Royal Representation Research Articles

ALTHOUGH ACCUSED BY CRITICS OF BEING UNPOETIC, Well That Ends Well has a few memorable lines. My title quotation is not one of them. The brief scene in which it occurs is sometimes cut in production because nothing happens in it. Its whole content is precisely a non-happening. Helen has brought the Florentine Widow and Diana to Marseilles, where the King of France is in residence, to prove before him her case as Bertram's wife. But when they get there and ask a courtier for access, he says that the King is now somewhere else: He hence removed last night, and with more haste / Than is his use (5.1.25-26).1 Is there a story in this unusual haste of the King's? You might think so, but when we catch up with him at Roussillon, no one ever mentions it. Perhaps the scene builds up suspense: Helen is, we know, thought dead, and we've just heard of a plan to replace her by marrying Bertram to Lafeu's daughter. But the prospective marriage is not presented in 4.5 in a way that makes us fear Helen will be too late in revealing herself to the King. In any case, whenever she arrives her very existence as a prior wife would invalidate any contract with Maudlin. I suppose a director might justify the Marseilles scene as underlining Helen's perseverance. She shows no discouragement at the bad news, but cheers on her companions by repeating the title proverb: All's well that ends well yet, / Though time seem so adverse, and means unfit (5.1.2829). But the four acts we have already seen surely leave no question about Helen's perseverance in love, as she first pursues Bertram to the French court to win him by curing the King's illness, and then in Florence takes Diana's place in bed with him to consummate their marriage and fulfill his impossible conditions. There needs no fifth-act addendum to convince us of her persistence. The scene then exists, it seems, simply to put off an expected conclusion. Marseilles, the destination that was to produce the King, can offer instead only a kind of royal representation, a man of the court who gives news of the King. The King himself is not where we thought he was but has moved on. It is after the second stage of the jouriiey, at Roussillon, that Helen and her party catch up with the King and stage the exposure and reclamation of Bertram that ends the play. Helen's journey has brought her full circle, from Roussillon to Paris and then via Roussillon again to Florence, to Marseilles, and once more to Roussillon. This geographical progression may suggest one point to the pointless scene I've just been looking at, a function in structure if not in plot. Helen's voyage out was in two stages: the first stage in Paris resulted in marriage with Bertram but denied

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