This paper explores the connections between the rhetoric of manners and characters’ sexual relations in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well. Many of the play’s characters appear caught at points of contradiction in prevailing codes of knowledge and behaviour. The effects of such contradictions are widespread, threatening courtly careers, social and sexual reputation, family harmony, and honour. These intricacies of action and relationship are most sharply concentrated on the young count, Bertram. The contradictions in his behaviour exemplify breakdowns in gender norms and practices that troubled many commentators in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The paper examines All’s Well that Ends Well as a particularly vivid illustration of social pressures that strongly impinge upon male identity and desire in the period. It argues that Shakespeare dramatizes shifting codes of manners and social meaning as they affect notions of shame, privacy, public control, and demeanour.