the Countess' adoptive daughter, but not at the cost of losing Bertram. “Daughter and mother / So strive upon [her] pulse …,” the Countess remarks, and, as Helena realizes, only through separation from her adoptive brother will the definitive bar of incest be removed: “Pardon, madam; / The Count Rossillion cannot be my brother” (I.iii.149-50). On her knees in submission and supplication, Helena begs that they not be regarded as rivals: “My dearest madam, / Let not your hate encounter with my love, / For loving where you do” (ll. 202-04). Instead, she invokes (as the Countess had earlier) their essential commonalty of purpose, experience, and love:

                    … 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!

(ll. 204-12)

Like the would-be wooer of Portia, Helena is prepared to “give and hazard all she has,” in the name of a love that is not more precious to her than it is impossible of fulfillment.

Though she is folk heroine, not social climber (no one except Cinderella's stepmother would accuse her of “ambition”), there are limits to the exercise of pure will: “Who ever strove / To know her merit that did miss her love?” (I.i.222-23). Still her impulse to follow Bertram is underwritten by the happy coincidence that the most effective medicine her father left her is a specific for the ailing King's “fistula.” More than coincidence, really, as she herself acknowledges:

                    There's something in't
More than my father's skill, which was the great'st
Of his profession, that his good receipt
Shall for my legacy be sanctified
By th' luckiest stars in heaven. …

(I.iii.237-41)

Even the best of nature requires the providential concurrence of powers beyond natural ken. But Helena is more than willing to stake her all on its success: “I'd venture / The well-lost life of mine on his grace's cure / By such a day, an hour” (ll. 242-44). Won over, the Countess gives her blessing, “my leave and love, / Means and attendants, and my loving greetings / To those of mine in court” (ll. 246-48). If one so interested in Bertram's well-being as his own mother, one so close to him that he has supplied for her the place of her own absent husband, can give her blessing upon the tie, we cannot very well interpose our own objections.

IV

Helena belongs to that class of active, intelligent, and aggressive Shakespearean heroines who don male disguises—assume the “masculine” initiative—in pursuit of their fulfillment as married women. This point is made explicit in Helena's interview with Parolles on the subject of her virginity, her social “honour,” her marital capital, which she would “lose”—invest—“to her own liking” (I.i.147). There is a paradox here: how can one actively be passive? how, given her dependent status as woman and ward, translate thought into deed, wish into actuality, love into marriage? “'Tis pity—,” she muses; “What's pity?,” Parolles asks, to which she replies:

That wishing well had not a body in't
Which might be felt, that we, the poorer born,
Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes,
Might with effects of them follow our friends,
And show what we alone must think, which never
Returns us thanks.

(ll. 175-82)

She is “not in his sphere,” as she—and we—realize, and the first half of the play is construed to minimize that disparity. But discrepancy of rank and birth symbolizes a greater and more germane distance: first, between the two principals (even as they are joined socially, they are divorced sexually) and, second, within each as individuals (as between thought and deed, wish and fulfillment of that wish, personal self and social role). The problem of the play is to orchestrate the simultaneous and reciprocal resolution of these conflicts—the reduction of distance, the creation of a viable intimacy, within and between Helena and Bertram, both as individuals and as a couple, all in the context of an arranged marriage.

Helena's case is evidently the easier of the two. She has but to secure the alliance of the Countess. So authorized, she can travel to Paris to seek out Bertram, not as her rival but as her emissary and adoptive daughter. And it is as her father's daughter that she cures the King, bringing the dead back to life, restoring him to potency and power. Lafew's comment strikes the proper note here. “I have seen a medicine,” he tells the King,

That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With sprightly fire and motion; whose simple touch
Is powerful to araise King Pippen, nay,
To give great Charlemain a pen in's hand
And write to her a love-line.

(II.i.71-77)

The phallic imagery is nicely understated, but the tenor is clear enough: that which was dead shall rise again. In effect, in restoring the King to health and potency, Helena reacquires a father who can, in turn, bestow her in marriage. The cure is, naturally, a miracle, “the rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times,” completely of a piece with the ordinary matter of Shakespearean comedy:

He that of greatest works is finisher
Oft does them by the weakest minister.
So holy writ in babes hath judgment shown,
When judges have been babes. Great floods have flown
From simple sources, and great seas have dried
When miracles have by the great'st been denied.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises, and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.

(ll. 135-43)

Helena risks her honor and her life on her cure, and in her success she is allowed the choice of her husband. By supernatural intervention and royal prerogative, woman is authorized to play the man—to choose, not be chosen, in marriage. Those who puzzle as to why Helena should love Bertram in the first place and choose to stay with him in the second ignore what parentally the two have in common: in the Countess they share the same mother; their fathers are dead; and in the King they share the same adoptive surrogate. Given the romance element of the play, it is surely expressive of Helena's deepest wishes that she be able to bring back to life, to restore to potency, power, and authority, a father who will grant her her wish and bestow upon her Bertram.

But so delicately poised is this marital equation that what is appropriate to her deepest wishes is directly contrary to Bertram's. For the father whom she re-creates for herself is not one that Bertram is disposed to obey. He asserts his traditional right “in such a business … to use / The help of mine own eyes” (II.iii.107-08). Whatever right a king may have in disposing a minor ward in marriage, dramatically our sympathies go to Bertram in his wish, in matters as intimate as love and marriage, to choose for himself. There is some question, however, as to whether he is, in fact as well as intention, capable of acting in his own best self-interest. Objectively, Helena is a marital prize of the highest order, and Bertram must obey his King. True self-interest, marriage to Helena, and submission to royal authority, distinct as all three are in Bertram's mind, are clearly congruent in the play. When Helena withdraws her petition upon Bertram's rejection—“That you are well restor'd, my lord, I'm glad. / Let the rest go” (ll. 147-48), the King forces the issue by threatening to withdraw his support from Bertram, to abandon him to his own self-destructive devices:

                    Check thy contempt;
Obey our will which travails in thy good;
Believe not thy disdain, but presently
Do thine own fortunes that obedient right
Which both thy duty owes and our power claims;
Or I will throw thee from my care for ever
Into the staggers and the careless lapse
Of youth and ignorance. …

(ll. 157-64)

A fatherless son, threatened here with abandonment by his adoptive father—“Welcome, count; / My son's no dearer” (I.ii.75-76)—Bertram acquiesces in the marriage:

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 enobled,
Is as 'twere born so.

(II.iii.167-73)

Helena has been granted the fulfillment of her wishes; in equity Bertram demands no less. The challenge, of course, is whether these two, meant for each other no less than Beatrice and Benedick, can, on their own initiatives and left to their own devices, acting on self-perceived motives of apparent self-interest, come together and stay together. For the moment, the answer is no. It is one of the components of the myth of romantic love that the individual partners shall have freely chosen one another, independently of any social or familial matrix of which they are a part. The enforced passivity of his role in the marriage contract galls Bertram beyond tolerance, and he naturally resists the obvious truth that he could not possibly have chosen better for himself than others—the Countess, the King, Helena—have chosen for him. (In this regard, Helena's love for Bertram is less problematic: it is simply there from the beginning, a donné of her person and her situation at Rossillion.) Thus, as soon as the marriage is celebrated, Bertram escapes to the military. Abetted by Parolles, whose elective counsel Bertram pointedly prefers to that of either Lafew or the King, he lies to his King and his wife and sets off for Florence. There he is improbably given the generalship of the cavalry—the horse, “Mars's fiery steed,” is Bertram's emblem in this play²—and wins back in war the honor he feels he has lost in marriage. As corollary to war-making (and through the adroit pimping of Parolles), he seeks the conquest of the virgin Diana, poor but nobly born.

Meanwhile, Helena returns to Rossillion, where she receives from Bertram the impossible conditions of their reunion. Despite her credentials as the daughter of Gerard de Narbon, there are limits to the powers of will: she can restore an aged king to potency; she can secure a husband far beyond her own social rank; but there is simply no way she can will her own impregnation. Conversely, though he will wed her but “not bed her,” it is not sex that drives Bertram from Helena, but the element of social and sexual compulsion which marriage to her represents. Bertram is decidedly not lacking in masculine force, despite his susceptibility to consolation in the company of the befeathered Parolles. He is an exemplary soldier, and he is clearly attracted to Diana. But he treasures the model of masculine love as simultaneously self-assertive and self-fulfilling, where in his own particular it is not. Exactly the same is true of Helena, and in this respect the pair are ideally matched. But where Bertram thrashes about in the random aggression of the battlefield and the bedroom in the company of the coward Parolles, Helena embarks upon a solitary pilgrimage to St. Jaques le Grand (cf. III.ii.102-29). The journey is professedly in penance for her marital “ambition”; in fact, it expresses her frustration—and consequent self-blame—at her inability to do for Bertram what she had done with such singular success for the King: to create, out of the intensity of her love and wholeness of her own self-giving, the entire substance of a relationship with another person. Her travels bring her to Florence together (later) with the news that she has died. The exchange is arranged with Diana, and like Mariana in Measure for Measure, she forgoes her very identity to consummate the wished-for union with her Angelo. From the extremes, then, of willed self-assertion—the restoration to life of a dead father and the securing of a husband—she passes to the converse extreme, complete self-abnegation, total loss of personal identity and will in love, and a symbolic death. But marriage, with its inevitable compulsions, its necessary curbing of unbridled individualism, continues to spook the skittish Bertram, and he flees Diana the instant the news of Helena's death reaches him: that is, the very moment—and the very news—that would have made it possible for him to fulfill his promise to marry her. Evidently, whether we are a Helena or a Bertram, we must be careful what we wish for, lest we get it.

If we ask further why Bertram should reject out of hand the “young, wise, fair” Helena, whose very name connotes the loveliest woman in the world, the answer must be because she is to him such a transparent stand-in for his own mother, the Dowager Countess. The marriage is what she had been wishing for all along, but to Bertram it simply constitutes submission to her will. “It hath happen'd all as I would have had it, save that he comes not along with her” (III.ii.1-2), the Countess remarks at Helena's return. And when Bertram's impossible letter is read, her response is unequivocal: “He was my son, / But I do wash his name out of my blood / And thou art all my child” (ll. 66-68). Like Gertrude, the Countess is a powerfully maternal figure, even matriarchal, and like King Hamlet, the old Count is dead. Such a marriage to the adoptive daughter of one's own mother has its own terrors, and insofar as Bertram is truly his mother's own son, we may assume that he wants—and fears—that transposed intimacy in equal measure. That circumstances beyond his control should enforce this unacknowledged wish upon him precisely through the agency of his King and guardian fills him with understandable anxiety, for the warmth and promise of intimacy that have attracted Helena to the Countess repel her son from Helena with equal force. Rather than wonder why Helena should love a Bertram and Bertram should reject a Helena, we should recall what happened when a similarly compensatory marriage between Ophelia and Prince Hamlet was blocked by Polonius, despite Gertrude's apparent encouragement and support, on grounds identical to those on which Bertram rejects Helena.

V

In war, Bertram finds the honor he seeks, earning the praise of the Duke of Florence and the promise of letters of recommendation for his courtly dossier that puts him on an equal and autonomous footing with his esteemed father. But war and the courtship of death have their limitations as a mode of self-fulfillment, as Helena, who takes upon herself the guilt of any danger that the reckless Bertram might risk, is the first to realize:

          Poor lord, is't I
That chase thee from thy country, and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event
Of the none-sparing war? …
                    better 'twere
I met the ravin lion when he roar'd
With sharp constraint of hunger; better 'twere
That all the miseries which nature owes
Were mine at once. No; come thou home, Rossillion,
Whence honour but of danger wins a scar,
As oft it loses all. …

(III.ii.102-05, 116-22)

After war, sex—as practiced by the predatory Bertram upon the vulnerable Diana—is equally destructive. For an hour's encounter in which no words pass, Bertram barters away the very family honor he had invoked in rejecting Helena. And for all our distaste for the bed-trick, it remains the perfect emblem of the joyless encounter that Bertram is in fact seeking. In return for the ring of his father's that has been passed down for six successive generations and that betokens the unexceptioned legitimacy of his inherited honor, he accepts the ring from off Helena's finger, thus affiancing himself to his own wife as a condition of fathering his own successor.

Surely Bertram's youth is crucial here. Scarcely an adolescent, packed off to the court to complete his education but dependent upon the King and too young to be sent to Italy, passion and self-restraint (“blood and virtue”) are precariously poised in him. “My Lord,” the Countess had said to Lafew, “'Tis an unseason'd courtier; good my lord, / Advise him” (I.i.66-68). Bertram's education as a courtier is the essential subject of the play, and that means learning to be a son to his mother, the son of his father, a subject to his King, a husband to his wife—and, in the future beyond the play, a father to his own son. What is unusual, in the context of Shakespeare's treatment of courtship and marriage, is that the education sentimentale proper to courtship must here emerge after the marriage has been irrevocably established. Bertram must come to accept that marriage to Helena is in fact in his own best self-interest, that whatever he thinks he wants, he actually desires her far more intensely than he is prepared to admit to himself. Hence the importance of their union in the dark, for darkness conceals not only Helena's identity from him but also his own deepest desires from himself. Only under these improbable circumstances can his impossible demands upon her—and his own inadmissable wishes for himself—be simultaneously fulfilled. This is true equally of his explicit demand (secure my ring, bear my child) as it is of his unconscious one (be to me as my mother was to my father). Just as Helena's marital destiny could finally be realized only through an act of supreme self-abnegation, so with Bertram. The difference lies in the fact that Helena is conscious of that necessity, while Bertram is not. Helena sleeps with Bertram knowing that he is her husband and because she loves him. He sleeps with her—indeed, can only sleep with her—under the condition that her identity remain hidden. Because he cannot, of his own volition, bring himself to take his father's place with respect to his mother's stand-in, Helena, he sleeps with her thinking she is Diana, a girl to whom he promises marriage, betroths himself, and whom he then betrays. Perhaps Laertes' advice to Ophelia was not so out of place after all.

Helena contrives Bertram's exposure by doing exactly as he demands. For all her force of will, she is capable of equally great submission: “Sir, I can nothing say / But that I am your most obedient servant” (II.v.71-72). She returns to the King for the husband she had earlier won. In the interim, however, she has herself learned the limits of will and the qualifications of desire; that marital relations, unlike the parental and filial ones on which they are based, are reciprocal and interlocking. Bertram has yet to learn much the same lesson. The exchange of rings trips him up, and he is obliged to admit in public what he has done in private. Under the scrutiny of the assembled court, deed must now match word; act, intent; social role, private self. Sex and society must be incorporated in a marriage both de facto and de jure. Caught in the toils of his own duplicity—as much self-deceit as deceit of others—it comes as an enormous relief to Bertram to learn that he has in fact committed adultery with his own wife, that he has betrayed, not the virtuous virgin of Florence, Diana, but only himself—less virtuous, perhaps, but as Count Rossillion, just as virginal.

VI

In this, a comedy, it is not for Shakespeare to articulate the process by which Bertram can come to say, “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly / I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (V.iii.309-10). Whatever else he may share with Hamlet, the youthful Bertram has none of the latter's introspection (itself by no means an infallible guide), and the dramatic sleight-of-hand by which Helena and Bertram are brought together does not wholly make explicit the substantive basis they have for finding in marriage to the other their own true self-interests. But it is simply churlish to contradict Helena when she says, “O my good lord, when I was like this maid / I found you wondrous kind” (ll. 303-04), where “kind” invokes Bertram's solicitude as well as his natural condition. None of us was there, and we must take Helena's word for it. Still, if their marriage is recognized as the favorable—and wished-for—compensation for prior familial imbalances and parental asymmetries, then its rationale is evident and agreeable. In marriage to Helena, Bertram secures a relationship at once socially acceptable and sexually satisfying, a way of marrying his mother and obeying his father (he makes no complaints about “Diana” afterwards, and it was certainly not because of sexual inadequacy that he originally deserted her). In her marriage to Bertram, Helena finds the father she has lost and, as the Countess' daughter-in-law, the mother she has never had. En route, she fulfills her own deepest desires as a woman: as a daughter to restore new life to the old King and so vindicate her father's memory, and as a wife to bear Bertram's child, desires parallel to Bertram's for military success and glory. Only the literal-minded will begrudge the substantive foundations of this union. Plausible, it is not; social barriers impede it; there is frankly an element of compulsion in it, both as presented to Bertram by the King and by Shakespeare to us. But we too can rejoice in it if we see that the marriage symbolizes on both parts an acceptance of their own faulty parental experiences; that it is no less what Bertram most deeply desires than it is what Helena so explicitly wants; and that it is no less life-giving, restorative, divinely sanctioned, and royally beneficent to him than to her. For Bertram, in his youth, his native rebelliousness, his justifiable fear of the enveloping maternalism of the Countess, and in the absence of his own father, is simply not prepared to admit to himself truths that are self-evident to others. It is to this boundary of self-awareness, self-admission, and self-acceptance that the reluctant Bertram must be brought by the plot-machinery of romance. And with this, Shakespeare draws the curtain. Let Helena's first words be our last:

The mightiest space in fortune nature brings
To join like likes, and kiss like native things.
Impossible be strange attempts to those
That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose
What hath been cannot be.

(I.i.218-22)

Notes

1. Cf. G. K. Hunter, ed., All's Well That Ends Well, The Arden Shakespeare (1959; rpt. London, 1967), pp. xxiii-xxiv. All quotations are from this edition.

2. Cf. the following (italics mine):

   Bertram. I shall stay here the forehorse to a smock. …

   (II.i.30)

   King. Check thy contempt; …
   Or I will throw thee from my care for ever
   Into the staggers and the careless lapse
   Of youth and ignorance. …

   (II.iii.157, 162-64)

   Parolles. 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. To other regions!
   France is a stable; we that dwell in't jades.

   (II.iii.275-80)

   Duke of Florence. The general of our horse thou art. …

   (III.iii.1)

   King. You boggle shrewdly. …

   (V.iii.231)