By any means

Shakespeare’s “All’s Well That Ends Well”, the big relationship lie, airplanes bereft of doors

I’m reading through Shakespeare’s plays in an attempt to make sense of the world. Today I’m writing about “All’s Well That Ends Well.” For a quick reference to posts on previous plays, click here. Next week, “Timon of Athens.”

I once worked for a company whose marketing copy said it provided ‘an unfair profit advantage.’ There’s a kind of mind that identifies strength in a turn of phrase like this; it’s not my kind of mind. Any company can maximize margin and lower costs, if it wants to do the work. That’s the definition of fair.

When managers direct employees to do ‘whatever it takes’ to land a sale, increase profits, or make customers happy, one hopes there’s an unspoken assumption that ‘whatever’ doesn’t include illegal or unethical actions. Sometimes it’s unspoken because it’s not intended. When safety matters more than profit, doors don’t typically fly off airplanes during flight. When they do, they expose the company’s priorities that allow ‘whatever’ in pursuit of profit.  

To be human is to make poor choices now and again. It helps when there’s a mechanism to regulate behaviour—oversight, shame, accountability. All’s Well That Ends Well presents a land ruled by a king who accepts failure and misfortune as necessary and inescapable. He’s lucky it ends as well as it does.

Summary

Bertram, the Count of Roussillon, and his mother the Countess are in mourning for the late Count Roussillon (Bertram’s father) when Bertram announces he’s leaving for the King’s court.  The King of France, a generous monarch who is quite sick with a fistula, has abandoned hope of being cured by his attending physicians. The Countess recalls the late Gérard de Narbonne, a legendary physician with almost magical powers to cure. If only he were still alive!

De Narbonne is survived by his daughter Helen, a penniless maid who lives with the Countess. Helen has fallen in love with Bertram, but he has no interest in marrying beneath his title.

After Bertram departs, Helen muses on her heartbreaking love for him. Bertram’s friend Paroles¹ enters. His nature is as his name suggests—he’s full of hot air, spewing words with nothing interesting to say. He banters with Helen, urging her to lose her virginity. Helen more than matches his wit while filling in her character as a virtuous and headstrong woman.

At court, the King welcomes Bertram, extending to him the love he held for Bertram’s late father. The King is in a dour mood, noting that he’s likely to die without medical intervention, and he’s given up on his doctors.

The Countess learns that Helen is secretly in love with Bertram. She tells Helen that she supports a match between them, and asks Helen about her plans. Helen admits that she’s setting out for Paris. Mentioning that her father had left his prescriptions with her when he died, Helen plans to offer to cure the King if she can see him. Despite having never practiced medicine, Helen’s confident she can make the King well.

At court, the King receives Helen despite his skepticism that any doctor, much less a girl, can cure him. Helen’s confident but the King wants assurances. He proposes a bet with her: what would she risk, should she be unsuccessful? Helen says that she’ll give her life if she fails, an offer the King accepts. But Helen presses him: and what if I succeed? The King asks what she wants. Helen says she wants a husband whom she’ll select, a request the King readily accepts.

A miracle happens: the King fully recovers with Helen’s prescription. The King, delighted to fulfill his part of the bargain, has four lords brought in for Helen to select. She rejects them all; she wants to marry Bertram.

The King tells Bertram he must marry Helen. Bertram pushes back. The King pressures him, but Bertram won’t have it: “A poor physician’s daughter, my wife? Disdain / Rather corrupt me ever.” (Act 2 Scene 3) The King offers to sweeten the pot, saying that he’ll make up the difference in honor and wealth that Helen lacks in her social position. Bertram is defiant: “I cannot love her, nor will strive to do’t.”

Helen’s prepared to let it go, but the King now feels invested (“My honour’s at the stake”). Angrily, he threatens Bertram that he’ll lose everything if he fails to comply. Bertram backpedals and agrees to marry Helen.

As soon as the vows are made, Bertram leaves for a war that’s being waged in Italy, refusing to consummate the marriage.   Before leaving, he sends Helen back to his estate, and gives her a letter for his mother. He promises Helen that he’ll see her in two days.

The Countess reads Bertram’s letter, in which he promises to never consummate his marriage. Moreover, he’s running away to serve the Duke of Florence and intends to live outside France as long as he or Helen lives. Bertram has also sent Helen a letter:

HELEN
    ‘When thou can’st 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 “never.”’
-Act 3 Scene 2

Helen, bereft, announces that she’ll take off, and she leaves the estate.

Helen shows up in Florence and befriends a widow whose daughter (Diana) Bertram is rumoured to be courting. Giving the widow money and asking for her trust, Helen suggests a plot. Diana, if willing, will seem to give in to Bertram’s pleas. She’ll set an assignation, and will demand that Bertram give her his family ring. Then Helen will switch places with Diana to meet with Bertram under cover of night, with Bertram none the wiser.

In a jest, Bertram conspires with two brothers named Lord Dumaine to kidnap Paroles and threaten him, in order to see what Paroles will say under pressure. The brothers affect a nonsense foreign language, which a French interpreter translates for Paroles. Blindfolded and threatened with execution, Paroles immediately shares everything he knows (military strength and movements). To cap off his treachery, he also vilifies his friend Bertram.

A peace is negotiated that concludes the war. Having heard a rumour that Helen died after fleeing the Roussillon’s estate, Bertram concludes that it’s safe to return home.

Helen too decides to return to France, now that Diana and she have pulled off the scheme. While traveling with Diana and the widow, Helen catches a gentleman who’s also traveling to France and she asks him to carry a letter to the court. The women’s pace is slower, but Helen expects to arrive soon after the letter is delivered.

At court, the King and the Countess express their sorrow for the loss of Helen, but decide to put the past behind and look forward to a better future. They discuss a possible bride for Bertram: the daughter of Lafeu, a confidant of the King.

Bertram arrives at court with a patch of velvet on his cheek, supposedly to cover a scar. It’s suggested that he gained the scar in battle, but given Bertram’s cowardice, a wit suggests it’s a syphilitic scar—more likely, given Bertram’s reputation.

The King and Bertram reconcile, and Bertram readily accepts a match with Lord Lafeu’s daughter. Lafeu asks him for an assurance of some kind, something of personal worth, to seal his intention. Bertram takes a ring off his finger, one that he received in bed with a woman he thought to be Diana, but who was in fact his wife, Helen.

The King demands to know where Bertram acquired the ring. The King’s recognized it as the ring he entrusted to Helen, who claimed she would never give it up. Bertram makes up a lame story about the ring being thrown down to him from a window while he was in Florence. The King knows this is preposterous, and he orders Bertram to be taken off.

At this point, the gentleman steps forward with the letter Helen had entrusted to him on the road. The letter is signed by Diana, and it charges that Bertram took her virginity when he was in Florence. In the letter, she begs the King to help her, a poor maid whom Bertram has misused. After the letter is read, Diana and her mother arrive.

The King demands of Bertram whether he knows Diana and her widow mother, which Bertram diffidently says he can neither confirm nor deny. Bertram denies being the husband of Diana; Lafeu takes back his promise of his daughter to marry Bertram.

Bertram, pressed, claims that Diana was a common whore who worked the camps, shaming her to deflect from his own indiscretion. Diana then shows her hand: she’s wearing the ancestral ring of the Roussillon family, which the Countess immediately recognizes.

Diana mentions that she’s recognized in court a witness who can corroborate her story: Paroles. While waiting for Paroles to appear, Bertram asserts that Paroles is an unreliable witness who will lie without thinking. Bertram then admits that he was with Diana, a common whore, who got the ring off of him. Diana says to him that she’ll give it back to him, if he’ll return her ring. Which ring is that? Diana says it looks remarkably like the ring that the King is now wearing.

Paroles arrives and substantiates Diana’s story. The King asks Diana where she got the ring he’s wearing. Diana parries his questions, talking riddles, until the King tires of it and orders her to be taken away. Diana asks for her bail to be put in: the Widow leaves the court supposedly to collect the jeweler who owned the ring and who can post her bail. The Widow returns with Helen.

Helen, now revealed to be pregnant with Bertram’s child, has fulfilled the terms in Bertram’s initial letter to him: she carries his child and she has his ancestral ring. Given that, Bertram must now accept her as his wife.

Bertram readily accepts their marriage, the court is moved by both Bertram’s conversion and the miraculous return (seemingly to life) of Helen, and the King is delighted to end the play on such a fine resolution. As Helen has maintained throughout the play, all’s well that ends well.

Thoughts

Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well can be considered twinned plays. They both concern moral ambiguity, supported by a plot device in which one woman avoids an immoral intimacy by substituting another woman who is not as morally compromised.

One significant difference between them is in the resources the compromised woman has available to her. In Measure, Isabella has no support group to assist her. Her intended sisters, in the convent from which she was diverted early in the play, have taken vows of silence and separation from men. In the last scene, after the Duke announces that he’s going to take Isabella for himself, she has no lines, no voice.

Helen, however, builds a support network throughout the play: the Countess, the King, the Widow and her daughter, Diana. She relies on them to see her ambitions to fulfillment. The last act displays the strength of her force as if on a chessboard. She makes her surprise entrance on a  board arrayed with her allies. Even Bertram’s best friend, Paroles, has switched sides to witness for Diana. Bertram stands alone. Helen’s strategic plays have left him with no choice.

Of the two plays, this is the merrier. The outcome is not just that justice has been served, but that the protagonist has won. Helen never lets us forget that it’s the win she’s after: “All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown. / Whate’er the course, the end is the renown.” (Act 4 Scene 5). She’s ambitious, smart, and crafty. How can one not rejoice in her getting what she wants, even if the apparent value of the prize is questionable, at best.

By any means possible

The title of the play is a phrase we use today. It’s something you might say when something turns out, despite the stress and uncertainty along the way. Well, at least it came out ok. All’s well that ends well.

But Helen’s intention is not just to accept that things will work out, but to do anything in her power to achieve her goal. Her only caveat is to protect virtue. Anything else is fair game: lying to Bertram, tricking him, paying another woman to deceive him. She’ll trick people who love her into thinking she’s dead. She’ll put Diana at risk in the King’s court. The ends, she maintains, justify the means.

The prize she’s so delighted to win comes with tarnish. He’s been shown to be amoral. He enters into contracts with no intention of following through (his forced marriage to Helen, his seduction of Diana then dropping her immediately after). He’s not true to his friends, and widely considered untrustworthy. He’s scarred, possibly syphilitic (presumably Helen can cure him with one of her father’s prescriptions). While Helen has amassed a fortune in goodwill and currency from the King and court, Bertram has squandered his reputation. It is not beneath Bertram to be married to Helen; rather, it’s beneath Helen to marry Bertram.

When Helen arrives in the final scene, surprising all with her seeming resurrection from death, Bertram immediately repents, asking of her “O, Pardon!”

HELEN
    O, my good lord, when I was like this maid 
    I found you wondrous kind. There is your ring.
    And, look you, here’s your letter. This it says,
    ‘When from my finger you can get this ring,
    And are by me with child,’ et cetera. This is done.
    Will you be mine now you are doubly won?
BERTRAM (To the King)
    If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly
    I’ll love her dearly, ever ever dearly.
HELEN
    If it appear not plain and prove untrue,
    Deadly divorce step between me and you.—
    O my dear mother, do I see you living?
-Act 5 Scene 3

Helen, in her ambition, has won. Following the King’s direction to release the past so that a brighter future is possible, she’s ready to pardon Bertram of his sins. He won’t change, although he professes to love her forever, so she must accommodate him to gain what she wants: a husband, children, a family.

Any of Helen’s female supporters should have told her, “Girl, he’s just not into you.” But Helen believes the big relationship lie, that marriage will change her spouse. If he lapses, she has her magical prescriptions and resolute craftiness to retrieve what she wants. I can only imagine their future lives cyclically alternating between happiness gained and lost.

The King functions to reconcile opposing forces, whether negotiating a peace, dispensing justice, or match making, which in this play consumes most of his efforts. He holds the perspective that to live is to experience ever-changing extremes: heat and cold, ill fortune and good, and he takes it even further to say that happiness is enriched by contrast with experiencing its opposite. The King’s advise is to put the past, with its unhappiness and misfortune, behind, so that happiness can be fully enjoyed. He reiterates that in his last lines: “All yet seems well; and if it end so meet, / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.”  This sentiment absolves Bertram of his past indiscretions, while accepting that the cycle will repeat.

We can only expect the same of large corporations upon whose safety investments our lives depend. Disaster inevitably follows when the corporation trades safety for profit. The company, exposed, says it will never happen again. Let’s put this in the past. Trust us. Eventually, the cycle repeats. All’s well that ends well, at least for now.  

Thanks for reading,

1. In French, parole means speech