SOURCE: Parker, R. B. “War and Sex in All's Well That Ends Well.” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 99-113.

[In the following essay, Parker addresses the tension between ideals of love and war in All's Well That Ends Well. The critic suggests that the principal function of the war in the play is to provide an outlet for Bertram and the other French courtiers to express their aggression, achieve some measure of fame, and—in the case of Bertram—escape responsibilities.]

I

I wish to pursue G. Wilson Knight's suggestion that All's Well That Ends Well is built on a conflict between the masculine concept of honour as prowess in war and the feminine concept of honour as chastity in love.¹ However, whereas Knight goes on to interpret the conclusion as an almost mystical victory for transcendent chastity in which ‘sanctity aspires to sexuality’ (p. 160), I propose to pick up his puzzling concept of Helena's ‘bisexuality’ to suggest instead that the conflict of the play is resolved by having each ideal—war and love—modify the other, so that the conclusion takes the form of a wry accommodation between them in which the purity of both ideals has had to be abandoned. As in Troilus and Cressida (echoed in All's Well) where there is a similar intercontamination of war and sex, this accommodation is seen through a consciousness of passing time. Shakespeare has added to his source² an important framework of death-haunted and nostalgic elders—the Countess, Lord Lafew, Lavache, and the melancholy King of France (who has a much more important part in the play than in Boccaccio)—which places the lovers' struggle in a perspective of succeeding generations, so that the young have to work out their relationships against their elders' fears and expectations for them. As Erik Erikson says in his essay ‘Youth: Fidelity and Diversity’:

It is the young who, by their responses and actions, tell the old whether life as represented by the old and as presented to the young has meaning; and it is the young who carry in them the power to confirm them and, joining the issues, to renew and to regenerate [as Helena does], or to reform and to rebel [which is Bertram's first reaction].³

Thus, we constantly see the actions of Bertram and Helena through the affectionate tolerance, exasperation, hope, and need of their elders; and though this focus is not exclusive or without its own ironies (and should not, therefore, be accepted uncritically),⁴ it does help to establish the note of cautious relief with which, as the title indicates, All's Well concludes.

The need for an accommodation between war and sexual love was an important and recurring motif in Renaissance art and thought. Edgar Wind illustrates this in his explication of such paintings as Veronese's Mars and Venus,⁵ where Cupid's binding together of the legs of the two deities produces milk from Venus' breast while another Cupid playfully uses Mars' own sword to drive away his war-horse. Plutarch reports 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’,⁶ and this is restated by Aquinas in his Summa Theologica in terms of the concupiscible and irascible passions of man's middle, or ‘sensible’, soul: ‘The passions of the irascible appetite counteract the passions of the concupiscible appetite: since concupiscence, on being roused, diminishes anger; and anger, being roused, diminishes concupiscence in many cases.’⁷ Venus, the concupiscible, and Mars, the irascible, were thought to temper each other to produce Chastity, one of the virtues of temperance that stands not for virginity but for fruitful sexual union. And though, as Wilson Knight noted, Diana rather than Venus is the co-deity of All's Well, this is a Diana who is, as Helena tells the Countess, ‘both herself and Love’ (1.3.208)⁸—in other words, the combined Diana and Venus figure that Wind demonstrates was a recurrent Renaissance image for the combination of Chastity and Sex, in which perspicacity must surrender to passion and chastity itself can prove a weapon.⁹

My argument, then, will be that, as Bertram must be educated from war to accept first sexuality, then its responsibilities, so Helena too must learn to abandon the false religion of self-abnegation in sexual love and bring it to fruition by increasingly deliberate aggression. Such an approach allows both characters something closer to their proper due than is usual in criticism of the play. The extremes of both the irascible and the concupiscible are tolerated by the older generation as aberrations or ‘sicknesses’ natural to the young, and their accommodation brings the hero and heroine back to Roussillon to confirm and rejuvenate both family and state in a pattern that anticipates that of Shakespeare's Romances. All's Well is not one of the final plays, however, and the tone of its conclusion recognizes that such an accommodation may also have its losses and uncertainties.

II

For most people the chief stumbling block to All's Well is the hero's character; like Dr Johnson, they cannot reconcile themselves to Bertram.¹⁰ As Helena's raptures over his ‘hawking eye’, his curls, and so forth indicate, one of Bertram's problems is that he is so good-looking that people are ready to make excuses for him and eager to see a potential for nobility in him that he does not really possess. This then produces a more troublesome problem: people keep saying they hope he will live up to the virtues and achievements of his famous father. He is constantly called ‘boy’—by his mother, by the King, by Lafew, and most often (with provocation) by his crony, the impostor Parolles—so we may assume he is still very young, probably in his late teens.

Like any adolescent whose widowed mother insists that he live up to a formidable father, Bertram wishes to escape from Roussillon in order to establish an identity for himself, first at the court, then, when that fails him, in a foreign war where the adolescent pressures of aggression and sexuality can find freer expression. At the beginning we do not see much of what he is like, only what others think of him; but, characteristically, he seems not even to have heard of the King's illness though Lafew says it is ‘notorious’ (1.1.33), and his eagerness to be gone from the ‘dark house’ of mourning slips awkwardly out when he interrupts his mother's conversation with Lafew (1.1.55), a breach of decorum that brings a mingled blessing and reproof from the Countess to her ‘unseason'd courtier’ (1.1.57-9, 67).

Bertram finds the court no freer than his home, however. It too is death-haunted, shadowed with nostalgia and distrust of the future. The King pushes his responsibility as guardian to the point of claiming ‘My son's no dearer’ (1.2.76), and goes even further than the Countess in lecturing him about his father's splendid example (1.2.19-22). Clearly, however, he fears that Bertram will turn out no better than the other young ‘goers backward’ at court (1.2.48), who, in the King's opinion, sacrifice honour to levity and the pursuit of fashionable clothes. Since we have seen that Bertram's chosen confidant is the impudent Parolles whose extravagance of dress is a subject of general remark, the foreboding seems well founded.

In lecturing Bertram about his father's virtues, the King especially emphasizes the elder Roussillon's soldiership; but irritatingly, when war breaks out between Florence and Siena, he forbids Bertram to take part in it because of his youth, yet at the same time encourages the other young courtiers to fight ‘on either part’, bidding them ‘be … the sons / Of worthy Frenchmen’ (2.1.11-12). It is at this point too, from the King himself, that the idea of war as a rival, or substitute, for sexuality is introduced. He bids the French volunteers,

                                        see that you come
Not to woo honour, but to wed it, when
The bravest questant shrinks:

(2.1.14-16)

and warns them jocularly against

Those girls of Italy, take heed of them;
They say our French lack language to deny
If they demand; beware of being captives
Before you serve.

(2.1.19-22)

The comment is ironically placed, since the King will soon be insisting that Bertram, whom he has forbidden to serve, must marry against his inclination, and will himself deny all Bertram's attempts to protest.

Even before this happens, however, Bertram interprets the King's restraint as a denial of his virility by an effeminizing environment. ‘I shall stay here the forehorse to a smock,’ he complains, 'Till honour be bought up, and no sword worn / But one to dance with’ (2.1.30-3). Parolles suggests he steal from court, in phrasing that reminds Bertram of his youth and has a martial-sexual pun on ‘stand’—‘And thy mind stand to't, boy, steal away’ (2.1.29)—and this is supported by the other volunteers in a typical scene of young male camaraderie. So before ever the marriage to Helena is raised, Bertram has come to see the court as a place of womanly restraint, with escape to war as a means to virile honour and to his acceptance as an equal by the young courtiers among whom he must establish his independent status.

This war-sex opposition is exacerbated when the King forces Bertram to marry Helena, after she has gone through a face-saving ceremony of rejecting the King's other wards. Whether these young Lords are ready to accept her, as their speeches suggest, or whether, as Lafew's rage at them implies, their responses show merely polite relief at not having been selected, it is important to notice the reasons which Helena gives for turning them down: one is too much above her in rank, another is too young to wish to marry, and to a third she says, ‘I'll never do you wrong, for your own sake’ (2.3.90). All these reasons apply equally to Bertram, and there is therefore considerable excuse for his shock when she bashfully fixes on him.

Bertram's reasons for rejecting Helena are complex. Like all Shakespeare's young lovers, he wishes to choose love for himself: ‘In such a business give me leave to use / The help of mine own eyes’ (2.3.107-8); but this is followed by a burst of snobbery meant to contrast with the courtesy to social inferiors his father has been praised for: ‘A poor physician's daughter my wife!’ (l. 115)—a protective insistence on rank hinted at earlier perhaps when, at his departure from Roussillon, he bade Helena ‘Be comfortable to my mother, your mistress’ (1.1.73). There are deeper reasons than these for the rejection, however. His ‘I know her well: / She had her breeding at my father's charge’ (2.3.113-14) shows that he associates Helena with the home he is trying to escape; and there may also be in this a covert fear of incest,¹¹ especially when we remember Helena's frantic, reiterated concern that the Countess should not regard Bertram as her ‘brother’ (1.3.150, 155, 157, 161).

But, most suggestive of all, in answer to the King's argument that he should marry Helena in gratitude for her having ‘raised’ his guardian from a ‘sickly bed’, there emerges what appears to be a recoil from sexuality itself, a fear not out of keeping (in those days at least) with Bertram's comparative youth: ‘But follows it, my lord, to bring me down / Must answer for your raising?’ (2.3.112-13). He can remain adamant, therefore, to the King's disquisition on virtue and nobility precisely because that really is not the issue for him, and only succumbs when the monarch asserts his double authority as ruler and surrogate ‘father’, browbeating the ‘proud, scornful boy’ with threats of ‘revenge and hate’ (l. 164) and insisting not only that Bertram marry Helena but also, quite unreasonably, that he love her too (ll. 182-3). Even allowing for the contemporary custom of arranged marriages and a ward's undoubted duty to obey his king, such a display of angry, personal pressure antagonizes us. As E. K. Chambers put it: ‘Even young asses have their rights, and one cannot but feel some sympathy for Bertram.’¹²

The recoil from sexuality beneath Bertram's social outrage issues in his determination not to bed Helena but to escape from marriage and the court to the masculine preserve of war. There is genuine, if slightly comic, adolescent despair in his cry,

O my Parolles, they have married me!
I'll to the Tuscan wars and never bed her

(ll. 268-9)

and he determines to escape ‘to those Italian fields / Where noble fellows strike’ because ‘Wars is no strife / To the dark house and the detested wife’ (ll. 286-8). The grounds for this decision are supported (but not, it should be noted, caused) by Parolles, who agrees that

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

(ll. 275-9)

and sums the situation up epigrammatically, ‘A young man married is a man that's marr'd’ (l. 294). Interestingly, the same argument is also advanced later by Lavache. At the point when the Countess receives Bertram's letter saying he will never sleep with Helena, the clown comments (playing like Parolles on ‘stand’),

… your son will not be kill'd so soon as I thought he would … if he run away, as I hear he does; the danger is in standing to't; that's the loss of men, though it be the getting of children.

(3.2.36-41)

Again military terms are used about a sexual situation, and it should be noted that the speech inverts Helena's praise of Parolles's cowardice earlier (in metaphors that also mocked his clothing): ‘the composition that your valour and fear makes in you is a virtue of a good wing, and I like the wear well’ (1.1.199-201). Helena approves of running away from war, Lavache from sexual debility.

In the parting scene (2.5) we feel great sympathy for Helena, whom Bertram harshly calls his ‘clog’; but the situation is presented as awkward and embarrassing for both of them, particularly when Helena works up courage to request a kiss and Bertram nervously evades her by insisting that she must immediately ‘haste to horse’. Once she is gone, his comment emphasizes what has become the basic opposition for him:

Go thou toward home, where I will never come
Whilst I can shake my sword or hear the drum

(2.5.90-1)

—where, for the first time, military life is associated with the drum which will later become the central symbol for experience of war in the play. Undoubtedly, as Richard Wheeler has recently argued,¹³ what we have here is a familiar picture of war embraced as a deflection of sexuality and a release for adolescent aggression, idealized by an ‘honour’ associated with bravery in the face of death and by the bonding of male companionship; but we oversimplify the situation if we forget the esteem in which such warrior courage was also held by Elizabethans or refuse sympathy to Bertram himself for the painful situation the King has placed him in.

This basic antagonism also emerges in Bertram's next scene, in which a new father-figure, the Duke of Florence, promotes him with unrealistic speed to be ‘general of our horse’ (a very appropriate position for a character representing Mars). Bertram's response again polarizes love and war, the latter symbolized once more by the drum:

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

(3.3.9-11)

and the Duke, in turn, invests war with sexuality when he bids fortune ‘play upon thy prosperous helm / As thy auspicious mistress!’ (3.3.7-8). At the same time, Shakespeare stresses that this promotion recognizes genuine achievement on Bertram's part. We hear later that he has ‘taken their great'st commander, and … with his own hand he slew the duke's brother’ (3.5.5-7); he is called ‘gallant’; his service is ‘honourable’ and ‘worthy’; people speak ‘nobly’ of him; the Duke sends letters to the King setting Bertram ‘high in fame’ (3.5.3-7, 48, 50; 5.3.31); and, at his return, Lafew is very willing to see the scar on his left cheek as ‘a good liv'ry of honour’ (4.5.95-6), ignoring Lavache's suggestion of a syphilitic incision (though we must remember also Parolles's boast of ‘Captain Spurio's’ cicatrice, also on his ‘sinister’ cheek, at 2.1.43, and Helena's disparagement of all such war scars at 3.2.121-2).

However, this masculine war honour is undermined in several ways: Shakespeare adds a certain ambiguity to the war itself; and nearly all act 4 is concerned with what Bertram calls the interlude of ‘the Fool and the Soldier’ (4.3.95), the exposure of Parolles's cowardice and treachery, during which the braggart makes some interesting accusations of sexual corruption throughout the army. These in turn reflect on Bertram's efforts to seduce the young Florentine whom Shakespeare has significantly named ‘Diana’.

The purpose and grounds of the Italian war are not only vague but more than a little dubious. The King of France, for mysterious ‘reasons of … state’ (3.1.10), refuses to send official aid to Florence because of a warning from his ‘cousin Austria’ (1.2.5-9), though the Duke of Florence appears able later to persuade the French volunteers that his cause is ‘holy’ (3.1.4). The drum that Parolles equates with war honour is lost because the cavalry (which are under Bertram's command) have mistakenly charged their own soldiers (3.6.46-7). And the conflict ends very vaguely with the Second Lord's announcement ‘there is an overture of peace’ capped immediately by the First Lord's ‘Nay, I assure you, a peace concluded’ (4.3.37-8), without further explanation. The war, in fact, is merely a convenience, a backdrop without clear purpose, circumstances, or outcome; so it is hard to take wholly seriously its danger or the honour won in it, especially since it is presented mainly as an outlet for the French courtiers' aggression and yearnings for fame, which are spoken of as a sickness of youth (as the Countess speaks of love). The war, we are told, serves as ‘A nursery to our gentry, who are sick / For breathing and exploit’ (1.2.16-17); it is ‘a physic’ for the ‘surfeit’ of their ‘ease’ (3.1.18-19). Moreover, as Parolles points out to Bertram, to volunteer is also very fashionable (2.1.49 ff.). Thus, war honour is qualified by the unsure principles behind the conflict, by the wholly self-centred, ‘sick’ motives of the volunteers, and by a sense of their conforming to fashion in this as in their clothes.¹⁴

This latter point is forcefully presented in the character of Parolles, Shakespeare's most significant addition to the source, who virtually dominates act 4. The spuriousness of Parolles is dramatized in three main ways. As his name suggests, he is a creature of words, not deeds; then, there is his costume, a confection of gaudy colours, feathers, and especially scarfs (2.3.246, 2.5.43-4, 3.5.85, 4.3.138-9, 312-13), which ensures that his first appearance is comic in itself, a discordant (but lively) blob of colour among the mourning clothes of Roussillon (like an inversion of the Marcade or Hamlet effects), as he elaborately salutes Helena while she anatomizes him aside; and lastly, there is the drum with which Parolles becomes identified and whose military summons is heard frequently thoughout act 4, signifying the noisy virility but ultimate emptiness of the whole Italian escapade. Appropriately, it is with the oath ‘I'll no more drumming. A plague of all drums!’ (4.3.288) that Parolles surrenders his pretensions as a soldier.

Helena and Lafew see through Parolles from the start, so Bertram's continued support of him in the face of Lafew's warning (2.5.7-8) indicates a serious immaturity of judgement; and it is mainly to disabuse this complacency that the French lords scheme to expose the braggart (4.3.30-3). It distorts Parolles's role, however, to condemn him too severely in terms of Bertram's evil angel or a vice figure. Though the Countess (3.2.87), Lafew (4.5.1), Mariana (3.5.16) and Diana (3.5.82) all alibi for Bertram by blaming Parolles's influence, in fact Bertram makes his own mistakes; Parolles merely supports them, and acts as a parodic reflection, not a cause, of Bertram's evils. Moreover, Parolles is a very amusing stage-figure: it should be noted that both French lords urge the drum trick not only to disabuse Bertram but also ‘for the love of laughter’ (3.6.32, 39); and the scene of the trick itself is kept from being painful by the fantastic gibberish with which his captors bewilder Parolles, by the impudent extravagance of his own lies, which makes the Second Lord exclaim gleefully ‘I begin to love him for this’ and ‘He hath out-villain'd villainy so far that the rarity redeems him’ (4.3.253, 264-5), and by the farcical breaking of stage decorum which has the First Lord's aside ‘How deep?’ apparently answered by Parolles's ‘Thirty fadom’ (4.1.56-7) and the braggart's wish for ‘A drum now of the enemy's—’ eliciting a prompt ‘Alarum within’ (4.1.63). At the end, moreover, Parolles reaches a disillusioned level of self-knowledge and acceptance of shame that can throw light on similar elements in the accommodations forced not only on Bertram but also, I would argue, on Helena as well.

The unmasking of Parolles is very carefully placed. It is preceded in act 4, scene 3 by the French lords' criticism of Bertram's callousness to Helena and his attempt to ‘pervert’ Diana (4.3.13-17). This leads them to a statement of the way that mankind proves a traitor to itself, drowning in its very virtues by swimming against their current, as the Countess warned earlier when she said that misused ‘virtues’ could be ‘traitors too’ (1.1.38-40). To the First Lord's ‘Now, God delay our rebellion! As we are ourselves, what things we are!’ (whose phrasing will be echoed later in Parolles's ‘Simply the thing am’), the Second Lord replies, in what is perhaps the crucial statement of the play:

Merely our own traitors. And as in the common course of all treasons we still see them reveal themselves till they attain to their abhorr'd ends; so he that in this action contrives against his own nobility, in his proper stream o'erflows himself.

(4.3.20-4)

Within this context of reproof, it is carefully emphasized that the tricking of Parolles between 10.00 p.m. and 1.00 a.m. (4.1.24) overlaps with Bertram's deception in the bed-trick between midnight and 1.00 a.m. (4.2.54-8, 4.3.28-9); so the parallels between them are obvious, though Bertram's realization of his disgrace will not occur till the end of the play. Parolles's treachery and increasingly desperate lies prefigure Bertram's ignoble contortions in the final trial scene; and, interestingly for the theme of Mars and Venus, it is sexual corruption that Parolles chiefly criticizes beneath the military show. Bertram, the heroic general of horse, becomes ‘a foolish idle boy, but for all that very ruttish’ (4.3.207), ‘a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds’ (4.3.212-13); and a poem found in the braggart's pocket warns Diana that Bertram is ‘a fool … Who pays before, but not when he does owe it’ (4.3.221-2). It is not only Bertram who provokes such criticism, however. Captain Dumain too is accused of ‘getting the shrieve's fool with child, a dumb innocent that could not say him nay’ (4.3.181-3), and of the common soldiers, Parolles claims, ‘the muster file, rotten and sound … amounts not to fifteen thousand poll; half of the which dare not shake the snow from off their cassocks lest they shake themselves to pieces’ (4.3.162-5). Parolles's extravagances must not be taken at face value, of course, but his comments offer a comic reflection of the way that war can distort and be a distortion of sexual instinct, reminding us that Bertram himself describes his lust for Diana as his ‘sick desires’ (4.2.35). As the First Lord comments at the beginning of Parolles's exposure (more truly than he realizes), ‘'A will betray us all unto ourselves’ (4.1.92).

The resolution of the drum trick is also important for the light it sheds on the main dénouement. Parolles, who has several times, like a diminished Falstaff, pleaded ‘let me live’ (4.1.83, 4.3.236, 299), learns to welcome life as a value in itself and to accept his shameful defects for what they are, without more pretension. ‘Safest in shame’, he decides, ‘Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live’, since ‘There's place and means for every man alive’ (4.3.322-8); while his bitter ‘Who cannot be crush'd with a plot?’ (l. 314) looks forward to Bertram's later collapse in a way that mitigates some of its sharpness. Man is not the ideal, invulnerable creature he pretends to be, and, as the First Lord wonders about Parolles, it is indeed ‘possible he should know what he is, and be that he is’ (4.1.44-5)—or as Lavache says cynically about cuckoldry, ‘If men could be contented to be what they are, there were no fear in marriage’ (1.3.48-9). And it is on this level that Parolles is later accommodated by Lafew. Ironically, though earlier he repudiated Lafew's suggestion that Bertram or anyone else could be his ‘lord and master’ (2.3.186 ff.)—a title Helena was only too eager to bestow (1.3.153)—now he accepts Lafew's patronage with abject gratitude, anticipating in the farcical mode the chagrin with which Bertram will be brought to recognize his shame and the relief with which he too will finally acknowledge Helena as wife.

The shaming of Parolles runs counterpoint, in carefully matched scenes, to Bertram's attempt to seduce Diana and his own deception by the bed-trick. This seduction has both its bad side and its good. The bad is obvious. Bertram is trying to satisfy sexual relations impersonally in terms of war, translating male aggression into promiscuity, in which sex is treated as the taking and possessing of a woman's ‘spoil’, repudiating responsibility and abandoning the woman as soon as she has surrendered. As the Second Lord puts it, Bertram ‘fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour’ (4.3.15). The sexual double standard emerges clearly in Parolles's attempt to justify Bertram in the final scene, when he explains that Bertram ‘did love her, sir, as a gentleman loves a woman. … He lov'd her, sir, and lov'd her not’ (5.3.243-5). The emptiness of the seducer's oaths and promises is exposed by Diana, who recognizes them as mere ‘words’ (4.2.30), which her mother warned her all men swear to get their way (4.2.70-1); and the struggle between Bertram and Diana is consistently described in metaphors of war. Bertram's love gifts are ‘engines of lust’ (3.5.19), but Diana is ‘arm'd for him and keeps her guard / In honestest defence’ (3.5.73-4). Though he ‘Lays down his wanton siege before her beauty, / Resolv'd to carry her’ (3.7.18-19), Diana tells him when he talks of honour,

                              your own proper wisdom
Brings in the champion Honour on my part
Against your vain assault.

(4.2.49-51)

Setting him up for the bed-trick, she talks of the time ‘When you have conquer'd my yet maiden bed’ (4.2.57); and confronted by Diana at the end, Bertram tries to excuse himself with a last flicker of this misapplied imagery when he says he only ‘boarded her i' th' wanton way of youth’ (5.3.210). Yet when the issue comes to an open clash between the ‘honour’ of his ancestral ring, handed down through the males of his family from ‘the first father’, and the ‘honour’ of Diana's chastity, he surrenders the emblem of that very nobility he had appealed to as an escape from Helena, in a way that both symbolically, and in terms of plot manipulation, will involve him deeply in the responsibilities of sex that he has been trying to evade.

The attempt on Diana must not be seen as wholly negative, in fact; it has even been called Bertram's ‘fortunate fall’.¹⁵ Quite apart from the circumstance that, in the plot, it enables Helena to reclaim him as her husband, psychologically it also marks an effort to assert a sexuality that earlier he ran away from. It is, after all, perverse virility that is misleading him in this situation, a misapplication of the ‘virtu’ that in war has brought him honour, so that ‘in his proper stream he o'erflows himself’. Helena's comments here on his ‘important blood’ and ‘idle fire’ (3.7.21, 26) are caught up later when the Countess excuses his behaviour as

Natural rebellion done i' th' blade of youth,
When oil and fire, too strong for reason's force,
O'erbears it and burns on

(5.3.6-8)

—catching up the ‘oil and fire’ imagery of her dead husband, whom the King reported as saying, ‘Let me not live … After my flame lacks oil …’ (1.2.58-9). Bertram appeals against ‘cold’ Diana to his own ‘quick fire of youth’ (4.2.5) and persists, the Widow says, ‘As if his life lay on't’ (3.7.43), offering Diana his life as well as his honour (4.2.52); and, importantly, his arguments, though only half sincere, are the same arguments for ‘natural’ use and procreation that Parolles uses to persuade Helena to part with her virginity in act 1, scene 1, arguments which set her on the path to win ‘the bright particular star’ she thought too much above her. Mars here is kneeling to Venus-Diana (as in the Renaissance emblems cited by Wind¹⁶), the irascible is beginning to accommodate itself to the concupiscible.

An important development has occurred, therefore; but its significance will not be grasped till Bertram accepts responsibility for sex and is jolted out of the complacency with which he returns to Roussillon, a confidence nicely caught in Lavache's description of the showy feathers in the hats of the returning volunteers (4.5.100-2—Bertram, we remember, was identified as ‘That with the plume’ at 3.5.77-8).

The Countess had earlier sent word to Bertram ‘that his sword can never win / The honour that he loses’ by leaving his wife (3.2.93-4) and this is repeated at Florence by the Second Lord, on hearing of Helena's supposed death: ‘The great dignity that his valour hath here acquir'd for him shall at home be encount'red with a shame as ample’ (4.3.65-7). Yet ironically (and this should prevent us assessing the older generation's view too simply), when he first returns, with Helena supposed dead, his elders are quite ready to modify their principles to welcome him. The Countess and Lafew make excuses for his behaviour, laying the blame on Parolles; Lafew even offers his daughter as a second wife; and we hear, for the first time, that this match had been contemplated before the marriage to Helena ever cropped up, which Bertram—with wholly new aplomb—cleverly uses both as a sign of his readiness now to submit to the King and as an excuse for his earlier reluctance to accept Helena. He also expresses regret for Helena's death, claiming to have loved her once he lost her; so the King too, admitting Bertram has ‘Well excus'd’ himself (5.3.55), forgives him—though, significantly, the King now seems to have relapsed into the valetudinarianism from which Helena rescued him.

Remembering the casualness with which Bertram actually received the news of his wife's death (4.3.85) and aware that Helena is en route to Roussillon, we anticipate Bertram's deflation. This starts with Lafew's recognition of Helena's ring and the King's suspicions of foul play, is followed by Diana's arrival with Bertram's ancestral ring, and culminates in the appearance of Helena herself, not dead but pregnant with Bertram's child. Bertram's ignoble, Parolles-like failures of nerve under these successive blows turn all his elders against him, but it should not be forgotten that all the apparent disasters are false, and that we are perfectly aware of this: irony mitigates censoriousness. The King's suspicion that Bertram must have had Helena murdered, Parolles's blundering attempts to support Bertram that only worsen his case, the growing confusion and exasperation of the King, and Diana's pert, riddling answers, all complicate and lighten the tone,¹⁷ till the delayed but long anticipated entry of Helena herself. Bertram's reply to her comment that as a wife she is only ‘The name and not the thing’ (5.3.302)—‘Both, both. O, pardon!’—seems as much relief at having escaped from the avalanche of social disapproval that has fallen on him as true love or repentance. He has surely swung from one extreme to the other of Freud's diagnosis of inhibited sexuality:¹⁸ from an attempt to escape into sex with a woman whom he can consider degraded by it, to the opposite pole of surrender to the ‘magical’ security of a dominating woman closely associated with his mother. There is no speech of reconciliation, no acceptance of responsibility, merely what Wheeler calls Bertram's ‘dismal and conditional final couplet’,¹⁹

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

(5.2.309-10)

in which he seems to be trying to reassert some feeble remnants of dignity and choice, only to be put down dourly by Helena's assurance of ‘Deadly divorce’ if he finds himself unsatisfied. Mars has indeed bowed to Venus, but the balance hardly seems an equal one; and it should surely not be only on Helena's behalf that we feel qualms about this marriage.

III

In fact, if one problem with All's Well is that we cannot be reconciled to Bertram, another is that we are tempted to identify with Helena too closely. However, as Bertram has to be educated to sex, Helena too has to cease idealizing her attraction to Bertram, to accept it at its most basic sexual level, and to learn to fight for her love even at some sacrifice of self-respect. And again we must remember Helena's youth: she is presumably younger even than Bertram. In the source, indeed, we are told that Giletta fell in love ‘more than was meete for a maiden of her age’.²⁰

The persuasiveness of Helena's passion is unquestionable, and it has long been recognized that her experience draws heavily on the emotions explored in Shakespeare's sonnets;²¹ but there are qualifications to it even from the start. There is surely an initial shock intended in her denial of sorrow for her father's death (the timing of which Shakespeare changes to emphasize this point), particularly as we see it in the context of the Countess and Lafew's grief and piety:

                    I think not on my father, …
… What was he like?
I have forgot him; my imagination
Carries no favour in't but Bertram's.

(1.1.77-81)

Her feeling is wholly sexual, moreover, and totally visual, concerned with Bertram's ‘arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls’, with ‘every line and trick of his sweet favour’ (1.1.92-4), not with any quality of his character; and she herself seems to recognize the superficiality of this by using metaphors of false religion about it: ‘But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy / Must sanctify his relics’ (1.1.95-6). Her recognition of ‘ambition’ in her love issues in a death-seeking absolutism that is both impractical and servile:²² ‘there is no living, none, / If Bertram be away’ (ll. 82-3); the frustration of her love is twice compared to ‘plague’ (ll. 88, 90); and she concludes with a bizarre image of miscegenation, ‘The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love’ (ll. 89-90), that reminds one irresistibly of Pyramus’ ‘Since lion vile hath here deflower'd my dear’ (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.284). In fact the emotional extravagances in this first soliloquy are very like those of the earlier, comic Helena in the Dream, who, according to Lysander,

Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry
Upon this spotted and inconstant man.

(1.1.109-10)

The earlier Helena recognized that

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;

(1.1.232-4)

she had the same servile persistence as this Helena:

The more you beat me, I will fawn upon you.
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you

(2.1.204-7)

and pushed it to a conclusion in the same sexual-death imagery:

I'll follow thee, and make a heaven of hell,
To die upon the hand I love so well.

(2.1.243-4)

It is in relation to this earlier, comic Helena, as much as to the sonnets, that we should see Helena's opening passion; and, indeed, the Countess recognizes that such a state of mind is part of ‘nature's truth’ in all young girls: ‘Such were our faults … Her eye is sick on't’ (1.3.130-1), where the mature tolerance but also criticism implied by ‘faults’ and ‘sick’ are an important guide to our response.

There is a certain despairing fancifulness about Helena's first soliloquy, then, but this is radically changed by the conversation with Parolles about virginity, in which Helena takes the initiative and shows an unexpectedly bawdy resilience. She recognizes Parolles as a liar, fool, and coward, but accepts him for Bertram's sake, and also, very acutely, recognizes that

                              these fixed evils sit so fit in him,
That they take place when virtue's steely bones
Looks bleak i' th' cold wind; withal, full oft we see
Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.

(1.1.100-3)

This is mainly pejorative, of course, but it contains a recognition of the unloveliness of ‘steely’ virtue and ‘cold’ wisdom, and also of something enduring in Parolles's very ‘evils’ that prefigures his eventual survival. It may, perhaps, anticipate a certain element in her own later compromise with Bertram.

The crux of the virginity discussion is Helena's question, ‘How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?’ (1.1.147), so that, as she puts it less bluntly to the Countess later, ‘Dian’ may be ‘both herself and Love’. Parolles's arguments for the sacrifice of virginity reflect mere libertinism, but with lines like ‘Get thee a good husband, and use him as he uses thee’ (ll. 210-11), he puts the idea of sexual action into Helena's head. In answer to his proposition, ‘Will you anything with it?’, the phrasing of her ‘Not my virginity; yet …’ (l. 161) suggests a determination to use virginity in the future—‘yet’ is an important modifier in this play—and it is followed by a day-dreaming passage about the paradoxes of love that Bertram will find in possessing it²³ which concludes, with obvious sexual ambiguity,

                                        'Tis pity …
That wishing well had not a body in't
Which might be felt.

(ll. 175-8)

This virginity discussion, which represents Helena's swing to a more practical frame of mind with an obliquity typical of her whole characterization, is couched almost entirely in terms of warfare. Recognizing ‘some stain of soldier’ in Parolles, she asks, ‘Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricado it against him?’, and the discussion is conducted throughout with wording such as ‘assails’, ‘though valiant, in the defence yet is weak’, ‘warlike resistance’, ‘setting down’, ‘undermine’, ‘blow up’, ‘blow down’, ‘military policy’, and ‘with the breach yourselves made you lose your city’, to conclude with Helena's ‘I will stand for't a little, though therefore I die a virgin’, where ‘little’ has the same force as the earlier ‘yet’ (ll. 109-132). A few lines later, her day-dream of what her virginity may mean to Bertram includes being his ‘captain, and an enemy’, ‘his sweet disaster’, and, significantly, his ‘traitress’ (ll. 164-9).

After this military interchange, Helena's second soliloquy shows a wholly new self-confidence:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky
Gives us free scope;

(ll. 212-14)

she now trusts nature ‘which mounts my love so high’ to ‘join like likes, and kiss like native things’; and picks up the mention of the King's illness earlier to sketch out a plan of action:

The king's disease—my project may deceive me,
But my intents are fix'd, and will not leave me.

(ll. 224-5)

Thus, through Parolles's sexual realism couched in the imagery of war, Helena has arrived at a plan of aggressive action, a ‘policy how virgins might blow up men’ (ll. 119-20).

Our knowing this creates an ironic undertow in the next Helena scene, where she gradually admits to the Countess her love for Bertram and her plan to cure the King; and the tone of the scene is complicated further because their conversation is preceded by comments from the Countess's clown and steward. Lavache's request to wed Isbel puts Helena's love for Bertram in a decidedly fleshy context. Like Touchstone with Audrey, he says he is driven to marriage ‘by the flesh’ (1.3.27). Perverting the marriage service, but anticipating the bed-trick, he claims, ‘I think I shall never have the blessing of God till I have issue a' my body’ (ll. 22-3), then goes on to welcome cuckoldry and to distinguish between marriage and nature's unregulated sexuality:

Your marriage comes by destiny,
Your cuckoo sings by kind.

(ll. 60-1)

He also gives as another ‘holy’ reason, ‘that I may repent’ the wickedness of merely being a creature of ‘flesh and blood’, which seems to anticipate, in exaggerated form, the sense of accepted limitations in Helena's marriage at the end.

Lavache also picks up the military vocabulary of the virginity discussion by a song unexpectedly comparing Helena to the Helen of Troilus and Cressida, ‘King Priam's joy’ (as Helena will be the King of France's) who sent Grecians to sack Troy; but perverts the end of the song (according to the Countess) to claim that it is rare to find one good woman in ten (ll. 67-76), concluding with ironic wonder at the fact ‘That man should be at woman's command and yet no hurt done’ (ll. 89-90; ‘hurt’ is another key word in the play). This war imagery is then associated with Helena's own state of mind when the steward tells of overhearing her complaint that Diana was ‘[no] queen of virgins, that would suffer her poor knight surpris'd without rescue in the first assault or ransom afterward’ (1.3.110-12).

Though the interview with the Countess is very sympathetic to Helena, there is also a dimension of irony to it because both we and the Countess already know she loves Bertram, and we (though not the Countess) know also that she has a scheme to win Bertram through curing the King. Her agitated, oblique manoeuvrings thus have a comic, if kindly, tinge to them. Moreover, there is now a reversion to the opening soliloquy's self-abnegation and sexual embrace of death. Of Bertram she exclaims,

My master, my dear lord he is; and I
His servant live, and will his vassal die.

(ll. 153-4)

She describes herself as one

That seeks not to find that her search implies,
But, riddle-like, lives sweetly where she dies

(ll. 211-12)

and once again the imagery of love's false religion surfaces: ‘Thus, Indian-like, / Religious in mine error, I adore …’ (ll. 199-200). Such hesitations, and toings and froings, are typical of Helena, as witness her temporary retreats when she is not immediately admitted to see the King, or before she can bring herself to choose a husband, or after Bertram first refuses her. They help to prevent her losing our sympathy as too determined, too ‘irascible’ a character, a function that obliquity of plotting will be called on to sustain in the second half of the play.

With the Countess's support, Helena turns her negative reflections on religion and death to a positive purpose in venturing to cure the King, in which endeavour she believes she will have heaven's support and for which she is ready to risk her life. It is important to grasp why this is an inadequate enterprise, however, quite apart from Bertram's refusal to be impressed by it. For one thing, she is relying on the father she claimed so undutifully to have forgotten, in other words on an inheritance analogous to Bertram's reliance on social rank yet rebellious relation to his father. Then, although there is a very heavy emphasis on the aid of heaven, her comment,

But most it is presumption in us when
The help of heaven we count the act of men

(2.1.150-1)

directly contradicts the self-reliance of her second soliloquy:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven

(1.1.212-13)

and though the idea of virginity's miraculous healing power is a traditional one, curiously it is less Helena's virginity than her sexual attractiveness that is invoked round the cure. Lafew first describes the ‘Doctor She’ as

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

(2.1.71-7)

Then, on leaving Helena to cure the King, he provides a second unexpected reminiscence of Troilus and Cressida which, at the same time, introduces the seemingly irrelevant term ‘traitor’ that is so central to the Bertram plot:

A traitor you do look like, but such traitors His majesty seldom fears; I am Cressid's uncle That dare leave two together.

(ll. 95-7)

Helena, moreover, not only lays her life as gage for the cure (as in the source), but also, and primarily, stakes her sexual reputation on it, venturing

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

(ll. 170-2)

Clearly, for Helena curing the King's fistula presents some sort of sexual risk, though why this should be so is not made clear.²⁴ After the cure, moreover, Lafew insists on an erotic element in the King's recovery; ‘your dolphin is not lustier’, he claims, and ‘Lustique, as the Dutchman says. I'll like a maid the better whilst I have a tooth in my head. Why, he's able to lead her a coranto’ (2.3.26, 41-3). This eroticism then seems to be projected into the King's insistence on Bertram accepting Helena in marriage, even when she demurs (whereas in the source the King makes the match reluctantly), as though Bertram is somehow serving as his guardian's representative or surrogate here and his refusal tarnishes the King's restored virility.²⁵ Similarly, Lafew also wishes he were young enough to wed Helena (ll. 59-61, 78-9), and would like to ‘make eunuchs’ of the ‘boys of ice’ who seem to be refusing her (ll. 86-8, 93-5). There is thus a strongly sexual aura round the cure, but it is kept mysterious and symbolic.

Having earned her right to choose a husband, Helena hesitates again, then determines to abandon virginity and fly from Dian's altar to ‘imperial Love’ (ll. 74-6); but when she reaches Bertram her ‘irascible’ confidence drains away and she reverts catastrophically to the earlier humility:

I dare not say I take you, but I give
Me and my service, ever whilst I live,
Into your guiding power

(ll. 102-4)

and is even willing to back down entirely when Bertram protests (ll. 147-8). It is the King's authority, not Helena's worth or her determination, which forces the marriage through; and afterwards she shows the same masochistic submissiveness to Bertram's refusal to consummate the marriage and his instructions to leave court (2.4.45, 49, 52), agreeing meekly, ‘Sir, I can nothing say / But that I am your most obedient servant’ (2.5.72-3). She also retains her earlier sense of unworthiness and guilt:

I am not worthy of the wealth I owe, …
But, like a timorous thief, most fain would steal
What law does vouch mine own

(2.5.79-82; cf. 75-6)

—an image she will pick up again when she leaves Roussillon after Bertram's letter of rejection in act 3, scene 2: ‘poor thief, I'll steal away’ (l. 129). Her reaction to that letter is to blame herself for the danger Bertram will run in the war, seeing herself distractedly as his murderer:

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.

(3.2.112-16)

For all our sympathy with her distress here, we know it was not all her fault; Bertram had determined to go to the war before the marriage was proposed. Moreover, her soliloquy is set ironically between scenes showing the high spirits of the volunteers arriving in Florence and Bertram's spectacular promotion to general of the horse. Clearly, Helena's guilty fear of war is no better grounded (at least in this play) than Bertram's fear of sex.

Her defeatism and self-blame are taken further in her letter to the Countess in act 3, scene 4, in which religion is again perverted to serve sexual chagrin. She claims to be going on a pilgrimage as penitence for the ‘ambitious love’ that has put Bertram's life at risk; she will ‘with zealous fervour sanctify’ his name (3.4.11); and, as usual, she offers to ‘embrace’ death herself in order to set him free (ll. 16-17). And once again this is ironically juxtaposed to a scene in which we hear of Bertram's further military success from a Florentine girl to whom he is now eager to pay court.

In terms of the concupiscible-irascible balance, therefore, Helena's first attempt to win Bertram has been too half-hearted: too self-doubting, too reliant on the skills and authority of others, too high-minded and self-pitying, and too oblique in its sexuality to succeed. She needs to grapple with her problem in a more aggressively sexual fashion; and this is exactly what she proceeds to do in the controversial bed-trick. However, just as her psychological hesitations softened aggression in the first half, in this part of the play it is diluted by diverting the dramatic focus to Bertram and Parolles and by keeping the exact nature of Helena's intentions at all times vague. The plot, however, reveals a complex and ruthless plan in two movements: the bed-trick and Bertram's public shaming.

Unlike Giletta in the source story, Helena makes no mention in either her soliloquy or the letter to the Countess of any plan to seek Bertram out or fulfil his seemingly impossible marriage conditions, but she does choose as her goal a shrine that will take her through Florence, where the Widow says the pilgrims to Saint Jacques habitually stay (3.5.92-4), and it is left unclear whether this was intentional. It is certainly chance that brings her into the company of Diana, the very girl Bertram is trying to seduce, but she is remarkably quick to grasp the situation (3.5.69-70) and then to exploit it. As she arranges for the Widow and Diana to aid her first in securing Bertram's family ring, then in the bed-trick, her means of persuasion are no longer the will of heaven and risk of her own life, but gold and the promise of royal favour; and the paradoxes with which she ends act 3, scene 7 reveal her own awareness of ambiguities in a plan that

Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed,
And lawful meaning in a lawful act,
Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact.

(ll. 45-7)

Helena is mostly kept absent from act 4, which focuses on Bertram and Parolles; but she turns up briefly in act 4, scene 4 with an important and disturbingly realistic reaction to the conventional bed-trick, reminiscent of Sonnet 129 (‘The expense of spirit …’):

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

(ll. 21-5)

She has prostituted herself to Bertram's desire for a purely physical, impersonal union, and it is not her virginity she is lamenting here but her feelings of damaged self-worth. She no longer idealizes Bertram.

A little mysteriously (and going beyond the source), Helena then persuades the Widow and Diana to accompany her to Marseilles. Ostensibly, this is to get more rewards from the King of France, but she also drops a hint that she has further instructions for Diana and tells them she has spread a rumour of her own death—her romantic death-seeking is certainly being converted to practical uses now. And, echoing the play's title, she argues that means can always be justified by ends. This same argument, again echoing the title, is repeated in the apparently unnecessary scene at Marseilles (5.1), where she finds the King departed for Roussillon; and there she also hands over a letter, already written, to be taken ahead to him, which turns out later to be the letter signed ‘Diana Capilet’ which claims that Bertram promised Diana marriage. We may conclude, therefore, that a public confrontation of Diana and Bertram before the King was always part of Helena's plan; and all this journeying emphasizes the determination and effort she is putting into it.

She does not appear again till the end of Bertram's public humiliation, but we are aware that it is all stage-managed by her, working through her surrogate, Diana. Not only has she arranged for Diana to produce Bertram's family ring to claim a marriage contract, but there is also the business of the second ring (not in the sources), which Diana promised to put on Bertram's finger during the night (4.2.61-2). We learn now for the first time that this was given to Helena by the King and that she swore to him only to part with it to Bertram in bed. Obviously, Lafew's recognition of it and the King's consequent suspicions are accidental, but by having Diana demand it, it is clear that it was also always part of Helena's plan. Finally, Diana riddlingly announces Helena's pregnancy. We accept this as fulfilling the romance pattern, but it is worth noting that this is the first we have heard of the pregnancy, that it seems an extremely lucky hit (Giletta slept with Beltramo several times and had twin sons before she confronted him), and that there has certainly not been time for the pregnancy to be so advanced that Helena can feel ‘her young one kick’ (5.3.296).

In other words, though it is kept carefully obscured, oblique, and out of central focus, there are sufficient indications that Helena has a complex and aggressive plan, not only to inveigle Bertram into bed with her (with the double ring trick for validation), but also to challenge and humiliate him before the King. Helena's final comments are also worth more analysis than is usually given them. There is no servility or self-abnegation now, nor, sadly, any idealism. In response to the King's surprise, she says, ‘'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see; / The name and not the thing’ (5.3.301-2), and reacts to Bertram's relieved ‘Both, both. O, pardon!’ with a reminder of his behaviour during the bed-trick: ‘O my good lord, when I was like this maid / I found you wondrous kind’ (ll. 303-4). She follows this with the inquiry, ‘Will you be mine now you are doubly won?’ (l. 308), by ‘name’ and ‘thing’, that is, by ring and pregnancy (and once more confronting the King); and has an equally uncompromising riposte for Bertram's promise to love her if she can prove her story:

If it appear not plain and prove untrue
Deadly divorce step between me and you!

(ll. 311-12)

Then she turns away for a greeting to the Countess—‘O my dear mother, do I see you living?’ (l. 313)—the affection of which is all the more striking because such feeling is conspicuously lacking in anything she says to Bertram in the scene. To him she has become ironical: at best teasing, at worst distinctly tart.

IV

Plainly, both lovers are now back in the fold of the French court, but the sense of qualified pleasure in their reunion is reflected also in their elders, who, we remember, had been willing to accommodate Bertram earlier when they thought Helena had died because of his desertion. The King is made to seem rather foolish by the convolutions of the plot. We know he is wrong to have Bertram arrested for Helena's murder and that Helena herself will soon appear; so his comment ‘I am wrapp'd in dismal thinkings’ (l. 128) is apt to get a laugh in performance (and seems phrased with that intention). His growing exasperation with Diana's riddling is also comically pettish (‘Take her away. I do not like her now’, l. 275) and Diana's replies to him are frankly pert: ‘By Jove, if ever I knew man 'twas you’ (l. 281; cf. 287). And his final offer to let Diana choose a husband too must surely be meant to seem ironic when we remember what happened to Helena earlier (particularly since Diana swore off marriage at 4.2.74). The wryness of tone here is underlined by Lafew who does not weep (as is often claimed) but says ‘Mine eyes smell onions, I shall weep anon’ (l. 314) and requests a handkerchief from the scarf-bepestered but now filthy and evil-smelling Parolles, only to be exasperated anew at the latter's ‘curtises’. There is also heavy repetition of ‘if’ and ‘seems’ at the end. Bertram promises love if Helena can prove her story; the King promises Diana a husband if she can prove herself a maid; and he concludes the play with the very qualified couplet,

All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,
The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet,

then extends the same note into the epilogue, begging applause with ‘All is well ended if this suit be won’.

So heavy a repetition must be intentional, and the mixed reaction it requires reflects a generalization made by the First Lord in act 4, in which moral categories are presented in irascible-concupiscible phrasing: ‘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’ (4.3.68-71). All's Well is consummately a play of middle age, written by a poet who belonged to neither of the generations shown in it; it looks back to the golden comedies, and forward to the Romances. Its main effect is one of accommodation and balance, the interweaving of youth and age, vice and virtue, realism and romance; and not the least important part of this ‘mingled yarn’ is its rueful mixture of war and sex, an accommodation of the irascible and the concupiscible, Mars and Diana-Venus, that remains unsettlingly partial.²⁶

Notes

1. G. Wilson Knight, ‘The Triple Eye’, in The Sovereign Flower (1958), pp. 93-160.

2. ‘Giletta of Narbona’, the ninth story of the third day of Boccaccio's Decameron (1348-58), as translated by William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (3rd edition, 1575).

3. Erik Erikson, ‘Youth: Fidelity and Diversity’, in The Challenge of Youth, ed. Erik H. Erikson (Garden, NY, 1965), p. 24.

4. As it tends to be in the otherwise very acute article by Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘New Techniques of Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 18 (1967), 337-62.

5. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (revised edition, Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 86 ff. (see plate 76).

6. De Iside et Osiride, 48 (Moralia 370D - 371A), quoted in Wind, p. 86.

7. Summa Theologica, I, Q.81, Art.2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 21 vols. (1912-25).

8. Quotations from All's Well are from the new Arden edition, edited by G. K. Hunter (3rd edition, 1959).

9. Wind, pp. 74-80.

10. Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven and London, 1968), vol. 7 of The Works of Samuel Johnson, p. 400.

11. This point is developed in Arthur Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge, 1981), chapter 5, and Richard Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Play (Berkeley, 1981), chapter 2.

12. See Discussions of Shakespeare's Problem Plays, ed. Robert Ornstein (Boston, 1961), p. 40.

13. Wheeler, p. 37.

14. For discussion of ironic aspects in the war, see Alexander Leggatt, ‘All's Well That Ends Well: The Testing of Romance’, Modern Language Quarterly, 32 (1971), 21-41.

15. See Robert Hapgood, ‘The Life of Shame: Parolles and All's Well’, Essays in Criticism, 15 (1965), 269-78. This essay develops the idea of an interconnection between acceptance of life and acceptance of shame.

16. See Wind, plate 77.

17. Many of these details are pointed out by Clifford Leech, ‘The Theme of Ambition in All's Well That Ends Well’, ELH, 21 (1954), 17-29.

18. ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (1953-74), vol. 11 (1957), pp. 179-90.

19. Wheeler, p. 56.

20. Quoted in Hunter, p. 145.

21. This relation is developed at length by Wilson Knight and by Wheeler; see also Roger Warren, ‘Why Does It End Well? Helena, Bertram, and the Sonnets’, Shakespeare Survey 22 (Cambridge, 1969), 79-92.

22. See Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society, trans. Montgomery Belgion (rev. edn. 1974), for a discussion of the ‘liebestod’ tradition in Western love literature.

23. The ‘There’ in ‘There shall your master have a thousand loves’ (1.1.162) can be interpreted as either ‘at court’ or ‘in my virginity’.

24. If the fistula were (as often) in the anus, this might be explicable; but it is never said that this is so, and in the source the fistula is in the King's breast (Hunter, p. 146).

25. Wheeler makes this point very effectively, pp. 76 ff.

26. A version of this paper was delivered at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting at Ashland, Oregon, in April, 1983.