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Character as the True Source of Nobility
When Bertram initially rejects the idea of marrying Helen, his main objection is that she comes from a different—and lower—social class than him. Whereas he is a count who has inherited his title from his father, Helen is just “a poor physician’s daughter” (2.3.126). Yet for everyone present, Bertram’s mistake seems self-evident. Despite not being born into the nobility, Helen is a beautiful, well-spoken, and honorable young woman whose obvious virtues reveal an intrinsic nobility of spirit. The Countess and Lafew have both felt drawn to Helen’s honorable character. Likewise, the King of France recognizes Helen’s uniqueness when she convinces him to accept the life-saving treatment she has brought to his court. The only person who doesn’t accept Helen is Bertram. So, when the young count complains about the match with Helen, the King is quick to dispel his concern, saying that he can simply confer noble status on Helen by giving her an inheritance. What the King is really saying here is that the title and material status that Bertram seems to associate with nobility is superficial. The only thing that really matters is an individual’s honor and virtue, which is a question of personal character.
Ironically, it’s precisely this personal nobility of character that Bertram is lacking. Throughout the play he shows himself to be immature, deceptive, and a ruthless manipulator of women. He’s also something of a coward who evades responsibility and uses letters as a tool to inflict cruelty on others. If Bertram is meant to be shining example of a young nobleman, then the nobility has a severe image problem. In this regard, Bertram shares an unflattering likeness to Parolles, the cowardly courtier who spends all his time talking himself up. The fact that both Bertram and Parolles are eventually exposed as men whose honor and virtue are wanting suggests that nobility has no inherent meaning if not substantiated by good character. In typical Shakespearean fashion, it is the Fool who states this theme most plainly when he jokes to Parolles that he should avoid trouble by saying, doing, and knowing nothing. He follows this advice with a cutting observation about the nobility in general: “to have nothing is to be a great part of your title, which is within a very little of nothing” (2.4.24–26). Inherited titles thus have no inherent value and must be substantiated with nobility of character.
The Importance of Self-Knowledge
One of the key traits that distinguishes the honorable characters from the dishonorable ones in All’s Well That Ends Well is that the honorable characters know themselves. Self-knowledge appears to be most abundant in the older generation of characters, including the Countess, Lafew, and the King of France. Each of these characters benefit from the wisdom of experience, and they often reflect explicitly and honestly on the situations they find themselves in. Among the younger generation, it tends to be the women who are most in possession of self-knowledge. Helen, for instance, is a resourceful young woman whose confidence in herself is well substantiated. She proves as much when she manages to convince the King to let him treat her. Despite her age, gender, and lack of experience, she asserts herself confidently, promising even to forfeit her own life should she prove unable to save his. In the end, her faith in herself bears out and she delivers on her seemingly impossible promise. The other young woman who displays admirable self-knowledge is Diana, who remains committed to her own chastity despite Bertram’s ruthless pursuit of her.
In contrast to these young women, the young men of the play exhibit greater limitations with self-awareness. At first glance, the most obvious person to suffer from a lack of self-knowledge is Parolles. Despite frequently portraying himself as an honorable soldier, his words just as frequently reveal that he is in fact a coward. It therefore comes as a surprise when, during the plot designed to expose his treachery, Parolles shows that he is indeed fully aware of his own foolhardiness. He knows that he’s all talk and no action, and he accepts this unsavory truth about himself—a fact that causes a lord to utter in shock: “Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?” (4.1.45–46). Though it doesn’t make him less of a treacherous coward, Parolles’s capacity for self-knowledge enables his minor rehabilitation in the play’s final act. It also distinguishes him from Bertram, who disowns Parolles without recognizing his own numerous character flaws. His lack of self-knowledge arguably leads to the tense final scene where the King catches him in a lie and publicly chastens him for it. If he wants to be redeemed, the King implies, Bertram will need to get “well acquainted with [him]self” (5.3.123).
The Human Source of Fate
When the audience first meets Helen and learns of her love for Bertram, she appears to us as a romantic stereotype who does what any lovesick young girl in her situation would do: lament how she’s been fated to love a man who doesn’t love her back. Soon, however, Helen experiences a shift in perception. Perhaps taking a cue from the memory of her late father, a physician who learned how to cure mysterious ailments through research and experimentation, Helen realizes that fate isn’t written in the stars. As she puts it in a monologue that comes at the end of the play’s first scene: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.222–23). As if in a moment of perfect clarity, Helen realizes that the concept of fate may be little more than an excuse for a person’s lack of self-application. Only “when we ourselves are dull” is it the case that the heavens “doth backward pull” (1.1.224–25). Otherwise, “the fated sky / Gives us free scope” (1.1.223–24).
With these words, Helen marks the first shift toward a plot in which she’ll take her fate into her own hands. Helen will repeatedly show great resourcefulness, thereby demonstrating the truth of her early observation about the human source of faith. Whenever she faces a setback, she places her faith in her own ability to figure things out—a faith that will eventually be enshrined in her titular aphorism, “all’s well that ends well” (see 4.4.39 and 5.1.30). Yet Helen isn’t the only character who bears out the truth that humans can make their own fate. By playing a crucial role in the bed-trick plot, Diana is also emblematic of this theme. Significantly, Diana shares a name with the Roman goddess of the hunt, who is also the goddess of chastity and fertility. Early in the play, Helen denounces this goddess, claiming that “Dian [is] no queen of virginity, that would suffer her poor knight [i.e., Helen] surprised without rescue in the first assault or ransom afterward” (1.3.115–18). As it turns out, Helen was right to disown the immortal goddess. When she later encounters the human Diana, this mortal proves perfectly capable of preserving her own chastity while enabling Helen’s fertility.
