SOURCE: “All's Well That Ends Well: The Testing of Romance,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1, March, 1971, pp. 21-41.

[In the following essay, Leggatt explores the tension between elements of romance and elements of realism in All's Well That Ends Well, noting that this tension is never resolved and therefore lends an experimental quality to the play.]

It has been commonly observed that romance and realism are in conflict in All's Well That Ends Well.¹ But, to a surprising extent, critics have been content to state the fact and then drop it, while they pursue issues relating to the play's ideas, its characterization, its source material, or what have you. Perhaps this is because we are so much in the habit of searching Shakespeare's plays for abstract ideas or for characterization which is psychologically explicable. The idea that the play's form may in itself be the controlling factor, the key to understanding, has not received the attention it merits. But these other lines of investigation inevitably become involved with the peculiar tensions of the play, and much debate has ensued. The play has been denounced and defended to the point where, if one sets oneself the task of reading a range of criticism on it, one rises with a feeling of having spent the day in a police court.

Much of the debate centers on the characters. Is Bertram a cad or a promising young fellow who simply needs to grow up? Is Helena a ministering angel or a vulture? Debates like this do not spring out of nothing, and the play provides enough evidence both ways to keep the controversy burning merrily for some time to come. My concern here is not to bring in a verdict of guilty or not guilty on Shakespeare and his characters, but to discover how the trouble started in the first place. I propose to do this by examining the characters, not as “real people” or as vehicles for certain ideas, but as creations springing from, and inextricably wedded to, the peculiar dramatic mode of the play. Or perhaps I should say modes. For Shakespeare is doing something rather unusual here: he is bringing two kinds of dramatic convention together, not in harmony (as in some of the earlier comedies), but in a positive and deliberate conflict. There is nothing here of the easy confidence with which Shakespeare moves from Rosalind's cool, satiric examination of love and marriage to the final masque of Hymen, and makes both acceptable. Here, the values of romance are tested in a world of down-to-earth and often unpleasant realism. The various tests which take place during the play reflect its essential nature: it is a play about testing, and a play which in itself is a test. Nor is the test in any way rigged; the tension between the two dramatic modes is genuine and intense, and the outcome is by no means certain.

In As You Like It, realism could work well enough with romance, since the former was represented by the easygoing animality of Touchstone and the only half-serious cynicism of Jaques. But in All's Well, as in Troilus and Cressida, the realities of life are harsher and much more hostile to romance. The King suffers, not from a genteel complaint like consumption, but from a fistula.² Parolles, condemning his brother officers, does not restrict himself to the usual charges of cowardice, but says of Dumaine: “in his sleep he does little harm, save to his bedclothes about him; but they know his conditions and lay him in straw” (IV.iii.246-49).³ The dangers of pox are recalled by Bertram's velvet patch, which might hide an honorable scar or a syphilitic chancre (IV.v.90-97). The clown Lavatch is not just a joker, but a “foul-mouth'd and calumnious knave” (I.iii.54-55), almost a Thersites. It is in a world like this—a world of fistulas, venereal disease, and bed-wetting—that Helena tries to win a husband by the romantic device of passing a test.

Of course, not everyone in the play talks like Parolles and Lavatch. The older aristocrats are aware of living in a fallen world, and they are rather weary of it; yet they are also aware that there are higher potentials in life than those that are being achieved at present. Being old, they look to the past for their ideals. There is, for example, the memory of Helena's father, whose skill very nearly lifted him above mortality. Shakespeare places his depiction of man's possible capabilities in a realistic context, and therefore keeps it this side of magic—but only just:

Countess: This young gentlewoman had a father—O that “had,” how sad a passage 'tis!—whose skill was almost as great as his honesty; had it stretch'd so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work. …
Lafew: He was excellent indeed, madam … he was skilful enough to have liv'd still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.

(I.i.16-29)

The King says 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)

The play opens with four of the leading characters in mourning for the Count, and his shadow lies over the first few scenes, which are full of reminiscence, giving a sense of past greatness and present decay. The decay is reflected symbolically in the King's sickness, which robs the court of the powerful central personality it needs, and makes virtue the property only of those who have survived from former days.⁴ The King casts a critical eye over the young courtiers who surround him; compared with Bertram's father, they seem frivolous and lacking in honor (I.ii.31-35). They are restless for action in the field, but the King, though willing to give them a chance, does not seem confident about their conduct. On bidding them farewell, he urges them to honor, but adds a very down-to-earth warning: “Those girls of Italy, take heed of them” (II.i.19). In Bertram's case in particular, the King's doubts are justified; and we see nothing in the later military scenes to indicate that any of the young lords has attained the old-fashioned honor of warfare.

Into this world of decay, in which memory alone seems noble, Shakespeare introduces Helena. Of all the sympathetic characters in the first part, she alone has forgotten the past and is launching with romantic aspirations into the future:

                    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.

(I.i.77-81)

As in the earlier comedies, romantic love leads to the idealization of the beloved. The King recalls human perfection in a dead friend; Helena sees it in a living man, on whom her future hopes are pinned. Her imagination gives Bertram a splendor that the actual man as we see him later does not seem to deserve. Her devotion to him is like the devotion of a worshiper to a god; the vocabulary of her love is religious:

                    'Twas pretty, though a plague,
To see him every hour; to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart's table—heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet favour.
But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics.

(I.i.90-96)

                    Thus, Indian-like,
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun that looks upon his worshipper
But knows of him no more

(I.iii.199-202)

At this point in the play, we have not seen enough of Bertram to doubt seriously Helena's view of him. We may agree with G. Wilson Knight that “Helena's love sees Bertram as he potentially is, that core and inmost music of his personality which no faults can disturb … and this outspaces the moral judgement, which, though present, is surpassed. …”⁵ Moral judgment is not so easily surpassed later, when we see more of him; but Helena's view of the potential Bertram sustains her all the way through, and for the moment we can share it.

Courtly and military honor seem now to be things of the past; if there is an ideal to cling to in this world, it looks as though it must be an ideal of love, for Helena's imagination offers the play's only living impulse toward perfection. One of the signs of this is the way her love unites youth and age. The King and his young courtiers remain aloof from each other; he doubts their capacity for honor, and they get no inspiration from him. But Helena enlists the sympathy of the Countess, who recalls her own youthful love and justifies the conduct of love as following the demands of nature:

                    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.

(I.iii.124-28)

This is recognized even at court, for Helena enlists the sympathy of the King and Lafew, who seem more enthusiastic about her than about the more courtly members of the younger generation. And there is another reason for confidence in Helena. She is not merely an idealist, out of touch with everything except her dream of romantic perfection. She can also hold her own in a down-to-earth battle of wits, as we see when she tangles with Parolles on the question of virginity. She appears to embrace the two aspects of the play's vision, and thus seems capable of bringing the play, in the end, to a satisfactory resolution, as Rosalind, a heroine with a similar double awareness, does in As You Like It.⁶

For the moment, however, her capacity to descend to market-place realities is kept in reserve. Her first project to win Bertram operates on the romantic, folk-tale level. She will win him as Bassanio wins Portia, by fulfilling a task, a task with a certain aura of magic—the curing of the King. Taken realistically, her skill as a physician would be an irrelevant claim on Bertram's love—and it is to this realistic level that we will later descend. But, for the moment, the logic of romance holds the two purposes together. Moreover, Shakespeare does what he did not do even in the riddle of Portia's caskets; he skirts the edge of the supernatural. The success of Helena's project depends on its working on a level higher than that of natural reality. We see a hint of this when the scheme is first mentioned. The Countess, though not unsympathetic, withholds actual encouragement until Helena mentions the magic properties of the cure:

                                        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; and would your honour
But give me leave to try success, I'd venture
The well-lost life of mine on his grace's cure
By such a day, an hour.
Countess: Dost thou believe't?
Helena: Ay, madam, knowingly.
Countess: Why, Helen, thou shalt have my leave and love. …

(I.iii.237-46)

The offer of Helena's death as the price of failure takes us more firmly on to the folk-tale level. The offer of sacrifice and the hint of magic are what really win the Countess over; in Helena she recognizes something more than mortal, and her acceptance of it is something like an act of faith. Just as realism, in this play, is pushed to one extreme and becomes sordid, so romance is pushed to the other, and becomes spiritual.

In the scene in which Helena persuades the King to let her undertake the cure, we have the high-water mark of romance in the play. The style, and especially the use of rhyme, is important, as Knight has remarked: “Observe the gnomic, formal, incantatory quality of the rhymes, functioning, as in Helena's first recognition of her own magical powers … as the language of inspiration: she seems to be mesmerizing the King.”⁷ The scene certainly seems to work on these terms in the theater.⁸ We are being lifted out of ordinary reality, and the rhyme, by making the speeches stylized, contributes powerfully to this effect. It is interesting to note that the King is the first to use rhyme. His first couplet sounds final and dismissive, as though he is trying to bring the argument to a close; and Helena takes it in this spirit, retiring discouraged. But as she is about to go, the King resumes the debate, still in couplets. It is as though, at the bottom of his mind, he does not really want her to leave and is trying to keep her with him by continuing the argument. She seems to sense this, for she responds, in couplets, to the point he has raised, and continues in this vein until she has won him over. In a sense, the King himself has made the first overture; and this is important. What will cure him is not so much the power of the medicine as his own willingness to believe in it. As Paulina says before the statue of Hermione comes to life, “It is required / You do awake your faith.” When Helena invokes God, Heaven, and Grace, the King responds:

Methinks in thee some blessed spirit doth speak
His powerful sound within an organ weak;
And what impossibility would slay
In common sense, sense saves another way.

(II.i.174-77)

The King's cure is not so much a medical achievement as an act of faith and grace; this is why we feel that he is really cured before he leaves the stage, and the “Flourish” which sounds at the end of the scene (unusual for an exit involving only two people) underlines the sense of triumph. We may contrast this with the doubts and qualifications of the play's ending, in which Bertram seems less capable of faith and asks for proof before he will submit to Helena.

For the moment, however, Helena's victory seems complete. Her magic makes itself felt even at the lower levels of reality. The stylized, incantatory verse of the interview with the King is its natural literary medium, but the wonder of it also affects the down-to-earth Lafew, who describes Helena's power in a more racy, comic way:

                    I have seen a medicine
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)

And, in his reaction to the cure, he states in prose what the King and Helena have said in verse:

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, a chatty old courtier with an earthy sense of humor, is there partly to provide a dramatic balance to the stylized “incantation” scene;⁹ but he also shows that the values of romance, centered on Helena, are now beginning to penetrate the world at large. The tired court that we saw at the beginning of the play is starting to wake up, for it now has something to believe in. And, most important, it wants to believe. Helena's magic has worked, because the King was receptive to it. Everything seems set, in fact, for a straightforward comic finale—the successful invasion of the ordinary world by the values of romance, and the final dance in which the couples, their difficulties overcome, join hands. Shakespeare creates something like the ending of one of his more conventional comedies—in the middle of Act II.

This brings us to the crucial scene of Bertram's refusal, which needs to be studied in some detail. Helena's entrance with the King after the cure seems designed to give a sense of triumph appropriate to the finale of a comedy; Lafew's exclamation, “Why, he's able to lead her a coranto” (II.iii.42-43), suggests that this may be precisely what he is doing; and a coranto is a very lively dance. The surprise of Parolles, which Lafew seems to share, that the woman before them is Helena may indicate that Helena, for the first time in the play, is splendidly dressed, so that she is for a moment unrecognizable. She now speaks in a manner recalling Portia when Bassanio has made his choice; she formally and triumphantly renounces maidenhood and embraces marriage, of which she now seems certain:

Now, Dian, from thy altar do I fly,
And to imperial Love, that god most high
Do my sighs stream.

(II.iii.74-76)

The sequence in which she passes among the lords, addressing them in formal rhymed couplets, suggests a dance, with the changing of partners; it has, in fact, been staged this way.¹⁰ Lafew's grumbling prose comments about the young men do not break the air of romance; rather, they maintain his role as a realistic spokesman who believes in the romantic values represented by Helena—and help to emphasize, by contrast, the formality of the other speeches. The romantic vision of the play seems to be proceeding to its consummation—and then Bertram, speaking in unrhymed verse, breaks the formal pattern by rejecting Helena's choice:

Bertram: My wife, my liege! I shall beseech your highness,
In such a business give me leave to use
The help of mine own eyes.
King: Know'st thou not, Bertram,
What she has done for me?
Bertram: Yes, my good lord,
But never hope to know why I should marry her.

(II.iii.106-10)

We come back to earth with a bump. It is as though Portia had said to Bassanio, “You may be good at riddles, but who ever said this was a sound basis for marriage?” The logic of romance requires Bertram's acceptance, but the logic of daylight reality suggests that personal compatibility is necessary in marriage; and Bertram does not want to marry Helena.¹¹

Romance has passed its first test in the fallen world—the curing of the King—but only because Helena has picked two receptive people, the King and Lafew, both of whom are capable of faith and of a response to the romantic. But such a response is beyond Bertram. When we get to know more of him, we see that Shakespeare has drawn a realistic portrait of a shallow, immature young man whose values are crass and earthbound, and whose two most important actions in the play—the refusal of Helena and the assault on Diana—spring, the first from snobbery, and the second from sensuality. Such a figure clearly does not fit the patterns of romance; his motivations are only too realistic. His refusal to accept Helena is the critical moment of the play, for it shows a direct clash between the values of romance and the values of reality. Helena has established a claim on Bertram, but not a realistic one. For the rest of the play, her task will be to win Bertram on his own terms.

The use of rhyme in this scene is as interesting as that in the King-Helena scene, though it has been less frequently remarked on. As before, it is associated with the romantic values centered on Helena. Bertram's first refusal, in blank verse with run-on lines, makes a deliberate, jarring contrast with the formal couplets of the “choice” scene. In reply, the King's lecture to Bertram on Helena's natural virtue, which should overcome rank, swells appropriately into rhyme. Bertram's second refusal breaks the rhyme again, and the rest of the scene is in blank verse, as the King, his appeal to higher values having failed, simply bullies Bertram into submission.

The romantic finale has been shattered; and the impression made by the scenes that follow is deliberately loose, scattered, and anticlimactic. There is no dramatic showdown between Helena and Bertram; he uses Parolles as an intermediary to tell her that he has been called away. When they do meet, they hardly know what to say to one another. She is formal and polite; he is clearly uncomfortable:

Helena: Sir, I can nothing say
But that I am your most obedient servant.
Bertram: Come, come; no more of that.
Helena: And ever shall
With true observance seek to eke out that
Wherein toward me my homely stars have fail'd
To equal my great fortune.
Bertram: Let that go.
My haste is very great. Farewell. Hie home.

(II.v.71-77)

There is a striking sense of the actual in this scene of embarrassment. We are back in the world of reality, and very cold reality at that. For this, Bertram is largely responsible. He is quite brutal about Helena behind her back, referring to her as “my clog” (II.v.53). He has a coldly prosaic explanation for his apparently temporary parting from her:

                    Prepar'd I was not
For such a business; therefore am I found
So much unsettled.

(II.v.61-63)

Helena has been an enchantress; she is now a practical problem, a nuisance, a clog. The magic of the King's cure has evaporated completely.

Bertram's response to the wedding is that of a child to whom brutal adults have done something dreadful: “O my Parolles, they have married me!” (II.iii.268). This shows us what Helena's problem now is. It is a problem on a realistic level, involving human wills and personalities rather than behavior imposed by the conventions of romance. Helena must win the acceptance—and, if possible, the love—of a recalcitrant husband who is not really ready for marriage. The problem is stated, however, in folk-tale terms. Helena once more has a task to perform: “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 …” (III.ii.56-58).¹² This looks like a kind of artistic compromise; the folk-tale task is a symbolic way of achieving the personal adjustment that reality requires. Bertram's refusal to consummate his marriage is a symbolic rejection of it.¹³ By getting him to sleep with her, Helena will achieve—again, symbolically—the personal acceptance necessary for marriage.¹⁴ However, the compromise is an uneasy one, for Bertram himself does not see the test on the folk-tale level, but regards it as simply an elaborate way of saying that he is not going to accept Helena as his wife. Having stated the conditions, he adds: “then call me husband; but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never’” (III.ii.58-59). On the naturalistic level, the achievement of the task is nearly as irrelevant to the achieving of marriage as is the curing of the King. It represents the personal adjustment which was the important factor missing from Helena's first task, but whether Bertram is really prepared to take symbolism for reality is still dubious. And, as we will see, it is the problem of Bertram's conversion that provides most difficulty at the end of the play.

The dramatic treatment of Helena at this point reflects the change in the nature of the task before her; winning Bertram is now seen as more of a practical problem than it was before; it cannot be done by magic alone. The enchantress-heroine has been rebuffed and told, in effect, that she has gained her husband by means that are not really valid. In asking Bertram for a kiss, she says that she “like a timorous thief, most fain would steal / What law does vouch mine own” (II.v.81-82). She seems disturbed by what she has done; she recognizes that the law provides an external sanction for her marriage, but that until the internal sanction—the consent of her husband—is provided, she is no better than a thief if she tries to claim his love, for that love is not rightly hers:

Ambitious love hath so in me offended
That barefoot plod I the cold ground upon,
With sainted vow my faults to have amended.

(III.iv.5-7)

The religious vocabulary of love now expresses penance; she has offended the object of her worship. Helena the enchantress has failed, and must withdraw to make room for a new Helena, in whom the practical side will be uppermost.¹⁵ The old Helena is seen from a greater distance; she comes to us at second hand in the letter (written in rhymed verse, a sad reminder of her earlier triumph) which is read aloud by the Countess's steward. As she disappears, she becomes more and more idealized by the other characters. The Countess, adopting the religious vocabulary that has been associated with Helena's love, describes her as a saint interceding for Bertram:

                    What angel shall
Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive,
Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear
And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath
Of greatest justice.

(III.iv.25-29)

This idealization of the absent Helena continues to the end of the play. She becomes, like Bertram's father, a distant memory of perfection, in a world which once more seems fallen and imperfect.

Realism is now firmly re-established as the dominant mode of the play. The magic which temporarily transformed the court of France is gone, and the next movement takes place in a harsh daylight that flatters nobody. The war for which Bertram has left his wife is treated critically.¹⁶ We are immediately suspicious when the Duke of Florence's explanation of the war elicits the comment from the First Lord,

          Holy seems the quarrel
Upon your Grace's part; black and fearful
On the opposer.

(III.i.4-6)

Our suspicions will be strengthened if we remember that the King had refused to take sides on the matter, allowing his men to choose either party (I.ii.1-15). And there is nothing particularly glorious, or even satisfactory, about the actual fighting. The battle in which the drum was lost seems to have been mismanaged and confused; owing to a mix-up in the orders, the Florentine cavalry, of which Bertram is the general, has attacked its own infantry (III.vi.45-47).¹⁷ There is not even a decisive impression of victory or defeat; all Bertram can say about the battle is, “Well, we cannot greatly condemn our success …” (III.vi.52). We never even hear who wins the war, if anybody does; all we know is that a peace has been arranged (IV.iii.38). There is no honor or glory in this war; it is a shambles, frustrating to the participants, and finally, for all we know, indecisive.

Just as there is no glamour in war, there is no romance in relations between the sexes. The idealism of Helena's love poetry in the first part of the play has now given way to a matter-of-fact view of sex. The warnings of Mariana, the widow's neighbor, when she advises Diana to guard her chastity, take us to the crass, prosy side of sex, the world of back-alley seductions (III.v.18-21). It is on this level that Bertram—as Parolles describes him, “a foolish idle boy, but for all that very ruttish” (IV.iii.207)—now operates. The sophistry he uses in attempting to seduce Diana recalls the arguments of Parolles himself in the “virginity” dialogue: “And now you should be as your mother was / When your sweet self was got” (IV.ii.9-10). This rather reduces him to Parolles' level; the attack on virginity masquerades as a defense of fertility. Like all seducers, Bertram is really thinking of the moment of pleasure and does not plan to be around nine months later.

In this cynical, disordered, and very real world of war and sex, the ideal values have not been quite forgotten. They are not so close to us as the romantic passion of Helena, or even the recent memory of Bertram's father; they seem to belong to a vaguer, more distant past. But they are there, and they are seen specifically in opposition to Bertram, who has immersed himself in the cynical world of the present. In his attempted seduction of Diana, he is betraying the nobility of his ancestry, symbolized by the ring, a priceless heirloom that he is willing to surrender for a moment of cheap pleasure:

          a ring the county wears
That downward hath succeeded in his house
From son to son some four or five descents
Since the first father wore it. This ring he holds
In most rich choice; yet, in his idle fire,
To buy his will it would not seem too dear,
Howe'er repented after.

(III.vii.22-28)

He is asking a similar sacrifice of Diana, whose honor is, like the ring, a priceless treasure that should not be lightly thrown away. When he shows himself reluctant to give her the ring, her response has a formal quality, given not in this case by rhyme, but by the repetition of Bertram's own words (a repetition that also underlines his hypocrisy in standing by his own honor and asking her to part with hers):

Bertram: It is an honour 'longing to our house,
Bequeathed down from many ancestors,
Which were the greatest obloquy i'th'world
In me to lose.
Diana: Mine honour's such a ring;
My chastity's the jewel of our house,
Bequeathed down from many ancestors,
Which were the greatest obloquy i'th'world
In me to lose.

(IV.ii. 42-49)

Diana herself, by the way, provides an interesting echo from the earlier part of the play. Diana was the goddess of Helena's prayers before her marriage (I.iii.110,¹⁸ 207; II.iii.74). Now, instead of a goddess, we have the ideal of chastity embodied in an ordinary woman. The ideal is the same, but its expression is more suited to the realistic world we now inhabit.

A similar transformation has now taken place in Helena herself. The romantic Helena has, as we have seen, retreated into the distance, and the new Helena appears more subdued. Her first entrance (III.v) is very quiet and low-key. She comes now not to a court, but to the house of a widow in reduced circumstances who takes in lodgers. She comes, however, bringing the old values with her. There is a repetition of the feeling we had in the first part of the play that she represents a power higher than her own. There is a drop in levels, however. She came to the King bearing the power of heaven; she comes now to the widow, assured of the power of the King:

That you may well perceive I have not wrong'd you
One of the greatest in the Christian world
Shall be my surety; for whose throne 'tis needful,
Ere I can perfect mine intents, to kneel.

(IV.iv.1-4)

The power of heaven is here too, though it is working at a more mundane level than it did when she was curing the King:

          Doubt not but heaven
Hath brought me up to be your daughter's dower,
As it hath fated her to be my motive
And helper to a husband.

(IV.iv.18-21)

Helena is still an agent for the values of romance, but she is working more in terms of the market place than she did before: “After, / To marry her I'll add three thousand crowns / To what is pass'd already” (III.vii.34-36). This new practicality fits the more practical nature of the task she has now in hand.

That task is regarded with a certain amount of uneasiness by the characters involved—and it seems to me that their uneasiness is justified, and reflects a deep tension in the play. Helena is winning what the law claims rightly belongs to her, and her sleeping with Bertram is entirely legal. There is, all the same, something distasteful about it. She is at once deceiving him and gratifying his lust, and the widow is not sure at first that what she is being asked to do is not ordinary pandering (III.vii.4-7). One speech in which Helena justifies her purposes is couched in riddling terms which, while they reflect the folk-tale nature of the task, also reveal its moral ambiguity:

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

(III.vii. 43-48)

The last line offers a clue to the spirit in which Helena is now operating. Although she may contemplate for a moment the moral ambiguities of what she is doing, her chief concern is to get the job done. The practical side is dominant. This is reflected in the expression that gives the play its title: “All's well that ends well; still the fine's the crown. / Whate'er the course, the end is the renown” (IV.iv.35-36). In other words, Helena asks us not to think too closely about the device by which she gains her husband, but to accept that the end justifies the means. If romance conquers, we should not be too concerned at the stooping involved.

In a purely romantic context, such considerations would not worry us; but Shakespeare has placed us in a real world in which there is not much to stop us from looking at the bed-trick literally. And if we look at it literally, it becomes, for all its legality, a bit sordid. The play's title, which at first seemed an expression of confidence, now looks more like an embarrassed apology. Helena's speeches seem to me to reflect Shakespeare's own uneasiness with the bed-trick, an uneasiness that is branded on the whole play by its title. Other Shakespearean comedy titles suggest that the playwright was impatient with the business of naming his play; this is the only one that suggests he was nervous about his material. And the fact that the bed-trick is a conventional act, symbolic of—but not literally representing—a psychological adjustment in Bertram, creates more problems, as I have suggested. Will Bertram's repentance be purely conventional and arbitrary, stemming entirely from the symbolic consummation of the marriage? Or will the playwright try to show that a real psychological adjustment is taking place, preparing the ground, so that when Helena fulfills the task, Bertram will be able—both symbolically and literally—to accept her? The latter course might have been more satisfactory, and Shakespeare seems to have been tempted by it. But he does not, evidently, have full confidence in it.

The Countess asks the King to excuse Bertram's conduct, which she attributes to his immaturity, with the implication that he will behave more worthily once he has grown up a bit:

          'Tis past, my liege,
And I beseech your majesty to make it
Natural rebellion done i'th' blade of youth,
When oil and fire, too strong for reason's force,
O'erbears it and burns on.

(V.iii.4-8)

Something of the sort seems to be suggested by a passage at the beginning of the “drum” scene, in which the Second Lord describes Bertram's reaction to a letter from his mother, presumably telling him of Helena's death: “there is something in't that stings his nature, for on the reading it he chang'd almost into another man” (IV.iii.2-4). We have our doubts about this change, however, when we realize that he is still determined to consummate his affair with Diana. And when Bertram actually appears, any suggestion that he is softened by his wife's death is dispelled:

I have tonight dispatch'd sixteen businesses a month's length apiece. By an abstract of success: I have congied with the duke, done my adieu with his nearest, buried a wife, mourn'd for her, writ to my lady mother I am returning, entertain'd my convoy, and between these main parcels of dispatch effected many nicer deeds; the last was the greatest, but that I have not ended yet.

(IV.iii.82-89)

He explains the latter point with a sardonic echo of his argument against virginity: “I mean, the business is not ended, as fearing to hear of it hereafter” (IV.iii.93-94). The curt, businesslike tone of his farewell to Helena still clings to him. Her death and his “mourning” for her are simply incidents in a busy evening, no more important than anything else that happened, and the “greatest” business is still the seduction of Diana. Nor does the unmasking of Parolles do much to change him; he has one illusion less, but his behavior is not appreciably different.¹⁹ When, on being forgiven by the King, Bertram expresses a sense of shame at his past conduct—“My high-repented blames / Dear sovereign, pardon to me” (V.iii.36-37)—we can be forgiven for wondering if the place and the company, rather than his own feelings, call forth these words. If Shakespeare meant to show that Bertram has repented and is ready for Helena even before she appears, he has not carried out his purpose with any great conviction.²⁰ It looks as though Bertram's acceptance of Helena will have to depend on romantic convention.

To confirm this, the quality of folk tale and romance, present only in a fitful way since Bertram's refusal, returns with a rush in the final scene. The “dead” Helena is idealized in preparation for her triumphant return. Lafew says of Bertram:

          He lost a wife
Whose beauty did astonish the survey
Of richest eyes; whose words all ears took captive;
Whose dear perfection hearts that scorn'd to serve
Humbly call'd mistress.

(V.iii.15-19)

The power of romance is set against Bertram; his accuser Diana speaks in highly formal, patterned verse, with an appeal to absolute values of faith and duty:

          If you shall marry
You give away this hand and that is mine,
You give away heaven's vows and those are mine,
You give away myself which is known mine;
For I by vow am so embodied yours
That she which marries you must marry me—
Either both or none.

(V.iii.168-74)

Helena's entrance to claim her husband is prepared by Diana's rhymed-verse riddles, which take us to the folk-tale level:

He knows himself my bed he hath defil'd;
And at that time he got his wife with child.
Dead though she be she feels her young one kick.
So there's my riddle: one that's dead is quick,
And now behold the meaning.

(V.iii.294-98)

Once again, romance is set in definite opposition to Bertram; accused in this formal incantatory style, he defends himself in a sordid way: “She's impudent, my lord, / And was a common gamester to the camp” (V.iii.186-87). His unpleasant behavior in this scene makes us feel that some kind of magic conversion will indeed be necessary for a satisfactory ending. Something of the sort seems to happen, in fact, when Helena enters, seemingly risen from the dead:

King: Is there no exorcist
Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?
Is't real that I see?
Helena: No, my good lord;
'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see;
The name and not the thing.
Bertram: Both, both. O pardon!

(V.iii.298-302)

Shakespeare seems, at this point, to have decided on a romantic, conventionalized ending, with the magical appearance of Helena producing a change in Bertram and a reconciliation between the two. It is not magic alone, however. Shakespeare reiterates, through Helena's first words, a point made in the curing of the King. Magic is not sufficient in itself unless confirmed by human will. The King, like the spectators by Hermione's statue, was required to awake his faith. Helena's magical return from the dead will not be meaningful unless Bertram really accepts her as a wife. His first reaction seems to give us the confirmation of love that Helena requires. It looks like a fairy-tale ending.

But the impulse in Shakespeare's imagination that produced the element of realism in the play has not been stilled. The miraculous conversion would be acceptable in a purely romantic context; but this play does not provide such a context. There is a hint of doubt, a slight qualification, in Bertram's next words: “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly / I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (V.iii.309-10).²¹ And the suggestion that the happy ending is not complete, but depends on certain conditions, is taken up in the King's closing speech: “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet” (V.iii.327-28). The happy ending is not seriously in doubt; but it is not completely confirmed, either.²² According to H. B. Charlton, “the play hardly generates the imaginative conviction that the good [Helena] secures must necessarily come out of the circumstances presented.”²³ It is not that we cannot accept the Elizabethan convention of quick repentances;²⁴ the experienced reader of Elizabethan plays soon learns to do with very little in the way of repentance speeches. We could have been satisfied if Shakespeare had merely cut the offending couplet and left Bertram with “Both, both. O pardon!” The problem is rather that the penitent himself is not co-operating; his repentance still depends on certain conditions. The ending is an honest reflection of the tensions created by the play as a whole. Bertram is a realistic character being acted on by a romantic convention whose power is not fully established. We are still not entirely sure that the solving of a riddle can make one person love another.

In other Shakespearean comedies which contain this tension between romance and realism, some kind of resolution is generally achieved. As You Like It, after all its satiric joking about love and marriage, ends with a masque of Hymen. The Tempest, after the masque of Prospero, with its vision of an ideal order, returns us to the ordinary, unpredictable world.²⁵Love's Labour's Lost fuses romance and reality in that the lovers, while brought to regard love as a serious business, not just a springtime game, express this new awareness in a series of highly romantic vows. But in All's Well That Ends Well the pull between these two magnetic centers in the playwright's imagination remains unresolved. Romance sets out to impose its values on an intractable world of reality; it suffers one serious rebuff, and while victory may be in sight at the end, we never see it achieved.

I stated at the beginning that my purpose was not to attack or defend All's Well That Ends Well, but to try to examine the tensions which give it its peculiar quality. Yet it is difficult to be quite neutral about this play, and any explanation of its peculiarities other than bad taste or incompetence is bound to be a defense of some sort. One may or may not like the play, but I think it deserves to be recognized as an important dramatic experiment, conducted with unusual courage and honesty. In the earlier plays, the attacks on romance were softened by the fact that they were only half-serious, and that, as Rosalind put it, “the whippers are in love too.” Bertram is an antiromantic character of a different order, however, one who resists love's magic not just with his mind, but with his whole nature. And yet the play is not a simple send-up of romance either; its values are established, especially in the early scenes, as serious and important. When Bertram refuses to play the game, we can see his point, but we feel a definite shock as well. Helena, as a miracle worker, has charm and power; and it is embarrassing to watch her cheating and tricking her way to a husband. The testing of romance is a painful business, and to feel disturbed by the play is, I think, a truer response than to try to explain its tensions away, for tension and uncertainty are its very life. It is the work, not of a confident artist, but of a courageous one, who is willing to ask awkward questions about the assumptions behind his own art.

Notes

1. G. K. Hunter, in his introduction to the Arden Edition of All's Well That Ends Well (London, 1962), p. xxxiii, notes that “the play juxtaposes extreme romantic conventions with down-to-earth and critical realism.” E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto, 1950), p. 2, says “there is something radically schizophrenic” about this play and Measure for Measure. According to Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in All's Well That Ends Well,” ELH, 21 (1954), 19, “the esemplastic power does not seem to have been fully at work.”

2. As Hunter's note on this passage points out, the term “fistula” in Shakespeare's day did not necessarily mean an abscess external to the rectum, but could apply to a burrowing abscess in any part of the body. This removes some of the unpleasantness, but it is still a nasty and embarrassing complaint to have.

3. Quotations from All's Well That Ends Well are from Hunter's edition, cited in note 1.

4. M. C. Bradbrook, “Virtue is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All's Well That Ends Well,” RES, 26 (1950), 289-301, points out that a court could be a center of nobility or of corruption, and that the King's illness left his courtiers exposed to the dangers of the place.

5. The Sovereign Flower (London, 1958), p. 139.

6. Hunter, in his introduction, p. xxxvii, puts it another way: “The magic of Helena is clearly associated with this elder age, but she herself must make her way in the new world of social mobility and opportunism. …”

7. The Sovereign Flower, p. 152.

8. See M. St. Clare Byrne's account of Tyrone Guthrie's 1959 production at Stratford-upon-Avon, in “The Shakespeare Season at The Old Vic, 1958-59 and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1959,” SQ, 10 (1959), 545-67, especially p. 563.

9. Dramatic balance is also provided by the prose comedy of the Countess and the Clown (II.ii), which is interposed between the “incantation” scene and the scene in which the King appears, cured, dancing with Helena.

10. See M. St. Clare Byrne, “The Shakespeare Season,” pp. 565-66. For Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York and London, 1965), pp. 116-17, the scene suggests a children's party game in which one of the guests refuses to be “it.” Hunter stresses the formal quality of the scene, as does Knight (The Sovereign Flower, p. 146).

11. As a ward of the court, Bertram is legally in the King's power; but that does not mean that his personal wishes are regarded by Shakespeare as irrelevant. Helena herself accepts Bertram's refusal and in effect asks the King to withdraw his power of enforcing Bertram's choice (II.iii.147-48).

12. For the folk-tale analogues to this task, see William Witherle Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, 2nd ed. (New York, 1960), pp. 41-45.

13. This point is developed by S. Nagarajan, “The Structure of All's Well That Ends Well,” EIC, 10 (1960), 24-31, especially p. 25.

14. John F. Adams, “All's Well That Ends Well: The Paradox of Procreation,” SQ, 12 (1961), 268, points out the sexual pun in the test of the ring, and compares Lavatch's bawdy remark about “Tib's rush” (ring) and “Tom's forefinger” (II.ii.21-22).

15. This effect is analyzed by Harold S. Wilson, “Dramatic Emphasis in All's Well That Ends Well,” HLQ, 13 (1950), 217-40, especially p. 226.

16. Leech reminds us that this play was written not long after Troilus and Cressida (“The Theme of Ambition,” p. 22).

17. Josephine Waters Bennett, “New Techniques of Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well,” SQ, 18 (1967), 351, speaks of “Bertram's success as a soldier” as a sign of his growing maturity. But she bases this on the gossip of the women, and there is a satiric contrast between this and what we hear in the camp, from the soldiers.

18. This reference to Diana is conjectural interpolation by Theobald, but a very convincing one.

19. The view that the unmasking of Parolles is the turning point in Bertram's development has been attacked by several critics; see, for example, Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), pp. 160-61.

20. There is a rather confusing passage (V.iii.42-67) in which the King and Bertram discuss a woman whom Bertram loved at first, then scorned, and loved again after he had lost her. The King's words at the beginning of the exchange identify the woman as Lafew's daughter Maudlin. But the passage ends, with no indication that the subject has changed, “Be this sweet Helen's knell, and now forget her” (V.iii.67). One might say, “textual corruption,” and thus cut one Gordian knot only to tie another. But sense can be made of the passage as it stands; Bertram's speech describing the course of his feelings (V.iii.44-55) seems to refer to Maudlin. The King's response, describing how we love too late those we have lost (V.iii.55-67), is couched in more general terms, and it may be that his reflections, though they begin with Maudlin, lead him to think of Helena and to apply the same thoughts to her. This is consistent with my view that Bertram has not really repented his treatment of his wife; and the idea that the passage is corrupt leaves us in the dark, or at the most extends into the final scene Shakespeare's earlier indecision over Bertram's response to the letter.

21. For obvious reasons, this couplet has bothered those who would prefer a purely romantic ending. M. St. Clare Byrne's account of this moment in the Guthrie production indicates that the reconciliation was satisfying because the stage picture of a contrite Bertram and a forgiving Helena allowed the words to pass unnoticed (“The Shakespeare Season,” pp. 557-58). But the words are there, and we cannot wish them away.

22. The “conditional” nature of the ending is discussed by John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies, 2nd ed. (London, 1962), p. 192; and Clifford Leech, “Shakespeare and the Idea of the Future,” UTQ 35 (1966), 225.

23. Shakespearian Comedy (1938; rpt. New York, 1961), p. 264.

24. Robert G. Hunter argues that the repentance fails to communicate to us because Shakespeare is depending on a convention which he counts on his audience to accept (Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, pp. 130-31). I would argue that the problem is not the failure of the repentance to communicate, but the fact that the repentance is incomplete in itself.

25. See Leech, “Shakespeare and the Idea of the Future,” pp. 226-28.