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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.
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