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THE STARTING POINT FOR THIS ESSAY IS SUSAN SNYDERS recent charactherization of All's Well as a "deconstructed fairy tale":(1) lurking beneath folkloric narrative of the poor physician's daughter who deploys magic and cunning in order to overcome a dashing count's disdainful resistance are the unrepresentable specters of female sexual desire and male sexual dread. Indeed, the play invests the fairy-tale motifs that W.W. Lawrence believes undergird All's Well--"The Healing of the King" and "The Fulfillment of the Tasks"--with potent erotic subtexts.(2) In adapting "The Healing of the King," Shakespeare, like his model Boccaccio, departs from tradition in making the King's healer a woman. Lawrence barely mentions this innovation, but it seems to me highly significant, especially since Shakespeare, unlike Boccaccio, makes Helena's gender--more particularly her sexual ardor and allure--indispensable to the cure.
Integral to the narrative of "The Fulfillment of the Tasks" is the bed-trick, an explicitly sexual event in which a disprized wife wins back her husband by making love to him incognito, taking the place of another woman, in some versions the wife herself in disguise, whom he has wooed. All's Well deconstructs this folkloric device by wedding it to genuine sexual perturbation. The bed-trick is not simply the consummation of a marriage, in which Helena cleverly satisfies Bertram's seemingly impossible conditions, but an act of prostitution, in which Helena services Bertram's lust and submits to humiliating anonymous "use," and a type of rape, in which Helena coerces Bertram into having sex with her against his will.
Yet, as many critics have noted, the play seems to suppress its own erotic subdrama.(3) Certainly Shakespeare idealizes and mystifies the sexual arousal that empowers Helena's cure of the King. He lends Helena magical and hieratic powers, giving her the capacity to effect a supernatural cure. He similarly desexualizes her erotic agency in the bed-trick, allowing Diana to serve as Helena's sexualized double. Diana suffers Bertram's degrading slander in the final scene, thus allowing Helena to reenter the play as a saintly resurrected figure whose visible pregnancy sanctifies her sexuality and who elicits an instantaneous reformation from Bertram. The bed-trick becomes a transcendent event, vastly removed from bodies groping in the dark, from the kind of event imaged as "defil[ing] the pitchy night" (4.4.24).(4)
In performance...