SOURCE: Hunt, Maurice. “Words and Deeds in All's Well That Ends Well.” Modern Language Quarterly 48, no. 4 (December 1987): 320-38.

[In the following essay, Hunt explores the disintegration of the relationship between language and action in All's Well That Ends Well.]

Were playgoers to judge from the King of France's recollection of the deceased Count of Rossillion, any question of competition between words and deeds in All's Well That Ends Well would appear settled during Act I. There, the ailing monarch, nostalgic for the past, praises Bertram's father for a remarkable ability:

So like a courtier, contempt nor bitterness
Were in his pride or sharpness; if they were,
His equal had awak'd them, and his honour,
Clock to itself, knew the true minute when
Exception bid him speak, and at this time
His tongue obey'd his hand.

(I.ii.36-41)¹

By making his tongue obey his hand, Bertram's father never risked becoming a Parolles, a character whose words ridiculously outstrip his capacity for performance. By precisely fitting words to deeds, the Count never sank to braggadocio. Moreover, through his metaphor of a striking clock, the King suggests that Bertram's father was a master of time; his knowledge of the “true minute” included a grasp of timing, of recognizing the opportune moment for wedding a deed to his word.

And yet this harmony of hand and tongue is lost in All's Well even as it is remembered. Shakespeare destabilizes the ideal image of deeds fitted to words when the King impicitly prefers the Count's deeds as communicators of his excellence:

                                                                                          Who were below him
He us'd as creatures of another place,
And bow'd his eminent top to their low ranks,
Making them proud of his humility
In their poor praise he humbled.

(I.ii.41-45)

“Us'd,” “bow'd,” “humbled”—these remembered actions rather than the Count's speeches convey his virtue in the King's opinion; primarily, the Count's modest deeds made him good and won him honor. More important, it is by his humble actions that his virtue can be known to succeeding generations; the King believes that the arrogant, verbose fops of the play's present age might reform themselves by copying the Count's ideal behavior (I.ii.45-48).

Ironically, however, such “a copy to these younger times” (I.ii.46) would have to consist of a word picture since the Count is dead. Significantly, the King's “royal speech” (I.ii.51) has created his encomium of deeds. The quoted phrase represents Bertram's compliment concerning the monarch's commemorative words. Coming close upon the King's implicit praise of deeds as a sign of virtue, Bertram's compliment nevertheless is a bit elvish on Shakespeare's part. Given the fluctuation of the value of words and deeds throughout All's Well, the audience may well wonder how, in the less than ideal worlds of Paris and Florence, the characters can achieve the balanced expression of the King's old friend. Even partial achievement would represent a Renaissance ideal. “That which we thinke let vs speake, and that which we speake let vs thinke; let our speeche accorde with our life,” Thomas Nashe wrote in The Anatomie of Absurditie (1589). According to T. McAlindon, the remark

is characteristic of its age not only in its refusal to separate eloquence from virtue but also in its appeal to what Nashe's contemporaries accepted as the fundamental norm, both rhetorical and moral, for all good speech: there must be a harmony between thought and word, between word and deed. The sign, the sensible impression of such harmony was decorum, or what the Elizabethans … variously referred to as comeliness. …²

Thus Helena's and Bertram's harmonizing of their words and deeds would signal acquired courtesy, an accomplishment of character complementing their attainment of true honor (an established reading of the play).³

Through his portrayal of the King of France, alternately preferring words and deeds, Shakespeare indicates that any actual wedding of word and deed in the play will be difficult. An analysis of the King's vacillation proves instructive. “Would I were with him,” he concludes concerning his dead friend:

                                                            He would always say—
Methinks I hear him now; his plausive words
He scatter'd not in ears, but grafted them
To grow there and to bear—“Let me not live”,
(This his good melancholy oft began
On the catastrophe and heel of pastime,
When it was out) “Let me not live”, quoth he,
“After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff
Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses
All but new things disdain; whose judgments are
Mere fathers of their garments; whose constancies
Expire before their fashions”. This he wish'd.
I, after him, do after him wish too,
Since I nor wax nor honey can bring home,
I quickly were dissolved from my hive
To give some labourers room.

(I.ii.52-67)

Because the monarch's recollection is so passionately expressed, the ears of his listeners seem to experience the miraculous fertility of the Count's words. Yet those words could neither halt time's onslaught nor dissuade death. Ravaging time entails disease, both the Count's unnamed, lethal malady and the King's fistula;⁴ crippled by time's agent, the monarch has become obsessed with deeds he can no longer perform (I.ii.64-67). He sadly wishes to follow his friend into darkness because he can bring home “nor wax nor honey.” By using the bee/hive metaphor, the King evokes a familiar image of industry, of deeds unselfishly done for the good of the community. Still, his conclusion that he were best “dissolved from my hive / To give some labourers room” smacks of more than self-pity; it reflects a degree of spiritual ignorance as well. The parable of the laborers and the hours (Matt. 20: 1-16), indirectly recalled by the King's language, asserts that the worker hired last, given time to accomplish only a few deeds before being called to the Great Reckoning, merits as large a reward as the laborer who has long toiled in the vineyard. Instead of devaluing work, the parable in fact sanctifies deeds when only a few acts can be redemptive. In short, while the King transfers worth from words to deeds during his affective speech, he does not appear to possess a spiritual understanding of the potential redemptiveness of action.

Throughout the early acts of All's Well, the King continues to waver between stressing words and recommending deeds as the means to virtue. Having talked himself out of acting, he resorts to pithy sayings as virtue's spur. Generally, his rhymed maxims must be regarded as a failure on his part.⁵ His personal reliance upon verbal precepts rather than exemplary deeds appears as early as the beginning of Act II, where he ends his off-stage advice to the courtiers leaving for the Italian war by recommending certain “warlike principles” (II.i.1-5). The futility of his sayings reveals itself in his listeners' immediate, ignoble advice to Bertram, whom they urge to steal away to fight even though the King has forbidden his departure. By not allowing his audience to hear the King's warlike sayings, Shakespeare shrewdly preconditions viewers to doubt the effectiveness of the monarch's words.

Regarded in this context, the King's later criticism of words seems dramatically apt. After hearing Bertram base his rejection of Helena on her humble birth, the King rebukes the young man. Aristocratic title, in the monarch's view, amounts to a hollow word upon a pedigree or coat of arms; in rejecting a “poor physician's daughter,” Bertram in his opinion condemns virtue because of its “name”—a superficial, social label (II.iii.121-24). “Thou dislik'st Helena for an unreal word,” the King might have said. “But do not so,” he cautions in a lengthy speech (II.iii.125-43), which has been called a “fiercely nominalistic harangue.”⁶ In this passage he unequivocally stresses deeds rather than words as honor's source. “From lowest place when virtuous things proceed, / The place is dignified by th' doer's deed,” he claims (II.iii.125-26). Moreover, he maintains, “Honours thrive / When rather from our acts we them derive / Than our foregoers” (II.iii.135-37). In keeping with this emphasis, the King coins a metaphor of epithet and grave to convey the essential unreliability of the word as an index of value. Seemingly a linguistic relativist at heart (at least with respect to other speakers' utterances), he subscribes to the nominalist view that words are arbitrary, dispensable labels for the nameless things they are meant to signify:

                                                                                Good alone
Is good, without a name; vileness is so:
The property by what it is should go,
Not by the title.

(II.iii.128-31)⁷

This amounts to a dangerous opinion for a speaker who will soon depend upon the notion that his words are divinely creative.⁸

The King's proposal for creating the social status that Helena supposedly lacks quickly reveals his exclusive notion. His means of planting honor where he would have it grow consists simply of his word (II.iii.156-57). If he declares that Helena is honorable, why, then, she is honorable. In his mind nothing is honorable or dishonorable but his saying makes it so. Here he insists on his royal word as an earthly version of the divine Word, which creates ex nihilo.⁹ In his testy reliance upon his “all-powerful” speech, the King almost comically denies his recent diatribe against the word. The irony of his about-face is not lost on Bertram:

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

(II.iii.167-73)

Obviously, Bertram makes fun of the King's grand idea of the magical power supposedly dwelling in his speech; he almost certainly perceives the startling inconsistency between the monarch's theoretical criticism of words in relation to deeds and his typically human angry insistence upon the potency of his speech when challenged. Bertram's flight from consummating his marriage graphically indicates the failure of the King's word to transform either Bertram's affections or Helena's status in her beloved's eyes.

Thus far analysis has focused on the manner by which Shakespeare suggests, through the King of France's character, that words and deeds cannot be brought into the harmony they once enjoyed in the former Count of Rossillion. In addition to the near impossibility of achieving such a harmony, the radical impotence of sayings casts further doubt upon the wedding of word and deed in All's Well. If words are inherently weak, mankind's morality risks becoming sadly dependent on its retrospective creation by powerful acts that supersede empty promises or ignored advice—the attempts of speech to prompt ethical behavior. The character of the Countess, admirable in every other respect, suggests that Shakespeare intended his audience to regard verbal insufficiency as a general failing. Like the King, Bertram's mother often futilely scatters sayings in Bertram's and Helena's ears. If her advice to Bertram as he leaves for Paris (see I.i.57-66) resembles that of Polonius when Laertes departs for France, the similarity underscores a dramatic point; her maxims, like those of Polonius, subsequently appear ineffectual even though she, unlike Polonius, commands the viewer's respect.¹⁰ In both his priggish treatment of Helena and his vicious assault on Diana's chastity, Bertram reveals that his mother's proverbs are powerless. Instead of blaming her unimpeachable character or her good intentions in uttering her maxims, we might locate the problem in the inability of words alone to influence or change a listener's behavior. Thus a heavy irony attaches itself to her warning “Be check'd for silence, / But never tax'd for speech” (I.i.63-64); she risks portraying herself as a somewhat fussy moralizer deaf to the weakness of her own sayings.

It might be argued that Helena's language represents an exception to the general indictment of words in All's Well. Near the end of the play, Lafew singles out Helena's gracious speech during his summary of the virtues of the supposedly dead heroine. The old courtier condemns Bertram for losing a wife “whose words all ears took captive” (V.iii.17). The proof for Lafew's claim rests in Act II. Helena's eloquent argument for the value of her therapy, an argument based on poetically phrased biblical truths (II.i.133-43, 147-57), moves the King to say:

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

(II.i.174-77)

At the end of the scene the King pledges, “If thou proceed / As high as word, my deed shall match thy deed” (II.i.208-9). Through the promise of her cure, the King and Helena have the opportunity to wed deed to word as memorably as the former Count of Rossillion. Although Helena's gracious speech persuades the King to try her cure (to his physical salvation), authoritative language does not effect the winning of Bertram—her main reason for healing the King in the first place (I.iii.225-30; II.i.189-99). The King's and Helena's wedding of words and deeds never occurs. Having played a role in renewing the King, the privileged word, spoken powerfully by the monarch, fails to convert Helena's unaffectionate husband. The King's failure of language cheats Helena of her prize.

The inability of major characters' words to dictate behavior and realize final wishes reflects a basic breakdown of communication in All's Well. Only in recent decades have critics become aware of Shakespeare's complex skepticism toward the communicative power of words—of the poetic medium itself. That the most eloquent artist of our language should have found the currency of his eloquence partially counterfeit strikes us as a paradox of the first order.¹¹ In most respects, Shakespeare's attitude toward language in All's Well conforms to this general linguistic skepticism. In the scene in which Parolles is duped, for example, the First Lord says, “When you sally upon him speak what terrible language you will; though you understand it not yourselves, no matter; for we must not seem to understand him, unless some one among us, whom we must produce for an interpreter” (IV.i.2-6). The repeated, ironic violation of cherished sayings argues that mankind does not fully grasp the meaning of sententious words easily uttered throughout the play. The Lord continues with his cues for Parolles' undoing: “Now he hath a smack of all neighbouring languages; therefore we must every one be a man of his own fancy, not to know what we speak one to another; so we seem to know is to know straight our purpose—choughs' language: gabble enough and good enough” (IV.i.15-20). Like Lafew's speech on modern and philosophical persons (II.iii.1-6), the Lord's words resonate beyond the demands of the episode, applying themselves first to the dramatis personae as a whole and then to the lives of the theater audience and the great world beyond.¹² Regarded metadramatically, the words imply that mankind lives in a linguistic prison, speaking past listeners in singular, untranslatable tongues, pretending that the babble of civilized speech expresses clear meanings.¹³

Not surprisingly, Parolles (whose name means “words”) viciously capitalizes on the essential unreliability of speech. According to a courtier whose accuracy we have no reason to doubt, Parolles is “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy your lordship's entertainment” (III.vi.9-12). Two of Parolles' three main vices involve the corruption of words. “I love not many words,” he hypocritically claims. “No more than a fish loves water,” the courtier sharply jests (III.vi.80-81). Predictably, Parolles' regrettable influence on Bertram consists of words—words that are never fulfilled in deeds. Usually these words make up Parolles' astonishing lies and puffy claims for success in battle. We can only conclude that Parolles, an older dandy, has ruled a naïve boy through his glib falsehoods and boasts, transparent to the mature Lafew but bewitching to the adolescent Bertram. Parolles' divorce of his deeds from his pretentious words amounts to an extreme example of the lesser separations of speech from behavior in the play, separations that, while not malicious in intent, nonetheless proceed from the fallen human condition encapsulated in the character of the fop.

Despite defects in speech and mankind's constitutional difficulty in synchronizing behavior with language, playgoers can detect a promise of the eventual melding of words and deeds in the extraordinary “speaking acts” of Helena. When the Countess lovingly states that she is the maiden's mother, Helena, in an episode that has often puzzled critics, insists that her guardian is “mine honourable mistress” (I.iii.134). Surprised, the Countess fixes upon her original, seemingly harmless word:

                                                                                Nay, a mother.
Why not a mother? When I said “a mother”,
Methought you saw a serpent.

(I.iii.134-36)

On first consideration, the Countess's “mother” seems to be the destructive counterpart to the King's supposedly creative word. Whereas the King through his verbal fiat attempts to join Bertram to Helena, the Countess through her word, in Helena's opinion, risks making the maiden's marriage a cultural taboo. The Countess understandably cannot guess the sudden horror that has seized Helena after the possibility of committing a kind of emotional incest occurs to her.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the basis for Helena's fear reveals itself. Significantly, the act—the deed—of Helena's blushing utters the truth to the Countess (I.iii.144-48). Helena's curdled blood in her cheeks and her weeping eye “say” openly that she cannot think of Bertram as a brother, sharing the same “mother” with him. As conveyers of meaning, blushing and weeping function more powerfully than any concealing words could. “You are my mother, madam,” Helena says as she capitulates (I.iii.156), yet her blushing and weeping continue to betray her secret fear, undermining her seeming acquiescence. The Countess concludes:

Yes, Helen, you might be my daughter-in-law.
God shield you mean it not! daughter and mother
So strive upon your pulse. What! pale again?
My fear hath catch'd your fondness; now I see
The myst'ry of your loneliness, and find
Your salt tears' head. Now to all sense 'tis gross:
You love my son. Invention is asham'd
Against the proclamation of thy passion
To say thou dost not. Therefore tell me true;
But tell me then, 'tis so; for, look, thy cheeks
Confess it t'one to th'other, and thine eyes
See it so grossly shown in thy behaviours
That in their kind they speak it; only sin
And hellish obstinacy tie thy tongue,
That truth should be suspected.

(I.iii.162-76)

The Countess's “mother” and “daughter” trigger a deed—Helena's act of blushing—that reveals an emotional truth when these words affect Helena's pulse—making the blood ebb and flow from her face. In this process, an act is auspiciously responsive to an uttered word. Equally important, Helena's expressive deeds suggest that Nature will speak when characters unnaturally or deceptively silence themselves, refusing to reveal a wholesome fact. The war among mankind's faculties resulting from unnatural silence stresses the importance in All's Well of trusting, spontaneous speech. Finally trapped by her body's utterances, Helena admits that she loves Bertram (I.iii.186-89).

Through this remarkable episode, Shakespeare has implied not only that deeds can on occasion speak but also that they can prompt an eventual honesty in words—an honesty ideally that figures in any re-creation of the harmony between word and deed. Helena soon learns to her grief, however, that wordless language cannot be selfishly manipulated or forced. Looking over the bachelor wards of the King, she becomes a bit coy with wordless language:

I am a simple maid, and therein wealthiest
That I protest I simply am a maid.
Please it your majesty, I have done already.
The blushes in my cheeks thus whisper me:
“We blush that thou should'st choose; but, be refused,
Let the white death sit on thy cheek for ever,
We'll ne'er come there again.”

(II.iii.66-72)

As a complex plotter, Helena can scarcely think of herself as a “simple maid.” By her declaration, she most likely wishes to test the strength of the King's promise, for he quickly protests, “Make choice, and see, / Who shuns thy love shuns all his love in me” (II.iii.72-73). Helena's translation of the “words” spoken by the blushes in her cheeks appears affected, overtly précieuse in its poetic message. During her encounter with the Countess she painfully learned that natural acts can speak vigorously; in this complementary episode she seeks to conjure her blood again to utter a message to her advantage. But the strain, the artificiality of the imagined utterance, indicates that even the clever heroine cannot willfully fabricate wordless speech. Though her translated utterance succeeds in its local purpose, it fails, when regarded within the larger context of this episode, to win Bertram as a loving husband.

Furthermore, Shakespeare suggests that the heavenly word cannot be inopportunely invoked by mortal wishes. It is entirely possible that heaven spoke through Helena when her fluent arguments, derived from biblical passages, played a part in moving the King to take her medicine. And yet, through the dramatic principle of analogous action, Shakespeare implies that the heavenly word will not oblige every selfish desire in every earthly circumstance. Between the episode of the word's success in helping to cure the King (II.i) and the scene of the word's failure to transform Bertram into a willing husband (II.iii), Shakespeare inserts a brief interlude predicting the failure of Helena's plot to win a husband through the (supposedly) supernatural voice of the King.

In a seemingly nonsensical meeting, the clown Lavatch playfully tells the Countess that he has a single answer serving all men bound, as he is, for the slippery court. “Marry, that's a bountiful answer that fits all questions,” she replies (II.ii.14-15). Lavatch quips: “It is like a barber's chair that fits all buttocks: the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawn-buttock, or any buttock” (II.ii.16-18). Feigning surprise, the Countess answers, “It must be an answer of most monstrous size that must fit all demands” (II.ii.31-32). Urged by Lavatch to ask any court question, the Countess hopes to find in foolish banter the restoration of youth that the King seeks in Helena's medicine: “To be young again, if we could, I will be a fool in question, hoping to be the wiser by your answer” (II.ii.37-38). Lavatch's answer to her varying questions consists of a single phrase: “O Lord, sir!” “I play the noble housewife with the time, / To entertain it so merrily with a fool,” the frustrated Countess finally declares (II.ii.54-55). Yet originally the phrase Lavatch has seized on was a heartfelt plea, as the Countess implies when she says to him, “Do you cry ‘O Lord, sir!’ at your whipping, and ‘spare not me’? Indeed your ‘O Lord, sir!’ is very sequent to your whipping …” (II.ii.48-50). At bottom, Lavatch's undying “O Lord, sir!” amounts to a prototypic prayer—a plea burlesquing and hence calling into question the royal verbal fiat about to be dramatized in the King's instant creation of Helena's honor as well as in his demand that Bertram love and marry her. Perhaps Helena presumes without warrant that Providence condones her securing Bertram by using the King's cure as leverage for a bargain. Certainly, Providence ultimately intends Bertram for Helena. But it may wish to refine her character by teaching her, somewhat painfully, of its reality independent of easy human invocation. Lavatch's comedy suggests that Helena hopes that any difficulty in her court business of curing the King and winning Bertram can be resolved (or glossed over) by either divine entreaty or reference to heavenly influence—“O Lord, sir.” When the Countess verbally trips up Lavatch in his tedious reply, he admits, “I ne'er had worse luck in my life in my ‘O Lord, sir!’ I see things may serve long, but not serve ever” (II.ii.52-53). His admission signals the King's and Helena's defeat in verbally converting Bertram.¹⁵

In the above analysis Providence appears to be the appropriate term for identifying the motive force behind events in All's Well. Marvelously creative words have their own life in this play, revealing their truth in their own providential time. Moreover, in All's Well Providence sets the context for the effectiveness of expressive deeds—but only for those characters who act boldly to help bring about their happiness. In the nostalgic, generally passive ambience of the play, Helena's willingness to act aggressively to fashion not only her joy but also her own character stands out in sharp relief. After Parolles energizes her during their witty debate on virginity,¹⁶ Helena's world becomes one of physics rather than verbal metaphysics, of motion rather than self-pitying stasis. In her early soliloquy she confidently declares, “The mightiest space in fortune nature brings / To join like likes, and kiss like native things” (I.i.218-19). That confidence rewards her. She enacts her naturalistic credo when she travels the “mightiest space” to find herself in a Florentine street through which her “like,” the fugitive Bertram, passes before her eyes.¹⁷ While Helena prays to Nature, she in fact invokes the Art above Nature, the Art that makes Nature: God's Art, Providence.¹⁸ Providence makes possible Helena's winning of Bertram through its mysterious dynamic of mutual attraction, a magnetism in which action—movement out of the dark rooms of the Countess and the King—is the key to redemption.¹⁹ Moreover, this magnetism verifies what the audience has suspected for some time: Helena and Bertram are more alike in character than one would first suppose.²⁰ Devious Bertram does come to admire Helena's creative duplicity (V.iii.309-10); the viewer suspects that he agrees to consummate his marriage as much for this reason as for his letting go of any love for Lafew's Maudlin.

Helena concludes her interrupted soliloquy in Act I with a firm resolve to win Bertram by striving to show her worth in the King's cure (I.i.222-25). Striving Helena, unafraid of pain, depends on deeds rather than words. That she fails in her first attempt, that her confidence after the King's cure is too easy, surely too sanguine—these facts suggest that Helena cannot gain Bertram through words alone (the King's promise and her naming Bertram).²¹ Deeds, ordered by Providence, advance her toward her passionate goal. Her act of pilgrimage, after all, fittingly ensures her eventual success.

Thus far, Shakespeare has providentially ordered either the word or the deed in All's Well. By determining the play's resolution through a riddle, he introduces the means for finally wedding words and deeds in this dark comedy.²² In a riddle, acts, by definition, give often profound meaning to seemingly empty or nonsensical words; in fact, until they are fulfilled by deeds, riddles frequently convey a destructive message. This certainly is the case in All's Well. Bertram, having ordered Helena to return to Rossillion, flees to the Italian wars instead of consummating his marriage. The cruel letter he sends her takes the form of a riddle: “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never’” (III.ii.56-59). “This is a dreadful sentence,” Helena adds (III.ii.60), her final word evoking the meanings of “judgment” and “statement.” In its primary meaning “sentence” condenses the idea of Bertram's dreadful word “never,” a nihilistic judgment displacing the hopeful potential represented by “then.” Somehow, dramatic action must fulfill Bertram's riddling words if Helena is to be happy; her deeds must flesh out the riddle—the word—for the admittedly toned-down happiness of this comedy to become a reality.

At first, however, Helena shows no inclination to realize the riddle. In fact, she chooses to act out other words in Bertram's letter instead. She reads,

“Till I have no wife I have nothing in France.”
Nothing in France until he has no wife!
Thou shalt have none, Rossillion, none in France;
Then hast thou all again.

(III.ii.99-102)

Helena of course is thinking of her sacrificial pilgrimage to St. Jaques le Grand, a journey that—when news of it reaches Bertram—will speed his return to Rossillion to claim his patrimony. That Helena intends her spiritual mortification to end in her death is clearly indicated by the concluding couplet of her letter to the Countess: “He is too good and fair for death and me; / Whom I myself embrace to set him free” (III.iv.16-17).²³ But after persuading the rector of St. Jaques to write a letter informing Bertram of her death, Helena decides to live; her change of heart represents the play's most unfathomable mystery. One can only conclude that, in comedy, life and love inevitably triumph over the death-wish. Whatever the case, Providence, through the natural dynamic of mutual attraction, leads Helena to Florence, where she quickly learns of Bertram's assault on Diana's chastity. Immediately she hits upon a plan to catch her husband. In “this deceit so lawful” (III.vii.38) Helena creates a riddle to match Bertram's enigma; in this respect she employs the word against the word. And she does so through the central deed of the play: the bed-trick. Assuring the old Widow of Florence that the stratagem she has devised—Diana is to beg Bertram's ring, assign a time for love-making, and give way to Helena—involves no sin, Helena concludes:

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

(III.vii.43-47)

These riddling words portray a paradox fulfilling the equally sphinxlike words of Bertram's letter; in this respect Helena's words satisfy his condition for marriage.

And what of Bertram? Can he fulfill words in deeds? Initially the evidence is not promising. Throughout All's Well, Shakespeare puns on “word” and “sword.” For example, after Bertram spurns Helena, the Countess says,

                                                                                Y'are welcome, gentlemen.
I will entreat you, when you see my son,
To tell him that his sword can never win
The honour that he loses. …

(III.ii.91-94)

Granted London pronunciation, an Elizabethan audience might hear the phrase “his sword” as “his word”—the second s lost in verbal elision.²⁴ In the light of Shakespeare's treatment of words and deeds in All's Well, the Countess makes a complex statement. On one level she opposes Bertram's words and his sword—the word and the deed, Mercury and Mars. On another level she focuses on the emptiness of Bertram's speech; one word, devalued by his promise-breaking with the King and Helena, can never redeem another word, the pedigree lost through his wretched behavior. Concerning the first dimension of meaning, we realize that Bertram, unlike Helena, cannot fulfill a word—his promise, in this instance—through a redemptive deed, performed by his sword.

Still, Bertram does manage to wed the word to the deed during the play's denouement. Significantly, another riddle begins the dramatic movement that results in the figurative wedding on which Bertram's actual marriage depends. In Act V, the truth of Helena's bed-trick is expressed in riddles, a verbal medium more maddening than enlightening to those unaware that only hard linguistic forms can express some facts. When Diana confronts Bertram in the final episode, she riddles upon the belief that he bedded her:

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

(V.iii.168-74)

Regarded in the light of her name, Diana's last words are evocative; the word as riddle suggests the symbolic blending of Helena and Diana (Love and Chastity).²⁵ Shakespeare prepares for this possibility when Helena suggests to the Countess that in her youth she herself perhaps did “Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian / Was both herself and love” (I.iii.207-8). Through a riddle Shakespeare identifies the paradoxical gift of chastity that association with Diana confers upon Helena. By doubling for Helena in the bed-trick, Diana publicly purifies the former virgin who, through questionable tricks, has in a sense prostituted herself to achieve an Elizabethan ideal: Married Chastity.

Only a riddling statement can reflect the purity of Helena's wordless deed. Such a statement concerns the ring, originally the King's gift to Helena, which was given to Bertram during the bed-trick. When Bertram tries to give the same ring to Maudlin as a betrothal token, the King, recognizing it, expresses shock as well as horror, for he assumes that Bertram has murdered Helena to obtain it. When the King asks Diana, “Know you this ring? This ring was his of late,” she asserts, “And this was it I gave him, being abed.” “The story then goes false,” the King continues, “you threw it him / Out of a casement?” “I have spoke the truth,” Diana simply replies (V.iii.226-29). For the characters on stage, Diana's claim undermines her credibility and thus her authority as agent of reconciliation. Obviously, Helena in the dark slipped the ring upon her husband's finger, intending it to undo him later and coaching Diana in her scheme. In what sense, then, can Diana claim to have spoken the truth? In the sense that Helena achieves wedded chastity through her bed-trick, Chastity (Diana) can be said to have been abed with Bertram. Diana's assertion that she gave Bertram the King's ring thus symbolically suggests the purity of Helena's deed, an act that redeems a world of lying words and broken promises. Diana's claim implies that the words of the play's comic ending create a subtext with its own kind of metaphoric truth.²⁶

Exasperated by the literal meaning of Diana's riddling statements, the King orders her to prison. When Diana tells her mother to fetch her “bail” (V.iii.289), Helena suddenly appears, miraculously so to the characters on stage. “Is't real that I see?” the King asks, perhaps rubbing his eyes. “No, my good lord,” Helena replies. “'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see; / The name and not the thing” (V.iii.300-302). Because Bertram, still ignorant of the consummation of his marriage, has not yet accepted her, Helena suggests that she is a wife in word only, not in everyday conjugal deed. Nonetheless, her judgment upon herself reverberates with extra dimensions of meaning. As shadows of substances (things, acts), words in the play have often seemed sadly divorced from the objects they are meant to portray—the gap usually indicative of a falsehood associated with the utterance of speech. During his directions for the babble of tongues, the Lord deceiving Parolles said, “When you sally upon him speak what terrible language you will; though you understand it not yourselves, no matter; for we must not seem to understand him, unless some one among us, whom we must produce for an interpreter” (IV.i.2-6). Considered within the context of the play as a whole, the Lord's “some one” ultimately refers to Diana. She becomes the interpreter making sense of the babble of tongues and cross-purposes among the play's characters.

When Bertram, hearing Helena's claim that she is a shadow of a wife, suddenly shouts, “Both. both. O pardon!” (V.iii.302), he reveals his new ability to fit thing with word—the reality of chastity (independent of any name) with the title of wife.²⁷ He suddenly grasps the principle of chastity that prompted Helena to undertake the unorthodox, easily misconstrued consummation of her marriage. Having fitted word and thing, shadow and substance, Bertram soon merges word and deed when he embraces Helena, accepting his wife in an act that perfects his wedding vows—to say nothing of his promise to the King.²⁸ With Bertram's words and embraces, the time has finally brought on romance summer, when briars have “leaves as well as thorns” (IV.iv.31-32). Bertram has acquired his father's admired ability to know “the true minute” for courteously fitting deeds to words. Helena reminds her husband:

                                                                                          There is your ring,
And, look you, here's your letter. This it says:
When from my finger you can get this ring
And is by me with child, & c. This is done;
Will you be mine now you are doubly won?

(V.iii.304-8)

“This is done.” The statement reflects the word become deed. In the warm claspings at the close of All's Well, the audience sees gestures, deeds that are no more than crystallized words of love.

Notes

1. All quotations from All's Well That Ends Well are from the Arden edition, ed. G. K. Hunter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).

2. Shakespeare and Decorum (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973), pp. 6-7.

3. M. C. Bradbrook, “Virtue is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All's Well That Ends Well,” RES, [Review of English Studies] n.s., 1 (1950): 289-301, has described this attainment as the play's central motif.

4. In Act V, the King indicates that time plays a major role in severing words from deeds in All's Well. “All is whole,” he states there. “Not one word more of the consumed time; / Let's take the instant by the forward top; / For we are old, and on our quick'st decrees / Th'inaudible and noiseless foot of time / Steals ere we can effect them” (V.iii.37-42). Clearly, time in Shakespeare's conception drives a wedge between words and their fulfillment in deeds. Thus contemplated deeds are best done without announcement or promise, silently, as a seal of their virtue.

5. John Edward Price, “Anti-moralistic Moralism in All's Well That Ends Well,” ShakS, [Shakespeare Studies] 12 (1979): 95-111, has argued that the King's language often consists of “useless platitude[s]” (p. 95) against which Bertram, seeking independence from a stale morality, actively rebels.

6. The phrase is Keir Elam's, offered during an analysis of the King's speech in Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 172-73.

7. For an overview of nominalist treatments of Shakespeare's language, see Margreta De Grazia, “Shakespeare's View of Language: An Historical Perspective,” SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] 29 (1978): 374-88. “In the sixteenth century,” De Grazia argues, “it was assumed that defects in man brought about confused speech; in the seventeenth century, it became widely held that confused speech brings on many of the defects in man” (p. 381). Nonetheless, the King of France's skeptical view of the essential rightness of words for things predicts the intense seventeenth-century distrust of language expressed by Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, among others. For strains of sixteenth-century nominalism in Shakespeare's comedies (strains not discussed by De Grazia), see Elam, pp. 118-36, 166-76.

8. Richard II constitutes Shakespeare's fullest analysis of royalty's divine speech. During his exploration of this topic in Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad: “Richard II” to “Henry V” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), James L. Calderwood remarks, “The original power of the divine Word remained actively at work in the King's English, just as divine authority descending by way of primogeniture was immanent in Richard himself” (p. 13). Calderwood's account of Shakespeare's questioning of these medieval/Renaissance dogmas in Richard II remains convincing: “it is the purpose of the play to divest Richard of these views—to drive a wedge between words and their meanings, between the world order and the word order, between the king and the man who is king, and between names and metaphors” (p. 13). Shakespeare's portrayal of the King of France's language extends this doctrinal criticism to All's Well.

9. A. F. Bellette, “Truth and Utterance in The Winter's Tale,” ShS, [Shakespeare Survey] 31 (1978): 69-71, analyzes Shakespeare's interest in this Johannine idea.

10. G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 96.

11. See Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 22-46, 260-84; and James L. Calderwood, “Love's Labour's Lost: A Wantoning with Words,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900], 5 (1965): 317-32, and “Coriolanus: Wordless Meanings and Meaningless Words,” SEL, 6 (1966): 211-24. Also see Anne Barton, “Shakespeare and the Limits of Language,” ShS, 24 (1971): 19-30; and William C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in “Love's Labour's Lost” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 11-29.

12. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), pp. 100-101, has argued that in All's Well Shakespeare's lines often “have profounder and more far-reaching meanings or undertones than their contexts warrant.”

13. This point is also made by Robert Hapgood, “The Life of Shame: Parolles and All's Well,” EIC, [Essays in Criticism] 15 (1965): 276-77.

14. For an account of the psychological threat of incest for Helena and especially for Bertram, see Richard P. Wheeler, “Marriage and Manhood in All's Well That Ends Well,” BuR, [Bucknell Review] 21 (1973): 111-13, and Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 42-43.

15. Frances M. Pearce, “Analogical Probability and the Clown in All's Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch (Weimar), 108 (1972): 129-44, complements the critical opinion that Lavatch's verbal analogues are uniformly derogatory with an account of their prophetic function (pp. 137-42). Pearce argues that “all the alleged correspondences between the Clown's words and later events have an order that precisely matches the order of events in the plot” (p. 139).

16. J. Dennis Huston, “‘Some Stain of Soldier’: The Functions of Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well,” SQ, 21 (1970): 431-38, was the first critic to describe Parolles' positive animation of Helena early in the play (pp. 434-38).

17. Critics generally join one of two camps concerning the question of Helena's sudden appearance in Florence. Those who believe that Helena planned from the beginning to hunt down Bertram in Italy—deceiving everyone with an empty promise of pilgrimage—include Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 151, 157; and Richard A. Levin, “All's Well That Ends Well, and ‘All Seems Well,’” ShakS, 13 (1980): 131, 137-39. Those who believe that Helena genuinely intends to repent by a pilgrimage to St. Jaques and that her appearance in Florence lacks predatory calculation are well represented by G. Wilson Knight's remark: “Though she certainly knew that Bertram had gone to serve the Duke (III.i.54), we must not suppose that her finding him in Florence was part of a deliberate plan, since her letter to the Countess had already urged his immediate return to France (III.iv.8) …” (p. 143). Also see James L. Calderwood, “Styles of Knowing in All's Well,” MLQ, [Modern Language Quarterly] 25 (1964): 282; J. C. Maxwell, “Helena's Pilgrimage,” RES, n.s., 20 (1969): 191; R. L. Smallwood, “The Design of All's Well That Ends Well,” ShS, 25 (1972): 53-54; and Gerard J. Gross, “The Conclusion to All's Well That Ends Well,” SEL, 23 (1983): 266.

18. A glance at Robert Fludd's well-known engraving Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617-19) reveals the popular Renaissance belief that Providence (God's Art) controls Nature. A gloss on the ideas in the engraving is provided by The Winter's Tale IV.iv.89-97. In Shakespeare's poetry, the Art “over that art / Which … adds to Nature”—the Art that “makes” Nature—clarifies the value of God's hand and chain in the engraving. For Fludd, these divine attributes symbolize the Art guiding that greater Nature which rules her “ape” mankind, who in turn remains intent on rectifying fallen nature through the secular art represented by his compasses.

19. W. L. Godshalk, “All's Well That Ends Well and the Morality Play,” SQ, 25 (1974): 61-70, notices this dynamic of magnetism in the play but ascribes it to Nature rather than to Providence (pp. 63-64).

20. Godshalk, p. 70. Also see Jay L. Halio, “All's Well That Ends Well,” SQ, 15 (1964): 38.

21. Price notes that “Helena's success over the Countess and the King has resulted from her ability at persuasive discourse. She will require more than this to succeed with Bertram. So, Helena moves to the background—in the literal and symbolically subservient garb of a pilgrim—and prepares to seize whatever opportunity arises” (p. 104). In other words, Helena resorts to deeds when words fail her.

22. The only study of the riddle in All's Well is Phyllis Gorfain, “Riddles and Reconciliation: Formal Unity in All's Well That Ends Well,” Journal of the Folklore Institute, 13 (1976): 263-81. Gorfain's conclusions about the importance of riddling in the play differ substantially from mine.

23. Hunter notes that in Helena's final verse “the whom refers to death, the him to Bertram” (p. 82).

24. Fausto Cercignani, Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 38, 112. Wordplay on “sword” and “word” was commonplace among Renaissance dramatists; the tension between words and swords in Marlowe's Tamburlaine—to cite one instance—is explained by Helen Watson-Williams, “The Power of Words: A Reading of Tamburlaine the Great, Part One,” English, 22 (1973): 13-18.

25. The merger of Diana and Venus in Helena, producing Married Chastity, has been described by John F. Adams, “All's Well That Ends Well: The Paradox of Procreation,” SQ, 12 (1961): 262-63; Eric LaGuardia, “Chastity, Regeneration, and World Order in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. 124; and David M. Bergeron, “The Mythical Structure of All's Well That Ends Well,” TSLL, [Texas Studies in Literature and Language] 14 (1973): 561-63.

26. William W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York: Macmillan, 1931), p. 74, represents the widespread critical objection to Shakespeare's protracting of Diana's role at the end of the play. Yet we have seen that the protraction serves a variety of necessary dramatic functions.

27. Gorfain notes that “Helena characterizes herself, when she enters the gathering at Rossillion, as ‘the shadow of a wife, the name and not the thing.’ Bertram happily acknowledges her as both, and thereby acknowledges the sexual union that harmonizes vow and deed, word and action, which are in tension throughout the play” (p. 268).

28. Alexander Welsh, “The Loss of Men and Getting of Children: All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” MLR, [Modern Language Review] 73 (1978): 24, writes: “In All's Well That Ends Well the tolerance of Parolles, at the end, implies some forgiveness of a less-than-perfect correspondence of words and deeds, and some forgiveness of Bertram.” In my view the correspondence is more precise.