SOURCE: Friedman, Michael D. “‘Service Is No Heritage’: Bertram and the Ideology of Procreation.” Studies in Philology 92, no. 1 (winter 1995): 80-101.

[In the following essay, Friedman focuses on the tension between Bertram's individualized sexual desires and the social necessity of legitimate procreation portrayed in All's Well That Ends Well.]

Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;
The world will be thy widow and still weep,
That thou no form of thee hast left behind
.....No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murd'rous shame commits.

(Sonnet 9, ll. 3-6, 13-14)

In contrast to the argument employed in the first eight of Shakespeare's procreation sonnets, Sonnet 9 abandons the strategy of exhorting the young man to beget a son for the benefit of his own self-perpetuation and turns instead to the concerns of “the world,” which maintains a keen interest in his failure thus far to produce an heir. This social dimension of the procreative process takes the form of familial pressure on the young man to carry out his duty to pass down the honor of his house for others' sake as well as his own. Robert Crosman, who recently argues for Southampton as the target of Shakespeare's exhortations, suggests, “If the sonnets are not addressed to Southampton, then they are addressed to someone very much like him: a vain young aristocrat with a beautiful mother and a dead father, whose family was eager to see him marry and beget an heir, but who was not himself eager to put aside self-admiration, casual sex, and perhaps crushes on older men.”¹ Such a description of the young man of the Sonnets also fits another of Shakespeare's creations, Bertram of All's Well that Ends Well, who finds himself in a similar situation vis-à-vis his own family. Bertram's recently widowed mother supports the designs of Helena, a waiting gentlewoman, to become her son's wife. By curing the King's illness, Helena earns the right to marry the Count, but Bertram disdains her lowly origins and refuses to consummate the marriage. Instead, he flees with his mentor Parolles to the Tuscan wars, where he attempts to seduce Diana, a virtuous maid. The play at this point goes beyond the situation described in Sonnet 9, for it enacts the ultimate triumph of the “makeless wife,” Helena, who beguiles the Count into unwittingly fulfilling his ancestral responsibility by means of a bed-trick. She conceives a child through this union, and “the world” eventually has its way.

Despite the fact that Helena's conspiracy achieves its desired effect, All's Well does not resolve the original contradiction between Bertram's desire to engage in unfettered sexual liaisons and his social obligation to father legitimate heirs. Indeed, Bertram's interactions with the predominantly male society of the court tend to exacerbate this conflict by encouraging him in both directions at once. The King urges Bertram to live up to the example set by his father, a family man and a soldier, but the sexual ethics associated with these roles, as the play presents them, are seemingly incompatible. While the institution of marriage promotes monogamous sexuality for the purpose of procreation, the code of military behavior condones the illicit seduction of young maids as analogous to the slaughter of enemies on the battlefield. At the end of the play, Bertram is first celebrated for his service in the wars, then condemned by his king and mother for his metaphorically equivalent act of military “service” performed, as Bertram thinks, upon Diana.² The moment of Helena's climactic reappearance at Rossillion dramatizes the ostensible resolution of this contradiction, for it demonstrates to Bertram that a man may love like a soldier and a father at the same time. Helena's bed trick allows Bertram to experience the thrill of licentious sex, then her pregnancy both legitimizes that experience and presents the Count with the fulfillment of his lineal duty. Of course, this resolution is merely imaginary, for as Janet Adelman points out, “the act imagined to have been deeply illicit is magically revealed as having been licit all along.”³ Nevertheless, Bertram submits to this illusory solution and accepts his designated social position as both soldier and father.

In Althusserian terminology, the conclusion of All's Well exemplifies the way in which ideology situates the subject (Bertram) in a “‘lived’ … relation to the real,”⁴ which, in the words of James Kavanagh, provides the subject with “a set of pre-conscious image-concepts in which men and women see and experience, before they think about, their place within a given social formation.”⁵ Ideology, in this context, refers to “a system of representations that offer the subject an imaginary, compelling sense of reality in which crucial contradictions of self and social order appear resolved.”⁶ In Bertram's case, the bed trick and the resulting pregnancy offer him just such a “compelling sense of reality,” which seems to resolve the conflict between his individual desire and the needs of the social order. However, the text also encounters some difficulty in attempting to reconcile the lustful, “wicked” intent of Bertram's act of seduction and the chaste, “lawful” meaning of his conjugal union with his wife. As Helena says to the Widow and Diana before the implementation of the bed trick,

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

(3.7.44-48)⁷

Faced with the nagging ambiguity of the deed that she and Bertram are about to perform, Helena cannot avoid the conclusion that the act is both “lawful” and “sinful” at the same time. Unable to resolve this contradiction, she simply dismisses it in favor of direct action to reclaim Bertram for the social order: “But let's about it.” Helena inevitably falls silent when she encounters the notion that lascivious male sexuality may be turned to legitimate procreative use,⁸ for such a paradox contradicts the cultural assumption that, as Sonnet 129 puts it, “lust in action” is “Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame” (ll. 1-2).⁹ Nevertheless, the text also highlights the biological truth that illicit copulation is no more “wasteful,” in a reproductive sense, than married sexuality; the product of an extramarital coupling is simply not recognized by society as a legitimate heir.

Therefore, the written text of All's Well manifests both the successful reconciliation of the subject to the social order and the unresolved contradictions which ought to impede such resolution. This counterposition of contrary ideological elements is one of the characteristic strengths of Shakespearean drama, but as Kavanagh tells us, the allowance of discursive space to opposed ideological components

also destabilizes the reconciliation effect that the text seeks to achieve within a given cultural ideology. The achievement of the appropriate effect with a text that opens itself so to insurgent ideological positions becomes more heavily reliant on the context of extra-textual ideological, political, and economic practices that surround and enmesh the text, and manage its consumption.¹⁰

Critical discourse represents one extra-textual practice which “develops and realizes the ideological effects of a literary text.”¹¹ When such a text is specifically dramatic, however, performative discourse may also serve to manage its consumption, providing a context in which the “reconciliation effect” may achieve stability within a particular cultural ideology. As an examination of All's Well on the stage will demonstrate, the performance choices of directors and actors have tended to eliminate or distract attention away from conflicts present in the written text, thereby averting ideological discord between the performed text and its spectators. Following a discussion of the competing ideologies of procreation at work in All's Well, this study will conclude with a consideration of the production history of Act 5, scene 3, with special emphasis on the moment of Helena's return, pregnant, to Rossillion, which offers various manifestations of the ideological function of performance.

Upon Bertram's arrival at the Court of France, the King immediately comments on the young Count's physical likeness to his predecessor:

                                                            Youth, thou bear'st thy father's face;
Frank nature, rather curious than in haste,
Hath well compos'd thee. Thy father's moral parts
Mayest thou inherit too!

(1.2.19-22)

This resemblance is at the heart of Bertram's conflict with society, for as R. B. Parker points out, his friends and family, “eager to see a potential for nobility in him that he does not really possess … keep saying they hope he will live up to the virtues and achievements of his famous father.”¹² The Count's responsibility to uphold the family name is symbolized by his ancestral ring, which he later hesitates to give to Diana when she asks for a token of his affection:

DIA:
                                                                                Give me that ring.
BER:
I'll lend it thee, my dear, but have no power
To give it from me.
DIA:
                                                                                Will you not, my lord?
BER:
It is an honour 'longing to our house,
Bequeathed down from many ancestors,
Which were the greatest obloquy i' th' world
In me to lose.

(4.2.39-45)

Bertram's ring represents not only his duty to emulate his honorable forbears, but also his link in a chain of inheritance that has endured for several generations. In order to avoid “the greatest obloquy i' th' world,” Bertram must both keep the ring (the honor of his house handed down to him intact by his father) and eventually produce a “sequent issue” (5.3.196) to whom he may bequeath it. Thus, Bertram's responsibility extends to future generations as well as to the past; he owes it to his father and his son to serve as the intermediary between them. As the poet reminds the young man in Sonnet 13, “You had a father; let your son say so” (l. 14).

Despite his duty to his house, Bertram gives away the symbol of his honor to a woman who cannot produce for him a legitimate heir, thereby endangering his link in the generational chain in both directions at once. The discrepancy between Bertram's ancestral obligations and his wartime behavior is one symptom of the conflicts within and between the ideologies which dominate the civilian and military spheres. At the moment of Bertram's first appearance at Court, the King urges the Count to emulate his father, the famous soldier, but when the Tuscan wars arise, the King prohibits the very emulation he ordains. Bertram is “commanded here, and kept a coil with / ‘Too young,’ and ‘The next year’ and ‘'Tis too early’” (2.1.27-28). Frustrated by this contradiction, Bertram must stand by and hear the King salute the other youths about to embark in their fathers' footsteps:

KING:
                                                            Farewell, young lords.
Whether I live or die, be you the sons
Of worthy Frenchmen; let Higher Italy—
Those bated that inherit but the fall
Of the last monarchy—see that you come
Not to woo honour, but to wed it, when
The bravest questant shrinks: find what you seek,
That fame may cry you loud. I say farewell.
1 LORD:
Health at your bidding serve your majesty!
KING:
Those girls of Italy, take heed of them;
They say our French lack language to deny
If they demand; beware of being captives
Before you serve.

(2.1.10-22)

The King's two speeches in this passage illustrate the dual and conflicting codes of sexual ethics impressed upon the minds of the young French courtiers. Their sovereign's first command “Not to woo honour, but to wed it” employs the language of love and courtship to describe the acquisition of glory on the battlefield; honor is personified as a woman with whom the young solider must not dally, but enjoy only within the confines of marriage. In the second speech, the King reverses the metaphorical relationship between love and war and speaks of courtship as if it were battle. Women, specifically “Those girls of Italy” are no longer personifications of honor, but enemies plotting to take the soldiers captive. Contradicting his earlier mandate of committed sexuality, the King warns his young lords to “serve,” both literally in the field and metaphorically in the beds of the Italian girls, before becoming prisoners of war or love.

Bertram's father, as his own generation remembers him, was a paragon of “service.” The invalid King in particular looks back nostalgically on his military comradeship with the former Count of Rossillion and tells his son,

I would I had that corporal soundness now,
As when thy father and myself in friendship
First tried our soldiership. He did look far
Into the service of the time, and was
Discipled of the bravest. He lasted long,
But on us both did haggish age steal on,
And wore us out of act.

(1.2.24-30)

In time, both the King and Bertram's father were eventually worn “out of act,” unable to perform their military “service.” This passage refers, in one sense, to the elder soldiers' unfitness for battle, but it also glances at their inability to perform the sexual “act,” which the King blames on the advancement of “haggish age.” Again, the soldier's enemy is personified as a woman, this time a sorceress who steals upon the unsuspecting warrior to sap his strength and virility. Plagued by this hag, the King now languishes of a fistula, but the courtier Lafew describes the ailment as a form of impotence which the alluring but virtuous Helena may cure by replenishing the King's sexual vitality:

                                                  I have seen a medicine
That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With sprightly fire and motion; whose simple touch
Is powerful to araise King Pippen, nay,
To give great Charlemain a pen in's hand
And write to her a love-line.

(2.1.71-77)

Old Lafew himself, in conversation with Parolles, laments the fact that age has also stolen away his own potency:

PAR:
My lord, you do me most insupportable vexation.
LAF:
I would it were hell-pains for thy sake, and my poor doing eternal; for doing I am past, as I will by thee, in what motion age will give me leave. Exit

(2.3.227-30)

Arthur Kirsch speculates that Lafew's “compulsive interest” in Parolles stems in part from his exasperation with his own “declining sexual powers”;¹³ Lafew is well past “doing” while the younger soldier is not. This envious scorn of youthful sexual capacity characterizes the elder generation's disdain for the younger men in the play, especially Bertram and Parolles.¹⁴

Faced with diminished capabilities, the old Count, as the King recalls, found no more purpose to his life: “‘Let me not live,’ quoth he, / ‘After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff / Of younger spirits’” (1.2.58-60). This wish eventually comes true, for the old Count's death clears the way for his young son to possess the “oil” or potency his father's flame of desire came to lack. As the Countess, excusing Bertram's earlier disobedience, says to the King near the end of the play,

                                                                                'Tis past, my liege,
And I beseech your majesty to make it
Natural rebellion done i' th' blade of youth,
When oil and fire, too strong for reason's force,
O'erbears it and burns on.

(5.3.4-8)

The King agrees that the fire and oil of youth (its will and its ability to put that will into action) is “too strong for reason's force” and acts against its own self-interest. Helena clarifies the explicitly sexual component of this metaphor when she explains to the Widow that Bertram's lust for Diana burns more intensely than his devotion to the symbol of his family's honor: “This ring he holds / In most rich choice; yet, in his idle fire, / To buy his will it would not seem too dear, / Howe'er repented after” (3.7.25-28). The youthful “abuse” of sexual capacity particularly angers the impotent Lafew, who observes the scene of Helena's choice of a husband from a distance and remarks on her suitors' apparent rejection of her proposals, “Do they all deny her? And they were sons of mine I'd have them whipp'd, or I would send them to th' Turk to make eunuchs of” (2.3.86-88). In Old Lafew's mind, any young man who foolishly passes up the chance to enjoy Helena's physical charms within the context of marriage does not deserve to possess sexual capability in the first place.

Angered by the youthful misuse of sexual potency, the King and Lafew pressure the young lords to apply their virile energies toward the reproduction of the elder generation's version of the social order. Helena's cure, although it seems to restore the King's own sexual vigor,¹⁵ cannot remove the class barriers which disqualify her as an appropriate partner in the propagation of his royal name.¹⁶ He may, however, bestow enough wealth upon Helena to make her what he considers an eligible match for Bertram, through whom the King may vicariously experience a legitimate consummation with Helena and thereby perpetuate the current social structure of the Court.¹⁷ The King's concern with procreation, not merely sexuality, is evident in his description of Helena's fitness to produce offspring for the house of Rossillion:

                                                            She is young, wise, fair;
In these to nature she's immediate heir,
And these breed honour; that is honour's scorn
Which challenges itself as honour's born
And is not like the sire.

(2.3.131-35)

After praising Helena's ability to “breed honour” for Bertram, the King moves the other direction along the chain of inheritance and criticizes Bertram's failure to live up to his father's example of honorable behavior. Ironically, Bertram's own notion of honor, with its emphasis on class consciousness, forbids the type of “humility” and disregard for distinctions in blood for which his father has been commended (1.2.44). Given the Count's present refusal to act as the link between generations, the King endeavors to ensure the continuation of the house of Rossillion by asserting his power to enforce Bertram's cooperation in the reproductive process: “It is in us to plant thine honour where / We please to have it grow” (2.3.156-57). As if by some form of artificial insemination, the King intends to plant the seed of Bertram's honor in Helena's womb, but Bertram foils this plan by running away without bedding his wife. Until the contradiction between the sexual roles of soldier and father is resolved, Bertram cannot be compelled to act “honorably” in the eyes of the Court.

Once Bertram escapes to the Tuscan wars, he leaves behind him the cultural expectations of the Court and enters the military domain, where the concept of “service” governs both battlefield and bedroom activity. In both arenas, the object is to kill one's enemy: either to slay the soldier in the field or to be the death of a maid's virginity. While the civilian social order openly glorifies the first type of service, it publicly condemns (yet privately winks at) the second, branding illicit seduction a barren, sterile pursuit that does not serve social ends. However, a competing military ideology espoused primarily by Parolles resolves this contradiction for Bertram by asserting that “Loss of virginity is rational increase” (1.1.125). In other words, all copulation, even “service” performed outside marriage, is potentially procreative; therefore, a man may kill and bring life in the same sexual act. Although Parolles' own soldiership is debatable, as a miles gloriosus whose name means “words,” he functions as a spokesman for an exaggerated version of the military ideology that “true” soldiers, like the brothers Dumaine, secretly disparage. Bertram shares the braggart soldier's attitude until his exposure in Act 4, which appears to invalidate Parolles' construction of reality and to prepare the Count for his re-entry into the civilian social order.

We first hear details of Bertram's great success in the wars from Diana and her mother, who discuss the Count's triumphs prior to Helena's arrival in Florence:

DIA:
They say the French count has done most honourable service.
WID:
It is reported that he has taken their great'st commander, and that with his own hand he slew the duke's brother.

(3.5.3-7)

Just as Bertram's “honorable service” in war involves the slaying of the duke's brother, his supposed seduction of Diana is described privately by the second Captain Dumaine as the slaughter of her virginity: “He hath perverted a young gentlewoman here in Florence, of a most chaste renown, and this night he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour” (4.3.13-15). As G. K. Hunter notes, “To ‘flesh a hound with the spoil’ was to give it some of the flesh of the hunted animal to eat, to stimulate its hunting instincts. So, Bertram's will (lust) is to be fleshed (rewarded and stimulated) with the honour of the girl it has hunted down.”¹⁸ Dumaine, who has himself accompanied the Count on the hunt for Diana (3.6), now somewhat hypocritically censures Bertram for tracking down his innocent prey, then killing and devouring her honor. In Dumaine's view, the Count has taken the first step toward demonstrating the violent and voracious sexual appetite ascribed to him by Parolles: “I knew the young count to be a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds” (4.3.211-13).¹⁹

All's Well also insistently portrays Bertram's pursuit of Diana as a martial campaign with sexual conquest as its objective.²⁰ As Helena tells the Widow, “The count he woos your daughter, / Lays down his wanton siege before her beauty, / Resolv'd to carry her” (3.7.17-19). Diana herself reproaches Bertram for attempting to carry out this form of military service:

BER:
                                                                                                              I love thee
By love's own sweet constraint, and will for ever
Do thee all rights of service.
DIA:
                                                                                          Ay, so you serve us
Till we serve you; but when you have our roses,
You barely leave our thorns to prick ourselves,
And mock us with our bareness.

(4.2.15-20)

As Diana knows, Bertram intends to pluck the rose of her chastity and leave her bare of honor, an image which John F. Adams argues represents the “barrenness” of dishonorable sexual union.²¹ The Clown Lavatch, telling the Countess his reasons for wishing to marry, agrees that carnal service outside the bonds of matrimony is deficient and unfruitful: “Service is no heritage, and I think I shall never have the blessing of God till I have issue a' my body; for they say barnes are blessings” (1.3.21-24). As Elizabeth Sacks comments,

The word “service” is double-edged, referring both to domestic servitude and sexual service, and the Clown's speech thus acquires a second meaning: “There is no future in sexual dalliance; I must marry and found a family.” The sexual pun on “service” points up the [“fact” that] illicit sexual encounter is sterile, offering no promise of children. Only marriage assures survival—“heritage,” “blessing of God”—through procreation.²²

The proverbial nature of the Clown's speech (“Service is no heritage”—“they say barnes are blessings”) suggests that Lavatch articulates the civilian social order's ideology of procreation. Bertram, as a subject, must also come to accept the sterility of service if he is to assume his place within that social formation.

However, Parolles' military code of ethics offers Bertram a different ideology which resolves temporarily the conflict between his desire for uncommitted sex and the wastefulness of such activity. According to Parolles (and biological fact), episodes of illicit sexuality are potentially no less procreative than conjugal relations, and a soldier's brief encounter with a maid will not necessarily leave her barren:

HEL:
You have some stain of soldier in you; let me ask you a question. Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricado it against him?
PAR:
Keep him out.
HEL:
But he assails; and our virginity, though valiant, in the defence yet is weak. Unfold to us some warlike resistance.
PAR:
There is none. Man setting down before you will undermine you and blow you up.

(1.1.109-17)²³

A soldier “setting down” before a virgin, like Bertram laying down his “wanton siege” before Diana's beauty, may easily blow her up, swelling her womb with his unborn child. Although the military context of these remarks implies that Parolles refers to martial “service,” he does not specify that such a loss of virginity takes place outside the context of marriage; indeed, the question of marriage simply does not arise. Parolles merely argues against virginity as an impediment to the natural, fruitful process of procreation: “Virginity, by being once lost, may be ten times found, by being ever kept it is ever lost. … There's little can be said in't; 'tis against the rule of nature. To speak on the part of virginity is to accuse your mothers, which is most infallible disobedience” (1.1.128-35). The extent to which Bertram has come to identify with this sense of reality is evident in the reasoning he uses to try to talk Diana into bed with him: “And now you should be as your mother was / When your sweet self was got” (4.2.9-10).²⁴ Like Parolles' appeal to the mothers of virgins, Bertram's reference to the sexuality of Diana's mother affirms procreation while avoiding the issue of marriage altogether.

Just after Bertram's wedding, Parolles voices overt opposition to wedlock in the proverbial language of his competing ideology: “A young man married is a man that's marr'd” (2.3.294). If military service itself is procreative, then there is no need for the restrictive, emasculating bonds of matrimony:

He wears his honour in a box unseen
That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home,
Spending his manly marrow in her arms,
Which should sustain the bound and high curvet
Of Mars's fiery steed.

(2.3.275-79)

Ironically, Parolles views married sexuality as a wasteful activity because it saps the “manly marrow,” the vital juices which sustain the soldier's potency and allow him to perform his military “service.” The belief that the act of intercourse drains the life out of a man reappears two scenes later, when the Clown informs the Countess that Bertram has run away from the Court:

CLO:
Nay, there is some comfort in the news, some comfort; your son will not be kill'd so soon as I thought he would.
COUNT:
Why should he be kill'd?
CLO:
So say I, madam—if he run away, as I hear he does; the danger is in standing to't; that's the loss of men, though it be the getting of children.

(3.2.35-41)

Like Parolles, the Clown observes the overlap between military and sexual service, which he calls “standing to't,” an action that paradoxically leads both to death and to the renewal of life.²⁵ Holding his ground on the battlefield will compel a soldier to kill or be killed, while rising to the occasion on the sexual battleground also leads to “the loss of men” as well as “the getting of children.”

However, Parolles himself does not “stand to't” under the pressure of the battlefield interrogation staged by the Dumaines in 4.3, and his cowardly double-dealing causes Bertram to disavow his allegiance to him. As the Count later portrays his former mentor to the King, “He's quoted for a most perfidious slave / With all the spots a' th' world tax'd and debosh'd, / Whose nature sickens but to speak a truth” (5.3.204-6). Having recognized Parolles' duplicity, Bertram disputes the truth of anything the braggart soldier might claim, particularly his valorization of sexual service, which the Count now views as mere debauchery. Thus, the play at this point demonizes Parolles' alternative ideology with an ad hominem argument rather than a refutation of its principles, and residual conflicts persist. When we see Bertram in Act 5, he is eager to please the king by marrying and assuming his position within the civilian social order, but traces of Parolles' version of the military ideology still remain within his “lived relation to the real.”

Bertram's sojourn in the Tuscan wars succeeds on all fronts: he lives up to his father's example as a soldier, and he achieves what he believes to be a sexual conquest in the tradition of military service. His own reputation as a warrior secured, Bertram attempts to make peace with the civilian social order by accepting a match with Lafew's daughter, which puts him in a position to emulate the old Count once again, this time as a producer of legitimate heirs.²⁶ Bertram's battlefield success has already led to one metaphorical pregnancy; the Duke of Florence, promoting Bertram to the command of his cavalry, ordains, “The general of our horse thou art, and we, / Great in our hope, lay our best love and credence / Upon thy promising fortune” (3.3.1-3). The Count's marriage to Maudlin is arranged so that he may make her “great” with child as well, but this match does not resolve the conflict between the codes governing the sexual behavior of the soldier and the father. Until Helena's reappearance, Bertram merely assigns these contradictory ethics to different spheres: he keeps the lustful, uncommitted copulation acceptable within the military context separate from the lawful, monogamous sexuality appropriate to the bonds of matrimony. Only Helena's legitimate pregnancy, engendered through an hour of “illicit” passion, can unite these two standards and fully reconcile Bertram to his social position. The visual revelation of Helena in a pregnant state embodies this resolution, fusing together in one form the chaste woman who has provided him with sexual stimulation and the wife who will bear him a child.

When Bertram first runs away from Helena to the wars, his mother insists that “his sword can never win / The honor that he loses” (3.2.92-93), but the Count's brave service on the battlefield restores him to the good graces of the King, who accepts Bertram's excuses for his disobedient conduct and approves his engagement to Maudlin. When Diana's charge of a prior claim to Bertram's hand threatens to disrupt this match, the Count downplays his attachment to her as a mere youthful indiscretion: “Certain it is I lik'd her / And boarded her i' th' wanton way of youth” (5.3.209-10). Here Bertram displays vestiges of the military view of sexuality advocated by Parolles: Diana was simply a vessel “boarded” by the young soldier during his allowably wanton service in the wars. Bertram's excuse assumes, with some justification, that the King and others share his distinction between the sexual behavior appropriate to military and civilian life, but Lafew, the enemy to youthful carnal abuses, now rejects the Count as a suitable match for Maudlin: “Your reputation comes too short for my daughter; you are no husband for her” (5.3.175-76). The elder generation, which rules the civilian social order, simultaneously exalts and condemns Bertram's “service” in the wars, and his reconciliation with society appears to be in jeopardy.

At this point, Helena, who has reportedly died of grief over the Count's abandonment of their marriage, miraculously returns to salvage Bertram's reconciliation to the civilian social formation. Her pregnancy represents a change from the play's source, in which Giletta of Narbona delivers twin sons, then waits years for them to grow up to resemble their father before offering them to him as evidence that she has fulfilled one of her assigned tasks.²⁷ The translation from prose fiction to drama may have occasioned the foreshortening of events here, but the demand for dramatic economy cannot also account for the curious deceleration of the movement of the plot at the beginning of Act 5. In reference to this slackened pace, R. B. Parker complains of “the apparently unnecessary scene at Marseilles”²⁸ during which Helena gives a letter to one of the King's men and laments the rigors of her “exceeding posting day and night” with Diana and the Widow (5.1.1). One of the functions of this scene, however, may be to create the illusion of the passage of a significant amount of time between the bed trick and Helena's arrival at Rossillion, time enough for her condition to begin to “show.” Helena's obvious pregnancy, unmentioned by the text until seconds before her appearance, may provide in performance a surprising dimension of visual significance for both the audience and Bertram.

Although Parker asserts that “there has certainly not been time for the pregnancy to be so advanced,”²⁹ Diana's prelude to Helena's entrance states specifically that her condition has progressed to the stage at which she can sense Bertram's child moving in her womb:

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

(5.3.294-98)

According to Diana's riddle, Helena is both “dead” and “quick,” ostensibly deceased yet alive, lifeless yet bearing life. In a similarly paradoxical way, she is now two women to Bertram, both the virgin he has killed in the line of service and the wife he has impregnated with his child. Tellingly, we must “behold” the meaning of this riddle; its significance is embodied by the visual image of Helena's chastely beautiful and pregnant form. After she appears, the text continues to direct attention to the implications of what Bertram and the others “see” when they look at her:

KING:
                                                                                Is there no exorcist
Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?
Is't real that I see?
HEL:
                                                                                                    No, my good lord;
'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see;
The name and not the thing.
BER:
Both, both. O pardon!

(5.3.298-302)

Helena claims to appear as a wife in “name” only and not as “the thing” itself; Bertram's spouse by law alone and not by practice. But when the Count views her, he sees “both” at the same time: the “shadow of a wife” whose chaste bed he knows he has not entered and the “real” wife with whom he has clearly conceived an offspring. By means of the bed trick, Helena portrays simultaneously the two diverse sexual partners Bertram seeks: the virgin illicitly (and yet still to be lawfully) deflowered, and the spouse who will help him fulfill his ancestral duty to procreate. Finding both coalesced into one woman, Bertram accepts this resolution, however imaginary it may be, and assumes his designated place at Helena's side, vowing to “love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (5.3.310).

Although from Bertram's point of view the conflict between his individual desire and the needs of the civilian social order is resolved, readers of All's Well have often found the Count's reconciliation with his society more open-ended and disturbing than one would expect in a romantic comedy. At least three sources of tension remain unresolved. First, even though Parolles himself is disgraced as a coward, his alternative ideology of procreation receives some degree of persuasive articulation that is never directly refuted. Contrary to cultural beliefs, sexual service does possess a reproductive capability equal biologically to that of conjugal relations. Second, Helena's dual role as a virgin sinfully seduced and a wife lawfully impregnated is merely illusory; readers are fully aware, in a way that Bertram is not, that the excitement of his “illicit” act was not in the deed itself but in his mind, as is the ultimate confluence of Helena's two roles. Can Bertram now desire Helena for herself and not simply as a body substituted for Diana's? Third, as Joseph Westlund points out, Helena makes a subtle change in the tasks assigned to her by Bertram when she reads them aloud at the end of the play:

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

(5.3.305-8)³⁰

Technically, Bertram is not yet “doubly won,” for Helena's pregnancy does not fulfill the second condition as it is originally stated in his letter: “show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to” (3.2.57-58). Unlike Giletta of the source, Helena still faces the task of convincing Bertram that the child is his; moreover, there is no guarantee that the baby will turn out to be the male heir to the house of Rossillion that Bertram is obliged to produce. These loose ends could potentially disrupt what Kavanagh calls “the reconciliation effect that the text seeks to achieve within a given cultural ideology,” but in production, the performance choices made by actors and directors have served to manage the consumption of the text and to resolve contradictions between the text's sense of reality and that of a particular audience. My conclusion will raise the question of whether or not such contradictions ought to be resolved in the first place.

Historically, stage productions of All's Well have approached these three issues with strategies of omission and misdirection designed to draw viewers' attention away from the contradictory elements of the final scene. According to Joseph G. Price, the precedent for nineteenth-century revivals was set by J. P. Kemble's 1811 acting edition, which contained several major cuts, including the entire virginity dialogue between Parolles and Helena, the passage from Bertram's letter mentioning the condition of the conception of a child, and all overt references to the bed trick.³¹ Samuel Phelps' production at Sadler's Wells in 1852, which probably followed the Kemble text, featured the same expurgations but went a step further by eliminating the bed trick altogether.³² These bowdlerizations are clearly intended to avoid offending the moral principles of the age, but they also resolve potential ideological conflicts for the audience by omitting their foundations. The removal of the virginity dialogue eliminates the most articulate expression of Parolles' competing ideology of procreation, which no longer challenges the notion that “service” is barren. The obfuscation or elimination of the bed trick blurs the contradictory roles of seduced virgin and lawful wife that Helena plays for Bertram upon her reappearance, and the loss of the condition of the child removes pregnancy (and with it the indeterminate sex of the baby) from its central position in the visual scheme of the conclusion.³³ As Price sums up the thrust of the altered text, “Everything in the play is directed to the delicate sensibility of the heroine and to the bliss of the reconciliation.”³⁴

While twentieth-century productions of All's Well have restored most of the passages deleted during the nineteenth century, some modern directors have also incorporated bits of stage business which focus attention primarily on Bertram's newfound romantic attachment to Helena. For example, Russell Fraser describes the ending of John Barton's 1967 RSC revival as follows: “Helena's entry was a moving event to which Bertram responded with a passionate cry on the words, ‘Both, both. Oh pardon!’; his ‘ability to collapse,’ in R. L. Smallwood's phrase, was ‘his salvation.’”³⁵ Photographs of the scene in performance show Bertram on his knees, grasping Helena's hand and the ring upon her finger as he smiles lovingly into her beaming face; however, she is not visibly pregnant.³⁶ Such a staging highlights Bertram's remorse over his shabby treatment of Helena and his awakening love for her, and these emotions overshadow questions about sexuality and reproduction that linger in the written text. The visual element of Helena's pregnancy is also effaced from the most widely known version of the play, Elijah Moshinsky's BBC television production, which employs a dramatic shift in perspective at the moment of her entrance. G. K. Hunter recalls,

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.³⁷

Moshinsky's manipulation of the audience's point of view directs our attention away from the visual image of Helena's body to the faces of the onlookers, particularly Bertram, whose apprehension of the event as a miraculous and moving resurrection the viewer is invited to share. The rest of the scene is shot with tight closeups, only briefly offering a glimpse of Helena's torso (which has not yet begun to show) moments before Bertram expresses his newly discovered love with a kiss. Thus, Moshinsky opts to allow the emotional power of Helena's reunion with her husband to take precedence over the troublesome meaning one might behold in her pregnant body, a choice which precludes potential conflict between the spectator's perception of reality and the version offered by the performed text.

When directors have provided audiences with the visual image of Helena in an observably pregnant state, their tendency has been to use stage business to foreground Bertram's attachment to the unborn child. Muriel St. Clare Byrne's influential review of Tyrone Guthrie's 1959 revival at Stratford-upon-Avon recalls that, at the moment of Bertram's concluding couplet, the Count knelt and clung to Helena in a “gesture of contrition.”³⁸ A photograph accompanying this review depicts Bertram down on one knee, his head pressed to Helena's side, with one hand resting gently on her slightly swollen womb.³⁹ A variation on this business occurred in the 1989 production directed by Edward Gilbert at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. Helena entered slowly, wearing a dress with an empire waist, which emphasized her expectant state. As she concluded her reading of the conditions of Bertram's letter—“This is done”—she took her husband's hand and placed it on her stomach, allowing him to feel the palpable life within her. Bertram's expression of love for Helena was clearly prompted by the powerful feelings evoked through this gesture, which signalled the beginning of the bond between the father and the child. As in the Guthrie production, the location of the spectator's emotional focus on the affection of Bertram for his unborn offspring, regardless of its sex, distracted attention from the Count's contradictory vision of Helena and the possible unfitness of the child to become the next Count Rossillion. Perhaps such an interpretation better suits the perceptions of an age which places less emphasis on gender in the determination of lineal inheritance.

As these modern examples show, Helena tends to be portrayed visually in 5.3 as either the object of Bertram's passion or as the mother of his child, but not “both,” as the text demands. When Helena's pregnancy is not visible, she may easily fit the conventional role of the object of male sexual desire, but when directors choose to make her condition obvious, they also tend to rechannel Bertram's ardor directly toward his child and only indirectly toward Helena in gratitude for conceiving his baby. What performances have not yet provided us is a picture of Helena as Bertram sees her, simultaneously his illicit lover and pregnant wife. The fact that there are practical difficulties involved in fusing these two parts convincingly on the stage is precisely the point; the union of the two roles is purely imaginary, and spectators unconvinced by the illusion that they have coalesced will become aware of the contradictions involved in their fusion, even if Bertram himself does not. These contradictions arise in the first place because Shakespeare's contrived solution, the bed trick, requires Bertram's reconciliation to the civilian social order to depend upon the facilitation of military “service,” with which the Court's ideology of procreation is ultimately incompatible. The sexual ethics of the soldier and the father are, in the end, mutually contradictory, and the play cannot hope to “resolve” them without residual conflicts.

I offer instances from the performance history of All's Well merely to demonstrate that the stage has traditionally attempted to resolve for its audiences the ideological conflicts present in the text rather than to allow these contradictions to trouble the guarded optimism of the conclusion. I do not claim that such stagings are “wrong” or “defective” in any sense; I only wish to point out that they achieve their effects, as do all performances, by foregrounding certain aspects of the text while obscuring others. It seems significant, however, that the aspects that are generally obscured are those which could potentially draw notice to the opposed ideological elements of the text and disrupt harmonious comic closure. As Sheldon Zitner remarks, “Music, dance, lighting and gesture and all the determination of actors and directors in league with audience susceptibilities can make All's Well seem [to be] a [traditional] comedy in the theatre. But the text has other directions.”⁴⁰ To follow in these alternative directions, a contemporary performance of the play might enlist elements of production to expose sites of ideological contestation rather than to conceal them. Performance has no obligation to make consistent and pleasing what the text presents as contradictory and unsettling; on the contrary, the revelation of the text's perplexing inconsistencies may represent the fullest expression of the play's ideology of procreation.

Notes

1. Robert Crosman, “Making Love Out of Nothing At All: The Issue of Story in Shakespeare's Procreation Sonnets,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 41 (1990): 486.

2. Previous explorations of the sexual connotations of “service” in All's Well include John F. Adams, “All's Well that Ends Well: The Paradox of Procreation,” SQ 12 (1961): 267; James L. Calderwood, “The Mingled Yarn of All's Well,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 62 (1963): 74; Christopher Roark, “Lavatch and Service in All's Well that Ends Well,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900] 28 (1988): 248-49; and Elizabeth Sacks, Shakespeare's Images of Pregnancy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), 52.

3. Janet Adelman, “Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare's Personality, eds. Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 152. Adelman's article is one of the most recent in a series of studies which explore male desire and sexual anxiety in All's Well, including Arthur Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Ruth Nevo, “Motive and Meaning in All's Well that Ends Well,” in “Fanned and Winnowed Opinions”: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, eds. John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton (London: Methuen, 1987), 26-51; and Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

4. Louis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Vintage, 1970), 233-34.

5. James H. Kavanagh, “Shakespeare in Ideology,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 145.

6. Kavanagh, 145.

7. Quotations from All's Well refer to the Arden Shakespeare edited by G. K. Hunter (London: Methuen, 1959) and will be noted parenthetically in the text.

8. For further comments on the unsettling quality of this paradox, see Kirsch, 137; and R. G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 124-25.

9. A similar situation occurs just after the bed trick when Helena reflects on the “sweet use” that a lustful Bertram has made of the wife he loathes:

                                                                                   But, O strange men!
   That can such sweet use make of what they hate,
   When saucy trusting of the cozen'd thoughts
   Defiles the pitchy night; so lust doth play
   With what it loathes for that which is away.
   But more of this hereafter.

   (4.4.21-26)

10. Kavanagh, 159.

11. Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar, “Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Hypotheses,” Praxis 5 (1980): 57, quoted in Kavanagh, 161.

12. R. B. Parker, “War and Sex in All's Well that Ends Well,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey] 37 (1984): 100.

13. Kirsch, 129.

14. Although the play accents Bertram's youth more strongly than that of Parolles, the braggart soldier is constantly associated with fashion, which Bertram's father condemns as an affectation of “younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses / All but new things disdain” (1.2.60-61).

15. R. B. Parker writes (p. 110), “After the cure … Lafew insists on an erotic element in the King's recovery; ‘your dolphin is not lustier,’ he claims, and ‘Lustique, as the Dutchman says. I'll like a maid the better whilst I have a tooth in my head. Why, he's able to lead her a coranto’” (2.3.26, 41-43).

16. Helena acknowledges this class distinction when she adds the following condition to her proposed reward for healing the King: “Exempted be from me the arrogance / To choose from forth the royal blood of France / My low and humble name to propagate / With any branch or image of thy state” (2.1.194-97). It is worth noting that Helena wholeheartedly embraces her role in the procreative process in a way that Bertram does not. Her individual conflict with the needs of the social order takes instead the form of the opposition between Venus and Diana, sexual passion and maiden purity, which is ultimately resolved as chaste love within the context of marriage. See Eric LaGuardia, “Chastity, Regeneration, and World Order in All's Well that Ends Well,” in Myth and Symbol, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963): 119-32.

17. For Bertram's role as the King's sexual surrogate, see Wheeler, 81; Parker, 110; and Carolyn Asp, “Subjectivity, Desire and Female Friendship in All's Well that Ends Well,” Literature and Psychology 32 (1986): 55.

18. G. K. Hunter, 105n.

19. The connection between military service, killing, and eating (with overtones of sexual appetite) also appear at the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing, when Beatrice asks the Messenger about Benedick's success in the recent war:

    BEAT:

    I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? For indeed I promised to eat all of his killing.

    LEON:

    Faith, niece, you tax Signior Benedick too much, but he'll be meet with you, I doubt it not.

    MESS:

    He hath done good service, lady, in these wars.

    BEAT:

    You had musty victual, and he hath holp to eat it: he is a very valiant trencherman; he hath an excellent stomach.

    (1.1.38-47)

    This quotation refers to the Arden Shakespeare Much Ado edited by A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1981).

20. For an extended discussion of the war/sex metaphor in All's Well, see Parker, 105-9.

21. Adams, 267. I agree in principle with Adams' interpretation of this passage, but he bolsters his evidence unjustifiably by reading “barrenness” for “bareness” in l. 20 without textual basis.

22. Sacks, 52.

23. Parolles also reminds us that even rape has reproductive consequences. Under interrogation, when asked if he is acquainted with Captain Dumaine, he replies, “I know him: 'a was a botcher's prentice in Paris, from whence he was whipp'd for getting the shrieve's fool with child, a dumb innocent that could not say him nay” (4.3.180-83).

24. The resemblance between these two passages has been noted by several critics, among them G. K. Hunter, 101n; Parker, 106; Michael Taylor, “Persecuting Time with Hope: The Cynicism of Romance in All's Well that Ends Well,” English Studies in Canada 11 (1985): 283; and Alexander Welsh, “The Loss of Men and Getting of Children: All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” MLR [Modern Language Review] 73 (1978): 18-19.

25. Welsh sees this passage as fundamental to his thesis that the reasoning of All's Well “is fundamentally biological rather than cultural, and biology admits only two possible ends of human existence: the continuation of the species and individual death” (p. 17).

26. Robert Ornstein writes, “After [Bertram] has proved his gallantry, won the esteem of his fellow officers, and possessed the prize of Diana's virginity, he is ready to marry Maudlin, especially when it will redeem him in the eyes of the King, his mother, and Lafew” (Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986], 174).

27. “‘Giletta of Narbona,’ The Thirty-eighth Novel of William Painter's The Palace of Pleasure,” is reprinted in G. K. Hunter's Arden edition, 145-52. Some critics have remarked that Shakespeare's alteration fits with the equivocal nature of All's Well as a whole, which presents us with only the possibility for a happy ending. John Arthos comments that the “particular reality of twins is exchanged for an unknown birth, for an uncertain image of all the confusions and hopes that have reigned before” (“The Comedy of Generation,” EIC [Essays in Criticism] 2 [1955]: 108). Joseph Westlund writes, “That Helena is simply pregnant suits the insistently tentative quality of the play. She stands as a perfect symbol of potential, one which contributes to the play's haunting sense of longing for something good which may, or may not, be realized” (Shakespeare's Reparative Comedies: A Psychoanalytic View of the Middle Plays [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 145).

28. Parker, 111.

29. Parker, 112.

30. Westlund, 144.

31. Joseph G. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of All's Well that Ends Well and its Critics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 24-26.

32. Price, 37.

33. Kemble's original 1794 production ironically featured an actress who was in fact pregnant at the time, but her condition was apparently considered a drawback rather than a feature to be exploited. As Charles Shattuck records, “Mrs. Jordan, who played the virginal Helena, was five months gone with child, a circumstance which drew one or two winking comments in the press and rendered further appearances in the role inadvisable” (Introduction to All's Well that Ends Well, John Philip Kemble Promptbooks [Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1974], i).

34. Price, 134.

35. Russell Fraser, ed. All's Well that Ends Well, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 35. Fraser quotes Smallwood's article, “The Design of All's Well that Ends Well,” ShS 25 (1972): 60.

36. See Peter Ansorge, “Contemporary Shakespeare,” Plays and Players 14 (August, 1967): 36. A slightly different version of the same photograph appears in Aspects of Shakespeare's “Problem Plays”: Articles Reprinted from Shakespeare Survey, eds. Kenneth Muir and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 25. Although one cannot assume that a publicity still reproduces the details of a performance exactly, the evidence that Barton employed such an approach to this scene is suggestive.

37. G. K. Hunter, “The BBC All's Well that Ends Well,” in Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews, eds. J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988), 187. See also Roger Warren, “Some Approaches to All's Well that Ends Well in Performance,” in Shakespeare, Man of the Theater, ed. Kenneth Muir et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), 119.

38. Muriel St. Clare Byrne, “The Shakespeare Season at the Old Vic, 1958-59 and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1959,” SQ 10 (1959): 557-58.

39. Byrne, 556-57. The same photo is reproduced in Muir and Wells, 25.

40. Sheldon P. Zitner, All's Well that Ends Well, Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 149.