rence, designing to
see her no more. Helena withdraws from the Countess's house, and
comes to Florence disguised.

Bertram woos Diana, a maid of Florence. Helena impersonates her,
receives her unsuspecting husband at night, takes from him a ring,
and gives, in exchange, a ring given to her by the King of France.
At the end of the war, Bertram, hearing that Helena is dead,
returns to France, wearing the ring. The King sees it and
challenges it. Bertram can give no just account of how he got it.
Helena, quick with child by him, confronts him, with the ring that
he left with her at Florence. Diana, the Florentine maid, gives
evidence that Helena impersonated her on the night of Bertram's
visit at Florence. Bertram accepts Helena as his wife, and the play
ends happily.

This play (whenever written) was extensively revised during the ruthless
mood that gave birth to _Measure for Measure_. The alterations were made
in a mood so much deeper than the mood of its first composition that
they make the play uneven. Something, perhaps some trick of health, that
made the mind clearer than the imagination, gave to Shakespeare for a
short time another (and pitiless) view of human obsessions.

It was a part of his belief that treachery is generally caused by
blindness, blindness generally by some obsession of passion. In this
play he treats of the removal of an obsession by making plain to the
obsessed, by pitiless judicial logic, the ugliness of the treachery it
causes.

Bertram is a young man fresh from home. He does not want to marry. He is
eager to see the world and to win honour. He has been accustomed to look
down on Helena as a poor dependant. He does not like her, and he does
not like being ordered. He is suddenly ordered to marry her. He has been
trapped by a woman's underhand trick. He sees himself brought into
bondage with all the plumes of his youth clipped close. There is no way
of escape; he has to marry her; but the King's order cannot quench his
rage against the woman who has so snared him. His rage burns inward into
a brooding, rankling ill-humour that becomes an obsession. It is one of
the tragedies of life that an evil obsession blinds the judgment on more
sides than one. The obsessed are always without criticism. A way of
destruction may be as narrow as a way of virtue; but all the other ways
of destruction run into it. Bertram in blinkers to the go