[In the following essay, Silverman examines the dual nature of the play's structure, demonstrating the way the comedic action of All's Well That Ends Well moves from simple and naïve to a more complex and insidious form.]

The willful refusal of certain characters to participate in the final comic harmony, and the manifold paradoxes which inform the “mature” comedies of Shakespeare, confront us with dramatic designs which threaten our usual assurance that disparate elements will ultimately knit together into a single structure. Occasionally, moreover, we find plays which are so obviously bifurcated that to reduce the importance of this structural break and replace it with some broad scheme of unification is to do serious damage. The Winter's Tale is an obvious example, with its hiatus of sixteen years between Act III and Act IV: here the incipient tragedy of Lecontes' jealousy yields to the broad pastoral comedy of Bohemia, so that in the final reconciliations the intensities of the earlier part are recollected through the joys of recognition as an old nightmare transcended through privation. Yet even with this division, we are given certain characters who are called upon to live with memories of separation. The division is made part of the play's thematic design.

All's Well is in this respect both a more complex and a less satisfactory play. Prior to The Winter's Tale, it is Shakespeare's most obvious example of a play exhibiting some sort of dualism in its structure.¹ But here the two halves remain examples of irreconcilable dramatic modes. This is the more surprising in that the shift here is not from incipient tragedy to romantic comedy, but from a deliberately naive and “miraculous” form of comedy to one more devious and filled with intrigue.² Denied an easy fulfillment by Bertram's stubborn refusal, the play describes a reconciliation much less full of wonder, with nocturnal substitution and feminine guile succeeding where potions and royal commands do not. Indeed, the play's two “halves” offer two types of imperfect comic resolution. We may be as dissatisfied with Bertram's acquiescence in Act V as we are with his refusal in Act II, and in that case we are forced back to examine the procedures leading up to his climactic actions.

I

We are asked by Helena in her second soliloquy to admit the possibility of “strange attempts,” as if those things which we understand to be merely possible are within the realm of achievement through an effort of will. Yet the sky is “fated” and the “power” which feeds her infatuation seems to lie outside her. The “remedies” may lie within her for changing her situation, but it is an inherited potion to which she turns. And in this plot we have inherited at the outset a great many elements which, if unraveled in a more or less predictable fashion, might lead to a satisfactory comic conclusion where the two lovers of different standing would be united when the aspiring heroine proves herself worthy by curing the King with a miraculous drug bequeathed her by her father (who might, if this were a romance, even at this point be resuscitated for the occasion of the marriage). Instead, the conventional romantic elements prove stubbornly resistant to ceremonious merger and must be hand-sewn together.

Helena is at her most passive at the very outset, watching in almost total silence as Bertram and Lafew take their leave for the Court. Her virtues and nurture are discussed approvingly by the Countess, but in her first soliloquy Helena seems undone by a self-destructive and all-consuming love:

Th' ambition in my love thus plagues itself.
The hind that would be mated by the lion
Must die for love.

(I.i.101-33)³

Bertram is “a bright particular star” whose “bright radiance and collateral light” comfort Helena only by reflection. The luxurious immobility of her infatuation admits its own disease:

                                                            '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.

(I.i.103-7)

Thus the conversation with Parolles on virginity, with its quick verbal thrusts, serves to display Helena in a more knowledgeable light than did the immediately preceding private imaginings, where unmated hinds must die for love of the lion. In the verbal duel she argues adeptly, without real passion, almost disingenuously in defense of chastity;⁴ and of course she will adapt herself to quite another set of circumstances than her argument ostensibly admits as soon as Bertram's intractable whim decrees. Parolles would argue that virginity is a condition which forces its holder to live within the boundaries of the self:

Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese; consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach. Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the canon.

(I.i.153-58)

Helena, however, does not make the proper connection between abstract desire and concrete achievement. In the midst of the conversation, by now only fitfully attended by the court-bound Parolles, Helena still seeks some means of making her silent wishes concretely felt. It is a pity, she says,

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 that we alone must think, which never
Returns us thanks.

(I.i.195-200)

Literally, she will not embody her desire until after Bertram's refusal of her hand in marriage. Until then her faith rests in more chastely ceremonious avenues of fulfillment. By the second soliloquy, with only thirty lines of inconsequential banter succeeding her rather pathetic wish, she has seemingly hit upon her “project” to cure the King and win Bertram. Without prior deliberation she has arrived at the solution which will satisfy private desire and induce harmony in the kingdom at large.

Given its rather reckless assertiveness and Helena's swift resolve, the entire second soliloquy is somewhat naive in its blunt purposiveness and its assertion of the primacy of the will. Events are conceived as constantly in motion, links in a chain of events capable of conclusion or irresolution according to the sharpness of our wits. Given this, the results are inevitable for a bright virgin:

                                                                                                    Who ever strove
To show her merit, that did miss her love?

(I.i.241-42)

The initial design which Helena employs, however, really has little to do with sharpness of wit and her intrinsic merit. She avails herself of an inherited miracle from her past, which succeeds in effecting only marriage without union. Recourse to the miraculous, no matter how virtuous and beneficial to the kingdom, can only persuade Bertram to enter the external form of that sublime action which traditionally ends romantic comedies.

Prior to her departure for Paris, Helena, whose love for Bertham has been related to the Countess, tells the older woman of her design:

You know my father left me some prescriptions
Of rare and prov'd effects, such as his reading
And manifest experience had collected
For general sovereignty; and that he will'd me
In heedfull'st reservation to bestow them,
As cures whose faculties inclusive were
More than they were in note. Amongst the rest,
There is a remedy approv'd set down
To cure the desperate languishing whereof
The King is render'd lost.

(I.iii.227-36)

These “rare and prov'd effects” are the offspring of Helena's wish for “effects” at I.i.198, and when the Countess objects that the King and the court physician have given up on a cure, Helena hints at sacramental power coming to her aid:

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

(I.iii.248-52)

She has earlier elevated Bertram to the status of a fixed star beneath which her constant love held her in a position of obsequious adoration. Now the stars and the heavens in general are displayed as heralds of her triumph. The Countess may remain mildly skeptical, but her attendant blessing shows her willingness to subscribe to Helena's venture.

The King shows considerably less enthusiasm, so that his earlier recollection of Gerard de Narbon to Bertram seemingly indicates no more than a general approbation of earlier times and the physicians who flourished then. He is introduced to Helena by Lafew, who sees in Helena a woman whose “simple touch / Is powerful to araise King Pepin” (II.i.78-79). Despite his tone of mild persiflage, Helena seems to him genuinely endowed with mythic powers of regeneration. The old lord speaks seriously of her surpassing wisdom and constancy, although actually he can have had no time in which to observe this and in the opening scene did not know her to be the daughter of the celebrated physician. We are not to think Lafew extraordinarily credulous, for he is exhibiting with a modicum of wit his willingness to subscribe to the conventions of court romance, wherein the King is cured by the innocent virgin. Within these boundaries, Lafew gives Helena free scope.

The King and Helena have their confrontation, which is oddly similar (at least in its high moral ring) to the interviews between Angelo and Isabella in Measure for Measure, II. ii and II. iv, and to the interminable discussions among the Greeks in Troilus and Cressida. And there is a quizzical tone imparted to the King's speeches, as if he is forced to acknowledge his own mistakenness even while unable to accept the validity of his opponent's arguments. The King doesn't expect much from Helena's drug, but she reminds him of the failure of expectations and suggests that the greater the expectation the higher the rate of failure in performance. This is reversal to rhetorical advantage, but makes sense in light of her stated aim of reversing normal expectation in the wooing of Bertram. Throughout the play, she will consistently remind herself and others of the merely possible; her way of attaining that possibility will markedly alter after II. iv. The King relents, hearing in her voice “some blessed spirit”; the sound of that voice rescues “impossibility” from death at the hands of common sense. The miraculous is about to have its brief innings.

We journey, then, from the amorous paradoxes of the opening soliloquies to a miraculous “solution.” Self-examination, no matter how limited, gives way to the formal incantation of the duologue:

KING.
Art thou so confident? Within what space
Hop'st thou my cure?
HEL.
                                                                      The great'st grace lending grace,
Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring
Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring,
Ere twice in murk and occidental damp
Moist Hesperus hath quench'd her sleepy lamp,
Or four and twenty times the pilot's glass
Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass,
What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly,
Health shall live free and sickness freely die.

(II.i.162-71)

The dying father passes on to his maiden daughter “the dearest issue of his practice,” and she singlehandedly confutes the findings of the King's “most learned doctors.” It is more than a miracle, it smacks of the highest sort of wish fulfillment. The deliberate simplification points toward a comic resolution which would now seem to be immediately available but which will prove for the time being to be practically unobtainable. For Bertram's earth-bound spirit and what has generally been termed his “sullenness” consists fundamentally of his refusal to participate with the other principals in subscribing immediately to a formal comic solution. Comedy's most triumphant celebration of renewal and the healing of division becomes his cry of desolation: “O my Parolles, they have married me!” (II.iii.289). He is as proud and scornful as the King charges, but he demands some sympathy, presented as he is with a closed dramatic situation which he can in no way control and within which the only gesture afforded his will is acquiescence. His remarks about Helena's parentage are crass, but they are wayward and futile gestures in comparison with the potentially venomous power of the King. “Obey our will,” he says,

Or I will throw thee from my care for ever
Into the staggers and the careless lapse
Of youth and ignorance; both my revenge and hate
Loosing upon thee, in the name of justice,
Without all terms of pity.

(II.iii.169-73)

Bertram's immediate show of submission is only good sense and self-preservation.

It would seem at this point that Helena has sensed, much more so than the King, that something has gone wrong with their design. Of course, one of the chief difficulties of All's Well is that, unlike Measure for Measure, so much of the plotting and manipulation (which will increase markedly from this point in the play onward) remains subterranean and unexamined in open dialogue or soliloquy. We are forced to accede to Helena's reliance on guile as a means of providing a comic resolution, as opposed to an antique cure for her condition and the kingdom's, without being privy to her exact plans. In The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, guile is sealed up by the power of a controlling intelligence. But Helena is more cautious: the openness of motive with which she presented her first solution to the King will no longer obtain. In the “betrothal” scene, which Helena of course dominates, we note that after her direct words to Bertram choosing him as her “guiding power” she speaks only once more. After some forty lines of altercation between Bertram and the King, Helena suggests that she wants no further part in the arrangement:

That you are well restor'd, my lord, I'm glad.
Let the rest go.

(II.iii.154-55)

Thereafter she remains silent. It is impossible to think that she has already settled silently on a new and more secretive course of action to suit the general time (the Florentine wars accord little with the miraculous restoration) and particular circumstance. But there is a calculated ambiguity in her brief meeting with Bertram before his Italian departure. Bertram almost apologetically asks for Helena's acquiescent understanding of his behavior:

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

(II.v.66-68)

He declares his unreadiness for marriage, and then hints at a grandiosity of motive which should somehow be of comfort to his forsaken wife:

For my respects are better than they seem,
And my appointments have in them a need
Greater than shows itself at the first view
To you that know them not.

(II.v.71-74)

His lie about his impending meeting with Helena is less noteworthy than the tentativeness and lack of substance in his discourse. Helena's responses are equally cryptic. We may of course see her once more drained of all power and self-control by Bertram's mere presence, prostrating herself before her exalted ideal. But her homiletic disclaimers (II.v.76-77; 78-81) seem too ungrudging, given her recent injury, and certainly the remark about her “homely stars” is a cutting reference to a familiar theme now buttressed by Bertram's stated reasons for refusing the marriage contract. Moreover, when she demands a parting kiss from her husband, she prefaces the request by a pregnant allusiveness disguised as maidenly reserve.

BER.
What would you have?
HEL.
Something; and scarce so much. Nothing, indeed.
I would not tell you what I would, my lord.
Faith, yes!
Strangers and foes do sunder, and not kiss.

(II.v.87-91)

She hints at something which is not resolved by her concrete demand for a kiss, a deferred fulfillment to be consummated, as it turns out, only by the devious occurrences in Italy.

II

A miraculous solution to difficulties generated in the comic protasis demands the direct and almost disinterested intercession of a supreme agency. The comic resolution in such cases must be effected by some power which gives to the action a unified perspective more wide-ranging and more ordered than that of any other single individual in the drama. With his metaphysical benignity, Prospero comes closest to identifying precisely breadth of vision with ultimate comic harmony. Prospero effects no “plot” or design; his art commands into being certain tableaux which engender movement toward understanding in those who wish to participate in the island's deeper meanings. In Measure for Measure, Vincentio's unquestionable breadth of vision never permits him to relinquish his design of high justice, which he prosecutes almost as severely and with as little thought for individual variance as Angelo upholds the more mundane letter of the law. Vincentio's raw material may be more intractable than Prospero's; at any rate, what promotes itself as divine justice in Measure is occasionally forced to reveal the shortcomings of its temporal guise. Although the final harmony of the comic ending may imitate full cosmic harmony, the means of arrival are often vexed. The conventional elements of Shakespearean comedy, it may be said—disguise, flight and retirement, the inversion of sexes—are reminders of the confused and fallen world of contingency whose redemption the unity of art may imitate. No drama can escape these contingent elements, since the very mode of their expression partakes so fully of the comic confusion. We account language most rich when it is complex and most apt to provide wit, while the intricacies of dramatic plot provide us with a feeling of complication at the least and intoxicated confusion at the best. To the extent that drama aspires to replace language with music and incantation, plot with dance and ritual gesture (as in the masque), it seeks to escape the paradoxes of its own condition.⁵

In the final three acts of All's Well, we are offered a different type of comedy than in the first two.⁶ Although Helena's fate remains the central concern, the unified perspective provided by her restorative power is replaced by a more varied design. In an earlier soliloquy, Helena has declared her “intents” to be “fix'd” (I.i.244); to the extent that her goal has always been Bertram, her intentions remain the same. But in the second half of the play she embarks on a course of perfecting those “intents” which Bertram's inadequate behavior has proved insufficient when openly offered. She becomes more flexible and, indeed, more devious. It is Bertram, with his vows to Diana (the opposite of maiden vows to the goddess) and his conditions for a return to France, who has put himself in the position of being coerced by his own fixed premises. The most noteworthy of these self-important pronouncements occurs in his letter to Helena:

When thou canst get the ring upon my finger which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never’.

(III.ii.59-63)

At the outset, there is a nice ambiguity which permits final reference to the rings of both Bertram (the one he gives Diana) and Helena (which she puts on his finger and which, according to Bertram's final speech, will never be removed). The letter reflects Bertram's verbal scrupulousness, a quality for which he so far has not been noted. He self-consciously replaces “then” with “never”; he plays with the differences between substance and shadow by pairing off “wife” with “nothing.” Gnomic messages of this sort often bring out the practical critic in Shakespearean characters, as the painful examples of Malvolio and Gloucester make clear. Bertram's message may lie closer in effect, though not intent, to prediction of the soothsayer in Cymbeline. A series of improbable events must occur before the time is eventually ordered. For Helena, Bertram's words are her “passport.” They serve to mark her departure for Italy and to give her a condition which she must fulfill. In a sense, she will perform a greater “miracle” than when she was endowed with her father's potent medicine, for she must rely on her own devices.

But to equate the “bed-trick” with the curing of the King, though each is the central “effect” in its portion of the play, would be to strain for a unity of tone which All's Well does not possess. When the King pronounces Helena's voice the organ through which “some blessed spirit doth speak (II.i.178), he only confirms the sanctity of the task which Helena has already ascribed to “inspired merit”:

But most it is presumption in us when
The help of Heaven we count the act of men.
Dear sir, to my endeavours give consent;
Of Heaven, not me, make an experiment.

(II.i.154-57)

Disguised as a pilgrim of Saint Jaques le Grand, however, she cannot be the pristine maiden who once stood before the King; she is, of course, such a pilgrim of love as was Romeo at the Capulet ball, embodying more secular pursuits than her “sainted vow” (III.iv.7) might attest.⁷ In that letter to the Countess, the echo of her earlier sanctification of Bertram is surely ironic, in light of the necessity of understanding “death” in its more literary sense.⁸ Her letter is her alibi, and spreading the rumor of her death is a necessary step toward achieving the final condition of Bertram's edict: “Till I have no wife I have nothing in France.” The conversation between the two lords (IV.iii.56-87) confirms the success of Helena's plot. Disguise has intensified into outright deceit.

We must be careful, though, to distinguish between the deceits of Helena and Parolles,⁹ and in this matter the opening conversation of IV. iii is most helpful. Speaking of Bertram's questionable behavior in Florence, the First Lord exclaims, “As we are ourselves, what things we are!” (IV.iii.23-24). In addition to the rueful assessment of our general ability to behave badly, “as” here permits a more shrewdly cynical reading: “To the extent that we are our true selves, we behave badly.” The two men agree that we are “our own traitors” (IV.iii.25) and “trumpeters of our unlawful intents” (IV.iii.32), and the conversation incorporates Parolles:

I would gladly have him [Bertram] see his company anatomiz'd, that he might take a measure of his own judgements, wherein so curiously he had set this counterfeit.

(IV.iii.36-40)

The stripping of Parolles will be an object lesson; but Parolles' counterfeiting is most painful in its exposure and nowhere more painful than in his final private reliance on the naked self, “simply the thing I am” (IV.iii.369). The Second Lord sees this quite clearly, and this accounts for his remark after he has been anatomized by Parolles:

PAR.
… I have little more to say, sir of his honesty. He has everything that an honest man should not have; what an honest man should have, he has nothing.
2. Lord.
I begin to love him for this.
BER.
For this description of thine honesty? A pox upon him for me, he's more and more a cat.

(IV.iii.288-95)

Bertram, of course, cannot understand why the Second Lord should be pleased, but it is in keeping with the gentlemen's earlier ambiguous approval of Helena's pilgrimage as a “pretence” (IV.iii.57). To the extent that Parolles can turn adversity into a strategic fiction (“He hath out-villain'd villainy so far, that the rarity redeems him”), he has the bemused approval of his onlookers, as had Falstaff when multiplying the buckram men. Since Parolles is finally a mere opportunist, he is exposed through an organized fiction. Helena treads the middle ground between her earlier straightforward and vulnerable design, and Parolles' fundamental lack of plot.

Deceit, then, may be “lawful” (III.vii.30, 38) when well managed and backed by the authority of the crown, gold, and domestic rectitude:

                                                                      Why then to-night
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.

(III.vii.43-47)

There is no gainsaying that the act is sinful if isolated from these mitigating factors, and even within them Bertram's intent is deemed sinful. The justification of the “plot” means simply that Helena acts from the “mingled” laws of her comic design, and that this design accommodates so delicate a device as lawful deceit. Disclosing herself finally to Bertram and the Court, Helena calls herself a “shadow” and “not the thing.” She is revealing the depth of her imitation, while reminding Bertram that she has fulfilled the terms of his stipulation to the letter. He correctly sees that she is both substance and shadow, capable of “doubly” winning him (V.iii.315). That is, she has won him both through miracle and guile; and her doubleness reflects the play's structure, as well as intensity and sleight of hand.

In arguing that All's Well moves from a simple and vulnerable comic design to one more devious and perdurable, we have reinforced the statements of many critics about the play's lack of any monocular unity. The lapsing of one kind of comedy within the play, and the emergence of another, shows the danger of thinking about comedy in terms of a single structural fabric. Individual plots, schemes, and designs may languish and revive in a single play; All's Well That Ends Well gives evidence of a play whose plot seems to be struggling to achieve some form of equitable resolution. The importance of this lapsed design is not whether ultimately it satisfies our unquestionable desire for some unified structure, but that it continually throws us back to examine the process of its achievement.

Notes

1. The double plot suggested by W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, 2d ed. (New York, 1960), has been accepted as a point of departure by most critics. In the Introduction to his New Arden edition of All's Well (London, 1959), G. K. Hunter applies Lawrence's description of theme to the play's structure and finds a fundamentally similar division (pp. xxx-xxxi).

2. See Alfred Harbage, “Intrigue in Elizabethan Tragedy,” Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig. ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, Mo., 1962), pp. 37-44. For Harbage, intrigue is constituted by all those elements of plot which involve a central character in various elaborate duplicities. This multiplication of contrivances, Harbage suggests, leads the audience toward comedy.

3. All quotations from the play are taken from the New Cambridge Edition, eds. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1942).

4. For example, at I.i.131-33.

5. Some recent critics have seen in this aspiration poetry's necessary ambition of substituting a monad or ‘effigy” for the fallen doubleness of words and syntax. See especially Sigurd Burckhardt, “The Poet as Fool and Priest,” ELH, 25 (1958), 279-98, and Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics (Princeton, 1964), pp. 58-70.

6. G. K. Hunter treats this difference, but calls Helena's behavior in the play's first half evidence of positive virtue, in the second, of negative virtue; see New Arden edition, p. xxxi.

7. For a further use of holy metaphor, compare Bertram's exchange with Diana at IV. ii. 21-34.

8. Compare James L. Calderwood, “The Mingled Yarn of All's Well,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 62 (1963), p. 71: “She has clearly forsaken the mode of action and returned to her original attitude of love-as-worship. … And so at this point Helena has come full circle in her movement from passivity to action and back to passivity.”

9. Their deceits are not distinguished by Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in All's Well,” ELH, 21 (1954), 17-29; or Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), pp. 145-56.