Shakespeare’s mothers. The Countess in All's Well That Ends Well.

My piece in the new edition of Liberties

I am delighted to have a piece about the Countess Rousillion, from All’s Well That Ends Well, in the new print edition of Liberties. Here is the opening.

Shakespeare’s mothers are often nasty. Lady Capulet ignores, then disowns, poor Juliet. Lady Macbeth would kill her child to gain a throne. Though they grieve (Constance in King John) it is vicious grief (Queen Margaret in Richard III). Sometimes they are terrifying: Volumnia raised Coriolanus to be a tyrant; Tamora encourages her son to commit rape in Titus Andronicus. Often, there are no mothers. O! Cordelia, Katherine, Miranda, Jessica — think how they need their mother’s love! Many are minor. Aemilia in A Comedy of Errors appears at the end, a resolution. The blameless Lady Macduff appears only to be hauntingly killed, a brief symbol of innocence in a darkening world. There is a wicked step-mother (Cymbeline), a jealous step-mother (Pericles), a weak-willed mother (Hamlet). It is almost incidental that Mistress Page (The Merry Wives of Windsor) is a mother; Cleopatra, too. Only Hermione’s strong innocence in A Winter’s Tale makes her rightfully beloved.

Hermione has a splendid precursor, the Countess of Rousillion, from All’s Well That Ends Well. This play is unjustly unloved, and the Countess gets less attention than she deserves. She is among Shakespeare’s most fascinating characters, and is his most wonderful mother.

All’s Well That Ends Well is an inverted romance in which the woman pursues the man. It is also about inverted families. It is often said that we cannot choose our parents: Shakespeare is interested in the fact that we cannot choose our children. Just as Helena inverts the expectations of a romantic heroine, so the Countess inverts the expectations of a mother, and picks her child.

My argument, in a nutshell:

Helena is one of Shakespeare’s great experiments. She inverts the expectations of her sex without losing her virtuous character nor destroying the basic plot of a romantic comedy, but with some of the most daring challenges to the form in the whole Shakespeare canon. She is matched in this by her adoptive mother.

I have a great love of this play and these characters, and am really delighted to have written this short appreciation. Some of the piece is available above the Liberties paywall. Or you can read the it in print, alongside Cass Sunstein, Ryan Ruby, and many others.

Janie Dee as the Countess and Ellie Piercy as Helena in the Globe’s 2011 production of All’s Well That Ends Well.