SOURCE: Bennett, Josephine Waters. “New Techniques of Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well.” Shakespeare Quarterly 18, no. 4 (autumn 1967): 337-62.

[In the following essay, Bennett investigates the various comic techniques Shakespeare employed in All's Well That Ends Well, and argues that the play is more a comedy than a romance.]

All's Well That Ends Well has long been a problem play in the sense that it presents unsolved problems to modern readers and producers. We have neither quarto nor record of performance to help date it,¹ and the variety of recent interpretations suggests that the playwright's intention is not now understood. Professor G. K. Hunter, in his excellent, recent edition, shrewdly observes that “criticism of All's Well has failed, for it has failed to provide a context within which the genuine virtues of the play can be appreciated.”² In fact, until we understand the intention of the playwright the genuine virtues of the play cannot be recognized. Hunter supplies a helpful hint when he observes that All's Well is the obvious twin of Measure for Measure: “plot, characterization, themes, vocabulary, even the tangles, perplexities, and perversities of treatment [are] shared”.³

Since we know that Measure for Measure was performed, and indeed, created⁴ to grace the Christmas festivities at court at the end of 1604, we can be reasonably sure that All's Well was written at about the same time.⁵ Hunter makes the usual assumption that All's Well is the earlier of the two. He says, “What difference there is, points to a slight development and clarification of the material when it is handled in Measure for Measure” (p. xxiv). I believe, on the contrary, that All's Well shows a marked advance in technique, in what he calls the “tangles, perplexities, and perversities of treatment”, by which Shakespeare was exploiting new sources of comic effect. This paper is chiefly concerned with analysis of these comic techniques, but frequent comparison with Measure for Measure will help to place All's Well in the process of Shakespeare's development, once we understand its nature and relationship to its twin.

All's Well That Ends Well has long been the least popular of Shakespeare's plays. Most modern critics have declared it a failure.⁶ Almost every one of the characters has been attacked as unpleasant, the trick by which Helena secures Bertram for husband has offended many, and the ending has proved inexplicable. I believe that this mass of unfavorable criticism arises largely from mistaken preconceptions about what the author was trying to do, or what he should have done. I propose, therefore, to examine the play from the point of view of what he did do, in the hope of arriving at an understanding of what he intended. That is, I propose to proceed on the assumption that the author knew his business and therefore that the play was a success in its time; and I believe that, when its true relation to Measure for Measure is recognized, it will be apparent that that play also was much enjoyed by the audience for which it was written.

The most obvious similarity between Measure for Measure and All's Well is, of course, the bed-trick by which, in the former Isabella's chastity is preserved, and in the latter Helena secures the husband of her choice. There are other basic similarities. In Measure for Measure Shakespeare begins with the paradox of a law which punishes the men for adultery instead of the women, and in All's Well the initial paradox is a woman's pursuit of a reluctant boy. In both, the situation is the reverse of what is usual and expected. Shakespeare had already exploited the female pursuer in Venus and Adonis, but in All's Well he reversed the relative positions of the two principals. Helena is no goddess but a woman of inferior birth and fortune to the man she pursues. These handicaps she overcomes by passionate determination and recklessness. Her pursuit of the noble Bertram is heedless of consequences.

Isabella is the Shakespearian heroine most often compared to her, yet her passionate nature and her resourcefulness both contrast with Isabella's need for masculine guidance, first of Lucio, and then, after her brother fails her, of the Friar. Most critics begin with the assumption that All's Well is basically romantic comedy. They try to see Helena as “a ministring angel”, a woman, like Isabella, with “a sense of divine mission”,⁷ and to make of the play a morality on the commonplace of honorable actions proved nobler than noble birth,⁸ or, recently, a prodigal-son play.⁹

However, as a character and in relation to the plot, the figure who corresponds most closely to Helena is not Isabella, but Mariana. She is the one who has been deserted by the man she loves, and who recovers him by means of the bed-trick. If we begin with Mariana's poignant little song,

Take, o take those lips away
That so sweetly were foresworn,(10)

expressing her loneliness and physical longing, perhaps we can see Helena more clearly. Both women have recourse to the bed-trick to consummate their marriages. The two women whose chastity is preserved by this substitution are, in one play Isabella, in the other Diana. Surely it is more reasonable to suppose that Helena developed from Mariana than that she is any relation to the chaste Isabella—and how could Isabella develop from either Helena or Diana? The repetition of the bed-trick suggests a deliberate relationship between the two plays which Shakespeare's first audience would recognize and understand. It is too striking a plot-device to be repeated accidentally or casually. It has been assumed that All's Well was written first, and that this trick was borrowed from it as an easy solution to Isabella's dilemma. But the bed-trick occurs in many stories, including the biblical story of Leah and Rachel. No particular source need be postulated to account for the Friar's plan to save Claudio and yet spare Isabella.¹¹

However, it is easy to see how the playwright's imagination might be challenged by the problem of what kind of woman would do such a thing. Mariana's part must be kept too small and subordinate to Isabella's to allow much character development, and so Shakespeare may have gone on to write All's Well, making use of a much more elaborate version of the bed-trick story for his main plot.

It has long been recognized that the plot of All's Well was derived from Painter's retelling of Boccaccio's story of Giletta of Narbona.¹² Shakespeare follows this story with considerable fidelity, except that he changes entirely the circumstances and character of the heroine. Giletta is rich, Helena is a poor dependent orphan. Giletta is a good, patient soul, very much like the patient Griselda. After her cure of the king and marriage to Beltramo, she returns alone to her husband's home and proves her worth by ruling his subjects so well as to earn their good will. After long consideration she sets out on a pilgrimage which leads her to Florence and the bed-trick. In fact, she lies with her husband several times, bears twins, and lingers in Florence long enough to have them nursed before she returns home with the ring on her finger and the twins in her arms. Then Beltramo relents and accepts her as his “dere spouse and wife”.

Shakespeare's Helena is no such patient creature. On the contrary, she is vehement and reckless in her pursuit of her Adonis. Her uncontrollable desire for Bertram drives her to find an excuse to follow him to Paris and to make her desperate pledge to cure the King or die in the attempt (II.i.186-188). When Bertram runs off to the wars rather than “bed” her, passionate remorse and self-immolating love drive her to undertake a pilgrimage from which she vows never to return (III.ii.99-129, and iv.4-17); and when, in Florence, she chances upon a girl he is courting, she immediately plans to substitute for this girl in her husband's embraces in order to fulfill the impossible conditions which he has imposed upon her. From her first cry, “There is no living, none, / If Bertram be away” (I.i.82-83), she is a consistent character, a woman so passionately in love, and so determined, that she will do anything to get her man. She has none of Giletta's patience. Shakespeare has heightened the impression of her impetuosity by shortening the time interval at every point. This, of course, was usual in turning a story into a play, but Shakespeare has used it here to give Helena impetuosity and the play rapid movement.

The change in the character of the heroine should prepare us for a change in the denouement; yet Hunter is not alone in calling the ending of All's Well perverse, and suggesting that his source story would have provided a more effective end to the tale which Shakespeare was retelling. “But no!” he says, “Shakespeare invents a labyrinthine series of accusations and lies for the last scene, protracting the reconciliation into a tedious lawsuit.”¹³ “Lawsuit” hardly describes the series of false charges and quibbles by which Diana proceeds, and she is certainly not “protracting” the reconciliation, but delaying it so that it is reduced to minimal length.

It is this delay, or rather avoidance of an emotional ending, which has caused most modern critics to declare the play a failure. However, this last scene, like the bed-trick, closely parallels Measure for Measure and constitutes the chief evidence that All's Well is the later play, since it is modeled on the ending of Measure for Measure, as a kind of echo, or parody, which depends for much of its humor, and even for full understanding, on Measure for Measure, so that the relationship could not be the other way around, as I hope to show.

Dissatisfaction with the denouement arises from mistaken notions of what the author was trying to do, and from a consequent failure to observe what he was actually doing. Because the source-story is romantic comedy, it has been assumed that Shakespeare's play is also romantic at base. Hunter says that throughout “the play juxtaposes extreme romantic conventions with down to earth and critical realism” (p. xxxiii). In other words, the playwright is telling a romantic story with other ends than romance in view. An age which can relish T. B. White's The Once and Future King and Camelot ought to be able to adjust to, and understand the purpose of, this juxtaposition. To read the play simply as romantic comedy gone wrong can only lead to disappointment.

And here we must take account of another mistaken preconception. Victorian distaste for the bed-trick was, of course, violent, and W. W. Lawrence, in an attempt to defend this part of the plot, explained it as derived from widespread folklore and fairytale. He argues that Shakespeare could not have intended Helena to be other than noble, or the ending other than romantic and “happy ever after”; because he did not attempt “to make such sweeping changes in the meaning of traditional stories, in situations made familiar to people by centuries of oral narrative” because the simple audience would be “perplexed and baffled.”¹⁴ The assumptions involved in this line of reasoning are astonishing. The whole conception of folklore is a nineteenth-century one, as anachronistic in this context as is the striking clock in Julius Caesar. Shakespeare was not thinking in terms of the folk, but dramatizing a story which he found in Painter's Palace of Pleasure, and which his quite literate audience probably also knew in that form. He had, no doubt, heard of the bed-trick in other connections and in other stories, but in the tale of Giletta of Narbona it is combined with the story of the healing of the king in a complex which has no such universal dissemination as Lawrence claims for it. Moreover, neither he nor his audience had the exaggerated respect for “the folk”, i.e. “the common man”, which the sociological theory of our time has created, a respect which tends to make folklore sacrosanct, and which clearly colors the condemnation of the ending of All's Well.¹⁵

On the other hand, Shakespeare probably was consciously recalling and suggesting the classical myth of Venus and Adonis, in the first half of the play, and of the impossible tasks given to Psyche (in the Cupid and Psyche story), in the second half of the play.¹⁶ Allusion to classical myth served the same purpose, in the Renaissance, that folktale often serves today; it provided an archetype which lent an aura of profound truth or ancient wisdom to a story, giving it depth, or the semblance of depth, which enlarged its significance. But far from venerating these classical myths as sacrosanct, the Renaissance poet felt free, and indeed felt an obligation, to recreate them by giving them new meaning, a new treatment which justified the retelling. The reader's, or in drama the hearer's, recognition of the old story heightened his pleasure and his appreciation of the artist's interpretation by high-lighting the changes he had made. This parody technique, as it has been called,¹⁷ was widely understood because it was taught in the grammar schools of the Renaissance. It is often mistaken, today, for simple plagiarism, or imitation.

But if folklore and romance are the wrong contexts in which to read or act this play, then how should we view it? Let us begin with the alterations which are most obvious in the story. In addition to changing the character of the heroine, Shakespeare repeatedly emphasized the youth of the hero, or protagonist, and he added several characters: the Countess, her Clown, Lafeu, and Parolles. These new characters govern the audience-response to both Bertram and Helena. Bertram's rebellion against his fate is made clearer and more reprehensible by the disapproval of his mother and Lafeu and by his choice of the knavish Parolles as his mentor. Helena's aggressiveness is reduced, especially in the first half of the play, by the sympathy and help given her by the Countess and Lafeu. Moreover, as Hunter observes, the playwright has, by these additions, counterpoised youth and age (pp. xxxvi-xxxviii) and “extreme romantic conventions with down-to-earth and critical realism” (p. xxxiii). He says, “Shakespeare is handling traditional motifs, but he makes a new effect out of them by manipulating the viewpoint” (p. xxxii). Unfortunately, I believe, Hunter does not pursue this insight far enough to observe how the point-of-view is manipulated, but instead complains of “the dramatic perversity of many of its [the play's] devices” (p. liii), especially in the last act. He finds even the verse, like the plot, “laboured and complex” (p. lvi), and, except for two or three great speeches, a failure (p. lix).

The techniques which Hunter calls “tangles, perplexities, and perversities of treatment” (pp. xxiii-xxiv), begin in the first act. Let us look at them there. The first 76 lines neatly provide the exposition: the Countess is a recent widow, Lafeu is conducting her son Bertram to Paris to be a ward of the King, the King is ill and his physicians have given him up, Helena's father, Gerard de Narbon, was a famous physician who might have cured him but he recently died leaving his daughter in the care of the Countess. Farewells are said and Helena is left alone on the stage and in tears, which Lafeu had suggested were for her late father; but she immediately bursts out,

O, were that all! I think not on my father,
.....                                                            What was he like?
I have forgot him; my imagination
Carries no favour in't but Bertram's.
I am undone; there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. …

(I.i.77-83)

Her lament runs on for twenty lines, but her passionate avowal is, by its suddenness, its extravagance, and her shocking admission that she has forgotten her father, too violent and abrupt to carry our sympathies with it. We are startled and surprised, rather than moved. She is interrupted by the entrance of Parolles, and in seven lines more of soliloquy we learn that she considers him a liar, a fool, and a coward, yet she begins her shrewd characterization with the words, “I love him for his [Bertram's] sake.” Then, like a quick-change artist, she changes her tone and bandies fooleries with Parolles, in prose, on the subject of virginity, going on (and back to verse) to speculate on Bertram's education in love at court, beginning, “There shall your master have a thousand loves,” and ending with a wish that she might follow him, obliquely expressed and beginning with a double entendre,

                                                                      'Tis pity
That wishing well had not a body in't
Which might be felt. …

(175-188)

“Felt” expresses both her desire to be with Bertram and the physical and more specific hunger which accompanies her desire to give herself—expresses it, in fact, so frankly as to raise a laugh in an audience which understood the innuendo.

Helena ends the conversation with a charge of cowardice aimed at Parolles which is so cleverly phrased that Parolles cannot think of an answer. He excuses himself, “I am so full of business I cannot answer thee acutely.” However, he will return a perfect courtier and teach her to be thankful for a courtier's counsel, ending, “Get thee a good husband, and use him as he uses thee. So farewell.” He has no idea of her passionate interest in Bertram, and yet the audience has been kept aware of what is uppermost in Helena's mind, and so is able to follow easily when she resumes in line 212 the soliloquy which had been interrupted in line 86.¹⁸ We have been kept aware of her thoughts while she spars with Parolles about virginity and Bertram's sex-education at court. Moreover, this demonstration of her nimble mind, her shrewd judgment of people and situations, and her ability to dissemble, prepares us for her subsequent activities and the reckless determination which carries her ultimately to success.¹⁹ She is no helpless innocent, no Isabella, but a woman mature in passion, if not in years, with strong will, wit, intelligence, and resourcefulness. She cuts off Parolles' insinuation that she discard her virginity with the curt, rejoinder, “Not my virginity yet:”²⁰ where the “yet” expresses a mind made up and should, taken with her passionate declaration of love, prepare us for her later desperate expedient for entrapping Bertram.

Preoccupation with the heroine, a sentimental over-sympathy with her distresses, arising apparently from the belief that this is essentially, or should be, a romantic play, is probably the main cause of modern failure to enjoy the play as comedy.²¹ Hunter says, “To fit Helena into the play or adapt the play to Helena is obviously the central problem of interpretation in All's Well” (p. xlviii). Our problem is rather to see Shakespeare's Helena as he intended and drew her, not to “adapt the play” to a romantic preconception of her. Hunter makes the usual comparison of Helena with Isabella, but Helena is a woman passionately in love, Isabella is Shakespeare's only comic heroine who is not in love. Helena is a determined and resourceful woman, Isabella is dependent on masculine guidance at every step.²² Isabella values her virginity above the life of her brother, Helena values her lover above her own life and wishes to die in order to rescue Bertram from the dangers of war. Both girls are deeply religious, but in a religious age that hardly constitutes a striking similarity. Both make use of religious conviction to further their own desires, in ways that are very human but not very similar. Helena can only be misunderstood if she is viewed in terms of Isabella.

The scene between Helena and Parolles so deeply shocked the Victorians that its virtues of character-exposition have been neglected. Critics have even denied that Shakespeare could have written it;²³ yet the exposure of Helena's thoughts under the disguise of banter with Parolles is as brilliant a bit of dialogue as there is anywhere in Shakespeare.

Helena's frankness was true to the life and manners of Shakespeare's day, but we must also remember that this dialogue was written to be spoken, not by a woman or young girl, but by a boy impersonating a woman. In that situation touches of burlesque were inevitable in comedy. In the last forty years we have largely restored Shakespeare's plays to the bare stage for which they were written, but so far we have done nothing to correct the distortion which results from the substitution of women for boys in the female parts. In fact, we have simply assumed that this substitution is an improvement. However, the parts were written for boys and are adjusted to that situation. Because they were to be acted by boys the dramatist compensated by giving the boys very feminine lines to speak, just as he compensated for the lack of scenery by making his characters speak sensitively of their surroundings. But he also took advantage of the bare stage for rapid changes of scene, and for other effects not possible with scenery.²⁴ He also took advantage of the dramatic possibilities of boy actors. It has been observed that producing Shakespeare with scenery gives a reduplicative effect which makes the poetry seem superfluous, and a similar reduplication arises from the use of women in parts written for boys impersonating women. For example, to use women in boy's clothes for the frequent situations in which his heroines dress as boys is to lose entirely the dramatic effectiveness of having boys pretending to be girls continue the pretense while they are dressed as boys.²⁵ These characters no longer act women's parts today, they merely are women. A naïve literalness has taken the place of acting, appreciation of which Shakespeare cultivated in his audience, and which, by the time All's Well was written, had reached a subtlety no modern audience expects or is prepared to appreciate. The success of the boys' companies attests the taste for this acting, for enjoyment of the techniques of illusion, or appreciation of both illusion and reality at the same time—the same kind of enjoyment involved in appreciating a picture for what it represents, and at the same time for the artist's skill in creating on a flat surface the illusion of three-dimensional objects.²⁶ We are doing violence to a delicate and intricate art when we substitute the literal for the imagined, as we regularly do in the case of Shakespeare's heroines.

In the resulting distortion we expect both too much and too little of the actress. It is a case of the painted versus the real fruit. We enjoy the latter both as beautiful and as stimulating to appetite, but the painted fruit, by leaving the appetite unstimulated, allows more various, more intellectual, and more lasting aesthetic pleasures. The imagined Helena can have more subtlety and variety because our protective (or concupiscent) emotions are not aroused: we are not involved with her as a woman, but only as acted and imagined woman. We can savor the similitude to reality, sensing at the same time both the illusion and the art which creates it, free from the blinding and blunting emotions which realism arouses.

We must make this adjustment to Shakespeare's art if we are to appreciate Helena, for she is easily the most subtle and intricate portrait of a woman which Shakespeare created—as courageous as Rosalind, as deeply in love as Viola, as intelligent and able as Portia. She is Juliet to an indifferent Romeo. If she lacks the quality of Juliet's charm, she commands our admiration of her generous spirit and dignity in adversity. Love is her whole being. As a girl hotly in love and pursuing a disdainful male, she is basically a comic figure; but her resourcefulness, quick wit and intelligence, and the integrity of her passion, save her from absurdity. And Shakespeare, with consummate skill, saves us from too much emotional involvement, too much sympathy for her to enjoy her predicament objectively. He does this by taking advantage of the artifice of the boy actor—and by manipulating our emotions through the point of view from which the story is told.

Whether a situation is comic or tragic depends not on the situation but on the point of view and the outcome. In All's Well That Ends Well Shakespeare has reassured his audience, by means of his title, about the outcome; and then he has proceeded to present a youthful romance from a mature point of view. He has used the Countess and Lafeu especially, but the King and the Widow also, and even the Clown, to help us to see Helena's troubles through grown-up eyes. “Even so it was with me when I was young”, says the Countess (I.iii.123) and gives us the perspective from which to view Helena.

Critics have complained that the play has no single, unified point of view because it is not written from the point of view of either Helena or Bertram, but it is not a romance of young love. It is a play of the extravagances of young love seen through the eyes of experienced, sympathetic, yet wiser maturity. In Romeo and Juliet we have the doting but completely uncomprehending father causing the destruction of his beloved daughter, i.e. we see him from the point of view of sympathy for the daughter. But in All's Well the lovers are presented as they appear to the wisely loving and experienced Countess, or to the generous, wise, and noble Lafeu. Between them they smooth the young lovers' way and help them to find each other by finding themselves. Lafeu is a wonderful study of a truely noble man, so entirely in command of himself that he always sees the need of the moment and attends to it, friend of the Countess, of Helena, of Bertram, of the King, and even friend to Parolles in his need. He is an experienced courtier and true gentleman who can jest his King into good humor or bandy words with Parolles, comfort the Countess, smooth Helena's way to the King, or make Bertram's peace for him. He is everything that a man ought to be. The fineness of the Countess has long been recognized. For contrast, we have presented to us the point of view of the old Clown, a shallow malcontent, seeing only the surface and understanding nothing, an utterly superficial observer. And we see love and war through the eyes of Parolles, the parasite, a light-weight sophisticate, incapable of either love or war, but making pretensions to both, able to impose only on the inexperienced Bertram. Parolles is unmasked before Bertram, he has deceived nobody else. Lafeu recognizes him as an empty husk. “Lord have mercy on thee for a hen!” he suddenly exclaims, and the basic effeminacy of Parolles' “scarves and bannerets”, his pretences and his cowardice, is made clear.

From this mature point of view Shakespeare makes comedy out of the desperations of young love, but it is comedy for the mature, not for those who demand “realism” so that they can “identify” with the leading character, those who regard “complete intellectual and emotional surrender to illusion” as “the summit of theatrical experience”.²⁷ It was intended for an audience which could enter into the fiction, and pity the passionate heroine, while at the same time savoring the acting, and, from the distance of a mature point of view, seeing the comic side of Helena's pursuit of Bertram. In a narrative, such as Venus and Adonis, the point of view of the narrator is easily maintained: the selection of diction, phrasing, imagery, and events establishes the tone. The author, in his persona as narrator, controls the reader's attitude toward the story. But in drama the characters must speak from their own point of view as characters; therefore the manipulation of audience-response is much more difficult to manage in anything beyond simple realism; but in this play Shakespeare has developed special techniques for achieving it.

To begin with, he has simplified the plot so that he has space to provide complex perspectives from which to view it. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, he has provided separate strands of amorous situation and dramatic fiction in the youthful affairs of the young lovers, in the married quarrel of the fairies, in the stately and formal mating of Theseus and Hippolyta, and then a travesty of tragedy, as of theater, in the “tedious brief scene of Pyramus and his love Thisbe”. In All's Well he has spun all this into a single strand, twisting together the romantic, the comic, the inexperienced, the mature, the theatrical, and the burlesque, exploiting the borderline between tears and laughter with a consummate art which we entirely miss if we take any single filament for the whole strand of his spinning.

Helena's second soliloquy, after her bout with Parolles, replaces elegiac emotion with decision; and here we become aware of another technique which the poet uses freely in this play (as in every other), the manipulation of language as part of his control of audience-response. Helena's first passionate outburst (ll. 77-96) is, as we would expect, in blank verse. Her conversation with Parolles is largely in prose. And her soliloquy of decision is in pentameter couplets, a medium which gives just the right sense of wisdom and finality to that decision:²⁸

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky
Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
.....                                                            Who ever strove
To show her merit that did miss her love?
The king's disease—my project may deceive me,
But my intents are fix'd, and will not leave me. Exit.

This is the end of scene i. We are so well able to follow the line of her unspoken thought that the mere hint, “the king's disease”, prepares us for what is coming; and this foresight provided for the audience is an important technique of comedy, since an audience enjoys being made to feel wiser than the people on the stage.

The manipulation of diction and speech rhythms goes far beyond the choice of meter. The blank verse lines of Helena's confession gain timbre and passion by frequent medial breaks (ten in twenty lines) and run-on lines (nine); while the fourteen lines of resolution, in couplets, show only four medial breaks and six run-on lines. The difference in diction is also marked. In the blank verse there are concrete images of the “bright particular star”, the hind and the lion, and the trope of drawing Bertram's picture and worshipping “his arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls”. In the couplets the figures are vague and abstract: “heaven”, “the fated sky”, “power”, “space”, “fortune”, “native things”, and so forth. Helena feels in concrete images, but thinks and decides in more general and less visual terms.

It is not that we consciously recognize these speech patterns and respond to them rationally, but that Shakespeare is playing on our emotions without our recognizing it. Unlike Guildenstern, he knows our stops and can play upon his audience as a musician plays upon his instrument. In All's Well he is exhibiting his virtuosity before an experienced audience, controlling the point of view, showing emotion, not evoking it, so that it can be observed acutely and understood rather than felt.

Another device for reducing the audience's emotional involvement is change of scene. The Merchant of Venice is notable for its regular alternation of scenes between Venice and Belmont, which gives the comedy a rhythm such as can be found also in other of Shakespeare's comedies; but here the change of place has a somewhat different use. Scene ii of Act I carries us away to Paris to see the King face the grim reality of imminent death. As usual, the change also reduces our sympathetic involvement with Helena and so prepares us, by a kind of emotional cold shower, for scene iii, which returns us to Rossillion and brings the Countess to Helena's assistance. The solicitude of Bertram's mother puts the sympathies of the audience on Helena's side, but not by the emotional means of making us sympathize with her, rather by the rational means of representing the Countess as sympathizing with her.

The management of audience-response is as subtle as it is masterful in this scene, which begins with the Countess' words to her Steward, “I will now hear. What say you of this gentlewoman?” The speech directs our thoughts to Helena, but the Steward's reply is interrupted by the entrance of the Clown, who comes to beg leave to marry “Isbel”. This has been recognized as a parody scene²⁹ anticipating Helena's interview with the Countess. Normally, a parody follows the thing parodied in the manner of mimicry, but here the parody is comic preparation for the more serious scene to follow. It tantalizes the audience with expectation, and, at the same time, by its comic mood, makes it impossible for us to take Helena's problem very seriously. The conversation of the Countess with her Clown is tied to Helena's situation not only by the opening lines which bring up the subject, but also by the Clown's song when he is commanded to summon her.

In the Arden edition of 1962 this song is merely described as “a ballad fragment” without any reference to the patent allusion, in the opening couplet, to Marlowe's famous lines,

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Illium?(30)

The Clown sings,

Was this fair face the cause, quoth she,
Why the Grecians sacked Troy?

The deliberate, prose flatness of the second line has humor as a teasing refusal to quote what the first line calls to mind. The Clown is playing on Shakespeare's choice of name for this heroine, a choice which is ironic, since Helena's story is the antithesis of Grecian Helen's. Both are beautiful, but one pursues where the other is pursued.

The “ballad” is followed by the Clown's report of the scarcity of good women, a thoroughly unserious preparation for the Countess' interview with Helena. Before Helena enters, however, the tone of the scene is modulated by the Steward's long-delayed report of what he has overheard of Helena's lamentation, and by the Countess' sympathetic sestet of reminiscence beginning, “even so it was with me when I was young.” So we are prepared for her kindly treatment of her ward.

If this were romantic comedy we should rightly expect a touching scene in which the Countess should sympathize with Helena and promise to help her. That is what happens; but Shakespeare has deliberately drained the scene of sentiment and rendered it comic by the contretemps of Helena's misunderstanding of the Countess' offer to be a mother to her. She violently rejects the idea. She will not have the Countess for mother because that would make Bertram her brother! The Countess is sympathetic (contrary to convention), but Helena makes help difficult. Only at the end of the scene is understanding achieved, and the Countess' shift from you to thee gives a touch of sentiment to her last speech. But immediately both scene and mood shift, as Act II opens at the French Court. There is no time for sentiment. And so it is throughout the play. There are moments of deep and honest emotion, on the part of both Helena and the Countess, but these moments are kept brief so that we observe rather than feel them. Immediate comic relief (as in I.i), complete change of scene (as in I.ii), or other device such as the Clown's anticipatory parody (as in I.iii), mutes the impact and “distances” the emotion.

As observers we are kept firmly outside the play, looking on—kept dangling by the delay of expected events, teased by allusive parallels, and delighted by the recognition of human absurdity which we have escaped from. “Even so it was with me when I was young”, says the Countess, smiling at Helena's woe and keying the audience's response to it. We also are wiser than Helena, and enjoy her woes from the vantage-point of self-gratulation.

The techniques observed in Act I appear also in the controversial Act V. In the first scene of the latter, Helena, Diana, and the Widow arrive at Marseilles expecting to find the King there, but learn that he has gone to Rossillion. Helena sends him a letter and prepares to follow it immediately. Scene ii, in Rossillion, settles the fate of Parolles and serves several dramatic purposes. It prevents Helena's arrival at Rossillion from following immediately on her setting out; that is, it serves as a time-interval. It also builds suspense by delaying an expected complication. We had learned, at the end of Act IV, that Lafeu, believing Helena to be dead, had arranged the King's forgiveness of Bertram and the marriage of his own daughter to him. This plan for a second marriage for Bertram, when the audience knows that his first wife is about to arrive, creates anticipation of the final complication and so provides suspense for the last act, just as the Duke's preparation to “return” and deal with Angelo creates the necessary suspense (much less effectively) for the last act of Measure for Measure.

In this scene (V.ii), first the Clown and then Lafeu subject Parolles to a kind of verbal hazing, or masculine joshing, about his bedraggled and masterless state and needy condition which keeps us waiting and so increases the tension. There is also a parody preparation for the “hazing” of Bertram in the scene which follows, just as in I.iii, the interview of the Countess and her Clown uses parody as emotional preparation for the Countess' interview with Helena. It also provides a neatly ironic conclusion to Parolles' story. In an earlier encounter with Lafeu, Parolles had indignantly denied that he was in anybody's service. He was “companion” to the Count of Rossillion, no servant to anyone (II.iii.186-195). In V.ii, he is reduced to humble gratitude for Lafeu's contemptuous engagement of his services: “though you are a fool and a knave you shall eat. Go to; follow.” Parolles comments fervently, “I praise God for you.” In similar fashion, in the next scene, Bertram is given such a hard time by the King, Lafeu, Diana, Parolles, and even the Countess, his mother, that he is reduced to fervent gratitude in his welcome of Helena as the solution of his difficulties.

As in I.iii, where the expected interview between Helena and the Countess is delayed, and sentiment avoided, first by the Clown's parody request for permission to marry, and then by Helena's refusal to accept the Countess as her mother; so in V.iii, the meeting between Helena and Bertram is delayed to the last moment so that there shall be no touching reconciliation, but only Lafeu's adult, humorous recognition of a potentially touching scene, in his wry comment, “Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon. Good Tom Drum [i.e. Parolles] lend me a handkercher.” The immediately preceding scene had called attention to Parolles' bedraggled and unwashed condition. The handkerchief would certainly not be clean!

Before we can appreciate the last scene fully, we must consider Shakespeare's characterization of Bertram and also the relation of the end of All's Well to the end of Measure for Measure. Dislike of Bertram has prevented our understanding of the play almost as much as the romanticizing of Helena.³¹ Shakespeare has been accused of denegrating Bertram, of making him an even more unpleasant character than Angelo, but this is not true. Bertram uses no such power of coercion to secure Diana's submission to his lust as Angelo attempts to use on Isabella; and, while his subsequent repudiation of Diana is more practical than admirable, there is in his conduct nothing comparable to Angelo's treacherous ordering of Claudio's execution in order to protect himself.

Hunter finds “the process of development out of frigid immaturity, through active evil, into humble wisdom and acceptance of life” (p. xxiv), clearer in the case of Angelo than of Bertram. This is curious, because Angelo's growth is little more than development of an uneasy conscience evidenced by soliloquies, and his repentance is adequate only because his crimes were prevented. He is much less convincing as a young nobleman of promise than is Bertram, who grows up in more ways, over an apparently longer period of time, and through experience in a more “real”, or plausible situation. At the beginning he is a minor whose loss of his father makes him the ward of the King. Our first glimpse of him after his arrival at court is his lament to the two Lords who are setting out for the Italian wars, “I am commanded here, and kept a coil with ‘Too young’, and ‘The next year’, and ‘Tis too early’” (II.i.27-28). Like the boy he is, he resolves, “By heaven, I'll steal away!”, and Parolles, his foolish counselor, encourages him. When Helena, having cured the King, is given her choice among the King's wards, she tells four of them in turn that she will make no demand of them. Each gives her a polite, but tepid, reply, while Lafeu fumes, “These boys are boys of ice”, “And they were sons of mine I'd have them whipp'd”. Then Helena turns to Bertram, among these “boys” and says with modest dignity,

I dare not say I take you, but I give
Me and my service, ever whilst I live,
Into your guiding power

(II.iii.102-104).

Bertram is shrilly indignant that he should be asked to pay the price of the King's cure. He protests,

A poor physician's daughter my wife! Disdain
Rather corrupt me ever!

Less disciplined than the others, or more tried, he talks like a willful adolescent. However, the King's honor is at stake and he forces Bertram to submit. Then, while the wedding is being performed off-stage, Lafeu's telling-off of Parolles fills the interval and confirms Helena's (and so the audience's) judgment of Parolles, so that, when Bertram comes to him immediately afterwards for comfort and counsel, the audience can see that bad counsel is at least partly to blame for Bertram's foolish conduct. The bridegroom's outburst of feeling is as tragi-comic as Helena's had been in the first scene:

                                                  O my Parolles, they have married me!
I'll to the Tuscan wars and never bed her

(II.iii.268-269).

Adonis was not more petulent, nor more reluctant. His utter boyish dismay at the prospect of the marriage bed is surely both more comic and more acceptable psychologically than Angelo's sudden desire for Isabella or his argumentative method of trying to seduce her. Both Lafeu and the King have given us mature perspective from which to see Bertram.

After the end of Act II, when he sends Helena off to Rossillion without so much as a parting kiss, we see little of Bertram, but what we hear indicates that he is maturing rapidly. Shakespeare fully understood the dramatic necessity of the single episode which serves as token of a whole development. He understood the need to indicate as well as to represent. Of Bertram's success as a soldier we have such brief indications. In III. iii, we see him being appointed to the very responsible post of “general of our horse”, by the Duke of Florence. In III. v, his fame is made clear by the crowd waiting in the street to see him pass, and by their comments. Diana says, “They say the French Count hath done most honorable service.” Her mother replies, “it is reported that he hath taken their great'st commander, and that with his own hand he slew the duke's brother.”

Bertram's attempt to seduce Diana indicates his growth in another direction, and the attempt to satisfy this new appetite is only too painfully typical of adolescent sexuality. He does not, however, actually lie with her, although he believes that he has, and so he is vulnerable to her lies in the last scene. The final step in his education is effected by the two Lords who unmask Parolles before him, and so, by a single episode, typify and epitomize the experiences which make him a competent judge of men.

At the end of Act IV, audience-attitude toward the return of Bertram is prepared by Lafeu, who tells the Countess that her son was misled by Parolles, and that he has prepared the King to forgive Bertram. His confidence in the young man is sufficiently indicated by his proposal that Bertram marry his daughter “to stop up” the King's displeasure (IV.v.72-73). The audience is shown Bertram's homecoming through the eyes of the Clown, who is concerned only with appearances. Yet we learn that he is well attended, as befits a successful general. The Clown says, “Faith, there's a dozen of 'em with delicate fine hats, and most courteous feathers which bow the head and nod at every man” (IV.v.100-102). Moreover, he reports that Bertram has begun to exhibit the badge of adulthood, a beard. This passage seems not to have been understood by most commentators. The Clown reports that Bertram has “a patch of velvet on's face; whether there be a scar under't or no, the velvet knows; but 'tis a goodly patch of velvet.³² His left cheek is a cheek of two pile and a half,³³ but his right cheek is worn bare” i.e. shaved. Lafeu immediately interprets this evidence of a wound too fresh to shave as “a scar nobly got”, but the Clown refuses to distinguish between scars, “It is your carbonado's face”, he says.³⁴

Bertram makes a more complete development from boy to man than Angelo does. He is also much the better man. He has proved himself a great success as a soldier, where Angelo was a complete failure as a ruler. The King says that he has a good report of him from Florence. At the beginning of the final scene he shows himself also to be a mature and able courtier. When the King asks him whether he remembers Lafeu's daughter, he replies,

Admiringly, my liege. At first
I stuck my choice upon her, ere my heart
Durst make too bold a herald of my tongue;
.....                                                                                Thence it came
That she whom all men prais'd, and whom myself
Since I have lost, have lov'd, was in mine eye
The dust that did offend it.

(V.iii.44-55)

Whether this is true or not, it is tactful. He has adroitly combined a prompt and graceful acceptance of the King's second choice of a wife for him with an excuse for his rejection of the first.³⁵ The king commends his diplomacy with the words, “well excus'd.”

The arrival and claim of Diana is a serious embarrassment to Bertram, but that alone would not have been sufficient to discredit him in the eyes of the King and Lafeu. The ethics of the day did not require a man to marry a woman just because he had seduced her. Shakespeare takes the precaution of showing us that Diana is well aware of what to expect if she yields to him. She says,

My mother told me just how he would woo
As if she sat in's heart. She says all men
Have the like oaths. He had sworn to marry me
When his wife's dead; and therefore I'll lie with him
When I am buried. Since Frenchmen are so braid,
Marry that will, I live and die a maid.

(IV.ii.69-74)

She is no betrayed innocent (as the audience knows, but Bertram does not), and if he slanders her by saying that she was “a common gamester of the camp”, the audience knows that she is shamelessly lying about him after having tricked him into consummating his marriage with Helena. It is the witness of the two rings which convinces his accusers that Bertram has done away with Helena and married himself solemnly to Diana.³⁶

Diana's conduct in the last scene is a close and obvious imitation of Isabella's in the last scene of Measure for Measure. In the latter play, however, there is more preparation for the false charge. We know, at least in general, why she makes it. She has been so instructed by the Friar (who is also the Duke). She protests to Mariana, “I would say the truth; but to accuse him so, / That is your part: yet I'm advis'd to do it.” We know that the Duke has been very busy arranging his “return” and the reckoning with Angelo. But just what Diana is trying to do with her false accusation we have not been told. Critics have assumed that Diana's accusation is a first, bungling attempt which Shakespeare made more effective in Measure for Measure; but what seems more likely is that All's Well is the later of the two plays, that Measure for Measure was a great success, and that the denouement of All's Well gains comic significance by its reminiscence (or parody) of its twin. Shakespeare was too able and experienced a dramatist, by 1604-5, to bungle a denouement.

In both plays the ending is stage-managed, but in All's Well the director, Helena, is off-stage so that her cleverness is not the point, as is the Duke's. We have been told that she is bringing Diana and the Widow to Rossillion with her, but we are kept in the dark as to why. We see her sending a letter ahead to the King, but we have no inkling of its deceptive purport until a letter signed “Diana Capilet” is brought to the King. We naturally assume that this is the same letter. It claims, “I followed him to his country for justice. Grant it me, O king!” (V.iii.143-144). We know that this is a false claim, but it gains point as reminiscence of the parallel scene in which Isabella begins her false accusation of Angelo with the words, “Justice, O royal Duke!” and ends, “And give me justice, justice, justice, justice!” (V.i.20-25).

Diana carries her false charges much further than did Isabella, and with much less justification, since Bertram used no such compulsion as Angelo had attempted. But Diana's situation is so similar to Isabella's that her accusation gains comic relevance if it is viewed as allusion. Both women are putting on an act. Isabella has been so instructed, as part of the Duke's plan to bring Angelo to repent. In All's Well we can easily guess that Diana's false accusation is intended to help Helena in some way, but how? Bertram is already in trouble because Lafeu and the King have recognized the ring he takes from his finger as the one which the King had given to Helena. This trouble over the ring seems purely accidental. We can hardly be expected to suppose that Helena had put it on Bertram's finger while they were in bed together with this particular end in view. But the focus of this scene is not Helena's cleverness but the embarrassment of Bertram. In Measure for Measure the Duke held the center of the stage, but in All's Well Bertram is the central figure. The King is not in command of the situation, because he neither knows the truth nor directs the action. He performs about the same function as does Escalus in Measure for Measure, who orders the arrest of the Friar for speaking ill of the Duke, and so brings about the revelation that the Friar is the Duke. In a somewhat similar fashion the King in All's Well orders the arrest first of Bertram and then of Diana, and so forces Helena to appear.

In Measure for Measure first Isabella appears and accuses Angelo falsely, and then Mariana appears and claims him for her husband, and the Duke orders Angelo to examine both women and pass judgment. Since in All's Well Helena is not to appear until the very end of the last scene, suspicion of Bertram is brought about by Lafeu's recognition of the King's ring. This second ring is Shakespeare's invention. Bertram's ring, which Helena must obtain, is part of the original story, but we suddenly hear, in this last scene, of a second ring, one which the King had given to Helena, and which Bertram had appeared wearing. The King demands to know where he got it. Bertram thinks that he got it from Diana when they were in bed together, and so he stoutly denies that it was ever Helena's. His denial leads the King to suspect that he got it by foul play, and his arrest is ordered. As he goes out he utters what is more true than he knows:

                                                                                If you should prove
This ring was ever hers, you shall as easily
Prove that I husbanded her bed in Florence,
Where yet she never was.

(V.iii.124-127)

Any audience can be counted upon to enjoy its superior knowledge of Helena's whereabouts.

In some ways the introduction of the second ring is a much better device for putting Bertram in jeopardy than was the double accusation against Angelo. In both plays the charges are double; the betrayal of a virgin and murder. In both, the audience knows that neither crime has actually been committed. However, the King's dark and persistent suspicion of Bertram is more life-like, more credible, than the false accusations of Angelo. The Duke has taken care that Claudio not be executed, and so he is merely putting on an act when he accuses Angelo. But the King has, within the limits of his knowledge, good reason to suspect Bertram, and so it is a brilliant bit of humor-of-situation when he orders Bertram to prison under suspicion of murdering Helena, when the audience knows that she is lurking somewhere in the wings, waiting for the right moment to appear.

There are echoes between the closing scenes of the two plays, not only of situations and predicaments, but also in the management of mood and tempo. Just as Measure for Measure, Act V, begins with the Duke's dissembling compliments to Angelo, so in All's Well everything goes smoothly for Bertram until Lafeu recognizes the King's ring. The King, and even the Countess, identify it as Helena's, and so the King, “wrapp'd in dismal thinkings”, orders his arrest. It is at this point that the letter signed “Diana Capilet” arrives, followed by Diana in person. The more serious charge, therefore, is woven in with the less serious, is brought first, and complicates the second charge (supported by Diana's possession of the ancestral ring). They come back to it near the end of the scene, when Diana offers to return Bertram's ring if he will return hers, i.e. the ring the King had given to Helena. The King's questioning of Diana about this second ring leads to his discrediting her and forcing her to produce “the jeweller that owes the ring”, Helena. This is a less elaborate, but more ingenious and closely knit series than the one which the Duke of Vienna weaves round Angelo; where first Isabella and then Mariana accuse him, and then, after the truth of that affair has come out and he has been married to Mariana, Angelo is condemned to die for having executed Claudio, so that Isabella must plead for his life, and finally the Duke thinks of another charge, the technical one of having executed Claudio at an unusual hour. The charges against Angelo are flimsy because the Duke, as well as the audience, knows that they are false, while the King's suspicion of Bertram, and Diana's charge of seduction are real at least to the King. However, the whole balance of the two scenes is different, because in Measure for Measure the whole long scene centers firmly about the Duke, while in All's Well not the comparable figure, the King, but Bertram is central. His is a wonderful acting part, requiring great bodily, as well as vocal expressiveness in this scene. His harrassment, caused by the King's unjustified suspicions and by the false charges of Diana, reduces him to a state of such acute embarrassment that the appearance of Helena is as welcome to him as the arrival of a pardon is to a condemned man. Everyone has turned against him; Lafeu rejects him as a prospective son-in-law, the King suspects him of murder, his mother accepts the evidence against him, and even Parolles testifies against him while protesting that he will not do so. Meanwhile the audience is kept waiting for the appearance of Helena, but when she finally does appear, those on stage are amazed at the sight of her. The King asks, “Is't real that I see?” and Helena replies,

                                                                      No my good lord;
'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see;
The name and not the thing.

Bertram bursts out with, “Both, both. O pardon!” (V.iii.300-302). For him she brings welcome relief from all his difficulties. His is an honest sentiment rendered ironic by its convenience. Here we have tragi-comedy in Shakespeare's vein: not the sentimentalism of the honest whore or the repentant wife, but the irony of life which sometimes renders virtue convenient. Bertram has grown up, that is, reason has gained control of will. He has accepted Lafeu's daughter gracefully because it is the King's will, only to be suspected of murder and confronted with Diana's demand for “justice”. The sudden appearance of Helena frees him from all embarrassments at once, from charges some of which he believes to be true, and none of which he can refute: from Lafeu's daughter and Diana, both. He already has a wife! His “Both, both, O pardon!” is heartfelt, though of a mingled motive which substitutes irony for pathos in its appeal to the audience's emotions.

All's Well ends with the practical business of providing Diana with a dowry. The king tells her,

If thou beest yet a fresh uncropped flower
Choose thou thy husband and I'll pay thy dower.

This is the same offer that he made to Helena at the beginning of the play, as if the playwright were saying, “Here we go again.” It is a comic ending to a comedy which has avoided, and carefully prevented, too deep involvement of the audience's sympathies, through the manipulation of tone, scene-sequence, and point of view.

The plot of All's Well, like that of Measure for Measure, involves a desperate remedy for a serious situation (though it is a greater stretching of “reality” than I can manage to call sentencing of a man to death for adultery or a woman's getting herself pregnant by an unwilling male “real life” problems). However, there is much less plot in All's Well than in its twin, and even less subplot. Instead of so much plot, there is more character development. Neither Isabella nor Angelo is comparable in depth and individuality to Helena and Bertram. Otherwise, in Measure for Measure, we have only the Duke and Escalus, whereas in All's Well there are the King and Lafeu, as well as the frequently admired Countess.³⁷ Helena has been misunderstood and misrepresented. Shakespeare gives her passionate moments, but they are sudden and brief. The firmness of her character and her heedless determination and ability deprive the audience of the protective impulse which is the active part of sympathy.

I have discussed the devices by which Shakespeare controls our sympathies in the first act. In Act II the focus of attention is on the King, his disease, and the miracle of his cure which is rendered ridiculous by its suddenness, and by the verbal contest between Lafeu and Parolles to describe it. In the scene in which Helena chooses, we see the King's wards from Lafeu's point of view as silly boys, and that attitude colors our reaction to Bertram's shrill refusal. Then the King takes Bertram in hand, and Helena is silent except for one dignified attempt to withdraw her choice of Bertram (II.iii.147-148). The wedding takes place off-stage, while Lafeu is telling-off Parolles. Then we see Bertram running to Parolles for comfort and advice and resolving, “I'll to the Tuscan wars and never bed her.” Helena appears in scene iv, but says little except to accede humbly to the orders which Bertram relays to her through Parolles. Parolles and the Clown dominate the scene. Helena has a minor part also in scene v, which concludes the act, and there her modest begging for a parting kiss from Bertram allows only a touch of pathos at the very end of the scene.

Act III immediately switches the action to Florence, where the Duke promises the two French Lords a welcome, and they assure him that “the younger of our nature” will follow. So Bertram's welcome in Florence is assured at second hand. Scene ii begins with the Countess and her Clown. She has a letter from Bertram, which she reads, announcing his determination never to “bed” Helena and to run away; but the reading of the letter is sandwiched between comments by the Clown. First he tells the Countess that her son is a very melancholy man because he sings all the time. This is preface to the punch-line, “I knew a man that had this trick of melancholy sold a good manor for a song.” Then, while the Countess silently reads her letter he makes the parody complaint, “I have no mind to Isbel since I was at court.” Then the Countess reads her letter aloud—the letter in which Bertram repudiates his wife. Her indignant comment is cut short by the return of the Clown to announce the arrival of Helena “between two soldiers”, a description which suggests an arrest. When the Countess asks, “What is the matter?” he assures her, “your son will not be kill'd so soon as I thought he would”, because he has run away. “The danger is in standing to't; that's the loss of men, though it be the begetting of children.” This bawdy joke, and the laugh it should raise, is preparation for Helena's tragic entry and her melodramatic announcement, “Madam, my lord is gone, for ever gone.”

The Countess acts like a sensible and mature person. She asks, “Where is my son, I pray you?” and Helena's lamentation is punctuated and modulated by the Countess' practical questions, “Brought you this letter, gentlemen?” “Towards Florence is he?” “And to be a soldier?” “Return you thither?” “Who is with him?” Her good sense is the point of view from which we should see Helena's fears. Her exit leaves Helena alone on the stage to utter her passionate lament (III.ii.99-129). She blames herself for driving him from home, and from “the sportive court” into the danger of “smoky muskets”. She imagines him killed, saying, “Better 'twere / I met the ravin lion when he roar'd,” than that her presence in Rossillion should keep Bertram from its safety. She ends with the resolution, and pun,

                                                                      Come night; end day;
For with the dark, poor thief, I'll steal away.

Was Shakespeare remembering, and suggesting, Thisbe? There is a bit of dimeter to reenforce the allusion. Otherwise, Helena's thirty lines of lamentation, although they are basically wrong-headed in preferring Bertram's safety to his honor, are poetic, even tragic. But certainly Helena's extravagant fears are intended to contrast with the Countess' reasonable and practical behavior. They contrast also with what follows. Scene iii gives us a glimpse of Bertram in Florence being appointed “the general of our horse” by the Duke. This is a post of great honor and responsibility. The little scene (only eleven lines) not only carries us far away from Helena and her tragic lament, but it also juxtaposes, and thus sharply contrasts reality with Helena's fearful imaginings.

In scene iv the Steward reads Helena's despairing farewell letter to the Countess, and the Countess orders a stern letter written to her son, but she is sensible enough to express the hope that everything will work out as, ultimately in fact, it does. Scene v takes us to Florence again, where we meet Diana and her widowed mother, and where Helena arrives and promptly makes her practical arrangements for the recovery of Bertram.

In the sequence of scenes in this play there is free use of the technique of comment by contrast. The reality of war is represented rationally in Act III, scenes i and iii, and Helena's womanly fears and despairs, in scenes ii and iv. The crass rearrangement of scenes to accommodate superfluous scenery, or out of mere whim, which many producers have been guilty of, has obscured the significance in Shakespearian plays of the sequence of scenes, arrangement of which was an important part of the modulation of audience-response which the dramatist uses so expertly. These scenes are not detachable or moveable parts, not merely elements in the dramatic telling of a story, but movements in a symphony in which the audience is the instrument.

In IV. ii, the Clown provides a touch of parody, as he does usually in this play, and as usual the parody comes first and prepares the mood for what follows. After the exit of the Countess, Helena utters her noble and musical lamentation and resolution to “steal away” so that Bertram may come home. Then comes the brief scene in Florence, where the Duke makes Bertram “general of our horse”, and Bertram pledges himself to Mars. Then, with only three lines of explanatory preparation, the Countess reads Helena's farewell letter (III.iv.4-17). The stilted and antique flavor of this sonnet-letter has been observed, but I believe that justice has not been done to its effectiveness in expressing the depth of feeling of Helena's grief. Her youthful passion of “I am undone; there is no living, none / If Bertram be away”; has burned itself to ashes, and these ashes of self-reproach and self-abnegation are distilled into eloquence in this sonnet:

I am Saint Jaques' pilgrim, thither gone.
Ambitious love hath so in me offended
That barefoot plod I the cold ground upon,
With sainted vow my faults to have amended. …

The dignity of the lines is created by the combination of simple, harmonious diction and religious imagery with a quaint (or antique) inversion of sentence structure and word order. It is extravagant. Even in the moment of reading it, the Countess does not take seriously the closing couplet,

He is too good and fair for death and me;
Whom I myself embrace to set him free.

However, she is moved, and expresses her emotion with grave dignity which mingles practical directions to her Steward with somewhat the same simple diction and even the inverted word order of the sonnet.

This is the end of the first movement of the play, in the middle of Act III. The next seven scenes (III.v, vi, vii, and IV.i-iv) are laid in Florence, and it is not until the last scene of Act IV that we see the Countess again. This scene provides the necessary information for the denouement. We learn that Helena is reported to be dead, and Bertram is returning. Lafeu tells the Countess that her son was misled by Parolles. Then, after fifty lines of bandying words with the Clown, he returns to the subject, “And I was about to tell you, since I heard of the good lady's death and that my lord your son was upon his return home, I moved the king my master to speak in the behalf of my daughter; which, in the minority of them both, his majesty out of a self-gracious remembrance did first propose. His highness hath promis'd me to do it; and to stop up the displeasure he hath conceived against your son there is no fitter matter. How does your ladyship like it?” (ll. 65-74). He also tells her that the King is coming and will arrive tomorrow. So all the necessary preparations are made for Act V, just as, in Measure for Measure, Act IV ends with three short scenes showing the Duke busy preparing for his “return” in Act V.

All's Well parallels Measure for Measure, not only in its use of the bed-trick, and in the management of Acts IV and V, but also in the emotional structure of Act III. Measure for Measure breaks sharply after the passionate scene between Isabella and Claudio in which he begs her to save his life at any cost and she denounces him. As she departs she is accosted by the eavesdropping Friar, who suggests the bed-trick as a way out of her dilemma. The two parts of this scene form so sharp a contrast that critics have described the play as breaking in two at this point. But the break at the same point in All's Well is equally sharp: III. iv, ends with the Countess' stately exit line, “Grief would have tears and sorrow bids me speak.” III. v, begins with the Widow's urgent, “Nay, come: for if they do approach the city, we shall lose all the sight.” In both plays the change is from emotion-fraught blank verse to plain and practical prose. In Measure for Measure the change takes place in the middle of a scene; in All's Well it is intensified by change of scene as we are transported from the deserted wife and mother at Rossillion to Florence and the bustle of war. We have been prepared for Bertram's success in war by scenes i and iii, as in Measure for Measure we were prepared for the Friar's intervention to help Claudio by his concern for Julietta (II.iii) and Claudio (III.i). However, the abrupt change of tone in the middle of Act III is a new technique, a shifting forward of the business of Act IV, so that the end of that Act could be used for preparation of the elaborate denouement in Act V. The same break occurs in The Winter's Tale, where III.ii, gives us Paulina's (false) grief that the Queen is dead and shows us Leontes' penitence. In III.iii, we are transported to the seacoast of Bohemia and the comic death of Antigonus and the rescue of the abandoned baby. The Winter's Tale also has an elaborately stagey last act to make room for.

The evidence that All's Well followed hard upon Measure for Measure, rather than preceded it, lies in the allusive parallels between the two plays. Which version of the bed-trick came first is not apparent, but the false accusation of Bertram, which so closely parallels the accusations of Angelo, is inadequately prepared for and, if we can believe most modern critics, ineffective unless it is recognized as a parody, or comic echo. In Measure for Measure Shakespeare made allusion to Much Ado About Nothing, recreating Dogberry as Constable Elbow, and echoing several comic situations in that play.³⁸ Similarly, in All's Well the echoes of Measure for Measure are pervasive, for, while there is no repetition of character, there is repetition of an important element in the plot, as well as parallel in the last scenes, and in the abrupt break in the middle of Act III. There is also a curious passage (II.iii) in which Parolles impertinently finishes Lafeu's sentences for him. Parolles is not so quick in his wit-contest with Helena, nor elsewhere in the play, but here his interruptions seem to be reminiscent of Lucio's interruptions of the Duke in the last act of Measure for Measure. Here Lafeu manages to outdo Parolles and get the upper hand, finishing his sentences for him. In Measure for Measure the Duke wins the contest easily when Lucio pulls off the Friar's hood and discovers that the Friar is the Duke. The scene in All's Well serves the purpose of emphasizing the absurdity of Helena's miraculous cure of the King, but the form it takes, the bandying of words between Parolles and Lafew, gains point as reminiscence of Lucio's compulsive interruptions of the Duke. While Measure for Measure gains somthing from reminiscence of Much Ado About Nothing, it does not seem to need All's Well to enrich its humor. On the other hand, All's Well is much enriched and more readily interpreted by reference to Measure for Measure. It is this relationship which suggests that it was written after Measure for Measure.

What is new in All's Well is the manipulation of point of view. Where, in the earlier comedies we see a character or a situation only occasionally through the eyes of another character, as for example in Prince Hal's description of Hotspur, in All's Well we see Helena's passion largely from the oblique angle of maturity, of the Countess' “Even so it was with me when I was young” (I.iii.123).

Bertram expresses for us the playwright's intention when he tells the King that the reason he could not appreciate Helena was that he had “stuck my choice” on Lafeu's daughter, and “the impression of mine eyes” being fixed on her,

Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me,
Which warp'd the line of every other favour,
Scorn'd a fair colour or express'd it stol'n,
Extended or contracted all proportions
To a most hideous object.

(V.iii.48-52)

The Elizabethans delighted in the manipulation of the “perspective glass” used to assist artists in keeping the proportion true between model and heroic statue, or miniature. It could also be used to furnish amusement by distorting images³⁹ as crooked mirrors are used in amusement parks today. Just so, in this play Shakespeare creates comedy by distorting the perspective of romance. We see Helena's love for Bertram largely through the eyes of the old Countess and her shallow Clown, who sees only surfaces and prefers to think the worst. The King's reminiscence of Bertram's father sets the perspective for Bertram, and Lafeu's comments provide the audience with the point of view from which to see the King's wards in the scene in which Helena chooses her husband.

What Hunter calls “the tangles, perplexities, and perversities of treatment” are simply this manipulation of point of view⁴⁰ by which Shakespeare modulates the responses of his audience. He manages this modulation in other ways in other plays, having other effects in view, but here he seems deliberately to arrange his instrument so that the audience can see the foot-work and the keyboard—can see him producing his effects. The contrasted scenes, the preparatory parody, the juxtaposition of romantic emotion and practical reality, the view of youth from the vantage point of age, are the techniques by which this comedy is created.

Ben Jonson, in attempting to exploit the humours theory of character on the stage, created characters whose individuality depended on the strength of their bias—a Volpone, or a Sir Epicure Mammon. But Shakespeare saw that the “characters” so popular on the stage and among the young wits of his day were distorted and colored more by the eye of the beholder than in themselves. It is this perspective, the angle of vision distorting the view, which he is exploiting in All's Well. And it is this “perspective” which gives the play unity. It is not the function of Parolles to provide this perspective, any more than it is the function of the Clown. They provide the contrast which sets off the mature wisdom and tolerance of the Countess and Lafeu. It is this tolerance, and foresight, rather than Helena's clever plotting, which is emphasized, so that it seems to bring the play to its happy, though restrained and wry ending, not in the embrace of Helena by Bertram, but in Lafeu's comment, “Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon” and in the King's cautious and (in view of Helena's experience) ironic offer to Diana,

If thou beest yet a fresh uncropped flower
Choose thou thy husband and I'll pay thy dower.

There is the caution of worldly wisdom which the mature cannot escape, in his final couplet,

All yet seems well, and if it end so meet
The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.

Modern concepts, on the one hand of “the folk”, and on the other of realism, verisimilitude as audience involvement, and the sentimentalism of “romantic love”, make it difficult for us to see the subject-matter and the techniques of audience-management which Shakespeare made use of increasingly in his Jacobean plays.⁴¹ The order in which these plays were written is important. The parallels between Measure for Measure and All's Well help to explain the latter play, and especially its ending. If we regard it as later, then Measure for Measure provides a frame of reference for it.

In All's Well Shakespeare felt free to omit steps in the action. We are never told how the report that Helena was dead got about. We know nothing about the ring which the King gave to Helena until Lafeu suddenly recognizes it as Bertram takes it from his finger. We are not told why Helena is taking Diana and her mother north with her, although we naturally assume that, having fulfilled Bertram's conditions, she is going back to France to claim her husband. We know that Helena sends a letter to the King from Marseilles when she does not find him there, but we do not know, until it is read in the final scene, that this letter is signed “Diana Capilet”, and that it is part of an elaborate plan to “put Bertram on a spot”. In fact, these omissions reduce our consciousness of Helena's plotting—of her cleverness. This is the reverse of the strategy in Measure for Measure where the Duke manages the denouement from a position at center-stage, so that his cleverness is made evident. The other characters are merely actors in a play he has planned and arranged—puppets for whom he manipulates the strings. Helena is kept off-stage until the last possible moment, and her machinations are left unexplained, even made as inconspicuous as possible—as if Bertram's embarrassment and the accusation of murder building up against him were accidental. In fact, Helena's cleverness is concealed, as far as possible, in order to keep the sympathy of the audience with her, and prevent it from shifting to Bertram. In addition to the obvious parallels between the endings of these twin plays, there is this contrast which shows the playwright's mastery in the control and direction of audience-sympathy which is a part of his exhibition of the technique of manipulating point of view.

Shakespeare has carried even further in this play than in Measure for Measure his experiments in representing serious and potentially tragic (or at least fatal) situations and emotions so controlled by various artifices as to prevent sympathy from destroying comedy. He had used paradox, irony, macabre humor, and above all theatricality in Measure for Measure, but he uses other, more subtle, and more varied devices of emphasis and distraction in All's Well. Having foregone his deus ex machina, the Duke, he had to find other ways of either reassuring the audience of the play's comic outcome, or distracting it from too deep a sympathy with the passionate Helena in the first half of the play, and from too clear an awareness of her scheming in the second half. The first he does by the sudden extravagance of her declarations, by the parody of her situation by the Clown, by her dashing from place to place (a device which anticipates something of the excitement of a Western movie), but especially by the juxtaposition and manipulation of scenes. However, the overriding and unifying device is the manipulation of point of view. Helena is mocked by Lavatch and competes with Parolles, but the play is full of wiser heads. Emotions are checked by the good sense of the Countess and guided by the unsentimental charity of Lafeu, who says to Parolles, “though you are a fool and a knave you shall eat”, and who, when the Countess expresses impatience with her Clown, replies, “I like him well; 'tis not amiss”, and changes the subject. The King and even the widow Capilet also help both to guide the youngsters and to provide the point of view of maturity from which to see them. In addition to these narrative devices, Shakespeare uses freely the manipulation of diction and of speech-rhythms to control and direct or mute our emotions. In all of these ways All's Well marks an advance beyond Measure for Measure and toward the intricacies of Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. It marks an advance also over Measure for Measure in the field of myth which gives depth and universality to the story. In both plays Shakespeare uses a currently familiar story for foreground, or plot; but in both he modifies the plot to bring it into meaningful relationship with archetypal backgrounds. In Measure for Measure the fall and redemption of mankind provides the archetypal pattern. In All's Well That Ends Well the treatment of the follies of young love from a mature point of view, the wisdom and charity of the Countess and Lafeu, provide a new dimension for the old Adonis and Psyche situations, giving this play a mellow wisdom which looks toward the last comedies. Here first, as later in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, there is the interplay of generations, the old guiding the young, or, in The Winter's Tale, the young healing old wounds and correcting old mistakes. All's Well has something to say to every generation. Seen in its true perspective, it is a wise, tolerant, and beautiful play.

Notes

1. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his “Introduction” to the New Cambridge Edition of the play (1929, 1955), p. vii, calls it “largely a palimpsest and overwritten upon juvenile work after a considerable interval of time”. J. Dover Wilson, in his notes to the same edition, agrees, pp. 103-106, finding many “indications of patchwork” and even evidence of a collaborator. Two allusions he thinks indicate 1604-5 as the date of revision, while one (II.i.30) he thinks fits an Elizabethan situation. It certainly does not require an Elizabethan date of writing. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (London, 1950), “Appendix E”, pp. 151-154, answers Wilson's arguments for stratification and collaboration. But M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London, 1951), p. 162, speaks of the play as “hovering uncertainly in date between early and late nineties”. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, II (London, 1958), 375, finds it “likely that All's Well was written between 1600 and 1603”. G. K. Hunter, “Introduction”, All's Well That Ends Well, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1962), pp. xix-xxi, reviews briefly discussion of the date.

2. Arden Edition, p. xxix.

3. Ibid., pp. xxiii-xxiv. Dover Wilson, pp. 106 ff., also comments on the parallelism of the two plays.

4. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, IV (Oxford, 1923, 1961), 119; and see my Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment (New York, Columbia University Press, 1966).

5. Hunter, pp. xxiii-xxv, says, “it is not probable that plot, characterization, themes, vocabulary, even the tangles, perplexities, and perversities of treatment should be shared, unless the mind and technique of the author were still at the same stage.”

6. John Russell Brown, “The Interpretation of Shakespeare's Comedies 1900-1953”, Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955), p. 11, reports of All's Well, “few critics believe that it was a successful play”. W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931, 1960), pp. 34-38, surveys the adverse criticism. Tillyard, p. 89, opens his discussion of the play with the sentence, “It is agreed that All's Well is in some sort a failure”.

7. The phrase is quoted from Hunter, p. xxiv. Anna B. Jameson, Shakespeare's Heroines (London, 1897), pp. 108-121, compares Helena to Juliet and Isabella among the “characters of passion and imagination”.

8. Lawrence, p. 37, attributes the idea of moral allegory on the theme, “Merit goes before rank”, to Gervinus. And see Hunter's note, pp. xxxviii and xxxix-xli. Bradbrook, also sees the play as moral allegory.

9. E. M. Waith, “Characterization in John Fletcher's Tragicomedies”, RES, [Review of English Studies] XIV (1943), 141-164, compares All's Well with its source to show that Shakespeare was “adapting his material to the fashionable pattern of the prodigal son” plays. R. Y. Turner, “Dramatic Conventions in All's Well That Ends Well”, PMLA, LXXV (1960), 497-502, analyzes it as a prodigal-son play.

10. Measure for Measure IV.i.1-2; text from The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. W. A. Neilson and C. J. Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. 411.

11. Lawrence, pp. 39-50, shows how widespread the story-motif was, and Hunter, pp. xliv-xlv, cites contemporary dramatic instances and one alleged from real life in Shakespeare's time. Lord Burleigh's daughter, the Countess of Oxford, was said to have used the trick.

12. Hunter, pp. xxv-xxix, succinctly discusses the source and Shakespeare's alterations of the plot, and he reprints William Painter's version of Boccaccio's story on pp. 145-152. It is also reprinted in Bullough, II, 389-396; and in Quiller-Couch's “Introduction” to the New Cambridge edition, pp. xiii-xxii.

13. P. liv. Quiller-Couch, p. xxxi, says, “The whole of the concluding Scene is clearly bad playwright's work, being at once spun-out and scamped.” W. W. Lawrence suggests that “the natural way” to manage the denouement “would be for Helena to claim justice of the king, tell her story, and call upon Diana to substantiate it”, p. 75.

14. Pp. 68, 69; and see Tillyard, pp. 95-97. Such statements assume a universal dissemination of all folktales, i.e. everybody always knew all of them, which is obviously absurd. Hunter, pp. xxx ff., discusses Lawrence's theory, but accepts it “for at least one level of Shakespeare's intention”.

15. The substitution in bed was not simply a story motif, much less a fairy-tale, but belongs to that class of folklore which is vulgar error, that is, a trick believed to be feasible and no doubt occasionally attempted by neglected wives.

16. Lawrence does not mention the Psyche story in his discussion of tales of the fulfillment of tasks (pp. 39-54), but Quiller-Couch recognizes the tale of Psyche as the “basic theme” behind the Patient Griselda and other mediaeval stories (p. xxix).

17. Hunter, p. xxxv and note treats the matter of parody briefly but ably.

18. The device of interrupted soliloquy occurs also in Measure for Measure, where (at the end of II.ii) Angelo exits talking to himself, and II.iv opens with his entrance soliloquizing on the same theme. Meanwhile the 43 lines of scene iii, in which the Duke-as-Friar interviews Juliet, have indicated the passage of time. Helena's interrupted soliloquy is much more cleverly managed.

19. Hunter, pp. xxxi-ii, explains her in terms of the source story, but Shakespeare makes her an entirely different, and much more consistent, character. Boccaccio's Giletta, with her echoes of the patient Griselda, would never have worked the bed-trick on her husband! Character and action are incompatible in the older tale.

20. I follow the punctuation of the Folio. Hunter prints a semicolon before yet and three dots after it, as if it were the beginning of a new thought, not the dismissal of the subject, the conditional, not the temporal yet.

21. Performances of this play are rare.

22. See my chapter on Isabella in Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment.

23. Dover Wilson calls this dialogue “tedious bawdy chat”, and would “relieve” Shakespeare of it; see the New Cambridge ed., p. 110. Hunter's notes on the passage are good, although he does not comment on “thing” in Parolles' conclusion to his anatomy of virginity, “Will you anything with it?” which gives point to Helena's crisp dismissal of his impertinence, “Not my virginity yet”.

24. Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe: 1599-1609 (New York, 1962), especially Chapter 3 ff., provides a useful survey.

25. Ben Jonson's tribute to Salomon, or Salathiel, Pavy (Epigrammes, CXX), who “plai'd so truely” old men's parts that the fates mistook him, does not require us to believe that the audience made a similar mistake.

26. An interesting attempt to analyze this dual consciousness is Maynard Mack's “Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays”, in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, Mo., 1962), pp. 275-296.

27. I quote a recent anonymous reviewer, who evidently thought that he was expressing a generally accepted criterion.

28. Dover Wilson, p. 124, finds Helena's final couplets in I. i. 211 ff. “strongly reminiscent of [the soliloquy] in the Gonzago play of Hamlet”, as also the couplets in the second half of II.i.161-168, which he compares with Hamlet III.ii.165-168 (p. 141 and see p. 107). Shakespeare uses the same device of couplets for Beatrice's decision after she has been tricked into believing that Benedick is in love with her; and see S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London, 1944), pp. 36-37, on the use of rime in As You Like It to “distance and tone down a scene where otherwise emotion might run too high”. Hunter, pp. xx-xxi, cites passages in Othello and Cymbeline which illustrate “the association of gnomic sentiments with formal couplets” as “a constant factor in Shakespearean and indeed Elizabethan dramatic art”. Tillyard, pp. 99-104, discusses these couplets, and points out that “Talbot and his son perish in couplets” in the First Part of Henry VI.

29. Hunter, p. xxxv, note 1, cites the Towneley Secunda Pastorum, and Marlowe's Faustus, but observes that “where, as in All's Well, the play is searching for a central point of view, the addition of parallel perspectives can only have a critical and even disintegrating effect.” It is my contention that All's Well has a central point of view, and that Shakespeare is here using parody to set the tone so as to present the desperation of the young in a comic light.

30. I quote from The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, in Chief Elizabethan Dramatists, ed. W. A. Neilson (Boston, 1911), Scene XIII, ll. 92-93, on p. 94. Hunter, note on p. 24, follows D. Wilson (New Cambridge Edition), who reports Malone's suggestion that the Clown is quoting a lost ballad, The Lamentation of Hecuba and the Ladies of Troy, entered in the Stationers' Register in 1586 (II, 451). Obviously something has been done to the song, since the Countess complains, “You corrupt the song, sirrah.” She refers to the “one good in ten,” but there may be other corruptions. Shakespeare echoes Marlowe's lines also in Troilus and Cressida II.ii.81-83, where also he gives them a prose flatness, Troilus says of Helen,

                                                                                                                  why, she is a pearl,
    Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships,
    And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants.

31. Hunter, pp. xlv-xlvii, discusses the “problem of Bertram”, comparing him to Coriolanus, but he does not consider the evidence of growing up. Lawrence, pp. 62-63, calls him “a cad and a villain”.

32. Editors usually interpret the “patch of velvet” literally, citing Measure for Measure I.ii.31-34, where the implication is very different. The Oxford English Dictionary gives, as the second meaning of velvet, “the soft downy skin which covers a deer's horn while in the growing stage”, and in no. 5 quotes, “these velvet bearded boys will still be doing”, C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, 2d ed. revised (Oxford, 1958), identifies the velvet in this passage of All's Well as “down on the cheek”. The difficulty of shaving over a scab, or fresh wound, is obvious, as is also the impracticability of making a patch of any cloth stick over a growing beard.

33. This is an absurdity. “Three pile” was the best French velvet, but no “half” pile is possible.

34. The carbonado, an incision to relieve syphilitic chancres, ties in with the reference to pile (L. pilus, hair) of the velvet. In Measure for Measure the line, “as thou art piled for a French velvet”, is explained by A. Dyce, General Glossary to Shakespeare's Works (Boston, 1901), as “a quibble between piled-peeled, stripped of hair, bald” from the pox, and piled as applied to velvet.

35. The audience knows why he is asked whether he remembers Lafeu's daughter, and would not be troubled about when and how Bertram came to know of it.

36. The exchange of rings would be further evidence that a private marriage had taken place.

37. Hunter, pp. xxxiii-iv, cites G. B. Shaw and Emile Legouis as admirers of the Countess, but many others have paid tribute.

38. See my Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment, Ch. VII. The names, Isbel and Diana Capilet, are obviously intended as allusions to Isabella and Juliet, comic because their situations are reversed.

39. Hunter, p. xxxiii, speaks of “the perspective of Parolles”, but he does not find that the play has a “unified viewpoint” (p. xxxv); see pp. xxix-xxx, and pp. 1 ff. on the unity of the play.

40. On p. xxxii he says, “Shakespeare is handling traditional motifs, but he makes a new effect out of them by manipulating the viewpoint.” However, he does not follow up that insight except by saying (p. xxxiii), “The Shakespearean view of Bertram and Helena could hardly, in short, be presented except in the perspective of Parolles—a perspective which reduces the effect of the folk-analogues that Lawrence regards as the key to the play.” It is not the perspective of Parolles, however, in which we see Bertram and Helena, but the perspective of the Countess, Lafeu, and the King, that is, the point of view of maturity and wisdom. One feels that if Hunter had been free to brush aside all previous discussion and examine the play afresh, his perceptive and informed judgment would largely have anticipated this paper, and improved upon it.

41. Hunter, p. liv-vi, finds “a strong case for avoiding the traditional separation of ‘problem-plays’ from ‘romances’ and considering as a group the ‘later comedies.’”