SOURCE: “Patterns of Resolution in Shakespeare's Comedies,” in The Happy End of Comedy: Jonson, Molière, and Shakespeare, pp. 124-37, University of Delaware Press, 1984.

[In the excerpt below, Jagendorf analyzes the discovery scenes in The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure in the context of the comic conventions of recapitulation and return. In each of these plays, Jagendorf notes, the final scenes are preceded by ones which feature a real or proposed substitution that complicates the plot; the satisfactory consequences of these exchanges, the critic maintains, are then revealed in trial-like, concluding episodes.]

Readers of Roman comedy are familiar with the exploitation of confusion about identity for the creation of deadlock and comic upheaval. Characters ignorant of who they are hold the key to many happy endings that are held up until someone arrives to identify them. In Terence's Woman of Andros, for example, the revelation of Glycerium's real name and status makes possible her marriage to the young man with his father's consent. A more complicated knot is created when one character is taken for another, the result of coincidence or intrigue. Such an exchange of identity makes likely more far-reaching consequences; the wife may share her bed with the god standing in for the husband (Amphitryon), the angry citizen may put his own son in chains, thinking him to be a slave who has tricked him by standing in for his young master (The Captives). Such mistakings approach seriousness by creating situations that would be irreversible if not for some saving grace or lucky revelation at a crucial moment. In his tragicomedies Shakespeare comes as close as possible to dramatizing the irreversible consequences of such exchanges and his model for such a transaction is the substitution of one body for another in the encounter of sex.

The actions of exchange and substitution of one person for another underlie the tragi-comic climaxes of The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure in a special way. In the two latter plays the act upon which the ending movement depends and which it mainly judges is an act of sexual intercourse with a woman substituted for the intended partner. In the first play, the ghoulish yet sincere exchange of Antonio's body for the forfeited bond does not indeed take place but in its stead other seemingly irrevocable transactions are made that repeat in a minor key the crucial acts of the play and link them to the happy end. In all three plays the near fatality of an act of exchange epitomizes the many dualities of tragi-comic resolution. It is both absurd and nobly unselfish, an act of blind lust and of rightful consummation, a trick of comic convention and a commentary on character, irrevocable and yet a release.¹

The law of exchange is the natural law of the commercial world of Venice where money and goods change hands and credit is extended in return for a bond that itself will turn into money on a given date. This is the natural cycle of business transactions controlled by law and custom and endangered by fortune. By agreeing to Shylock's “merry bond” Antonio symbolically undermines the impersonal practices of business, going even further than the generosity of “what's mine is yours” to the extreme emotional and spiritual commitment of “my life is yours.”

The exchange of money for goods is an unending cycle, the aim of which is profit. The substitution of a body for one factor in the transaction makes the cycle stop before a potentially tragic exchange that is a grotesque parody of a business deal. Antonio's substitution of his body for the debt of 3,000 ducats is, structurally, a simpler form of the tragicomic knot than the parallel acts of Mariana and Helena. The women's act is real; they hand over their body to the lust of a predator and, losing the blood of virginity, redeem their enemy lover. Antonio exploits all the pathos of such an act:

Repent but you that you shall lose your friend,
And he repents not that he pays your debt;
For if the Jew do cut but deep enough,
I’ll pay it instantly with all my heart.

(4.1.278-81)

However, he does not have to spill his blood to redeem his friend. The loss of maidenhood, while irrevocable, avoids tragedy through marriage while the exchange of a life for a debt cannot be digested by comedy. So the crucial act does not take place in The Merchant of Venice, but in its stead a symbolic analogy occurs as its sequel and creates the knot that the resolution must untie. Portia, who has given everything to her chosen lover—“Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours / Is now converted” (3.2.166-67)—makes the final gift of her body dependent on the redeeming of Antonio's debt. Meanwhile the exchange of rings stands for the postponed consummating embrace. But the connection between the redemption of the debt and mutual possession in marriage is not as simple as that between Antonio's adoption of the debt and Bassanio's successful search for a bride. Antonio's forfeit of his body made possible his friend's success as a lover; Bassanio's requiting that generous act, even hypothetically, is falsely symmetrical. His oath protesting that he would give up his life, his wife, and all the world is heard with understandable irony by Portia:

I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all
Here to this devil, to deliver you.

(4.1.286-87)

For Bassanio is not his own man. Even his body is not his to give since it belongs to his wife, who has his ring. Any requiting of Antonio's friendship becomes a betrayal of his marriage. The two obligations are seemingly contradictory; they can be reconciled only by the trick of the substituted woman, which in all three plays is the condition for the male victim's ambiguous act of wrong-doing and redemption. An act of treachery, it turns out, may simultaneously be its opposite, just as giving away a ring may, in comic circumstances, also be giving it back:

                                         … when this ring
Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence;
O then be bold to say Bassanio's dead!

(3.2.183-85)

Thus Bassanio, who does symbolically what Antonio is saved from doing, is saved from the consequences of his act by the double presence of the figure of the “young doctor of Rome,” of Portia's claim and Antonio's, of male and female.

The Merchant of Venice is not a play that scatters indications of ending along its way. For instance, the bond between Shylock and Antonio, unlike Bertram's extreme conditions for bedding Helena, bears no hint in its own wording of its subversion. The ending movement, initiated by Portia's tying the consummation of her marriage to Antonio's release from the bond, is in fact an attempt to solve the relationship between the unilaterally self-sacrificing act of male friendship that begins the play and the mutual obligations of married love that it makes possible but that supersede it. That a difficult choice must be made is clear from Bassanio's dilemma with the ring. The play ends well by contriving a congruency between the genuine split in the man and the sacrificial doubleness of the woman, or between the man's harmless breach of faith and the woman's benevolent mischief.

In the other two plays the male wrongdoers are forced to reconcile their lust for one woman with their possession of another. Their own blind act serves both purposes and their evil intention is redeemed by its satisfactory outcome. Bassanio, whose courtesy and loyalty overcome his love vow, cannot in the one act express both friendship and love but must be made to seem an adulterer in order to earn his happy ending. Bassanio's “guilt” in the ring scene puts him in a position vis à vis Portia analogical to that of Antonio vis à vis Shylock. He too has broken a bond and deserves death (in lover’ rhetoric) or more prosaically, the horns of cuckold:

Now, by mine honor which is yet mine own,
I’ll have that doctor for [my] bedfellow.

(5.1.232-33)

Antonio's second binding points the parallel again. These repetitions are a reversal of the earlier binding and trial because the source of both “credit” and mercy is now Portia instead of Shylock.

Portia finally fills all possible positions vis à vis the hapless men: wronged wife, mysterious sweetheart, judicious advocate, source of credit and mercy. It is she who is “double” and not Bassanio, the target of her accusation. As such she can easily change places with herself, return the ring, and solve everything. But the initial, disturbing asymmetry remains. The self-sacrificing friend for whom Bassanio was prepared to forfeit wife and all is the odd man out. His second and excessive offer to bind his soul upon the forfeit for Bassanio's faith is a genuine but unserious gesture. He has no more role to play, for Portia's credit is given without forfeit and he has become a pawn in her game. Thus the liberation of Antonio also frees Bassanio from his tie to the older man and the conflicting obligations of friendship and marriage are resolved by making both men clients of Portia.

Unlike the other two darker tragi-comedies, the crucial acts of forfeit and bloodletting do not take place in The Merchant of Venice. Antonio does not give his body for his friend, nor does he spill his blood, as Mariana and Helena do to seal their status as wives. It is the avoidance of the serious transaction that makes the ending of this play a lighter affair. In its stead there is its artificial image in the coda of the rings, which exposes earlier choices and repeats the gesture of forfeit but only formally and without pain.

The very name All's Well That Ends Well points to a tension between the happy ending and the not-so-happy events that it compensates for.² Twice Helena must remind her partners in her project that “Though time seem so adverse and means unfit” (5.1.26), the end “is the renown” (4.4.36) and will justify the means by which it was achieved. In this play it is the patient plotting of a loving and understanding woman that turns the “abhorr’d ends” of a trifler who contrives against his own nobility into the hallowed end that he was fleeing:

Bertram: A heaven on earth I have won by wooing thee. (Exit)
Diana: For which live long to thank both heaven and me!
You may so in the end.

(4.2.66-68)

This transposition of ends (exchanging the irresponsible deflowering of a virgin for the consummation of a marriage) is the result of a redeeming act of substitution—“this deceit so lawful” (3.7.38) that converts bad into good without demanding the full price of recognition, neither at the moment of encounter nor at the end.

The crucial act of this play, the hidden encounter in Diana's bed, is morally two-faced. As a destructive act of lust it has no consequences because the lust remains a purpose, a wicked meaning, more in the head than in the deed. As a beneficent fact of consummation it does have consequences—the pregnancy of Helena and the fulfillment of the seemingly impossible conditions of Bertram's letter. But the initiator of the act, whether we stress its sinful or redeeming aspect, remains blind, unaware of his shame (act 4) as he is laconic in his acceptance of guilt in the final scene. Although this lack of awareness in Bertram has been considered a weakness by many,³ it is in keeping with the play's insistence that man is judged by his acts rather than by his intentions and with the nature of the critical sexual encounter that makes beneficent use of the lover's silence, blindness, and ignorance.

The elaborate final scene of the play is disappointing if we expect a scene of recognition. It lacks the wonder of discovery and, as Bertram takes the center, develops into an unpleasant investigation of his pretensions and self-indulgent evasions. The shock of revelation that transfigures so many of Shakespeare's comic endings is absent. In its stead there is a curiously impersonal exposure of Bertram's guilt by stages until the crisis of incomprehension summed up by Diana's cryptic lines brings about the intervention of Helena:

… he's guilty, and he is not guilty.
He knows I am no maid, and he’ll swear to’t;
I’ll swear I am a maid, and he knows not.

(5.3.289-91)

Helena is the meaning of Diana's riddle just as she, bearing ring and child, is the answer to the seemingly unanswerable challenge of Bertram's letter. This resolution, like the clever answer to a riddle, is primarily a matter of words and hidden logic, not feeling. The paradoxical formulations of Diana (“Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick. / So there's my riddle: one that's dead is quick,” 5.3.302-3) do not, as in the romances, compress and strain into a line of verse a complete and astonishing turnabout of fortune. Rather they draw attention to the trick around which this resolution is built. It is this act that informs all the paradoxes and cryptic formulations of the play's final sequence. It is behind the elaborate and circular interrogations about the ring, and its peculiar nature helps to explain the flatness of the ending.

The encounter between awareness, total or partial, and blindness in varying degrees is fundamental to most kinds of comedy. It is the condition of the most primitive joke or trick played upon a victim, and much sophisticated, it underlies the illusions and misreadings of intention and action in the subtlest of comedies. The bed-trick is essentially a primitive practical joke with serious consequences. Blindness and awareness, victim and hunter are set in clear and diagrammatic opposition in the neat and tendentious setup of darkness and silence in the bed. What differentiates it from the simple practical joke is the physical involvement of the “joker”; the woman in the sexual encounter is both the player of a trick and the object of lust. She is an observer of her victim and yet a participator in an act that changes her own status. Intellectually superior because she knows, she is physically subject to the man who “knows” her carnally though he does not recognize her.

The implications of sexual knowledge without recognition are not ignored by Shakespeare. They are painfully analyzed by Helena, who makes us feel the copresence in that moment of enjoyed passion and abuse:

… 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; …

(4.4.21-24)

What is unpleasant here is that this base form of knowing should be the key to the happy end and that the protagonist/victim Bertram, having blindly engendered it, is left by the dramatist on that level of knowledge until the curtain falls. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the erotic confusions of the night produce a state of exhaustion out of which the resolution can follow with the rhythmic logic of day following night. The audience is left to make the connections between the madness of the erotic chase, the recollections of the lovers, and the stability and fruitfulness of the marriage bed. In All's Well That Ends Well blind lust is not a prelude or foil to consummation but accompanies it and is indistinguishable from it. This ironic salvation through blindness marks Bertram for the rest of the play and severely limits his chances of attaining any satisfactory recognition. Even his base companion and moral parallel, Parolles, is observed in a moment of truth as he is forced to come to terms with himself, to know himself a braggart. It is the denial of this self-knowledge to Bertram that characterizes the final scene of the play.

This scene seems to move in a way not intended, indeed specifically rejected by those who would control it. In the brief prologue the King makes it clear that the bitter past is to be forgiven and that complaints about Bertram's behavior will be suppressed:

We are reconcil’d, and the first view shall kill
All repetition.

(5.3.21-22)

However, repetition is just what the scene engineers. Although the past is buried by the King along with Helena the dialogue cannot move in any other direction. What directs the movement of the play to its final confrontation is not so much a knowing character as the fact of the consummation that throws up evidence (the rings), produces the riddles, and throws into ironic relief the angry ignorance of the King and the forced maneuvers of Bertram.

“All this may be good drama, but it is bad psychology,” says W. W. Lawrence of the apparently unnecessary elaborateness of Shakespeare's denouement.⁴ The postponement of the confrontation between Bertram and Helena seems to him unjustified by anything but the desire for a coup de théâtre of the kind that final scenes in comedy tend to provide. Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, found that Shakespeare was “hastening to the end of the play”⁵ and precipitating the action. Both are in fact noticing the same thing: the denouement's apparent lack of interest in feeling and the seeming lapse into convention as the vindicated wife picks out her man again. Certainly Shakespeare's source in Painter is far more direct; the narrative simply brings Giletta to her husband's court to reveal herself and her children and repeat her story.⁶ Dramatic tradition, on the other hand, demands revelation step by step. Certainly in comedies this stage-by-stage advance to the obvious recognition is a formula exploiting the laughable blindness of the personae to what is obvious to us. Yet in Shakespeare, perhaps most markedly in his last plays, the stages of the final recognition are an enactment of something less formal than moral—a process of awakening.

In All's Well quite clearly no awakening takes place. There is no major affirmative note at the end of this sequence that would make of its stages steps on such a lucid path. The protagonist has come to the final scene without self-knowledge, a bearer of false values and yet already saved. To succeed as an optimistic and harmonious ending, the denouement would have to bridge the gap between the blind knowledge of sex and the self-knowledge of discovery. This is structurally impossible because the intervening motif of regret or repentance is missing. As a second best, and more realistically in keeping with the play's mood and the protagonist's nature, the denouement recapitulates in detailed sequence instances of Bertram's falseness, mocking him at the very moment of revelation with his continued lack of self-knowledge:

… But for this lord,
Who hath abus’d me, as he knows himself,
Though yet he never harm’d me, here I quit him.
He knows himself my bed he hath defil’d, …

(5.3.297-300)

Bertram's defenses penetrated anew by each twist in the scene are here totally down. His sin and salvation, the “mingled yarn, good and ill together” (4.3.71-72), are one: the former he chose, the latter chose him. Diana's speech juxtaposes Bertram's ignorance, his thoughts of abuse and defilement and his redeeming act of generation. Thus the King's stern words to the slippery youth turn out to have a fair meaning:

Sir, for my thoughts, you have them ill to friend
Till your deeds gain them; …

(5.3.182-83)

The ignorant deed does produce the rational end, but the name and the thing are still separated and in his last speech the play's constantly deluded protagonist makes his love dependent surprisingly on more knowledge:

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

(5.3.315-16)

J. L. Calderwood is right when he calls the final scene a “gloss on the bed-trick.”⁷ It is in fact a demonstration of its happy consequences but also a recapitulation of its irresolvable paradox of perversion and fulfillment. The substitution of one body for another in the dark makes of sin an illusion and a reality of marriage insomuch as we concentrate on the deed alone. At the end, when the characters confront each other in awareness as well as in daylight, the disturbing, unruly energy of sex is still there in Helena's speech next to the evidence that would harness it:

O my good lord, when I was like this maid,
I found you wondrous kind. There is your ring, …

(5.3.309-10)

The ring does make a circular progress from Bertram and back to him and this might imply harmony like the return of the ring in The Merchant of Venice. But the encounter upon which this potential harmony is based is analyzed too vividly, is too alive to fit tamely into the formal solution. Bertram in being “kind” then was only being true to his baser natural instincts and no miracle has transformed them.

In Measure for Measure the bed-trick is used in an analogous way to foil evil and facilitate ending but the ideas that radiate from the act and are focused in it are of a different kind. In the denouement of this play is a good example of how Shakespeare clothes a stock device of comic resolution with meaning, thus linking the traditionally formal and self-sufficient end with the deepest concerns of the play.

There is a fundamental opposition in the play between two kinds of exchange. One kind is hard and unyielding; this is the meting out of punishment for crime, injury for injury, and measure for measure. This kind of exchange is potentially catastrophic because in its strictness it may entail death for the offender. The other kind of exchange tends to undermine catastrophe and strictness by exploiting the old device of substitution. Thus instead of an Angelo for a Claudio there is a Ragozine for a Claudio, and instead of a raped Isabella there is a betrothed Mariana in the bed. The comic exchanges represent the benevolent devices and exploitation of accident that resolve deadlocks and turn either/or situations into traps with an escape hatch.

The multiple substitutions of the end, therefore, need to be seen in the context of the important situations of exchange and substitution that form the backbone of the plot. Then we will understand how the device takes on some of the resonance of an idea.⁸

The opening gambit of the play is itself an act of substitution. Angelo is put in the place of the Duke. He is in fact called “substitute” (5.1.133, 140), but at the beginning the Duke puts it in the most pointed way:

In our remove be thou at full ourself.

(1.1.43)

The traditional comic use of the substitute figure is to solve problems, to fit into crucial slots and remain passive. Here at the opening of the play the substitute is encouraged to be active and independent and so the problems of mortality and mercy are created in order to be resolved at the end by an assortment of more conventional substitute figures. Angelo's taking of the Duke's place and his extreme interpretation of his authority create the kind of confrontation characteristic of the middle action of the play. The judge is placed opposite the sinner and asked whether he has ever been in his position:

Whether you had not sometime in your life
Err’d in this point which now you censure him,

(2.1.14-15)

This figure is used with effective monosyllabic bluntness by Isabella:

If he had been as you, and you as he.
You would have slipp’d like him, but he, like you,
Would not have been so stern.

(2.2.64-66)

These hypothetical changes of place are of course hints of the great reversal to come when Angelo does become as Claudio. Thus far, then, the Duke's temporary abdication has created a situation in which it has become possible for characters to speculate radically on the artificiality of the separation between judge and offender and reverse them in their minds.

If change of place creates the situation and the possible exchange of moral opposites complicates it, the more conventional exchange of a woman's body for a proffered favor creates the dilemma that only the bed-trick can untie. This time Isabella and not Angelo is at the center and the suggested transaction is the substitution of her virginity for her brother's redemption, or the payment of her virginity to redeem his forfeited life. The similarity of temper that critics have often noted about Isabella and Angelo⁹ is reinforced by our understanding of the formal similarity of their positions vis à vis the offender. The precise Angelo will not put himself in the criminal's place to save him though he later finds himself imitating his crime. The chaste Isabella will not put her body in the criminal's place (Angelo's power) to save him though she later finds someone else to imitate her there. She certainly has strong arguments to support her refusal but it still looks selfish in the light of the most powerful, if only evoked, substitution of this central part of the play. For it is surely Christ's sacrifice of himself, the placing of his body in the grip of death, that saved all the souls that were forfeit once to the law that doomed them as sinners. The remedy is mercy but it is brought to man by Christ's yielding himself up to save his brother. This is the unequal exchange that is the antithesis of tit for tat and measure for measure. It is a godly privilege or a martyr's. Its absoluteness cannot fit into the natural human world of comedy where the substitutions and exchanges that now begin as the action reaches its crisis are the familiar tricks played by the virtuous to beat evil at its own game.

One can judge Shakespeare's awareness of the conventionality of the device and his turning that artifice to advantage in the incident of the substitute head. Angelo's wickedness is combated by two tricks of substitution: Mariana in Isabella's place and somebody's head instead of Claudio's. But in the latter case the traditionally passive decoy of such situations, Barnardine, rebels against his role:

I swear I will not die to-day for any man's persuasion.

(4.3.59-60)

And so the hard-pressed politicians of virtue have to make use of a timely casualty to supply the deputy Angelo with the deputy (Ragozine) of a deputy head (Barnardine). The human conflict with the convention (Barnardine's refusal) makes the lucky chance more plausible and more serious.

The discovery scene in all three tragi-comedies is a judicial probe into the past, using a triallike procedure to follow closely the evasions and lies of the offender until he is brought face-to-face with the redeeming consequences of his crime. In The Merchant of Venice the trial of the rings is lighthearted, a joke with certain serious connections to Bassanio's dilemma; in All's Well the trial explores the disturbing mystery of blind knowledge in sex. In Measure for Measure, the longest and most elaborate of them, the trial juxtaposes the disguise of Angelo and the pretenses of Isabella and the Duke in a complex recapitulation, the formal purpose of which is to create a deadlock composed of the accumulation of frustrated endings that reveal Angelo's guilt and compromise him but depend on the “coup” of the Duke's intervention for release into action.

The awareness of the criminal is the most important structural datum of this scene.¹⁰ Unlike Bertram and despite the limited number of speeches he is given in the scene, Angelo's conscience is awake, we know, and the encounter is therefore a subtler one than that of All's Well. The protagonists are more of a match for each other. Because of this the scene is also less ceremonious, less formal and more chaotic. The Duke's plan to proceed with Angelo “By cold gradation and weal-balanc’d form” (4.3.100) is hardly carried out, for a ceremony is less personal and more distanced than the passionate play-acting of this final scene.

The two major confrontations with Isabella and with Mariana reenact in a distorting glass Angelo's two critical moments—his temptation and his fall. The temptation is replayed according to Angelo's version of its consequences:

Who will believe thee, Isabel?

(2.4.154)

Isabella's denunciation, part true and part play-acting, brings out the secret only to delay revelation. The Duke's ironic rejection of her charges—

                                         … it imports no reason
That with such vehemency he should pursue
Faults proper to himself.

(5.1.108-10)

—and Mariana's contradicting them create the deadlock and frustration needed if the “coup” of the Duke's unmasking is to work. The power of the true ending depends on the energy stalled by the false endings. Thus Mariana's unveiling, a formal gesture accompanied by formal language—

This is that face, thou cruel Angelo,
Which once thou swor'st was worth the looking on;
This is the hand which, with a vow’d contract,
Was fast belock’d in thine; …

(5.1.207-10)

—is lost in Lucio's joke and in Angelo's evasive speech. The deadlock of frustrated endings comes to a head in the exit of the Duke and the appearance of the mysterious Friar. Here is the central situation of the play in one picture—the Duke absent, the despair of the suppliants, the impossibility of convincing the public that the judge is the villain. Thus in one scene the Duke has again set up the essence of the action: his absence and return. But this time his return is violent, a turnabout to stop all further change:

Thou art the first knave that e’er mad'st a duke.

(5.1.356)

Then the gesture of unseating Angelo completes the return:

We’ll borrow a place of him.—Sir, by your leave.

(5.1.362)

The Duke's unmasking and assumption of his rightful place as ruler and judge expose the foregoing action as a trial lacking only a sentence to bring it to completion. This is the point in the play where the given facts of source material and comic convention put the most strain on artistic logic. Basically the reprieve of Angelo and the revelation of the substituted head are the facts of plot that do away with the tragic knot and replace it with a comic finale. But they are not transparent or isolated tricks. They depend on Isabella's intervention, a moment of real and difficult choice that, formally, counters the strictest exchange proposed by the Duke (“An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!” 5.1.409) with the hypothesis, secretly true, which would make that exchange unnecessary:

Look, if it please you, on this man condemn’d
As if my brother liv'd.

(5.1.444-45)

Isabella, by kneeling for Angelo's life, puts herself in Mariana's place—“Sweet Isabel, take my part”—thus making up for her inability to put herself in her brother's place earlier in the play, and rewarding Mariana for taking Isabel's part in the bed.

The revelation of the last benefactor of cunning exchange—Claudio—puts the seal on the device and links it clearly with the tragicomic ethos. The stern resolution of “like doth quit like” is commuted to the comic solution of “Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well.” (5.1.496). The balancing mutual cancellation of the former contrasts with the imbalance of evil producing good. This has happened thanks to the device of substitution, which draws the sting of both lust and murder by having them spend their force on the wrong object.

The substitutions and exchanges that in farce would be the consequence of accident and luck determined by polished geometries of plot are here both a cunning tactic to test and combat evil on the level of plot and, on a symbolic level, represent the alternative to the lex talionis, which would only exchange blood for blood. “Like quits like” is based on a primitive equation of injuries; the other exchanges produce good out of evil, no equation this time but a form of change.

Although we do not hear Isabella's assent to the Duke's offer of marriage, there is more than conventional propriety in his proposal. The self-surrender and mingling of flesh in the sacrament of marriage is the closest a Christian can come, in the natural world of comedy, to transcending self. “What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.” (5.1.537) is the fairest and most hopeful proposal of exchange in a play whose title posits an exchange as severe as it is irrevocable.

The scenes of discovery we have discussed all lead us to contemplate the past, whether that be the past just enacted on the stage or the remoter past of the story's beginning. If the comedies of circular journey go back to the beginning, the tragi-comedies end with a scene of trial whose purpose it is to expose in a cunning and roundabout way the misdeeds that dominated the middle action and created the crisis. Such final scenes dramatize the serious principle that acts have inevitable consequences, which is modified by the comic principle that there is a device to counter every evil intent.

The happy ending of forgiveness comes when the shameful actions of the past have been reconstructed in full and in public. It is an extreme juxtaposition and puts an enormous strain on our expectations of the sinning characters who straddle contrary experiences of exposure and release without undergoing a process of conversion. Thus they remain what they always were, cast clearly against the background of their recapitulated misdeeds, but released by a duality in the misdeed itself and the generosity of others.¹¹ This is one of the most important significances of the conventions of recapitulation and return at the end of these plays. They enable the dramatist not just to explain the intricacies of the knot or complete a formal pattern, but to entertain the mind of his audience with the conflicting claims of happy change and ironic consistency. The new beginning that the end of comedy so often proposes cannot be really new. In the case of tragedy, death or disaster clear the scene for a fresh start, symbolized by the accession to power of a new king. In these comedies the survival of all the characters begs the question that the recapitulation and the figure of return make more specific. How much weight do we give the fiction of change, based as it is on such unpromising material? …

Notes

1. Criticism has mostly dwelt on the absurdities, to a modern taste, of the device. A. P. Rossiter, for instance, in Angel with Horns (London, 1961), 125, says that the “inquiringness” of the problem comedies makes for a tension between the device itself and our curiosity about the minds of those who take part in it. Critics with a more historical bias like W. W. Lawrence in Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (London, 1969), find the device's acceptability in its currency: “they were current in the story-telling of his own day” (p. 97). Studies of the thematic relevance of the device are less common, but see James Black, “The Unfolding of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973): 119-28.

2. In an enlightening article, Ian Donaldson (“ All's Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare's Play of Endings,” Essays in Criticism 27 [1977]: 34-55), analyzes the thematic use of different conceptions of end and ending in the play. He does not focus, as I do, on the act of exchange, which makes a good ending of a bad intent.

3. For example, G. K. Hunter in the introduction to the New Arden edition of the play (1967), pp. xlvi-xlvii, who finds Bertram a success on the level of Jonsonian caricature but incoherent on any deeper level.

4. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, 78.

5. Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson [New Haven, Conn., and London, 1968], 7:400.

6. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, Novel 38 in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 2 (London and New York, 1958). The relevant passage is on p. 396.

7. J. L. Calderwood, “Styles of Knowing in All's Well,” Modern Language Quarterly 25 (1964): 293.

8. James Black in “The Unfolding of Measure for Measure,” is one of the few critics who take seriously the device of substitution, especially Mariana's for Isabella. See 124-26.

9. See Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (New York, 1965), 100. Schanzer quotes, though he does not agree with, Quiller-Couch's view that Isabel and Angelo are “two pendent portraits or studies in the ugliness of Puritan hypocrisy” (105).

10. See Bertrand Evans's subtle analysis of this awareness in Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), 209. Evans describes Angelo as “a figure at once odious, comic and pathetic: supposing himself guilty of heinous crimes of which remembrance tortures him, but which he is convinced he can keep hidden, he is truly guilty of no criminal acts, but all his intents are known to the authority who can call him to account.”

11. Mary Lascelles, in Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure” (London, 1953), 157, makes the point succinctly: “To will, and to do harm are, according to the logic of Shakespearean tragi-comedy, distinct.”