HISTORICAL LOCATION: DECONSTRUCTING THE FAIRIES OF EARLIER PLAYS
The critical trend for historically locating the plays at the time of their composition has, as we’ve already seen, been informative. Stanley Wells, for example, has noted that there could be an affinity between the conduct of Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well and the Earl of Southampton’s personal history of a refusal of an arranged relationship and the later tempestuous love affair that led to his marriage.
‘At the age of seventeen Shakespeare’s patron the Earl of Southampton, who was ward to Lord Burleigh, faced an enormous fine and his influential guardian’s serious displeasure for refusing to marry Burleigh’s granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, simply, it would seem, because she did not attract him and in any case he – like Bertram – did not want to marry…But a few years later Southampton made the Queen furious by seducing Lady Elizabeth Vernon, whom he later married…It is not impossible that Shakespeare had these real-life events in mind as he wrote All’s Well That Ends Well.’
Wells, S. (2010: 141), Shakespeare, Sex and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press
There is an affinity between this story, as Wells also notes, and that of Shakespeare’s classically based poem Venus and Adonis. There is so much in this play, however, particularly in the context of Helena’s curing of the King’s illness and her subsequent choice of a husband, that has a fairy story ambience, and yet Shakespeare appears almost to be deconstructing the nonsense of the fairies of his earlier plays as the reality of the world is allowed to bear down upon the romantic plot. Helena’s motivating force from the start is to win Bertram for her husband, although she is poor and not of his social class. She is also portrayed – as her early dialogue (1.1.107f.) with Parolles makes clear – as sexually and socially aware of the disparity between the genders concerning not just the loss of virginity but the power of sexuality. She – remember, originally played by a boy actor – is given an overt sexual awareness in her jibes, for example, ‘Bless our poor virginity from underminers and blowers-up! Is there no military policy how virgins might blow up men?’ (1.1.121–3) – bawdiness which the audience may have appreciated.
THE BED TRICK
The play contains a bed trick, a device we also find in Measure for Measure. Wells suggests (2010: 146) in both that it is ‘a kind of rape by a woman of a man’, commenting that ‘rape is the ultimate consequence of lust, the very opposite of love’ even though ‘the physical act is identical’ (147). In the case of this play, however, Helena makes it evident in her discussion with the Countess, Bertram’s mother, that, despite her poverty, she is in love with Bertram.
I love your son.
My friends were poor, but honest; so’s my love.
(1.3.191–2)
Similarly, in Measure for Measure, Mariana, who takes Isabella’s place in Angelo’s bed, does so because she still loves him, despite his prior off-stage rejection of her when her fortune was lost. These are not simple issues relating merely to a dichotomy of lust or love, which, as Jacqueline Rose notes, in traditional criticism often ‘traces the problem of interpretation to the woman’ (Drakakis, J. (ed.) [1985: 229], Alternative Shakespeares). Rather, they contain a more open exploration of human conduct – male and female – in relation to audience expectations. When plays represent life, why do they have to be consistent? What happens in life is not bound by a narrative harmony or an ultimate teleology. So why do plays, even if drawing on myths and fables, have to conform to the exterior rules used in other plays? May they not each create their own discipline through which they can find expression that challenges aesthetic expectations?
Disrupting the dramatic structure
We have seen that this is the way in which Shakespeare has consistently approached his writing from the mid-1590s onwards, perhaps experimenting with a number of plays to find the right structure but then moving on, deliberately frustrating at least some of the elements of those structures to create something challenging and fresh. So it is with All’s Well and with Measure for Measure. We may have become relatively comfortable with the way that structure, plot and content coalesced in the romantic comedies but in these two plays he certainly disrupts his own structure, asking questions of it through the nature of the stories he wishes to dramatize. This is not, however, necessarily a chronological issue. We have seen earlier, for example, ‘life colliding with art’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing.
MODERN PRAGMATISM AND SEXUAL POWER
There is, however, another aspect to consider. All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure concern love, sex, status and power. Over the last 70 years, in Western culture, we have experienced a sexual revolution, a freeing of sexual attitudes and controls, which are reflected in the contemporary production and interpretation of these plays. What we see now in Helena and the Countess in All’s Well, and Isabella and Mariana in Measure for Measure, may therefore be different from what audiences first saw then, or, indeed, in subsequent performances over the last 400 years of these plays’ histories.
Helena is in love. She wants her man and will do what is necessary to achieve her desire. The King’s illness allows her achieve her ambition. She has, maybe for us, a modern pragmatism:
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky
Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
…
The king’s disease – my project may deceive me,
But my intents are fix’d, and will not leave me.
(1.1. 216–19, 228–9)
Here, of course, the medieval fairy-story element surfaces, but what is this disease of the King? We may think of archetypes and go back to myths of the sick King, representing the waste of the land, the loss of fertility. Critics have noted that there is a sexual power in the way Helena cures him of the fistula, a malignant growth usually situated in the lower region of the body, although the play’s source places this tumour near his heart. The language of the interaction between Helena and the King is in rhyming couplets, reminiscent of an incantation or spell, suggesting that she is endowed with a mysterious power inherited from her father’s learning. The King agrees to the application of the remedy but with a warning:
Sweet practiser, thy physic will I try,
That ministers thine own death if I die.
(2.1. 184–5)
There is risk to her, but if all goes well then there will be a reward. The King makes his solemn promise:
Here is my hand; the premises observ’d,
Thy will by my performance shall be serv’d;
(2.1.200–201)
This is a solemn bargain made in private between the two of them. It may be something sexual, sacred or satanic but it is certainly intimate as they leave the stage:
…If thou proceed
As high as word, my deed shall match thy deed.
(2.1.208–9)
Deeds will be matched and wonders will ensue, new life will be given to the ailing King and all seems to go ahead as planned.
CHOICES TO BE MADE
It is as if at the conclusion of Act 2, Scene 1 we have come to an end of one movement in a sequence of tales in this play. The next movement of the main narrative is reminiscent possibly of The Merchant of Venice’s cabinet-choices scene in Belmont. The King having recovered, Helena examines various lords for her to choose a husband. Lafew, the commentator for the audience, wishes that he was one of them, wondering why ‘all they deny her’ (2.3.88), but it is she who is discouraging them. This is clever writing by Shakespeare as he increases the tension of the scene right up to Bertram’s actual rejection of Helena:
My wife, my liege! I shall beseech your highness,
In such a business give me leave to use
The help of mine own eyes.
(2.3.107–9)
She may not be ugly or old as in Chaucer’s Tale, but in his ‘eyes’ it is
as if she is, since she is poor and lacking social status. She has cured the King but his ‘proxy’ of her reward in marriage is refused. The expectations from old tales are turned upside down in order to produce an innovative alternative narrative. In this, the second, more complex tale, Bertram is forced to wed her but refuses to bed her, which allows for a new riddle to be introduced with the impossible challenge given to her by letter:
When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never’.
(3.2.55–8)
There is, however, more to this inversion of the traditional folk–tale mode. In rejecting Helena, Bertram is also challenging the King’s promise since it is he who undertakes to decide on any adjustments to the social hierarchy. It is also unusual since here it is not the daughter who objects to a patriarchal instruction (as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), but the son who does so.
Key idea
We are now deep into traditional tales of trickery and deceit, but with a difference, since this narrative reflects the tensions and the emotions as well as machinations of characters embedded in complex social situations.
In Shakespeare and Decorum (1973: 17), Thomas McAlindon writes, ‘…the thoroughly inept title of All’s Well That Ends Well underscores the tragic seriousness of the comic action and the unsatisfactoriness of the marriage denouement for which a decent girl has indecently schemed.’ Such a view, however, too easily moves the play into a naturalistic world and takes it away from that of fable and fairy tale, where, if babies can be changed in cradles, so women can certainly change places with one another in bed. Also, on the surface of it, the riddle that Bertram sets Helena as a condition of marriage seems, in view of his behaviour towards her, impossible to fulfil. But in a story such as this, Bertram can be deceived by Helena’s ingenuity in his night of sexual pleasure with the person he thought was Diana: even her name, the goddess of chastity, gives us a clue. So Bertram then has to make up fantastical excuses to explain how he came to be in possession of the King’s ring given to Helena, from whom it should never have been parted. This is all integral to the wider fantastical but engrossing story.
THE PLAY AS SOCIAL ‘METAPHOR’
We may, nevertheless, still consider the story as a parable, or what Parolles ironically calls ‘a metaphor’ (5.2.11). It is a fairy tale – with classical reference – revealing love, lust, faithfulness, deceit, absurdity, status and motivation, with some psychology being applied by Shakespeare especially in his portrayal of the Countess, who plays the part of a mother to her son to whom she remains as close as she is to Helena:
Which of them both
Is dearest to me I have no skill in sense
To make distinction.
(3.4.38–40)
Spotlight
The first person questioned by the King in Act 5, Scene 3, in an attempt to get to the truth, is, fittingly, Parolles, who as his name implies is just ‘words’, and who the King sees as being ‘too fine in thy evidence’ (5.3.267). Yet he has a particular function in the play. The comic Parolles subplot deflects us from taking the Bertram story too seriously, and a correspondence is implied between him as the boastful, wordy braggart and Bertram, the Count of Rossillion, who makes up stories to protect himself. When placed in a corner both characters act similarly. It is the folly of denial. Through the play, the Clown is a perceptive witty commentator on both the action of the play and the ambiguities inherent even in the language of the society:
CLOWN O madam, yonder’s my lord your son with a patch of velvet on’s face; whether there be a scar under’t or no, the velvet knows; but ’tis a goodly patch of velvet. His left cheek is a cheek of two pile and a half, but his right cheek is worn bare.
LAFEW A scar nobly got, or a noble scar, is a good liv’ry of honour; so belike is that.
CLOWN But it is your carbonado’d face.
(4.5.93–100)
A face scarred for life with carbonadoes or incisions was common, not necessarily as a mark of military honour but as the result of syphilis, over-activity in the ‘sex wars’, as Shakespeare’s audience would have known only too well.
All’s Well That Ends Well isn’t always given the credit that is due to it. Perhaps we expect something from it that runs against the context of fable that is at its heart. Possibly, however, Shakespeare does endow too much character into the parts within a setting which hasn’t been distanced enough from realism and a genre that cannot adequately contain it. But in performance the play does work, implying in its fable motif the collision between life and fiction which confronts us throughout its progress. In this play, more appropriately perhaps than with Measure for Measure, Chaucer’s comments about his own tales have a resonance: ‘Consider then and hold me free of blame;/ And why be serious about a game?’ (Words between the Host and the Miller, Coghill’s translation, p. 104).
Measure for Measure
If All’s Well That Ends Well has caused critics ‘problems’ of incredulity in the mixing of the narrative genres and the perceived perfunctoriness of its conclusion, then Measure for Measure became in the mid-twentieth century almost a battleground between two influential critics. F. R. Leavis (The Common Pursuit, 1952) launched what could only be seen as an intellectual assault on his ‘friend’ L. C. Knights (‘The Ambiguity of Measure for Measure’, 1942), accusing the latter of a departure from his early work where, as we have seen, he had professed that the better the language, the better the play. In his 1942 essay Knights was sympathetic to the ambiguities of Measure for Measure and this caused some consternation for a number of twentieth-century evaluations of the play. The problem for these critics resided in their frustration with both the progress and the conclusion of the play.
Criticism has moved on considerably since then and the term ‘problem plays’ is now rarely employed, although G. Wilson Knight’s interpretation (1930) of the Duke of Vienna as a Christlike figure is one that, despite causing much critical concern, nevertheless still retains a need for attention:
O my dread lord,
I should be guiltier than my guiltiness
To think I can be undiscernible,
When I perceive your Grace, like power divine,
Hath looked upon my passes.
(5.1.363–7)
‘To G. Wilson Knight (1930), these lines made clear that their speaker, Angelo, represented Fallen Man, while their addressee, Duke Vincento, represented Almighty God. Other critics rightly took the dramatic context of the speech more seriously. They pointed out that, among other things, it is a particular character in a particular situation who sees the Duke as “like pow’r divine”; no other character in Measure for Measure praises the Duke so abjectly; while from the start of the play the Duke engages in morally dubious intrigues for the purpose of astounding his subjects and humiliating Angelo.’
Knapp, J. (2002: xi), Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation and Theater in Renaissance England. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press
MEASURE FOR MEASURE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
In the twenty-first century the exposure of religious hypocrisy in society has been often foregrounded. We live in an age when priests, bishops and even cardinals, so critical of modern sexual culture and practices, have had to confess to ‘inappropriate’ criminal and sexual conduct in their own lives. The scandals that have rocked the modern Church have raised all sorts of questions about the nature of morality itself, which may make some of the issues in Measure for Measure look tame by comparison. Nevertheless, the play appears to ask a series of questions that it then leaves open for the audience to consider. Who is to judge what is moral or immoral, ethical or not? Are not many acts of judgement, to an extent, acts of hypocrisy?
The clown, Pompey, points out to Escalus, from the perspective of Mistress Overdone’s brothel where he works as a procurer (Act 2, Scene 2), the impossibility of curtailing sexual a
ctivity:
ESCALUS How would you live, Pompey? By being a bawd? What do you think of the trade, Pompey? Is it a lawful trade?
POMPEY If the law would allow it, sir.
ESCALUS But the law will not allow it, Pompey; nor it shall not be allowed in Vienna.
POMPEY Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?
ESCALUS No, Pompey.
POMPEY Truly, sir, in my opinion, they will to’t then.
(2.1.220–30)
Pompey makes the point that laws are artificial restraints and in this case incompatible with nature. Just as in Love’s Labour’s Lost the vow of celibacy and the self-imposed exile from female company made by the aristocratic scholars is ridiculous, so laws enacted against natural instincts are impossible to enforce without removing the means of that instinct by general castration. It is farcical but it opens a debate that extends beyond lechery to authority. If in Hamlet the Prince can metamorphose Caesar into becoming a stopper for a beer barrel, so even the clown Pompey’s name reduces a historic Roman general to being a bawd.
HYPOCRISY
The Duke is unable to cure the evils within Vienna, and he announces at the start of the play that he is to leave the city for a time, appointing Angelo as his deputy to rule in his place. But the Duke then disguises himself as a friar and returns to the city to witness how things are going. In doing so, he becomes involved in attempts to correct the errors which the hypocritical Angelo makes, as well as their impact on certain other inhabitants, especially Isabella who initially expresses the desire to become a nun.
Meddling friars – who the Wife of Bath saw as responsible for getting rid of the fairies – do not generally fare well in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s comedy, however, also ridicules Puritanism. In Act 2, Scene 2 the Duke’s deputy, Angelo, who has introduced harsh sexual laws, himself falls into temptation. Although he has condemned Isabella’s brother, Claudio, to death for getting his girlfriend, Juliet, pregnant, the hypocritical Angelo lusts after Isabella. She pleads for mercy for her brother. Angelo’s puritanical mind tries to reconcile his feelings with the law by debating, at first, whether the fault for his temptation lies with her or him:
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 32