Helen, meanwhile, has strong natural qualities (the “dispositions she inherits”) reinforced by a loving and responsible upbringing (the “education” she has received first from her doctor father, then in the household of the Countess).

Parallel to the question of nature and nurture is that of divine providence and individual responsibility. Helen believes that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven”: like Bertram, she is a voice of modernity in her belief that individuals can carve their own destiny. She does so by means of disguise and bold solo travel: from Rossillion in southwest France to Paris, where she gains access to the King, then to Florence in the dress of a pilgrim en route to Compostela. Like Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Viola in Twelfth Night, she uses her disguised self as an opportunity to talk about her true feelings. The part is the longest in the play and it gives an actor great opportunities for the portrayal of an isolated young woman’s self-exploration through both soliloquy and dialogue in lucid and serpentine verse, not to mention passages of prose banter and some piercing asides.

As Dr. Johnson dryly noted, the geography seems somewhat awry when Helen undertakes her pilgrimage: in going from France to Spain via Italy, she is “somewhat out of the road.” Such details did not matter to Shakespeare. For him, the pilgrim motif—taken over from the story in Boccaccio that was his source for the main plot of the play—had symbolic importance in that it associated Helen with an older value structure of reverence and self-sacrifice even as she asserts her own will. Pilgrims are people who believe in miracles, so Helen’s adoption of the role allies her with the worldview voiced by the old courtier Lafew after she has cured the King: “They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.”

Yet Helen is only a pretended pilgrim and the King has been cured not by a miracle but by the medical knowledge she has inherited from her father. Again and again the play takes a fairy-tale motif and turns it into something tougher, more earthly and open to philosophical debate. Lafew’s generalization sets up the key scene in which Bertram rejects Helen. The idea of unquestioning obedience to the King’s will is itself a thing “supernatural and causeless.” It depends upon an “unknown fear,” the mystique of monarchy, the idea that the King is God’s representative on earth and that to challenge him will cause the entire fabric of the natural order to collapse. In a crucial rhyming couplet near the end of the play—often editorially reassigned to the Countess of Rossillion for no good textual reason—the King says that, since he has failed in his management of Bertram’s first marriage, the second had better be a success, otherwise “nature” may as well “cesse” (cease).

Shakespeare’s instinctive conservatism tips the balance in favor of the old order. The King, the Countess, and the old courtier are generous and ethically admirable, much more obviously sympathetic than Bertram, Parolles, and Lavatch. Bertram has to be tricked out of his sexual selfishness and Parolles out of his vainglory, but still Shakespeare the role-player and wordsmith invests huge dramatic energy in the darker characters. He uses them to open cracks in the established order. The King tells Bertram that Helen should be viewed for what she is within, not by way of the superficial trappings of wealth and rank: “The property by what it is should go, / Not by the title.” Yet his own authority depends on his title, and the “go by what it is” argument might be turned to say that if Bertram does not love Helen he should not marry her. The King moves swiftly from reasoning to the assertion of raw authority: “My honour’s at the stake, which to defeat, / I must produce my power.” Shakespeare’s intensely compacted writing style makes the point. By “which to defeat,” the King means “in order to defeat the threat to my honour,” but ironically the very need to produce his “power” itself defeats the code of honor. As so often in Shakespeare’s darker plays, the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli lurks in the shadows, whispering that fine old codes such as honor and duty can only be underwritten by raw power.

He who asserts the new code of the self must live by that code. Both Bertram and Parolles are found out. The two lords Dumaine are not only mechanics in the double plot of ambush and bed trick, but also commentators upon how their victims are brought to self-knowledge: “As we are ourselves, what things are we! / Merely our own traitors.” The Dumaines too are young and modern in their recognition that we cannot simply sort our kind into sheep and goats in the manner of authoritarian religious dispensations. They propose instead that human life is shaded gray: “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.” This could be the epigraph for Shakespeare’s dramatically mingled yarn of tragicomedy.

Parolles comes to acknowledge his boastful tongue. “Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live,” he vows. What, though, can this mean, given that—as his name indicates—he is made of nothing but words? Bertram, meanwhile, only comes to realize how much Helen is to be valued when she has been lost. The fiction of comedy gives him a second chance to love her. But in the modern world where there are no miracles, “all’s well that ends well” is a fiction. Along the way we have been promised on more than one occasion that all will end well, but when it comes to the climax the King says that “all yet seems well” and that “if it end so meet” then all bitterness will be past. Those little conditional qualifiers leave open the door to the tragic world.

THE CRITICS DEBATE

Early critics regarded All’s Well as a farce, then as a romance, then largely as a failure in psychological realism. In the nineteenth century, commentators highlighted a lack of poetry in the drama: “The style of the whole is more sententious than imaginative: the glowing colours of fancy could not with propriety have been employed on such a subject.”2

At the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, George Bernard Shaw suggested that the problem of the play was its modernity: a part such as that of Helen was “too genuine and beautiful and modern for the public.”3 In Shaw’s view, Helen’s independence of mind made her into a proto-feminist heroine, an anticipation of the female characters in the plays of Henrik Ibsen who sought to escape the doll’s house.