[In the following essay, Shapiro examines the theme of mutual redemption derived from self-knowledge in All's Well That Ends Well.]

Toward the end of his Introduction to the New Arden edition of All's Well That Ends Well, G. K. Hunter outlines the case for considering the “problem plays” as precursors of the late romances.¹ Looking backward as well as forward, one can also approach All's Well and Measure for Measure as the last of Shakespeare's love comedies and see these “problem plays” as a transition from a relatively realistic mode to the predominantly symbolic mode of the final romances. Considered as a transitional work, All's Well is an exciting, if not altogether successful, experiment.

Most of the major critics of the play have either seconded Samuel Johnson's famous attack on Bertram, or followed Coleridge in adoring Helena as Shakespeare's “loveliest creation.”² Some have done both at once. The inevitable minority backlash against Helena is perhaps best represented by A. H. Carter.³ Unfortunately, such partisanship on behalf of one or the other of the main characters eclipses the symmetrical pattern of the play, a pattern we associate with many love comedies. When hero and heroine are presented symmetrically, or in parallel fashion, like the four Athenian lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Beatrice and Benedick, and Ferdinand and Miranda, they are more or less equally disposed or indisposed to falling in love, share common or similar ideals, aspirations, or inadequacies, and pass through similar or equivalent trials to achieve their union.

Such a symmetrical or parallel presentation of Bertram and Helena seems to be part of the design of All's Well. Within the first sixty lines of the play, for example, we hear the Countess speak twice on the theme of “blood and virtue”—that is, heritage and character, once about Helena and twenty lines later to Bertram:

I have those hopes of her good that her education promises her dispositions [which] she inherits—which makes fair gifts fairer.

(I.i.36-38)

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

(I.i.57-60)

In other words, both Helena and Bertram have yet to demonstrate personal qualities worthy of their blood, and both must strive to distinguish themselves through impressive achievement, as Muriel Bradbrook has pointed out.⁴ Individually, they travel to court, the seat of recognition for worldly attainment, and then assert themselves in ways likely to lead to distinction: Helena undertakes to cure the King, and Bertram goes off to war. However, while both Helena and Bertram achieve what they set out to achieve, they lose something more valuable in the process: Through her miraculous cure of the King, Helena wins Bertram's hand but not his heart; in Italy, Bertram wins glory on the battlefield but loses most of his honor in the boudoir and the remainder at court.

A fugue-like pattern emerges when one isolates those episodes which develop the theme of the success and failure of self-assertion with respect to Bertram and Helena. Bertram and Parolles, and then Helena, leave Rossillion for the court. First Helena and then Bertram embark on a quest for honor, while Parolles parodies their aspirations by seeking and sporting the outward tokens of distinguished achievement—“the name but not the thing.” Restating and developing the subject in stretto, Helena and Bertram assert themselves in separate episodes, as mounting complications quicken the tempo. At the end of the play, the King invites Diana to choose a husband from among his courtiers, nearly sending the play back to II.iii to be repeated.⁵ Finally, Helena's and Bertram's individual efforts, like independent melodic lines, come together in a magnificent close, when both characters acknowledge the ultimate failure of their attempts to achieve distinction, thereby proceeding, as I shall presently argue, to redeem themselves and each other.

When one begins to think of the two central characters in this play as being roughly symmetrical or parallel, Bertram becomes more sympathetic and Helena more human. For example, as the Countess' speeches in the opening scene suggest, both Helena and Bertram are under considerable pressure to prove themselves worthy of their legacies. But this problem is more acute for sons, who must demonstrate virtù by displaying physical courage, than for daughters, who can demonstrate virtue somewhat more passively through chastity. The Countess, in the parallel speeches on blood and virtue already quoted, seems more hopeful that nurture will perfect Helena's nature than that Bertram will succeed his father “in manners as in shape.” Similarly, the King welcomes Bertram to the court with a prayer that challenges him to live up to his descent:

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!

(I.ii.19-22)

Like Hamlet and Prince Hal, both Bertram and Helena carry the burden of an illustrious father, but only Bertram is suspected of not meriting his heritage while being restrained from demonstrating his merit. His mother would keep her “unseasoned” son safe at home if she could, while the King, a substitute father, forbids him to go off to war for another year. Significantly, Shakespeare has added these roles to the original tale, evidently to heighten our sympathies with Bertram's struggle to grow into manhood. Ironically, the society which tries to prevent him from doing so desperately needs rejuvenation by the young, as John Arthos has pointed out.⁶ Bertram's father is dead, the King is dying, the Countess and Lafew feel the approach of death, and an autumnal, elegiac tone suffuses the entire play. Given these internal and social pressures on Bertram to manifest his mettle, coupled with the overprotectiveness of his mother and surrogate father, it is hardly surprising that Shakespeare makes the young Count decide to run off to Italy even before Helena's arrival at court. Once he has joined “the big wars that make ambition virtue,” to borrow Othello's memorable phrase, his prowess and bravery earn him the distinction he pursues:

It is reported that he has taken their great'st commander, and that with his own hand he slew the duke's brother.

(III.v.5-7)

A moment after we learn of these brilliant achievements, we learn of his dishonorable attempts to seduce Diana.

Helena too has human desires and defects. In her case it is not parental pressure or Oedipal rivalry but her love for Bertram that makes her regard healing the King's fistula as an opportunity for gaining the distinction she feels will make her worthy of Bertram's love:

… Nor would I have him till I do deserve him;
Yet never know how that desert should be.

(I.iii.194-95)

In light of the action of the play, the first of the two lines just quoted can be taken to mean, “When I deserve him then I'll have him.” Helena's strivings for desert, like the Florentine exploits that bring Bertram both honor and shame, lead directly to distinction and, as we shall see, to disaster.

It could be objected that symmetrically presented lovers are the exception rather than the rule in Shakespearean comedy. More often than not, heroines like Portia and Rosalind possess a greater awareness of themselves and their situations than do their lovers, whom they gently steer toward the mutually desired union. Helena is often ranked among them: “She is the fifth and last in the succession of heroines who—all practisers, overpeerers, proprietors of central secrets about which large actions revolve, and in varying degrees controllers of their worlds—stand in the line of Prospero.”⁷ Some critics feel that Shakespeare matches Helena's strategic advantages with moral and spiritual superiority over the other characters, especially Bertram, and such critics eagerly agree with the Countess that Helena “deserves a lord / That twenty such rude boys might tend upon / And call her, hourly, mistress” (III.ii.80-82). Whereas Helena's nineteenth-century admirers like Shaw praised human qualities such as “exquisite tenderness and impulsive courage,”⁸ more recent devotees incline toward canonization and deification. G. Wilson Knight describes Helena as “a semi-divine person, or some new type of saint,”⁹ while R. G. Hunter argues that Helena has the interceding and redeeming powers of the “literary descendants of the Virgin in the medieval narrative and dramatic ‘Miracles of Our Lady.’”¹⁰

I do not think that this exalted view of Helena can survive close scrutiny. It is true that Helena is a girl of rare virtue—intelligent, chaste, courageous, and determined. From the start she is humble about her birth and her qualities. In the conversation with Parolles about virginity near the end of I.i. she implies that virginity is less a passive state to be preserved from the onslaughts of men than an active force to be employed in redeeming them.¹¹ Helena herself takes no credit for the King's recovery, modestly describing herself as the mere agency of super-human power, but writers on magic generally insist that such agents must first attain a high level of moral and spiritual development.¹²

But what have these impressive gifts to do with romantic love? Helena has striven to make herself deserving of Bertram's love, as if love were a reward for outstanding accomplishment or, worse still, something to be commanded by the successful. As John Russell Brown has argued, Helena violates the ethos of Shakespearean love comedy in failing to understand that love must be freely and voluntarily given, not extracted by force, even force of merit.¹³ She realizes her error an instant after she claims Bertram as her prize, watching him recoil, and she vainly tries to correct her mistake, but by that time the King sees his own “honor at the stake” and compels Bertram to accept the match. Except for the snobbery about social rank, Bertram's reluctance to marry her under such conditions is quite understandable, for not only has he been crushed by the King's authority but he sees in marriage the death of all his aspirations to masculine forms of honor.¹⁴ Parolles articulates Bertram's fears when he argues that sexual energy should be sublimated into martial flurry, not dissipated in marital union:

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.

(II.iii.275-79)

Helena may be the representative of the transcendental in Bertram's life, as G. Wilson Knight calls her, but as even Knight remarks, “We need not wish to be married to it” (p. 156), much less have it shoved down our throats. Helena herself acknowledges the presumptuousness of claiming love by desert when she accepts responsibility for Bertram's flight and possible death:

                                                            Poor lord, is't I
That chase thee from thy country, and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event
Of the none-sparing war? And is it I
That drive thee from the sportive court, where thou
Wast shot at with fair eyes, to be the mark
of smoky muskets? …
Whoever shoots at him, I set him there;
Whoever charges on his forward breast,
I am the caitiff that do hold him to't;
And though I kill him not, I am the cause
His death was so effected.

(III.ii.102-16)

At this point in the play, Helena resembles Viola more than she does Portia or Rosalind. Confronted by a problem, both Viola and Helena take brisk, assertive steps to control the situation. Shakespeare is very explicit about Helena's abandonment of passivity for action:

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.212-15)

Like Viola, Helena resolves to act audaciously and meets with great initial success, only to discover, very shortly, that she has entangled herself in a fresh set of complications without having extricated herself from the first. But Helena outdoes Viola in assertiveness. Whereas Viola forsakes any notion of solving her problems through her own actions and flings herself on the mercy of the future—

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me t' untie!(15)

—Helena is more resilient. Instead of collapsing into passivity when her first scheme boomerangs, she embarks on a second course of action—the pilgrimage to St. Jaques le Grand, or Santiago of Campostella, Spain. Actually, it makes little difference to the play whether Helena ever journeyed to St. Jaques, whether she crosses Bertram's path by chance or by design, or whether she had the bed-trick, or something like it, in mind when she left Rossillion or hatched the plan only after hearing of Bertram's attempt to seduce Diana; for the entire scheme is a failure.¹⁶ That is, whether we see her as a penitent pilgrim or as a keen-eyed huntress, her second attempt to win Bertram's love by self-assertion is no more successful than the first.

In the first place, the plan depends on such ethically shabby tactics as the false rumor of her death certified by the rector of the shrine, and the bribing of the Widow and Diana. As Clifford Leech says, “The words of Helena are too full of high sentence for us to be amused by her obliquity.”¹⁷ Moreover, very few of us can still accept W. W. Lawrence's defense of the bed-trick as a conventional device of folk tale and novella.¹⁸ G. K. Hunter, pointing to the realistic features of the play that differentiate it from folk tale and novella, concludes, “Elements of the play fight strongly against any facile acceptance of the bed-trick” (p. xlv). Furthermore, even if one sympathizes with the Clever Maid who fulfills the Impossible Conditions, surely one must grant the possibility of sympathy for the Roguish Gallant who evades the Predacious Wench. To these considerations one might add that Helena's repeated insistence on the lawfulness of the bed-trick suggests the need to shore up the dubious ethicality of the whole scheme with legality. Finally, we come to the point which has evaded all of the play's critics: The bed-trick may seem from our point of view to resolve all of the complications of the play, and viewed retrospectively it certainly has led to such tidy resolution, but Helena feels that the bed-trick is unsuccessful, almost tragically so, or is at best irrelevant to her desire to gain Bertram's love.

Let us examine the climatic moment. Diana has been disgraced and is about to be imprisoned; Helena, still unreconciled with Bertram, now bears his child; and Bertram has been disowned by his mother, dishonored before the King, and is now under guard on suspicion of having murdered his wife. The stage is now set for the heroine to enter in triumph and blithely resolve all the complications. Diana asks her mother to fetch her bail, that is, Helena, then smugly teases the King with riddles. The curious thing about Helena's entrance, however, is that it lacks even the least shred of triumph:

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.

(V.iii.297-302)

Diana's riddles and the King's fanfare introduce not a jubilant Helena but a Helena who is humble and contrite, and who has good reason to be so. She may be the living answer to Diana's riddles, but in her answer to the King she admits her failure to solve her most urgent human problem—how to win Bertram's love—and her squalid efforts to solve this problem are in part responsible for the suffering of others. Furthermore, she now knows that she can no more deserve Bertram's love by fulfilling his conditions than she could by curing the King. In short, she has married Bertram, slept with him, acquired his ancestral ring, and conceived his child, but she has not won his love.

Bertram's response to the lines just quoted—so short that most critics overlook it—is nothing less than the climax of the play:

Both, both. O Pardon!

With the first two of these four words, Bertram accepts her as his wife—both the name and the thing—before Helena or anyone else mentions his impossible conditions. In so doing, he implicitly forgives her for attempting to claim his love by desert and for the near-tragic consequences of that attempt. With the last two of these four words, he asks her to forgive his obstinate perversity. Thus, while Helena may be responsible for Bertram's redemption, he is also the agent of hers. Had Bertram not forgiven Helena and accepted her as his wife, she would have suffered a part of the fate attendant on her failing to cure the King in her first plan to win Bertram's love—and with more cause:

                                                            Tax of impudence,
A strumpet's boldness, a divulged shame,
Traduc'd by odious ballads; my maiden's name
Sear'd otherwise.

(II.i.169-72)

Helena's identity as a woman depends on Bertram, whose free and unconstrained forgiveness and acceptance of his wife turns a sordid deception into a ratification of their marriage bond. Helena's relinquishing of her claim to be Bertram's wife and Bertram's validation of that claim are mutually redemptive acts of love and lead them out of the morass they have made of their own lives and onto the high ground of mutual forgiveness, where they can sustain the nobler parts of their natures. Furthermore, Shakespeare prevents this highly emotional scene of mutual redemption from wallowing in bathos by making Lafew's comic weeping parody lachrymose sentimentality and by using a series of “if's” to suggest the fragility of the lovers' reconciliation.

If the play is to succeed on stage, or at least this interpretation of it, Bertram's “Both, both. O Pardon!” must strike us as a spontaneous outburst of pure love, and not as a gesture calculated to save his neck. The stark simplicity of these four words in their context suggests that we are expected to grant the authenticity of the sentiment, especially when we contrast this line with the patent insincerity of Bertram's earlier acceptance of Helena at the King's command:

Pardon, my gracious lord; for I submit
My fancy to your eyes. When I consider
What great creation and what dole of honour
Flies where you bid it, I find that she, which late
Was in my nobler thoughts most base, is now
The praised of the king; who, so ennobled,
Is as 'twere born so.

(II.iii.167-73)

My emphasis on Bertram's redemptive role in the play connotes no slighting of Helena's, which has been noticed by most modern critics of the work. Indeed, in their symmetrical, or parallel, relationship to one another they are mutually redemptive, for each of them regains through humility and submission what has been lost through self-assertion. Although the apotheosis of Helena, more than any other critical tendency, has obscured this symmetry, I would stress that she redeems Bertram and is in turn redeemed by him not as a saint or goddess, but, in Keats's words, as “a real woman, lineal indeed / From Pyrrha's pebbles or old Adam's seed.”¹⁹

Despite its structural affinities with some of Shakespeare's earlier love comedies, All's Well seems to differ from them in presenting the humanness of the lovers so candidly that they seem too deeply flawed for their conventional roles. Bertram, the boy who is trying to prove his manhood, is inseparable from the philandering cavalier who lies shamelessly to evade the King's wrath; while Helena, the gifted, courageous virgin blends into the Clever Wench of folk tale and novella—in a context which reveals the duplicity and futility of her wiliness. This intertwining of strengths and weaknesses makes Bertram and Helena palpably human, nearly too much so for the play, and yet this sense of their human frailty leads us to the very heart of the play. As one of the French lords says,

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

(IV.iii. 68-71)

In All's Well, as in some of Shakespeare's earlier comedies, romantic love is the redemptive force that untangles this mingled yarn.

Redemption in All's Well begins with self-knowledge; Helena's dejected entrance in the final scene indicates an awareness of her moral failure, and Bertram's sins are publicly exposed. Whereas the Countess, like many a parent, would attribute the corruption of her son's well-derived nature to Parolles' inducement (III.ii. 88-89), Shakespeare forces Bertram to bear the responsibility squarely on his own shoulders. From self-knowledge the redemptive process leads hero and heroine through repentance to mutual forgiveness and finally into a relationship that will enable them, to adopt Knight's phrase, to serve and rebuild their better selves (p. 144). Yet Shakespeare never lets us forget that in the mingled yarn of human life, redemptive forces are rooted in human sexuality. Thinking he is in bed with Diana, the Count fathers the child that will enable Helena to fulfill his impossible conditions, while Helena, by virtue of the unsavory bed-trick, prevents her husband from violating his marriage vows and his honor. In a way that anticipates the final romances, redemption through love occurs despite yet through the characters' imperfect, humanly blundering efforts to attain their goals.

Like redemption in a more strictly theological sense, redemption through human love in All's Well occurs only after characters show a willingness to sacrifice worldly achievement for spiritual humility. Just as in theological views of grace, where repentance and humility precede union with God, so too in Shakespeare's conception of redemption through love, repentance and humility generally precede marital union. Early in All's Well, however, the Clown places marriage before repentance, wishing to marry in order to repent:

I have been, madam, a wicked creature, as you and all flesh and blood are, and indeed I do marry that I may repent.

(I.iii. 33-35)

The Countess may be partly correct in interpreting this remark to mean that he will regret having married, as Bertram will do, but the statement foreshadows Bertram's fate in another way, for it is only through marriage that the Count learns genuinely to repent his own misconduct. While repentance and humility precede marital union in most love comedies, in All's Well they are the necessary conditions for the true union—both the name and the thing—that Bertram and Helena achieve after marriage.

There is a special resonance in another of the Clown's utterances—the ironic commentary on his master, the devil, which is really a sermon on humility and repentance:

I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always loved a great fire, and the master I speak of ever keeps a good fire; but sure he is the prince of the world; let his nobility remain in's court, I am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little for pomp to enter; some that humble themselves may, but the many will be too chill and tender, and they'll be for the flow'ry way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire.

(IV.v. 44-52)

This speech not only anticipates the mutual redemption of Bertram and Helena, but also casts its light forward onto Parolles, as one who is too chill and tender for the humility and repentance that must precede redemption. Instead of transcending his baser inclinations at the end of the play, he sinks down into them, but at least has been freed from the compulsion to pass himself off as a noble warrior. Although he has fallen short of redemption, he has achieved self-knowledge, not the self-knowledge that he is a cowardly braggart—for that he has always known—but the knowledge that pretension is enslaving and exposure inevitable. Released from the strain and fear inherent in his earlier posturing, he can revel in his true self, play the fool without hypocrisy or deceit, and be “simply the thing I am” (IV.iii. 322)—an example of wayward humanity untouched by the redemptive power of human love. On this basis Parolles is accepted into the community of human fellowship, where “there's place and means for every man alive” (IV.iii. 328):

PAROLLES.
It lies in you, my lord, to bring me in some grace, for you did bring me out.
LAFEW.
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. … Sirrah, inquire further after me. I had talk of you last night; though you are a fool and a knave you shall eat. Go to: follow.

(V.ii. 43-51)

One might object that the view of All's Well just presented overtaxes his faith in the power of human love to redeem lovers as deeply flawed as Bertram and Helena. Much depends of course on the actors playing these roles to keep before us the essential goodness of Bertram and Helena, and to suggest that their flaws result from youth and immaturity, which are stressed throughout the play, from Bertram's desperate need to fill his father's shoes, from Helena's ardent quest for the man she loves. Even the best acting may not make the conventional love-comedy ending seem any less facile or pat, and it may well be that in affirming the power of Eros to redeem such typical specimens of fallen humanity, Shakespeare has reached the limits of the genre. To put it another way, Shakespeare has raised serious psychological and moral questions but has answered them—inadequately—by resorting to conventions of love comedy. Nevertheless, this familiar observation about All's Well (and Measure for Measure) becomes less damning than would appear when one notes that Shakespeare does virtually the same thing in the late romances, but has simply found or created a different set of dramaturgical conventions through which to express his vision of the redemptive power of human love guided by Providence. Love in the final romances is not exclusively romantic or sexual, and frequently is filial; children as well as lovers are the agents of redemption. The germ of this idea may be found in All's Well, where Helena—pregnant with Bertram's child—carries in her womb the living proof of her marriage bond, which when freely accepted will redeem both husband and wife. Moreover, imputations of facile endings are avoided in the final romances in part by greater emphasis on the suffering, penance, and contrition that precedes redemption and regeneration. Here too the germ of the idea exists in All's Well, where Bertram's wriggling and Helena's humiliation anticipate the searing spiritual agonies of Leontes and Alonzo.

If the play is a failure, as we are frequently told, it is a particularly illuminating one. Representing a transitional phase in the development of Shakespearean comedy, it was written at a time when Shakespeare had mastered, perhaps exhausted, the possibilities of the love comedy but had not yet discovered the artistic potentialities of the romance. But one need not invoke the evolution of Shakespeare's career to justify the play's existence, for All's Well That Ends Well is a carefully balanced and delicately wrought work of art, in which Shakespeare reveals the human substance beneath the idealizations of conventional love comedy and celebrates the capacity of humanity to transcend itself through love.

Notes

1. G. K. Hunter, ed., All's Well That Ends Well (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. liv-lvi. I quote throughout from this edition.

2. Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (London, 1960), p. 84; Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 2nd ed. (London, 1960), I, 102. The trend continues in recent criticism. See R. G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York, 1965), pp. 106-31.

3. A. H. Carter, “In Defense of Bertram,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 7 (1956), 21-31. See the reply to Carter by F. G. Schoff, “Claudio, Bertram, and a Note on Interpretation,” SQ, 10 (1959), 11-23. In recent criticism, the most balanced views of Helena are offered by Alexander Leggatt, “All's Well That Ends Well: The Testing of Romance,” MLQ [Modern Language Quarterly], 32 (1971), 21-41; and Walter N. King, “Shakespeare's ‘Mingled Yarn,’” MLQ, 21 (1960), 33-44. Leggatt describes the play as a courageous if unsuccessful attempt to blend the romantic and realistic modes, but his view ultimately depends on the feeling—which I do not share—that Bertram's final repentance is incomplete. My reading of the play parallels King's at many points, but he stops far short of mutual redemption and self-transcendence, and thus fails to see the play's relationship to the late romances.

4. Muriel Bradbook, “Virtue Is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All's Well That Ends Well,” RES [Review of English Studies], n.s., 1 (1950), 289-301.

5. Although Miss Bradbrook has argued that Elizabethan guardians did have the right to choose husbands for their wards, love comedies generally encourage us to disapprove the exercise of such rights. But the King in All's Well, who is partially responsible for the suffering in the play, as he forces Bertram to marry Helena even after Helena abandons her claim to her reward, has learned nothing. In popular comedy of our own day, it is quite common for an ending to take us back to the beginning or to an earlier point in the work, like a repeat in a musical score. Cyclic form in comedy invokes the dismaying feeling of “here we go again,” suggests the futility of any attempt to extract wisdom from suffering, and points to the recurrence ad infinitum of the kinds of problems such comedies deal with. Other examples of cyclic form in Shakespearean comedy occur at the end of The Comedy of Errors, where a renewal of the confusion of identities undermines the stability of the final reunions and reconciliations; and at the end of The Merchant of Venice, where Antonio, who has just escaped death because he staked his flesh on Bassanio's fidelity to the bond with Shylock, now offers to stake his soul on Bassanio's fidelity to the marriage bond with Portia.

6. John Arthos, “The Comedy of Generation,” Essays in Criticism, 5 (1955), 101.

7. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), p. 149.

8. Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York, 1961), p. 12.

9. G. Wilson Knight, “The Third Eye,” in The Sovereign Flower (London, 1958), p. 146.

10. R. G. Hunter, p. 130. Helena is even called “a surrogate for Christ” by Carl Dennis, “All's Well That Ends Well and the Meaning of Agape,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], 50 (1971), 83.

11. This is especially true if one retains the Folio punctuation of lines 161-62:

    Not my virginity yet:
    There shall your master have a thousand loves, …

    Knight (pp. 137-39) argues with great persuasiveness that “there” refers to “my virginity.” King (p. 39) quotes the following comment by Steevens: “Parolles has been laughing at the unprofitableness of virginity, especially when it grows ancient, and compares it to withered fruit. Helena, properly enough, replies, that hers is not yet in that state, but that in the enjoyment of her his master should find the gratification of all his most romantic wishes.”

12. “There is moreover a most necessary and secret thing which is absolutely necessary for a magician, and which is the key to all magical operations, and this is ‘the Dignification of man for such high virtue and power.’ It is through the intellect, the highest faculty of the soul, that miraculous works are done, and it is by an ascetic, pure, and religious way of life that is to be achieved the dignification necessary for the religious Magus” (Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition [London, 1964], p. 138). Miss Yates is translating a passage from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, III, 3. Lynn Thorndike (A History of Magic and Experimental Science [New York, 1923-41], I, 311), citing a work attributed to a Neo-Platonist named Iamblichus (d. a.d. 330), Liber de mysteriis, I, 12, comments that invocations used in theurgical operations are intended to “purify those who employ them from their passions and impurity and exalt them to union with the pure and the divine.” Similarly, E. J. Holmyard (Alchemy [Harmondsworth, 1957], p. 157) quotes the following passage from a poem about alchemy, “Upon the Sacred Art,” written early in the eighth century by the Byzantine Greek alchemist Archelaos:

    The work which thou expectest to perform
    Will bring thee easily great joy and gain
    When soul and body thou dost beautify
    With chasteness, fasts and purity of mind,
    Avoiding life's distractions and, alone
    In prayerful service, giving praise to God,
    Entreating him with supplicating hands
    To grant thee grace and knowledge from above. …
    Thy body mortify by serving God:
    Thy soul let wing to look on godliness:
    So shalt thou never have at all the wish
    To do or think a thing that is not right.
    For strength of soul is manliness of mind,
    Sagacious reasoning and prudent thought.
    All passions purify and wash away
    The stain of carnal joys with streams of tears. …

    (trans. C. A. Browne)

13. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies, 2nd ed. (London, 1962), pp. 187-88, 192.

14. Richard Wheeler, “A Psychological Study of All's Well That Ends Well,” unpub. diss. (State University of New York at Buffalo, 1969-70), pp. 17-64. See his forthcoming article, to be published in Bucknell Review.

15. Twelfth Night, II.ii.41-42. Brown (p. 186) and Evans (p. 150) also notice Helena's resemblance to Viola.

16. For a recent discussion of the ambiguity surrounding Helena's motives, see J. C. Maxwell, “Helena's Pilgrimage,” RES, n.s., 20 (1969), 189-92.

17. Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in All's Well That Ends Well,” ELH, 21 (1954), 26.

18. W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (New York, 1931), pp. 48-61.

19. “Lamia,” Part I, ll. 332-33. For a recent attempt to stress the humanness of Helena's love, see Roger Warren, “Why Does It End Well? Helena, Bertram and the Sonnets,” Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), 79-92. Although Warren finally sees Helena as the play's sole redemptive figure, he argues that her relationship with Bertram shares many of the fears and frustrations of the poet's relationship with his beloved in the sonnets.