In 1991 I was invited to give a paper on Women in Theatre at the Divina Conference at Turin University. I titled it ‘The Heroine, the Harpy and the Human Being’. I wanted to look at the perceptions of virtue and vice in female characters and to uphold the right of women and female characters to be imperfect and flawed without being condemned as the baddy, the whore or the temptress.
The full piece dealt with modern as well as classical roles and was later published in New Theatre Quarterly (Vol. IX, number 34).
For this book I decided to focus on the character of Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, who exemplifies many of my observations. In order to be true to what I was writing at the time, I have kept to these observations in the current reworking for this book, but I am happy to say that a lot of the attitudes I was up against then have changed.
A more detailed study of Helena can be read in a piece I wrote for Clamorous Voices.
Any actress playing a classical heroine has to tackle the concepts of virtue and chastity: they are words which come up so centrally and so often that it is impossible to skirt round them. They are used to define the whole woman, and often nothing else about her is known or deemed to be important. As a modern woman I could never connect personally with the significance the word ‘chastity’ had for a character I was playing, until Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well showed me a way through. I found if I mentally substituted the word ‘integrity’ for ‘chastity’, I could reach her need to preserve her sense of self, her internal moral core.
According to the morality of the day, a woman was virtuous simply by being a virgin. A virgin was a commodity on the marriage market, and if a woman lost her virginity out of wedlock, she was sullied goods and lost all claim to virtue. Virtue and virginity became one and the same.
But this makes virtue passive, or at most something to be maintained by resisting, a negative action. This kind of virtue is a male-centred definition, to do with the value of a prize to be won by men, and nothing to do with the intrinsic moral worth of a female human being. In other words, in classical drama and literature men earn their worth through their actions, whereas a heroine doesn’t have to do anything, she just has to be innocent, preferably quiet, and definitely a virgin. Female virtue is a state of being, rather than doing.
Historically, it was men who created the tie-up between a woman’s virginity and her virtue, but we women want our heroines and ourselves to be tested against the general human virtues and prove ourselves by our deeds and decisions against the same criteria as men.
In Act IV, Scene 3, of All’s Well That Ends Well Shakespeare says:
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.
It is one of my favourite speeches. It is not at all famous and comes from the mouth of a minor character who doesn’t even have a name (the First Lord).
It felt to me to be one of the central tenets of the play, and therefore it seemed that Shakespeare intended his chief female character, Helena, to reflect it. I believe Shakespeare deliberately created a heroine who is imperfect but whose worth he ultimately believes in. He challenges the audience to accept a flawed female as their guide through the story and to allow her to win in the end. That end remains ambiguous but, I think, hopeful. It would be unbelievable if it were all rosy, but it would be uncharacteristically cynical if the title were entirely ironic.
Helena came to me with a bad reputation. Critics over the years had judged her as immodest, ambitious, predatory and sanctimonious. It was 1981, and the play had not often been performed because so many people deemed it unplayable and the heroine unacceptable. What is Helena’s crime? She pursues the man of her choice rather than waiting for him to choose her. Helena’s namesake in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which I played in that same season) also chases after her man, but she is loveable because her quest is hopeless and it is treated comedically. In Act II, Scene 2, she voices the inappropriateness of her behaviour and despises her own desperation:
We cannot fight for love, as men may do.
We should be woo’d and were not made to woo,
and what is here comically expressed, is the predicament of the other, more serious Helena as well.
I was not interested in judging All’s Well’s Helena. I had my work cut out learning her very opaque speeches and summoning the courage and technique to play my first major Shakespeare role on the main stage at Stratford in the company of Dame Peggy Ashcroft among other luminaries.
What I instantly related to was a woman of ambition. To date, my favourite role had been Nina in The Seagull. Nina is no ordinary sweet young thing but an ambitious actress eager for experience, who gets battered by tragedy, is strengthened by it and moves on. I could always relate to ambition, having plenty of drive myself. What was harder to relate to was the fact that the full extent of Helena’s ambition was to get her man.
Precisely because she is hard to label, Helena is one of the most interesting and modern of Shakespeare’s women that I have ever played. However, the label-seeking analysts want to know where they stand. They fret over whether All’s Well is a comedy, a romance or a tragedy. The answer is that it hops between all three and all three overlap; a bit like life really. But a label it must have, so it becomes ‘a problem play’, and the major problem is what to make of the central couple, Helena and Bertram.
It is one thing to come to terms with a heroine who pursues and traps a man into marriage, but another to accept that the man she pursues doesn’t seem worth the effort. Neither hero nor heroine is likeable.
The issue of likeability is one I have come up against often since, but never so clearly as with Helena. Seldom does anybody ask whether they like Hamlet, Henry V, or King Lear, but somehow the heroine has to be sympathetic, palatable, liked. It is definitely easier for a woman to be liked if she is pretty, gentle, and unassuming than if she is intense, ambitious, and complicated like Helena.
On the other hand, it is interesting that George Bernard Shaw preferred Helena to any other Shakespeare heroine, and having studied the part in depth and played it in repertoire over a period of two years, I feel certain that Shakespeare was basically on her side. Every decent, wise character in the play approves of her, and her only detractors are Parolles, a known cheat, and Bertram, an immature snobbish boy.
From the start, I felt for Helena’s unrequited love and her social isolation. I liked her for her ambition and the way she shoved self-pity aside and followed her dream. I admired her guts chancing her arm at curing the King. I was fascinated by her oblique, broken-up, cryptic soliloquies at the beginning of the play. They gave me a clue as to her tangled thoughts, and the fact that she almost could not speak her ambition out loud, it seemed so transgressive. This means that she could barely admit her feelings to herself, since a confessional soliloquy to the audience is the equivalent of talking to oneself.
About her faults I was maybe less than honest. I was feeling defensive against what seemed to be a historical sea of prejudice, so I was perhaps in denial about any of her shortcomings, her possible underhandedness, her blinkeredness about Bertram’s feelings, her scheming—and I sought every justification for these that I could dig out of the text.
Trevor Nunn, the director, also saw the need to redeem the misunderstood Helena if he was going to make the play work. By setting the play in the early twentieth century, he helped my interpretation of Helena by suggesting a connection with the emancipated heroines of Ibsen and Shaw. He also encouraged me to emphasise Helena’s trepidation and thereby her bravery, to dig out and deliver whatever self-deprecatory wit she might have, and to find her moments of remorse and compassion for Bertram. The opportunities were all there in Shakespeare’s text.
Yes, she can seem secretive and indirect, especially in her dealings with Bertram, but I put that down to diffidence and self-doubt. Yes, she can seem manipulative but, as I see it, she only manipulates what Fate seems to set in her pathway, and Fate seems consistently to reward her faith. First her pursuit of Bertram gets a blessing from his own mother, the Countess of Rousillon, then her faith (plus a little medical know-how) manages to cure the King of France of a fatal disease, and then the King promises her Bertram as her reward.
When things go terribly wrong and Helena realises that her monomania has driven Bertram away from France and on to the battlefield and possible death, she is willing to give up her pursuit, become a wandering pilgrim and leave France, since it is her presence there that has forced Bertram to run to the wars.
No, come thou home, Rousillon,
Whence honour but of danger wins a scar,
As oft it loses all: I will be gone;
My being here it is that holds thee hence:
Shall I stay here to do’t? no, no, although
The air of paradise did fan the house
And angels officed all: I will be gone.
All this seems quite clearly to indicate her willing self-sacrifice to Bertram’s happiness, but then, for the sake of a good plot, Shakespeare has her winding up in Italy and, by ‘coincidence’, exactly in that part of Italy where Bertram’s regiment is stationed. The prejudiced in the audience see only the schemer deliberately stalking her prey. They forget the soliloquy they have recently heard. Actions have spoken louder than words.
The fact that everyone Helena meets seems to like her, including the Widow and Diana, who take to her immediately, can be seen by the prejudiced as evidence of her manipulative charm. I tried to be as straight as possible, but the plot is twisty and doesn’t help me.
Why did I try? Partly I was being true to what I found in the text, but partly I was guilty of wanting to make Helena as palatable as I possibly could. This tends to happen with actresses of my generation who do not want to play into any possible misogynist interpretations of a female role. We feel burdened by the need to overcompensate and make our character better than anyone else, wiser, more moral, more sympathetic; and that leads to a different, though understandable, kind of inaccuracy.
Helena was complicated enough for me not to have to come down one side or another of the ‘heroine or harpy’ argument. I loved her variety, her contradictions, her elusiveness, her switches from diffidence to dynamism, from conjuror to rejected victim, from pilgrim to adventurer. I love her ‘feminine’ empathy and her ‘masculine’ wooing and pursuing; and she does all this without having to wear trousers!
After a long and painful journey she wins through. Bertram has been through a painful journey too, and Helena’s steadfastness, that once sickened him, becomes the very thing he needs to redeem him from his own self-loathing and humiliation.
I did have trouble with both Shakespeare’s and Trevor’s idea of the woman as redeemer. This kind of idealism doesn’t seem true to a real woman’s experience any more than the negative portrayal of a scheming succubus, but I also can’t believe that Shakespeare meant to leave the audience with a sense of ‘Well, that marriage sure ain’t gonna last’ or ‘Poor geezer saddled with that domineering woman’. I think he meant to leave us with a feeling that these two people have gone on an incredible journey, and who knows? They might work it out, and their life could be very interesting.
Whatever All’s Well ’s textbook reputation, Shakespeare wrote it to be performed rather than read or written about, and, as we hoped it would prove, with the flesh and blood of live performance the harpy Helena and the wastrel Bertram were revealed to be human beings of a mingled yarn.
The production was received for the most part with rapture. The acting was praised, but I could not entirely enjoy the success. Despite all our efforts to clarify Helena’s motives, one male critic still referred to her as ‘the martyr/bitch’. Therefore I felt I had failed. Now, however, I’m inclined to think that that review told me more about the reviewer’s fears than about my performance, and that the prejudice and misogyny of a few male critics is their problem, not mine. If, despite the delicate ambiguity we placed in the final moments of the play, one critic managed to read a ‘triumphant smile’ into my apprehensive face as I took Bertram’s hand, and if, despite our leaving the audience with the tentative optimism we dared to believe that Shakespeare himself intended, some critics chose to read blatant cynicism into it, that is their right. What more could I do?
Like many of the women we portray, we actresses have become expert at the subtle, the subversive, and the almost subliminal means of communicating our beliefs. The trouble is that this indirectness leaves the door wide open for misinterpretation. One’s personal statement obliquely infiltrated into a piece of work or a character is necessarily filtered through the eyes and ears of the beholder, and it is the beholder’s right to understand it as he or she feels.
Whether in classical or modern drama, I fight for the right to portray women who are as contradictory, complex and diverse as the women I see all around me, and I uphold my right to present ordinary, flawed women at the heart of a play.
Virtue and its opposite are human, not an endowment from the gods. There is always a chink in the halo, or a redeeming shaft of light under the black hood. As an actor you look for your character’s motive. That is almost all you have to know. You try to understand why they do what they do and then set the acting in motion. We do not sit in judgment at the centre of our character any more than we spend our day assessing our own character at every moment of our lives in the real world. Whether the part I am playing is deemed a heroine or a harpy, I only need concern myself with her thoughts, her words and her deeds—and by following them I find a complex human being.