Summary
The King bids farewell to a group of soldiers bound for Florence, including the brothers Dumaine, who encourage Bertram to come with them. Bertram says he is needed at court, however, and stays behind.
Meanwhile, Helena arrives and informs the King that she has a powerful medicine that her father left her, one that will cure the King in only two days. Helena tells him that if the medicine fails, she will give her own life. If the medicine works, however, she requests that the King allow her to marry a man of her choosing. After initially rejecting Helena's help, the King agrees.
The Countess sends her clown, Lavatch, to Paris with a message for Helena.
When Helena's cure works, the King brings her five eligible companions to choose from as her husband. Helena, however, requests to marry Bertram, who is taken aback. He refuses to marry Helena because they are of different social strata. The King tells Bertram that inner worth is more important, and Bertram eventually capitulates. While Lafeu and Parolles argue over the events, Bertram and Helena are married. Afterward, Bertram tells Parolles that he never intends to consummate the marriage and is instead going to send Helena home to the Countess while he runs off to war.
Parolles and Bertram tell Helena that she must return home, as Bertram is needed on urgent business. Lafeu warns Bertram that Parolles is not a great soldier as he claims to be.
Bertram leaves and Helena returns to Rousillon, where the Countess has received a letter from Bertram saying he would rather live abroad than continue in his marriage. Helena also receives a letter from Bertram, in which he tells her that when she wears his ring (which he never takes off) and bears his child, then he will commit to being her husband – in other words, Bertram plans to never return. Brokenhearted, Helena leaves Rousillon, leaving a note behind for the Countess that says she is traveling to a monastery.
The Countess writes to Bertram and Helena separately, urging them both to return home.
Analysis
In Act Two of the play, Shakespeare continues the theme of inverted gender norms that was established in the first act. Helena's offer to treat the King is initially rejected, even after she tells the King that it was her father – a famous doctor whom the King himself laments is no longer alive – who left her the medicine she plans to use. Put simply, the King does not trust a woman to have the medical knowledge to effectively cure him of his disease.
When Helena's work is successful, however, everyone is proven wrong, and Helena is rewarded in a unique way. Helena's request to marry any man she likes is not simply a whimsical plot device on Shakespeare's part. On the contrary, this was a common literary trope that dates back to medieval romances, when a lowly but brave knight would embark on a seemingly impossible quest and, once achieved, was often rewarded by the king with a wife who would raise his own social status. In hearkening back to this literary convention, Shakespeare effectively places Helena in the position of the questing knight, suggesting that women too can act with bravery, valor, and intelligence and be similarly rewarded for their efforts.
Helena's reward does not last long, however, as Bertram acquiesces to marrying her at the behest of the King but refuses to consummate the marriage and live with his wife. So hung up is Bertram on the difference between their social classes that he runs off to war and refuses to return home.
In many ways, Bertram's behavior suggests his refusal to inhabit the role of the "wife" given to the knight as a reward; Bertram's refusal to consummate his marriage represents his rejection of the gendered inversion that the events of the play have established thus far. Recognizing that he has to some degree been treated as an object in the exchange between Helena and the King, Bertram enacts whatever agency he has in order to reject this paradigm, introducing a new conflict to the play.
Notably, Bertram's chosen alternative to playing the "wife" is to run away to war: as Parolles and other characters make clear, war is a masculine enterprise and those who refuse to participate are effeminate cowards. In choosing the war over his marriage, Bertram attempts to reverse the gendered role reversal that has already occurred and re-establish the status quo.
