Last week, we thought about Demetrius from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I referenced his potential role as a precursor to characters who would appear much more prominently in Shakespeare’s later comedies: men who exist to provoke meditations on what men owe to women to whom they have made a promise, and what women are allowed to do to force men to make good on those promises. This is only of passing concern in Midsummer, but it’s brought to the forefront later in Shakespeare’s career with several plays that include the infamous device of the ‘bed trick.’ One of these plays is All’s Well That Ends Well, and one of these characters is Bertram.
‘Proud, scornful boy, unworthy this good gift’
Bertram rejects a Helena of his own: the orphaned young woman he was raised with, who draws upon her late father’s medical skill to cure the dying King of France. In return, he promises she can marry whoever she chooses, and she chooses Bertram. Bertram is horrified. Helena attempts to relent in the face of his disgust, but the King insists, and they are married. Bertram refuses to reconcile himself to this fate, instead setting Helena a paradoxical ultimatum: he will only act as a husband to her when she has taken the ring from his finger and bears his child.
Absolutely every single person in the play thinks this is, to put it simply, a dick move. Bertram’s only supporter is the show’s clown-ish role, Parolles, who is unmasked to Bertram over the course of the play as a liar and a coward and someone whose judgment we should not trust. There are quite a lot of Shakespeare comedies where the bad behavior of men does not really receive the mockery and judgment it deserves, but in Bertram’s case, Shakespeare absolutely piles it on. His own mother, the literal king, the girl he’s trying to cheat on his wife with, random bystanders—practically everyone in the play gets a chance to point out what an absolute idiot he is for not appreciating someone as great as Helena.
Most of these characters eventually conspire to help Helena fulfill Bertram’s impossible demands by way of a bed trick—she disguises herself as Diana, the woman Bertram is trying to seduce, and she and Bertram spend the night together. Helena gets Bertram’s ring and gets pregnant, and in the play’s last scene, enters just in time to rescue Bertram from a web of lies, as he attempts to wriggle out of his promise to marry Diana, thinking Helena is dead.
He attempts to do this, by the way, by saying Diana’s just some slut who slept with all the soldiers. Just in case everyone saying so wasn’t enough to drive home that Bertram is the worst.
Helena, pregnant, demonstrates that she has done what Bertram sneeringly asked. He tells the King, “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.” And that’s the last line he speaks in the play.
Many twenty-first century productions have made a great deal of this if, suggesting that nothing has really changed in Bertram’s heart—he’s been caught for now, but will always be looking for new ways to slip free of Helena and, now, his child. But by this point, would that really be so bad?
‘Will you be mine now you are doubly won?’
Part of my aim up to this point has been to read characters as generously as possible. But Shakespeare seems to work as hard as he can to make that impossible in this instance. To be perfectly frank, I can’t stand to watch this play: Bertram and the play’s ending make me too angry. I don’t understand what the story is trying to say, I don’t understand what his unrelenting unpleasantness is for.
I do find something touching in the phrasing of Bertram’s final line: “I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.” There’s something about its simplicity, about the repetition of such small and yet expansive words. For someone who has spent an entire long scene spinning lie after lie, it feels striking to have his language stripped down to something so basic. It makes it sound true.
Bertram undergoes the same journey as Demetrius, but it takes longer and his transformation is shorter. But I think the point is ultimately the same: that women— even the most resourceful and clever ones, like Helena—require a husband for any form of social security. And for a man to break a promise to provide that security is an act of deep cowardice and selfishness that a woman is entitled to make right at any cost. And moreover, he cannot be a good person, a good man, until he accepts that right, and accepts that woman.
Because to modern eyes, a bed trick is frankly a kind of rape: it’s sex under false pretenses, sex that we know for certain the man would not consent to if he knew the truth. But the argument of Shakespeare and other writers who deploy the bed trick seems to be that the man has already consented by marrying or agreeing to marry the woman—the real crime is his refusal to see that promise through.
It’s not a moral that can be simply celebrated or condemned. It’s a powerful recognition of women’s social vulnerability, and an assertion of their right to claim redress from men who have misled them, even if that redress mostly takes place in fantastical terms that can only exist onstage.
It’s also a reminder that for all Shakespeare’s famous love stories, he comes from an era when the purpose of marriage was still in flux, stranded somewhere between recognition that it was largely an act of political, economic, and religious necessity and a more modern expectation that it be a companionable partnership between two people who might even love each other. The lesson both Demetrius and Bertram need to learn is that the word ‘love’ in marriage does not necessarily mean what they think it does. It means respect, it means cooperation, it means an acceptance of responsibility. It means acknowledging that you have more power than your wife or fiancee, and you have a responsibility to use that power to take care of her, because she really has no way to stop you if you don’t (unless, of course, she has access to the magic of theatre). For Shakespeare, this is a good thing. Accepting these facts makes you an adult, a gentleman, a good person.
Simultaneously patronizing and realistic, it’s a conclusion I don’t quite know what to do with. I have absolutely no idea how an artist can make it legible or palatable to modern viewers. Neither, in the end, do Helena and Bertram. They just have to live with it.
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