SOURCE: Friedman, Michael D. “‘Service Is No Heritage’: Bertram and the Ideology of Procreation.” Studies in Philology 92, no. 1 (winter 1995): 80-101.

In the following essay, Friedman focuses on the tension between Bertram's individualized sexual desires and the social necessity of legitimate procreation portrayed in All's Well That Ends Well.

Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die, The world will wail thee like a makeless wife; The world will be thy widow and still weep, That thou no form of thee hast left behind .....No love toward others in that bosom sits That on himself such murd'rous shame commits. 

(Sonnet 9, ll. 3-6, 13-14)

In contrast to the argument employed in the first eight of Shakespeare's procreation sonnets, Sonnet 9 abandons the strategy of exhorting the young man to beget a son for the benefit of his own self-perpetuation and turns instead to the concerns of “the world,” which maintains a...