All’s Well That Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” those plays whose resolution is most unsatisfactory; the poet’s justice seeming to us injustice. The Count Roussillon, whose father died when he was a minor, became a ward of the French king, who thereupon had the power to bestow him in marriage; and the king forces him, against his will, to marry a female physician who cures the king of a serious ailment. The count flies the marriage and refuses to consummate it, but his wife, hearing that he is pursuing a young maid in Florence, convinces her to make an assignation with him, and takes the young maid’s place in bed, and all this becoming known, the two become proper man and wife.
There is no apparent fitness between the two. She is not even of noble birth, and Shakespeare rarely composes such mixed marriages; she loves him, but there is no indication the feeling is at all mutual. His reaction when she chooses to marry him is:
My wife, my liege? I shall beseech your highness
In such a business, give me leave to use
The help of mine own eyes. (II.iii)
And his conclusion after the king’s exhortation is: “I cannot love her, nor will strive to do ’t.” There is no evolution from this position. He is forced into a marriage he never wanted.
That we consider such imposition to be the worst form of tyranny, and hardly any freedom more dear than that to choose our mates, we cannot now deny. One of my companions in the audience whispered in my ear in frustration at the plot, “This is a terrible play.”
But there is something in Shakespeare’s terribleness, which reminds me so strongly of the terribleness of life itself, that I am loath to dismiss this play out of hand, merely because the lead character gets something other than he wanted. Would I not then have to dismiss also the universe itself, as a sorry bit of playmaking? Hardly any of the characters get what they want. And there is a powerful vitality in the play, which is one of the reasons why it is performed – it is by no means one of Shakespeare’s worst.
The easiest way to deal with such problem plots is the reading strategy of Helen Luke. That sibyl of the interior life treated all artistic creations as they are in fact, as productions of a single brain; and hence there is no Count Roussillon to be oppressed by the King and wedded to Helena, but all of them are but portions of one man, which must, by the accident that they were all born in one body, come together in harmony. By this allegorizing the whole into a psychomachia – which, let me repeat, is literally true, and all other readings fictionalizing – this becomes something like the story of the wedding of pride and humility, the overcoming of the cold, frigid aloofness which is described as two forms of barrenness, war (which Roussillon pursues in place of marriage) and virginity.
The diatribes against virginity are astonishing, and reveal the depth of Shakespeare’s vitality, which again and again seems so much greater than mere virtue or moralism. This is the speech of one Parolles, interrupted by a few lines of Helena, the future wife:
It is not politic, in the commonwealth of nature, to preserve virginity. Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there never was virgin got, til virginity was first lost. That you were made of, is metal to make virgins. Virginity, by being once lost, may be ten times found; by being ever kept, it is ever lost; ’tis too cold a companion: away with’t.
There’s little can be said in’t, ’tis against the rule of Nature. To speak on the part of virginity, is to accuse your mothers; which is most infallible disobedience. He that hangs himself is a virgin: virginity murthers itself, and should be buried in highways out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate offendress against Nature. Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese, consumes itself to the very pairing, and so dies with feeding his own stomach. Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the canon. Keep it not, you cannot choose but lose by’t. Out with’t: within a year it will make itself two, which is goodly increase, and the principal itself not much the worse. Away with’t.
’Tis a commodity will lose the gloss with lying: the longer kept, the less worth: off with’t while ’tis vendible. Answer the time of request, virginity like an old courtier, wears her cap out of fashion, richly suited, but unsuitable, just like the brooch and the toothpick, which were not now: your date is better in your pie and your porridge, than in your cheek; and your virginity, your old virginity, is like one of our French wither’d pears, it looks ill, it eats drily, marry ’tis a wither’d pear: it was formerly better, marry yet ’tis a wither’d pear: will you anything with it? (I.i)
There is much here that is persistent in Shakespeare’s thought. One is that one must yield; yield to life, yield to the conditions of life. This idea is found all over Greek and Roman mythology, in the unpalatable narrative form of rape, which is the normal mode of intercourse between gods and humans. Those who know suffering from the myriad things that happen in their lives they cannot change or control, know this is true, though it is not the stuff of cocktail-party chitchat. The king says to Roussillon, “Thou wrong’st thy self, if thou shouldst strive to choose.” You have no choice; before fate there must be a fiat mihi secundum voluntatem tuam, and no other. Another major obsession for Shakespeare is that this yielding is specifically a yielding to contradiction: only by yielding virginity can there be such things as virgins. The head cannot understand this.
This marriage of pride and humility is seen in the first half of the story, in which Helena cures the ailing king. The wounded king is one of those archetypal storylines which immediately suggests the world of fairytale and the subconscious. The encounter between the lowly Helena and the diffident king is most remarkable for the cold, standoffish pride of the king, who seems not even to desire a cure, if it makes him seem foolish:
We thank you maiden,
But may not be so credulous of cure,
When our most learned doctors leave us, and
The congregated college have concluded,
That laboring Art can never ransom Nature
From her inaidable estate: I say we must not
So stain our judgement, or corrupt our hope,
To prostitute our past-cure malady
To empirics, or to dissever so
Our great self and our credit, to esteem
A senseless hope, when help past sense we deem. (II.ii)
The king too is trapped by pride, and cannot be cured by the learned doctors, but only by one who is lowly and humble. Helena’s response, whose Christian taint is most obvious:
He that of greatest works is finisher,
Oft does them by the weakest minister;
So holy Writ in babes hath judgement shown,
When Judges have been babes; great floods have flown
From simple sources; and great Seas have dried
When miracles have by the greatest been denied.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits,
Where hope is coldest, and despair most shifts.
The king again rebuffs this:
I must not hear thee, fare thee well kind maid,
Thy pains not us’d, must by thyself be paid.
Proffers not took reap thanks for their reward.
But he is ultimately convinced by Helena’s Portia-like eloquence, and attempts the cure, which succeeds, resulting in his bestowing, at first unsuccessfully, the gift of a husband on Helena.
Shakespeare took his plot from Boccaccio, and the alterations are worth noticing, as they all indicate the same intent of mind. In Boccaccio’s story the physician’s daughter is noble and wealthy; Shakespeare makes her lowly and poor. So he can make her into the “the stone that the builders rejected,” and in psychological terms the rejected, despised part of ourselves, confrontation with which alone can create new life – the wedding and bedding with which the play concludes. She wanders through Italy as a pilgrim, and even feigns her death, making her return at the end of the play a kind of resurrection. Her coming then is “like a thief in the night”:
I am not worthy of the wealth I owe,
Nor dare I say ’tis mine: and yet it is,
But like a timorous thief, most faine would steal
What law does vouch mine own. (II.iv)
The defeat of pride, which is falseness, occurs twice more in plots added to the original. Shakespeare adds a braggart named Parolles, who adds much comic value to the play. He brags of his Martial spirit, all of which is show. This is revealed when he is captured by his own men and shows himself a coward in every respect. Yet this confrontation with his real self is not the worst of things. He says in a soliloquy:
Yet I am thankful: if my heart were great
’Twould burst at this; Captain I’ll be no more,
But I will eat, and drink, and sleep as soft
As a captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live: who knows himself a braggart
Let him fear this; for it will come to pass,
That every braggart shall be found an ass.
Rust sword, cool blushes, and Parolles live
Safest in shame: being fool’d, by fool’ry thrive:
There’s place and means for every man alive. (IV.iii)
Later he becomes a beggar, and a witness at the end, where he serves some use, to show Roussillon a liar. This is the other humbling of pride, a secondary one of Roussillon himself. He is made by Shakespeare into a philanderer, or as Parolles says,
I know the young count to be a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to Virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds. (IV.iii)
The maid whose place Helena takes in bed, named Diana, he treacherously slanders before the king. This subplot makes Roussillon into another dealer in false promises, which are the stuff of pride. (It also makes us more disposed to accept the humiliation he endures at having to take a wife he does not want.)
The bed-trick is one of the obsessions of Shakespeare: sexuality where appearance and reality diverge. He cannot help but obsess on the contradictions like Paul meditating on God’s justice:
Why then tonight
Let us assay our plot, which if it speed,
Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed;
And lawful meaning in a lawful act,
Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact. (III.vii)
Because he is 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 it not.
Great king I am no strumpet, by my life,
I am either maid, or else this old man’s wife. (V.iii)
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,
And at that time he got his wife with child:
Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick:
So there’s my riddle, one that’s dead is quick. (V.iii)
So the fulfilment of the Law comes only through its violation. “God hath consigned all men to disobedience, that He may have mercy on them all.” Jung said, “Unless devotion is given to the thing which must prove false in the end, that which is true in the end cannot enter.” This is one of those bits of wisdom, exemplified by the plot, which we cannot understand but only observe and acknowledge in our own lives.
Let me close this essay by marvelling over the obvious: how extraordinary the language of Shakespeare is, so rich and complex and strange as to beggar all memory of it. It had been a year since I had any contact with the poet, and the simple grand fact of his language struck me once more. There was nothing, it seems, he was not willing to say, and he hardly ever spared his audience. But the complexity is always counterbalanced by things so simple and yet so inventive you cannot fathom how he thought so:
Mine eyes smell onions, I shall cry anon. (V.iii)
‘He did love her sir, as a gentleman loves a woman.’
‘How is that?’
“He lov’d her sir, and lov’d her not.’ (V.iii)
He makes knowing Latin a real pleasure. Of fighting to the death:
I would have that drum, or another – or hic iacet. (III.vi)
He speaks elsewhere of a rascal’s “facinorous spirit.” We have already seen “desperate offendress,” and “whale to virginity.” It is truly extraordinary to have this web of words thrown over your head, and attempt to cut your way through it.
I saw the play at the Woodstock Shakespeare Festival, the which may God prosper; it is one of the finest, most spirited drama festivals I have ever seen. The actors are there just for love, and the crowd as well. All there are groundlings, for there are no seats, in obedience to the truth that
our bloods
Of color, weight, and heat, pour’d all together,
Would quite confound distinction.
Would that all our activities would bow their heads to this truth, level the mountains of pride, and fill up the valleys of humility, and the marriage of heaven and earth be effected here.
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