“The credit of your father”

As the initial group leaves Helena alone on the stage for a few moments, Lafew offers these parting words: “Farewell, pretty lady. You must hold the credit of your father” (1.1.77). I think that this statement can serve as a kind of motto for the play, and it certainly applies to Helena and to Bertram. These characters must sustain and uphold the reputation and legacy of their fathers. The play exacerbates the difficulty of this task because the play “is haunted by dead, aging, and inadequate fathers.”1 The absence, death, or unavailability of father figures certainly complicates Bertram’s task of developing his own masculine identity, as Adelman has observed: “But the achievement of manhood is notoriously problematic in a world of dead and dying fathers.”2 Unless a sufficient surrogate father appears, one remains dependent on memory. In this and in many other ways, All’s Well may remind us of Hamlet. Bertram’s and Helena’s memories hold in them idealized versions of their fathers; and their struggle becomes, at least in part, to come to terms with those absent fathers. How they do or do not succeed helps shape our understanding of these principal characters.