[In the following essay, Halio examines the sources, dramatic structure, and characters of All's Well That Ends Well, and contends that although fascinating and complex, the play is a failure.]

Certainly W. W. Lawrence's complaint about the criticism of Shakespeare's problem comedies—or the lack of it¹—has steadily been remedied. Not only do we have Lawrence's own extensive research, but the plays have elsewhere won treatment, notably in E. M. W. Tillyard's book² and many times in articles and whole chapters of works on Shakespeare. This new interest parallels a rather considerable revision in our critical approach to Shakespeare and to literature in general, and one might speculate with good cause on how much this new approach is, in fact, responsible for the attention the problem comedies have recently attracted. But such speculation is not here intended. Despite the new interest, some questions of interpretation remain still unanswered, or inadequately answered. This paper will deal with the questions concerning the least of the group, All's Well That Ends Well. No apology for choosing this play is necessary, for we must agree with Tillyard that though All's Well is a failure, it is a most “interesting” and “complicated” failure, if unfortunately not a “heroic” one.³

The kinds of questions which still demand attention in All's Well fall roughly into four groups: the relationship of the relevant source material (including questions of rhetoric, atmosphere, and dramatic emphasis); the function of the minor characters; the role of Bertram; and the underlying unity (if any) between the two main divisions of the dramatic structure. These questions, let it be remarked at once, should not be dealt with separately, for herein is the root of much mischief; they must be treated as complementary and mingled parts of the basic critical problem. For example, most critics and scholars have noted Shakespeare's addition of the Countess and Lafew, and several of them have distinguished a little between the King in Painter's translation of Boccaccio and the one in All's Well.⁴ But the reason usually mentioned to explain these additions or changes seems strangely literal-minded: they are introduced simply to build up audience sympathy for Helena.⁵ Consistently overlooked is Shakespeare's effort to give these characters some existence of their own, if not individually, then at least as a special group important for the play's thematic development. They are all old and all uncommonly given to dwelling upon their age, their decline, and (pre-eminently in the example of the King), their approaching death. This emphasis cannot be pointless. It does not derive fundamentally from Boccaccio (who may have suggested it), and, except to accentuate her youth, it has little to do with our feelings about Helena. Again, critics have often noted the two-part structure of this play; but they have either considered one part without the other⁶ or, when they tried to establish some interrelationship between the parts, have in most cases stuck with Lawrence and his discussion of the Clever Wench legends.⁷ But a more basic thematic link between these parts is suggested which so far has gone largely unnoticed and which makes the play, as a dramatic poem, much more intelligible. If it does not save All's Well, it at least helps us better to account for the play's failure.

To understand the play more completely, then, we must analyze in detail its structure, themes, and language, keeping in view the source-relationships of these aspects as well. The opening lines at once introduce the theme of disease, death, and decay—the recent death of the old Count of Rossillion, the King's fistula, the passing of Helena's father six months ‘previously, the young lords’ need for “breathing and exploit”. This theme is stressed throughout the first two acts, which constitute the first part of the play and deal mainly with the healing of the King. Shakespeare may have found a suggestion for this emphasis at the beginning of Boccaccio's tale of Giletta of Narbona in Painter's Palace of Pleasure:

In Fraunce there was a gentleman called Isnardo, the counte of Rossillione, who because he was sickely and diseased, kept always in his house a phisition, named maister Gerardo of Narbona.

(Novel 38)

Shakespeare begins shortly after the death of “Isnardo” and, unlike his source, gives no explicit reason for the fact that Helena grew up with Bertram. But the idea of constant illness (hardly developed by Boccaccio except for the King's fistula) may have stirred his imagination and may in part explain the creation of the old Countess and Lafew. To accent the idea of decay, Shakespeare places the death of Helena's father earlier than Boccaccio does; the opening dialogue thus becomes a veritable dirge, lamenting not only the death of the old Count and the King's disease, but Gerardo's death, too (I.i.19-26). The keynote is struck in the first line; there is something both morbid and unnatural in the Countess' speech: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.”

Only Helena seems unaffected by the idea of death: her preoccupation with her passion for Bertram—Lafew has to remind her to think on her father (I.i.88)—appears at first merely a malady of a different sort, but emerges at the end of the long scene as the only healthy thing in it. The contrast is significant: in this way Shakespeare prepares us for Helena's role as the “providence of the play”, to use Dowden's term,⁸ or as the dominant restorative force amidst all the sickness. Restorative, but also regenerative. For closely associated with the theme of individual death and disease is another theme, the passing of generations, introduced and more fully developed by the King in the second scene, as we shall see presently. Hence another reason for creating the Countess and Lafew and for more carefully portraying the King: the universe of All's Well contrasts two worlds—the old order represented by the aged nobility and centered in France; the new order represented by the aspiring young bourgeois (Helena and Parolles) and centered mainly in Florence. Bertram is the link between the two worlds: it is through him that regeneration will occur when he synthesizes the best of both.⁹ But before he can effect this synthesis, he must be able to perceive the “best” and embrace it, and unfortunately Bertram is himself diseased. His ailment is more serious than that of the other young nobles who, stifled in France, need only the Tuscan wars for physic (I.ii.15-17; III.i.17-19). Bertram's sickness (in a larger, metaphorical sense) colors his judgment and affects his actions, and thus requires a more searching remedy.

According to this pattern, then, Bertram is to be the central character of the play; but he does not assume this importance dramatically until after his marriage to Helena, when the action shifts to Florence.¹⁰ Shakespeare first defines the true instrument of regeneration and the difficulties it must encounter and overcome. He does this directly by opposing Helena and Parolles (another new character): their wit combat on virginity (I.i.121-179) prefigures the more serious struggle in which they will soon engage, and Helena's victory prefigures, too, her ultimate success. The dialogue occurs in the middle of the first scene where—despite a light-hearted tone—their respective views on procreation are made clear.¹¹ The quibbling sequence near the end of this dialogue takes on added significance when viewed with regard to the conflict between the regenerative and degenerative forces in the play: Helena claims Parolles must have been born under a retrograde Mars—he goes “so much backward” when he fights (I.i.204-214). But not only in the wars is Parolles “retrograde”; in his emphasis on clothes, manners, and mere words he exemplifies the degenerate influence at work among the younger members of French society.¹² When Bertram first appears at Court, the King almost immediately launches upon an extended eulogy of the older generation, represented by Bertram's father, to the discredit of the younger set. He speaks of the dead Count before Bertram, Lafew, and Parolles (who is silent throughout):

                                                                                          It much repairs me
To talk of your good father. In his youth
He had the wit which I can well observe
To-day in our young lords; but they may jest
Till their own scorn return to them unnoted
Ere they can hide their levity in honour
So like a courtier. Contempt nor bitterness
Were in his pride or sharpness. If they were,
His equal had awak'd them; and his honour,
Clock to itself, knew the true minute when
Exception bid him speak, and at this time
His tongue obey'd his hand. Who were below him
He us'd as creatures of another place;
And bow'd his eminent top to their low ranks,
Making them proud of his humility,
In their poor praise he humbled. Such a man
Might be a copy to these younger times,
Which followed well, would demonstrate them now
But goers backward.

(I.ii.30-48)

The clock metaphor, really a conceit, boldly if obliquely insists upon the purport of the entire passage: a noble era is passing, yielding to a less noble, more “reactionary” time (note goers backward), a time which the King describes more fully in his speech on virtue in Act II (II.iii.124-151). The inference is clear: Parolles, for all his fashionable clothes and language, represents those “whose judgments are Mere fathers of their garments” (I.ii.61-62). To this extent only is he capable of regeneration. Yet it is he whom Bertram retains as his guide throughout most of the play.¹³

If Parolles is “kept under” by the stars that govern him (I.i.209), Helena is determined not to be. After earlier but momentary resignation to her position of shining in Bertram's “collateral” light but not in his sphere (I.i.96), she recognizes the true relationship of human will and heavenly restraint:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky
Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

(I.i.231-234)

Here begins what has sometimes been called the “morality” pattern in All's Well: the struggle between Helena and Parolles for Bertram's favor.¹⁴ Parolles is patently an ass, detected by all save Bertram; but Helena must prove herself to her idol, to the other characters in the play, and to us. Hence she devises her plan to heal the King. Upon reaching Paris, she overcomes the King's doubts and is recognized as a minister of Providence even before she succeeds in curing him (II.i.178 f.). To be sure, Helena herself understands her ministry as something more than human (I.iii.248-249; II.i.139ff.), and at least one critic has explained the peculiar incantatory verse in this scene as therefore appropriate.¹⁵ But we need not repeat Tillyard's version of the theme of Bertram, natural man, redeemed by Helena, the agent of grace (pp. 118-122). We may simply note that at this point Helena proves her ability to heal in a literal sense, and the cure seems miraculous to all. Even Bertram and Parolles admit the wonder of it when Lafew shrewdly comments on the nature of event (II.iii.1-9).

By healing the King, Helena merits her bounty, as stipulated in the terms of the venture she chose to undertake: she may select her husband from among the King's wards. This precipitates the first major crisis in the play—a crisis no less severe for critics trying to understand Shakespeare than it is for Bertram. Many have found Helena's conduct blamable,¹⁶ and still more have condemned either (or both) Bertram and the King.¹⁷ Several have tried valiantly, if unconvincingly, to defend Bertram, notably A. H. Carter in a recent article.¹⁸ But no one, it seems, has adequately followed Dowden's hint to place the action subsequent to the healing of the King in its proper relationship to the first action in the play:

A motto for the play may be found in the words uttered with pious astonishment by the clown, when his mistress bids him to begone, “That man should be at woman's command, and yet no harm done”. Helena is the providence of the play; and there is “no hurt done,” but rather healing—healing of the body of the French king, healing of the spirit of the man she loves.¹⁹

Bertram's refusal to accept Helena as his wife and his later renegade conduct must be understood in the context of what has preceded; and Helena's influence upon him must be seen as following closely the pre-set pattern of her healing of the King—the initial refusal to believe in and accept her, the eventual success after what seems a “miracle”.

This early, repeated reference to the miraculous nature of the King's cure may also explain the “blackening” of Bertram's character, a problem pondered by all who have compared Bertram with Boccaccio's Beltramo.²⁰ Bertram is blind to the real virtues of Helena—and in this sense ill, for no one else (except Parolles) fails to recognize her worth. His judgment is corrupted and his idea of nobility, as the King says, diseased:

Where great additions swell us, and virtue none,
It is a dropsied honor.

(II.iii.134 f.)

Earlier, at the suggestion of Parolles and two young lords (II.i.25-36), he falsely believes he will gain honor by disobeying the King and stealing from the court to fight in Florence, and after his marriage he actually does run off. His debauchery in Italy and especially his treatment of Diana seriously detract from his service on the battlefield and argue further this sense of “dropsied honor” (see III.v.3-87). Helena follows her husband to Florence, as the requirements of the traditional story demand; but she follows also to “cure” his affliction.

For Helena's effect upon Bertram, like her effect upon the King, is restorative. It is a long-standing error, as noted above,²¹ to regard Bertram as utterly without principle or virtue apart from his martial prowess—a man upon whom Helena, quite inexplicably (except for social ambition), is throwing herself away. Yet this error may be avoided—not by recourse (with Clifford Leech) to a theory of irrational love,²² nor by overstating (with Carter) Bertram's case against his bride (pp. 21 ff.), but by a close attention to the text: to Helena's explicit statement as to why she finds Bertram worth her labors (and the serious risks they entail); to supporting statements from other characters; and finally to a basic concept stated, quite forthrightly, at two or three important points in the action. As Helena implies, the distance which separates her from Bertram in the social hierarchy is purely artificial; there is no essential difference between them in character:

What power is it which mounts my love so high?
That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye?
The mightiest space in fortune nature brings
To join like likes and kiss like native things.

(I.i.235-238)

Only after Bertram leaves for the court, the “learning place” as Helena calls it (I.i.91), and falls heavily under the influence of Parolles, does his character really suffer. Lafew has some good words to say for Bertram at the beginning of the play (I.i.7-12), but these may betoken mere courtesy and at any rate appear directed more to the Countess than to her son. Nevertheless, the old Countess' comment on Bertram's desertion of Helena is unequivocal; she blames Parolles for the failure of her son's nobility—

My son corrupts a well-derived nature
With his inducement.

(III.ii.90 f.)

These statements suggest, however inadequately, that Bertram has a more complex character than he has generally been credited with. As has sometimes been pointed out, one motif of the play is that pronounced by the French Lord, Captain Dumain:

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipp'd them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherish'd by our virtues.

(IV.iii.82-87)

Our very excellences, moreover, may become ambiguous, as the Countess says regarding Helena:

I have those hopes of her good that her education promises. Her dispositions she inherits, which makes fair gifts fairer; for where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities, their commendations go with pity—they are virtues and traitors too.

(I.i.44-50)

But this ambiguous character describes the Countess' own son (as he develops in the play) more closely than it does Helena. Diana tells us this much as she and Helena watch the Count pass in parade through the streets of Florence (III.v.81-85). Later, at the precise moment Bertram believes he is seducing Diana, the two lords reflect upon his misconduct:

2. Lord.
Now God delay our rebellion! As we are ourselves, what things are we!
1. Lord.
Merely our own traitors. And as, in the common course of all treasons, we still see them reveal themselves till they attain to their abhorr'd ends, so he that in this action contrives against his own nobility, in his proper stream o'erflows himself.

(IV.iii.23-30)

Bertram, then, must be understood as not altogether a cad, but someone who, once rescued from the self-treason caused by his particular affliction (Parolles), may well merit Helena's devotion. Indeed, the theme of sin (or vice) as self-treason emerges as the dominant theme of the latter and more important part of the play.²³ Where Shakespeare errs is in his failure to dramatize the brighter aspects of Bertram's character: though we hear of his better qualities, we never see them translated into action.²⁴ Shakespeare might otherwise have saved matters to some extent had he sufficiently carried over the disease imagery from part one to make the point clear about his hero's behavior; but the most we get is a hint from Bertram about his “sick desires” for Diana (IV.ii.35). Of course, much of what we find wanting in the study may be provided on the stage—the play is said to act better than it reads.²⁵ With only the text before us, however, we find Shakespeare depending far more than usual upon the implications of structural relationships to suggest his “meaning” in All's Well; depending too much, in fact, for we strain to comprehend.²⁶

To resume our analysis: the theme of self-betrayal is most obviously dramatized through the plight of Parolles. Here the poet-dramatist, quite in control of the technique developed in his earlier plays, utilizes the comic sub-plot to underline the ideas he tries to convey more seriously in the main action, an aspect of the structure of All's Well which Lawrence and Quiller-Couch entirely miss.²⁷ Parolles' special virtues—his gift of words, his military aspirations—ultimately prove “virtues and traitors too”; they ruin him, as on the very eve of his disaster he himself suspects will happen (IV.i.30-47). The specific way he subverts himself is to betray the instigators of the plot, as 2. Lord says, to themselves (IV.i.101). This betrayal, which Parolles promises to make faithfully (IV.i.94)—that is, “accurately” with an ironic play on the sense “loyally”—includes in the actual event revealing to the “enemy” not only the size of the Duke's forces, but the moral characters of his principal lieutenants, specifically, their vices, or self-treasons, as they may now be called. Self-treason thus leads to self-knowledge, the theme anticipated in the subplot by Lafew's earlier penetration into the character of Parolles and repeatedly pointed to by quibbles on the word find (II.iii.217, II.iv.32-39; V.ii.45-48). Parolles discovers that simply the thing he is shall make him live (IV.iii.369 ff.), and the two lords are doubtless the wiser for their own exposure. As for Bertram, the experience of witnessing his friend's perfidy represents but the beginning of his own self-knowledge: his ill-tempered comments during Parolles' unmasking clash with the good-humored spirit of the others involved in the interrogation and reveal as yet only partial insight into the nature of ethical conduct and mature judgment.²⁸

Helena's attempt to fulfill the conditions Bertram has set for their reunion—obtaining his ring and bearing his child—carries through the theme of self-treason in the main plot and leads directly to the resolution of the action. Helena now reveals herself as something more than the “simple” maid that others have considered her and that she herself has pretended to be.²⁹ Her use of the bed-trick does not demand the usual explanation here, and besides, much convincing apology has already been made in her behalf.³⁰ By apparently satisfying Bertram's lust and violating the chastity symbolized by her name, Diana gives the illusion of self-treason, but actually Helena is the one who behaves as the traitor, in an ironic and hitherto unrecognized manner. It is a central paradox of the play that what is often a worthy or lawful objective may have to be obtained through somewhat dubious means. In order to unmask Parolles, for example, the brothers Dumain resort to “honest” deception. Earlier, Helena describes her paradoxical situation when she pleads for some token of affection from Bertram before leaving for Rossillion without him: like a “timorous thief” she would steal what, through marriage, she already has a right to (IV.v.84-87). The paradox becomes acute when she formulates her plan with Diana and Diana's mother to get Bertram's ring and perform the bed-trick:

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

(III.vii.44-47)

After lying with Bertram, Helena comments further on the irony of the situation: his “cozen'd thoughts” have allowed her husband to enjoy—and thoroughly to enjoy!—that which he loathes (IV.iv.21-25). Finally, by taking Diana's place Helena proves to be her own traitor in precisely the way that Lafew jokingly suggests when he introduces her to the King:

A traitor you do look like, but such traitors
His Majesty seldom fears. I am Cressid's uncle,
That dare leave two together. Fare you well.

(II.i.99-101)

Lafew plays upon the two senses of traitor “disloyal person” and “lewd person, naughty-pack” (Cotgrave).³¹ By sleeping with Bertram under the guise of his paramour, Helena appears to identify herself more fully with the others of her generation by becoming a “traitor” to herself, too.

In the last act all the treasons in the play are detected and the promised restoration fulfilled: what was perhaps dubiously begun is at length well ended. Helena returns to Paris and with Diana's help once more forces Bertram out of the King's good favor. But it is no part of her purpose to leave Bertram, with his added sins upon him, in this state. Like Vincentio in Measure for Measure, she teaches him to understand the ways of true judgment and honor and human nature, including his own nature. There is, of course, no doubt that Helena can settle all Bertram's suspicions of his being “doubly won”, or that Bertram will recover from his erring ways and show himself molded, like Angelo, into a much better man for being “a little bad”.³² If his recovery appears miraculous, it was, as we have seen, supposed to appear thus, a complement to Helena's healing of the King and a testimony to the power of innate virtue.³³ Helena herself undergoes a “rebirth,” though less miraculous than the King and court at first believe, when she emerges alive again after her reported “death”. Nevertheless, she carries within her in Bertram's unborn child the ever-new and ever-unchanging miracle of regeneration through which the nobility of Rossillion and bourgeois excellence join in final synthesis. Bertram's ring, the legacy of Rossillion that now appears on Helena's hand, symbolizes in another way this consummation. Also launched upon a new and truer life is Parolles. His nickname, “Tom Drum” (V.iii.322), earned by the unmasking episode, is a last reminder of the contrast between his hollowness, his sterility—and Helena's rich burden of life. Seeing the change that has come over the braggart-turned-fool, Lafew admits him into his household where Parolles will henceforth be able—in quite another way than he had once hoped—to “eat, speak, and move under the influence of the most receiv'd star” (II.i.56-57). And if Lafew can accept the emergence of the true Parolles, can we not accept the recovery of the “true” Bertram?

So H. S. Wilson (pp. 236-238), among others, would have us do. It has been the thesis of this paper to show that we, in fact, must accept Bertram if we understand rightly the main thematic patterns and structural relationships in the play. Helena has good cause to pursue Bertram for her husband, over and above what some critics have described as her desire to climb the social ladder.³⁴ That she is genuinely in love with him is revealed with utmost clarity in the opening scene; that he is an object worthy of her love is also indicated, if somewhat inadequately. At court, under the influence of Parolles, Bertram corrupts his “well-derived nobility” and is unable to perceive the real virtue which Helena holds out to him. The healing of the King, meanwhile, not only provides Helena with the opportunity to land the one man she loves; it also paves the way for us to understand her function in the second part of the action. Like any good wife, she tries to “cure” her husband of his bad conduct because she realizes better than anyone else the excellent man he really can be. If Shakespeare fails to supply us with sufficient verbal clues as to Bertram's true character (he does not neglect them altogether), it is quite possible that he depended (if unduly) upon the implications of his plot and (more plausibly) upon the acting itself. At the end, Helena triumphs. Bertram's last unworthy deeds, his perjury, his calumny of Diana, are, as it were, the final exhalation of his distemper. But with his concluding remarks, once again we strain to comprehend, not so much the meaning, which is clear, but a different breakdown in technique. Bertram's acceptance of Helena might be at least a little more gracious:

If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,
I'll love her dearly—ever, ever dearly.

(V.iii.316-317)

Perhaps the critics are right: Shakespeare may have been in a hurry to finish.³⁵ Or the couplets at the end are vestiges, along with those in Act II, of some early version of All's Well.³⁶ In any event, judgment here seems impossible, and from the point of view of this paper, irrelevant. Though all evidence indicates our acceptance of Bertram at the end is intended, we may yet reject him, along with much else in the play, as seriously beneath the reach of Shakespeare's greatest art. Nor need we lament these shortcomings overmuch: failure is always in itself instructive. Its value for Shakespeare we cannot, of course, ascertain; its value for critics (and biographers who may wish to indulge in a little bardolatry) can only be salubrious.

Notes

1. “There is a special reason for discussing these comedies afresh … Oddly enough, they seem never to have been studied minutely and dispassionately as a group, and their complexities probed in the light of modern knowledge”, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931), p. 9; cf. pp. vii-viii.

2. Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto, 1949).

3. Tillyard, p. 94.

4. Kenneth Muir's comments in Shakespeare's Sources (London, 1957), I, 99-100, are typical.

5. See, e.g., T. M. Parrott, Shakespearean Comedy (New York, 1949), p. 350, or John Middleton Murry, Shakespeare (London, 1936), p. 299. An important exception is H. B. Charlton; see his Shakespearian Comedy (London, 1938), pp. 219-222.

6. See M. C. Bradbrook, “Virtue Is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All's Well That Ends Well”, RES, [Review of English Studies] N.S., I (1950), 289-301.

7. H. S. Wilson's article, “Dramatic Emphasis in All's Well That Ends Well”, HLQ, [Huntington Library Quarterly] XIII (1949-50), 217-240, is only a subtler presentation of Lawrence's main thesis.

8. Edward Dowden, Shakespeare, His Mind and Art, 3rd ed. (New York, 1881), p. 76.

9. Tillyard, pp. 12, 110-112, notes the same opposition but is far less cheerful about its resolution.

10. Cf. Wilson, p. 226. Also compare Oscar J. Campbell's discussion of the role of Angelo, similarly described as the central character of Measure for Measure, in Shakespeare's Satire (New York, 1943), pp. 124-141.

11. Cf. Lavatch's comments, I.iii.19 ff. and elsewhere. Lawrence allies the Clown, the fourth significant addition to the dramatis personae, with Parolles in the statement of vulgar cynicism developed in the play to contrast with Helena's “bright virtue” (pp. 63-67). But in so doing, he overlooks some important differences: Lavatch may with as much justice be allied with Helena and Lafew as among the first to detect the hollowness of Parolles (see II.iv.17-38); and unlike the braggart he earns Lafew's praise (IV.v.72; cf. Parolles and Lafew, II.iii.191 ff.). The Clown's speeches pose some interesting problems of interpretation which scholarship has left almost entirely ignored; until they are worked out, it seems wise to reserve comment on the true function of this character.

12. Actually, Shakespeare's criticism here is directed (as usual) to English society. See the excellent but neglected article by G. P. Krapp, “Parolles”, in Shaksperian Studies by Members of the Department of English and Comparative Literature in Columbia University (New York, 1916), pp. 291-300.

13. The contrast is again with the old Count, who chose, for his fool, the perspicacious Lavatch. Cf. Bradbrook, p. 295.

14. Bradbrook, p. 301; Tillyard, pp. 114-115. Cf. H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), p. 425.

15. Tillyard, pp. 104-105; cf. Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in All's Well That Ends Well”, ELH, XXI (1954), p. 20.

16. See, e.g., Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, All's Well That Ends Well, New Cambridge edition (1929), pp. xxix-xxxi.

17. Samuel Johnson's often quoted comment on Bertram seems to have established the particular bias against him; see Lawrence, p. 35.

18. “In Defense of Bertram”, Shakespeare Quarterly, VII (1956) 21-31. Cf. F. G. Schoff's discussion of this article in “Claudio, Bertram, and A Note on Interpretation”, Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959), 11-23.

19. Shakespeare, His Mind and Art, p. 76. Lawrence, p. 66, quotes this passage, but only to criticize Dowden for taking the Clown's remark out of context.

20. See Lawrence, pp. 59-64; Murry, Shakespeare, pp. 298-303; Quiller-Couch, pp. xxvi-xxviii; Wilson, p. 225, note.

21. See note 17.

22. Leech, p. 23; cf. E. C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition (London, 1949), p. 138.

23. The theme of self-treason as it involves Bertram and Parolles is mentioned briefly by M. D. H. Parker, The Slave of Life (London, 1955), p. 122, and John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies (London, 1957), p. 191. Cf. Two Gentlemen of Verona, IV.iv.10.

24. Hazelton Spencer remarks: “It is perhaps regrettable that Shakespeare failed to invent some scene in which the recreant husband might help an old lady across the street or throw his purse to a deserving beggar or perform some other good turn that would prove him the owner of a heart of gold at least the equal of Tom Jones's” (The Art and Life of William Shakespeare [New York, 1940], p. 298).

25. Muir, I, 101. Cf. Tillyard, p. 94; Wilson, pp. 239-240; and especially Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries: “Only by seeing this work of art and by trusting the eye, can we be sensible of its full and harmonious effect. But that even the eye may be convinced, a great actress is required. Bertram also demands a good actor, if the spectator is to perceive that this is a man capable of rewarding efforts so great on the part of a woman, a man whose painful wooing promises a grateful possession. That this unsentimental youth has a heart, this corrupted libertine a good heart, that this scorner can ever love the scorned, this is indeed read in his scanty words, but few readers of the present day are free enough from sentimentality to believe such things on the credit of a few words. The case is entirely different when, in the acted Bertram, they see the noble nature, the ruin of his character at Florence, and the contrition which his sins and his simplicity call forth; when, from the whole bearing of the brusque man, they perceive what the one word ‘pardon’ signified in his mouth, when they see his breast heave at the last appearance of Helena bringing ease to his conscience. Credence is then given to his last words; for the great change in his nature—of which now only a forlorn word or two is read and overlooked—would then have been witnessed. Seldom has a task so independent as the character of Bertram been left to the art of the actor; but still more seldom is the actor to be found, who knows how to execute it” (cited by F. E. Halliday, Shakespeare and His Critics [London, 1949], p. 430). For an account of the recent performance of All's Well by the Old Vic which (if nothing else) bears out Gervinus' comment on Bertram's role, see Richard David, “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant”, Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955), pp. 134-136.

26. Cf. M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (New York, 1952), pp. 169-170. Miss Bradbrook's discussion of All's Well in this book is mainly a condensation of her earlier article, referred to above; but in the pages cited she adds some important criticism on Shakespeare's handling of Bertram.

27. Lawrence, p. 33; Quiller-Couch, pp. xxiv-xxv. More recent critics have noticed the parallel; see, e.g., Goddard, pp. 430-433, for an analysis different from that presented here.

28. Cf. Carter, p. 23: “Despite Helena's and Lafew's revelation of Parolles' worthlessness, Bertram has been constant to his friend. But by the middle of the play (III.vi), he is willing to put him to the test, and his rejection of Parolles (IV.iii), like Hal's of Falstaff, is symbolic of an increased maturity and establishes the probability that he will be able to change his mind and accept Helena.”

29. See I.i.48-51, II.1.140-144, II.iii.72-73. Earlier, her opening lines (I.i.62, 90 ff.), the debate with Parolles, her rhetoric before the Countess (I.iii.143 ff.), and the plot to win Bertram, have suggested something more than the “innocence of babes”, though the last point may be disputable.

30. See Lawrence, pp. 51-54. The argument there is well seconded by Murry, p. 300, and Tillyard, p. 102. Cf., however, Leech, p. 26.

31. See my article, “Traitor in All's Well and Troilus and Cressida”, MLN, LXXII (1957), 408-409.

32. Measure for Measure V.i.444-446.

33. Cf. Bradbrook, “Virtue Is the True Nobility”, p. 301: “Bertram's conversion must be reckoned among Helena's miracles.” Wilson, p. 236, also uses the term “conversion”. As I have tried to show, we miss an important theme in the play if we regard Bertram's change as a “conversion” instead of a “recovery”. Closer to the mark is Goddard's comment (p. 425): “With the penetration of love, his good angel, Helena, alone sees through from the first to what this perverted youth is under what he has become. By keeping her faith in that vision, in spite of the evidence against it, she brings about a resurrection of himself within himself through the miracle of what seems to him her own literal resurrection. Her sudden appearance in the flesh after being reported dead shocks him back into what he has really been all along.” Cf. also Lafew's remark in the final scene:

                                                                                                                  the young lord
    Did to his Majesty, his mother, and his lady,
    Offence of mighty note; but to himself
    The greatest wrong of all.

    (V.iii.12-15)

34. Bradbrook, “Virtue Is the True Nobility”, p. 297; Tillyard, p. 106.

35. See, e.g., Muir, I, 101; Leech, p. 20; and cf. Murry, p. 304.

36. For two sharply opposed views on stratification in All's Well, see J. Dover Wilson's argument, “The Copy for All's Well That Ends Well, 1623” in the New Cambridge ed., pp. 101-113, and Tillyard's reply, Appendix E, pp. 161-163. The evidence on either side is at least doubtful; and ultimately criticism must deal with the play as it exists in the only form we have. And for this, whether or not he revised his own early work, or accepted the original work or revision of some other person, Shakespeare must still assume responsibility.