Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well.  Not.

Two Jerks Get Each Other and Get What They Deserve.

The Age of Trump and the Normalization of Bad Behavior.

Burton Weltman

 

Prologue: Setting the Tone.

It is the opening scene of a play.  A young lady is in public mourning for the death of her father, who was a great and generous man.  She grieves and sheds tears, surrounded by friends who admired her father and who admire her for her devotion to her father.

When the friends leave, she soliloquizes that she is not really grieving for her father.  She is not thinking of him, she says.  She does not even remember him.  She is grieving, instead, over the hopelessness of her desire to marry a young nobleman.  What drives her to tears is that as a mere commoner, she does not know how she can succeed in marrying someone so high above her.

Finishing her soliloquy, the young lady immediately engages in lighthearted sexual banter with another character, a man she supposedly despises.  She closes the scene with a fierce avowal to herself of her determination to marry the nobleman. “My intents are fixed and will not leave me,” she declaims.  What would you say about this young lady?  Would you say that she is a romantic heroine who is showing her loving nature?  Or would you say that she is cold-hearted social climber who is showing us her selfish ambitions?

The situation I have described above is the opening scene from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.  Critics and directors almost invariably say that the young lady in this scene, Helena, who is the main character in the play, is a romantic heroine pining for love. And this view of her informs the way that critics interpret the play and directors stage it as a light-hearted romantic comedy.  I think that is not the best way to play Helena or to interpret the play.

I think the play makes more sense, and is more interesting and relevant, if Helena is played as a self-centered social climber and the play is performed as a seriously darkish comedy, not a light romance. In this view, the play’s title is ironic because things do not actually end well, and the moral of the play is that all is not well just because it seems to end well.  The message is that the ends of an action, no matter how intensely desired or desirable, do not justify any and all means.

Ethics 101:  Do the ends justify any and every means?  What justifies the ends? 

Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well[1] is a comedy about a woman who chases after an unreceptive man, traps the man through admittedly dubious means, and gets him as a husband in the end.  It is generally performed as a light-hearted romantic comedy with the woman, Helena, played as a model of feminine virtue, and even a feminist heroine, despite the dubious tactics she uses to get Bertram, her man. This essay argues that, despite its title, the play does not end well, and that Shakespeare did not intend to promote the idea that all’s well that ends well. The crux of the argument is that Helena is not the virtuous heroine she seems to others in the play and to most interpreters of the play, and that the play is best performed as an ironic takeoff on a romantic comedy, a darkish comedy rather than a romance.

One of the great things about Shakespeare’s plays is that they can legitimately be interpreted in a variety of ways, albeit some ways are arguably better than others.  The way in which an actress says her lines, the inflection in her voice, the look on her face, the body language she exhibits, can determine their meaning.  In the case of All’s Well That Ends Well, I think that Helena’s lines are better said in a way that conveys her willful ambition to scale the social heights and to possess Bertram.  She repeatedly says that she idolizes him, that is, she has made him into an object of desire that she has to own no matter what it takes, whether by means fair or foul.

Although Helena succeeds in her campaign to get the recalcitrant Bertram, I don’t think the play ends happily for her or for Bertram.  Bertram is forced in the end to marry a woman for whom he does not care and who has just ruined his life as far as he is concerned.  He is not likely to treat his unwanted wife with affection, and I think Shakespeare expects us to see that theirs is not likely to be a happy marriage for either of them.

I think also that we are not expected to approve of the hard-ball tactics Helena uses to get Bertram.  She is consistently inconsiderate of others and violates all sorts of ethical norms.  The play is a comedy, but I think we are supposed to cringe even as we laugh at her antics, and refuse to accept her bad behavior as normal.  All’s Well That Ends Well is not, in this view, intended to promote the idea implicit in its title that the ends of an action justify any and all means to its accomplishment.

To the contrary, I think the play demonstrates Shakespeare’s commitment to classical virtues and to a sense of personal honor that are directly the opposite of the selfish cynicism reflected in the idea that all’s well that ends well.  The play’s title is, in this view, ironic, as is its ending.  The moral of the story is that bad means produce bad ends.   All’s Well That Ends Well is a morality play in which the putative heroine behaves in ways that we are supposed to reject as dishonorable, even though her bad behavior is accepted as normal by most of the others in the play.  The play, in this reading, functions as a warning not to let bad behavior become normalized and become the norm.  This is not a conventional interpretation of the play.

The Moral and Historical Context: Cycles of Cynicism and Idealism.

All’s Well That Ends Well was written at the turn of the seventeenth century in the midst of debates in late Renaissance Europe about the nature of history and the history of ethical theories and practices.  The debates were not new.  Conflicting ideas about whether history proceeds in a straight line or in cycles, and whether morals were getting better or worse over time, had been argued since ancient times.  During the era of the European Renaissance, in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, cyclical ideas predominated and these ideas are reflected in both Shakespeare’s English history plays and his dramas set in other times and places.

The name Renaissance, which means “rebirth,” was given to this era by its participants.  The name reflects their primary goal of reviving the classical humanities and classical virtues, especially a sense of honor among people, that they attributed to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and that that they thought had been lost during what they termed the “Dark Ages” of the medieval era.  Honor in the sense of behaving honorably, not merely winning honors, was the goal, and it was expected of women as well as men.

Shakespeare’s plays are full of men and women competing for honors, many of them behaving dishonorably.  But for Shakespeare, winning was not everything.  Renaissance humanists, Shakespeare among them, hoped to promote an enlightened era of high honor and moral purpose that would emulate that of the ancients.  It is within this historical and moral context that I think All’s Well That Ends Well should be seen.[2]

The idea that ethical theories and practices ebb and flow in cycles goes back to Plato in Western intellectual history and forward to recent times.  Mortimer Adler, the best-selling American philosopher of all time, albeit now largely forgotten since his death in 2001, used to say that while the sciences are inherently progressive, the humanities, including ethics, are episodic.  Theories and practices in the sciences dialectally scaffold onward and upward upon each other, with the present building on the past and becoming the foundation of the future.[3]

Not so, Adler said, in the humanities, and especially with respect to ethics.  Ethical theories and practices waver over time between high idealism and low cynicism.  People may argue about whether the overall ethical trend in history has been in the long run for the better or the worse, but it is unarguably the case that historical eras in which ethical idealism predominates are invariably succeeded by eras of widespread cynicism.  While every era has its share of bad behavior, some more, others less, the moral tone of an era can be judged by the nature and extent to which bad behavior has become normalized, that is, accepted, even if with a grimace.

As moral cycles evolve and revolve, Adler noted, moral ideas that have been discarded in one era as obsolete are generally recycled and return in the next era, even if in modified form.  Deja vu all over again.  Adler strove to recycle the ethics of the ancients in a form fit for modern times.  He hoped, thereby, to help foster an ethical upswing in our times by imbuing popular culture with the classical virtues he saw in the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers.  Reason and rationality, honesty and humility, tolerance and respect, compromise and cooperation, and especially a sense of honor, were high among these ancient virtues.

Like the classical philosophers he admired, Adler was particularly concerned with the way in which people defined the ends that they considered worthy, the means that they considered legitimate toward those ends, and the proper relation between means and ends.  These, he opined, are keys to whether behavior can be considered ethical or cynical.

Ethical behavior in this view requires that the ends people seek be endowed with humane purpose and that the means they use be consistent with those ends, that is, be honorable and humane.  Cynicism, which is often paraded by its adherents as realism, generally holds that no matter what people say, selfish self-interest is the only real goal of human behavior.  All else is hypocritical posturing.  Cynics also allow that any effective means, no matter how despicable or dishonorable, is acceptable toward a person’s goals.  Cynicism assumes that we live in a zero-sum, dog-eat-dog world in which we are all out for only ourselves.  Self is the be-all-and-end-all.

In a cynical era, bad behavior is widely normalized.  That is, immoral ideas and actions become so common that they are accepted, even if begrudgingly, as necessary realities.  We are currently struggling through just such a time in the United States today.  Shakespeare was living through a similar time in England when he was writing All’s Well that Ends Well, which is one of the things that makes the play relevant to us today.  It was a time when calumny and knavery seemed to abound.  But, even as Shakespeare’s plays are full of people behaving badly, the plays also reflect the effort of Shakespeare and other like-minded Renaissance humanists to restore humanity, civility, and honor to public life.  By promoting the classical virtues, they were trying to rescue their cynical age from the normalization of bad behavior.  All’s Well that Ends Well was, I suggest, a part of that ethical project.  It is not how the play is generally performed.

All’s Well that Ends Well is generally played as a light-hearted romantic comedy in which a bit of bad behavior is acceptable in pursuit of a personal goal, such as marriage to the person of one’s choice.  The play is generally performed for the amusement of the audience and not for moral enlightenment.  I disagree with this approach.  I think that the play can best be read as a comedy with a serious purpose, a morality play about means, ends and ethics that resonates in our cynical Trumpian times.  It is an ironical play about cynical people.  That it is in the form of a romantic comedy may fool some interpreters, but it is a romantic comedy without romance, and it has an ostensibly happy ending that is not really happy.

The fact that most interpreters don’t see what I claim are the ironies of the play’s title, the play’s romantic form, and the play’s superficially happy ending may itself be an instance of the normalization of bad behavior that characterizes our own times.  It is widely expected in our times that people will lie, cheat, and threaten their way to their ends as the characters do in this play. Cynicism of this sort pervades the mass media, the social media, and the behavior of our politicians, especially the present-day President of the United States.

But I don’t think that Shakespeare intended to promote cynicism in this play.  Yes, we laugh at the bad behavior of Helena and others in the play.  But I think we are expected also to cringe at the despicable doings of the characters and refuse to accept them as normal.

The Story: A Tangled Web.

All’s Well That Ends Well is set in France and the main characters are French.  This setting is itself a clue that Shakespeare, who was writing in Francophobe England, was not going to think well of the main characters.  The play is set at a time seemingly near Shakespeare’s own when the King of France still ruled over a predominantly feudal system of social relations.  Under the feudal system, people were tied personally to those above them in the social hierarchy, effectively owned by their superiors and subject to their control.  Social class distinctions were considered very important.  The action of the play revolves around the efforts of a middle-class young woman, Helena, to overcome class barriers and marry a young nobleman, Count Bertram.

The main story is fairly simple, although it gets tangled up in comic twists and turns.  Helena is the daughter of a famous doctor who has recently died.  She is widely praised for her virtue by all and sundry, including Bertram’s mother.  Helena wants to marry Bertram, but he doesn’t want to marry her.  She is willing to resort to extreme means to get her way, but so is he.  This is the central problem around which the play turns.

As the play opens, the French King is terminally ill and desperate for any cure.  Helena claims that she has inherited from her father a cure for the King’s illness and she will give it to the King if he will order the man of her choice to marry her.  The King agrees to the bargain with Helena, and she  cures him using her father’s remedy.  The King then orders Bertram to marry Helena and, much to Bertram’s chagrin, he performs a civil marriage ceremony to bind them.

Bertram is an arrogant, insolent, and insulting fellow.  He has previously rejected Helena’s romantic overtures, considers her socially beneath him, and is furious at being forced into marriage with her.  Bertram has good breeding and good looks, but he is not on good behavior.  He refuses to consummate the marriage and says that he will not consider himself actually married to Helena unless she is first impregnated by him and she wears a ring that he keeps perpetually on his own finger.  These seem to be insuperable conditions since Bertram says that he won’t ever sleep with Helena and that he never takes off the ring.

Having been ordered by the King to stay in France with Helena, Bertram disobeys the King and runs off to Italy to serve in the Florentine army.  He is encouraged in this action by his sidekick Parolles, who is regarded by everyone else in the play as a sycophant, parasite, coward and scoundrel, but whom Bertram insists on keeping as a confidant.

Helena, after pretending to go to a convent and having given out a false story that she has died on the way, follows Bertram to Florence.  There, she learns that Bertram is trying to seduce a beautiful young woman named Diana with false promises of marriage.  Helena bribes Diana and her mother to pretend to give in to Bertram’s solicitation of Diana, but only if Bertram will give Diana his ring and will accept from her a ring that unbeknownst to Bertram had been given to Helena by the French King.

Bertram is so infatuated with Diana that he agrees to these terms and she agrees to sleep with him for an hour in absolute darkness and silence.  At the appointed place and time, Helena substitutes herself for Diana.  In the dark, Bertram cannot tell the difference.  This maneuver is known as “the bed trick.”  As a result, Bertram unwittingly sleeps with Helena and impregnates her, gives her his sacred ring, and accepts Helena’s ring for himself.

Having slaked his lust in the seeming conquest of Diana and having heard the false news that Helena was dead, Bertram abandons Diana and returns to France, claiming to mourn the death of Helena and begging the King’s pardon for having disobeyed his orders.  There, however, he finds waiting for him Helena, pregnant and wearing his ring, accompanied by Diana.

Bertram tries lying his way out of the trap Helena has set for him, but Helena and Diana are too much for him.  So, in the end, to save himself from severe punishment by the King, Bertram says that he will give up his opposition to being married to Helena.  In turn, the King, in recognition of Diana’s service to Helena, promises Diana that he will order any young man of her choice to marry her.  At this point, the plays closes with the King concluding that “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet, the bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.”  (V, 3, 578-579)  But is this so?  Is this Shakespeare’s conclusion?  Is that what he intended us to think?  I think not.

A Problem Play: So, what’s the problem?

All’s Well That Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays and is often disparaged or dismissed as an inartful effort by the novice Bard, and as “the least interesting” of his plays.[4]  It is generally considered one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” because it supposedly raises ethical problems that are not clearly resolved at the end and because the main characters behave in problematical ways.

What are we to make of the heroine Helena who gets her man through the underhanded bed trick and through coercion of Bertram by the King?  What are we to make of Bertram, ostensibly the drama’s male hero, who is despicable until he seemingly undergoes a miraculous change of character in the last lines of the play?  How are we supposed to reconcile the ethical flaws in these main characters with the form of a romantic comedy?  The consensus of most critics is that you can’t, and that is considered a major problem with the play.  In their interpretations, they skim over the bad behavior of Helena and underplay Bertram’s.  The play is a romance, they claim, but a flawed romance.

The Shakespearian critic Mark Van Doren, for example, considered the play to be a failure as a romance because the plot was mechanical and the characters were unromantic and without passion.  Dismissing Bertram as “a commonplace cad” who “was never cut out for the hero of a play,” Van Doren mourned that Helena begins as “one of Shakespeare’s most interesting women” but “thins out” in the course of the play.  In the end, he concluded, Helena becomes “mechanical like the play,” just going through the motions of an implausible plot.[5]

Other interpreters have similarly had a problem believing that the loveable Helena could be so insistently in love with the eminently unlovable Bertram.  These interpreters generally try to resolve this problem in one of two ways.  One way is to play Bertram as a rebellious youth in whom Helena is mature enough to see the potential for a loving and loveable husband.  In this view, Bertram’s bad behavior is merely a stage of development that he will eventually outgrow.

The other and almost opposite way is to play Bertram as an incorrigible knave, but as so charming and handsome that a naïvely virtuous Helena is blinded by his beauty and cannot resist him.  In this view, it is Helena’s innocent immaturity that is the problem.  Neither of these ways of portraying Bertram is generally considered satisfactory, so that while the play is still considered a romance, it is deemed fatally flawed.[6]

In a similar vein, the Shakespearian scholar Harold Goddard opined that the play could work as a romance if one views Helena as a good angel and Parolles as a bad angel, so that “the drama is a struggle between Helena and Parolles for possession of Bertram.” Like most critics, Goddard gushes over Helena.  “Helena is so entrancingly drawn,” he exclaims, that she would make a great romantic heroine if only she had a suitably romantic hero to complement her.

But she doesn’t, and Goddard concludes that the play is a failed romance because Shakespeare “has blackened Bertram so utterly” that he does not need a bad angel to lead him astray.  Bertram is just plain nasty, bad and unsuitable for a romantic hero.  In Goddard’s view, Helena is a flawless heroine and the problem with the play is Bertram.[7]

Goddard agrees with most critics who see Bertram as the major problem with the play.  Helena is almost invariably seen as the virtuous essence of true womanhood, a feminist avatar who fights her way to victory.  Although some critics have a problem with accepting that Helena would stoop to something as low as the bed trick to trap Bertram, they generally give her a pass.  “Her ends are achieved by morally ambiguous means so that marriage [at the end of the play] seems at best a precarious institution on which to base the presumed reassurances of romantic comedy.”  That is, Helena’s low actions are inconsistent with what is seen as her high character and with what are considered the characteristics of a romantic comedy.[8]  But these critics have generally glossed over Helena’s dubious methods as ethical compromises necessary to achieve her goals.  These critics essentially adopt the mantra of the play that all’s well that ends well, and that the ends justify the means.  In so doing, they have essentially normalized bad behavior.

In my view, Van Doren, Goddard and other critics are right that one cannot reconcile the ethical flaws of the characters in the play with the form of a romantic comedy.  But I don’t think that is a problem because I don’t think the play is supposed to be taken as a romantic comedy.  I don’t think that we are supposed to think well of either Helena or Bertram.  While most critics see Bertram’s blatant flaws, they don’t often see Helena’s.  Hers are more subtle but more important, especially if we do not want to fall into the habit of normalizing bad behavior.

Helena: All that glitters is not gold.

The key to what I think is a better interpretation of All’s Well That Ends Well is in seeing that Helena is not a golden girl but a gold digger.  She is a thoroughgoing opportunist who is bedazzled not only by Bertram’s money but by his status and his person.  What fools most interpreters, I think, is that the play is punctuated by colloquies and soliloquies in which Helena professes her overwhelming love for Bertram.  But the Bertram she loves is not the real Bertram.  As almost every critic has noted, Bertram is quite unlovable, and it is impossible to play him otherwise.  So, it is not the actual Bertram that Helena loves, but her idealized golden image of him.  She worships him as an idol that she intends to possess.

As noted in the Prologue above, I think Shakespeare gives us a clue to Helena’s character in the opening of the play when she admits that she despairs not for her father but for her seemingly hopeless desire for Bertram. “I think not on my father,” she says, “I have forgot him.”  She is solely occupied by her desire to marry Bertram.  “My imagination carries no favor in’t but Bertram’s,” she says.  She harbors what she calls an “idolatrous fancy” for him, but “he is so above me,” she cries, that she does not know how she will be able to win him. (I, 1, 84-101)

In these opening lines, I think we can see at least two key things about Helena.  First, that she is quite cold-hearted to place her infatuation for Bertram above the respectful remembrance she owes her father.  Second, that she idealizes and idolizes Bertram beyond his personal merit and that her feelings are based largely on his high social status.  As the play progresses, instances of Helena’s cold-blooded callousness and overwhelming personal ambition follow one another.

Immediately after this opening soliloquy, and right on the heels of going through the motions of publicly mourning her father’s death, Helena engages in a long sexually explicit repartee with Parolles, a man she describes as a scoundrel.  Parolles opens the conversation by decrying virginity as selfishness on the part of a woman for refusing to share herself with others.  He then rallies Helena to give up her own virginity.  Helena does not squelch him as you would think a virtuous heroine ought, nor does she deny the validity of his argument.  Instead, they banter for quite a while, until she finally concludes that she intends to save her virginity for Bertram. (I, 1, 115-193)  Although Helena’s conclusion is conventionally moralistic, her sudden transition from public mourning to sexual jesting is not what one would expect from a virtuous heroine.

Helena’s next move is to go to the King when she hears of his illness and to offer him her father’s cure.  She does not, however, offer him the cure out of sympathy, let alone out of patriotic duty.  She offers him the cure as part of a commercial exchange.  “But if I help, what do you promise me,” Helena insists.  And she promises to cure the King only if he orders the man of her choosing to marry her.  (II, 1, 209-225)  Implicit in her bargaining with the King is that if he does not promise her the desired quid pro quo, she will let him die.  So, the King, a desperate dying man, gives her the promise she desires.  She then gives him the cure he desires and he then forces Bertram to marry her.

Note that Helena seems willing to let the King die if she does not get her way.  That is pretty cold-blooded for someone who is conventionally played as a virtuous heroine.  Note also that she has no problems with Bertram being forced to marry her even though he says that he does not love her and does not want to marry her.  That is pretty cold-hearted for someone who is conventionally portrayed as a romantic heroine.

When Bertram runs off to Italy, Helena secretly follows him.  And when she discovers that he lusts after Diana, she bribes Diana’s mother and Diana to let her play the bed trick on Bertram and get Bertram’s prized ring.  The plan is for Diana to insist on exchanging rings as a pledge of her betrothal to Bertram before she will sleep with him.  Having gotten Bertram’s ring, Diana will give it to Helena who will then sleep with him.  “Take this purse of gold,” Helena says to Diana’s mother, “and let me buy your friendly help thus far, which I will overpay and pay again after I have found it,” that is, after Bertram has been fooled into the bed trick and Helena has received his ring.  This is, again, a purely commercial transaction between Helena, on the one hand, and Diana’s mother and Diana, on the other.  Note that Helena seems to have little regard here for Diana’s reputation when it gets abroad, as it surely will, that she was seemingly seduced by Bertram and sacrificed her virginity for a ring.  That is not very considerate for a golden girl.

Perhaps most important in this bed trick plan, Helena has no regard whatsoever for the child she intends to bear for a father who does not want a child.  Helena is not only playing a low-down trick on Bertram to get him to marry her, but on the child that she is tricking him into conceiving.

When Helena gives out false rumors of her own death, it is a means of tricking Bertram into going back to France and, thereby, falling under the jurisdiction of the King.  Although it is a minor offense compared to her others, this is still a low trick to play on Bertram and she shows no regard for the people who will mourn her death.  Again, not very high-minded or considerate.

Finally, having trapped Bertram and put him into the position of either accepting his marriage to her or else being severely punished by the King, Helena has no problem with going forward in life with a husband who does not want to marry her in the first place, and is henceforth likely to have only the most negative feelings toward her.  Not a very romantic ending.

Even more significant, in a time and place in which husbands were considered to own their wives, and in which a wife’s physical wellbeing was subject to her husband’s whims, Helena’s marriage to Bertram does not seem to be a happy ending or a good beginning for either of them. Given Bertram’s wandering eye, willful nature, and deep-seated arrogance, Helena’s triumph may be a Pyrrhic victory.  The end of the play may be only the beginning of her troubles.

The mantra “all’s well that ends well” is recited repeatedly during the course of the play by Helena as she lies, cheats, threatens, and bribes her way to eventual victory. (V, 1, 30)  The mantra is also cited by the French King in his summation of events at the end of the play.  (V, 3, 378-380)  In this summation, he excuses the despicable actions of both Helena and Bertram on the grounds that the two love birds have ended up together at last.

From the point of view of Helena and the King, the moral of the story seems to be that the ends justify the means and that winning is everything.  This is not a very high-minded conclusion.  I don’t think it is Shakespeare’s, nor should it be ours.  The moral of the story that Shakespeare intended seems more likely to be that foul means produce foul ends.  And that is a moral not only for Shakespeare’s time but for ours as well.

Bertram: Taking the feud out of the feudal system.

My contention that Shakespeare intended All’s Well That Ends Well to be taken as a morality play is supported, I think, by the play’s treatment of Bertram and the historical setting of the play.  In the opening lines of the play, Bertram’s mother is bemoaning the fact that with the death of Bertram’s father, Bertram has become a ward of the King.  She complains that in losing her husband, she has also lost her son.  Bertram, in turn, complains that he “must attend his Majesty’s command” and be “evermore in subjection.” (I, 1, 1-6)  In these complaints of the dowager countess and her son the count, Shakespeare establishes the declining power of the nobility and the rising authority of the King as the historical context of the play’s action and Bertram’s personal grievances.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays deal with changing social systems and with people getting caught up in the changes.  His plays frequently dramatize conflicts between old and new social norms, roles, and institutions, and with the misfits and misconnections that can result.  All’s Well That Ends Well is an example of this.  While the misbehaviors of Helena and Bertram constitute the core of the play, changes in the feudal system constitute the context of the play and the first cause of the play’s action.

Feudalism was a hierarchical system of power and prestige whose main purpose was maintaining social order and fielding an army of noble warriors.  In the medieval feudal system, nobles served as warriors, as knights in shining armor, who were granted land and privileges by a king in return for military service.  By Shakespeare’s time, guns that could be wielded by ordinary commoners had made skilled and armored knights obsolete.  Kings fielding armies of gun-toting commoners were no longer dependent on the nobles for military protection.

As a result, European kings no longer had to accede to demands of the ancient nobles, and the feudal system devolved into a form of monarchial absolutism in many countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Kings were able to elevate their allies, many of them mere nouveau social climbers, into the nobility.  Noblemen were, in turn, being transformed from macho warriors into foppish courtiers, mere flatterers who hung about the king’s court.  These social changes were occurring in France and beginning in England during Shakespeare’s time.

These changes from feudalism to monarchial absolutism constitute the primary cause of the action in All’s Well That Ends Well.  Helena wants to become a countess and raise her own social status with the help of the King.  Bertram wants to be a noble warrior and maintain his ancient social status despite the King.  Helena’s victorious ascension into the nobility, and the King’s assertion of his authority over Bertram in the end, symbolize the triumph of the new social system over the old.

These social changes help us to understand Bertram.  Bertram is not just a naturally nasty person.  He is a would-be warrior who is expected to play at being a dandyish courtier.  He is an unwilling exemplar of the decline of feudalism and the degradation of noble warriors who have been required to exchange their military skills for courtly manners.  Having been ordered by the King to hang around his court, Bertram runs off to war and distinguishes himself as a warrior, only to be tricked back to the King’s court and coerced into docility.

Bertram exemplifies the problem of living a life of honor in a courtier system that rewards sycophancy and punishes independence.  Medieval knights owed fealty to their king but the king was, in turn, dependent on their willingness to fight for him.  This interdependence gave the knights a good deal of independence.  The courtier system demeaned the nobility, forcing them to supinely court the king’s favor.  Instead of competing as warriors against each other and against foreign enemies, they competed with each other as flatterers of the king.  They suffered a transition from feuding and fighting to fawning and flattering.

How was one to act honorably or honestly in a system in which one must continually dance attendance on the King and the King can even tell you whom you must marry?  That is Bertram’s conundrum, and it may help account for his exaggerated sense of himself, his intense opposition to marrying beneath his social rank, and his running off to war.  He is fighting a rearguard action on behalf of his noble warrior status.

As an indication of the declining importance of warriors in the fading feudal system, the play depicts a decision by the King to send French noblemen abroad as mercenaries to fight on behalf of whomever they wish, which is what Bertram does in going to Florence. (I, 2, 15-21)   The King decides that rather than have disgruntled warriors venting their pent-up aggression against him or in the form of disorder within his kingdom, he encourages them to go fight elsewhere, and fight anybody anywhere else.  They are useless and a nuisance to him.

Another example of the changing social system is the scene in which the King orders Bertram to marry Helena.  When Bertram objects on the grounds of Helena’s low social status, the King launches into a long speech about how a person’s birth is irrelevant to her worth.  “From the lowest place whence virtuous deeds proceed,” he intones, “the place is dignified by the doer’s deed.” (II, 3, 128-155).  Harold Goddard calls it “the most equalitarian speech in all Shakespeare.”  But no sooner does the King finish the speech than he peremptorily orders Bertram to take Helena’s hand and submit to being married to her.

There is a seeming contradiction here – a democratic speech followed by a dictatorial action.  Most interpreters of the play take the speech at face value as a democratic avowal, and then either ignore the contradiction or skim over it.  Goddard concludes that “The King is an odd mixture…he is a radical democrat in theory but a feudal monarch… in practice.”[9]   I don’t agree.  I don’t see any inconsistency in the King’s denigrating nobles, such as Bertram, down to the level of commoners, such as Helena, and then asserting his absolute prerogative as King over them both.  That was the theory and practice of the absolute monarchies that were emerging during Shakespeare’s time to replace feudalism.  Shakespeare astutely recognized this trend in his play.

The degeneracy of the feudal system is finally shown by the way that even the degenerate Paroles is able at the end of the play to find a benefactor who is willing to take him in as a skilled courtier.  Paroles has previously shown himself to be a coward and a would-be traitor in the Florentine wars, but his skill as a flatterer and liar enable him to land on his feet as a courtier despite it all.  (V, 3, 365-369)

The power of the King over the nobility is finally emphasized at the end of the play when he tells Diana, who is a commoner even lower than Helena was, that he will order the man of her choice to marry her.  Since the man of her choice may be a nobleman, as was Helena’s, the King has, thereby, doubled down on the action that first began the problems in the play.  Will it end well?

The Comic Situation: Foils and Fools.

All’s Well That Ends Well is conventionally played as a romantic comedy.  I have argued herein that it is not a romance but rather a darkish comedy.  Helena is an ambitious social climber who wants to marry up in the social hierarchy.  Bertram is an insufferable snob and inveterate womanizer who doesn’t want to marry down.  She will use any means to get her way.  He will go to drastic ends to get his.  There are a lot of humorous twists and turns in the plot until Helena eventually gets her way and gets what is on its face the last laugh.  But what makes the play a comedy is not merely that it is humorous or that it supposedly ends happily, which I contend it doesn’t.  It is the nature of the conflict in the play that characterizes it as comedic.

Comedy has been described as a story of wisdom versus folly, wise people versus foolish people.[10]  In comedy, the problem is created by someone acting out of stupidity or ignorance, “the intervention of fools.” [11]  A comic drama generally consists of the wise trying to teach the fools or at least restrain them from further foolishness.[12]  Comedy promotes a hierarchical world in which the wiser and more responsible people are encouraged and empowered to control the stupid and irresponsible people, educating them when that is possible, and tricking, controlling or excluding them when that is not.  A comedy may have a happy or unhappy ending depending on whether the fools learn their lesson.  In All’s Well That Ends Well, they don’t.

Bertram is a fool to think he can outsmart Helena and outrun the King.  He foolishly thinks he has fooled her by imposing impossible conditions on his acceptance of his marriage to her.  But Helena then fools him with the bed trick and the false announcement of her death, and she wins the contest.  Bertram gets his comeuppance, and his foolishness is constrained.  But Helena is also a fool to think that capturing Bertram is going to lead to a happy married life.  She will become a countess but he will have the power to make her life miserable.  She is likely to get her comeuppance.  It is a play full of fools fooling fools and becoming fools themselves.  Looked at in this way, and performed with the requisite irony, I think the play is funnier, more coherent, and more interesting than the conventional interpretation.

Enough Already.

I am writing this essay at the end of November, 2019.  We have in the United States a President who represents most of the worst and none of the best aspects of our society.  President Trump is a scoundrel who flaunts his bad behavior and challenges anyone to oppose him.  And some forty per cent of the public seem to support him.  When he says or does something particularly despicable, his supporters invariably skim over it with the comment that “Well, that is just Trump being Trump.”

Meanwhile, President Trump not only violates but desecrates almost every ethical norm and democratic political principle upon which our society is based.  He is not an honorable person.  That so many people accept his misbehavior as somehow normal is a testament to the cynicism that seems to characterize the present moment.  That has to change.

Playing All’s Well That Ends Well as a light-hearted romantic comedy encourages cynicism that tolerates the normalization of bad behavior.  That isn’t acceptable.  The key to the play, in my opinion, is the way in which Helena is played.  In my view, Helena is not an altogether bad person, but she should be played as an opportunist who is able to fool those around her with a pretense of innocent virtue, and who schemes her way underhandedly to her desired end.

Performed that way, the play is not a problem, a failure, or the mistake of a novice.  It is, instead, a useful reminder that ends, no matter how intensely desired or desirable, do not justify dishonorable means, and that normalizing bad behavior will likely lead to undesirable ends.

B.W.  11/29/19

[1] William Shakespeare. All’s Well That Ends Well. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

[2] Frank Kermode.  The Age of Shakespeare. New York: Modern Library, 2005. P.142.

Harold Goddard.  The Meaning of Shakespeare.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. P.254.

[3] For a discussion of Adler’s philosophy see Burton Weltman. “Individualism versus Socialism in American Education: Rereading Mortimer Adler and The Paidea Proposal.” Educational Theory. Winter 2002, Volume 52, No.1. Pp.61-80.

[4] Frank Kermode. The Age of Shakespeare. New York: Modern Library, 2005.  P.139.

[5] Mark Van Doren.  Shakespeare. New York: New York Review Books, 2005. Pp.179-180, 182-183, 185.

[6] Wikopedia.  All’s Well that Ends Well.  11/7/19.

[7] Harold Goddard.  The Meaning of Shakespeare.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.  Pp.38-40.

[8] Terence Spencer, et al.  “William Shakespeare.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed 10/1/19.

[9] Harold Goddard.  The Meaning of Shakespeare.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.  Pp.48-49.

[10] Aristotle. Poetics. New York, Hill and Wang, 1961, 59.

[11] Kenneth Burke.  Attitudes Toward History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, p.41.

[12] Paul Goodman. The Structure of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1954, 82-100.