The King and the Physician’s Daughter: All’s Well That Ends Well and the Late Romances

The King and the Physician’s Daughter: AlFs Well That Ends Well and the Late Romances Richard P. Wheeler In his now classic formulation of “The Argument of Come­ dy,” Northrop Frye called attention to the unusual turn Shake­ speare gives the typical comic pattern in All’s Well that Ends Well—and noted die difficulties this alteration has posed for critics: The normal comic resolution is the surrender of the senex to the hero, never the reverse. Shakespeare tried to reverse the pattern in All’s Well that Ends Well, where the king of France forces Bertram to marry Helena, and the critics have not yet stopped making faces over it.l This curious inversion of comic action is all the more remarkable in the light of Frye’s suggestion that New Comedy dramatizes a “comic Oedipus situation” in which a young man (the son in the Oedipus triangle) outwits a father to win the love of a young woman (p. 58). The heroine is unconsciously linked to an image of the youthful mother that a son loved and thought himself to possess as a young child. In this framework, the comic move­ ment toward marriage builds on fantasies of triumphant return to a time in which a boy thought himself in secure and complete possession of a mother’s love and the father could still be re­ garded as an unwelcome intruder, susceptible, at least in the child’s imagination, to magical exclusion.2 The complex dramatic strategies in Shakespeare’s festive comedies which safeguard triumphs in love relations from the contamination of familial associations deserve more extensive treatment than they may be given here. But their purpose in creating a world in which young love may prosper is neatly 311 312 Comparative Drama summed up by Rosalind in As You Like It: “But what talk we of fathers when there is such a man as Orlando?” In All’s Well, however, there is a very strong emphasis on bonds that are grounded in family experience. Unlike the festive comedies, All’s Well presents an action in which parental figures are closely and actively involved in the steps that lead to marriage. In the late romances there is a further intensification of family bonds, as Shakespeare evolves a comic design that includes but does not turn on the fulfilment of youthful love in marriage. In this paper I will try to account for some of the difficulties posed by All’s Well by examining one kind of relation that play has to the late romances. C. L. Barber has provided the framework that brings this relation into focus. “In the festive comedies,” argues Barber, “holiday liberty frees passion from inhibition and the control of an older generation.” But in the late romances, the festive movement is included within a larger movement where the centre of feeling is in the older generation. The fes­ tive comedies move out to the creation of new families; Pericles and The Winter’s Tale move through experiences of loss back to the recovery of family relations in and through the next gen­ eration. . . . One can put this in summary by saying that where regular comedy deals with freeing sexuality from the ties of family, these late romances deal with freeing family ties from the threat of sexual degradation.3 In All’s Well, a play caught in the middle of this transition, a central action much like those of the festive comedies is brought under unique and disruptive pressures by the partial intrusion of a pattern of love and desire that is grounded in relations with­ in a family. Professor Barber argues that in the late romances “fulfilment for the principal figure requires a transformation of love, not simply liberation of it” (ibid.). Pericles and The Winter's Tale transform love relations which include hazardous, perverse trends. Repressed components in Pericles’ love for a daughter and Leontes’s love for a friend4 lead to catastrophic situations of loss and betrayal. The action of these plays recovers those rela­ tions on a new plane, purified of perverse sexual longings. In All’s Well, Shakespeare attempts to dramatize the resolution of a love situation that...