[In the following essay, Dennis discusses the religious themes of fidelity and divine love in All's Well That Ends Well.]

Dr. Johnson's criticism of All's Well that Ends Well has never been effectively answered. Its hero, Bertram, is too fault-ridden to attract the reader's sympathies, and his final good fortune in getting back the good wife he unjustly spurns seems grossly unmerited. Bertram, as Dr. Johnson writes, is “a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate; when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.”¹ And where Bertram repels us by his faults, Helena pains us by her blind devotion to a man in no way worthy of her. Pursuing someone incapable of appreciating her virtues, she seems to be casting the pearl of her love before a swine. A few critics have responded to these problems by defending Bertram as a man unfairly forced into marriage or by attacking Helena as an aggressive schemer; but in doing so they must overlook not only the main emphasis of the action but also all the judgments made about the two protagonists by the other characters. The facts remain that Bertram is a boor, a liar, and a cheat, and that Helena's ingenuity is exercised simply in working to win her unworthy husband's love by demonstrating her own. The play must be defended not by trying to minimize the distaste and pain that the characters cause us, but by showing that these responses result inevitably from Shakespeare's thematic intentions.

Our problem with Bertram can be brought into sharper focus if we try to define precisely the central issues of his career. At first glance he seems to be given the pivotal decision of the play. For in the second act he must choose either to affirm or deny the intrinsic excellence of Helena, and he proves too superficial to choose rightly. This blindness to his wife's virtues is complemented by his blindness to his servant's vices, for Parolles affirms the kind of extrinsic values that Helena repudiates. As the man of words, Parolles cultivates only the externals of nobility. Dressing and speaking as a fop, boasting of his imaginary prowess, he is in fact, underneath his rhetoric, as Helena tells us, “a notorious liar / … a great way fool, solely a coward” (I.i.111-12).² Helena, on the other hand, though lacking the outer gloss of high birth and station, possesses all the inner virtues. As the countess says, Helena's character combines the moral gifts she has inherited with the virtues she has striven for: “She derives her honesty and achieves her goodness” (I.i.51). In refusing to live with Helena and going off to the wars with empty Parolles, then, Bertram chooses surface over substance. He rejects his wife because, like his servant, he believes that intrinsic possessions such as rank and title are more important than intrinsic possessions, that honor dwells in a man's circumstances rather than in his character.³ Even when the king explicitly points out the mistake of disliking “virtue for the name,” assuring him that “The place is dignified by the doer's deed” (II.iii.131, 133), Bertram remains unconvinced. He agrees to the marriage not because he accepts the king's logic but because he fears his power, and for most of the rest of the play he shows repeatedly how completely he has adopted his servant's vices. He is attracted to Diana because of her outer physical beauty, not because of her moral purity, declaring, indeed, that her honesty is her only “fault” (III.vi.120). And he out-lies Parolles in swearing his undying love to her, when he is only attempting to destroy her honor.

What perhaps bothers the reader most about Bertram's attempted seduction is not simply that it shows him as morally hollow as Parolles, but that it is not completed until after he sees Parolles exposed before his eyes as a moral humbug. Though the logic of the play connects Bertram's vices with his respect for Parolles, his rejection of Parolles does not lead to any rejection in himself of the values that Parolles embodies. After the scene of exposure he goes off to sleep with the woman he believes to be Diana; and in the final scene of the play, still showing no trace of remorse over the supposed death of Helena, he tries to make an advantageous marriage by denying his promises to Diana and maligning her character. Our expectations for some growth in Bertram, then, are raised by Parolles' exposure only to be frustrated. And the reader is left wondering why Shakespeare would choose to deepen the reader's dislike of Bertram when on this occasion he might so easily have lessened it. An understanding of the moral issues behind Bertram's choices is not much help in making him more attractive.

Perhaps our problem with Bertram can be best handled by treating it as an adjunct of Helena's career, by regarding Helena as the central figure in the play and explaining Bertram through her. Surely her importance in the decisive events of the plot would seem to justify this emphasis. She is in many ways the architect of the action, manipulating her husband's career first by substituting for Diana and later by contriving the scene of his trial and exposure. If we can understand the meaning of her love for Bertram, we may be able to understand why Bertram is presented as he is.

If one approaches Helena from the point of view of the earlier comedies, he may be inclined to see her career as an instance of the irrationality of romantic love. Her pursuit of a man who rudely spurns her, who does nothing to gain, hold, or deserve her devotion, may remind us of the way in which Shakespeare's other Helena pursues Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In speaking of the blindness of her own emotions, the earlier Helena seems to provide a moral for the later one: “Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity” (I.i.232-33). Another parallel for Helena's blindness, from a play closer in time and tone to All's Well that Ends Well, is Troilus's subjective love for Cressida. Yet although Troilus adores a woman whom clear-sighted Ulysses knows on first glance to be a slut, he is finally brought down to reality by visual proof of her infidelity. Helena's awareness of Bertram's infidelity, on the other hand, does nothing to change her attitude to him. Moreover, the ending of the play seems not to destroy her illusions but to vindicate her perseverance by allowing her finally to obtain the husband she has been pursuing. And her love, unlike Troilus's, is not criticized by a single character. Neither she nor anyone else regards her commitment as a foolish casting of pearls before swine. Bertram, rather, is seen as foolish for casting away the jewel of her love. In rejecting the “dear perfections” of Helena, Lafeu declares, Bertram does “to himself / The greatest wrong of all” (V.iii.14-18). And instead of her appearing weakly passive like the earlier Helena, our Helena seems to be the most active and most powerful person in the play, miraculously curing the dying king as well as controlling the fate of Bertram. She herself equates the success of her love with the exertion of her own will, with the ability to shape her own fortunes:

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

(I.i.231-34)

The forceful perseverance of Helena's moral will seems to vindicate her love.

If we are not meant to condemn Helena's love as blind emotion, even though the man she loves is clearly meant to appear ignoble, we must conclude that the play defends a kind of love that is not based on the worth of the recipient. Love here is not a reward bestowed on someone because of his virtues but rather a free gift based on an internal necessity in the giver. It is the kind of giving which the modern theologian Anders Nygren finds expressed most completely in the writings of the Apostles, where it is called agape. One gives agape not because the beloved deserves to be loved but because God has commanded every man to love his neighbor as himself. In Helena, Shakespeare presents a figure who perhaps embodies this ideal more fully than any other of his heroines. All's Well that Ends Well seems to set out deliberately to explore the meaning of agape.

In Christian thought the necessity of agape is sometimes linked to the limitations of fallen man. Because our intelligence is darkened we do not have the ability to know another man's inner life; and because our own wills are perverse we do not have the right to judge him. Every man by strict justice would be condemned to death and damnation. He is saved by an unearned gift of love from God and must extend such love to his fellowman. In Shakespeare this argument for mercy is clearly presented in Portia's plea to Shylock or Isabella's plea to Angelo. But in All's Well that Ends Well the situation is slightly altered. As Bertram's dedicated wife rather than his judge, Helena offers love that is characterized not so much by mercy and forgiveness as by belief and commitment. This dimension of agape is perhaps best defined as creative faith, the kind of unlimited trust that Kierkegaard celebrates in his great book on agape, The Works of Love. The lover who gives agape to his beloved chooses to reject the outer light of reason for the inner light of faith. No matter how convincing the evidence against his beloved's goodness might appear, he chooses to believe by a leap of faith in his beloved's ideal self. The idealized subjective image of his beloved is more real to him than the objective fact. This kind of belief is embodied in Helena's love for Bertram. While Bertram steadily degenerates in our eyes he remains fixed in hers, even though she has all the evidence we have to condemn him. She begins by worshiping him as a “bright particular star” above her “sphere” (I.i.97-100). When he cruelly rejects her, she chooses to take the guilt of his disdain upon herself, contending that she was at fault in reaching for too high a prize. And when she sees with her own eyes the treachery he is practicing on Diana, she judges the deed but not the doer. Her only moral comment on the episode is a mild speech of a few lines in which she speaks of “strange men” whose “lust doth play / With what it loathes for that which is away” (IV.iv.21-25). By using the word “strange” she presents an objectively vicious act as merely a foolish one; and by speaking of “men” in general rather than of Bertram in particular she seems to excuse Bertram's personal guilt. And this very mild and indirect reproach is cut short with the phrase “But more of this hereafter,” as if any act of judgment is irrelevant to her purpose. When she finally confronts Bertram openly at the end of the play, as he stands tangled in his lies and slanders, trying to arrange a marriage that shows complete disregard for her memory, she utters not one word of blame. To her, Bertram is still “my good lord,” as she twice calls him. Her only concern is that “the shadow of a wife” be made a real one by his accepting her (V.iii.308). By some miracle of faith Bertram remains untarnished in her eyes.

Although agape can be fully justified as obedience to the divine command, “Thou shalt love,” regardless of its practical effect, it is usually seen as helping to produce moral growth in the beloved. As Kierkegaard expresses it, “Love builds up.” Through the lover's faith the beloved is provided with an unchanging image of his own ideal self. Thus, no matter how bad his actions may become, he may still be able to avoid losing all faith in his own capacity for good. Seeing his ideal self in his lover's eyes, he may begin to believe in his own worthiness, in his ability to change. The closing scene of All's Well that Ends Well seems to suggest that Helena's love has produced such a change in Bertram. Though the play ends only thirty lines after Helena reveals herself to Bertram, and he speaks only three lines, some important shift in his perceptions seems to be indicated. Here is the key passage:

                                                            [Re-enter Widow, with Helena.]
KING.
                                                            Is there no exorcist
Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?
Is't real that I see?
HELENA.
                                                            No, my good lord.
'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see,
The name and not the thing.
BERTRAM.
                                                            Both, both. Oh, pardon!
HELENA.
O my good lord, when I was like this maid
I found you wondrous kind. There is your ring;
And, look you, here's your letter. This it says:
“When from my finger you can get this ring
And are by me with child,” &c. This is done
Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?
BERTRAM.
If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,
I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.

(V.iii.305-17)

Bertram's plea for pardon here appears to be a sincere expression of contrition. He does not yet know exactly how Helena is related to Diana, but the simple shock of her reappearance after her presumed death, a shock which the king expresses outwardly, seems to destroy his desire for any more false pretenses and to reveal to himself his own turpitude. His promise to love Helena “dearly, ever, ever dearly” if she can prove the truth of her contentions suggests no reluctant compliance with his bond but an eager hope in her devotion. Though he can hardly believe that she loves him, he sincerely wants to find it true. For if it can be shown that the woman he has most wronged has thought him worth her devotion, has dedicated herself solely to winning his love, he may be able to accept himself. Her vision may enable him to discover within himself some capacity for good, and help him move from remorse to love.

Once we see that All's Well that Ends Well is about the works of agape, we can understand why Bertram is presented so unsympathetically until the very end of the play, why even the exposure of Parolles is allowed to lead to no change in Bertram's character. Bertram must be presented as vice-ridden in order to make clear the unconditional nature of Helena's love; and he must remain so for his final transformation to be seen not as the result of his own moral exertion but of her fidelity. Only by the delaying of Bertram's growth until he is stunned by the constancy of Helena's belief can the redemptive power of agape be fully celebrated. Shakespeare takes the risk of losing the reader's sympathy for the hero in order to give greater scope to the heroine's devotion. If the devotion seems to some readers strangely unselective, that strangeness is central to the meaning of the kind of love that Shakespeare sets out deliberately to explore.

The centrality of agape in the play becomes even more obvious when we notice that it is extended not only to Bertram but also to Parolles, to the man who embodies all the worst qualities of his master. Here, however, agape takes a less idealistic form. The pardon that Lafeu grants to Parolles is based not on faith but on pity. Where Helena is Bertram's believer, Lafeu is Parolles's exposer, persistently pointing out the hollowness of Parolles's pretensions. Yet the very fact that Lafeu sees Parolles's worthlessness only makes the unconditional nature of his forgiveness more obvious. When Parolles returns to his master's house bedraggled after his exposure, “muddled in Fortune's mood,” as he himself admits (V.ii.4), an exterior man with no appearances left, he is a moral cipher. Yet Lafeu, knowing all, receives his plea for help, accepting him as part of his retinue: “Though you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat. Go to, follow” (V.ii.56-57). Parolles' terse one-line response to this acceptance, “I praise God for you,” perhaps indicates, like his master's final line, a movement towards contrition and change. He has already decided, when his cowardice is exposed in Act IV, to give up all pretensions of merit, declaring, “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live” (IV.iii.369-70). And now in asking for help he not only dispenses with bragging about himself but also with the kind of obsequious flattery of his betters that previously made him contemptible. And in praising God and not Lafeu, Parolles seems to be finally acknowledging a religious order above the social, aware that he owes his reception not to any virtue in himself or to any social form but to Lafeu's adherence to God's commandment, “Thou shalt love.”

The uniquely religious character of the love at the center of All's Well that Ends Well is evident not only in the literal statements and actions of its characters but also in the metaphoric dimensions of the play. Through typological allusions and episodes the major characters are linked with central figures of the Christian myth. Perhaps this level becomes first obvious through the contrasting appeals that Parolles and Helena make to Bertram; for these opposed advisors, like figures in a morality play, are figuratively associated with either the minions of Satan or the angels of God. It is not difficult to see the man of words, Parolles, as a follower of the father of lies, the Devil. Lafeu in fact makes this connection clear when he first attacks Parolles as a fool and a knave. “The Devil it is that's thy master,” he insists, when Parolles contends that he serves him who dwells “above” (II.iii.261-264). And at the end of his career Lafeu makes clear to Parolles the necessity of rejecting his master the Devil for God:

PAROLLES.
It lies in you, my lord, to bring me in some grace, for you did bring me out.
LAFEU.
Out upon thee, knave! Dost thou put upon me at once both the office of God and the Devil? One brings thee in grace, and the other brings thee out.

(V.ii.49-53)

In helping Parolles to change his master, Lafeu gives his own name symbolic significance. He becomes an agent of the fire of purgatory that will enable Parolles to receive heavenly grace.

The Devil's servant in the play, Parolles, must contend with God's minister, Helena. Several passages suggest that Helena enjoys an especially close bond with heaven, and seem to justify G. Wilson Knight's contention that Helena is presented as “a channel or medium for the divine or cosmic powers,” an example of “renaissance sainthood.”⁴ Thus, when she urges the king to take her father's cure, she insists she is acting an intermediary for some heavenly power:

But most it is presumption in us when
The help of Heaven we count the act of men.
Dear sir, to my endeavors give consent.
Of Heaven, not me, make an experiment.

(II.i.154-57)

And the unexpected success of the cure is specifically called by Lafeu a miracle of the “very hand of Heaven” (II. iii. 37). When Helena later meets Bertram at Florence she is a pilgrim on the way to the shrine of “Saint Jaques,” and she tells Diana's mother that “Heaven” is directing her to her husband (IV. iv. 18). And Bertram's mother, the Countess, later supports this contention by declaring Helena's prayers to be Bertram's only hope of salvation, his only link to heaven:

                              What angel shall
Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive
Unless her prayers, whom Heaven delights to hear
And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath
Of greatest justice.

(III.iv.25-29)

In rejecting Helena for Parolles, then, Bertram metaphorically rejects God for the Devil, Heaven for Hell.

But Helena is presented figuratively not only as the saintly intermediary for her husband but as the Divine Intercessor for all men, Christ. Her unceasing pursuit of Bertram becomes a metaphor for Christ's irresistible pursuit of everyman's salvation. She is the Hound of Heaven, hunting down the recalcitrant soul until it yields under the pressure of Christ's irresistible love. Human agape is finally only an imitation of the archetypal act of agape expressed by Christ's Incarnation. By God's strict justice, fallen man would be damned. He is saved only because Christ's love is not based on desert but is rather a divine, unmerited gift to man. The name given to this divine agape is “grace”; and Helena, as the clown Lavache declares, is “the herb of grace” (IV.v.18).

As a surrogate for Christ, Helena undergoes a series of trials which have clear typological references. In her first important action she performs one of Christ's miracles, curing the sick, which proves she is heaven-sent; but she is rejected by the stubborn heart of the fallen man, Bertram. Like Christ, Helena dies in demonstrating her love, or at least leads others to believe in her death. And finally like Christ she is resurrected from apparent death to make a final demonstration of her holy power.⁵ Bertram's yielding to this miracle of resurrection is an image of man's wonder at the spectacle of Christ's Passion and Resurrection. Viewed as a whole, Helena's career can be seen in terms of typological symbolism as Christ's descent from Heaven to Earth and His eventual return. Just as Christ leaves Heaven in order to bring fallen man into heaven, so Helena leaves the Countess's court at Rousillon in order to allow Bertram to return to it. The imagery of her speech of departure makes this parallel explicit:

                    I will be gone.
My being here it is that holds thee hence.
Shall I stay here to do 't? No, no, although
The air of paradise did fan the house
And angels officed all.

(III.ii.125-29)

Only by Helena's descent into the world can Bertram be saved from the world, the flesh, and the Devil, and be led back to his holy home.

Once we see Helena as a Christ-figure, Bertram's continued recalcitrance can be understood in religious terms as a means of demonstrating the wonder of Christ's love. The more stubborn and sinful the man, the more miraculously unlimited is Christ's love for him shown to be. In theological terms we might call the delaying of Bertram's repentance an illustration of the doctrine of the felix culpa. Had Bertram changed earlier, before Helena's trials and sacrifices, we would have been deprived of the fullest demonstration of divine agape.

The uneasiness that the reader may feel in Bertram's undeserved good fortune results, then, from the strangeness of the Christian view of God's relation to man, from the divine illogic that lies at the heart of the idea of grace. If it bothers us that a worthless man should be given not only his wife's love but the love of God, and that his contrition alone is enough to secure both his wife and his salvation, then we are bothered by a central tenet of Christian thought. Our objections are like those of the workers in the vineyard in Christ's parable (Matthew 20:1-16). We repeat the complaint of the day-long workers that their master is unjust in giving the same wages they received to a late-comer who worked only the last hour before sunset. The moral that Christ draws suspends human notions of justice: “The first shall be last and the last shall be first; for many are called but few are chosen.” Under the rule of grace, the death-bed repenter can receive a higher place in God's kingdom than the man who lives a lifetime of righteousness. As Helena twice expresses it, as she pursues Bertram, “All's Well that Ends Well.”

Notes

1. Arthur Sherbo (ed.), Johnson on Shakespeare (Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. VII, Yale, 1968), p. 404.

2. Citations from All's Well that Ends Well in this essay are to The Complete Works, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York, 1968).

3. Muriel Bradbrook, in her useful essay, “Virtue is the True Nobility” (Review of English Studies, 26 [1950], pp. 298-301), points out how the issue of “high birth versus native merits” is a central one in the play.

4. G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower (London, 1958), p. 156.

5. Perhaps one may say Helena also dies figuratively in the sexual sense as a substitute sacrifice to Bertram's lust.