[1]<\/a>.) Helena was happy to share the company of the festive girls of Florence, who were dressed in a manner reminiscent of the girls in the dance at the gym in the film version of West Side Story<\/i>. Only the wedding photos, taken after Helena\u2019s recovery of Bertram, in which the faces grew progressively gloomier in a set of freeze-frames, seemed to predict the disillusionment of the newlyweds. The production did not specifically evoke the tone of wonder we associate with the late romances\u2014the sets were occasionally evocative of the fantastic illustrations of Dr. Seuss\u2014but it certainly affirmed Helena\u2019s healthy sexuality and distinguished her from the cool repression of Isabella. Indeed, this Helena had more in common with the scheming city wives of Middleton and looked back to the upbeat, pragmatic heroines of Shakespeare\u2019s early comedies, from Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona<\/i> and Rosalind in As You Like It<\/i>, rather than to the long-suffering Isabella.<\/p>\nLike Thaisa, Hermione, and other heroines of the romances, Helena disappears from the action for a long stretch and is widely thought by the other characters to have died, and her return in Act 5 is treated as a miraculous resurrection. Since the audience is privy to her planned disappearance, the effect of her return is not as shocking as Hermione\u2019s in The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/i>. Most significantly, in a manner that anticipates the late romances, Helena is depicted as a medical and psychological healer; as such, she looks backward to Friar Laurence as an herbal physician and forward to Cerimon and Marina in Pericles<\/i>. The herbal cures of the friar and Helena demonstrate that Shakespeare\u2019s interest in herbal cures preceded his acquaintance with future son-in-law Dr. John Hall; perhaps, instead, his interest in holistic medicine prepared the way for his apparently friendly relationship with Susanna\u2019s husband, the respected Puritan physician of Hall\u2019s Croft in Stratford-upon-Avon. Helena\u2019s cure of the King of France from his life-threatening fistula is a highly complex affair, and it deserves better than Lois Potter\u2019s flippant dismissal, in her new biography of the playwright: \u201cHelena, though Bernard Shaw called her a \u2018lady doctor,\u2019 does not really have more medical skills than those every woman of the period was supposed to have, plus a prescription that her father has left among his papers\u201d (336). To say this is to miss the profoundly spiritual and psychological effects of her treatment; and if indeed \u201cevery woman of the period\u201d had the same medical skills, why did none of them possess the expertise to cure the ailing monarch? \u201cEvery woman\u201d didn\u2019t cure the King of France; only Helena, heir to her father\u2019s considerable medical knowledge, provided the cure.<\/p>\n
Although Shakespeare for good reason chooses not to stage the scene of the king\u2019s recovery, Helena\u2019s therapeutic skills are considerable, and the audience is encouraged to believe her claim to be able to cure the king. Her father, Gerard de Narbon, left her \u201cprescriptions \/ Of rare and proved effects\u201d (1.3.219-20); the fact that he did so on his deathbed (2.1.106-7) gives this knowledge the extra cachet of a solemn parental blessing. Lafew testifies to the astounding effect of Helena\u2019s treatment when he tells the ailing king that he had seen a medicine that could \u201cbreathe life into a stone\u201d and \u201c[q]uicken a rock\u201d (2.1.74-75). Even Parolles, not normally given to praising anyone but himself, proclaims Helena\u2019s cure as \u201cthe rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times\u201d (2.3.7-8). Helena approaches her opportunity to cure the king with the same confidence with which she chooses Bertram as her marriage partner. Unlike the boastful Parolles, she announces her intention to provide a cure with crisp professional confidence rather than with boastful self-promotion: \u201cThere is a remedy . . . \/ To cure [the King\u2019s] desperate languishings\u201d (1.3.226-27), she announces, and she furthermore coolly predicts that she can cure the king in twenty-four hours (2.1.167).<\/p>\n
Shakespeare chooses not to depict Helena at work as a medical practitioner, but it is clear that everyone in the play, except the jejune Bertram, is impressed by Helena\u2019s dignity and perseverance. Lafew admits to being amazed by her professional manner, wisdom, and constancy (2.1.84-85), while Helena herself modestly insists that \u201cremedies oft in ourselves do lie,\u201d although they are popularly attributed to heaven (1.1.216-17). Helen Wilcox calls All\u2019s Well<\/i> \u201cShakespeare\u2019s \u2018miracle play,\u2019\u201d not because of any indebtedness to the medieval dramatic genre but because \u201cdevotion, faith and redemption are among its chief concerns\u201d (140). In attempting to cure the king, Helena insists that the test is on heaven, not on her, and she describes her proposed treatment in specifically theological terms as \u201cgreat\u2019st grace lending grace\u201d (2.1.162). She even hints briefly at an astrological influence at work in her cure when she notes, \u201chis good receipt \/ Shall for my legacy be sanctified \/ By th\u2019 luckiest stars in heaven\u201d (1.3.242-44). Wilcox is on solid footing to claim that Helena\u2019s major actions in the play\u2014the cure, her pilgrimage to a holy shrine, her apparent return from the dead, and her pregnancy\u2014confirm her identity as an agent of divine grace. As Wilcox insists, \u201cThe source of her confidence is divine aid or \u2018greatest Grace lending grace\u2019 [sic<\/i>], for which she claims simply to function as a conduit\u201d (141).<\/p>\n
At the same time, however, it must be admitted that her pregnancy\u2014indeed, what Wilcox calls \u201cthe mysterious pregnancy of a supposedly virgin mother\u201d (140)\u2014is actually not the result of any divine miracle but a skillfully-planned and well-executed bed trick which nearly results in a ruined reputation and imprisonment for Helena\u2019s paid accomplice, Diana. Bertram is, of course, Helena\u2019s newly-married husband, and he imagines in the pitch darkness that he is accomplishing his lustful goal of seducing Diana. It is statistically a long shot for Helena to become pregnant at her very first sexual encounter, but we have to remember that, unlike Isabella in Measure for Measure<\/i>, she is already something of a sexual adventurer, in word if not in physical act. She has already parried wittily with Parolles about her virginity, and she admits early in the play that her affection for Bertram is irrational and close to idolatry\u2014\u201cIndian-like\u201d (1.3.201).<\/p>\n
The play chooses not to stage two crucial scenes that no Hollywood producer today with an eye on the box-office receipts would omit from a screen version: the cure of the king and the bed trick. Elliott\u2019s 2009 Royal National Theatre production happily enacted the bed trick in shadows behind a backlit sheet, with Diana, already in bed with Bertram, skillfully handing off the baton, so to speak, to Helena, who enthusiastically jumps into the bed to replace her. And whatever the exact nature of the king\u2019s malady may be, it is hard for the reader not to conceive of the cure as at least partly, or largely, the result of a sexual encounter. While we are never told exactly where the king\u2019s \u201cfistula\u201d is located, the malady is usually associated with the rectum or the groin. In explaining the benefits of Helena\u2019s proposed cure to the ailing monarch, Lafew tells the king that her cure could \u201cmake you dance canary\u201d and could \u201caraise King Pepin\u201d and \u201cgive great Charlemain a pen in\u2019s hand,\u201d and both phrases strongly suggest the reawakening of sexual potency (2.1.75-78), as do the earlier lines about enlivening stones and rocks. When he emerges from his encounter with Helena, Lafew describes the king with the striking and unexpected German or Dutch adjective lustig <\/i>(2.3.41); and, describing a dance that is even more pointedly sexual than the canary, Lafew says that the king is now \u201cable to lead her a coranto\u201d (2.3.43). Certainly by the mid-seventeenth century, the coranto had earned a reputation as a provocative sexual dance; the Ranters and other radical religious sects of the English Revolution were often accused of conducting mixed naked dances, as in the \u201cRanters\u2019 coranto\u201d or the \u201cAdamite Curranto.\u201d (For example, Gilbert Roulston, one of the numerous anti-Ranter pamphleteers from the years 1650-51 salaciously reported that the Ranters \u201cstript themselves quite naked, and dans[ed] the Adamites Curranto<\/i>\u201d [2].) \u00a0This is not to insist necessarily that Helena has actually provided sexual services to the king, only that there seems to have been clear erotic or sexual content to Helena\u2019s therapy, and that Lafew\u2019s provocative language invites us at least to imagine such content. It is even tempting to imagine that Helena at the play\u2019s end is carrying not Bertram\u2019s child but the king\u2019s. (Admittedly, this possibility drives the fairy tale aspect of the romance genre into the brick wall of hard reality; and if this theory of the king\u2019s paternity is correct, Helena would join the company of such brisk pragmatists in the romances as the brothel managers in Pericles<\/i> and Autolycus in The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/i>.)<\/p>\n
If Shakespeare\u2019s depiction of the king\u2019s cure hints broadly at bawdy behavior, it fits in deftly with the other cunning aspects of Helena\u2019s character. She has, after all, chosen Bertram for a marriage partner clearly against his will; she misrepresents the nature of her supposedly religious pilgrimage, going to Florence rather than St. Jacques le Grand; she devises the bed trick and pays Diana for her bawdy role in it; and she recruits the Widow of Florence and Diana in her feminine conspiracy. The bed trick has its origin in the narrative of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38, where Tamar, posing as a prostitute, has sex with her father-in-law, Judah, who fails to recognize her identity, in order to convey the seed of Judah. The deception of the bed trick neatly parallels the climax of the play\u2019s subplot, the exposure of the mendacity of the boastful Parolles; the disguised Helena seduces Bertram, who is besotted with lust for Diana and agrees to meet his imagined beloved in the dark, just as Parolles, while captured and blindfolded, eagerly betrays the military secrets of the army. Blinded by lust or the determination to remain alive, at whatever cost to honor, Bertram and Parolles commit actions that bring them into discredit, although Parolles is publicly humiliated, while Bertram is forgiven and rewarded at play\u2019s end. At least the cowardly Parolles admits to the pragmatism that underlies his shabby betrayal\u2014\u201dSimply the thing I am \/ Shall make me live\u201d (4.3.335-36)\u2014while Bertram is as churlish as ever when confronted with the evidence that Helena has indeed fulfilled the conditions of his impossible bargain.<\/p>\n
Helena\u2019s cure of the king bears comparison with the twin scenes of healing in Pericles<\/i> and anticipates a persistent theme in the late romances. Cerimon, who revives Thaisa from her apparent death and rude burial at sea, is depicted as an exemplary healer who piously invokes the Greek physician-god Aesculapius for guidance (3.2.114). Unlike Helena, he claims no divine mandate for his cures, and in his expository speeches he reveals information that his followers undoubtedly already know: that he prefers virtue and cunning over status (nobleness) and riches (28-30) and that he has had medical training. He has studied medicine (\u201c\u2018Tis known I ever \/ Have studied physic\u201d [33-34]) and is acquainted with \u201cblest infusions\u201d (37). When he recognizes that Thaisa shows signs of life, he promptly calls for fire and medical supplies\u2014which in his holistic program include cloths, music, and air (81-83, 89, 90, 93). But he\u2019s no miracle-worker, and early in the scene he admits to a servant that he was unable to save the life of his master (7-9). He understands that Thaisa\u2019s recovery is tentative and warns his assistants to be cautious, but his exhortation to Thaisa\u2014\u201dLive, and make \/ Us weep to hear your fate, fair creature, \/ Rare as you seem to be\u201d (104-6)\u2014has a miraculous ring to it, as if Cerimon were calling her back into life. When in the play\u2019s final scene he presents the long-lost Thaisa to the incredulous Pericles, he sounds like both a consoling physician and an archeologist who has found a treasure: \u201cLook, Thaisa is \/ Recovered\u201d (5.3.27-28).<\/p>\n
Marina\u2019s therapy, when she cures her speechless father on the ship in the harbor at Mytilene, is more a matter of music therapy than hard medical treatment\u2014unlike Helena, she has no prescriptions inherited from a medical father\u2014but she achieves immediate results. Pericles is first roused out of his silence by Marina\u2019s song, then by his gradual realization of Marina\u2019s true identity. Sadly, no original song by Shakespeare has survived, and none is included in the 1609 quarto text, and while the song included in Lawrence Twine\u2019s Pattern of Painful Adventures<\/i> is hardly distinguished poetry, it does include some crucial details which eventually help Pericles to confirm Marina\u2019s identity: \u201cAmongst the harlots foul I walk \/ Yet harlot none am I\u201d (qtd. in Warren 290). From Marina\u2019s opening words, it is conceivably (but only remotely) possible to excuse Pericles for striking Marina, if he is convinced that she is merely a hardened prostitute who has come to solicit his patronage. Yet only a thug or deranged person would respond violently to the simplicity and sincerity of Marina\u2019s singing.\u00a0 We should perhaps recall that Marina endured an unhappy childhood at the court of Cleon and Dionyza and that she had inadvertently inspired Dionyza\u2019s insane hatred simply by outshining their daughter Philoten. Yet she did learn a valuable set of skills appropriate to a gentle woman at the Renaissance court, such as sewing, singing, weaving, and dancing (4.6.184); these are the skills that Marina proposes to teach at the academy for young women that she will open, with Bolt\u2019s assistance, from the money paid to her by Lysimachus. She also proposes to teach \u201cother virtues, which I\u2019ll keep from boast\u201d (4.6.185), as she explains it discretely to Bolt. It\u2019s hard not to imagine these as courtesans\u2019 tricks that she has observed during her stay in the Mytilene brothel; moreover, sewing, singing, and dancing are among the skills that a skillful Renaissance courtesan like Veronica Franco in Venice would keep in her repertory of professional activities. (As Margaret F. Rosenthal notes in her reconstruction of the career of Franco, the courtesan\u2019s complex repertory of services was by no means <\/i>\u201climited to sexual activity\u201d [4].) Unlike Helena, Marina seemingly remains a virgin to the end of her play; but no heroine of a Shakespearean romance has endured more threats of violence and threats of sexual assault. Given her bitter life experiences, it seems scarcely plausible to describe Marina as \u201cinnocent\u201d by the time she exits the play as promised wife of Lysimachus, the corrupt prince and harbor official and cynical sex addict.<\/p>\n
In short, Shakespeare\u2019s interest in affirming the power of magical and medical cures in All\u2019s Well<\/i> precedes the official canon of the \u201clate romances,\u201d and Helena\u2019s pluck and initiative make her comparable more to the heroines of the romances, especially Marina, than to the abstemious Isabella in Measure for Measure<\/i>, with whom she is frequently paired. The proposed later date for All\u2019s Well<\/i> suggests that this play, rather than Pericles<\/i>, begins the period of the romances, on which Shakespeare spends most of his artistic energy in the latest phase of his writing career. Helena\u2019s career looks forward to Marina\u2019s, in the sense that both overcome impossible odds, have problematic relationships with fathers who have either died or disappeared, are confronted with highly unusual sexual demands, and (most intriguingly) are possessed of unusual medical skills and therapeutic techniques. Dismayingly, both find themselves in marriages to unsuitable partners. Bertram is hostile to or ungrateful for the benefits of the match that Helena has dreamt about idolatrously from the beginning, and Lysimachus is a corrupt prince cynically taking kickbacks as the harbor inspector whose response to his first sight of Marina is appallingly sexist: \u201cFaith, she would serve after a long voyage at sea\u201d (4.6.43-44). One is tempted to say of these marriages, as Jaques sneeringly taunts Touchstone, \u201cthy loving voyage \/ Is but for two months victualed\u201d (AYL<\/i> 5.4.190-91).<\/p>\n
Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith may well be correct in detecting the collaboration of Thomas Middleton in the composition of All\u2019s Well<\/i>, and we may well attribute the play\u2019s sexual cynicism to the author of plays like A Chaste Maid in Cheapside<\/i>, just as one might credit or blame George Wilkins, the brothel-keeper and cynical playwright, for the seamier sexual details in Pericles<\/i> that (as the Victorians would say) our \u201cgentle\u201d Shakespeare would surely never countenance. Helena\u2019s taste for sexual intrigue and her determination to become pregnant by the man she desires may well have been suggested to Shakespeare by the opportunism of Middleton\u2019s bawdy heroines. The innocent, credulous belief of both Helena and Marina that their medical cures are guided by heaven seems purely Shakespearean, and this faith in heavenly intervention is scarcely like a Middletonian solution. The evidence for Middleton\u2019s involvement is simply not strong enough at this point to credit him as a collaborator. Yet there are enough hints (like the use of the unusual word fistula<\/i> and Helena\u2019s shocking sexual pragmatism) to suggest that Shakespeare felt Middleton\u2019s influence on some level.<\/p>\n
Helena\u2019s pregnancy, against all odds, like the preservation of Marina\u2019s virginity despite horrendous threats, is the miracle that introduces the world of the late romances. It prepares the stage for the triumphant restoration of the reputation of Imogen, the recovery of the lost Perdita, and the miraculous preservation or literal resurrection of Hermione. As the earliest of Shakespeare\u2019s romances, All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/i> is itself \u201cthe rarest argument of wonder.\u201d<\/p>\n
Notes<\/p>\n
[1]<\/a>. All quotations from Shakespearean text refer to The Complete Works of Shakespeare<\/i>, ed. David Bevington, 6th<\/sup> ed. (New York: Pearson, 2009).<\/p>\nWorks Cited<\/p>\n
Maguire, Laurie, and Emma Smith. \u201cAll\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/i>.\u201d Times Literary Supplement<\/i> 8 June 2012: 6. Print.<\/p>\n
—. \u201cMany Hands\u2014A New Shakespeare Collaboration?\u201d Times Literary Supplement<\/i> 19 April 2012: 13-15. Print.<\/p>\n
McMullan, Gordon. \u201cWhat is a \u2018Late Play\u2019?\u201d Shakespeare\u2019s Last Plays<\/i>. Ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 5-28. Print.<\/p>\n
Potter, Lois. The Life of William Shakespeare<\/i>. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Print.<\/p>\n
Rosenthal, Margaret F. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century<\/i> Venice<\/i>. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Print.<\/p>\n
Roulston, Gilbert. The Ranters Bible<\/i>. London, 1650. Early English Books Online<\/i>. Web. 19 November 2013.<\/p>\n
Shakespeare, William. All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/i>. The Complete Works of Shakespeare<\/i>. Ed. David Bevington. 6th<\/sup> ed. New York: Pearson, 2009. 374-413. Print.<\/p>\n—. All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/i>. Dir. Marianne Elliott. Royal National Theatre, London. 2009. Performance.<\/p>\n
—. As You Like It<\/i>. The Complete Works of Shakespeare<\/i>. Ed. David Bevington. 6th<\/sup> ed. New York: Pearson, 2009. 298-332. Print.<\/p>\n—. Pericles<\/i>. The Complete Works of Shakespeare<\/i>. Ed. David Bevington. 6th<\/sup> ed. New York: Pearson, 2009. 1442-74. Print.<\/p>\n—. Pericles<\/i>. Ed. Roger Warren. Oxford Shakespeare. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.<\/p>\n
Taylor, Gary, and John Lavagnino, eds. Thomas Middleton: The Collected Words<\/i>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.<\/p>\n
Vickers, Brian, and Marcus Dahl. \u201c\u2018What Is Infirm. . . \u2018<\/i>: All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/i>: An Attribution Rejected.\u201d Times Literary Supplement<\/i> 11 May 2012: 14-15. Print.<\/p>\n
Wilcox, Helen. \u201cShakespeare\u2019s Miracle Play?: Religion in All\u2019s Well, That Ends Well<\/i>.\u201d All\u2019s Well, That<\/i> Ends Well: New Critical Essays<\/i>. Ed. Gary Waller. New York: Routledge, 2007. 140-54. Print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Byron Nelson, West Virginia University\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Volume V: 2012\u00a0 Print as pdf In\u00a0recent years, All\u2019s Well That Ends Well has enjoyed fresh consideration, on both page and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1388,"featured_media":0,"parent":1262,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1430","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1388"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1430"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2034,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1430\/revisions\/2034"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}