All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare Page B

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