#i hate bertram

Ah, Bertram. My literary nemesis. Well, him and Freud. 

My problem with Bertram isn’t that he’s jerk. If I’m being honest, he makes a decent villain. And I don’t think Shakespeare wants us to like him, considering Bertram is just...the worst. My issue is that he’s too much of a jerk to be a decent love interest, and his “redemption” or whatever happens way too fast.

Bertram goes from hating Helena to just accepting her and loving her for being Such A Clever Lady in literally two lines of dialogue. It’s not believable. He never apologizes for any of his awfulness.

Bertram just doesn’t make sense. There is NO reason for Helena to be as devoted to him as she is. And she’s pretty clearly in love with him in the text; I can’t figure out a convincing way to twist it so that she wants independence. That’d honestly make for a more interesting play. If Bertram was just a plain villain, I’d find his character less annoying, but then that just adds to the problems with Helena (who is otherwise an interesting and well-written heroine).

Could you stage Bertram so his jerkish tendencies could be a reaction to the pressure put on him by society? That he might not actually hate Helena, but just be extremely misguided? You could try. But that wouldn’t change the way he treats Diana, which has nothing to do with his familial/social pressures. And let’s say a director managed to make him a misguided soul who needs Helena to ground him--that makes the already-disgusting bed trick so much worse.

I do believe Bertram can be staged well; I’ve heard it can happen. But it would take a VERY good director and actor to do so. I’d love to see a production of All’s Well that manages to make Bertram sympathetic, because I feel like he could be really interesting if done right. The love interest being the villain has so much narrative potential, but based on Shakespeare’s text alone, the opportunity is wasted. And this was after he’d written Hamlet! Willy Shakes knew how to write characters that challenge your sympathies. But Bertram is just a mess that doesn’t fit in with the context of the play and I’m very mad about it.