Which we ascribe to heaven.
strike the keynote of her resolute temper. Yet her love, a maiden’s idolatry, is content without possession; with her, ‘Dian’ is ‘both herself and love’ (I, iii. 218). If she forms plans for showing her merit and thus commending herself in Bertram’s eyes, she takes no step herself; it is the Countess who, having discovered her love, welcomes her prospective daughter-in-law and sends her with all proper convoy to court to ‘cure the king.’ Her choosing of Bertram (II, iii. 109) is an offer of life-long service, not the appropriation of a well-won prize. And when Bertram bluntly declares that he ‘cannot love her nor will strive to do it,’ she proposes, turning to the king, to withdraw her whole claim:
That you are well restored, my lord, I’m glad;
Let the rest go.
The crucial situation, however, for her (and for Shakespeare) begins only with Bertram’s definite departure, and scornful intimation of the conditions on which he will be her husband. Giletta, on receiving the corresponding message, had made up her mind at once what to do; had arranged her affairs and set out on the soi-disant pilgrimage to Florence, where Beltramo she knows will be found. Helena’s procedure is less clear. Two distinct courses were open to her. She might, like Giletta, make direct for Bertram at Florence, under the pretext of going on a pilgrimage. Or she might finally surrender the pursuit of a husband who had decisively shown he did not love her, as she had already proposed to do when he had only declared that he did not. The second was unquestionably more in keeping with Helen’s character. But the first was more in keeping with the plot. It might well be that Shakespeare’s Helen would hesitate between the two. But it is in any case probable that Shakespeare hesitated, and that the marks of his hesitation have not been effaced from the text.
On reading Bertram’s letter she is, like Imogen when she reads Posthumus’s, for the moment overwhelmed. ‘This is a dreadful sentence.’ She hardly speaks, and gives no hint to the Countess of her thoughts. But when she is alone she breaks out in the great passionate monologue of renunciation (III, ii. 102 f.)....
No, come thou home, Rousillon,
Whence honour but of danger wins a scar,
As oft it loses all: I will be gone;
My being here it is that holds thee hence: