SOURCE: Bergeron, David M. “The Mythical Structure of All's Well That Ends Well.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14, no. 4 (winter 1973): 559-68.

[In the following essay, Bergeron focuses on All's Well That Ends Well's allusions to the tumultuous affair of the classical gods of love and war, Venus and Mars, and associates these figures respectively with Helena and Bertram.]

Critics have frequently discussed the symbolic structure of Shakespearean comedy, whether they suggest the pattern of the journey into the “green world,” a structure perfectly realized in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or the ritual structure of reconciliation in the late romances. Though the approaches to the structure of All's Well that Ends Well have been richly varied,¹ I find in the play a symbolic structure that has gone largely unnoticed. Through both language and action Shakespeare endows this play with a mythical structure representing the story of Mars and Venus. Bertram and Helena are not, of course, the exact equivalents of Mars and Venus, but they bear certain resemblances and they ultimately participate in this myth that transcends the mundane limits of their human quarrel. This paper seeks to answer how and why this particular myth is at work in All's Well.

Though some of the references in the play to the Mars-Venus story seem quite incidental, others reveal on the part of the principal characters a self-conscious awareness of the myth, suggesting that the dramatist is himself working out a design. The concept, and later the actual character, of Diana intrudes in the play also, offering another variable in the mythic equation. What emerges is a structure built on the idea of opposites with the Helena-Bertram (Venus-Mars) story at the center. Faithful to myth, Shakespeare has Venus win the victory over Mars, thereby resolving one of the play's fundamental issues by ultimate reconciliation. Life and love, epitomized in Venus and Helena, triumph over death and war, symbolized in Mars and Bertram; out of the struggle comes a peaceful union. By examining the play and by looking at certain representative precedents or analogues for the treatment of this myth, we can add another dimension to our understanding of how this play sloughs off the shackles of tragedy and becomes a comedy.

The person of Mars is represented chiefly by Bertram but also tangentially and ironically by Parolles. Through soldierly ventures Bertram seeks honor and fulfillment, but his companion Parolles understates and finally parodies the heroic military quest. In the midst of the play's opening scene Helena asks Parolles what sign he was born under; he replies that he was born “under Mars.”² With considerable wit Helena suggests that Parolles was born when Mars was “retrograde” because Parolles goes “so much backward” when he fights (l. 194). Mars as a concept is thus introduced early in the play, if somewhat humorously, as Helena hits at the cowardice of Parolles, this most unlikely devotee of Mars. But the influence of Mars exists as a positive force in the action, as we shall see in Bertram, not simply a matter of planetary determination.

While others leave for the Florentine war, Bertram remains behind, at least temporarily, much against his own wishes. He chafes under the restraint, not getting to use his sword as a true follower of Mars, and he finally determines: “By heaven, I'll steal away!” (II.i.33). The Lords and Parolles encourage this rebellion, and Parolles cries out to the departing soldiers: “Mars dote on you for his novices!” (II.i.47). The influence of Mars is obviously strong and in striking contrast to the power embodied in Helena, who, later in this same scene, meets the King and makes preparations for her healing act. From early in the play, then, military might (Mars) which is bent largely on destruction is set in opposition to the spiritual force of life represented by Helena.

In the pivotal scene, II.iii, that ends one of the play's dramatic problems and gives rise to another, Bertram reluctantly accepts Helena as his wife, an acceptance that yields to the King by observing the outward form of marriage but not the inner reality, neither physical nor spiritual. The union here between Mars and Venus is superficial and imposed, not a genuine reconciliation of opposites. At the close of the scene Bertram tells Parolles that he has wedded Helena, but will not bed her: “I'll to the Tuscan wars, and never bed her” (l. 267). War (Mars) is seen as the alternative to marriage. Naturally Parolles encourages this myopic vision of Bertram's: “To th' wars, my boy, to th' wars!” According to Parolles, Bertram ought to leave his “kicky-wicky” at home, using his “manly marrow” to “sustain the bound and high curvet / Of Mars's fiery steed” (ll. 276-277). At the close of Act II when Bertram takes dispassionate leave of Helena, he vows never to return home “Whilst I can shake my sword or hear the drum” (II.v.89). Bertram is firmly committed to marching in the army of Mars, to trying to transcend the mundane world with Mars's fiery steed. The culmination of this commitment comes in III.iii, where Bertram takes command of the Duke of Florence's troops. And Bertram pledges: “This very day, / Great Mars, I put myself into thy file. / Make me but like my thoughts, and I shall prove / A lover of thy drum, hater of love” (ll. 8-11). To love the drum and hate love is to be at the opposite end of the scale from Venus.

The final explicit reference to Mars is made by Parolles shortly before he is “captured.” He chides himself for having a tongue that is foolhardy, “but my heart hath the fear of Mars before it, and of his creatures, not daring the reports of my tongue” (IV.i.29-30). In this scene and in IV.iii, Parolles as disciple of Mars is thoroughly discredited, raising questions about all those who readily embrace Mars. In turn the dramatist makes Bertram more susceptible to change by his coming to understand what his comrade in arms is really like. For Parolles by the end of the play the chariot of Mars has run aground, and for Bertram it has encountered an opposing force to which Bertram ultimately yields, now willing to march to a different drummer.

That opposing force in the mythic structure is the play's central character, Helena. As her character is more subtly presented than Bertram's, so is her role in the Mars-Venus myth more complex. She appears as both Venus and Diana with the role of Venus triumphing, which is the dramatist's way of setting up another series of opposites. One could argue that beneath the breast of the chaste Diana beats the heart of Venus; or, in terms of other kinds of Renaissance representations, “infolded” in Helena are both Diana and Venus. In the first scene of the play Helena reveals that she has been meditating on virginity, and she asks Parolles: “Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricado it against him?” (I.i.108-109). To be contemplating virginity is to be busy about the role of the chaste Diana. By the end of the scene this Diana has fixed her sights on Bertram, suggesting something of the role of the hunter associated with Diana. More likely it shows that Diana may be a kind of pose while Venus seeks for a strategy to find her fulfillment in Bertram. Like Hamlet, Helena needs to suit the form to the conceit.

When the name Helena is mentioned in I.iii, Lavatch breaks into song about Helen of Troy, whose fair face was the cause of the ancient war. While the song may seem ironically inappropriate for Helena, it may also anticipate her role as Venus figure. When later in this scene Helena confesses her love of Bertram to his mother, the Countess Rossillion, she urges the Countess not to hate her:

… but if yourself, …
Did ever in so true a flame of liking,
Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian
Was both herself and Love, O, then give pity
To her whose state is such that cannot choose
But lend and give where she is sure to lose. …

(I.iii.202-208)

Diana and Venus are mingled in the image, as Helena indicates the tension between these compelling forces.

After Helena cures the King, which could also be a manifestation of her Diana role since Diana is sometimes presented as a healer, she reaches the point of making her choice of husband, the reward for her act of healing. Here she makes an explicit, self-conscious statement about her mythic role: “Now, Dian, from thy altar do I fly, / And to imperial Love, that god most high, / Do my sighs stream” (II.iii.73-75). The dramatist makes explicit what had been implied, and we as audience cannot ignore Helena's own awareness of her Diana-Venus role. She here forswears Diana in order to embrace the new deity Love, but the dramatic action is not that simple, as Bertram refuses to aid the cause of love.

By Act III, scene v, Helena has put on her disguise of the holy pilgrim, a disguise that lets her pass unnoticed in Florence and suits well the “religious” aspect of her character, seen most clearly in the healing of the King and in the Countess' words in III.iv. The concept and image of the holy pilgrim also correspond to the Diana pose, and Helena in fact observes in conversation that her chief merit “Is a reservèd honesty …” (III.v.60). In this scene Helena meets the Widow's daughter named Diana, who, interestingly, is being sought by Bertram. What the dramatist succeeds in doing is to take the implied and infolded concept of Diana and give it concrete realization in a character who could have been given any number of other names. The naming of this girl Diana is deliberate, not arbitrary.

The actual Diana now both figuratively and literally frees Helena to pursue her Venus role, and Helena's pursuit and “capture” of Bertram is accelerated. The strategy is for Helena to take Diana's place in bed when Bertram comes to seduce Diana, who will remain “most chastely absent” (III.vii.34). The assignation takes place; in mythic terms Mars and Venus meet, though of course Bertram believes that he is conquering Diana. He is in fact being conquered by Helena as Venus, for this event ultimately meets the restrictive conditions set up by Bertram earlier and gives Helena control over the outcome of events. Here in Act IV word is sent out that Helena is dead, again a dramatic strategy but also symbolically appropriate since the chaste Helena-Diana is now dead and Helena-Venus lives.

All forces gather in the closing scene of the play where Bertram's lies are exposed; the character Diana is instrumental in exposing him. Chastity or honesty tears to shreds Bertram's desperate defense of his actions. Before the “dead” Helena is “resurrected,” Diana offers the puzzling riddle:

He knows himself my bed he hath defiled,
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 my meaning.

(V.iii.297-301)

After these words Helena appears, resolving Diana's paradox. Venus is very much alive, and Mars acknowledges her victory, proclaiming that he'll “love her dearly—ever, ever dearly” (l. 313). In the mythic structure of the play Mars and Venus have participated in a fertility ritual, absolutely necessary if life is to be renewed and re-created—as Parolles reminds us, “It is not politic in the commonwealth of nature to preserve virginity” (I.i.121-123).

Various analogues illustrate how other artists have dealt with the myth, both the Venus-Diana and Mars-Venus stories, each suggesting a bringing together of traditional opposites. Spenser in the proem to Book III of The Faerie Queene, a book that celebrates chastity, claims that the virtue of chastity “is shrined in my Soveraines brest, / And formd so lively in each perfect part, / That to all ladies, which have it profest, / Neede but behold the pourtraict of her hart, / If pourtrayed it might bee by any living art.”³ As we know, Elizabeth was associated with Diana by Spenser and by many other writers.⁴ But in the proem to Book IV Spenser focuses on another quality: “… to that sacred saint my soveraigne Queene, / In whose chast breast all bountie naturall / And treasures of true love enlocked beene, / Bove all her sexe that ever yet was seene: / To her I sing of love, that loveth best. …” Spenser infolds the goddess of chastity and the goddess of love into one person, Elizabeth, who may be a historical prototype of the joining of Diana and Venus. In addition, in Book III, canto vi, Spenser describes the birth of Belphoebe (maydenhed) and Amoret (womanhed), twins born of Crysogone and nurtured by Diana and Venus, respectively. Here the fusion of opposites is unfolded into these two figures.

Lamenting the loss of Elizabeth's favor, Walter Raleigh, writing to Sir Robert Cecil, recalls former pleasures: “I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks, like a nymph. …”⁵ The association of Elizabeth with Diana and Venus as triumphant over Mars comes in Friar Bacon's closing prophetic speech in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Until the birth of Elizabeth, Bacon says,

… Mars shall be master of the field;
But then the stormy threats of war shall cease.
.....Drums shall be turn'd to timbrels of delight. …

(sc. 16, ll. 49-52)⁶

The flowers of the goddesses shall bow to this “matchless flower”: “Venus' hyacinth shall vail her top,” and all in consort “Shall stoop and wonder at Diana's rose.” While Greene, and other writers, may emphasize Elizabeth as Diana, they cannot avoid speaking also of her love and beauty, the power of Venus. The galaxy of Mars-Venus-Diana was personified in a masque presented before Elizabeth as part of the pageant entertainment at Norwich in 1578; each offered gifts to the Queen. Mars acknowledged that Elizabeth was a “Prince of Peace”; Venus said that in looking at the Queen a man “may another Venus see”; Diana referred to her as “chaste Dame” who in body and mind is “free from staine.”⁷

In the realm of Renaissance art Professor Edgar Wind discusses this union in a medal of Giovanna degli Albizzi in which Venus is disguised as a nymph of Diana. As Wind observes: “The union of Chastity and Love through the mediation of Beauty is now expressed by one hybrid figure in which the two opposing goddesses, Diana and Venus, are merged into one.”⁸

In other literary works we find this union of opposing goddesses with a character named Helen also included. From the drama preceding All's Well one can turn to George Peele's The Araygnement of Paris (c. 1581-1584) for such an example. Pallas, Juno, and Venus each in turn present a show to Paris before he makes his judgment. The directions for Venus' show indicate: “Here Helen entreth in her braverie, with 4. Cupides attending on her. …”⁹ Helen comes as representative of Venus, but in the Italian song that she sings she compares herself to Diana. In Book II, chapter 21 of the Arcadia (1590 text) Sidney also makes the association of a Helen figure, here the queen of Corinth, with both Diana and Venus as he describes this Helen's control and guidance of her court:

… she using so straunge, and yet so well-succeeding a temper … made her people by peace, warlike; her courtiers by sports, learned; her Ladies by Love, chast. For by continuall martiall exercises without bloud, she made them perfect in that bloudy art. Her sportes were such as caried riches of Knowledge upon the streame of Delight; & such the behaviour both of her self, and her Ladies, as builded their chastitie, not upon waywardnes, but by choice of worthines: So as it seemed, that court to have bene the mariage place of Love and Vertue, & that her selfe was a Diana apparelled in the garments of Venus.¹⁰

As Peele and Sidney make a mythical association between Helen-Diana-Venus, so Shakespeare years later could make his Helena mythically representative of both Diana and Venus.

As suggested earlier, the larger mythic structure of All's Well is concerned with the contention between Mars and Venus with Venus victorious. Renaissance painters delighted in giving visual embodiment to the myth as one can observe in paintings by Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Paolo Veronesse, and Francesco Cossa, all indicating that the god of war is inferior in strength to the goddess of grace and amiability.¹¹ Pico della Mirandola writing “On the general nature of Beauty” argues that it is necessary for union to overcome strife; hence, “for this reason is it said by the poets that Venus loves Mars, because Beauty, which we call Venus, cannot subsist without contrariety; and that Venus tames and mitigates Mars, because the tempering power restrains and overcomes the strife and hate which persist between the contrary elements.”¹² Centuries earlier Plutarch in De Iside et Osiride had written that “in the fables of the Greeks, Harmony was born from the union of Venus and Mars: of whom the latter is fierce and contentious, the former generous and pleasing.”¹³ How closely Bertram and Helena parallel Plutarch's distinction of Mars and Venus. Lucretius in the opening of De Rerum Natura writes of the pacifying power of Venus, noting in particular her relationship to Mars: “For thou alone canst delight mortals with quiet peace, since Mars mighty in battle rules the savage works of war, who often casts himself upon thy lap wholly vanquished by the ever-living wound of love, and thus looking upward with shapely neck thrown back feeds his eager eyes with love, gaping upon thee, goddess, and as he lies back his breath hangs upon thy lips.”¹⁴

The victory of Venus over Mars survives in various dramatic forms including some of the popular pageant entertainments of the sixteenth century. The scanty evidence for the Christmas revels of 1522-1523 indicates that on Twelfth Night a “triumph” of Cupid, Venus, and Mars was presented.¹⁵ Venus was brought in on a “chaire trivmfall,” and Mars came in heavily armed. Apparently there was some kind of débat with Venus defeating the Misrule's Marshal; the role of Mars in all of this is indeterminate. Later pageants show Elizabeth in a Venus-like role bringing peaceful union to warring or contentious forces (the manifestation of Mars). In the tiltyard at Whitehall in 1581 the Foster Children of Desire, including among them Philip Sidney, besieged the Fortress of Perfect Beauty, the specially constructed residence for Elizabeth. The full martial fury could not topple the place of beauty, though the attacks were fierce and there was much “shivering of the swordes.”¹⁶ The allegorical pageant ended with a representative of the Children of Desire being sent to the queen with an olive branch, which, the speaker said, was offered “in token of your [Elizabeth's] Triumphant peace, And of their peaceable servitude” (sig. C2). Symbolically, Venus has triumphed over Mars. One could offer a similar interpretation for some of the events that occurred during the Elvetham progress pageant in 1591. The warring forces of the wood gods and sea gods were stilled by the peaceful presence of Elizabeth, who is regarded as a friend to peace and enemy to war.¹⁷ The entire pageant offers a grand apotheosis of Elizabeth who, like Venus, tames Mars, overcomes conflict, and generates peace.

Looking at Shakespeare's early comedy, one might perceive something of the struggle between Mars and Venus in Love's Labour's Lost, at least symbolically. Those well-intentioned but foolhardy men of Navarre are called to the task of celibate contemplation in highly martial terms. The King bids the men to rally round the scholarly flag, “brave conquerors—… / That war against your own affections / And the huge army of the world's desires—” (I.i.8-10). If the men may be viewed as militant scholars, the Princess and her retinue possess the redeeming qualities of love and beauty (Venus), not to mention common sense. These women lay siege to the Fortress of Militant Scholarship and quickly blunt the sharp edge of discipline; seldom has Venus won so easily over Mars. Eventually the men own up to the demand of love, and the King in IV.iii offers a new rallying cry: “Saint Cupid then! And, soldiers, to the field!” (l. 361). Disarmed, their academy dismantled, these former scholars, now wiser, respond to the call of love and life.

The theme of peaceful union growing out of conflict pervades the paintings of Mars-Venus, especially the ones by Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo where the Mars figure is stripped of his armor and cupid figures play with it as Mars sleeps and Venus watches. In Piero's more pastoral rendering there is a distinction between background and foreground of the painting that may function as a symbol for All's Well. The background, and we are given a view of some distance, is barren with a solitary hill and a few scraggly trees, whereas the foreground where Venus and Mars lie is lush with vegetation. This distinction of symbolic landscape is common in Renaissance painting and may suggest here the difference between the period of contention (barrenness) and the period of union and reconciliation (fruitfulness). Or perhaps the arid background is the area from which Mars has come to arrive at the flourishing world presided over by Venus.

In either case the symbolism is appropriate to All's Well where the play begins in barrenness—death and decay abound and the King has a seemingly incurable illness. By the end of the drama the world of Rossillion is flourishing—even Helena, our Venus figure, is fruitful—pregnant with Bertram's child; the King has been cured; and Helena takes note of the Countess: “O my dear mother, do I see you living?” (V.iii.316). As the King says at one point earlier in the final scene, “All is whole” (l. 37). The characters have passed through the wasteland of tragedy (the background of Piero's painting) into the land of comic regeneration and renewal (the foreground). One of the play's fundamental questions—how does one restore a decaying world?—has been resolved, and the hopes are clearly resting on the union of Helena and Bertram. If they are indeed Mars-Venus, then their child should be Harmony. Shakespeare has understood that in the myth of Mars-Venus there is strife and contention (essential for any drama), but there is also ultimately peace and union. One might argue that Bertram and Helena's relationship resolves into discordia concors.

If we may accept the myth of Mars-Venus as a viable structure in All's Well, then we may more readily understand the contentious nature of Bertram and the generative force of Helena as she heals the King and subdues her Mars. The mythic pattern offers a paradigm of union wrought by love and of the renewing power of love, echoing experiences from Spenser's Temple of Venus and Garden of Adonis. Such a final paradigm demonstrates how far All's Well moves away from its tragic potential into a comic realization, foreshadowed by Helena's own awareness that “time will bring on summer, / When briers shall have leaves as well as thorns, / And be as sweet as sharp” (IV.iv.31-33).

Notes

1. Joseph Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of ‘All's Well that Ends Well’ and Its Critics (Toronto, 1968).

2. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore, 1969), I.i.185. All quotations from Shakespeare are from this edition.

3. The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Dodge (Boston, 1936).

4. See E. C. Wilson, England's Eliza (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), pp. 167-229.

5. Letter from the Tower, July, 1592, in The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Edward Edwards (London, 1868), II, 51.

6. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. Daniel Seltzer (Lincoln, Neb., 1963).

7. John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1823), II, 160-163.

8. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn., 1958), pp. 73-74.

9. Dramatic Works of George Peele, ed. R. Mark Benbow (New Haven, Conn., 1970), III, 83 (Act II, scene ii).

10. The Prose Works of Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1922), I, 283. I am indebted to Professor Gerald Snare for this reference and for other advice about this paper.

11. See Wind, Pagan Mysteries, for reproductions of these paintings, illus. 54-57. For further discussion see Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1962), pp. 162-164.

12. Quoted in Wind, Pagan Mysteries, p. 83.

13. Ibid., p. 82.

14. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1966), p. 5.

15. Sydney Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969), pp. 312-313.

16. Henry Goldwell, A briefe declaration of the shews … (London, 1581), sig. C1.

17. For further discussion of these pageants see David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 (London & Columbia, S.C., 1971), pp. 44-46, 57-61.