SHAKESPEARE, THE EARL AND THE JESUIT

CHAPTER 5

All’s Well that Ends Well

 

Is it true, as Sidney might have said, that Shakespeare “never lieth” because he “nothing affirmeth”? Shakespeare did, in fact, affirm some things. The author of Lucrece professed to the earl of Southampton, “What I have done is yours, what I have to doe is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours.” How sincere were the asseveration and the promise? The poet himself, in Sonnet 115, acknowledged that “Time” might “Creep in ’twixt vows, and . . . blunt the sharp’st intents”; but blunted intents are initially real. Shakespeare may have meant to write for his patron into an indefinite future. Few scholars, however, have looked for signs that he did. It is more usual to speculate about a moment or moments of rupture between the two men (as may be signaled, for example in the Sonnets) and to guess when and why they might have occurred. Akrigg, the most consulted of Southampton’s biographers, imagined that Shakespeare left his patron’s service well-rewarded in mid-1594 and soon felt that the “bloom was off . . . the relationship.” Still “involved emotionally” with the young earl, the poet became “increasingly critical” of him over several years, registered complaints in sonnets that were never shown to their addressee, and by 1599 “felt intensely a break in the friendship.” Estranged from Southampton before the Essex Rebellion, Shakespeare “sought to renew his friendship” with the earl after King James pardoned and released the imprisoned traitor, Sonnet 107 being the poet’s olive branch. Terms of affability were re-established and maintained until the publication, in 1609, of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, whose unflattering suggestions about the earl led him to “terminate” the relationship.[1] This narrative is hardly definitive, but it has the virtue of assuming that Shakespeare’s writing for or about his patron and “friend” may have continued after the brief public notices in Venus and Lucrece of the poet’s dedication and the dedicatee’s acceptance.

Sonnet 107, which scholarly opinion now with greater and greater assurance dates at the beginning of the reign of King James,[2] has no likelier purpose than to celebrate the earl of Southampton’s release from imprisonment at the new monarch’s ascension:

 

The “mortal moon,” Elizabeth, has died and left behind her tyrant’s crest; despite fears and prophecies that her death would result in civil war, a new “age” of peace has been inaugurated; the balm that anointed a new ruler at his crowning has with its drops given “fresh” life to one whose “confined doom” had threatened forfeiture of love and life.[3] As well as looking forward, the poet looks back to “fears” and misguided prophecies--and, perhaps hoping that Southampton will remember Hamlet, quotes from the Prince himself, “O my prophetic soul” (1.5.40).[4] A sense is given of a recent encounter: “My love looks fresh”; and the poet is writing for his friend again: “thou in this shalt find thy monument.”[5]

We need not assume that the new writing ended with this poem. Looking at the plays that Shakespeare produced soon after Southampton’s enfranchisement, we might wonder if he had decided to repeat but radically transform in drama what he had done in his “dedicated” poems, paying new tributes by recalling old ones, as well as subjecting to revised analysis persistent issues that time and circumstance had cast in a new light. The first of these plays is All’s Well that Ends Well.[6]

Akrigg suggested a number of ways in which Shakespeare could have had Southampton in mind when fashioning the character of Bertram, count of Rossillion. Twice in All’s Well the playwright “slips” and calls the count an “earl” (3.5.12, 18). As was the young Southampton, Rossillion is a royal ward who resists an arranged marriage. In Ireland, Essex appointed Southampton General of the Horse; in Italy, the Duke of Florence makes Bertram “general of our horse” (3.3.1).[7] Other connections of the play to Southampton, none of which originates in the source-tale written by Boccaccio, may be noted. The earl’s eagerness for military service abroad in the mid-1590’s, frustrated by Elizabeth when she forbade his soldiering in France and Spain, may be reflected in Bertram’s hunger for the “brave wars” in Tuscany and the King of France’s refusal to allow him to join his comrades’ expedition  (the young Rossillion’s angry sense that he is kept from the wars to be “forehorse to a smock” [2.1.30] was probably shared by Southampton); and Southampton’s later disobedience to the Queen, when in Ireland he accepted the generalship of the horse against her orders, foreshadowed Bertram’s flouting the commands of his King.[8] Southampton’s brother-in-law, Thomas Arundel, was another soldier who sought glory in wars on the Continent. He fought for the Emperor Rudolf against the Turks, and in one battle managed to wrest away the Turkish banner with his own hands.[9] His courage defined by negation the cowardice of Parolles, who failed to recapture his regiment’s drum. Southampton’s private as well as his public life seems to have offered Shakespeare ideas for his play. All’s Well features a countess who ignores rules of social hierarchy in desiring a match between her son and a physician’s daughter, just as Mary, countess of Southampton, violated such protocols in (perhaps) choosing an early lover and, to a lesser extent, a third husband. The non-fictional countess was of course in the position of receiving as her daughter-in-law her son’s bride, Elizabeth Vernon, who though a cousin of Essex, was far beneath her son in rank and wealth, and whom the countess had to be persuaded to accept. Vernon’s ultimate claim on Southampton was her pre-marital pregnancy; Helena’s on Bertram, her post-nuptial pregnancy.[10] Helena’s case had its model in The Decameron, and only obliquely in Southampton’s life; but a playwright may often choose a narrative source because it already provides him with much of, if never exactly, what he wants to say.

These correspondences are intriguing; but All’s Well is most strikingly relevant to Southampton’s life in its central concern with the meaning and significance of “merit.” After his conviction and imprisonment, Henry Wriothesley lost not only his freedom, but his honor, his title, and his wealth. He was reduced to a “nothing” out of which King James was able to create him anew: he became again earl of Southampton (with the precedence due to his former status), wealthy through crown-granted monopoly, honored in royal circles, restored to authority in his territories, given new offices and power.[11] The King of France in All’s Well self-confidently (and self-consciously) declared at length that “Virtue” was authentic merit, that “Good alone, is good, without a name” and should be judged by its property or essence, “Not by the title.” Yet like King James he believed in his power to create “honor” ex nihilo: Of Helena he tells Bertram “If thou canst like this creature as a maid, / I can create the rest. Virtue and she / Is her own dower; honor and wealth from me. . . . / It is in us to plant . . . honor where / We please to have it grow” (2.3.128-57). The play is about Helena’s elevation, not in virtue, but in “honor,” by royal fiat. In witnessing it, Southampton could not miss the parallel with his own situation. It is wrong, then, simply to see the earl shadowed in the count of Rossillion, whose shortcomings could offend Southampton only if attached allegorically to him. Shakespeare’s purposes in the play, which are in part biographical without being allegorical, will not sustain naive readings.

To search those purposes requires first that we consider All’s Well as a set of recapitulations. Although Shakespeare often repeats himself, he seems in this play to have deliberately planted numerous traces of his former writings, as though offering a new gift that contained recognizable parts of old presents. In a single scene, for example, he reaches back across a decade to introduce names from the past: “Sebastian [Twelfth Night] . . . Corambus [Hamlet, Q.1, Corambis] . . . Jaques [As You Like It] . . . Ch[ris]topher [Taming of the Shrew], Vaumond (Hamlet, Voltemand) . . . Dumaine [Love’s Labor’s Lost]” (4.3.162-76). Elsewhere in All’s Well we find Rinaldo (3.4.19; cf. Hamlet’s Reynaldo), the mysteriously silent “Violenta” (3.5, s.d.; cf. Viola in Twelfth Night, named “Violenta” in Folio 1, 1.5..166, s.d.), Antonio (one of Shakespeare’s favorite names) and Escalus (3.5.75-76; cf. Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet),  Diana Capilet (5.3.147; cf. Capulet in Romeo and Juliet), and of course Helena (whose antecedents appeared in both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, with “Cressid’s uncle,” Pandarus [AW 2.1.97], in Troilus and Cressida).

More than names are recalled. Love’s Labor’s Lost has a troop of false “Muscovites,” as does All’s Well (LLL 5.2.121; AW 4.1.69). Both plays have sun-worshipers: Berowne is one who “like a rude and savage man of Inde,” bows his head and is blinded by Rosaline’s heavenly majesty ; Helena confesses to being “Indian-like” in her idolatrous worship of Bertram, her “sun” (LLL 4.3.218-24; AW 1.3.204-6). Pandulph in King John argues the invalidity of improperly sworn oaths: “It is religion that doth make vows kept, / But thou hast sworn against religion, / But what thou swear’st against the thing thou swear’st.” Diana Capilet is no theologian, but she shares the churchman’s views on swearing: “This has no holding, / To swear by Him whom I protest to love / That I will work against Him” (KJ 3.1.279-81; AW 4.2.27-29). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream we hear of the “red-hipp’d humble-bee”; in All’s Well the “humble-bee” is also “red-tail’d” (MND 4.1.12; AW 4.5.6). Shylock tells us that some persons “are mad if they behold a cat”; Bertram is among them (MV 4.1.48; AW 4.3.237). Parolles, a lesser Falstaff--liar, coward, corrupter of youth, and somehow pardonable--has like his predecessor a great scene in which the truth about him is exposed; before it he contemplates giving himself “some hurts” as Falstaff had done, and saying that he “got them in exploit” (1HIV 2.4.261-2, 309-11; AW 4.1.37-38, 4.3). In Henry V Captain Fluellen seems much conversant with “the true disciplines of the wars,” with “the ceremonies of the wars, and the cares of it, and  the forms of it”; Captain Parolles, self-proclaimed “militarist,” professes to know the wars, “the whole theoric . . . and the practice” (HV 3.2.72, 4.1.72-73; AW 4.3.141-43). Henry’s soldier Michael Williams, having been assured by the disguised king that the cause of war in France is “just” and the “quarrel honorable,” still harbors doubts: “if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning” (HV 4.1.127-35). In All’s Well, a French Lord assures the Duke of Florence, though with a qualifying “seems”: “Holy seems the quarrel / Upon your Grace’s part; black and fearful on the opposer” AW 3.1.4-6). The arch-realist Cassius in Julius Caesar famously observes: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves that we are underlings” (JC 1.2.140-41). In this sentiment he is echoed by Helena: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven” (AW 1.1.216-17). As You Like It’s Touchstone is a “courtly jester who goes to the country” whereas Lavatch, in All’s Well, is a “country clown who is sent to Court.” Touchstone “woos a country maiden and decides to wed her.” Lavatch “loses interest in his country maiden and forsakes her after he has been to Court,” all the while displaying features of other Shakespearean clowns who season plays with the spice of wit, melancholy, and cynicism.[12]  The final remedy that Helena chooses in order to win over her husband includes her pretending to die. This ruse was not in Boccaccio’s tale but invented by Shakespeare, who had already used it in Much Ado about Nothing.

The resonance of Shakespeare’s earlier work in All’s Well that Ends Well is quite conspicuous in the parallels between the play and the poems, especially the Sonnets and Venus and Adonis. Critics have been especially struck by the Sonnets’ anticipation of important elements of All’s Well. Sheldon Zitner, like others, has noted that

Helena receives from her prototype in the Sonnets an interiority, private thoughts and anguish, that she tries at times to keep hidden, a self-abnegation coexisting with tactical self-seeking and self-defense, a willingness to dissemble to gain her ends. Like the Sonnets’ poet she loves a “lascivious boy,” filled with “Lascivious grace” (AW 4.3.220; Sonnet 40.13), whose lovableness must be (like Helena’s “honor”) created if it is to exist. As if to emphasize affiliations, the language of the Sonnets is often reproduced in the play. In Sonnet 36, for example, the poet reflects on the social proscriptions that make love between “unequals” almost impossible to acknowledge and tells his friend, do not “with public kindness honor me, / Unless thou take that honor from thy name. / But do not so . . .” (11-13). The King in All’s Well uses the same simple words in urging Bertram to ignore social inequalities:

The love of the poet is “religious,” almost unto “idolatry” (31.6, 105.1); Helena’s love, “Religious in [her] error,” is bred of “idolatrous fancy” (AW 1.3.205; 1.1.97). The echoes are not accidental, for there are too many more of them to allow for accident:

We cannot be sure what part the Sonnets played in the relationship between Shakespeare and Southampton. If the poet addressed pieces to the “friend” as verse letters (comparable to Donne’s verse epistles to his friends), not all of them may have been “sent.”  There is so much repetition in the Sonnets, so much that sounds like private complaint which the speaker only imagines making public, so much that is impolitic or even insulting, that they seem like journal entries which may on occasion have turned into messages. If the poems were part of a fiction that derived inspiration or incident from life, and as such were (according to the testimony of Francis Meres in 1598) passed around to Shakespeare’s “private friends,” among whom Southampton may have been numbered, the earl may have had for any number of reasons special insights into their meaning. It appears that the lyrics were composed in several different groups, with a range of different purposes, and across a long period of time--from the early “Anne Hathaway” poem (145) to at least the “Southampton” sonnet of 1603 (107). What is proposed here is that the Sonnets, whatever their origins, became part of the large store of literary capital that underwrote the making of All’s Well that Ends Well, a play which reminded the earl of Shakespeare’s early declaration that “What I have done is yours, what I have to doe is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours.”

If Southampton was to notice the Sonnets in the fabric of the play, he was surely to see in it as well the first of Shakespeare’s poetic diptych publicly dedicated to him, Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare found in Boccaccio a source that helped him reprise the motif of a passionate female pursuing much against his will a young man who breaks away from her to give himself to an idealized form of male aggression, Adonis’s hunting, Bertram’s war. The play alludes to the poem not just in its plot but in its conceits and forms of expression. Compare, for example, Venus and Parolles on the unnaturalness (“unkindness”) of virginity:

 

Compare Venus and Helena as they solicit a kiss:

Compare Venus and a French Lord on life’s imperfect mixtures:

 

 

There are many other verbal likenesses, among them:

 

What likelier purpose could all of these recollections serve than that of the poet’s signalling a new artistic beginning created out of an old one, to correspond with the patron’s embarkation upon a new life?

All’s Well retells the story of Venus and Adonis after a tumultuous decade for Southampton, who would see the original narrative written for him appropriately and therefore drastically revised. After flirting with disaster himself, he might welcome the transformation of the comic tragedy into a story in which all’s well that ends well. Helena has become a more respectable Venus, and more cunning, so that she might avoid catastrophe. Like Venus, Helena besieges and retreats from her beloved, but much more subtly, strategically, and successfully. Helena has within her both self-interest and altruism, but she is shrewd enough to believe that they need not be at odds, whereas for Venus, who was both predatory and maternal in her “love,” doubleness led nowhere. Adonis has become Bertram, a young man no longer prepubescent and incompetent, though maintaining some of the boy’s naïveté and petulance; still requiring freedom, but for different reasons; now needing redemption from his own inflexibility, wayward lust, and mendacity; and in a fairy tale ending, Bertram is redeemed. Southampton had escaped being gored by the enemies from whom, Adonis-like, he had rashly courted disaster. Now a married man, “caught” by a woman whom he loved, he could well appreciate the turn of his tale toward marriage. Whatever pressures from Southampton’s family were suggested in Venus have been transformed into the benignant exhortations of the countess of Rossillion. The specter of Burghley, who had tried to force upon Southampton an unwanted match has shaded into the King of France, who tyrannically insists that a young count marry a woman not of his liking; but such a threat was in Southampton’s past, and the play’s monarch, in his new-fashioning of Helena, assumes features of the new King of England who has just remade Henry Wriothesley.

Probably the last play that Shakespeare had meant Southampton to see before the ill-fated Essex Rebellion was Hamlet. If All’s Well represented an attempt at large scale recapitulation, reminding the earl of a decade-long relationship in which the poet, on at least some occasions, wrote for his patron works that offered not only entertainment but serious reflection on themes of greater and lesser moment, we should expect that Hamlet would be vividly recalled in the comedy. It is. Readers and audiences have been quick to recognize how from the beginning of All’s Well, Hamlet is brought immediately and almost flagrantly into the picture--but Hamlet, of course, with a difference. All of the mourners in the opening scene are dressed in black, unlike the courtiers in Elsinore, where the young prince is singular in his dark costume. One of the bereaved is a widow, the countess of Rossillion, who speaks of a “second husband,” and is told that she “shall find of the King a husband,” but who, no second Gertrude, remains in her widowhood. Her son, Bertram, will “weep o’er [his] father’s death anew,” but, much more forgetful than Hamlet, never again recalls his dead parent. The King, Bertram’s new guardian, will become the young man’s “father” in a relationship that Hamlet had resisted. Helena, an orphan whom the countess has raised, is urged by Lafew, a king’s counsellor less foolish than Polonius, to control the grief she feels for her dead father: “Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, excessive grief the enemy to the living.”  Lafew sounds like Gertrude and Claudius when they try to persuade Hamlet that the “filial obligation for some term / To do obsequious sorrow” for a dead father should not become “obstinate condolement” (AW 1.1.55-56; Ham 1.2.68-106). Then the widow, like Polonius but more succinctly, gives her son precepts to follow as he leaves (as Laertes left) for Paris:

 

We soon learn that Helena loves Bertram, but sees him as “a bright particular star . . . above [her] sphere,” as though she had heard Polonius tell Ophelia, “Hamlet is a prince out of thy star” (AW 1.1.86-9; Ham 2.2.141). The difference in rank will not ultimately matter for the young Frenchwoman, because she is shrewd and strong-willed; despite social protocols, the countess of Rossillion desires Helena as a daughter-in-law. Gertrude had wished that Hamlet would marry Ophelia, who was beneath him in rank; but Ophelia, Helena’s opposite, submitted helplessly and without question to the authority of her father when he insisted that stars and spheres be kept separate. Ophelia went mad when her father was killed by her lover; she blurred the distinction between the two men in the song of the Walsingham pilgrim. Helena thinks only of her lover, and after her father’s death she coldly, shockingly remarks, “I think not on my father. . . . What was he like? I have forgotten him” (Ham 4.5. 23-32; AW 1.1.79-82). As if to give a final and comic emphasis to the differences between Ophelia and Helena, near the end of the first scene of All’s Well Parolles denigrates virginity, calls it suicidal, and declares that dead virgins should be buried “out of all sanctified limit”--just as the “churlish priest” in Hamlet protested that Ophelia should have been interred “in ground unsanctified” (AW 1.1.138-40; Ham 5.1.229). Parolles then presses Helena to be “Out with’t! . . . Off with’t. . . . Get thee a good husband” (AW 1.1.146, 154, 214; ). Surely his words are meant to recall Hamlet’s exclamations of opposite tenor to Ophelia: “Get thee to a nunn’ry. . . . we will have no moe marriage” (Ham 3.1.120, 147).

Hamlet continues to appear in All’s Well beyond the comedy’s first scene, and not just in the names of characters mentioned in both dramas. In both plays we hear of wrongdoers whipped or escaping whipping, of horses being wagered, of  “woodcocks” being caught, of  “tragedians,” and (as nowhere else in Shakespeare) of the game of “hoodman-blind,” to which Parolles is actually subjected. Helena’s incantatory speech about the diurnal rounds of the horses of the sun resembles the Player King’s about the annual journey of “Phoebus’ cart.” Lavatch’s “flow’ry way . . . to the great fire” is Ophelia’s “primrose path.” Lafew believes in miracles: “They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.” Hamlet believes in mysteries: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”[14]

From Venus and Adonis, then, to Hamlet, from a mythical-comical-tragical-pastoral poem to a historical-comical-tragical play, and through lyrics, histories, comedies, and tragedies that fell in between, Shakespeare ranged for material of his own that would help him construct All’s Well that Ends Well. His remembrance, however, would have been drastically incomplete, on his own and on Southampton’s behalf, had it not included the written remains of Robert Southwell, which had occasioned so much of what Shakespeare had wished to say to himself and to his patron. The hidden conversation between Shakespeare and the earl often concerned religion, with Southwell’s words and thoughts the medium of exchange. Shakespeare’s part of the dialogue continued in All’s Well, and through the same means.

In All’s Well, as in many of his other works (The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure, for example), Shakespeare introduces into an essentially secular narrative source a surprisingly large number of religious references. Usually the additions can be shown to serve specific purposes; but in All’s Well they might seem particularly gratuitous. Why are there appeals to the remote power of “heaven” in explaining the King’s cure, when the proximate curative force of earthly medicine would seem sufficient for a story that never becomes religious in itself? Why are there allusions to contemporary religious conflicts between Papists and Protestants in a drama set in Catholic France and Italy? Why is so much biblical religion mouthed by Lavatch, who is in fact comically cynical about religious politics and less than serious about religious doctrine? Has Shakespeare decided to make religion merely entertaining? It may have simply amused many in his audience, but the earl of Southampton would probably have looked more seriously on matters that his personal history had never allowed him to take lightly. Scaramelli, secretary to the Venetian ambassador, reported in 1603 (when All’s Well was in the making) that the “Catholic” Southampton had recently announced a divine touching of his “heart,” that “the example” of the King had now “more weight” with the earl “than the disputes of theologians.”[15]  Southampton’s declaration sounds latitudinarian, but does not suggest a loss of religious seriousness. Whatever his beliefs at this point, he could not have forgotten the religion preached by his kinsman Southwell; and Shakespeare’s nostalgic play provided a lot of Southwell to be recalled.

The character of Helena, as Shakespeare developed her beyond the lightly sketched Giletta of Boccaccio, owes something to the Jesuit’s writing. When the playwright wants his heroine idealized, he recalls Southwell’s description of the sanctified soul. Helena possesses “Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage, all / That happiness and prime can happy call” (AW 2.1.181-2). The saints in heaven, Southwell proclaims, enjoy the “fulnesse of felicity . . . courage . . . , perfect intelligence . . . , bodyes . . . bewteous . . . , alwais in youth . . . and prime of theyr force . . . wisdome . . .  (EC 190^v-191^v, 194^r). When Helena is made to seem less severely perfect, honestly acknowledging to herself her unfilial feelings toward her dead parent--“I think not on my father.  .  .  . I have forgot him”--she falls short of the ideal asserted by Southwell when he addresses his father: “I am not of so unnatural a kind . . . as . . . to forget my secondary maker and author of my being” (AW 1.1.79-82; EF, 3).

 Helena’s soliloquy about the “ambition” in her love seems written out of musings on the same theme by Southwell’s Marie Magdalen:

 

Marie too knew of “loves ambition” (MMFT, 28^v). Without her Lord, she said, who was the “life of her soule. . . , any other life would be death” (cf. “no living, none, if Bertram be away”). The image of her love Marie “had limm’d in her heart,” a “Table” which she feared to break, and to which she had entrusted the last “relique” of her happiness (MMFT 5^r; and 13^v: “it is all one”).

 One of the most painful moments in All’s Well is that in which the newly married Helena asks for a kiss from her new husband and is refused. Marie Magdalen had also been rebuffed when she sought to kiss the resurrected Jesus (“noli me tangere”; MMFT 60^v-61^v), and her story, as told by Southwell, gave Helena her language of request: “like a timorous thief, [I] most fain would steal / What law does vouch mine own. . . . / Faith, yes: / Strangers and foes do sunder, and not kiss“ (AW 2.5.81-86). Compare, in the Funeral Teares, “timerous . . . stealing . . . theefes”; “recover a right”; “avoucheth” “my interest would averre him to be mine”; “stranger . . . sunder . . . faith . . . kisse” (MMFT 40^v-41^v; 41^r; 43^r: 42^r; 43^v, 48^r-v, 51^v).

In another solitary meditation, Helena’s fears that Bertram might be wounded in battle have verbal and imagistic precedents in Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort:

 

Helena and Southwell both present themselves as physicians, one of the body, the other of the soul; they both risk “vildest torture” and the loss of their lives to perform their service (AW 2.1.174); and they speak of their work in closely parallel terms.

 

To the King’s initial refusal of Helena’s offer to cure him, “Doctor She,” as Lafew calls her, responds by appealing to the example of the young Daniel, wise beyond his years in “judgment,” victor over Susanna’s “judges”:

Southwell the physician of souls is also a Daniel come to judgment:

It is not just Helena who benefits from Shakespeare’s recollection of Southwell. In his weakness, the brooding King feels that his “flame lacks oil” (AW 1.2.59); Southwell had used the same image (EC, 56^v: “the oyle, to nourishe and feede his flame”). When the monarch is restored to health, his deficiencies turn into a superflux (as he sees it) of creative power. “I can create” a new Helena, he tells Bertram; “It is in us to plant . . . honor where / We please to have it grow” (AW 2.3.143, 156-7). In his potency he resembles Southwell’s God: “the young grouth of Gods planting should to its glory shewe it selfe”; “if God of a childe that cometh naked out of his mothers wombe . . . , the poorest bratt that is borne in the worlde, can make . . . mightye Emperours . . . , how much more able is he to advaunce the most impotent wretch to a greater dignitye” (EC, 157^v and 190^r).  Southwell’s words may also lie behind the criticisms leveled against Bertram by his acquaintances: “He hath perverted a young gentlewoman,” one of the Lords observes, “and fleshes his will in the spoil of her honor”; compare “spoyle . . .our flesh . . . perverse . . .honours” (AW 4.3.14-17; EC 42^r, 44^v-45^r, 46^r). Parolles, once defeated, will not surrender to despair: “Captain I'll be no more; / But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft / As captain shall” (AW 4.3.331-3). He thus stands in sharp contrast to David’s Captain, Uriah, whom Southwell offers as a model of heroic virtue: “Urias . . . answered . . . shall I goe into my house to eate, drinke and have the companye of my wyfe . . . ? He thought it, an odious thinge, to have better lodginge than . . . his captaine . . . , to sleepe in a softe bedd” (EC, 27^r).

Both the piety of Lafew and the irreverence of the clown Lavatch draw forms of expression from Southwell’s prose. Lafew states his belief in miracles, for example, in lines that might have come from the Epistle of Comfort:

 

In a bit of verbal sparring with Lafew and the countess (AW 4.5. 20-55), Lavatch has a mouth full of the bible. He is, he says, “no great Nebuchadnezzar,” for he has “not much skill in grass” (with a pun on “grace”; cf. Daniel 4:28-30). He serves the “prince of darkness, alias the devil . . . , the prince of the world” (cf. Ephesians 6:12). Yet in clownish inconsistency he claims to be “for . . . the narrow gate” that leads to heaven, not “for the flowery way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire” (cf. Matt. 7:13-14). These biblical allusions came together easily for Shakespeare, because they are all near one another in Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort: “grace”; “Nabuchodonozor’s image”; “the prince of darcknesse . . . the princes and powers . . . of the worlde of this darcknesse”; “lowe is our waye . . . to heaven. . . . the wide waye . . . onlye leadeth to perdition. . . . The path to heaven is narrowe” (EC, 52^r; 54^r; 43^v, 49^v; 52^v-53^r).[19] The Epistle may even help to explain how Lavatch got his name. After writing again of Nebuchadnezzar and the “narrowe . . . waye, that leadeth to lyfe” (EC, 149^v, 146^v), Southwell says of Catholic martyrs: “Well may they be called, the neat or kine of the church . . . , feeding uppon grasse and wilde hearbes unfitt for mans eatinge [to] turne them into sweete mylke . . . for the benefitt of mankinde” (152^r). Lavatch the Cow (“neat,” “kine,” “la vache”) and self-styled “prophet” (AW 1.3.58), who claims to have little skill in “grass” or in “grace” (which were phonetically the same) and is averse to suffering in the “flesh” for any kind of principle (AW 1.3.29), feeds only for himself. Thus from Southwell’s perspective he would be an anti-martyr, with a name that suits him with an apt irony.[20]

This apparent cacophony of miscellaneous memories, when added to the other elements that have made All’s Well into a “problem play”--its ambiguous tone, its unusual blend of generic conventions, its perplexing ethic--turns the drama into an extraordinary challenge. Shakespeare, if writing it especially, did not write it exclusively, for an audience of one. Yet no audience could have been aware of all of its subterranean echoes. Southampton would have appreciated more of them than anyone else, and he would have been better able than most to understand how (as remains to be demonstrated) so many converged into a unified choric effect. We must ask, of course, whether Shakespeare would have offered this difficult and even troubling work to Southampton in the wake of the devoutly simple celebration voiced in Sonnet 107? The answer is yes, if the earl had the honesty and depth to appreciate the complexities that his own experiences had contributed to it, and if he were willing to acknowledge that in at least two respects, a good ending might not make all well.

“All’s well that ends well” is a maxim often embraced by those who feel the need to forget the failure that precedes success, or the pain through which happiness is achieved, but who may in fact have to live in an imperfect oblivion. The play’s psychological realism competes on such even terms with its folk-tale elements that it is not easy for an audience to forget the character flaws in the married couple that might qualify (though without wholly undermining) a happy ending.  If all is well, it could have been and may yet be better, and may be worse. This is a truth of which Southampton must have remained aware even in the glow of his new good fortune, and it would have been foolish of Shakespeare to deny it.

 “All’s well that ends well”: lurking behind this aphorism is another one, “the end justifies the means,” which can embody a philosophy of ethical adventurousness or of ethical opportunism. Does Shakespeare accept or renounce such a principle in his play?[21] Helena lies and manipulates her way to a success that is hard to begrudge her, especially if she is as “good” as almost everyone in the play believes, and if she is as “good for” Bertram as he seems finally, if abruptly, to recognize.[22] And yet Helena herself does not “justify” her actions very well. “Ambitious” in her love (AW 3.4.5), she believes that she deserves Bertram: “Who ever strove / To show her merit, that did miss her love?” (AW 1.1.226-27). She gains a husband, however, not by “showing” her worth but by using the coercive power of a King, in a ploy whose justice she never questions. She regains Bertram by lying about her death, by persuading a priest to do the same, and by resorting to the bed-trick in which she substitutes herself for the woman her husband thought he had seduced. Helena assures Diana’s mother that the ruse is “lawful” (AW 3.7.30), but the casuistry she offers in defense of the deed is faulty:

 

Bertram’s intention (“meaning”) may be “wicked” yet “lawful,” since he intends adultery but in having intercourse with his wife does not physically commit it. The civil law is concerned here with behavior, not intentions (a point of importance in the much more richly casuistical Measure for Measure). Religious law, however, does consider intention in defining the morality of an act. Adultery may be committed in the “heart” alone (Matt. 5:28-29), and Bertram is guilty of it. It is not true, then, that “both” do “not sin.” Indeed, a theologian might convict Helena too of sinning, because she suborns Bertram’s transgression.

If faults matter in the play, however, they do not matter utterly. The unsavory melancholy and cynicism of the clown is tolerated by the countess, who does not like him but keeps him in her employ. Though “honesty be no puritan,” Lavatch insists, it will “do no hurt”; pure perfection, he implies, would do hurt, and a less radical goodness does well to temporize with the ideal, as even proud puritans do with the authorities over the “surplice” (AW 1.3.93-95). No one gainsays him or provides a confuting example. Higher on the scale of iniquity is Parolles, who is shallow, posturing, deceitful, and corrupting, guilty of personal and political treason. He raises laughs, unintentionally, but has little wit to cover his multitude of sins. Yet even the Lord Dumaine, whom he slanders, says with a generosity at least partially ingenuous that he begins to “love” Parolles,” and finds that “rarity redeems him” (AW 4.3.262, 274). What saves Parolles, in fact, is his stripping down to essentials: “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live” (AW 4.3.333-34). He is “simply” a fool, but has to be even more simply a man to be so, and Lafew’s contemptuous anger toward him after the knave’s humiliation changes to pity: “though you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat” (AW 5.2.53-54).

 Helena had seen through Parolles from the beginning, but decided to “love” him for Bertram’s sake, and saw that his “evils” might find a fit “place” when “virtue’s steely bones / Looks bleak i’ th’ cold wind” (AW 1.1.99-104). Such an unconventional attitude allows the heroine to love Bertram, whose “evils” accumulate alarmingly but never with the direst consequences. Helena is not the only tolerant one. The countess of Rossillion is so infuriated by her son’s behavior toward Helena that at one point she would disown him: “He was my son, / But I do wash his name out of my blood” (AW 3.2.66-67); but not long afterwards, with nothing to spur a change of mind, she is a loving mother again: “Which of them both / Is dearest to me, I have no skill in sense / To make distinction” (3.4.38-40). Bertram’s friends understand that he is guilty of much “blame” and has betrayed himself to “abhorr’d ends”; yet they do not abandon him, making allowances for the “mingled yarn” that constitutes life, “good and ill together” (4.3.6, 23,71-71). In the final scene, the King grants Bertram forgiveness, takes it back, and bestows it again.

No one in the play but Helena herself believes that she needs to be forgiven for anything. She herself feels remorse when she learns that Bertram has fled from “the dark house and the detested wife” to a war that may kill him: “Whoever shoots at him, I set him there” (2.3.292, 3.2.90-129). Her sense of guilt, however, does not survive the penitential pilgrimage that she makes, perhaps not to Compostela as she had announced, but certainly to Bertram’s Florence, where scruples seem forgotten in her energetic attempts to win back her wayward husband.[23] An audience, however, may find much for which to blame her. As early as the eighteenth century, when Dr. Johnson offered his by now notorious censure of Bertram, Charlotte Lennox found Helena “cruel, artful, and insolent.” Johnson could not “reconcile his heart” to Bertram,

 

A “typical” critic’s grievances against Helena can be summarized (as they have been by Susan Snyder) in Johnson’s rhetorical mold:

A sympathetic actress may considerably lessen the severity of such a judgment (Angela Down managed to do so in Elijah Moshinsky’s BBC production) but cannot suppress it entirely. Helena is not beyond the need for forgiveness. The end does not, at least not entirely, justify the means. A resort to unjustifiable means, however, may be pardoned. There is much in the play to encourage a generous leniency toward Helena: the honesty of her passion; her astringent eloquence in expressing it; the pain she suffers as well as her sorrowful acknowledgment of the pain that she inflicts; the frequent testimony about her “goodness,” and the general sense conveyed by the play that Bertram is a fool to despise her, would do well to accept her, and seems at last to understand his good fortune in being loved by a woman who (as Mariana would say of Angelo) will “crave no other, nor no better man” (MM 5.1.426). In spite of these encouragements, many have refused to pardon Helena. Forgiveness is one of the most difficult and controversial of virtues.

All’s Well may be read, however, as though Shakespeare, characteristically, wishes in this play to solicit mercy especially when granting it seems most shocking to a conventional or complacent moral sense, as in the case of Bertram. The playwright changes Boccaccio’s Beltramo into his own Bertram in ways that make the young count of Rossillion seem unforgiveable. There is nothing in the Decameron like Bertram’s ugly descent, in the play’s final scene, into suave arrogance, false remorse, self-interested ingratiation, desperate lying, and slanderous abuse. And yet Bertram is “dismissed into happiness” anyway--or rather, into the “hope” of happiness, since the play’s ending is deliberately made to appear provisional: “All yet seems well,” says the King, “and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet” (5.3.333-34; emphasis added). Bertram’s words of repentance are terse and few; he does not say or do enough to conform to the stereotype of the prodigal who is forgiven because of his ostentatious compunction.[25] He is forgiven not so much because of what he has become but because of what he may, but will not necessarily, be; and thus he is shown the most powerful (some would say, irresponsible) kind of mercy. The ending of All’s Well need not, then, reveal an inept Shakespeare, hastily closing down a play that was failing, or a cynical Shakespeare, debunking comic formulas on which he had relied for too long,[26] but a radical Shakespeare, advancing a long-held and deeply felt ethic. This moral vision was embodied not only in the playwright’s “comedies of forgiveness”--of which Measure for Measure with all of its resemblances to All’s Well in situation and theme would prove the most notable example--but in Venus and Adonis,[27] a clear prototype of All’s Well and the first poem that Shakespeare dedicated to the earl of Southampton. And as the play was staged, what issue could have been more important to the newly pardoned Southampton than mercy that is fully aware of past unworthiness but looks ahead to future deserving?

In All’s Well, however, the future is more an hypothesis than a vision, and it cannot escape its origins. As Helena and Bertram, the new generation, strain toward independence, they are tied to the past that created them. Helena claims to have forgotten her father, but her ambition would have come to nothing without the gift of knowledge she had received from him; and that ambition, of course, is nothing else than to marry the man presented to her by her childhood. She is a young (not a “new”) woman, intelligent and aggressive, who makes use of the “old” institution of wardship to achieve her great desire, and is comforted and abetted by her elders. The King is indebted to the young, but he is suspicious of new ways that he believes lack the authentic nobility of the old ones, which was evident in the greatness of the dead count of Rossillion. If Bertram is to be saved, it is by being brought back into conformity with the ideals of his father and mother, and thus made worthy of the “blood” he has inherited. Such is the power of the past in Shakespeare’s story, and its influence makes “all end well,” if the play provides an acceptable meaning for each of these terms.

As we have seen, however, the tale itself is also an accumulation of memories woven like a “mingled yarn” out of a history that has left traces of itself in literature. These copious vestiges are of several kinds. Some are surely the inevitable repetitions of a poet who cannot forget all that he has said when he ventures to say something new. Some seem deliberately to recreate the “Shakespeare” who wrote works “for” Southampton: poems or plays that fulfilled in a general way a promise to dedicate “all” to a patron and friend; or, like Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Sonnet 107, that spoke to Southampton’s situation or state of mind. Others are reminiscences of Robert Southwell, the dead Jesuit whose legacy Shakespeare held onto tenaciously, in spite of the many reasons he had to resist or forswear it. What is the power of this kind of “past” as it exhibits itself in a play with special meaning for Southampton?

The past, insofar as it had not vanished, had become what Southampton now was. Shakespeare the man and “Shakespeare” the work were not only in Southampton’s mind and heart; they were part of his essential character, not to be removed by ignoring or forgetting. It is not entirely fanciful to speculate that All’s Well implies as much, especially since Shakespeare himself in the dedication to Lucrece, after declaring to Southampton that his “love” was “without end,” spoke to him the language of spiritual sharing: “What I have done is yours, what I have to doe is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours.” The writer suggests not only that “you are part of all I have done,” but “what is mine is yours because you are part of me.” The idea of such unity can be mocked in Shakespeare, as it is by Lavatch and the poet of the Sonnets (AW 1.3.44-50; Sonnet 42, 13-14); but the concept is derided only insofar as it can be abused. Some of the doubts about the relationship of Helena and Bertram arise precisely because the couple seem for almost all of the play to have achieved no union of souls. Sharing means “you are part of me,” and also, of course, “I am part of you; what I have done is part of you.” What the poet has “done” is widely advertised in the play, apparently in commemoration, perhaps as a sign of continuing oneness.

The past-made-present was also Robert Southwell, spokesman for the Old Faith that would never cease to importune. The Jesuit cousin of Shakespeare and Southampton had challenged both men long before All’s Well was written. Shakespeare inscribed the Jesuit’s words on his “heart’s table” and would not erase them. Southwell was present in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece when those poems ushered Southampton into his majority; he was in the play that recovered the years that had served as a prologue to the earl’s new life. In All’s Well as before, Southwell the writer can be seen as a source of literary inspiration; but again, he also seems to stand for something, for a set of ideals as hard and bright as steel that may shine when brought close to heaven’s sun and yet look “bleak i’ th’ cold wind” of an unholy world. Because Shakespeare kept repeating for Southampton this assessment of Southwell’s ideal, it is reasonable to believe that the “worldlings,” nobleman and playwright, were united in their attitude toward it--aware as they were of its hardness, which might either invigorate or crush a spirit, and of its bleak brilliance that confounds the eye of conscience. Southwell would always stand for martyrdom, from which Southampton in 1603 had claimed to have distanced himself more than ever before, placing “king” before “theologians.” Southampton would have laughed at Lavatch, who in the play was the comic opposite of Southwell’s martyred “kine” and an agent of religious satire; but the clown was hardly an ethical model or a privileged voice, and the earl was surely able to see the limitations of Lavatch’s character and point of view. Southampton could leave martyrdom to the martyrs without despising them. Otherwise an utterly incongruous topic in All’s Well, martyrdom must have been alluded to because it belonged to the memories that the play was meant to revive; and the resurrected past was too complex for a simple response.

The other part of Southwell’s message that the play recalled was the uncompromising commandment, “seeke not . . . good by evill” (EC, 53^r). As already suggested, All’s Well that Ends Well tests the principle that the end may justify the means and stops short of endorsing it. Shakespeare emphasizes forgiveness rather than acquittal. And yet, if forgiveness is granted generously and promiscuously, the rigorous axiom that ends may not justify means seems mitigated. When forgiveness is the end, who is to say that all does not end well? Not Robert Southwell himself.