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Practical
Miracles:
All's Well that Ends Well by Sarah Skwire
The King
of France’s ill health is almost the first topic of discussion
as All’s Well that Ends Well opens. When the Countess asks “What
hope is there of his majesty’s amendment?” (1.1.11) it is
only line eleven of the play’s first scene.1 This foregrounding
of the subject of the King’s health suggests that it will be an
important topic throughout the play, and it is. However, the King is
not merely sick so that Helena may cure him and then request Bertram
as her reward. His illness is much more than a Hitchcockian McGuffin
that creates motives for the characters’ actions but has no greater
meaning or purpose. It is, instead, an important key to providing a coherent
reading of a play that is often seen as having two nearly irreconcilable
halves and to providing a clearer understanding of Helena’s complex
characterization.
The
first suggestion that the King’s illness is going to be a significant
factor in the play is the fact that Shakespeare, unlike many early modern
dramatists, tells his audience exactly what is wrong with the King.
The King has a fistula, a specific ailment. He is not simply sick or suffering. We know, with relative precision, what is wrong with him. The OED confirms that a fistula is a specific thing, and that the term “fistula” would have meant the same thing to an early modern as it does to a modern: a “long, narrow, suppurating canal of morbid origin in some part of the body; a long sinuous pipe-like ulcer with a narrow orifice.” David Bevington suggests that Shakespeare may not have had such a specific definition in mind for the King’s fistula. “Whether Shakespeare gave the complaint this much detailed attention is to be doubted; he mentions it only once, perhaps indicating some kind of ulcerous sore.” 2 Bevington’s suggestion is plausible. Both of Shakespeare’s most probable sources for the plot of All’s Well, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Painter’s English translation/retelling of Boccaccio, refer to the King’s disease as a fistula. So, it is possible that Shakespeare had a passing knowledge of the term and simply took it from his sources and applied it to his play. However, both Boccaccio and Painter are careful to mention the placement of the King’s fistula. Boccaccio says that the King had “a growth on his chest which had been badly tended [and] had left him with a fistula that caused him no end of pain and misery.” 3 Painter explains that “the French king had a swelling upon his breast, which by reason of ill cure, was growen to be a Fistula, which did put him to marveilous paine and griefe.” 4 What is interesting about the specificity of Boccaccio’s and Painter’s placement of the King’s fistula is that Shakespeare does not replicate that placement in his play. We are never told where the King’s fistula is. Possibly we are left without this information because, as Bevington suggests, Shakespeare was not interested in paying any more attention to this illness. This may be too quick an answer, however. After all, Shakespeare was writing a play that centers on pains of the heart, and the symbolic appeal of a fistula on the King’s chest must have been strong. So, why leave it out? Part of the answer may be that the absence of additional specific detail about the fistula is meant to allow space for the audience to make some assumptions. F. David Hoeniger makes a strong case that there was an obvious assumption available for those who wanted one. With particular reference to Arderne’s Treatises of Fistula in Ano, Hoeniger notes that most fistulas described in early medical books are anal fistulas and that anal fistulas were so common a medical problem that most audience members “would have guessed that [the King’s fistula] was in ano.” 5 Even though Hoeniger may be overstating the general public awareness of fistulas, Shakespeare did have a connection to a source of medical information through his daughter Susanna’s marriage to the physician John Hall. 6 It is possible that Shakespeare, perhaps utilizing Hall’s medical knowledge, chose to remedy a medical improbability in the sources by eliminating their references to an unusual type of fistula and by making available the possibility that the King might be suffering from the more common type. Additionally, medical descriptions of anal fistulas coincide nicely with Shakespeare’s presentation of the King’s illness as a “past-cure malady” (2.1.120). An anal fistula was notoriously difficult to heal. Arderne’s fifteenth century treatise on fistula in ano, which remained the standard work on the subject throughout the early modern period, stated that “I know not in al my tyme, ne hard not in al my tyme, of any man, nouther in yngland ne in parties biyond the see, that kouth cure fistula in ano.”7 In the late seventeenth century, Richard Wiseman, Charles II’s surgeon, was still noting the great danger and difficulty of trying to cure anal fistulas.8 It would also be appropriate for the King to have an anal fistula because the disease was associated with his lifestyle. The King’s youth was spent serving in the military with Bertram’s father. By the time the play begins, however, this active life has given over to a stationary one. As the King tells Bertram: I would I had that corporal soundness now, The King’s lifestyle of years of soldiering followed by years of relative inactivity, is, as D’Arcy Power notes, the perfect background for developing an anal fistula. “Wet, cold, long hours in the saddle weighted down by the heavy armour of the time, would readily lead to this condition in the knightly class; whilst the sedentary habits and gross feeding causing constipation would account for it in the religious and civic life."9 By intentionally not specifying the location of the King’s fistula, Shakespeare allows for the possibility that it could be anywhere. He permits the audience to make its own diagnosis, and the more information one has about the details of an anal fistula, the more plausible it seems as an appropriate diagnosis for the King’s disease. Even placing aside the medical probabilities of this diagnosis, raising the possibility of a king with an anal fistula may well have appealed to Shakespeare’s bawdy sense of humor. Jokes about bottoms appear in the text twice, both times when the King’s fistula has just been a topic for discussion. When Helena and the Countess discuss the difficulty of her proposed plan to cure the King the Countess points out that it will be hard for the King and his doctors to believe that he can be helped by an “unlearned virgin when the schools/ Embowel’d of their doctrine, have left off/ the danger to itself” (1.3.235-7, emphasis mine). In the scene immediately after the King consents to try Helena’s cure, the Clown gives a short speech entirely focused on buttocks: “It is like a barber’s chair that fits all buttocks: the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawn-buttock, or any buttock” (2.2.16-18). While Shakespeare does not indulge in the endless variations of jokes and puns about bottoms that mark Midsummer Night’s Dream, he does seem to be enjoying the humorous potential of the King’s disease. That anal fistulas were at least as funny to others as they were painful to the sufferers is supported by extant popular representations of them. Certainly the image of the fistula operation from the Sloane MS 2002 (Fig. 1) and the woodcut of an operation on an anal fistula from J. Russel’s broadside (Fig. 2) have a grotesque comedy that attests to the mingled repulsiveness and humor of such a disease. Both images stress the invasive nature of the procedures as large hands spread open and enter into the patients’ bodies. The exposure and humiliation entailed in the simple medical examination of an anal fistula was extreme. Such extreme humiliation is always funny when it happens to someone else, and even funnier when it happens to someone in a position of power. Beyond the comedy, however, the idea that the King might suffer from an anal fistula serves to accent the weakness of an infirm ruler. It makes him simultaneously a figure of fun and an object of pity—much like the poor sufferers in the Sloane MS and the broadside woodcut. A king is not a woodcut, though, and for him to be potentially exposed, vulnerable, and humorous is highly undesirable. Lafew seems to glance at this concern for both the severity and the humor of the King’s illness in an early conversation with Bertram. Ber: What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of? The editors of the Riverside, Arden, and Norton editions of Shakespeare all note that Lafew’s comment about the fistula’s notoriety is an indirect slur on Bertram’s distance from the important news and gossip of the court. They gloss “notorious” simply as “well-known,” which is correct insofar as it goes. However, none of them mention that the OED indicates that as early as the mid-fifteenth century, the word “notorious” carried with it the distinctly negative connotation of being well known for unsavory reasons. If the King’s fistula might be in ano, than Lafew’s use of the word notorious is more precise and more interesting than editors have suggested. Rather than a simple insult to Bertram’s naiveté, the comment is also a wish that the King’s illness not be such a common topic of conversation and such an innately embarrassing disease.10 Although I believe that Shakespeare intentionally raises the possibility that the King is suffering from an anal fistula, the precise location of the fistula is not as important to a reading of All’s Well as is the fact that the fistula, wherever it is, is cured realistically. Asserting the realism of Helena’s cure of the King is somewhat controversial. Nearly every other critical interpretation of All’s Well has commented on the “miracle” of Helena’s cure. Northrop Frye explicitly denies the possibility of a realistic cure, stating that, “It seems clear that Helena’s healing powers…are really a form of magic, whatever she may have found her in her recipe books.”11 G.K. Hunter refers to her “magical and romantic actions.”12 The Riverside editors discuss her “miraculous cure”13 Susan Bassnett-McGuire says Helena has “magical healing powers.”14 David McCandless calls them “magical and hieratic powers, giving her the capacity to effect a supernatural cure.”15 Nicholas Brooke attributes to her “a pretty potent form of magic (of obscure kind).”16 David Haley, whose book reads Helena’s cure of the King as literally or metaphorically alchemical, consistently refers to the cure simply as “Helena’s miracle”17 and calls Helena “daemonic…a miracle working prophet.”18 David Bevington notes that, while her power to cure is real, it is associated “with the magical power of romance.”19 The critical literature on All’s Well sees a distinct division between the world of medicine and the world of miracle, and most critics firmly place Helena in the latter. These arguments in favor of Helena’s cure belonging to the world of miracle rather than to the world of medicine draw their support primarily from the language of miracle and wonder used in the first scene of act two, where Helena persuades the King to let her attempt a cure. Indeed, the play’s roots in the fairy tale conventions of the “Healing of the King” and the “Fulfillment of the Tasks,” outlined by Lawrence,20 suggest some sort of connection between the story and miracles and magic. Additionally, when Helena speaks to the King her language does include images from mystical literature. She references the miracles of the Bible, commenting how “He that of greatest works is finisher / Oft does them by the weakest minister” (2.1.135-6) and how “holy writ in babes hath judgment shown” (2.1.137). Having clearly established her Christianity, which leads David Palmer to comment that “faith and humility before the inscrutable will of God”21 cure the King, Helena is then free to range among pagan images to emphasize how swiftly her medicine will work. The greatest Grace lending grace, It is this speech that leads G. K. Hunter to comment in his introduction to the Arden edition of All’s Well that “The traditional association of virginity with magic power and priesthood is…involved in the priestess-like incantations for the recovery”22 with which Helena addresses the King. J. Scott Bentley also wants to present Helena as a priestess type, whose only medical abilities are contained within the magic of her person. He writes, “Helena continues to infuse divinity into language when she meets the King and, at least onstage, cures him with words alone. Paracelsians believed that these words, verba mirifica, could treat the psychological causes of the physical disease by acting in conjunction with the magus’ chemical remedy.”23 While Bentley’s argument about Helena as a Paracelsian healer who combines words and chemicals to cure illness does permit the possibility that her cure is not exclusively magical, his comment that the King is “cured by words alone,” undermines that practical possibility as soon as it is raised. 24 Bentley and Hunter, as well as the whole catalogue of other critics who refer to Helena’s “miraculous cure” have apparently accepted Helena’s references to miracles and divine grace unquestioningly. If she says, or seems to say, that her cure will be a miracle, it must be one. At least some of the King’s courtiers are equally convinced that the King’s cure has been magically/miraculously accomplished. When Helena’s cure works and the King’s health is restored in the third scene of act two, Lafew rejoices: “They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.” Parolles calls it simply the “rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times,” and both Lafew and Parolles make reference to a ballad already written about the cure called “A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor.” (2.3.1-7, 23-4). It is these speeches around which is focused the argument for a “two worlds” view of All’s Well—where medicine and miracles are directly opposed, where the older generation still believes in wonder and the younger believes only in science, and where Helena is an odd throwback to the mystery, miracle, and honor of the older world. G. K. Hunter, for example, points to these speeches, particularly Lafew’s long speech, as moments when “The moral frailty of the young is specifically associated with the new scientific naturalism which was in Shakespeare’s own day replacing the older obedience to supernatural sanctions.”25 The editors of the Riverside edition of Shakespeare also firmly separate the two worlds. They place Helena in the “vanished world of the past” rather than the “debased present day society” as she comes “Into this skeptical hard-headed world…offering something quite alien to it, in the form of a miraculous cure.”26 Susan Bassnett-McGuire labels the two worlds “pre and post Machiavellian,”27 but the core of the “two worlds view” and the sense of a play that is strongly divided along this axis remain the same. The “two worlds” view creates a picture of All’s Well as strongly bifurcated. A character can be either in the “old world” of nobility, magic, miracles, and true love with the Countess and the King or in the new world of aristocracy, science, reason, expediency and lust with Parolles and Bertram. One’s generation generally determines one’s position. Helena is, of course, the exception to the rule. In this critical construction of the play, she belongs to the younger world by virtue of age alone. Her moral outlook, her magical/mythical/miraculous actions, and her affectionate attachment to the King and the Countess all mark her as belonging, really, to the older world. The trouble with viewing Helena as magical, miraculous, and part of the old world, is the fact that the cure she offers is a specifically medical and realistic cure, a “new world” cure offered by a presumably “old world” character. Helena, in fact, carefully explains the provenance of the medicine to the Countess and to the King, both times in nearly the same language. To the Countess she states that her father left her prescriptions for medicines: Of rare and prov’d effects, such as his readingSpeaking to the King in the second act, Helena similarly emphasizes the facts that the medicine she is using came from her father, not from her, and that he had exceptional learning and experience. Many receipts he gave me, chiefly one,Helena is using a technique that is common in early modern medical advertising. She is explaining the medicine’s pedigree to reassure the patient. She got the medicine from her father, a famous physician, who got it through his long practice and experience. Unlike most medical advertisements, however, Helena never traces her medicines back to God.28 Helena’s focus on the provenance of her medicine is doubly important as it emphasizes the earthly origin of her medicine and Shakespeare’s dedication to that earthliness. Both Boccaccio and Painter specify that their heroine makes her medicine herself. Boccaccio explains, “She had learnt a great deal from her father, so she made up a powder from certain herbs that were beneficial to what she took to be the affection in question.”29 Painter writes, “Whereuppon with such knowledge, as she had learned at her fathers hands before time, shee made a pouder of certaine herbes which she felt meete for that disease.”30 In both Boccaccio and Painter, then, a relatively untrained and unprofessional individual creates a highly sophisticated and successful cure for a complicated disease. The sources partially explain the miraculousness of this triumphant cure brought about by this unexpected person by emphasizing the training their heroines received from their father. Yet, this creation of a cure virtually ex nihilo, from nothing more than memory and guesswork, remains markedly impressive and possibly even wondrous. In contrast to these sources, Shakespeare makes it quite clear that Helena is simply following her father’s recipe for a cure. The recipe for the medicine is specifically “approv’d, set down” and has been carefully “stored up” for future use. Helena is achieving no mystical feats of medical skill here. She does not even have to make an educated guess about what herbs might be most effective. She simply has a good formula for a good medicine that she prepares and applies with care and success. Interestingly, both Boccaccio and Painter refer to the medicine that is used to cure the King as a “powder.” Shakespeare does not specify the form that the medicine takes. As with Shakespeare’s silence about the precise position of the King’s fistula, his silence about the form of the medicine may be a case of a conscious excising of an incorrect detail from his source material. Early modern cures for fistulas rarely took the form of powders. Richard Wiseman does say that a “cure palliative” may be effected if one will “apply a small Caustick upon the Orifice to remove the Callus…it may be spread thin with any lenient Unguent, as the exigency requires.”31 Helena’s cure may simply be one of these caustics or unguents. However, a cure palliative would merely alleviate the King’s symptoms and not actually cure the fistula in the dramatic manner the play suggests. For an actual cure, Wiseman recommends a more surgical procedure. He instructs doctors that before attempting a cure: “You shall make a search with a Probe into the Fistula, running up by the Intestinum Rectum, and the while annoint your finger with a little oil or butter and pass it up; and according as you see the Probe more or less distant, or penetrating proceed in the cure.”32 This is apparently the operation being performed on the fistula patient in figure one. After the extent of the fistula is determined, the doctor is instructed to “begin with laying it open first to the Anus…you shall then consider the Habit of Body…so you may Let-blood or Purge: but if there be no necessity of either, you shall prescribe your Patient a good Diet, to prevent Fluxion, and especially a Diarrhoea; for a Looseness much disturbs the cure.”33 Helena’s “receipt” and “remedy” then, may be instructions for a surgical procedure combined with recommendations for a post-surgical diet and treatment of the incision. It is also possible that Shakespeare chose not to specify the exact nature of Helena’s remedy because Helena’s father is supposed to have recorded a successful remedy that was not widely known. Helena herself refers to her father’s medicines as “notes whose faculties inclusive were / More than they were of note” (1.3.221-2). In other words, his cures are more powerful than they are well-known. For Shakespeare to leave the form of the cure unspecified, then, is to allow his audience to imagine a cure which could work more rapidly, more comfortably, more effectively, than any with which they might be familiar. It is impossible to say precisely what sort of cure Helena’s “remedy” is. However, Shakespeare was clearly not satisfied with the source’s description of it as a powder and chose instead to leave that detail out, and thereby to make available to the audience the possibility that Helena’s cure is something other than a familiar medicine. Just as Shakespeare’s decision not to include the fistula’s location allows for more medically probable ideas about its placement, his decision not to include the description of Helena’s “remedy” as a “powder” allows for more medically plausible types of cures. In both cases, Shakespeare’s alteration of his source materials suggests that he did put some consideration into the accuracy of his presentation of the King’s fistula and of its cure. Considering the care taken to make the possibility of a realistic cure of the King available to the audience, it may seem odd that so many people, inside and outside the world of the play, greet it as such a miracle. However, we must not forget that Helena does use the language of miracle and wonder to describe her cure. In her discussion with the Countess she suggests that some sort of good luck is at work in her possession of this particular cure at this particular time:
There’s something in’tThis is a slippery passage, which seems to raise the possibility that Helena believes her cure is “sanctified,” godly, or providential in some way. The problem is the passage’s murky syntax. Helena’s “it” in line 237 could refer specifically to her father’s medicine. The implication of the passage would then be that the cure involves not only medicine, but also luck and providence. However, Helena’s “it” could refer more generally to her plan for the future—to use her father’s legacy of medical recipes to win Bertram by means of curing the King. The passage would then imply that it is Helena’s plan as a whole, and the convenient coincidences that allow it to be put into effect, that are blessed by luck and providence. The difference is subtle. In the first reading, Helena makes a statement that directly connects her medicine to the world of wonder and miracle. In the second reading, the connection is much more tenuous. The medicine is still blessed, but only insofar as it is connected to Helena’s plan. Indeed, the confusing syntax may well reflect Helena’s confusion on the subject, as well as the conflicting possibilities Shakespeare suggests for his audience. Her earlier comment that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven” (1.1.212-3), with its significant pun on the word “remedy,” is a striking negation of the type of luck and providence suggested in the later speech. A more definite use of the language of miracle and wonder occurs when Helena tries to persuade the King to try her cure. However, her use of this language comes only after her failed attempts to convince the King to try her cure based on its provenance from an esteemed physician and its medical excellence. When the King responds to Helena’s medical arguments with nothing but scorn and doubt for the powers of medicine, it becomes apparent that this kind of persuasion is not going to be effective. Indeed, the King dismisses her with the comment that: “But what at full I know, thou know’st no part; / I knowing all my peril, thou no art.” (2.1.131-2) Only after this dismissal does Helena turn to the language of miracle and wonder in a final attempt to persuade the King to let her try her cure. Her move here is calculated and logical. The King, firmly lodged in the “old world” of miracle and wonder, refuses to respond to Helena’s “new world” arguments about her cure’s medical pedigree. So, Helena consciously switches registers, takes on the hallmarks of “old world” speech, and attempts to convince the King by using arguments that he may be more culturally prepared to accept. Clearly, Helena’s attempt works. The King agrees to try the treatment, and the court, as has been noted, presents the successful cure as a great miracle. What is less clear is whether Helena herself is persuaded that anything other than medicine has helped the King. Determining the level of sincerity of the use of religious rhetoric in a medical setting is tricky. While a medical practitioner may honestly believe that his or her medicines, ability to heal, and successful cures are entirely due to God’s favor, there is nearly always an aspect of advertising involved in mentioning God’s assistance. Helena’s “miracle” speeches are perfect examples of this difficulty. She has made it clear that the cure she is offering is a medical cure. Her references to God and to miracles are not in any way a retraction of this description of her cure. They are, instead, a combination of a rhetorical device used to persuade the King to try her cure and a statement of the belief common to many early modern medical practitioners that God is involved in all healing—no matter what the earthly vehicle may be. Roger Warren, in other words, is correct when he sees these “miracle” speeches as suggesting “some sort of faith healing, in the limited sense that the King must be persuaded that she can heal him.”34 Other critics who insist on the solely miraculous nature of Helena’s healing powers seem to be as charmed and distracted by her rhetoric as are the King and the court. Reading Helena’s cure as a medical response to a situation that seems to require a miracle to resolve it begins to provide a compelling picture of Helena. Many critics have read Helena, particularly in the second half of the play, as a submissive and suffering “patient Griselda.” David Haley says that she, “in the latter part of the play, invokes the idea of providence in a wishful vein that proves she is not mistress of her fate.”35 G.K.Hunter claims that she is only, “clever enough to be virtuous, pious, and patient till Destiny and Justice work things out for her.”36 Pamela D. Stewart gives her credit only for being a woman who, “draws affectionate sympathy for her plight.”37 Perhaps the most condemnatory comment comes from Lisa Jardine, who argues that, “In the second half of the play, Helena acts out an atonement for her ‘forwardness;’ which is at once a ritual return to exemplary passivity, and fairy tale ‘performing of the task;’ set by Bertram’s riddle.”38 Jardine, who refers to Helena as she is presented in the first half of the play as a woman who is “specifically accomplished” and who has “specialist knowledge and… the power that knowledge gives her”39 reads the second half of the play as a defeat of Helena’s knowledge and power, a complete and punishing inversion of her character. Understanding that the cure Helena performs is a real one and that her use of miraculous language is, at least in part, a skilled attempt to communicate with the superstitious and aged King and his credulous court makes us realize that, like Prince Hal, Helena is adept enough at suiting her language and her self-presentation to be able to “drink with any tinker in his own language.”40 Her enjoyment and appreciation of the “old world” philosophy and beliefs do not mean that she is intrinsically a part of the old world, any more than Hal’s proficiency at Eastcheap patter means that his true place is in the tavern. But Helena’s linguistic flexibility is often overlooked, unlike Hal’s, because is not explicitly highlighted in the play. Critics read her adaptability as bifurcation, her flexibility as incoherent characterization, and her perceived “change in personality” as a punishment for previous independent behavior. Helena’s ability to negotiate between the miraculous and the practical, shown so clearly in her handling of the King’s illness, is also crucial to her managing of the bed-trick that resolves the play’s second half. Bertram, desperate to rid himself of his “clog,” attempts to structure a situation seemingly even more impossible than the King’s cure. He works, like Helena, to turn the language of miracle and wonder to his own benefit, cautioning her that she “must not marvel, Helen, at my course…and rather muse than ask why I entreat you” 2.5.57-64), in hopes of creating an atmosphere of mystery to surround his desertion of her. Similarly, his riddling letter to her is, in his mind, less a challenge than a dismissal. “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a ‘then,’ I write a ‘never.’” (3.2.56-59) Because Bertram is less proficient in “old world” speech and ideas than Helena is, he does not suspect that she will accept his challenge, that she will “insist on the fairy-tale framework, reading his metaphor of rejections as a scenario of acceptance.”41From her experience of curing the King, Helena has learned that the language and structures of fairy tales can be used in a practical manner to accomplish her desired ends. So, when faced with a riddling and dismissive set of fairy-tale conditions for regaining her husband, Helena responds, not by waiting patiently or by working to atone for her earlier audacity, but by meeting the challenge head on and finding, once again, a realistic and practical solution for a situation which seems to require a miracle. Her remedies lie in herself. It is, then, Helena’s practical, rational, realistic approach to curing the king’s illness that is the true mark of her character and that goes some way in explaining the moral ambiguity of the bed-trick. It seems highly improbable that the romantic, pious, patient, and long-suffering Helena constructed by most critics could be the same Helena who willingly lies, buys another woman’s reputation, and hurts her friends by feigning her own death. A more practical Helena, a Helena who is able to construct events that look like miracles in order to achieve her own goals, may no longer be Shakespeare’s “loveliest heroine,”42 but she is coherent, determined, and capable.
Notes
1. All’s Well that Ends Well. The Arden Edition of
the Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. G.K. Hunter. (London: Routledge,1989) 1.1.11. All further
citations from All’s Well are taken from the Arden edition, and references
are given parenthetically within the text.
2. David Bevington. “’More needs she the divine than the physician’:
The Limitations of Medicine in Shakespeare’s Late Plays” Divers
toyes mengled: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Culture. Eds.
Michel Bitot et al. (Tours: Université François Rabelais,
1996.) 399.
3. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron, section III.9. Trans. Guido Waldman.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 232.
4. William Painter. “‘Giletta of Narbona’, the Thirty-Eighth
Novel of William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure.” All’s
Well that Ends Well. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare.
Ed. G.K. Hunter. (London: Routledge,1989) 146.
5. F. David Hoeniger. Medicine and Shakespeare in the English
Renaissance. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 297.
Nicholas Brooke also suggests that
the King has an anal fistula. Nicholas Brooke. “All’s Well
that End’s Well.” Aspects of Shakespeare’s Problem
Plays: Articles Reprinted from Shakespeare Survey. Eds. Kenneth Muir
and Stanley Wells. (Cambridge,
CUP, 1982) 10.
6. Susanna did not marry John Hall until 1607 but since he had lived in
Stratford for some time it seems likely that he was on good terms with
the Shakespeare
family for a while before the marriage.
7. John Arderne. Treatises of Fistula in Ano, Haemorrhoids, and Clysters. Ed.
D’arcy Power. London: Early English Text Society, 1910) 3.
8. Richard Wiseman. Eight Chirurgical Treatises, 4th Ed. (London:
Benj. Tooke, 1705) 218.
9. D’Arcy Power. “Introduction.” John Arderne. Treatises
of Fistula in Ano, Haemorrhoids, and Clysters. Ed. D’arcy
Power. London: Early English Text Society, 1910) xv.
10. Richard Stansgaard suggests that the King’s fistula would be
additionally embarrassing because the abscess of a fistula is “not
unlike that caused by the plague” and that Shakespeare “in
dramatizing the plight of a king ill of a fistula, was drawing on the notoriety
then attached to plague-like
diseases.” (“All’s Well that Ends Well and the Galenico-Paracelsian
Controversy.” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 25, no. 2, Summer 1972,
174-5). While this is an interesting possibility, especially considering
the plague-time
setting of the Decameron and the high incidence of the plague
during the years when Shakespeare was writing, it seems to push the interpretation
of “fistula” too
far. The wide variety of terms that are specific to the instantly recognizable
marks of the plague—tokens, buboes, boils, etc.—and that
Shakespeare uses often in other plays when he wishes to reference the
plague, make
it improbable that he would have needed or wanted to be so oblique if
he wanted such a reference
about the King in All’s Well. In addition, the notoriety and embarrassment
of a fistula qua fistula, particularly if it were in ano, would be sufficient
in and of itself, independent of any connection to the plague.
11. Northrop Frye. The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections
on Shakespeare’s
Problem Comedies. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 46.
12. All’s Well that Ends Well. The Arden Edition, xxxiii.
13. All’s Well that Ends Well. The Riverside
Shakespeare. Eds.
G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), 500.
14. Susan Bassnett-McGuire. “An Ill Marriage in an Ill Government:
Patterns of Unresolved Conflict in All’s Well that Ends Well.” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch,
Vol. 120, (1984), 98.
15. David McCandless. “Helena’s Bed-trick: Gender and Performance
in All’s Well that Ends Well.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.
45, no. 4. (Winter, 1994) 450.
16. Brooke. 10.
17. David Haley. Shakespeare’s Courtly Mirror: Reflexivity and Providence
in All’s Well that Ends Well. (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
1993) 41, 224.
18. Ibid., 123
19. Bevington, 399
20. William Witherle Lawrence. Shakespeare’s Problem
Comedies,
2nd Ed. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960) 33.
21. David J. Palmer. “Comedy and the Protestant Spirit
in Shakespeare’s
All’s Well that Ends Well.” Bulleting of the
John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol. 71, no. 1,
(Spring, 1989) 98.
22. All’s Well that Ends Well, The Arden Edition, xlii.
23. J. Scott Bentley. “Helena’s Paracelsian Cure of the King:
Magia Naturalis in All’s Well that Ends Well.” (Cauda
Pavonis, Vol. 5, No. 1. Spring, 1986) 2. Emphasis mine. In her dissertation
from Oxford
University Natsu Hattori has also noted that Helena’s speech to the
King “recalls
the formulae spoken during the casting of a magic spell” (193).
24. Further, Bentley’s comment that the King is cured onstage (at
the2 end of act two, scene one) is remarkably inattentive to the text. Far
from
being cured, the King calls for assistance in leaving the room (“Give
me some help here, ho!”) at line 208 and promises Helena a reward
at lines 208-9 if her cure succeeds. Clearly, he is not better yet.
25. All’s Well that Ends Well, The Arden Edition, xxxii.
26. All’s Well that Ends Well. The Riverside Shakespeare. 501,
500.
27. Bassnett-McGuire, 98.
28. For a discussion of the use of religion in early modern
medical advertising, see Sarah E. Skwire. “The Medical Defense: The Pious Physician in
Popular Culture” in “No Health in Us”: Representations
of Illness in Early Modern Literature. (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago,
2000) 30-42.
29. Boccaccio. The Decameron, section III.9, 232-3.
30.
Painter, 146.
31.
Wiseman, 218.
32.
Ibid., 219.
33.
Ibid., 218.
34. Roger Warren. “Why Does it End Well? Helena, Bertram,
and the Sonnets.” Aspects
of Shakespeare’s Problem Plays: Articles Reprinted from Shakespeare
Survey. Eds. Kenneth Muir and Stanley Wells. (Cambridge, CUP, 1982) 43.
35.Haley, 73.
36. All’s Well that Ends Well. The Arden Edition, xxxii.
37.Stewart, 335.
38. Lisa Jardine. “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s
Learned Heroines: These are Old Paradoxes.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.
38, no. 1, (Spring 2987) 11.
39. Ibid., 6-7.
40. William Shakespeare. King Henry IV, Part I. The Arden Shakespeare.
Ed. A. R. Humphreys. (London: Routledge, 1992) 2.4.18-19.
41.
McCandless. 459.
42.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other
Dramatists. (London: Oxford University Press, 1931) 126.
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