Bed Tricks in the Age of #MeToo
Director’s and Dramaturgical Note from Jennifer Sturley
The concept of a “bed trick”--in which one person tricks another into sex through identity deception--is not unique to All’s Well That Ends Well, or even to Shakespeare. The idea dates back as early as Genesis and was a common plot device in Early Modern theatre and literature. Typically these bed tricks were perpetrated by a wife against a husband (or sometimes vice versa), following an Early Modern assumption that marriage equated implied consent. (For context, I should note that marital rape was not a crime in any US state until the 1970s, and even today in many states, it is treated differently under the law from non-spousal rape.) Often, like in All’s Well That Ends Well, the bed trick was framed as an innovative solution to the problem of a disloyal husband, a clever trick to remind him what he was missing at home.
The #MeToo Movement, first started by Tarana Burke in 2006 and brought to the forefront of national attention in 2017 by Alyssa Milano in response to the 80 women who publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, has caused a reckoning in every industry, but particularly in the arts. In approaching All’s Well That Ends Well, I knew that a challenge (and opportunity) of the script would be the contrast in how notions of consent are understood today in comparison to several centuries ago. Our more nuanced perspective in the twenty-first century allow us to clearly see Helena’s actions as rape, although they might not have been viewed as such in Shakespeare’s time.
In All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare gives us an anti-heroine: charismatic, charming, ambitious--and equally, manipulative, ruthless, and selfish. The First Lord says at one point, “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together” (4.3). Our process as a company in approaching the moral complexities of this play was to embrace the both/and, not merely the either/or. We can both take offense to Bertram’s cruelty and immaturity and still acknowledge that sexual assault is a traumatic and violent act, never a justified punishment. Similarly, we can both empathize with Helena’s unrequited love and still decry how she responds to that situation. Our production attempts to capture this duality through the nonverbal storytelling medium of dance film, as a way to supplement the text with metaphorical representations of the emotional experience of the characters in certain scenes, such as the bed trick. In the moment, Bertram consents to his belief of the circumstances, with Diana. In the final scene of the play, when the truth is revealed, Bertram relives those events very differently.
The story-within-a-story nature of this play is emphasized through the screendance pieces and some self-aware metatheatrical moments in the text. The title, already a cliche when Shakespeare used it, is repeated four times in the script, each time couched in subjunctives and hypotheticals: all’s well that ends well if… Do the ends justify the means? Do someone’s circumstances excuse their behavior? As in life, it is easy to look at characters in a play and search for clear answers: villains and heroes, black and white morals. But sometimes terrible people do wonderful things, or wonderful people do terrible things, and sometimes people don’t fit cleanly into those boxes. At the end of the play, the king tries (once again) to force something that doesn’t quite fit: in this case, a happy ending. It’s the convention we’re used to seeing onstage, and in pairing this end with the events of the play thus far, Shakespeare invites us to reflect on the sometimes arbitrary nature of the genre categories of tragedy, comedy, or history. All’s Well That Ends Well is often classified as a “problem play,” in part because of all the messiness around these very issues. Many of us turn towards art seeking answers to these difficult questions. Life is inherently messy, and sometimes there aren’t clear-cut answers. Good art can reflect rather than sanitize that mess.