Summary
Helena travels to Florence, where she hears a woman named Diana talking with her mother, the Widow, and their neighbor, Mariana.
Helena learns that Bertram has been pursuing Diana and that he frequently talks about his wife at home whom he dislikes.
The Widow encourages Diana to maintain her chastity despite Bertram's advances. She also invites Helena to stay with them.
At the camp of the Duke of Florence, the brothers Dumaine tell Bertram not to trust Parolles because he is a liar. They devise a plan to expose Parolles, in which they will convince him to retrieve the battalion's drum that was lost on the battlefield. Then, they will appear dressed as enemy soldiers and "capture" Parolles to show how easily he will betray his friends.
With their plan in place, they approach Parolles about the drum, saying it was an unimportant loss. Parolles, being self-centered and boastful, announces that he will retrieve the drum.
Meanwhile, Bertram plans to visit Diana once more in an attempt to seduce her.
Helena, after revealing her true identity to the Widow, enlists Diana and the Widow to help her in her plot to secure her husband. Diana will get Bertram's ring from him as a token of his affection for her, then invite Bertram to her bedchamber at night. Diana will then switch places with Helena, so that Bertram unknowingly has sex with his wife instead of Diana.
Analysis
Act Three of the play returns to the motif of female friendship and women supporting one another.
When Helena arrives in Florence, she is welcomed into a conversation between the Widow, her daughter Diana, and their neighbor Mariana, in which they discuss the importance of virginity and Diana's rejection of Bertram's advances. The Widow and Diana also agree to help Helena in her scheme to deceive Bertram (even though Helena had to pay them to help), underscoring this female alliance as a major driver of the plot.
The bond created among the three women is reminiscent of the support the Countess offered to Helena at the beginning of the play, her blessing being the thing that catalyzed Helena's trip to Paris and her plan to cure the King in exchange for Bertram's hand. Thus, as the play continues, Shakespeare showcases female bonds growing stronger and more effective at the same time he dramatizes the breakdown of bonds between men.
This tactful female alliance appears in stark contrast to the masculine environment of the Duke's camp, in which the brothers Dumaine want to expose Parolles, mostly for their own entertainment. As the women plot and scheme to deceive Bertram for what Helena sees as a life-or-death situation, the men of the play plot a ruse of their own. This ruse, however, is decidedly low stakes, based more on their desire to embarrass Parolles than achieve any particular goal of their own.
As such, the play suggests that the women of the play are growing stronger through their allied scheme against Bertram while the men are too distracted with their own antics to notice – a situation that emphasizes the play's major theme of love and romance as a "battlefield" in which the sexes vie for the upper hand. With the plot to expose Parolles playing a major role at the Duke's camp, the play suggests that the women are organized and honest with one another while relationships between men are often duplicitous and tenuous at best.
