THE SOURCE of All’s Well that Ends Well was either Boccaccio’s tale in the Decameron (III. 9) or William Painter’s version of the same tale in The Palace of Pleasure (1566) (I. 38). The two versions differ very little, Painter tells how the Count of Rossiglione, being an invalid, keeps a personal physician in his house, named Gerardo of Narbona. Beltramo, the Count’s son, is brought up with Gerardo’s daughter, Giletta. She falls in love with the boy, ‘more than was meet for a maiden of her age’. When the Count dies, Beltramo, ‘left under the royal custody of the King’, is sent to Paris. Gerardo dies shortly afterwards, and Giletta is prevented by her kinsfolk from following Beltramo to Paris. She is rich, but she refuses many suitors. When she hears that the King suffers from a fistula, she journeys to Paris with one of her father’s remedies. After seeing Beltramo, she tells the King she can cure him within eight days ‘by the aide and helpe of God’. At first the King refuses to be her patient and she suggests that if she fails to cure him she should be burnt at the stake, the King for his part promising to find her a husband. She stipulates that the husband shall be one of her choosing, ‘without presumption of any of your children or other of your bloud’. The cure is successful. Beltramo at first refuses to marry Giletta, but he finally accepts her, under protest. He gets permission to return home to consummate the marriage, but goes instead to take service with the Florentines, then at war with the Siennese. Giletta goes to Rossiglione, where she wins the affection of her subjects by her wise rule. She sends word to Beltramo that if he has abandoned his country because of her, she will depart. He replies that he will not return till she has the ring from his finger and a son in her arms begotten by him. Giletta thereupon assembles the noblest and chiefest of her country and tells them that, to enable Beltramo to return home, she is going to spend the rest of her life in pilgrimages and devotion. She goes to Florence, where she hears that Beltramo is in love with a poor girl. She tells the girl’s mother that she will provide a dowry for her daughter if she will demand Beltramo’s ring, make an assignation with him, and allow Giletta to take her place in bed. The mother consents and Giletta by this means is able to consummate her marriage. Painter adds that she slept with him many more times: Boccaccio mentions only one occasion. When Giletta knows she is pregnant, she gives the girl money and jewels, and in due course gives birth to twin sons. Meanwhile Beltramo has returned home and when he is about to hold a feast Giletta arrives with her babies. She falls at his feet, explaining how she fulfilled his hard conditions. Beltramo, urged by his friends, acknowledges Giletta as his wife and they live happily ever after.
Helena, unlike Giletta, is poor and Shakespeare makes no mention of her having suitors. She does not see Bertram before her interview with the King. After the cure, the King lines up three or four lords for Helena to choose from, and Bertram had expressed a wish to go to the wars before he is trapped into marriage. Helena receives his harsh letter as soon as she arrives at Rousillon, and not in answer to a letter of hers; and she decides at once to leave for Florence, not after ruling for several months. Shakespeare, however, does not mention, as Painter does, that she hopes to fulfil the two conditions, as this might reduce the sympathy of the audience. She meets Diana and her mother as soon as she arrives in Florence, Shakespeare fusing Helena’s hostess and the mother. He complicates the business of the rings by having Diana give Bertram the ring Helena had received from the King. Bertram returns home because of the false news of his wife’s death; Helena returns with Diana and her mother before the birth of her child; and Shakespeare has the King visiting Rousillon at the time. Bertram is about to be married to Lafeu’s daughter, to whom he gives Helena’s ring. This is recognized by Lafeu and the King, Bertram is arrested on suspicion of murdering Helena; Diana enters and claims his hand, and when he repudiates her as a harlot, she demands her ring. Finally Helena enters and all is explained. These complications in the last act, and Bertram’s ordeal, are stage-managed by Helena.
Shakespeare creates several important characters. Bertram’s mother, the poet’s most sympathetic portrait of an old lady, and Lafeu are two of them; and both express a warm admiration for Helena, feeling that she is really too good for Bertram. The rather gloomy Clown is introduced partly to sing a song about Helen of Troy, implying a contrast between her destructiveness and Helena’s healing powers, as revealed in her cure of the King and in her redemption of Bertram. Finally, and most significantly, Shakespeare adds the character of Parolles, the man of words, the miles gloriosus, whose exposure is the first shock administered to Bertram’s self-conceit and false values. He is shown to be as incapable of choosing a friend as he is of appreciating the woman he has been driven to marry. His false values are still further revealed in his willingness to promise marriage as a means of seduction – unlike Beltramo in this – and his moral bankruptcy is displayed in the last scene when he slanders Diana.
The King’s attitude, too, differs from that of his prototype. In the source, the King is reluctant for Giletta to choose Beltramo; but in the play the King has an eloquent speech on the theme that ‘virtue is the true nobility’. It may be mentioned that Giovanni Battista Nenna’s treatise on nobility, translated by William Jones and published in 1595 under the title Nennio, is a debate on the subject of whether true nobility is founded on birth or virtue. The conclusion is that ‘true and perfect nobilitie, doth consist in the vertues of the minde’. The supporter of this view points out that ‘the body is lesse noble than the minde. Of which two partes nature hath framed man, the one being subiect to corruption, the other eternallie dureable’.1 Since we are all descended from Adam, nobility does not depend on birth, for ‘if Adam was noble, why then we are all noble … but if hee were ignoble, and base, we are so likewise’. It follows that ‘true and perfit Nobilitie, is deriued from no other fountaine, then the vertues of the minde, and not from the worthinesse of bloud’. A king can ennoble any man he pleases; it follows that the ‘dignity of a doctor is equall vnto the degree of a knight which hee obtaineth as a reward of his vertues’. We are reminded of Helena and her father. Indeed, Nenna points out that women too are noble by reason of their virtue:
a Lady not borne of any noble bloud, but beautified with good conditions, ought farre to be preferred before her, whose birth is noble, and renowmed, and by her vnordinate behauior becommeth base, and infamous.
The King in All’s Well, who points out that Helena is noble because she is virtuous, and that he can himself give her the rank she lacks, agrees with Nenna and other writers on the subject ‘that the nobilitie of the minde, is farre more true, and farre more perfect, then the nobility of blood conioyned with riches’.
Most critics feel dissatisfied with the play, as they are not with the source.2 Our sympathies are divided between Beltramo and Giletta, and when she succeeds in an apparently impossible task we feel she deserves the hand of the hero. Whether he deserves her is not a question to be raised. Shakespeare transformed the conventional material of the story and, in so doing, gave himself nearly insoluble problems. W. W. Lawrence, indeed, pointed out3 the folk-tale elements surviving in the play and he argued that the Elizabethans would have applauded Helena’s cleverness. The trouble is, as Middleton Murry declared,4 that Helena is by no means a medieval type, but created with ‘delicate hesitation’ as well as business-like resolution. Bertram, moreover, unlike Beltramo, is ‘a cad, morbidly conscious of his birth, blind in his judgement of others, vicious in his morals, and, when cornered, a cowardly liar’ – not, one would think, much of a prize. But Harold S. Wilson was right, I believe, in his interpretation of the play.5 Shakespeare realized that Helena’s actions in the second half of the play were liable to rob her of our sympathy. He arouses our admiration for her in the first acts, both by her own actions and by the comments of others, and in the second half of the play he removes her from the centre of the stage. Bertram’s siege of Diana’s chastity, the unmasking of Parolles, and the accusation of Bertram in the final scene ‘successively provide the focus of interest while Helena works out her designs unobtrusively in the background’. If the title of the play is to be justified, Bertram must be converted, not just trapped; and the function of the Parolles scenes – once the most popular part of the play – and of Bertram’s final ordeal, in which he is exposed for what he shamefully is, is to bring him to a self-recognition, and so make him less unworthy of his wife, whom Shaw admired as a forerunner of Ibsen’s heroines.6
Helena never loses our sympathy, especially when the play is performed. The way she releases the King from his promise, her quiet submissiveness when Bertram repudiates her, and her wish to save him from the dangers of war all prevent us from feeling that she is like Ann Whitfield, hunting down her prey. In the scenes in which Bertram is tricked, the emphasis is mainly on Helena’s pathos, and Diana is never merely a puppet. As Wilson said,
the controlling idea of the play that emerges is the conception of Helena’s love as far stronger than Bertram’s arrogance, a love which works unobtrusively and with humility toward an end that heaven favors.
(p. 239)
We may feel in reading the play that Shakespeare did not quite succeed in humanizing his source-material. Some of the trouble may be due to imperfect revision and a poor text – Violante, for example, is given no words to say, and Bertram’s final capitulation is given in an absurd couplet. But it is a play which acts much better than it reads, and the undertones (e.g. the feeling that, apart from Helena, the younger generation are inferior to their elders) and ambiguities, especially in the character of the heroine, may not be evidences of failure on the part of the dramatist but of a deliberate deepening of his theme. If the Clown were given better jokes and Bertram a better speech at the end, the play would leave us with feelings of greater satisfaction.