Shakespeare

Dilation and Inflation 305sentence” (III.ii.61) he sends to Helena to be a final word, just as he hopes his“scoring”—the consummation of his quest to conquer a virginal “Dian”—will bethe “end” of the “business” (IV.iii.96), as opposed to the blowing up of pregnancyor pursuit that from the perspective of a man like Bertram is simply another kindof female plot, a way of converting what should be an end or fine into abeginning. It is in this doubled space of deferred consummation—Bertram’sputting off of Helena and Diana’s putting off of him—that Helena, however,effects the plot that finally converts Bertram’s closed sentence from a final wordinto the pretext for her own version of increase and multiply, both generationaland interpretive. She becomes in the process both a lower-caste woman openingan aristocratic family up to exogamous increase and a successful hermeneut,opening the closed or virgin text of a recalcitrant Bertram to more fertilemeaning. In the terms of the early exchange between Parolles and Helena,Helena’s fulfillment of the conditions of Bertram’s “dreadful sentence” involvesher opening up of its closure to increase, just as the bed trick that accomplishesthis project involves the blowing up of virginity in a sense very different fromBertram’s reckoning.Helena’s increase, then, takes a hermeneutic as well as a bodily orgenerational form. On the same night as Parolles, or “words,” is granted space toexpose himself as a “counterfeit module,” Bertram’s forbidding text is opened toa fulfillment that simultaneously fulfills and alters it. The space that includesboth kinds of extension is the interval of “patience” (epil. 5) that is the elapsedtime of the play itself, by the end of which Helena, as Doctor She, has opened aclosed or concluding “sentence,” won Bertram a second time (V.iii.308), whichthe space of delay has served to render different from the first, and finallysupplied in her own dilated body the expanded and bountiful “answer” 28 that fitsall of this play’s several riddles or questions, including the riddling of a “Dian” inits final scene:He knows himself my bed he hath defil’d,And at that time he got his wife with child.Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick.So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick—And now behold the meaning.[Helena enters](V.iii.300–304)Helena’s increase—both hermeneutic and generational—renders the play,however, a problematic one in part because it involves a reversal of gender as wellas a more threatening version of increase and multiply. In Diana’s final riddling,Helena herself is the multiple answer, in a play literally filled with such riddlingquestions or demands. The intervening space of language between question and