Isaiah Davis Essays - Alls Well That Ends Well, William Shakespeare

Isaiah Davis One of the themes that emerge from Shakespeare's comedy All's Well That Ends Well is the conflict between old and new, age and youth, wisdom and folly, reason and passion. As one critic points out, a simple glance at the characters of the play reveals an almost equally balanced cast of old and young. "In performance it is apparent that the youth of the leading characters, Helena, Bertram, Diana and Paroles, is in each case precisely balanced by the greater age of their counterparts, the Countess, the King of France, the Widow of Florence and the old counselor Lafeu."1 Indeed, the dialectic between youth and age is established in the first act as the Countess sees a mirror of her former self in Helena's love sick countenance in scene three when she exclaims "Even so it was with me when I was young," and Bertram's worthiness to the ailing King of France in the previous scene appears to hang upon his youthful resemblance to his deceased father. As the King explains, "Such a man might be a copy to these younger times,/Which followed well would demonstrate them now/But goers-backward. Like so many literary youths of his day, Shakespeare went backward for his source material for All's Well and based the play on Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Boccaccio's early sixteenth-century story revolves around Gillette of Narbona, the daughter of a wealthy and respected physician. Giletta, like Helena (the daughter of the deceased--and indigent--Gerard de Narbonne), falls in love with young count Beltrami, follows him to Paris where she remedies the King's incurable disease, and, because of her newly-acquired royal favor, is granted the right to demand a husband: Beltrami. Despite the King's elitist reluctance to grant Gillette her wish (which contrasts the Shakespearean monarch's unmitigated blessing), he keeps his promise and orders the count to marry the physician's daughter. The rest of Boccaccio's story proceeds in like fashion to Shakespeare's with the exception of Gillettes arrival at Rossiglione (vs. Rossillion) with twin sons as opposed to a single fetus. As W. W. Lawrence points out, conventional folk motifs such as "The Fulfillment of the Tasks" and "The Healing of the King" undergird Boccacio's--and thus Shakespeare's--tale.2 In addition to theses narrative devices, the play also contains another folk motif, that of the "bed-trick"--a frequently used convention in Renaissance drama that allows one lover to be substituted for another unbeknownst to the first party of a particular amorous tryst. Shakespeare relies on tradition to provide character types for him as well as thematic elements. The puffed-up Platean soldier or miles gloriosus figure makes his appearance in All's Well in the guise of Parolles, who "descends from a venerable line of braggart warriors, talkers and not doers, who originate with Aristophanes and then swagger their way through Menander, Plautus, and Terrence into Elizabethan comedy. Thus, Shakespeare collects old conventions, devices and stock characters to create a new fairy-tale, one that bears the distinctive mark of tradition but reveals new insights. For Shakespeare's archetypal story is one that gives genesis to some difficult questions. As many critics testify, All's Well differs from many of Shakespeare's other comedies in its dark overtones. He illustrates certain problems at court but provides no Greenworld; he introduces a love story without two active lovers; he creates a seemingly equivocal heroine and a callow, prevaricating hero. "In this world," Anne Barton explains, "unicorns do not exist to testify to the mystic power of virginity, and Prince Charming is likely to prefer the fashionably dressed elder sisters to beauty in rags. Love itself is not simply the servant of a fantastic plot, but a matter of complex adjustments within the personality. Indeed, Shakespeare's old skins produce potent and problematic new wine for, as many critics note, the psychologically complex characters in this play prove far too sophisticated for the formal stylistic vehicle that contains them. This fairy-tale ends happily, but only if we suspend our disbelief to allow for Bertram's all too brief conversion and forgive him of certain newly rendered sins that further cast him as a rather unworthy prize. This fairy-tale ends happily if we can resolve the problems presented by Helena's character: Is she a "saintly maiden" or a "cunning vixen. It