All's Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare's Marriage1

All’s Well That Ends Well R. BRIAN and Shakespeare’s Marriage1 PARKER

Résumé : Cette note revient sur le peu de faits connus du mariage de Shakes- peare,faits qui semblent indiquer une union plus ou moins imposée par lafamille d’une femme enceinte, pour proposer une dimension biographique de cette comédie tardive. Justement, l’un des principaux facteurs qui font qualifier All’s Well That Ends Well de « comédie problématique » est le rôle inhabituel joué par le mariage comme marqueur, non pas de la réalisation du désir de deux jeunes amoureux, mais plutôt du triomphe de l’héroïne de la pièce au depens du jeune homme, qui avait résisté à un tel mariage. Ce triomphe s’effectue par un stratégème faisant en sorte que le jeune homme se trouve obligé d’accepter la jeune femme déjà enceinte, et le mélange d’amertume et de honte marquant son attitude aurait bien pu être projeté sur le personnage par un dramaturge plus agé qui reconnaissait, dans son texte source, l’image miroir d’une situation de sa jeunesse.

hough most criticism of All’s Well That Ends Well pays a great deal of Tattention to parallels between the play and Shakespeare’s sonnets, none of the recent studies or editions considers it in relation to Shakespeare’s marriage.2 The resemblances, however (and, of course, the concomitant dangers of oversimple interpretation), are quite striking. Stripped of special pleading, the documentary facts of the marriage are these. On 27 November 1582 a licence was recorded in the Bishop’s Register of Worcester for William Shakespeare to marry Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton, a village outside Stratford-on-Avon. The very next day, 28 Novem- ber 1582, two friends of the Hathaway family of Shottery, a parish of Stratford, put up a bond at Worcester to guarantee the marriage of William Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway of Stratford by special licence requiring

Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, XXV, 3 (2001) /43 44 / Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme only one calling of the banns, probably just before the ceremony. Records of neither the licence (unless it was the Whateley licence of the previous day, which is possible but unlikely),3 nor the marriage itself have survived, but the wedding certainly took place. On the evidence of her gravestone, Anne Hathaway was eight years older than her bridegroom, twenty-six to his eighteen; and though she is described as “maiden” in the bond, in fact she was already three months pregnant: her first child, Susanna, was born at the end of the following May. Nineteen months later the couple had twins, Judith and Hamnet, and Shake- speare left Stratford to spend the next twenty-five years of his working life elsewhere, with only occasional visits home (Aubrey says once a year) until he returned finally to Stratford at the very end of his career. There were no further pregnancies and there is no record of Anne ever visiting him in London; and, if the sonnets are at all autobiographical, the poet had love affairs while he was away. And then there is the meagre and hotly debated interlineation in his will by which the only thing left to Anne Hathaway was his “second best bed,” however that should be construed. There have been many attempts to prettify these facts, all dependent partly on supposition,4 but the basic conclusion one can justifiably draw from them is that Shakespeare had a hurried, perhaps even a shot-gun, marriage to a woman considerably older than himself whom he had made pregnant, and that, though the couple may have become reconciled later in life, theirs was by no means a companionate marriage. Certainly, in his plays from Romeo and Juliet to The Tempest Shakespeare persistently opposes premarital sex; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream he advises against unequal ageinloveaffairs;andinTwelfth Night he warns specifically and at length against boys marrying women older than themselves. Orsino tells Viola, in her disguise as “Cesario,”

Let still the woman take An elder than herself, so wears she to him; So sways she level in her husband’s heart. For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and infirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn, Than women’s are. . . . Then let thy love be younger than thyself, Or thy affection cannot hold the beat; For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r Being once display’d, doth fall that very hour. (II.4.29-39) R. Brian Parker / All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Marriage / 45

Having fathered twins himself, Shakespeare was fascinated by the phenomenon, as witness The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night itself; and it may have been this that attracted him to the Boccaccio source story for All’s Well in the first place, because its heroine, Giletta, the model for Helena in the play, gives birth to twin boys before she confronts the Bertram character, Beltramo, to claim her marital rights. Such a background makes it unlikely that Shakespeare reacted to the Boccaccio story of “Giletta of Narbonne” with unmixed feelings; and, in fact, aspects of the marriage can throw light on several characteristics of All’s Well that have led to its description as a “problem comedy.” To begin with, there is the treatment of the heroine. Helena (or “Helen” as she may originally have been called5) is a very different person from Boccaccio’s Giletta. Not only is she poor, whereas Giletta is rich (Anne Hathaway’s dowry was only modest), but Shakespeare seems to have thrust the positive and negative aspects of her personality vigorously apart, presenting the former mostly through the language — which is why, perhaps, it has attracted disproportionate attention — and the latter through elaborations of the plot. Helena is constantly praised by characters we respect, in particular Bertram’s mother, the Countess of Rossillion, and her friend Lord Lafew, both of whom are Shakespeare’s inventions, not in the Boccaccio story. She is constantly associated with the will of Heaven, particularly in her cure of the King and her decision to go on a pilgrimage to repent the way her forwardness has led to Bertram’s self-exile and the risking of his life in war. As G. Wilson Knight puts it, “religious values cluster round her.”6 And, as audience, we are made privy to her emotional distress by the fact that, in the first half of the play, she is given all the soliloquies. The only other person to soliloquize is (perhaps designedly) Parolles in the second half. These positive effects of the text are contradicted, however, by Shake- speare’s alterations to the plot. Helena has a streak of moral evasiveness that starts to seem hypocritical and even wily. Unlike Giletta, who is totally frank about her motives, Helena at first tries to conceal the reason for her decision to try to cure the King, then obscures her pursuit of Bertram into Italy by pretending to be a pilgrim — though Florence is blatantly (and surely designedly) well wide of the route between France and St. James of Com- postella in northern Spain, which Shakespeare has her claim as destination (III.4.4). The bribery of Diana to secure Bertram’s ancestral ring and to let Helena perform the bed-trick are as in Boccaccio (though one can wonder whose money Helena is using), but Shakespeare then introduces several complications —the lie that she has died because of Bertram’s unkindness, the business of the second ring that she gave Bertram in bed (which we learn later was a gift to her from the King), and the sending of a letter purportedly 46 / Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme from Diana, then of Diana herself, to accuse Bertram of breach-of-promise — which make it clear that public humiliation of Bertram before the King has been part of Helena’s plan since his desertion. Quite a piece of work is Helena,infact,ifregardedonlyinrelationtoplot;anditisatributeto Shakespeare’s skill (and perhaps his generosity) that he keeps our sympathy with her — not only by the textual support already mentioned, but also by having her hesitate in the first half of the play when confronted by the Countess, when the King first refuses to see her, and when Bertram protests against their marriage, and in the second half of the play by diverting the focus to Parolles and by never letting us know the extent of Helena’s plotting until well after the fact. The effect, however, is mixed, as Shakespeare’s own experience might lead us to expect, and the final union of the lovers (if Bertram may justifiably be so described) has been universally condemned as unpersuasive, as indeed the King’s emphasis on “seems” and “if” in the Epilogue seems designed to recognize.7 Another aspect of the play that the biographical record may shed light on is the character of the hero. Like Dr. Johnson, most of us find it difficult to reconcile our hearts to Bertram, and critics who idealize Helena are particularly puzzled at her choice of such an unreliable and feckless husband. Shakespeare may be indulging in a little self-criticism here, but of more importance is the question of Bertram’s age, especially vis-à-vis Helena. Because Boccaccio emphasizes Giletta’s youth and Parolles at one point calls Helena “little” (I.1.188 — a reference, of course, to the boy actor playing the role), most critics and directors assume that Helena must be younger than Bertram, in Elizabethan terms probably fifteen to his seven- teen. However, though Helena must be of an age still to merit the adjective “young,” Bertram is actually called “boy” many times and is denied permis- sion to go soldiering by the King because he is younger than the other courtiers. Without having as much as an eight-year gap between them or going to the extremes of W. S. Gilbert (or Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate), Bertram’s panic when this protégée of his mother unexpectedly demands him in marriage, as well as his emotional collapse into her safe-keeping at the end, make most sense if the role is cast to suggest an inexperienced sixteen-year-old confronted by an older woman who can still be described by the previous generation in the play as “young”:8 a situation Shakespeare had developed in his early poem Venus and Adonis and dramatised in his first play, Henry VI. Bertram’s behaviour, in fact, illustrates Freud’s analysis of inhibited sexuality: having tried with Diana to have sex with a girl he can consider demeaned by it, he collapses into the control of a dominating woman closely associated with his mother. A biographical reading of this kind postulates the mature Shakespeare looking back on the stresses of his R. Brian Parker / All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Marriage / 47 early marriage with a mixture of shame, sympathy, guilt, and self-justifica- tion (“I behaved badly but there was reason for it”). Such a complicated response seems to me quite plausible: the writer of the sonnets certainly knew such self-disgust. Thirdly, there is the question of why Shakespeare at the conclusion invents the character of Lafew’s daughter, Maudlin, to whom it is agreed that Bertram was informally engaged before he left for Court. This “ghost character” serves no plot purpose whatsoever, and the audience is left wondering why she was not mentioned earlier by Bertram or even by her father (or, for that matter, by the King, who is said to have initiated their engagement). Knowledge of such a prior understanding would certainly have affected our earlier attitude to Helena’s proposal and Bertram’s reac- tions to it. Is it pushing speculation too far to see in this oddly unheralded and quite unnecessary Maudlin a shadow of the elusive Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton? A similar situation is explored in Henry VI, where the young king is engaged to marry someone else before he is unceremoniously commanded to accept the experienced and overbearing Margaret; and, of course, with an interesting shift of the bedtrick, there is also that other jilted girl, Mariana of the moated grange, in another problem comedy of this period, Measure for Measure. A final detail, more loosely connected to the marriage data, is the second ring, which the King has presented to Helena to give her husband on their bridal night. This complements Bertram’s ancestral ring and, unlike the allusion to Maudlin, does function minimally in the plot as an initial cause of the King's and Lafew’s distrust of Bertram’s repentance. It is not a necessary device, however, and it raises questions about Helena’s relations with the King that may be worth pursuing. In conjunction with the unexpectedly sexual aura that Shakespeare has added to Helena’s cure, with the King’s vehement insistence on immediate marriage (whereas in Boccaccio he is reluctant), with his continuing promi- nence in the action (in Boccaccio he disappears after the cure), with Helena’s promise of his favour to the Widow and determination to shame Bertram before him, and with the claim at the dénouement that already she can “feel her young one kick” (V.3.302), though there has not been anything like sufficient time for this, the play sketches in the shadow of a suspicion about the paternity of Helena’s child: the sort of niggling, marginal doubt that anyone in Shakespeare’s own position would most probably have enter- tained at some stage. Bertram shows no such doubt, of course, as yet; but all these details have been added by Shakespeare to the source story, and cumulatively they provide an intriguing extra dimension for the lovers’ unconvincing reunion and the King’s warily tentative epitaph.9 48 / Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme

So radical a subtext is only tenable on close reading, of course. Though it is no falser than Wilson Knights’ religious overemphasis, any attempt to stage the suspicion would obliterate the ending’s ironic ambiguity. Actors should perhaps be aware of the argument, but only as a possibility. Like Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well demands a complex “Mannerist” response, and there are many ways to shade it. And if the sonnets are to be drawn on for analogies (or Shakespeare’s part in the Mountjoy lawsuit), there is equal reason to consider the play’s parallels to the records of 1582. Trinity College, University of Toronto

Notes 1. This note is excerpted from a lecture on All’s Well delivered at the Festival Theatre of Stratford, Ontario, on 31 July 2002. Quotations and references are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 2. E.g., such standard editions of All’s Well That Ends Well as those by G. K. Hunter, The New Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1959), and Susan Snyder, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); books on the play by Joseph G. Price (The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of All’s Well That Ends Well and Its Critics [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968]), J. L. Styan (All’s Well That’s Ends Well, Shakespeare in Performance [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984]), and Sheldon P. Zitner (All’s Well That Ends Well, Twayne’s New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare [Boston: Twayne, 1989]); Richard Wheeler’s psychoanalytic study, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Plays: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); and the most recent biography by Park Honan (Shakespeare: A Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998]). Even Sir Sidney Lee in his A Life of William Shakespeare, 4th rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1929), though he interprets the marriage records as literally as I, does not draw analogies between them and All’s Well (he also thinks Anne Whateley must have been engaged to some other William Shakespeare). 3. The usual arguments are that “Whateley” was a mistranscription of (or confusion for) “Hathaway,” in which case Anne Hathaway was probably living for some reason at Temple Grafton, so the marriage may well have been solemnized in that village, whose records have not survived. Supposition is thus built on supposition, and there is no hard evidence for any of it. The fact that legally bonds had to be given before a licence could be issued is also ignored. 4. The best authorities for the standard interpretation are Joseph William Gray, Shake- speare’s Marriage, His Departure from Stratford and Other Incidents in His Life (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), and Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York: Oxford University Press in association with The Scolar Press, 1975). 5. Susan Snyder argues this convincingly in her Oxford edition of 1993. R. Brian Parker / All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Marriage / 49

6. G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism, together with Related Essays and Indexes to Earlier Volumes (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 144. 7. Interpretations incorporating the less ideal aspects of Helena’s character have been successfully essayed at Stratford-on-Avon by Joyce Redmond (1955), Estelle Kohler (1967), and Harriet Walker (1981), and Angela Downs skillfully balanced both sides of the character in the BBC television production of 1981. Critics most disparaging of Helena are Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare’s Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), and Richard A. Levin, “All’s Well and ‘All Seems Well,’” Shakespeare Studies 13 (1981): 131-44. In chapter 3 of William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays, Twayne’s English Authors Series (New York: Twayne, 1993), pp. 54-91, Richard Hillman argues cogently that Helena is presented as the “metadramatist” of her own role as “love’s martyr.” 8. Helena was represented as older than Bertram in John Houseman’s New York produc- tion of 1959 and Richard Monette’s of 2002 at Stratford, Ontario, but neither explored the insight very thoroughly. 9. If one were to indulge in the fancy for sequels so beloved of Victorians, one might speculate that Helena, like Giletta, will give birth to twins and Bertram will leave Rossillion again for a more protracted absence.