SOURCE: Parker, Patricia. “All's Well That Ends Well: Increase and Multiply.” In Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, edited by David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn, pp. 355-90. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992.

[In the following essay, Parker suggests linkages between characters, scenes, and themes in All's Well That Ends Well, arguing that the sexual terms “increase” and “dilation” have economic, verbal, hermeneutic, and familial implications in the play.]

All's well that ends well! still the fine's the crown;
Whate'er the course, the end is the renown.

(IV.iv.35-36)

In act II of All's Well That Ends Well, Parolles (the Shakespearean character whose name means “words”) advises the curter Bertram to employ more words in his “adieu” to the lords of the French court by taking what he calls a “more dilated farewell”:

Use a more spacious ceremony to the noble lords; you have restrain'd yourself within the list of too cold an adieu. Be more expressive to them, for they wear themselves in the cap of the time. … After them, and take a more dilated farewell. …

(II.i.50-57; my emphasis)¹

Parolles, who is studying to be the “perfect courtier” (I.i.203), here counsels Bertram—an immature or “unseason'd courtier” (I.i.67)—in the verbal fashions of the court. But the terms he suggests, of recourse to a more “spacious ceremony” and “more dilated farewell,” will occur in another, later scene in which Parolles himself is “granted space” (IV.i.88) after he almost loses his life for want of “language” (IV.i.70).

Parolles' counsel to Bertram to “take a more dilated farewell” sounds in a play filled with farewells—from Bertram's initial departure for Paris and his subsequent stealing away to Florence to Helena's pilgrimage and the final return of the characters to Rossillion. The play inherits these displacements from its narrative source, Boccaccio's story of Giletta of Narbona in Decameron III.9, summarized in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure:

Giletta a Phisition's daughter of Narbon, healed the French King of a Fistula, for reward whereof she demaunded Beltramo Counte of Rossiglione to husband. The Counte being maried against his will, for despite fled to Florence, and loved another. Giletta, his wife, by pollicie founde meanes to lye with her husbande, in place of his lover, and was begotten with childe of two sonnes: which knowen to her husband, he received her againe, and afterwards he lived in great honour and felicitie.²

With name changes to Helena and Bertram, a streamlining of the bedtrick to a single night and pregnancy, the feigned death of the wife, and a much less “felicitous” atmosphere at its end, this narrative is essentially the plot Shakespeare follows in All's Well. To it, however—notoriously, in the view of many critics—he added not only the figure of Parolles but a great deal whose interconnection still remains largely uninterpreted in this play: chiefly, the scenes of wordplay between Bertram's countess mother, the counselor Lafew, and the clown Lavatch; the repeated evocations of the specter of incest; and variation on the multiple senses of “increase,” the theme that Thomas M. Greene³ has reminded us combines the generational, hermeneutic, and economic motifs already writ large in Shakespeare's sonnets. I want to suggest in what follows—in response, in part, to G. K. Hunter's lament that criticism of the play has “failed to provide a context within which the genuine virtues of the play can be appreciated”—precisely the unnoticed links between the various characters, scenes, and “businesses” added by Shakespeare to his much more “straightforward” source.⁴ This I propose to do under the heading of “increase.”

“Increase” in the sense of “increase and multiply” is, of course, the command delivered to Adam and Eve at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, the command that makes possible the narrative extension as well as the multiplication of life that ensues. It is also the command recalled repeatedly in texts contemporary with All's Well which treat of the loss of virginity required in order to amplify and extend the branches of a family tree: an act of increase that depends on the opening up of something constricted or closed.⁵ All the traditional arguments against virginity, from the discourse of Genius in the Roman de la Rose to the texts that echo it, oppose its “end” or “fine” to the extension, and reprieve from death, made possible through such an opening to increase.⁶ This generational form of opening, in the arguments traditionally martialled against virginity, depends on inducing something closed to open and dilate. But the “increase” of such sexual opening also had its hermeneutic and verbal counterparts, the understanding of interpretation as opening up to “increase” a closed, hermetic, or forbidding text (“dilating or enlarging a matter by interpretation,” as one text puts it),⁷ and the dilation of discourse whose parodic double was empty inflation or mere words. “Increase and multiply” in both the generational and the hermeneutic sense is, for example, the subject of the chapter of Augustine's Confessions that links the command in Genesis to the interpreter's opening of a scriptural text, a link also forged in the early modern tradition of verbal copia as an amplification of speech which proceeds by increasing a smaller, more restricted, stock of words.⁸ What I want to suggest in focussing on “dilation” in both sexual and other senses in All's Well is that this linking of verbal, hermeneutic, and familial under the heading of “increase” also provides a way into the subtle interconnections between the play's otherwise apparently unconnected and disjointed scenes, a much-needed context for its buried linkages.

Whether or not it is the play corresponding to Francis Meres' mysterious reference to a Love's Labors Wonne, All's Well That Ends Well is Shakespeare's most conspicuously teleological title, suggestive of the comic plot of fulfillment achieved only after a period of trial. Yet the Shakespearean play whose title appears to emphasize final closure is not only notoriously ambiguous in its own ultimate close but filled with more pressing, and more immediate, senses of ending or closing off.⁹ By contrast, both in the scene in which Parolles counsels Bertram to “take a more dilated farewell” (“Use a more spacious ceremony”) and in the scene where this same Parolles is threatened with immediate death for want of “language” before he is finally “granted space” (IV.iii.96), the extension of discourse, as of life, is linked with the creation of an intervening “space.” Such an association is not restricted to scenes actually involving “Parolles” or words: it extends to the play's repeated enactment of something constricted or closed that needs to be “granted space” or opened up.

Like several other plays of Shakespeare, All's Well begins with a heavy sense of conclusion—not, as in The Comedy of Errors, for example, with a literal “doom” or sentence of death, but with a different kind of “sentence,” one whose constrictions the play itself will need to counter in order to be granted space and language of its own. The play opens with the need to open up a space between beginning and end, birth and death, son and husband, in the despairing sentence uttered by the countess at the moment of her son's first farewell. In this, the play's own first sentence—“In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband”—the sense of “delivery” as birth is immediately short-circuited by the heavier sense of burial, or death. Birth and death are too close here. The interval between them is the opposite of a more “spacious” interim or “dilated farewell,” just as the potentially incestuous collapse of space between husband and son as “second husband” invokes a sense of generational constriction.

Ironically, however, it is the “farewell” the countess fears will be a second death—Bertram's departure for the French court—which the King's representative Lafew goes on to present as a different kind of “second,” in a play which will be filled with seconds and surrogates. Lafew's response—“You shall find of the king a husband, madam; you, sir, a father” (I.i.6-7)—deflects the hint of incestuous conflation in the countess's opening line by displacement onto a surrogate or substitute father; but it also thereby converts a gloom-filled “sentence” or apparent end into a starting point and Bertram's departing introduction of space or distance into a form of “delivery.” As with The Comedy of Errors, whose opening contains a play on opening, All's Well depends at its beginning on the opening up of space within something more constricted: both the hints of incest and the sense of still-birth that would, to paraphrase Bertram's later line, cause the play itself to “end” ere it “begin” (II.v.27).

I start with this oppressive sense of ending at the beginning of All's Well not simply to introduce the importance in this play of spacing out and opening up but to address one of its central interpretive cruxes—the question of why this opening scene should also include the extended exchange between Parolles and Helena on the subject of “increase.” At the beginning of this exchange, Helena is immersed in her own despairing meditation on ending (“I am undone, there is no living, none, / If Bertram be away,” I.i.84-85). And it is precisely in the midst of this oppressive sense of close or end—after the marking of two fathers' deaths (Helena's as well as Bertram's) and allusion to the mortal malady of the king—that the play introduces Parolles, the character whose name means not just one but many “words” (V.ii.36-40), along with his counsel to “increase and multiply.”

Parolles enters the scene as Helena is lamenting the same departure the countess had mourned as a form of burial; and the sparring between them—an exemplary instance of what Stephen Greenblatt has called Shakespeare's warming verbal “friction”¹⁰—is on the subject of “virginity” as another kind of death (“virginity murthers itself,” I.i.39). The punning that ensues on pregnancy as the “blowing up” of virgins and on tumescence and detumescence as “blowing up” and then “blowing … down” a man (lines 119-124) quickly leads to the extended exchange on the subject of “increase”:

PAROLLES.
Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost. … Virginity, by being once lost, may be ten times found; by being ever kept, it is ever lost. 'Tis too cold a companion; away with't … 'tis against the rule of nature. … Keep it not, you cannot choose but lose by't. Out with't! Within t'one year it will make itself two, which is a goodly increase, and the principal itself not much the worse.

(I.i.127-49)

The imagery of the entire passage links generational and monetary “increase”—increase of the principal through interest and propagation as a form of increase and multiply—the two forms of wealth linked in the period as ways to “encrease” a “stock.”¹¹ The notoriously inflated (or “blown up”) Parolles, who enters the play as the champion of “increase,” forges as well a linking of both with verbal increase; the entrance of the figure whose name means “words” is linked with the opening up of the play to its own more dilated farewell. As if to call attention to the link, the scene's description of virginity as “too cold a companion” or as an “old courtier” who “wears her cap out of fashion” and knows not how to suit either “fashion” or “time” (I.i.156-57) verbally anticipates the later scene of Parolles' “more dilated farewell,” with its contrasting of those who “wear themselves in the cap of the time” to “too cold an adieu” (II.i.49-56).¹²

All's Well That Ends Well begins, then, with an oppressive sense of death and a “farewell” that appears at first to the countess and to Helena as death's equivalent, an ending beyond which there is “no living, none.” But in the case of Helena, who will be the prime generator of the plot to come, the exchange with the character called “words” on the subject of “increase” seems to involve opening up this oppressive sense of end in a way not unlike the opening up of the surrogate death or “fine” of virginity. Parolles—the figure in the play for an increase or dilation that is finally only inflated or “blown up”—enters the play just as the Helena who is focused on death is, in another sense, as he suggests, “meditating on virginity.” And by the end of this sparring with the figure called “words,” Helena has passed from despair to a more active sense that “our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,” from passivity before unalterable necessity (“now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy / Must sanctify his relics”) to the generation of a plot. Her intention to travel to Paris in order to offer a cure to the king and win Bertram is the result:

HELENA:
                                                                                                    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.

(I.i.226-29)

The intervening space introduced by Bertram's farewell becomes, after the exchange with Parolles on “increase,” the space of Helena's “project,” both in the sense of a plot with an end in view and in the sense of something directed towards the future. Opening up a space within constriction, achieving a reprieve in the face of an oppressive sense of end or “fine,” is what enables the play called All's Well That Ends Well to open itself to “increase.” The exchange with Parolles provides both for the play and for Helena, its prime mover, the “parole” his name suggests:¹³ both the “word” she takes up in a scene whose final words are hers and the reprieve from ending her “project” proceeds to provide. The verbal sparring of this opening scene clearly establishes an association between Parolles or “words” and the dilation which is simultaneously the generational, monetary, and verbal fulfillment of the command to “increase and multiply.”

This early exchange between Parolles and Helena on the subject of “increase” proleptically anticipates Helena's own eventual pregnancy after she has found a way to “blow up” her virginity according to her own designs and has presented Bertram with evidence of that increase. But the importance of “increase” in all of its senses—and hence the importance of this early exchange—is also underlined in a succession of scenes apparently so minor that they have remained strikingly underinterpreted in criticism of All's Well, though they provide some of the best examples of the importance in Shakespeare of the apparently marginal. The link between verbal and generational “increase” established in the sparring between Parolles and Helena is reaffirmed almost immediately within act I itself when, in scene iii, the steward's wordy or Parolles-like preamble (2-5) serves as a form of stalling for time, filling up the space before the countess notices the presence of the clown Lavatch, who has come to express his own desire to “increase and multiply” (lines 22-24: “I think I shall never have the blessing of God till I have issue a' my body”).¹⁴ The link between words and “bearing” or generational increase—along with disparagement of merely empty or inflated words—has already been established just before this scene, in the king's praise of Bertram's father as one whose “plausive words” were “scatter'd not in ears, but grafted … / To grow there and to bear” (I.ii.53-55). This image is explicitly recalled in the clown's “He that ears my land spares my team” (I.iii.44) as a comic argument for cuckoldry as an increase of “husbandry.”

“Increase” also pervades the multiple allusions throughout the play to alchemy as a means of renewing or extending life, as the “multiplying medicine” (V.iii.102) associated with the command in Genesis to “increase and multiply.”¹⁵ But the sense of “increase” as opening up a space within something constricted even more strikingly suggests links between the first act's insistence on increase and its equally insistent emphasis on incest, an emphasis nowhere found in the play's narrative source. The countess's opening line (“In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband”) not only collapses the space between birth and death, allowing no space of life or saving interval, but also conflates incestuously a “husband” and a “son.”¹⁶ What is only hinted at in the countess's initial line, however, is directly confronted as the threat of incest in the scene later in act 1 where Helena objects to calling Bertram's mother her “mother” as well. The passage is striking enough in its resistance to this conflation to deserve fuller quotation:

COUNTESS.
                                        You know, Helen,
I am a mother to you.
HELENA.
Mine honourable mistress.
COUNTESS.
                                        Nay, a mother,
Why not a mother? When I said ‘a mother,’
Methought you saw a serpent. What's in ‘mother’
That you start at it? I say I am your mother,
And put you in the catalogue of those
That were enwombed mine …

.....

… does it curd thy blood
To say I am thy mother? What's the matter, …

.....

—Why, that you are my daughter?
HELENA.
                                        That I am not.
COUNTESS.
I say I am your mother.
HELENA.
                                        Pardon, madam;
The Count Rossillion cannot be my brother.
I am from humble, he from honored name;
No note upon my parents, his all noble.
My master, my dear lord he is, and I
His servant live, and will his vassal die.
He must not be my brother.
COUNTESS.
                                                  Nor I your mother?
HELENA.
You are my mother, madam; would you were—
So that my lord your son were not my brother—
Indeed my mother! Or were you both our mothers,
I care no more for than I do for heaven,
So I were not his sister. Can't no other,
But, I your daughter, he must be my brother?
COUNTESS.
Yes, Helen, you might be my daughter-in-law.

(I.iii.138-67)

In relation to the series of chess moves Helena must make if she is to be “mated” as she desires (I.i.91),¹⁷ becoming the “daughter” of the countess would resolve one of the obstacles she faces—the class distance from Bertram as one too far “above” her (I.i.82-92). But it would do so only by creating another obstacle, the dangerous proximity of consanguinuity. Therefore, Helena here invokes the very distance in social position she had earlier bemoaned (“The Count Rossillion cannot be my brother. / I am from humble, he from honoured name”). “Daughter”—the term that in early modern usage could name both daughter by marriage and daughter by birth—is displaced or spaced into its more distant correlative (“you might be my daughter-in-law”), exogamous extension rather than endogamous collapse. The separation of ambiguously paired identities, originally contained within a “double-meaning” (IV.iii.99) name, comes in this scene as the answer to one of the play's first riddles, in ways that remind us how close the links are between incest, with its conflation of familial identities, and the kind of riddling whose solution depends on such spacing or separating out.¹⁸ The sense of incest as involving something too “near”—and hence the need to create a space between relations that threaten to come too close—is underscored verbally just before this exchange by the Steward's otherwise gratuitous “I was very late more near her than I think she wish'd me” (I.iii.106-7; my emphasis).

The whole extended space of All's Well That Ends Well—which proceeds through a series of displacements or farewells—is needed to provide the corresponding “answer” to this early scene of incest and its riddling, just as later in Pericles a series of geographical displacements and a relentlessly narrative espacement intervene to separate out an opening incest's riddling conflation of generations and identities. The plot of All's Well from this point forward in fact involves a series of displacements as well as a putting off of conclusions which are premature or threaten to be too “near.” The heavy sense of ending with which the play begins and the exchange between Parolles and Helena on the death-wish of virginity have their counterpart in the literal death-wish of the ailing king, in a scene (II.i) in which the word “farewell” is sounded throughout. The king's gesture of parting from the young French lords on their way to war in Italy is joined by his sense that his own end is unalterably at hand (First Lord. “'Tis our hope, sir, / After well-ent'red soldiers, to return / And find your Grace in health. / King. No, no, it cannot be,” II.i.5-8). And it is, again, in this scene—as the king temporarily retires to another part of the stage—that Parolles appears, uttering now the counsel to “take a more dilated farewell” (II.i.57; my emphasis).

Parolles' urging of this “more spacious ceremony” is inserted between two iterations of the king's sense of the imminence and inevitability of his end, the second of which is explicitly a form of death-wish:

LAFEW.
But, my good lord, 'tis thus: will you be cur'd
Of your infirmity?
KING.
                                        No.
LAFEW.
                    O, will you eat
No grapes, my royal fox?

(II.i.68-70)

It is at this point—in the same scene as Parolles' “more spacious ceremony” and “more dilated farewell”—that Helena arrives as the “Doctor She” (II.i.79) provided with an enabling “physic.” Once again, the exchange between Helena and the king has to do with the granting of a “space” (II.i.159). The king's conviction that he is “one near death” (122-31) is countered by Helena's reminders that:

                                                                                great floods have flown
From simple sources; and great seas have dried
When miracles have by the great'st been denied.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.

(II.i.139-44)

The king's fixation on ending is countered not only by the hope offered through Helena's physic but through this series of images recalling the miracles, and “parole,” of the Exodus—water from rock and the drying of the Red Sea—at precisely those points where what had at first seemed an imminent end opens into a space of reprieve. It needs to be observed that here “coldest” gathers echoes both from the symbolic death of “cold” virginity in the early exchange on “increase” and from the “cold” of Parolles' counteradvice to take “a more dilated farewell” (“you have restrain'd yourself within the list of too cold an adieu,” II.i.51-52; my emphasis).¹⁹

The king's exchange with Helena, though it leads first to his refusal of what he terms a “senseless help” (line 124) for a “past-cure malady” (“fare thee well, kind maid. / Thy pains not us'd must by thyself be paid,” 145-46), results finally in the granting to Helena of the requested “space” (159) in which to try her cure, and in the king's readiness to be her “resolv'd patient” (204) in all the multiple senses of that phrase. In the fertility imagery appropriate for a king whose ailment, a fistula or “pipe,” also suggests a kind of impotence,²⁰ Helena herself becomes a form of “physic.” This scene of Exodus-imagery of water coming from rock or barren ground is filled, as has often been remarked, with innuendos of sexual rejuvenation, which begin with Lafew's comparing himself to “Cressid's uncle” (97) as he leaves the two alone together (“I have see a medicine / That's able to breathe life into a stone, / Quicken a rock … powerful to araise King Pippen, nay, / To give great Charlemain a pen in's hand / And write to her a love-line,” II.i.72-78). The king's becoming “lustick” or “lusty” (II.iii.41) as a result of the cure of the “Doctor She” is hence related to a specifically sexual “increase” through the familiar associations of this phallic “pen,” long linked with fulfillment of the command to “increase and multiply.”²¹ By contrast, the fistula, not just “water-pipe” (Latin, fistula) but a “running” sore, provides a parody of this fertility, of flowing liquid from a “stone.” As a choice for the opposite of genuine fertility, it also forges a link with the pseudo-increase or parodic fertility of Parolles or “words,” since the association between a fistula or running sore and an unstoppable loquacity was proverbial (“Loquacity,” as one contemporary text puts it, is “the Fistula of the minde”).²²

The king's “lustique” cure also, however, both procures a reprieve for him and performs, once again, a transition for Helena from the threat of death (“If I break time, or flinch in property / Of what I spoke, unpitied let me die,” II.i.187-88) to the possibility of “increase.” This is expressed through the images of genealogical “branches” and grafting, in lines that eschew the right to have her “low and humble name to propagate / With any branch or image” as lofty as the king's (II.i.197-98). The familiar image of generational increase through the branches of a family tree, invoked in Helena's disclaimer as she chooses Bertram instead, will by the end of the play, as at the end of Cymbeline, be linked as well with the ramifications or “branches” of an extended discourse.²³ But even here the King's progression from the death-wish of his anticipated end parallels the reprieve and regeneration of Helena after the exchange with Parolles on the subject of “increase.” The involvement of Parolles or “words” in both scenes—first as the proponent of “increase and multiply” as opposed to the death-wish of virginity and then as the counsellor of a “more spacious ceremony” and “more dilated farewell” in the scene of the king's valedictory—suggests that he is paired not only with Helena but, more generally, with a form of increase that puts off immediate ends and, more specifically, with one that depends on “paroles.”²⁴

The play whose title foregrounds closure or ending appears, then, from its very beginning to gain its own life or “increase”—and the achievement within it of the project of a “Doctor She”—from the opening up of space and the putting off of endings, as well as from the tension between mere verbal dilation in its empty, “blown up” form and a dilation which is finally of a more fruitful kind. This kind of dilation includes the extension or dilated farewell of a play whose length is underscored by the Epilogue's reference to the “patience” of the audience. The subtle juxtaposition with Helena at both points in the play's early acts establishes a link between the two—Helena's argument to the king recalling Parolles' argument against the death wish of virginity—and hence begins to suggest a relationship of counterfeit or parodic imitation between the kind of verbal dilation or wordy inflation he represents and the “increase” represented by her. This difference is underlined by Helena's “I am not an imposture” (II.i.155) in the same scene in which Parolles asks to be remembered (“Say to him I live”) to one “Captain Spurio” (II.i.43), whose name literally means “counterfeit.”²⁵ To see Shakespeare's insertion into his source of the figure of “Parolles”—often regarded as a supernumerary irrelevance—as related instead to all the multiple senses of “increase” is not only to suggest a link, as well as an opposition, between this “manifold linguist” and the figure of Helena who directs its plot, but also to suggest the subtle links that exist between the many scenes within the play that are often similarly treated as marginal or supernumerary.

As if to emphasize a connection between the extension of life and the extending of words, as between the play's various forms of putting off, the entrance of Helena through which the king is offered a respite from death (II.i.93) is preceded by lines which give to his counsellor Lafew (whose name might instead promise a contrasting “in few”) a verbosity associated elsewhere with Parolles (“Thus he his special nothing ever prologues,” II.i.92). Most striking in this regard, however, is the fact that the offstage interval in which the King's death is postponed by Helena's physic is filled by an extraordinary scene of wordplay on the theme of “putting off,” in another of those Shakespearean additions to the source whose verbal sparring once again involves the intersection between natural and other forms of “increase.” (It begins, for example, with a double-meaning reference to the clown's “breeding,” II.ii.1-2.) That such a dizzyingly pyrotechnical exchange on “putting off” should come immediately after Parolles' education of Bertram on the courtier's art of the “dilated farewell,” as well as after the king's agreement to a “space” which puts off his death, makes it yet another of the play's apparently marginal but strategically revealing scenes. In the series of parallels through which the clown parodically iterates the larger plot, Lavatch declares that his “business is but to the court” (II.ii.4) in lines that directly echo Parolles' studying to be the “perfect courtier” in the scene just before (“I am so full of businesses, I cannot answer thee acutely. I will return perfect courtier,” II.i.202ff.). And “putting off,” in the exchange that follows in this scene, ranges through various meanings from “selling” to “palming off on some one” to taking off one's cap before it settles into an extended parody of the very forms of “putting off” which Parolles, in his counselling of a “more dilated farewell,” had instructed the “unseason'd courtier” Bertram to learn—the technique of extending or amplifying through the courtier's apparently endless supply of words.²⁶

As the wordplay proceeds, such “putting off” becomes linked with the clown's description of “an answer [that] will serve all men,” a description to which the countess responds, “That's a bountiful answer that fits all questions,” and then again, “It must be an answer of most monstrous size that must fit all demands.” The “answer” that will “fit all demands” becomes, as the scene proceeds, the clown's stalling “O Lord sir,” which puts off or evades through a copious supply of intervening words, the empty “nothings” associated in the larger play with Parolles (“Clown. Ask me if I am a courtier … ? / Countess: I pray you, sir, are you a courtier? / Clown. O Lord, sir! There's a simple putting off”). “Putting off” is here a form of filling up both space and time, postponing a more direct “answer” to a “question” through a Parolles-like ability to extend through words. But what is signal in this scene is the fact that it not only calls attention to the idea—and multiple forms—of “putting off” but also reminds us that putting off cannot necessarily last forever, as the clown discovers as the scene approaches its own conclusion:

CLOWN.
I ne'er had worse luck in my life in my ‘O Lord, sir!’
I see things may serve long, but not serve ever.
COUNTESS.
I play the noble huswife with the time,
To entertain it so merrily with a fool.
CLOWN.
O Lord, sir!—Why, there't serves well again.
COUNTESS.
An end, sir; to your business: give Helen this,
And urge her to a present answer back.

(II.ii.57-64)

“Things may serve long, but not serve ever” provides a motto which applies to all this play's forms of putting off, from the physic which, even in the hands of Gerard de Narbon, can extend life but not ultimately put off death (I.i.28-29),²⁷ to the wordy “nothing” (II.iv.21-26) Parolles, whose “spurious” counterfeiting will be ultimately exposed. Both “An end, sir!” and the countess's call for a “present answer” remind us, in this play of ends or “fines,” of ends which, though deferred, do finally come, even to a play whose own extension and increase depends on putting off.

The sheer multiplicity of changes on the theme of “putting off” in this scene of wordplay between the countess and the clown, however, also forges links with the different forms of “putting off” that follow act II—an act that at first looks as if it might provide a more immediate folktale ending in the conclusion of the project through which Helena wins a husband by curing the king. For this same clown, in yet another parody of the larger plot, announces in his next exchange with the countess his intention to “put off” his intended wife (“I have no mind to Isbet since I was at court,” III.i.12), just after Bertram has managed to evade the wife who chooses him rather than the other way around. The entire comic scene on the forms of “putting off” (II.ii) is linked by unmistakable verbal echo to the kind of putting off which thus generates the plot a second time, when Helena is wedded to, but not bedded by, a now again-departing Bertram. This time the putting off is not verbal but erotic. But this delay of consummation is announced once again through Parolles or words, sent to deliver another “adieu”:

Madam, my lord will go away to-night,
A very serious business calls on him.
The great prerogative and rite of love,
Which, as your due, time claims, he does acknowledge,
But puts it off to a compell'd restraint;
Whose want, and whose delay, is strew'd with sweets,
Which they distill now in the curbed time,
To make the coming hour o'erflow with joy,
And pleasure drown the brim.

(II.iv.39-47; my emphasis)

Bertram's earlier farewell, his departure for Paris, had introduced the distance which led first to Helena's despairing sense of an end (“there is no living, none”) and then to her first more active project, the curing of the king and the fulfillment of the play's first comic plot. This, his second displacement, now for Italy, creates a space of putting off which reaches its end only after she relies not on her father's medicine but on her own devices.

Once again, this displacement creates what the king had earlier called a “coming space” (II.iii.181)—here the space before consummation that Helena, like Desdemona, experiences as a “heavy interim” (Othello, I.iii.958). It is in this new period of put-off ends that attention is repeatedly called to Bertram's being under the influence of “Parolles,” as if the play were aligning verbal and erotic “putting off” in its larger plot as it does more microscopically in its interweaving of asides that refer both to the putting off of Helena and to the lengthy travellers' tales associated with Parolles's bombast (II.v.15-31). Verbal echoes link Bertram with a Parolles-like inflation as the “proud, scornful boy” rebuked by the king for disparaging Helena's humble social origins (“Where great additions swell's and virtue none, / It is a dropsied honour,” II.iii.127-28; my emphasis). The “answer” Bertram offers to the king's command to “speak” is a speech of wordy nothings which in retrospect appear to have been, no less than the clown's “O Lord, sir,” a form of putting off (II.iii.167-73). And while Lafew's repeated references to the spurious or counterfeit dilation of travellers' tales (II.iii.202; II.v.28-31) have Parolles as their clearly intended referent, his “A good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner, but one that lies three thirds and uses a known truth to pass a thousand nothings with should be once heard and twice beaten” (II.v.28-31) applies just as appropriately to Bertram, who is about to practice such a deception on Helena and on Diana, this second plot's now second virgin.

Bertram intends his departure to be another definitive and unalterable end (“tonight, / When I should take possession of the bride, / end ere I do begin,” II.v.25-27; my emphasis). It is therefore at this point that he delivers not just the letter to the countess announcing “I have wedded her, not bedded her, and sworn to make the ‘not’ eternal” (III.ii.21-22), but a second letter whose curt farewell or intended last word is punningly termed a “dreadful sentence,” both a final statement and a “doom” (“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.57-60). This deferral of consummation by Bertram's farewell creates yet another intervening “space”—now described as a “breadth” or “long distance” (III.ii.24)—which Helena first, passively and Griselda-like, calls a time of “waiting” upon her husband's will (II.iv.52), as if Bertram were a stand-in for another “lord,” as in the familiar allegories of the Griselda story. But it also becomes the space of a different and specifically female “plot” (III.vii.44), a project which opens up this “dreadful sentence” by converting it from a concluding statement or final word into a form of riddling question. Bertram's “not” (III.ii.22) is turned into a “knot” to be explicated or untied, and his apparently definitive “never” becomes the temporal trajectory of a demand to be answered or fulfilled. Helena calls it her “passport” (III.ii.56), in the sense of something which licences her to wander or displaces her from her home; and her displacement takes the form of a pilgrimage, traditionally the sign of displacement or of an exodus which distances or separates out.²⁸

This second departure and second “project” bring together with extraordinarily concentrated internal echoes the play's several overlapping forms of “increase,” as well as a dilation and a delay that are simultaneously erotic and verbal. The “space” of Helena's plot becomes the space of a doubled deferral of consummation or erotic holding off. One of these is presented in its most conventional form as the virginity of a figure named “Dian,” a name added by Shakespeare to the play's source and explicitly identified with the “titled goddess” (IV.ii.2) of virginity. The other, more problematically, converts the delaying of consummation from a female to a male introduction of space or distance, and the withholding object of desire from a woman to the “peevish, proud, idle” (I.i) boy whose conditions Helena finally fulfills.²⁹ In the first, Bertram's rhetorical appeals to Diana to “stand no more off” (IV.ii.34) directly echo Parolles' arguments against virginity in the early exchange with Helena on the subject of “increase” (“you are cold and stern / And now you should be as your mother was / When your sweet self was got,” IV.ii.8-10); and Bertram's wooing of a “Dian” invokes the traditional lexicon of female “angling” or delay presented in its most commercial form as what Parolles in that opening exchange had called a “vendible commodity” (I.i.153-55). In the second, the fact that the actively questing Helena must now “blow up” a man—or, in the language of the exchange with Parolles in act l, inspire the tumescence necessary to “increase”—introduces one of this problem play's most problematic elements, the tonal problems in comedy of such reversal of the orthodox pattern of wooing: the sexual pursuit of a reluctant male by an active and finally successful woman.³⁰

The early exchange between Parolles and Helena (I.i) on the subject of virginity had already presented it as a “commodity” which, “the longer kept,” is “the less worth” (“Off with't while 'tis vendible,” I.i.152-54). But the economics of “putting off”—of gauging how long to “put off” the sale in order to increase but not jeopardize the price—is the burden of Parolles' counsel to Diana on how to handle men like Bertram whose only interest lies in “scoring,” a word also linked to accounting or tallying (“When he swears oaths, bid him drop gold, and take it; / After he scores, he never pays the score. / Half won is match well made; match, and well make it; / He n'er pays after-debts; take it before,” IV.iii.223-26).³¹ This is the conventional masculinist topos—of feminine delay as a way of raising “rate” or price—that Bertram rehearses as an aggressive defence when he is confronted by this “Dian” in act V:

She knew her distance, and did angle for me,
Madding my eagerness with her restraint,
As all impediments in fancy's course
Are motives of more fancy, and in fine,
Her inf'nite cunning, with her modern grace,
Subdu'd me to her rate.

(V.iii.212-17)

The conventional delay of a “Dian” of virginity (whose “infinite cunning” achieves a desired “fine” or end by putting off another one) and Bertram's putting off of consummation with Helena, his “compell'd” wife (IV.ii.15), become, then, the motive forms of “putting off” that generate the play's second, and more extended, plot, as well as the now different plotting of a “Doctor She.” This explicit evocation of the tradition of erotic delay and its link with “rate” or increase is, like the early exchange between Helena and Parolles, yet another Shakespearean addition not to be found in the play's narrative source. Like the comic wordplay on the forms of “putting off” in the scene between the clown and countess in act II, it suggests that what Shakespeare added to the narrative from Boccaccio, apart from Parolles the “manifold linguist,” is an emphasis on “increase” itself, in all the different forms it takes in All's Well.

As if to continue the complex exchange between Helena's plot of “increase” and the form of increase or putting off represented by Parolles or “words,” the scenes in act IV that effect the “blowing up” of her own virginity in the bedtrick are presented in direct parallel with the scenes in which the ambushed Parolles, the play's figure for the inflation of mere words, is correspondingly deflated or blown down. Act IV, for example, begins with the plot to expose Parolles as an inflated “bubble” or “wordy nothing” (III.vi.5) when he hopes to counterfeit the recovery of his “drum” by simply filling the time for long enough (IV.i.24-25). Act IV then proceeds to interleave these scenes with those of Helena's delivery to “fill the time” (III.vii.33) in the parallel counterfeiting of the bedtrick. In the scene at the French court in act II, Parolles' counsel to Bertram to “use a more spacious ceremony” and “take a more dilated farewell” associates him explicitly with the increase or amplification of discourse as well as with the prolonging of a “farewell”; and throughout the play, the figure of Parolles combines the courtier's verbal amplitude with the stage character of the “blown up” or inflated braggart. The scene of the ambush in act IV—and its deflation of Parolles, the play's “manifold linguist” (IV.i.19-20)—depends once again on a foregrounding of language or “paroles.”³² The “choughs' language: gabble enough and good enough” (IV.i.19-20), which the ambushers conspire to speak, is parodically both empty sound or nonsensical “nothings” and the prattle of the “chough” or chatterer Parolles shares with the Osric of Hamlet and other Shakespearean sendups of the loquacious “new man.”³³ When Parolles is ambushed by men who pretend not to understand his “tongue,” not only does a lack or “want” of language entail the threat of immediate death for the figure named “words” (“I shall lose my life for want of language,” IV.i.70); but after his plea for an extension of life (“O, let me live, / And all the secrets of our camp I'll show,” IV.i.83-84), he too is “granted space” (IV.i.88) for long enough to expose himself as the “counterfeit module” (IV.iii.96) or wordy “nothing” he is. His discourse becomes a parody of the “confession” (IV.iii.113) that such a delaying of a “doom” is traditionally provided for, an elaborate “running” stream of words in which he spills the “secrets” of others as the “answers” to the “demands” of his ambushers' “inter'gatories” (IV.iii.183).

The interspersing of the scenes that make up the “plot” to deflate the inflation or swelling of Parolles with Helena's fulfillment of the conditions of Bertram's letter by being “blown up” in a different sense brings to a climax the link and contest between Helena and Parolles which began with the early sparring on “increase.” The “space” granted to Parolles as a reprieve or putting off of death (IV.i,iii) is provided in scenes which coincide with Diana's introduction of an erotic delay and with Bertram's “Stand no more off” (IV.ii.34). On the same night that Parolles, pretending to be something he is not, exposes himself to a deflating recognition scene and has all his “knots” untied except on his “scarf” (IV.iii.323-24), Helena, avoiding recognition by pretending to be someone she is not, effects her own “plot” by “filling the time” (III.vii.33-44) in the bed of virginal “Dian” for long enough to convert Bertram's eternal “not” into a marriage “knot” and become pregnant with the demanded “issue.” The inflated Parolles is “crush'd with a plot” and finally “undone” (IV.iii.312-13) though, as long as the play continues, he continues to live as “simply the thing he is” (IV.iii.333-34). On the same night, Helena accomplishes the sexual “doing” that effects her “plot” and leads to the blowing up which will serve as a sign of her “increase.” If one of the major preoccupations of All's Well is the relation between words and deeds, then Parolles or empty words is deflated on the same night as the bodily increase of Helena provides her with a sign of marriage in deed as well as word.

We have already remarked the long-standing link between natural and interpretive “increase,” between the opening up of virginity and the opening of a closed or forbidding text. Bertram considers the forbidding text or “dreadful sentence” (III.ii.60) he sends to Helena to be a form of final act or last word, just as he hopes his “scoring”—the consummation of his quest to conquer a virginal “Dian”—will be the “end” of the “business” (IV.ii.93) as opposed to the “blowing up” of pregnancy or outcry which from the perspective of a man like Bertram is simply another kind of female plot, a way of converting what should be an end or “fine” into a beginning. It is in this doubled space of deferred consummation, however—Bertram's putting off of Helena and Diana's putting off of him—that Helena effects the plot that finally converts Bertram's closed “sentence” from a final word into the pretext for her own version of “increase and multiply,” both generational and interpretive. In the process she becomes both a lower-caste woman opening an aristocratic family up to exogamous increase and a successful hermeneut opening the closed or virgin text of a recalcitrant Bertram to more fertile meaning. In the terms of the early exchange between Parolles and Helena, Helena's fulfillment of the conditions of Bertram's “dreadful sentence” involves her opening up of its closure to increase, just as the bedtrick that accomplishes this project involves the “blowing up” of virginity in a sense very different from Bertram's reckoning.

Helena's “increase,” then, takes a hermeneutic as well as a bodily or generational form. On the same night as Parolles or “words” is granted “space” to expose himself as a “counterfeit module,” Bertram's forbidding text is opened to a fulfillment which simultaneously fulfills and alters it.³⁴ The space that includes both kinds of extension is the interval of “patience” (Epilogue, 5) which is the elapsed time of the play itself, by the end of which Helena, as the “Doctor She,” has opened a closed or concluding “sentence”; won Bertram a second time (V.iii.308), which the space of delay has served to render different from the first; and finally supplied in her own dilated body the expanded and bountiful “answer”³⁵ which fits all of this play's several riddles or questions, including the riddling of a “Dian” in its final scene:

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

(V.iii.300-304; my emphasis)

Helena's “increase”—both hermeneutic and generational—renders the play, however, a “problem” play because it involves a reversal of gender as well as a more threatening version of “increase and multiply.” In Dian's final riddling, Helena herself is the multiple “answer” in a play literally filled with such riddling questions or demands. The intervening space of “language” between question and answer is linked in this play with the space of delay between courtship and consummation in the very scene where Parolles advises Bertram to take a more “dilated farewell.” Here the king addresses the young French lords about to set off for war in Italy, in lines whose phallic “questant” and feminine “demand” are echoed in the “questions” and “answers” of the wordplay which follows in the scene between countess and clown on the theme of “putting off”:

KING.
                              see that you come
Not to woo honor, but to wed it, when
The bravest questant shrinks. …

.....

Those girls of Italy, take heed of them.
They say our French lack language to deny
If they demand.

(II.i.14-21)

“Language” here is cast as something which puts off demands or questions, or something interposed between a demand and its corresponding answer. The “lack” of language which here implies more immediate consummation or ending is echoed within the play both in the clown's comic variations on the forms of putting off and in the ambush scene, where a lack or “want of language” entails, for Parolles, the threat of immediate death before he gives way to his interrogators' “demands” (IV.iii). But apart from its evocation of war's homoerotic context, the phallic sense of “questant” and the reference to the “girls of Italy” gives to these lines an unsettling suggestion of a “questing” that reverses the orthodox gender positions. Diana, indeed, becomes this “girl of Italy,” as the “demand” for the ring (III.vii.22) and the phrasing of Bertram's first lying account of her suggests in saying that he had no “answer” for her amorous demand (V.iii.98). She is also the demander of riddles, in the series of paradoxes that baffle the court and endanger her case until she produces Helena back from supposed death as their manifold “answer.”

In the curiously phallic language of the king's address to his men—with its undertone of the sexual sense of “answer” and its evocation, once again, of tumescence and detumescence (“when / The bravest questant shrinks,” II.i.15-16)—the sense of gender reversal before these aggressive “girls of Italy” and their possibly unsatisfiable “demands” gives the passage a sense of “de-manned” as well as “demand.” If “Not to woo honour, but to wed it” recalls the aggressive male context of Theseus's “I woo'd thee with my sword” in A Midsummer Night's Dream, both the “shrinking” here and the reference to a female “demand” suggest something more troubling for the orthodox and conventional. Phyllis Gorfain has described the way in which All's Well, in making women the demanders of riddles as well as the stage-managers of the plot (in Helena's case making “demand” even of a king), reverses the normative power structures of both society and riddling. And it is this reversal—of women as “demanders” and hence, in a patriarchal culture, de-manners—that provides us with much of the “problem” of this “problem” play.³⁶

The tonal uneasiness which results from this reversal is part of what Susan Snyder, in a superb essay on All's Well, locates in the play's conversion, in Helena, of her namesake Helen of Troy—the quintessential passive object of desire—into an active pursuer of a man.³⁷ In this context, Helena's “passport” associates her not only with a licence to wander but with the assumed licentiousness of the wandering woman who follows a man.³⁸ Within the play, explicit discomfort with a woman's demanding (or commanding) a man sounds not only through Bertram's evident misogyny and surly resistance but through the scenes with the clown Lavatch, whose exclamation—“That man should be at woman's command, and yet no hurt done!” (I.iii.92-93)—evokes the more orthodox Pauline strictures on the proper order of female and male. The servant Lavatch, commanded by the countess, his gender subordinate but social superior, is the source both of the play's one explicit reference to Helen of Troy and of the misogynist moral that there is only “one good woman in ten” (I.iii.82). It may be—as with the presentation of Helena as a “most weak / And debile minister” (II.iii.30-31), yet one who demands—that the unease with female ordering in this play makes it, along with A Midsummer Night's Dream and Troilus and Cressida, an indirect glance at that Elizabeth who, both in her virginity and in her stagemanaging of male subordinates, frequently invited such resentment and such aggressive double entendre.³⁹ The sexual double meanings of Lavatch's claim to “understand” his mistress the countess “most fruitfully” (II.ii.69-70), from one who “stands under” her as her servant or social inferior, release the salacious (and ambivalent) senses of “serve” used several times within this play. This includes the Petrarchan language which, as Diana points out, is part of the rhetoric of men who “serve” in love until they achieve the consummation through which women “serve” them, and hence the actual power relations beneath the Petrarchan niceties (IV.ii.17-18).⁴⁰

It is within this context that we may turn, finally, to the threat of “increase” in the bedtrick itself. Helena becomes, through its substitution, not the imposed and rejected wife but the sought-for “Dian” of the male imagination, whose virginity attracts all the Petrarchan epithets attached to it in the exchange with Parolles in act 1.⁴¹ The scene in which the trick is conceived by its female co-conspirators goes out of its way to stress that the substitution is a “lawful” one:

HELENA.
You see it lawful then. It is no more
But that your daughter, ere she seems as won,
Desires this ring; appoints him an encounter;
In fine, delivers me to fill the time,
Herself most chastely absent.

(III.vii.30-34)

HELENA.
Why then to-night
Let us assay our plot, which if it speed
Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed,
And lawful meaning in a lawful act.

(III.vii.42-46)

The bedtrick presented as “lawful,” however, depends, like the counterfeiting of Parolles, upon duplicity, not just in the mundane sense of fooling Bertram (who appears not to notice any difference in the dark) but in the literal sense of manipulating the relationship between one and two. The riddle presented by Diana in the final scene (“He knows himself my bed he hath defiled”) depends literally upon such duplicity, on one figure's being displaced or separated out into two. It plays on the Helena who, in the bed of Diana, simultaneously is and becomes “no longer Dian” in two riddling senses, no longer virginal and not the “Dian” he intends, in lines where Helena's responding “When I was like this maid” (V.iii.309) means similarly “when I counterfeited her likeness” and “when I was a ‘maid,’ like her.”

Helena's devising of the bedtrick has opened her to the charge of “strumpet,” even with all the protestations of “lawful meaning in a lawful act.” If, in fulfillment of the early exchange with Parolles, the originally virginal Helena, now “no longer Dian,” provides an “answer” to Bertram's dooming “sentence” by opening her body—and her closed virginity—to “increase,” then this same opening and active pursuit leaves her (as it does Desdemona) vulnerable to questioning. In the exchange of wordplay on “bountiful” answers and answers of “most monstrous size” in the scene between the clown and the countess in act II, a “bountiful” answer is described as “like a barber's chair that fits all buttocks” (II.ii.17). But these lines also link it to the proverbial slang for “whore,” as when Stephen Gosson refers to Venus as “a notorious strumpet … that made her self as common as a Barbars chayre.”⁴² The answer of “most monstrous size” that can “fit” all questions (or the “barber's chair that fits all buttocks”) is like the “common place” of the Dark Lady Sonnets, open to all men.⁴³ In lying with Bertram, Helena, like her, also lies.

There is another sense, however, in which the bedtrick involves duplicity as well as an unexpected form of “increase.” In a play which goes out of its way to stress surrogates or seconds as well as second times, Helena herself is double rather than simple or single. This splitting of Helena is underlined by its contrast to the first words spoken about her, by the countess, in the play:

Where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities, there commendations go with pity: they are virtues and traitors too. In her they are the better for their simpleness.

(I.i.41-44; my emphasis)

The female figure whose medicine already associates her with “simples” (II.i.75) is associated here with a simpleness routinely glossed in its sense as singleness, as something without mixture or addition.⁴⁴ “Simple” is the term repeatedly attached to Helena in the play's early scenes (“I am a simple maid, and therein wealthiest / That I protest I simply am a maid,” II.iii.66-67). But even in the “simple touch” (II.i.75) of her link with simples or medicinal herbs in the curing of the king, this “simple maid” is ambiguously double—a virgin or “maid” who risks the “tax of impudence / A strumpet's boldness” (II.i.170-71) by the “demands” she makes (II.i.86, 191), in a curing scene filled with sexual innuendo and double entendre. Her patron is a “Dian” she wishes could be “both herself and Love” (I.iii.212-13), in a line that already names the tension in the play between the “titled goddess” of virginity and the “strumpet” Venus, a split between “virgin” and “whore” that Carol Thomas Neely shrewdly links to the polarizations of masculine fantasy in this play.⁴⁵

This splitting—or doubleness—comes with the substitution of the name “Helen” for the source's Giletta, and that name's explicit linking with Helen of Troy (I.iii.70-71). In the version of Stesichorus, well known and frequently exploited in early modern texts,⁴⁶ the wanton Trojan Helen was a surrogate or spurious substitute for the true and chaste one, whose chastity was by contrast preserved by being kept removed from the scene of strumpetry, herself (to borrow a phrase from the bedtrick) “most chastely absent.” (The reference to the lover who “sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt”—the single allusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream to the Helen of Troy with whom Shakespeare's only other Helena shares her name—suggests just such a glancing at the Stesichorus legend, where Egypt is the place of the chastely distanced double or lookalike.) Stesichorus's version, in other words, already splits a single female figure into virgin and whore: a figure called “Helen” remains chaste or “Dian” because of the female surrogate who takes her place, just as in All's Well, “Dian” is kept apart and virginal in a bedtrick in which a figure named “Helen” now takes her place.

Such splitting or doubling—as well as the substituting of a surrogate—also enables the riddling distinctions of the bedtrick that both link and separate “Dian” from the “Helen” who is “no longer Dian” in All's Well. Whereas before, each figure had threatened to embody the opposite of the associations of her name—Helena the married wife left still virgin by her husband's rejection, Diana the virgin associated with the goddess of virginity but inviting Bertram to her bed—Helena in the bedtrick substitutes for Diana in a way that involves duplicity and doubling but paradoxically preserves the chastity of both. Helena is both the “other” woman and herself, in an echo of the clown's paradoxical changes on the benefits of being seconded in husbandry.

The Helena of All's Well is disturbing to more “simple” or singular conceptions because she embodies the fear that women are always double or duplicitous. When this Shakespearean “Helen” goes to “Paris” to seek her own ends, Lafew calls her “Cressida,” linking her even further with the Troy legends of duplicitous women. Diana is not just duplicitous but triplicate: “Diana” and “Fontybell” appear as names for her in the text but so, mysteriously, does “Violenta.”⁴⁷ The bedtrick—a scandal to Victorian audiences and part of what, in the play, according to Dover Wilson, sets “our” teeth on edge in the exclusive male “our” of such criticism—embodies the anxiety that it is never possible to go to bed with only one woman, that the woman in question is always split. Approach a “Dian,” the ultimate male conquest, and you get, instead, a “Helen,” the infamous strumpet or, what is worse, female sexuality with its own different and more active agenda.

For Bertram, the bedtrick plotted by women acting not as rivals but as co-conspirators makes his night of consummation—to him apparently a simple “end” or “fine”—into what we might call a nightmare of “increase.” One woman, the desired one, turns out to be duplicitous, or two. It is not just that consummating his desire may be anything but an “end” to the business—for a man who seems very much not to want to “blow up” virgins in Parolles' sense of the “rational increase” of pregnancy—but that what he had projected as both a conquest and a telos turns out to be anything but “simple.” They trifle with him in a double sense: the object of consummation is “no longer Dian” in a sense very different from what he had planned, and the wife he thought he had abandoned is the exalted virgin he deflowers. If his intended “scoring,” to use Parolles' term, carries the meaning of an accounting or numbering, the number he tallies is increased in a way beyond his simpler reckoning.

The play which places so much stress on “end” or “fine” is finally, at its own end, still open to increase. The king's “Let us from point to point this story know” is a version of the invitation to elaborate all the “ramifications” or branches of a story that in so many Shakespearean endings forecasts a continuation beyond a more limited dramatic close. And his famous “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet” (V.iii.333-34) opens up closure itself to contingency, to an “increase” that may not be of a particularly closural kind.⁴⁸ Not only is there an offstage extension promised after its “end” or “fine”—a narrative that in the source is told, instead, before Giletta is accepted by her husband⁴⁹—but Helena is still only pregnant at the end, unlike Giletta, who has already produced the demanded “issue” in the form of twin sons. We are not surprised that a play that has placed such stock in deferral should continue to do so in its own final lines, shifting the relative certainties of its source to a projection that keeps these ends still at a distance. But the play entitled All's Well That Ends Well ends with an epilogue that also stresses its dependence on audience approval (“It is ended, if you will approve it”), in a way that begs the question of whether a plot that so clearly reverses the orthodox roles of gender and class can so simply be “approved.” The teleological title summons assumptions of the conventional comic end (already altered in Shakespeare, however, as early as Love's Labor's Lost). But All's Well That Ends Well continues to be a “problem” comedy, despite attempts to dispel that designation for it.

There is another way, for example, that the problem of gender in particular is related to the plotting of “increase and multiply.” The interpretive activity seen as opening up or inducing an opening in an otherwise closed or forbidding text is, as we have seen, an activity which is itself already explicitly gendered by its link with the opening of a closed female figure to “increase.” In the masculinist logic of Parolles' changes on the “blowing up” of virgins, Helena is cast as the closed or narrow “o” (to use Helkiah Crooke's term) to be dilated or opened up. But as the active Venus whose virginal Adonis is reluctantly won, as the figure who in the bedtrick accomplishes (in all senses) a “blowing up,” and as the hermeneut who induces an opening in Bertram's closed “sentence” which opens it to “increase,” she not only reverses the orthodox positions of class and gender but also occupies too many positions at once. The structures of comedy that are summoned in act V to provide closure for a scene that refuses, whatever the title, to be satisfyingly closed are those wed to the orthodoxies these more conventional roles provide. But the fact that in this story of “increase” Helena has to play, in a more desperate sense than Bottom, all the roles at once leaves unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, the story's relation to the more traditional distribution of gendered parts.

The plot is, finally, the story not only of the spacing that avoids a potential incest or threatening “nearness,” but of the opening of an aristocratic family to a more expansive exogamy, an expansion that links it with the famous images of grafting from The Winter's Tale. Despite his best efforts to prevent it, Bertram's noble family expands just enough to graft onto itself a slip of lesser stock, an image used several times in this play for the “breeding” that enables such “increase” (in, for example, the Countess's “'Tis often seen / Adoption strives with nature, and choice breeds / A native slip to us from foreign seeds,” I.iii.144-46). The spurned lower-caste girl wins a husband of her choice, and the family incorporates a household servant whose folktale fulfillment of impossible tasks finally pays the price of entrance. But it is still only a constrained class and gender victory; and she remains his “servant” (I.iii.159) in at least one of the play's multiple senses of that term. If “women are words, men deeds”—an ubiquitous early modern proverb still echoed on the Great Seal of the State of Maryland—and if Parolles is therefore effeminated through his association with “words,” Helena is not only the accomplisher of deeds but the figure who has to shrink back into a more passive female role in time for a conventional comic close. If the bedtrick is the ultimate sign of her active achievement, it is also the place where she takes the place of the passive object of desire, becoming the traditional “vessel” of bearing in a tradition where the pregnant female body was the seal and sign of that passivity. Bertram's family expands just enough to take in its “foreign seeds,” and Helena's “increase” is accepted as Bertram's issue rather than the “spurious” one it might have been.⁵⁰ But Helena's dilation, like that of the pregnant votaress of A Midsummer Night's Dream, is still uneasily conscripted to a patriarchal structure, albeit a more enfeebled one. What the women of this play manage to effect is, by contrast to the male bonding of Parolles and Bertram, consistently impressive. But in this play this “project”—in the form, perhaps, of a “sentence” still to be fulfilled—remains, uneasily, the project of an order within whose constrictions there may be still only a severely limited “space” to plot.

Notes

1. All's Well That Ends Well, II.i.50-57. The text used in this and all references is The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, 1575 edition, novel 38, in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).

3. See Thomas M. Greene, “Pitiful Thrivers: Failed Husbandry in the Sonnets,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 230-44.

4. See G. K. Hunter, ed., All's Well That Ends Well, Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1959), xxix. The original Cambridge editors of the play, in numbering it among Shakespeare's “worst” plays, commend Boccaccio's more “simple” narrative line and praise Painter's as “straighter and more dignified than the plot of All's Well; straighter, because it keeps to its theme, without pushing in the business of Parolles, Lafeu, and the clowning of the Clown; more dignified in that it conducts Helena … to her determined purpose, yet consistently with the behaviour of a great lady.” Their complaints against Shakespeare's less-dignified Helena echo Victorian horror at a plot which stresses a woman's active (and explicitly sexual) pursuit of a man rather than her role as passive object or long-suffering wife. The New Cambridge edition, edited by Russell Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), provides in its introduction a useful survey of views of the play.

5. For the use of the term “dilation” for the sexual opening of a woman see, among others, The Works of Aristotle, the Famous Philosopher, in the reprint edition by Arno Press (New York, 1974), 10, 81. Audrey Eccles' Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, Ohio, 1982) also cites passages on the “opening” of the cervix “in Copulation … and in childbirth.” See also “answerable” in Helkiah Crooke, A Description of the Body of Man (1616), 234, on the cervix: “It receyveth the yard fitly like a sheath, wherefore the amplitude is answerable to that it must contain. … It becommeth in the time of coition longer or shorter, wider or narrower as the yard is; and according to the womans appetite … more open or more contracted.” Crooke also describes the “orifice” of the womb as “like the letter, o, small and wondrous narrow” (233). On the iteration of “increase and multiply” in discussions of propagation in early modern texts, see Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” Representations 14 (Spring 1986), esp. 38, and the early sections of his Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990). Laqueur cites E. Roesslin's The Birth of Mankinde (1545) in this respect, though not the way that text, subtitled The Womans Book, subverts the orthodoxies of the “perfection” of the more active male his essay principally pursues.

6. See, for example, the praise of Francis Marker in The Booke of Honour (1625) for “those who have dilated and made excellent their bloods, by the great happiness of their fortunate Issues” (II.ii.47) or Herbert of Cherbury's argument in “Ode upon a Question Mov'd” (“So when one wing can make no way / Two joyned can themselves dilate, / So can two persons propagate, / When singly either would decay”).

7. See John Smith, Mysterie of Rhetorique Unveil'd (1657), in its definition of Paradiastole, a relatively late text which here sums up a long tradition. See also John Chamberlin, Increase and Multiply (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1976) on the ars praedicandi tradition of the preacher-hermeneut's “opening” of a brief or difficult and forbidding text of Scripture into the extended verbal forms of commentary and sermon.

8. On these various traditions, see my earlier “Dilation and Delay: Renaissance Matrices,” in Poetics Today 5, 3 (1984): 519-29, and Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), esp. chap. 2. The present essay is from the All's Well chapter of a longer book, published in germ as part of “Dilation and Delay.”

9. On endings and intermediate endings in this play see, among other treatments, Ian Donaldson, “All's Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare's Play of Endings,” Essays in Criticism 27 (1977): 34ff.; Gerard J. Gross, “The Conclusion to All's Well That Ends Well,” Studies in English Literature 23 (1983): 257-76; Thomas Cartelli, “Shakespeare's ‘Rough Magic’: Ending as Artifice in All's Well That Ends Well,” Centennial Review 27 (1983): 117-34. For a different reading of second times and second chances, see David M. Bergeron, “The Structure of Healing in All's Well That Ends Well,” South Atlantic Bulletin 37 (1972): 25-34.

10. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” in his Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988). Though the notion of the “warming” of verbal friction is a very fruitful one for this play, with its repeated “cold,” the linkages this essay makes with broader generalizations about gender in the period are ones I would resist. See my “Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain,” forthcoming.

11. For the link elsewhere in Shakespeare between “increase” of wealth, especially through usury, and generational “increase,” see Marc Shell's reading of ewes and usury in the chapter on The Merchant of Venice in The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978); and Thomas M. Greene's essay on the sonnets (n. 3) which begin “From fairest creatures we desire increase” (I.i). See also the “womb's increase” in Coriolanus, I.i.183, and “The children are not in the fault, whereupon the world increases” (2 Henry 4, II.ii.29). “Increase” is glossed in John Barrett's Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionarie (London, 1573) with “An inlarger, multiplier, or increaser. Propagator, toris.” Thomas Wilson's A Discourse upon Usury (London, 1572) gives as its definition of usury (fol. 85): “As for example, I doe lende to receive more then I layde out … and my chiefe purpose in laying out my moneye is, by my principal to encrease my stocke, and hope by my lending, to receive an overplus.” Wilson, author as well of The Arte of Rhetorique and The Rule of Reason, strongly opposes usury in this text (in contrast to lending to those in need without interest, according to the law of charity). Its prologue contrasts the “plenty” of the merchants with the true “plenty” of what he calls “spiritual usury.”

12. G. K. Hunter, in the Arden edition (p. 13n.), suggests that here Helena, like Desdemona in Othello, II.i (a scene which Rymer complained of as mere wordy filler or verbal dilation for its own sake), is simply filling the time in this exchange with Parolles. If this is so, there is even more reason to associate Helena and “Parolles” with the idea of other kinds of “increase” in the play, including the extension of the play itself as a thing of words.

13. Susan Snyder provides a stimulating reading of this exchange as one of the points in the play where Helen shifts from passive to active. See her “All's Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare's Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object,” in English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 66-77. “Parole” in the sense of being “on parole” comes ultimately from the expression “parole of honour” (parole d'honneur), whose first English usage is recorded in the OED as 1616. Another entry, for 1658, records this borrowing from the French as a “new” usage in English; but it is impossible to have a sense from the OED of familiarity with this meaning in the early 1600s, to which the play is now dated. John Minsheu, Ductor in Linguas or a Guide into the Tongues (London, 1617) gives the French “parole” as “used … for a plee in Court” and cites as well its sense of “a lease by word of mouth.”

14. G. K. Hunter's Arden edition note here (21) comments that “the steward's preamble is very wordy and it is possible to believe that he is playing for time till the Countess notices the clown's presence.”

15. See, for example, II.iv.35-37; V.iii.102.

16. In this respect, the creation of a space within incestuous conflation in All's Well anticipates Pericles, where the original incestuous pairing of father and daughter is spaced out through the incremental repetitions of a plot that finally displaces these relations into father, mother, daughter and son-in-law. See also The Winter's Tale, where Mamillius, the son who is a copy or exact “likeness” of his father, dies and is in a sense replaced by Florizel, a son-in-law. The spacing described by Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), is thus anticipated by these Shakespearean plots and workings out of the threat of incest through narrative extension. On the peculiarly “processional” form of Pericles produced by this spacing, see Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 27. On its repetitions and recursions, see Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare's Other Language (New York: Methuen, 1987), 33-61. All's Well contains a father who is described as a “copy” for his son, as well as featuring a sense of potentially incestuous proximity between Bertram and the mother Shakespeare adds to the narrative source.

17. Helena is the “hind that would be mated by the lion” (I.i.91) and the figure called “queen” (I.i.106) by Parolles.

18. On the link between incest and riddling, see Phyllis Gorfain, “Riddles and Reconciliation: Formal Unity in All's Well That Ends Well,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 13 (1976): 263-81.

19. “Cold” is one of several linking words in this echo chamber of a play. It is also used for Diana's virginity (“I spoke with her but once / And found her wondrous cold,” III.vi.112-13; and again “you are cold and stern, / And now you should be as your mother was / When your sweet self was got,” IV.ii.8-10). Just before the exchange with Parolles on increase, Helena has recourse to this image in lines which ambiguously prefer this “notorious liar” to “virtue's steely bones” which look “bleak i' th'cold wind.” Helena comments that “full oft we see / Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly” (I.i.103-5).

20. See The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (London, 1634), bk. 13, chap. 21, p. 484: “It tooke its denomination from the similitude of a reeden [Fistula] that is, a pipe, like whose hollownes it is”; it sometimes “drops with continuall moisture”—some have “run for many yeares”; bk. 13, chap. 22, p. 485: it can “penetrate even to the bowells, which come into the parts orespread with large vessells or Nerves which, happen to effeminate and tender persons.”

21. Here the locus classicus might again be the discourse of Genius in the Roman de la Rose.

22. The full text is from Thomas Blount, The Academie of Eloquence (London, 1654), 76: “Loquacity is the Fistula of the minde, ever running, and almost incurable. A talkative fellow is the unbrac't drum, which beats a wise man out of his wits.” Both images apply to Parolles, the unstoppable flowing “tongue” or “manifold linguist” who is also called “Tom Drum” in V.iii.321. For the association with loquacity, see also the OED citation of Bulwer, Chiron (1644), 5: “The mouth is but a running sore and hollow fistula of the minde.”

23. See Cymbeline, V.v.382; and All's Well, V.iii.325.

24. To relate Parolles to the increase of the play—as well as to the iterations within it of the theme of “increase”—suggests a different perspective on Shakespeare's invention of Parolles and his subplot in this play, beyond the moral ones usually adduced in which he and Helena struggle, in morality-play fashion, for the soul of Bertram, though it does not deny that obvious motif.

25. According to Florio's A Worlde of Wordes (1598), “spuriare” means “to adulterate, to sophisticate, to counterfeit.” The fact that “Captain Spurio” is the name introduced in the same scene as the one where Parolles counsels Bertram in the courtly art of the “more dilated farewell” also subtly forges a link between the spacious (“use a more spacious ceremony”) and the spurious, suggesting that a “spacious” dilation may also be a “spurious” one.

26. “He that cannot make a leg, put off's cap, kiss his hand, and say nothing, has neither leg, hands, lip, nor cap; and indeed such a fellow, to say precisely, were not for the court” (II.ii.9-13).

27. At the point where the king is cured, the name of “Paracelsus” is mentioned, perhaps not just because he was a rival of the “Galen” with whom he is explicitly paired, but because he was author of a treatise (De vita longa) on extending life, and of treatises on alchemy as a miraculous form of “multiplying.” His real name was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.

28. Contemporary definitions of “passport” include Barrett's in Alvearie (“safe conduct to passe”) and Minsheu's in Ductor in linguas: “Passeport, is compounded of two French words (Passer, i. transire, & port, i. portus). It signifieth with us a Licence made by any that hath authoritie, for the safe passage of any man from one place to another.”

29. See Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 70.

30. See, in particular, Susan Snyder on this aspect of the play.

31. Barrett's Alvearie gives for “score” a “tallie of wood, whereon a number of things delivered, is marked.” The Latin equivalent he cites is tessera.

32. There may be an echo, in the figure of Parolles generally but especially here in the scene of multiple languages, of the figure of Panurge (another “manifold linguist”) in Rabelais. Panurge is also related to the amplification of the texts in which he appears.

33. On the predominance of wordiness as a feature of the 16th-century movement away from an older military society to a society of humanists and courtiers (the new men featured in Shakespeare from the Suffolk/Talbot contrast in the early histories to the extreme form of Osric), see Joan Kelly's now classic essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” reprinted in her Women, History & Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 44ff.

34. In her fine chapter on All's Well, Neely notes (88) that Helena's pregnancy actually alters the letter of the “sentence” of Bertram's demand. See also Gorfain, 267.

35. An “answer” in Renaissance English usage also implies something which accords or agrees with, fits, or resembles the original question. See Barret's Alvearie (“to Answere: to accorde and agree wyth some thing: to be like, or to resemble”) and Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), 391: “The aim of the play is discovering the most comprehensive truth, not proving the validity of one side or the other. This is why the ‘answer’ usually embraces both.” See also William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1937), 90, 102.

36. For one excellent summary of the “problem play” or “problem comedy” designation, see Neely, 58-62. For women as demanders of riddles in this play, see Gorfain, 40, 45.

37. Snyder, above. The aggressive female wooer is already a disturbing and tonally ambivalent Ovidian motif, epitomized by the sexually aggressive Salmacis incorporated into the Venus of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, where the conventional gender roles of pursuer and pursued (subject and object) are similarly reversed. On the aggressive female wooer in general, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1977), 19; on Salmacis, see Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 57-58.

38. Randle Cotgrave's definition in A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611) forges a link between “passport” as a licence for travel and a “light” woman: “Elle a son passe-port. She hath somewhat about her that makes her way wheresoever she goes; (Said of a light, and wandering housewife).”

39. On Queen Elizabeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, see Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 2 (1983): 61-94. See also Eric Mallin's “Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida,” Representations, 29 (1990): 145-79.

40. On this Petrarchan dynamic, see Nancy Vickers' now classic “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79. In the Petrarchan dialectic of “service” and mastery, the “Dian” who stands as the object of praise is also the virgin to be mastered; and the language of idealized service dissimulates its own will to control. On the “Petrarchan” politics of the Elizabethan age, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Univ, of Chicago Press, 1980), 165ff; and Montrose's application of Vickers' model to A Midsummer Night's Dream (n. 39 above).

41. The folio text for this scene may not, in this respect, need editorial amendment when it places a colon after “not my virginity yet” and then proceeds to list the Petrarchan commonplaces associated with it. In the Oxford single-volume Shakespeare, Gary Taylor adds a reference to the court. See Susan Snyder, 68.

42. See Stephen Gosson, An Apologie of the Schoole of Abuse (1579), printed along with The Schoole of Abuse (1597) (London, 1868), 661, and its description of Venus as “a notorious strumpet … that made her self as common as a Barbars chayre.” This semantic complex in All's Well is shared by Othello's crossing of “barbarian” with the “maid of Barbery” as the strumpet of the Moor. Barbiera was slang for “whore.” See Frankie Rubenstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984), xii, 21. See also Ben Jonson's Alchemist and Epicoene, especially Morose's “That cursed barber! I have married his cittern that is common to all men.”

43. If space permitted, this would also be the place to develop the relation between the semantic complexes of “dilation” and “increase” in All's Well and the Shakespearean uses—here and in other plays—of the sexual double entendres of “stretching.” All's Well makes repeated use of the figure of stretching, both in its description of the skill of the physician Gerard de Narbon which “had it stretch'd so far, would have made nature immortal” (I.i.19-20) and in the king's reference to the “gift” that “doth stretch itself as 'tis received” (II.ii.4). But the latter image—stretching in order to receive—appears elsewhere in Shakespeare in an explicitly sexual sense: as the opening up or stretching of female sexuality to “fit” whatever it receives. It appears in the image of the chevril glove (“Here's a wit of cheveril, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad!—I stretch it out for that word ‘broad’,” II.iv.87) in Romeo and Juliet and in the Old Lady's reference, in Henry VIII, to the ambivalent “capacity” of Ann Bullen (“The capacity / Of your soft chevril conscience would receive, If you might please to stretch it,” II.iii.33). The image of the “chevril glove” is linked to female wantonness in the scene in Twelfth Night where Feste invokes the “chev'ril glove” in lines that refer to making his sister “wanton.” But it is also explicitly summoned for Diana's duplicitous “angling” (part of the Shakespearean complex of ingle/ningle/Othello's “corner in the thing I love”) in the final scene of All's Well when, in her riddling double entendres, she begins to look perilously close to the prostitute or “common customer” (V.iii.276) Bertram seeks to portray her as (“This woman's an easy glove, my lord, she goes off and on at pleasure,” V.iii.267-68). The link between dilation or stretching as sexual opening—in the case of virginity, a painful stretching—and other kinds of “service” is suggested as well in the double entendres of Philostrate's description of the mechanicals' play as “nothing, nothing in the world; / Unless you can find sport in their intents, / Extremely stretch'd, and conn'd with cruel pain, / To do you service” (A Midsummer Night's Dream V.i.78-81), where though the surface meaning of “extremely stretch'd” is something like “strained to the uttermost” (Riverside), there is a sense of the sexualized language of class difference as the metaphor of sexual “service” extending to all “servants.” See also Rubenstein's Dictionary, under “con,” “stretch,” “nothing.” The painful opening/dilating/stretching of a virgin is described in Helkiah Crooke's Description: “When the yarde entreth into the necke of the wombe, then the fleshy membranes … are torn even to their rootes, and the Caruncles are so fretted and streatched, that a man would beleeve they were never ioyned” (236). It is rare, he comments, that “the Membranes are dilated with little or no paine. … For all virgins although they be never so mellow, yet have their first coition painfull” (236). The fact that the “answer” that must be “of most monstrous size” could refer to male tumescence as easily as to female “stretching” would lead us into exploration of what Derrida calls “double invagination” in Shakespeare, where the dilation or opening of a woman, as a figure for the dilation of discourse, is joined by the tradition of narrative prologance (see, for example, Mercutio's double entendres on cutting his “tale short” in Romeo and Juliet). The first reference in All's Well to “stretching” is to the physician whose skill “had it stretch'd so far, would have made nature immortal, and death … have play for lack of work” (I.i.19-21), in a context which relates such stretching to the extension of life essential if the play itself is not to end ere it begins. For the Shakespearean sonnets that come closest to suggesting this complex, see sonnets 135 (“thou, whose will is large and spacious”) and 137 (“the wide world's common place”). See with them Crooke's Description (234) on the relation between the “amplitude” of the dilation of the cervix and a woman's sexual appetite (n. 5 above).

44. See the gloss to All's Well I.i.30-34, in the New Cambridge edition, 42.

45. See Neely, 73, 85-86. She also points out Helena's links with the harlot/saint Mary Magdalene. The wife Bertram pledges to marry, when Helena is assumed to be dead, is named Maudlin, the familiar form of Magdalene. As Neely comments (OED 2): “It is furthermore ironically appropriate that Bertram pledges to marry a woman named Maudlin, the vernacular form of Magdalene and, in the early seventeenth century, a noun meaning a penitent. Mary Magdalene's traditional roles as reformed harlot and weeping penitent figure forth Bertram's own penitence and reform; they coincide with those of the promiscuous Diana and the saintly Helena that Bertram images and foreshadow the surprises still to come in the play” (85). Neely (80) sees this transformation of Helena, the rejected wife, into the desired “Dian” as part of Bertram's separation of himself, in the play's second part, from the authority of his mother and the surrogate-paternal authority of the king. This sense of the need to gain distance or “space” is foregrounded both in the threat of incest added to the source and in the dominance of the older generation in the plot. For superb psychoanalytic readings of both, see the different emphases of Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), chap. 2; Janet Adelmen, “Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman N. Holland et al. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 151-74; and Ruth Nevo, “Motive and Meaning in All's Well That Ends Well,” in John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton, eds., ‘Fanned and Winnowed Opinions’: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1987), 26-51.

46. See, e.g., the use of Stesichorus's version by Spenser for the splitting of true and false Florimel, and the split between Una (one) and the seemingly chaste but licentious and duplicitous Duessa, outlined by James Nohrnberg in The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), 115. For Stesichorus's story of the two Helens, see Plato's versions in the Phaedrus and the Republic.

47. See the note in The Explicator 41 (1982): 6, 9, entitled “Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, lines 2017-18,” though its reading of the play is utterly divergent from my own.

48. On its problematic ending, see among others James Calderwood, “Styles of Knowing in All's Well That Ends Well,” MLN [Modern Language Notes] 25 (1964): 292-94; Gross, 257-76; Neely, 87-92; Gorfain, 264, 271ff., 275-76; and Anne Barton's Riverside introduction, with n. 9 above.

49. See Gross, 262.

50. According to Florio's A Worlde of Wordes (1598), “Spurio” means “a whores sonne whose father is not known, a bastard, one base borne. Used also for a counterfeit,” a definition that could fit the “spurious” son who might have been the (feared) “increase” born of Bertram's lying with Dian (if she, not Helena, had been impregnated in that bed). Spacing, “delivery,” or distancing of the kind we have traced links All's Well (as well as Pericles and, in different ways, The Winter's Tale) to the psychological imperative of differentiation and displacement stressed in the rich psychoanalytic readings the play has sustained (see n. 45 above). And its transformation of incestuous or endogamous “nearness” into exogamous “increase” takes this sense of spacing as extension into the dynastic and political. At the same time, its “increase” becomes, from the very opening, part of the play's own “metadramatic” production of itself. This perception becomes less anachronistically “modern” when we reflect that one of the charges against Shakespeare as dramatist—a charge he turned to parodic advantage more than once—was that he generated the stuff of his plays in part from inflated or bombastic filler, precisely the forms of “putting off” associated with Parolles here. (Othello starts with reference to “bombast circumstance” and then contains in II.i a scene that has been accused by more than just its detractor, Rymer, of being a wordy filler. In The Comedy of Errors, Egeon's tedious opening narrative becomes part of a sotto voce comment on the different generic tendencies of “show” and “tell,” the notorious dilations of narrative romance—from which it comes—and the stricter economies of the new classical comedy). If, then, Parolles in his addiction to “words” is in part a satiric addition of the “new man” and his effeminating wordiness to the Boccaccio source, it is a portrait and addition associated with the “increase” of the play itself. On the effeminating sense of wordiness in metadramatic relation to Shakespeare (for example, in Hamlet), see my Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), esp. 20-24; and my “On the Tongue: Cross-Gendering, Effeminacy, and the Art of Words,” Style 23, 3 (1989): 453.