War and Sex in All’s Well That Ends Well

Summary

I wish to pursue G. Wilson Knight’s suggestion that All’s Well That Ends Well is built on a conflict between the masculine concept of honour as prowess in war and the feminine concept of honour as chastity in love. However, whereas Knight goes on to interpret the conclusion as an almost mystical victory for transcendent chastity in which ‘sanctity aspires to sexuality’ (p. 160), I propose to pick up his puzzling concept of Helena’s ‘bisexuality’ to suggest instead that the conflict of the play is resolved by having each ideal – war and love – modify the other, so that the conclusion takes the form of a wry accommodation between them in which the purity of both ideals has had to be abandoned. As in Troilus and Cressida (echoed in All’s Well) where there is a similar intercontamination of war and sex, this accommodation is seen through a consciousness of passing time. Shakespeare has added to his source an important framework of death-haunted and nostalgic elders – the Countess, Lord Lafew, Lavache, and the melancholy King of France (who has a much more important part in the play than in Boccaccio) – which places the lovers’ struggle in a perspective of succeeding generations, so that the young have to work out their relationships against their elders’ fears and expectations for them.