Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Criticism and interpretation
Bertram, the King's ward, has to do the King's bidding. He
grudgingly accepts her; they are married. He leaves her, and goes
to the wars in the service of the Duke of Florence, designing to
see her no more. Helena withdraws from the Countess's house, and
comes to Florence disguised.
Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena impersonates her,
receives her unsuspecting husband at night, takes from him a ring,
and gives, in exchange, a ring given to her by the King of France.
At the end of the war, Bertram, hearing that Helena is dead,
returns to France, wearing the ring. The King sees it and
challenges it. Bertram can give no just account of how he got it.
Helena, quick with child by him, confronts him, with the ring that
he left with her at Florence. Diana, the Florentine maid, gives
evidence that Helena impersonated her on the night of Bertram's
visit at Florence. Bertram accepts Helena as his wife, and the play
ends happily.
This play (whenever written) was extensively revised during the ruthless
mood that gave birth to _Measure for Measure_. The alterations were made
in a mood so much deeper than the mood of its first composition that
they make the play uneven. Something, perhaps some trick of health, that
made the mind clearer than the imagination, gave to Shakespeare for a
short time another (and pitiless) view of human obsessions.
It was a part of his belief that treachery is generally caused by
blindness, blindness generally by some obsession of passion. In this
play he treats of the removal of an obsession by making plain to the
obsessed, by pitiless judicial logic, the ugliness of the treachery it
causes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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