SOURCE: Haley, David. “Bertram at Court.” In Shakespeare's Courtly Mirror: Reflexivity and Prudence in All's Well That Ends Well, pp. 1-51. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Haley interprets All's Well That Ends Well as a moral play depicting Bertram's path to self-discovery and his transcendence of a courtly “crisis of honor.”]

PROUD, SCORNFUL BOY

In its structure and dramatic emphasis, All's Well That Ends Well looks like Helena's play. Her intellect and force of personality dominate every scene in which she appears, and the audience is kept aware of her extraordinarily active presence even after she has been reported dead, in the latter part of the play. Yet critics persist in discussing Bertram as though his persona, rather than hers, held the key to the play's design. This is because the playwright everywhere solicits our concern for the young Count. Within the society of the play, Bertram is the theme of every tongue, his conduct a common topic of discourse. The heroine, hoping he will acknowledge her for his countess, implicitly takes part in the argument over Bertram's merits. Her formidable will fixes our attention upon her object, and our opinion of Bertram cannot be separated from Helena's unwavering belief in him.

Shakespeare's own estimate of Bertram is not easy to discover from the role he creates for his aristocratic but callow hero. Because Bertram's sullen character lacks the straightforward erotic purpose of an Orlando or a Bassanio, or even a Proteus, he seems unapt to propel the Menandrine action or “argument” that Frye and others have found in classical comedy. Nor is the young man's behavior any more consonant with the romantic, festive plot which, in most of Shakespeare's comedies, brings a liberating change: the King is healed and Helena is restored, but the first of these transformations works to restrict the hero instead of freeing him, while the effect of the second, as modern productions of All's Well have shown, is debatable.¹

In counterpoising Bertram's youth against the entire older generation, the playwright obviously traces a ritual of social renewal. The elders' valedictory and elegiac speeches supply a kind of backdrop for Bertram's initiation into public life and for his marriage, but the expected revitalization, signaled by the reappearance of his pregnant wife, comes about in spite of Bertram's having done all he could to prevent it. He fulfills his comic role without alacrity or grace, so that even in his last-minute change he does not seem to conform to the traditional, Menandrine hero.

Instead of individualizing his personality, Shakespeare makes this “proud, scornful boy”² a specimen of the unformed nobleman. No matter what discreditable attitude Bertram assumes—stubborn, petulant, or aloof, as the dramatic action may require—his psychology is not revealed. Shakespeare never gives him a soliloquy. At the end of the play, he marks the long-awaited dawning of Bertram's self-recognition with two and a half lines that barely register intellectual growth on the young man's part. The playwright finds Bertram attractive, apparently, for much the same reason that Helena does: the young nobleman embodies the heroic virtues of the court. All told, Shakespeare is less intent on defining Bertram's characteristic limitations than on guarding his aristocratic potential.

This view of Bertram, of course, is similar to the view that the poet in the Sonnets takes of his presumably aristocratic subject. … [H]ere it is only necessary to remark that the entire society of the play, and not merely the playwright or poet, focuses its attention on Bertram. A. P. Rossiter speaks for many readers when he notices how the other characters maintain a running ethical commentary upon Bertram: “In a very different way from Hamlet, Bertram is ‘the observed of all observers.’ The questioning attitude that is set up by all this [i.e., the ‘abstract ethical comments’] is one of the play's characteristics: although admittedly not all the reflections are clear.”³

The playwright, I believe, wishes to communicate to the audience this “questioning attitude,” and means to involve us, too, in the ongoing dialogue about virtue and honor and providence that dominates this courtly play. If Shakespeare, in writing All's Well, had wanted to “create a young man wholly responsive to his own invention,” he need not have exposed his hero to the court and its exacting scrutiny. Consequently, Bertram engages our interest in a manner quite unlike the hero of an Entwicklungsroman. We do not watch him develop; like Hal, who is an adult masking as a youth, he suddenly casts off his immaturity. The determinate result of his dramatic change counts far more than its gradual evolution. Although Bertram's mentors are fond of calling him a “boy,” they never doubt that he will claim his aristocratic birthright.⁴

What they do question, and what the playwright, too, seems to ask, is how Bertram can establish the true ground of his nobility—whether the young nobleman is able to manifest his essential areté or excellence despite the shame his own actions have heaped upon it. Unlike Hal, this “unseason'd courtier” (I.i. 67) has no plan to set off his mettle against a carefully prepared foil. Given his uncommunicative nature, Bertram's discovery of honor has to be inferred mostly from his deeds. Except to criticize Parolles, he does not engage in the discussions of merit that punctuate the play. Nevertheless these courtly discussions, alternating with his actions, create a dramatic dialogue that leads up to Bertram's recognition of Helena and his appropriation of her virtue. The taciturn hero and his demanding honor are the real subject of the courtly dialogue. In other words, All's Well thematizes Bertram's role as courtier.⁵

The best critical formulation of the play's chief theme, the discovery of true nobility, is still Muriel Bradbrook's. She believed that

Shakespeare was trying to write a moral play. … He was not writing allegorically but his characters have a symbolic and extrapersonal significance. … [The] structural center [of the play is] the King's judgment on virtue and nobility. … [Helena claims] desert for virtue, [whereas Bertram, in his mother's words,] ‘corrupts a well-derived nature.’ … In Helena and Bertram, the true and false nobility are in contest. Helena seeks recognition: Bertram denies it. The King, with the Countess and Lafew, [were created] to act as arbiters. … Helena is a ‘jewel’ which Bertram throws away. His rejection of her must be seen not in isolation but as linked with his choice of Parolles. … [In the final scene,] an elaborate and inexorable shaming of the now utterly silenced young man proceeds.⁶

This comprehensive summary of the play's themes necessarily subordinates some structural elements that need to be brought into the foreground. I agree that the play's “structural center” is act 2, scene 3, but I shall argue that, as an engine of the dramatic movement, the King's judgment is of lesser moment than Bertram's profoundly spontaneous rejection of Helena. Shakespeare has contrived to make his young hero's perverseness the spring of the action, and, as I hope to show, Bertram's recklessness, both when he throws away his “jewel” and later when he ignorantly judges himself, is in fact his uncanny means of working out his self-fulfillment. This obliquely providential action, I believe, gives All's Well its character of a “moral play.” Helena, Bertram, and the King do take on an “extrapersonal significance,” but this does not arise from moral (or from theological) allegory. It is built up, rather, through specific biblical allusions, the most important of which have not hitherto been identified.

Bradbrook's thematic and formal analysis defines the contents of All's Well, but at the cost of arresting the play's dynamic unfolding. To help us get back to the dramatic source of our perceptions, Frye's theory of how the dramatic experience is structured can be useful. Adopting terms from Aristotelian logic, Frye assigns to comedy four “causes”: efficient, formal, material, and final. Of these, the two last and most important miss their effect, it would seem, in All's Well. Frye finds the “material cause” of the comedy in the young man's sexual desire, and the “final cause” in “the audience, which is expected by its applause to take part in the comic resolution.” Let us see how both of these “causes” affect the overall course of the action in All's Well which, as was already observed, appears to stray from the Menandrine plot.⁷

Frye thinks that Shakespeare tried to reverse the usual pattern—in which the young man defeats or outwits the senex in order to obtain the young woman—by letting the King impose a wife upon Bertram. If we take a broader view of the play's action, however, we can see that Shakespeare has retained the Menandrine argument intact but woven it into a more comprehensive, circuitously providential plot. The forced marriage in the middle of the play is not the comic climax. It occasions no festivity, nor is it consummated. Far from reconciling the younger generation with the older, this marriage only frustrates the young man and fortifies his wayward inclinations. But this warping of youthful desire actually deflects it towards the comic end. The King's willful fiat, by thwarting Bertram's natural choice, drives him upon the libertine course that takes him to Diana. Allowing for this bias, the hero's erotic intent does quite literally lead him to the consummation of his marriage.

The form of the New Comedy, then, can be discerned in All's Well; its elements are here, but they are oddly transmuted. Shakespeare seems to displace natural impulses from their straightforward course and to dislocate the direct relationships found in Menander. The hero's lust reaches its goal, but per ambages. The clever slave who assists him is none other than Helena. Her service is fantastically doubled and parodied by Parolles, who by encouraging the hero to forsake his wife speeds him into her arms. Also doubled from the New Comedy is the sympathetic mother. Normally she is her son's ally against the senex. In All's Well the Countess's support is inadvertently neutralized when she backs the King's second choice of a wife for Bertram (Maudlin), so that Helena must turn to a surrogate mother, the Widow, to help her achieve a husband. The strangest modification of all, though, is Shakespeare's fracturing the Menandrine role of the senex into three parts: the King, Lafew, and Bertram's dead father. Each of these paternal figures in turn offers to impose on Bertram a wife whom he cannot accept on their terms without compromising the virtue that makes him noble—his prerogative of self-determination. That, rather than some erotic prize, is what is at stake in the Menandrine conflict between generations, and that is what the young man desperately defends when, driven to a bay, he finds his voice. “In such a business,” he implores the King, “give me leave to use / The help of mine own eyes” (II.iii.107-8).

Is the hero victorious in his struggle with the senex, as the comic pattern requires? Yes, in some fashion; but our answer in this point is hypothetical, since the effect of the Menandrine plot can be known only by the response of the audience, which is its “final cause.” And the stage history of All's Well is largely a history of how its last, climactic scene has been received. Putting aside for the moment the two main responses to Bertram's behavior by readers who either have resented him for a cad “dismissed to happiness” (Johnson) or have pleaded on behalf of the noble youth deprived of his liberty (Coleridge), we may look at some theatrical interpretations of Bertram and of the final scene.⁸

Since midcentury, several productions have emphasized Bertram's youthful desirability. A reviewer in 1959 found that “he is too normal to be basically unlikeable: one simply has to wait for him to grow up.” In 1981, another reviewer thought that “Bertram might be immature, but he was clearly worth waiting for, even suffering for, as a sexual partner.” Such an impetuous, unformed Bertram apparently stems from Guthrie's earliest production (1953, Ontario), in which Bertram starts out as a young fool tricked into marriage, and then, disillusioned with Parolles, begins to mature. “At last, when he is ready for the kind of woman that Helena is, Helena is waiting for him.”⁹

In contrast to these interpretations showing Bertram's potential for growth, at least three productions have laid the stress upon his aloofness and snobbery. Nunn's production of 1981-82 presented both versions of Bertram. With Gwilym playing the role originally, this production was “a sympathetic play about growing-up.” When Franks replaced Gwilym in the part, “the interpretation became more coherent but less exciting. Franks offered adolescent weakness rather than adolescent self-assertion. The benefit of this was that it came as less of a shock when, in the final scene, Bertram's horror at the prospect of marrying Diana reveals him to be a snob after all.”¹⁰

As with the character of Bertram, so with the ending of the play, directors have had to choose between excitement and coherence—between romantic promise and moral or social plausibility. They must make their interpretation clear in the brief space of thirty lines. Upon Helena's sensational entrance, the King speaks first. Then Helena's three short speeches frame Bertram's two, their entire dialogue occupying a bare thirteen lines before she turns aside to the Countess, and Lafew and the King speak the remaining lines. When Helena plaintively remarks that she is wife only in “name and not the thing,” Bertram vehemently corrects her (“Both, both”) and then begs “O pardon!” as he (usually) kneels to her. He speaks again after Helena, either raising him from his knees or kneeling with him, shows him his letter and indicates she carries their child. This speech—Bertram's final word—is the notorious couplet:

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

A director can control the intimacy of this reunion by modulating the movements of the pair, especially their exit, but Bertram's delivery of the couplet is critical for the interpretation of the ending. Parolles, after he was exposed in an analogical anticipation of this scene, was given a notable soliloquy. Bertram, who at no point in the play appears alone, here steps into the historic role of Rossillion by appropriating, without comment, the aristocratic persona that everybody seems to have expected him to assume.

His final couplet, dubbed by one reviewer “perhaps the worst that any actor could be asked to speak,” nevertheless can be the means for asserting a touch of self-possession after his humiliation, a slight dignity of resolution, like Parolles' “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live” (IV.iii.322-23). Or the couplet can be spoken in a note of wonder as a repentant Bertram, crushed by Helena's benign plot, finds that his sexual prodigality quits him well; more quizzical than reflective, he is welcomed home in a festive ending. While generally preferring the latter alternative, recent directors, mindful of the skepticism in the King's couplet that closes the play (“All yet seems well”), have hedged the festivity with touches of irony which the audience is at liberty to ignore.

“Bertram's if seemed wondering rather than skeptical, admiring rather than conditional,” said a reviewer of the Nunn production. And Price, surveying the reviews of Barton's production, noted that “Bertram's own exposure was kept much lighter” than that of Parolles, “partly through the comic management of a delightful Diana who relished her role. The audience accepted the final reconciliation, one in which the wisdom of romance overwhelmed the credible shallowness of youth. And isn't it precisely in this that the joy of All's Well resides?” Not exactly, we may reply. In Barton's production, Bertram slapped Helena on the back at their final exit; and in the Nunn production, when Bertram went to take her hand, “he didn't actually do so; instead he spoke that cryptic, conditional couplet. … Left alone, Bertram and Helena walked upstage together, their hands still apart, the final image of an unequal marriage.” Plainly, neither directors nor the critics can quite agree that All's Well should be played as festive comedy.¹¹

Some productions have diminished the unpleasant selfishness of Bertram's character by making him appear as the remote, partly idealized object of Helena's passion. This approach to the play harks back to the nineteenth-century interpretation of Helena as the sentimental heroine of a melodrama. Roger Warren reports of Jones's 1977 production that

in the kiss scene, when Helena finally blurted out her request, Bertram bent and brushed her hand with his lips, whereupon she seized him and held him in a prolonged kiss. … It was an original interpretation. It did not sentimentalize Bertram. … On the other hand, it did not exaggerate the cruelty. Some of Bertram's harshness elsewhere was underdone, ‘Here comes my clog’ thrown away, back to the audience. The cutting edge of the writing was missing here. … Everything built, as it should, to Helena's redemptive entry.

In his version for BBC-TV (1980), Moshinsky also took a sentimental approach, deploying the camera to break down our critical distance so that we might experience with the characters onstage a harmonious close. Helena's entry cannot seem miraculous to us, who know she lives and anxiously awaits the unfolding climax. But on television, “as the cast looks through the door music begins to play. ‘Behold the meaning,’ says Diana. But the camera does not allow us to behold. Instead it does what the camera does best—it shows us a set of mouths and eyes. As it tracks along the line we are made witness to a series of inner sunrises, as face after face responds to the miracle and lights up with understanding and relief. I confess to finding it a very moving experience.”¹²

Foreshortening the final scene to suggest “the wisdom of romance” or to approximate the nostalgia of The Winter's Tale subordinates realistic comedy to thematic “redemption.” Whatever individuality Bertram has won from his protracted crisis gets lost in Helena's transfiguration. A magical ending deprives Bertram of his past; he is not permitted to reflect upon his experience. Even Parolles, after all, was transformed by his shame, not annihilated. Having observed Bertram through five acts, the audience does not want him dismissed to happiness without some indication of how his humiliation and unexpected reprieve have affected him. A romantic ending ought not to come at the expense of the play's structural integrity. For our own dramatic experience to be coherent, we need to know what Bertram has learned.

The playwright does not tell us, and we are sent back to the dialectic of the drama, or to the thematic arguments that arise from its scenes of courtly reflection and heroic action. While it is no doubt true that an apparent ineptitude like Bertram's final speech “goes better, as so much does, in the theatre,” even an otherwise successful performance may leave its audience unconvinced that the playwright's conception has been fully articulated. For the purpose of highlighting this dramatic logic, Bradbrook's statement of the traditional subject of All's Well, quoted above, is more helpful than the various glosses that attempt to translate its humanistic themes into the post-Renaissance language of social evolution or psychology.

These attempts usually end by diverting attention from the play's topical, moral question: whether a young aristocrat can achieve on his own terms the birthright that he has alienated by his rash actions. Having raised this question, the playwright pursues it within the customary social framework to which the characters belong. The youth's transformation requires no real social change; Bertram can simply assume his place among the next generation of elders. The King welcomes him to court with the wish that the young Count may be like his dead father, whom he resembles: “Thy father's moral parts / Mayest thou inherit too!” (I.ii.21-22). Similarly, a Freudian analysis of Bertram's rebellion that uncovers “faulty parental experiences” in both Helena's and Bertram's past trivializes the significance of the self-determining choice Shakespeare wishes to dramatize.¹³

The root of Bertram's rebellion is as much intellectual as libidinous. His “vile misprision” of true nobility (II.iii.152) is no less a crisis for the court than for him. By repudiating Helena and striving ignorantly against his own inheritance, he forces the court to reconsider its heroic ideal. His devious path to his station as Count Rossillion imitates the sinuous dialectic of the courtiers' debate about excellence. That courtly debate generates most of the drama. Once its nature has been called into question, honor cannot be defined fully and dramatically without a jarring contention between King, court, and Bertram.¹⁴

.....

VILE MISPRISION

The Socratic principle that all knowledge is self-knowledge was adopted implicitly by the Renaissance court, but, as Castiglione warns in discussing how a prince should be educated, the principle was to be respected indirectly with wit and geniality, not with a pedantry betraying self-ignorance. Not every poet had Shakespeare's tact. Ben Jonson for instance in his satirical comedy, Cynthia's Revels, undertakes to instruct his sophisticated audience in the quality of courtliness. Dramatizing humanistic personifications more aggressively than Shakespeare does, Jonson simply thrusts noble virtue on stage in the person of “Arete.” Cynthia's revels are staged beside a fountain of self-love from which the false courtiers drink. The fountain stands in opposition to the familiar Renaissance glass that confers self-knowledge upon its viewer, as, for example, the jewelled walls of Logistilla's palace in Orlando Furioso (10.58-60). Cynthia's court is supposed to be such a glass. Jonson's simple antithesis of self-love and self-knowledge is more humanistic than courtly; therein lies the real difference between Cynthia's court and the court of All's Well. Rather more complacent than Shakespeare, Jonson does not hesitate to show Arete along with Cynthia bestowing their approval upon the scholar Crites, an apparent surrogate of the playwright himself.¹⁵

Self-love of the kind that Jonson exposes in his courtiers was an easy mark for the dramatist, an affectation on the order of Malvolio's. However, a puritanical steward “sick of self-love” (TN [Twelfth Night] I.v.85) could be traduced more familiarly than an aristocrat, whose vanity, except in the case of a bald caricature like Portia's Prince of Arragon, was not easily distinguishable from a justifiable pride. Huizinga has taught our democratic era the extent to which late medieval society sustained the illusion that nobility was the cause, not the effect, of a prosperous commonwealth. The ideal life to which the aristocrat aspired, and which his society expected him to live, was a sublimation of man's sensual vice, guilt, and cruelty. By his peculiar ars vivendi, he raised these faults into a plausible and conspicuous honor. Where the humanist pursued self-knowledge philosophically, the aristocrat cultivated his honor.¹⁶

This was the nobleman's indispensable glass. Socrates, in all vital crises, was wont to heed his internal monitor; the Renaissance courtier steered life's treacherous course by his honor. Our habit of differentiating from one's public image a more essential, personal self makes it difficult to appreciate the aristocrat's stake in his reputation. That—and not his soul—was his essence, as Cassio's lament bemoaning his intemperance well shows: “O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial” (Oth. [Othello] II.iii.255-56). And with the cry, “Othello's occupation's gone” (III.iii.357), his General sinks into the same abyss of confounded identity. For the aristocrat, honor comes before his soul; or rather, the usual concern for one's soul yields place, in him, to an intent regard for the glass of his honor, whose condition he gauges by the respect others show for it.

Shakespeare usually does not require his characters formally to define their honor. Although Falstaff's catechism on honor springs to mind and the word is much on Hotspur's tongue, only brief invocations of honor punctuate Shakespeare's drama from King John down through The Winter's Tale. In this respect All's Well stands out from Shakespeare's other plays. In no play is the actual word honor (aside from the form of address, “your honor”) sounded as often as here. Because it is understood in All's Well to be the foundation of courtly existence, honor is an implicit topic in nearly every dialogue, and it becomes the explicit issue at the crisis in act 2, scene 3, when Bertram recoils at Helena's choosing him for her husband. The King defines honor in an authoritative speech (117-44) sharply distinguishing virtue from inheritance, and, to edify the stubborn young nobleman, makes his meaning as concrete as possible by an emblematic conjunction of himself and Helena: “Virtue and she / Is her own dower; honour and wealth from me” (143-44). The King speaks as it were ex cathedra from the plenum of his court, with the excellent virgin by his side. Their tableau powerfully reinforces his words. Helena is unmistakably the mirror of honor. Yet Bertram rejects her: “I cannot love her nor will strive to do't” (line 145).

“Thou wrong'st thyself,” responds the King, “if thou should'st strive to choose.” Bertram does wrong himself; he disdains the proffered honor. But here the scene of courtly harmony suddenly fractures into an acrimonious debate between opposed conceptions of honor, each having its strong validity. From one standpoint we can see that the young aristocrat foolishly repudiates the kingly “dole” (line 169) meant for him; from another, we can cheer his refusal to play a courtly role arbitrarily foisted upon him by his royal guardian. The King presents Helena's honor to us under a traditional and proverbial form of definition backed by his will. He impatiently brushes aside the circumstance that to Bertram, Helena is “a poor physician's daughter.” She is really not much more, yet, to us. The King can only reiterate “what she has done for me.”

For her part, Helena, who began the scene in nervously heightened spirits, feels the strain of the situation and tries to step between the King and Bertram (147-48): “That you are well restor'd, my lord, I'm glad. / Let the rest go.” Her embarrassed deprecation is not entirely on her own account. She is dismayed to see the willful King crush the spirit of the youth whose “arched brows” and “hawking eye” (I.i.92) should draw everyone's admiration. But now the King considers that his own honor is on the line:

My honour's at the stake, which to defeat,
I must produce my power. Here, take her hand,
Proud, scornful boy, unworthy this good gift,
That dost in vile misprision shackle up
My love and her desert;
.....Do thine own fortunes that obedient right
Which both thy duty owes and our power claims;
Or I will throw thee from my care forever
Into the staggers and the careless lapse
Of youth and ignorance.

(II.iii.149-64)

This scene, which opened with the praises of Helena's miracle and unfolded in the fairy tale ritual of her choice of husbands, now runs up against a hard reality: the fact that courtly honor is ambiguous. The mirror of the monarch's community shows a crack. The King, restored to “as able body as when he number'd thirty” (IV.v.77-78), thinks that the court's honor has been sufficiently burnished by his miraculous healing. If he called this assembly with the object of presenting a quasi-dramatic choice or “discovery” of honor in the way that a masque discovers (reveals) a personified virtue, he is bitterly disappointed when Bertram refuses to discover (find) honor in Helena.

In earlier scenes, the King has shown his mistrust, and perhaps his sexual jealousy, of the young courtiers. Bertram represents the younger generation whose “levity” of spirit the King deplores (I.ii.35) and would control by the fiat of this match (“As thou lov'st her / Thy love's to me religious; else, does err” [182-83]). He wants to define honor for the young men, ignoring the fact that the present generation of courtiers refashion the mirror by their own deeds and reflections. For them honor is actual and contemporaneous. The older generation demands recognition for an honor it tiresomely locates in the past. When the King lectures the courtiers upon the honor exemplified by his friend the late Count, he forgets that the courtly mirror, as it grows mostly retrospective, becomes unreal. By his speech on hypothetical honor, the King denies to the young noblemen—and specifically to Bertram—their prerogative of renewing the honor of the court.

The King has created this strained situation in order to make good his promise to grant Helena's wish. When she hesitates, he encourages her to “Make choice, and see, / Who shuns thy love shuns all his love in me” (72-73). He claims “both sovereign power and father's voice” over these “noble bachelors” (53-54), arrogating to himself a godlike paternalism and equating courtly honor with the courtiers' “love [i.e., interest] in me.” By his angry pun—“Proud, scornful boy, unworthy this good gift, / That doest in vile misprision shackle up / My love and her desert”—the King intimates that Bertram wrongly “shackles up” his honor in the prison of his scorn (“misprision”). His honor, he is told, lies in the King's “love” and Helena's “desert”; in spurning those, he does not know his own good and diminishes himself.

The King says his own honor is threatened by this rebuff. Bertram's real offense, though, is his affront to the court, or at any rate to its elders. Helena, who came hither after gaining the blessing of the Countess and who promptly converted Lafew and the King to the knot of her admirers, has the approval now of the entire older generation. She represents their honor, as if the elders had chosen her as their moral successor. The King offers her as an extraordinary bride, more precious to him than a daughter. That is why Lafew is upset when the King's wards seem not to respond to her.¹⁷

The traditional courtly debate over honor, then, is raised in this central scene to a contest between the generations, with the sexual rivalry that is always latent in such contests flaring up here as Bertram resists the King. To Bertram, who was silent during the talk of her miracle at the start of the scene, Helena cannot appear very dazzling. Here is the young woman bred up with him at Rossillion whom he left behind to “be comfortable to my mother” (I.i.73). This is not the honor he sought at court. “She has rais'd me from my sickly bed,” says the King. Bertram's insolent retort, with its sexual pun on “raising” and “bring me down,” expresses his impatience with the old King and his valetudinarian honor:

But follows it, my lord, to bring me down
Must answer for your raising? I know her well:
She had her breeding at my father's charge—
A poor physician's daughter my wife! Disdain
Rather corrupt me ever!

(111-16)

The generational conflict of wills pushes this scene towards tragedy, as in the opening scene of King Lear. Bertram's stubbornness is not honestly forthright like Cordelia's, though, and after the King's threat (quoted above) Bertram prudently feigns to change his mind and submit to having honor thrust upon him by the proposed marriage:

                                                                                When I consider
What great creation and what dole of honor
Flies where you bid it, I find that she, which late
Was in my nobler thoughts most base, is now
The praised of the king; who, so ennobled,
Is as 'twere born so.

(II.iii.168-73)

A specious equanimity settles over the court as the King, with a masquelike benediction, decrees the marriage: “Good fortune and the favour of the king / Smile upon this contract” (177-78).

Such a forced reconciliation of their different notions of honor is palpably wrong. Without Bertram's willingness, there can be no marriage between nobility and virtue; without the younger generation's ardor, no quest for honor in court and society and therefore no heroic self-knowledge. The implied sneer in Bertram's speech of submission shows that the court has been infected with disdain. The disdain is picked up in Lafew's flouting of Parolles that follows. Their recapitulation of the antagonism between the King and Bertram is satirically entertaining, but it also exposes the older generation's contempt for its successors, upon whom the elders impotently try to impose their will. The satire shows us a daemonic mirror, reflecting not so much the court's virtues and vices, or its hopes and fears, as its delusion and indecision. The court has mistaken honor and finds its capacity for epic deliberation impaired.

It is important to understand exactly what Bertram is rejecting in his deeply instinctive response to the King's offer. Recent critics, taking their cue from the evidently sexual overtones in this confrontation and in the dialogue between Bertram and Parolles at the end of the scene, point to the young man's loathing of “the dark house and the detested wife” (line 288). This tack is too reductive in that it isolates his “precarious masculinity,” or some other psychological abstraction, from the complex social situation to which Bertram responds. At best, such reduction may help us see that Bertram has a case, in opposition to those critics who carry on Johnson's heavy reprobation of him. The case for Bertram becomes stronger, however, when regarded not from the standpoint of psychology but in the perspective afforded by the courtly mirror.¹⁸

Bertram identifies honor with the “brave wars” (II.i.25). He seeks to create honor by himself. Helena's familiar virtue adds nothing to the inheritance he means to augment by his own deeds. The King not only overlooks his ward's noble ambition, but tries to curb his individual preeminence by imposing on the young man an image of the late Count, Bertram's father:

                                                                                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.

(I.ii.41-44)

Bertram's disdainful response to Helena's choice shows none of his father's graceful condescension, but that is in part because he can no longer address her as an inferior. In a sense, Helena has become his rival. She emulates his noble aim of achieving honor by deeds instead of by birth or, for that matter, by a donative from the King. Like Lear autocratically ignoring Cordelia's firm sense of what is filial and meet, the King dismisses Bertram's notion of honor. He demands that the young Count constrict his vision of honor, and hence the heroic image of himself, to the figure of this maid who has cured his master. What Bertram rejects is not Helena per se, nor yet the example of his father. Bertram, like Cordelia, repudiates the false mirror the King holds up to view—the mirror, that is, in which the King represents himself as the supreme fount of honor, surrounded by courtiers who glorify the vigorous image of their restored prince. Such honor is merely demonstrative. Finding it repellent to his noble substance, Bertram, in a gesture instinct with real honor, rejects it.

BY REFLECTION

The combination against Bertram of Helena's desire joined with his sovereign's will is formidable. The young man spontaneously withstands it, and the sullen disdain that his resistance puts on masks the heroic resolution of an aristocrat. No longer the petulant youth who repined at being interdicted from the wars, Bertram suddenly is spurred to seek his proper role in the courtly epic. He shuns his “love in [the King]” to pursue glory where the King shunned it: in honor abroad, among the wars and the “girls of Italy” (II.i.19). One might say that he individuates himself by defying the King's authority, but to stress his psychological autonomy is to miss the chief point of the scene: its demonstration of self-transcendence. Bertram's spontaneous act is definitive for him. It is also exemplary for the court, as I will try to explain.

Bertram justifiably resents the King's overbearing treatment. That “he is shamefully and cruelly wronged” was also the opinion of Andrew Lang: “He is enslaved in the dawn of his youth, and his resolve to go to the wars, and leave his wife at the church door, is in no way unbecoming. Every one would sympathize with the woman had the matrimonial constraint been on the other side. … It is not correct to say [as Johnson did] that Bertram ‘leaves Helena as a profligate.’ Nothing in his life becomes him like the leaving her.”¹⁹ The force of Lang's protest is not met by the reply that the King had the right to dispose of his noble wards as long as the match did not “disparage” them in rank. The King observes the rules of wardship and says he will ennoble Helena, but he still wrongs Bertram by offering to foreshorten the youth's career of honor. When at the end of the scene Bertram declares himself free to seek honor, Parolles concurs: “The King has done you wrong; but hush 'tis so.”

To the King's taunt of “Proud, scornful boy,” Bertram might well retort, “Proud, my lord, and true.” Critics who characterize Bertram's first real affirmation of honor as adolescent rebellion, or as a blind struggle for autonomy, are ignoring its impact on the court. Bertram's pride, like Cordelia's, suggests strength of character beneath his stubbornness. A less spirited courtier would tamely embrace the fortune provided him by his king; instead, Bertram asserts his right to determine his own place in the mirror of the court, a right he would forfeit by this arbitrary match. The King tries to play the role of providence, as if he were God disposing his ward's fate. Bertram's protest rescues his honor from the interference of Helena and the King. He spurns the prospect of domestic glory offered him. In breaking with his King and venturing on an unfamiliar path, Bertram transcends himself. All's Well pivots upon this scene of self-transcendence.

As we saw in examining the nobleman's mirror, his honor will not let him repose in his private self or the ordinary “ego.” The dialogue opening the play (I.i.1-7) sounds the aristocratic imperative of self-transcendence:

COUNT.
In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband.
BER.
And I in going, madam, weep o'er my father's death anew; but I must attend his majesty's command, to whom I am now in ward, evermore in subjection.
LAF.
You shall find of the king a husband, madam; you, sir, a father.

As a young, “unseason'd courtier,” armed only with his mother's blessing and advice, Bertram answers the King's summons to Paris (I.1.60-68). He leaves Rossillion for his proper sphere at court, where the nobleman seeks his epic (or mock-epic) role in its mirror of honor.

Although Bertram's father is dead, the late Count's fame eclipses his son in the eyes of their sovereign, and his father's legacy is something else Bertram must transcend. At court, the King indeed acts as “a father” to Bertram, but he patronizes him in a manner calculated to stifle the courtier's spirit. He provides for Bertram a premature, adventitious honor, which is not what the Countess wished in her benediction for her son:

Be thou bless'd, Bertram, and succeed thy father
In manners as in shape! Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright!

(I.i.56-60)

His blood and shape are Bertram's inherent birthright. By itself, the marriage to Helena cannot confer virtue, manners, or goodness upon him. These are qualities he must “contend for.”

In his lecture upon honor, the King asserts that

Where great additions swell's and virtue none,
It is a dropsied honour.
.....                                                            Honours thrive
When rather from our acts we them derive
Than our foregoers.

(II.iii.127-37)

Even as he speaks these words, the royal guardian proposes to bestow on his ward the hand of Helena, a “great addition” unsuited to a nobleman who would “derive” his honor from heroic deeds. Bertram's “contend[ing]” for honor commences with this quarrel. The attempt on the part of the King and Helena to forestall his fate by marriage makes Bertram see that his true honor is in jeopardy, and he removes himself from the King's oppressive tutelage, entrusting his destiny to “Great Mars” (III.iii.9).

Paradoxically, this rupture frees Bertram so he may follow the prescriptions the King earlier laid down for the courtiers in quest of honor. By leaving the court, Bertram ceases to be the King's ward, but he remains his subject (“in subjection”) and becomes an active figure in the Italian wars, which supply factitious, epic roles for the French courtiers. Bertram wins honor for himself and for the court and King; and—once the play's convoluted plot has been unwound—his rebellion also fulfills the hopes of his mother's benediction. Thus, by driving the young man off in quest of a heroic role elsewhere, the King inadvertently seconds Bertram's instinct of self-transcendence, which from this point on determines the direction the play will take.

To comprehend Bertram's act and its critical placing, we must back up a bit and review more carefully the King's role as antagonist to the young man. All's Well opens with a scene of domestic mourning, whence our attention is immediately directed to the court and its sick King. Lafew, remembering what the King used to be, promises the Countess and her orphaned son that Bertram will receive at court the guidance he lacks, “a father. He that so generally is at all times good must of necessity hold his virtue to [Bertram]” (I.i.6-8). Arrived at court, Bertram discovers the King's virtue at a low ebb, his hospitality enfeebled because he is preoccupied with his disease. The doctors, says the King, “have worn me out / With several applications; nature and sickness / Debate it at their leisure. Welcome, Count; / My son's no dearer” (I.ii.73-76). After this compulsive greeting, the King exercises his guardianship, we learn, by peremptorily forbidding Bertram to go to the wars.²⁰

We see the sick King again as act 2 opens and the courtiers take their leave for Italy. Shakespeare has interpolated both of these court scenes into Boccaccio's story in order to indicate that real honor is to be won in contests abroad. The spirited young Bertram grasps this very clearly, but the King's thoughts dwell at home and upon his struggle with his disease. He never imagines that the fame his courtiers win abroad might help restore his own vigor, or that the young lords' undertaking is necessary to fulfill the honor of his court. His weary cynicism bids fair to sap the glory of their enterprise.

He tells them to let the Italians “see that you come / Not to woo honour, but to wed it” (14-15)—a trite metaphor with alarming implications, in view of the hero's compelled marriage two scenes later. As the other noblemen leave for Italy, Bertram complains to Parolles, “I am commanded here, and kept to a coil with / ‘Too young,’ and ‘The next year’ and ‘'Tis too early’” (27-28). Although it occurs to him that he might “steal away,” when Parolles asks “What will ye do?” Bertram replies (or shows why he fears to reply) with a laconic “Stay: the King” (F2 reading). Bertram has been thoroughly cowed by his autocratic patron's monopoly of the terms of honor. The thought torments him that he must “stay here the forehorse to a smock” until all “honour be bought up” abroad (30-32), but so far he submits to the King's will.

When the King next shows himself to his court, in the central scene we have been discussing (II.iii), nothing has changed for Bertram. The King on the other hand has been transformed. Helena's cure has reinvigorated him so that he is “lustique” enough to lead her in a lively dance or “coranto” (41-43). His rejuvenation seems especially miraculous to Lafew, who brought this “Doctor She” (II.i.78) to the King. This big court scene, which climaxes in Bertram's defiant act of self-transcendence, opens accordingly on a note of wonder expressed by Lafew as he enters with Bertram and Parolles:

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

(II.iii.1-6)

This speech highlights the providential theme associated with Helena. I want to defer that theme … and call attention here to the courtiers' self-consciousness or reflexiveness conspicuous in Lafew's speech and in the comments it inspires. Parolles chimes in with Lafew's every remark, creating an inane dialogue that parallels the Clown's “O Lord, sir!” of the preceding scene (II.ii). Parolles' affectation and Lafew's Polonian wisdom between them express the courtier's embarrassed hyperbole, the effect (to vary Johnson's definition) of wonder operating upon skepticism. They agree that Helena's miracle shows the “very hand of heaven … in a most weak … and debile minister; great power, great transcendence” (31-35). This little display of courtly self-mockery culminates in Lafew's reading of a ballad title that seems to parody the providential theme of the play itself (“A Showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor”).²¹

The self-conscious dialogue here is characteristic of the play, combining marvel and satire, or romance and realism. The curious mélange is always noticed by students of All's Well, and usually is explained as the merging of two disparate perspectives or kinds of drama. But the discrepancy inheres in the court society that Shakespeare portrays and is only brought to light by the supernatural effect of Helena's miracle. The court is familiar with the nobleman's boast of heroic self-transcendence; that is a customary, humanistic paradox, but, as Parolles' outlandish phrase (“great transcendence”) shows, no one can tell what to make of divine grace. The courtiers' embarrassment at the start of the scene quickly proves to be widespread throughout the court.

What is peculiar about this scene, and what raises a problem for its producer, is the way the playwright praises the miracle but immediately limits its effect. A modern audience, naturally assuming that Helena's deed introduces Divine Providence into the play, becomes confused when next it beholds the mere quality of honor usurping the stage from God. Helena's own miscalculation of her providential role will be discussed in a later chapter. What needs to be emphasized here, where Divine Providence has just been thematically enunciated, is the fact that the playwright firmly reasserts the court's secular perspective. Helena has easily overcome the doubts of the elders—the Countess, Lafew, the King—but she has yet to encounter the skepticism of the young aristocrats. Instead of dwelling upon Lafew's admiration of “things supernatural” or on Parolles' grandiloquence, we should notice Bertram's silence. It suggests he does not find the miracle particularly uplifting.²²

Neither do the other young noblemen. Addressing herself to the “parcel / Of noble bachelors” who are at the King's bestowing, Helena proceeds with diffidence in this most unnatural, “frank election”:

HEL.
                                                                                                                                                      Gentlemen,
Heaven hath through me restor'd the king to health.
ALL.
We understand it, and thank heaven for you.
HEL.
I am a simple maid, and therein wealthiest
That I protest I simply am a maid.
Please it your majesty, I have done already.
The blushes in my cheeks thus whisper me:
“We blush that thou should'st choose, but, be refused,
Let the white death sit on thy cheek forever,
We'll ne'er come there again.”
KING.
                                                                                          Make choice, and see,
Who shuns thy love shuns all his love in me.

(63-73)

Helena's metaphor of death is a premonition of the consequences her choice may have. On the surface, her virgin modesty is what inhibits her from making her desires public. More profoundly, she appreciates, as the King and Lafew cannot, the momentousness of the occasion. A refusal from Bertram will annihilate her. But the “death” she intuits is more than personal. She is about to risk defining herself in the mirror of the court as Bertram's countess. Her deliberation as she abandons her maiden security is like the deliberation of the courtier who relinquishes a comfortably private identity for the sake of honor. Either choice is an act of self-transcendence that radically alters the courtier's or cortigiana's orientation towards their society. Their affirmation of individual integrity demonstrates a vital alternative to the honor offered by the King. It creates a moment of trepidation in the court, as in the opening scene of King Lear, and changes the court's actual image of honor. Helena's self-transcending “election” is therefore heroic, and it sets the example for Bertram, whose fateful response raises him to his epic role.

Elated by the success of their “miracle,” the King and Helena overlook the courtier's loyalty to his secular honor. Editors who follow Johnson think that Lafew misunderstands Helena's exchanges with the lords and that she refuses them, not they her. Thus, the New Shakespeare editors assume that “all three lords who do speak are very ready to accept this delightful maid at the King's hands. … Despite her blushes, Helena thoroughly enjoys this interview of the candidates for her hand.” This misreading makes light of Helena's premonition, and it ignores the vital issue of honor contested here between the generations. The young lords' icy politeness masks a contempt of which Helena is quite sensible. As she says to one of them, “The honour, sir, that flames in your fair eyes / Before I speak, too threat'ningly replies” (80-81). “Do they all deny her?” asks Lafew, observing the scene. Although his personal interest makes him anxious about Helena's success, we may take it that his fears are well-grounded. Lafew's choric comments elsewhere in the play are always accurate, as Price demonstrates.²³

This remarkable scene, a spectacle of worldly honor set off with urbane references to heaven, captures the mirror of the court at that critical moment when its collective being is touched by change (transition; metaphorically, death). Helena must fear in Bertram the same transcendence she experiences in herself. The aristocratic gesture of going beyond oneself takes any of several forms: the hero's self-sacrifice, the warrior's vow, the nobleman's characteristically impersonal regard for his family and his fame, the courtier's self-deprecation or sprezzatura. Bertram must reject the King's gift to transcend and complete himself.

I said earlier that Shakespeare rarely prescribes manners for the courtier, but he does tutor his noblemen specifically in self-transcendence—not only in the Sonnets, but quite explicitly in Ulysses' lesson to the self-regarding Achilles (Tro. [Troilus and Cressida] III.iii.96-120). Ulysses tells the sulking hero that

                                                  man, how dearly ever parted,
How much in having, or without or in,
Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,
Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection.

“Reflection” means just the opposite of thinking about oneself as Achilles is doing. It refers to the act whereby the nobleman gives up, alienates, or transcends his private image of himself in order to find his greater, heroic self in the public mirror. As Ulysses says, the “position … is familiar”:

No man is the lord of any thing,
Though in and of him there be much consisting,
Till he communicate his parts with others;
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,
Till he behold them formed in th' applause
Where th' are extended.

Before he can “communicate his parts with others,” the nobleman must expect to figuratively die in himself, in the manner of which Helena has a presentiment. Ulysses' doctrine cuts deeper than the denunciation of self-love that exercises Crites in Cynthia's Revels. The philosopher seeks to know himself, but the aristocrat, as Ulysses' lesson teaches, cannot rest with contemplative knowledge. He gives a further, reflexive twist to the Delphic injunction. The aristocratic courtier knows that he is not what he is—knows that he is other than himself. This means he can realize himself only in transcending himself. The Renaissance aristocrat aims at self-transcendence, not at self-fashioning. He relinquishes introspection for praxis. He appropriates the image in the mirror—the image of an actual self participating in events (history). The courtier's self and his public image become interchangeable. Their concrete realization is his honor.

Bertram is eager to realize himself “by reflection” in the mirror of his honor. Although his first moves appear uncertain, Bertram understands honor in its contemporaneous, courtly-epic scope better than the King does. The honor offered by the King is circumscribed and false. Bertram thinks he knows that Helena and her honor are no part of the transcendent honor he means to achieve or “communicate … with others.” Her miracle now impedes his career, and he sees he must remove her. As he will write in his letter to her at Rossillion, “Till I have no wife, I have nothing in France” (III.ii.73).

This is Bertram's original discovery of himself at court. Rejecting Helena, he rejects the self that he is (his place at court as the King's ward) and appeals to the self that he has yet to become—the honor he expects to win. This ulterior self which he identifies with his honor is as yet indeterminate; insofar as it is other, Bertram does not possess it. Like honor, it must be communicated to become his; yet he can only communicate what he possesses. The play will solve this riddle reflexively. Helena is the clue, representing both what Bertram rejects and what he seeks. With Helena's aid, Bertram will provide his own destiny. But his self-providence operates indirectly. He does not fashion himself. Transcending himself rather, he acts prudentially to form the other self, the self of the mirror. That self is his honor, and he is reciprocally fashioned by it.

Even though he leaves the court, Bertram's actions henceforth take their significance largely from his heroic deliberation. Bertram's initial discovery of this heroic prudence confirms him a genuine courtier and subject of the King. His self-conscious virtue requires proving in the mirror that extends beyond the French court. The crisis of honor within the court forces the court to turn outward, and to rediscover its epic ideal through praxis.

Notes

1. See Northrop Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58-73. “New Comedy is certainly concerned with the maneuvering of a young man toward a young woman, and marriage is the tonic chord on which it ends. The normal comic resolution is the surrender of the senex to the hero, never the reverse. Shakespeare tried to reverse the pattern in All's Well That Ends Well, where the king of France forces Bertram to marry Helena, and the critics have not yet stopped making faces over it.” Frye's essay has been reprinted in Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. James Calderwood (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 50.

   The rather slight stage history of All's Well since the mid-eighteenth century is related in Joseph Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of All's Well That Ends Well and Its Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). Some recent productions of All's Well are discussed below.

2. The King's phrase, II.iii.151, when Bertram balks at Helena's choosing him. See All's Well That Ends Well, New Arden edition, ed. G. K. Hunter (London: Methuen & Co., 1959). Unless noted otherwise, the play and its Boccaccian source are both cited from this edition. Other Shakespearean quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

3. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Graham Storey (London: Longman, 1961), 96-97. This posthumously published lecture dates from 1950-56.

4. For the notion that Shakespeare has structured All's Well as a “revenge comedy,” and so makes Bertram “wholly responsive to his own invention,” see Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 59-60.

5. Properly speaking, Shakespeare dramatizes his materials, whereas the word “thematize” might imply he is doing philosophy instead of making a play. If we understand by theme not a literary motif discerned only by the reader in the study, but a topic of cultivated discussion made dramatically accessible, then Shakespeare often handles his basic themes in such a way as to deconstruct them. Even the title, All's Well That Ends Well, demands a radical interpretation. …

6. M. C. Bradbrook, “Virtue Is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All's Well That Ends Well,” The Review of English Studies, n.s., 1 (1950): 289-301. The phrases quoted are from pp. 290 and 296-97. Bradbrook condensed the essay while adding some pessimistic remarks about Bertram in her Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), 162-70.

7. Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” 50.

8. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy; see also Hunter, ed., All's Well, introduction, p. xxix: “From this point of view [i.e., that of theatrical performance), and it is ultimately the crucial one, criticism of All's Well has failed, for it has failed to provide a context within which the genuine virtues of the play can be appreciated.” Since Hunter wrote this in 1957, more than a half-dozen successful, generally acclaimed productions have been directed by Guthrie (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1959), Houseman (Stratford, Connecticut, 1959), Barton (Stratford/Aldwych, 1967-68), David Jones (Stratford, Ontario, 1977), Moshinsky (BBC-TV, 1980), Nunn (Stratford/Barbican, 1981-82), and Barry Kyle (Stratford/Barbican, 1989-90). Many details of these productions are usefully collected by J. L. Styan, All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

9. Muriel St. Clare Byrne, “The Shakespeare Season at the Old Vic, 1958-59, and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1959,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959):562; Nicholas Shrimpton, “Shakespeare Performances in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, 1981-82,” Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983):150; Robertson Davies, “The Players,” in Tyrone Guthrie and Robertson Davies, Renown at Stratford: A Record of the Shakespeare Festival in Canada, 1953 (Toronto: Clark, Irwin, 1953), 75; Styan, All's Well, 23.

10. Shrimpton, “Shakespeare Performances,” 150. The Barton production played Bertram “with an icy correctness of demeanor,” in Styan's view (All's Well, 22), and the Moshinksy Bertram (Ian Charleson) was blandly taciturn. For the Jones version, see below. Reviewing the recent production by Barry Kyle, Barbara Everett (review of All's Well That Ends Well, TLS, 27 Oct./2 Nov. 1989, 1185) found a Bertram invested with “a younger brother's wistful affection for Helena,” with the result that he “never comes near that brute male charm which actually overwhelms her; robbed of its aristocratic certitude, Bertram's part is almost unactable.”

    Perhaps one lesson of these modern performances is that a producer should decide not between an amiable Bertram and a snob, but between an aristocrat capable or incapable of reflecting upon his experience. One reviewer thought that in the first Nunn version, Gwilym became “a savage Strindbergian monster” (Styan, All's Well, 22). If he has played a Bertram who is excessively foolish, or who is throughout ruled by his impulses, the actor may find it hard to show consideration, like an angel, overtaking his character in the final thirty lines.

11. Byrne, “The Shakespeare Season,” 557, calls Bertram's couplet “the worst,” and adds, “I did not hear him speak it. I did not knowingly shut my ears. Actress and producer simply persuaded me at the critical moment to be all eyes and feeling.” For the other quotations, see Russell Jackson's review of the Nunn production, “All's Well That Ends Well at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre,” Cahiers Elisabèthains 22 (1982):98; Joseph Price, “The Interpretation of Shakespeare in the Theatre,” in Directions in Literary Criticism, ed. Stanley Weintraub and Philip Young (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973), 78; Styan, All's Well, 116; Roger Warren, “Shakespeare at Stratford and London,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983):80.

    Price finds that in one review “even the much-maligned reconciliation was justified in critical theory reminiscent of Langer, Frye, and Barber” (“Interpretation,” 80). Cf. R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays (London: Routledge, 1971), 17: “An account of the play that focusses on the dramatic action suggests a different estimate of All's Well, as something other than festive comedy.” In his recent Stratford production, Barry Kyle, aiming apparently at another sort of festive ending, “floods his stage with actual small persons, ‘Children of Estate Workers,’ who lose his heroine all the effect of her return home to Rossillion at last” (Everett, review of All's Well).

12. See Roger Warren, “Comedies and Histories at Two Stratfords, 1977,” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978):145-46. The description of the Moshinsky film is by G. K. Hunter (review of the BBC-TV production, Shakespeare Quarterly 33 [1982]:76); quoted in Styan, All's Well, 114.

13. The remark about Bertram's speech going better in the theater is by J. C. Trewin, Going to Shakespeare (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978), 187 (quoted in Styan, All's Well, 115). For a reading of the marriage of Bertram and Helena as the symbol of their “acceptance of their own faulty parental experiences,” see W. Speed Hill, “Marriage as Destiny: An Essay on All's Well That Ends Well,” English Literary Review 5 (1975):344-59. Hill remarks interestingly that “Bertram's education as a courtier is the essential subject of the play” (p. 357).

14. Jay Halio (“All's Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 [1964]:33) thinks that “if Shakespeare fails to supply us with sufficient verbal clues as to Betram's true character … it is quite possible that he depended (if unduly) upon the implications of his plot and (more plausibly) upon the acting itself.” Halio develops Bradbrook's point that Bertram's nobility is from the start problematic and that Parolles is “symptomatic” of Bertram's self-betrayal. Jonas Barish, in his good introduction to All's Well, in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), says of Bertram's initial rejection of Helena, “He misconceives his aristocratic heritage, at this moment, as a simple possession, rather than as a quality of spirit or an ideal to be realized” (p. 366).

15. Parolles' paradoxical argument that Helena's virginity betrays “self-love … the most inhibited sin in the canon” (I.i.142-43) parrots the courtly gospel of Cynthia's Revels. Asotus in the same play, and several other Jonsonian characters in Every Man Out of His Humor about a year before (1599), evidently made the foppish exclamation, “O Lord, sir!” current on the stage.

16. See Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), especially chapters 4-6. Besides Huizinga's examples of honor that reveal “the primitive and spontaneous asceticism … at the bottom of the chivalric ideal” (p. 77), canto 29 of Orlando Furioso supplies a striking illustration of the heroic nobleman and his queer lack of what we call self-consciousness. Rodomonte, having in his drunkenness been tricked by Isabella into chopping off her head, erects a shrine to her and her dead fiancé. He then builds a narrow bridge over the nearby river and challenges all passengers, promising their spoils as trophies for the couple's tomb. The Saracen thus translates his guilt into aggression, compels the world to pay for his error, and institutes a ritual conflict symbolizing his determination to hew to his honor and to Muslim law (if he gets drunk again or forfeits his self-mastery, he can atone by falling into water). The chivalric hero regularly uses his vow to define himself.

17. See below for the differing interpretations of the lines in which Helena steps forth to make her choice. In the next act (III.ii.79-82), the Countess repeats the elders' indignation at the rejection of Helena.

    For a discussion of the older generation's sexual jealousy in All's Well, see Arthur Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chapter 5. Kirsch takes up Rossiter's hint that Shakespeare had been reading Montaigne's essay, “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” in Florio's translation (see Rossiter, Angel with Horns, 98-99).

18. An example of psychological abstraction can be found in Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development, 40-41; he thinks this “forced marriage to Helena deflects [Bertram] from his quest for a masculine identity and toward a sexuality he fears” (owing to his associating Helena with his mother and hence with Oedipal feelings that threaten to overwhelm his “precarious masculinity”).

19. Andrew Lang, “All's Well That Ends Well,” Harper's Magazine 85 (1892):220-22.

20. The sick king, as the example of King Lear reminds us, “was always something more than a metaphor for Shakespeare” (Bradbrook, “Virtue Is the True Nobility,” 294). Bradbrook interprets this symbol in All's Well as an admonition against the perils of the court. “A sick or ageing ruler left the courtiers exposed to all the natural dangers of the place without restraint.” In Bradbrook's view (Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, 170), Shakespeare missed or abandoned his original aim of showing in Bertram the “fashioning of a gentleman.” Bradbrook is right about the playwright's original plan (which he does, however, complete), but she gives a sentimental, uncourtly meaning to “gentleman.” Shakespeare's courtier knows when to “condescend” to inferiors, but his chief study is his honor; without that, he is no “gentleman.”

    Significantly, Jung puts just the opposite interpretation upon the figure of the sick king, a fundamental symbol of the alchemists. Jung maintains that the sick or infertile king in myths and fairy tales corresponds to the ennui or depression that always signals the start of the “individuation” process.

21. Commenting in her New Penguin edition of the play ([New York: Penguin Books, 1970], 176), when Parolles says “If you will have it [i.e., the account of the miracle] in showing, you shall read it in what-do-ye-call there,” Barbara Everett suggests that Lafew does not read off a title, as Hunter and several producers of the play have him doing. Even if Parolles refers to a broadside ballad or a print, says Everett, Lafew takes “showing” to mean manifestation, and so formulates its meaning in an elegant courtly motto. Everett's interpretation brings out the self-conscious effect of Lafew's summary, which is a good example of courtly reflexiveness or self-mirroring.

22. Bertram says next to nothing in this dialogue, and his silence has troubled the editors who have rearranged the speeches in an effort to mute Parolles' verbosity and repair Bertram's “meekness.” The Globe editors reduce Parolles to nothing but an echo, and Sisson simply omits Bertram from the entry (see Hunter's note on the passage). But as Everett (ed., All's Well, 176) remarks, “The characters in this play do have odd angles: the youth Bertram has his meekness, and the fool Parolles his moments of strength.” I think Bertram's silence argues rather that he is not much more interested in the miraculous cure than he was in the King's “notorious” disease, of which Lafew had to inform him (I.i.30-33).

23. All's Well That Ends Well, The New Shakespeare, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 146, 148; Price, The Unfortunate Comedy, 155-56.

Works Cited

Bradbrook, M. C. “Virtue Is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All's Well That Ends Well.” The Review of English Studies, n.s., 1 (1950): 289-301. (Reprinted in Muir, ed., Shakespeare: The Comedies.)

Byrne, Muriel St. Clare. “The Shakespeare Season at the Old Vic, 1958-59, and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1959.” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 556-67.

Frye, Northrop. “The Argument of Comedy.” In English Institute Essays, 1948. Edited by D. A. Robertson, Jr. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. (Reprinted in Calderwood, ed., Essays in Shakespearean Criticism.)

Lang, Andrew. “All's Well That Ends Well.” Harper's Magazine 85 (1892): 213-27.

Price, Joseph G. “The Interpretation of Shakespeare in the Theatre.” In Directions in Literary Criticism, edited by Stanley Weintraub and Philip Young. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973.

———. The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of All's Well That Ends Well and Its Critics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968.

Rossiter, A. P. Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare. Edited by Graham Storey. London: Longman, 1961.

Shrimpton, Nicholas. “Shakespeare Performances in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, 1981-2.” Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983): 149-51.

Warren, Roger. “Comedies and Histories at Two Stratfords, 1977.” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978): 145-52.