Part 11 (1/2)
_All's Well that Ends Well._
_Written._ (?)
_Published._ 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The story of Helena's love for Bertram is found in the _Decamerone_ of Boccaccio (giorn. 3, nov. 9).
Shakespeare may have read it in the _Palace of Pleasure_.
_The Fable._ Helena, orphan daughter of a physician, has been brought up, as a dependant, in the house of the Countess of Rousillon. She falls in love with Bertram, the son of the Countess and the King's ward.
Bertram goes to the French Court, on his way to the wars. He finds the King dangerously ill. Helena, hearing of the King's illness, comes to the Court as a physician. She offers to cure the King with one of her father's remedies, on condition that, when cured, he will give her in marriage the man of her choice. The King accepts these conditions; she cures him; she chooses for her husband Bertram.
Bertram, the King's ward, has to do the King's bidding. He grudgingly accepts her; they are married. He leaves her, and goes to the wars in the service of the Duke of Florence, designing to see her no more. Helena withdraws from the Countess's house, and comes to Florence disguised.
Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena impersonates her, receives her unsuspecting husband at night, takes from him a ring, and gives, in exchange, a ring given to her by the King of France.
At the end of the war, Bertram, hearing that Helena is dead, returns to France, wearing the ring. The King sees it and challenges it. Bertram can give no just account of how he got it.
Helena, quick with child by him, confronts him, with the ring that he left with her at Florence. Diana, the Florentine maid, gives evidence that Helena impersonated her on the night of Bertram's visit at Florence. Bertram accepts Helena as his wife, and the play ends happily.
This play (whenever written) was extensively revised during the ruthless mood that gave birth to _Measure for Measure_. The alterations were made in a mood so much deeper than the mood of its first composition that they make the play uneven. Something, perhaps some trick of health, that made the mind clearer than the imagination, gave to Shakespeare for a short time another (and pitiless) view of human obsessions.
It was a part of his belief that treachery is generally caused by blindness, blindness generally by some obsession of pa.s.sion. In this play he treats of the removal of an obsession by making plain to the obsessed, by pitiless judicial logic, the ugliness of the treachery it causes.
Bertram is a young man fresh from home. He does not want to marry. He is eager to see the world and to win honour. He has been accustomed to look down on Helena as a poor dependant. He does not like her, and he does not like being ordered. He is suddenly ordered to marry her. He has been trapped by a woman's underhand trick. He sees himself brought into bondage with all the plumes of his youth clipped close. There is no way of escape; he has to marry her; but the King's order cannot quench his rage against the woman who has so snared him. His rage burns inward into a brooding, rankling ill-humour that becomes an obsession. It is one of the tragedies of life that an evil obsession blinds the judgment on more sides than one. The obsessed are always without criticism. A way of destruction may be as narrow as a way of virtue; but all the other ways of destruction run into it. Bertram in blinkers to the good in Helena is blind to the faults in himself and in Parolles his friend. Wilfully, as the sullen do, he thinks himself justified in doing evil because evil has been done to him. Hot blood is running in him. Temptation, never far from youth, is always near the unbalanced. He takes an unworthy confidant, as the obsessed do, and goes in over the ears. His sin is the giving of salutation to sportive blood, it is love, it is ”natural rebellion,” it is young man's pastime. But looked at coldly and judicially, with the nature of the confidant laid bare, and the lies of the sinner made plain, it is an ugly thing. Pa.s.sion is sweet enough to seem truth, the only truth. Let the eyes be opened a little, and it will blast the heart with horror. What man thought true is then seen to be this, this thing, this devil of falseness who gives man this kind of friend, makes him tell this kind of lie, and brands him with this kind of shame.
Shakespeare is just to Bertram. The treachery of a woman is often the cause of a man's treachery to womanhood. Helena's obsession of love makes her blind to the results of her actions. She twice puts the man whom she loves into an intolerable position, which nothing but a king can end. The fantasy is not made so real that we can believe in the possibility of happiness between two so married. Helena has been praised as one of the n.o.blest of Shakespeare's women. Shakespeare saw her more clearly than any man who has ever lived. He saw her as a woman who practises a borrowed art, not for art's sake, nor for charity, but, woman fas.h.i.+on, for a selfish end. He saw her put a man into a position of ignominy quite unbearable, and then plot with other women to keep him in that position. Lastly, he saw her beloved all the time by the conventionally minded of both s.e.xes.
The play is full of effective theatrical situations. It contains much fine poetry. Besides the poetry there are startling moments of insight--
”My mother told me just how he would woo As if she sat in's heart....”
”Now, G.o.d delay our rebellion! as we are ourselves, What things are we! Merely our own traitors.”
”I would gladly have him see his company anatomised, That he might take a measure of his own judgments.”
”The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”
”Our rash faults Make trivial price of serious things we have, Not knowing them until we know their grave: Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust, Destroy our friends and after weep their dust.”
_Julius Caesar._
_Written._ 1601 (?)
_Produced._ (?)
_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ The Lives of Antonius, Brutus and Julius Caesar in Sir Thomas North's _Plutarch_.
A tragedy of Julius Caesar, now lost, was performed by Shakespeare's company in 1594. Shakespeare must have known this play.