[In the following essay, Snyder examines the diverse critical assessments of All's Well That Ends Well's Helena from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.]

All's Well that Ends Well has never been a favourite with audiences and readers. No allusions to it from Shakespeare's own time have been found, and evaluations by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics tend to be at best defensive; more often their tone is embarrassed or denunciatory, and some, like Quiller-Couch, Tillyard, and Josephine W. Bennett, do not hesitate to label the play a failure. Eighteenth-century audiences enjoyed the Paroles plot, but the Garrick version they saw displaced and dimmed the heroine and her trials of love to highlight the braggart soldier. Though nineteenth-century productions restored Helen to centre stage, it was in adaptations designed to distance her from sexual aggressiveness, and indeed from sexuality itself; yet in spite of all this anxious care, the play was performed only seventeen times in the entire century, considerably less than the fifty-one performances of the preceding century. Recent decades, however, have seen frequent productions: Shakespeare Quarterly records fifty-six since World War II. In the best of these—notably those by Tyrone Guthrie (1953 at Stratford, Ontario, and 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon), Elijah Moshinsky (BBC Shakespeare series, filmed 1980), and Trevor Nunn (Stratford-upon-Avon 1981, London and New York 1982)—the script survives without distorting cuts; pain, farce, and social constraints all find their places in a dramatic experience of considerable complexity.¹

This popularity of All's Well on stage both reflects and furthers an upswing in critical interest in the play and a new respect for its power and subtlety as drama. Tillyard, significantly, thought he might have had to qualify his label of ‘interesting failure’ if he had seen All's Well performed. That he had not had the opportunity, and assumed that no one else had either,² speaks perhaps as much to the tenacity of Victorian distaste for the indecencies of the play's plot as to stageworthiness per se. The current vogue on stage of All's Well, and of the other ‘problem plays’ Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, in turn owes something to the modernist penchant for irony and to more recent post-structuralist trends in criticism, which value the very dislocations and gaps that distressed earlier organicist critics. Critics and directors alike see opportunity in the discord of modes, the signs of class and gender ideologies in conflict, that were only defects for earlier generations.

Besides objections to the incomplete blending of the ‘mingled yarn’, detractors of All's Well have sometimes located its problem in Bertram, an unsatisfactory figure not worthy of the hero's role or of Helen's love. Queasiness about the bed-trick recurs as well. Generally speaking, however, unease about All's Well has focused on Helen herself.

Samuel Johnson summed up Bertram's nature and behaviour as a serious stumbling-block to enjoying the play as a comedy:

I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.³

And many after Johnson, whether officially espousing poetic justice or not, feel that Bertram deserves casting out rather than reincorporation with his wife at the play's end. As Hugh Richmond points out, Bertram is given none of the charm that renders the offences of other adolescent heroes more tolerable to the audience.⁴ Nor, although we seem meant to accept him as penitent at the play's end, has Shakespeare given him words to compel our belief in his change of heart. There is a limit to how much transformation the actor can project into his brief ‘Both, both. O pardon!’, his lines of conditional acceptance addressed to the King, and his subsequent silence, even with assistance from stage business (5.3.308-end).

Those who nevertheless find grounds for hope in this graceless character stress his youth. Immature Bertrams work best on the stage (Guthrie's Edward de Souza and Nunn's Philip Franks, in London and New York, are good examples), and the line of criticism that does most to rehabilitate him concentrates on problems of maturation. In this line, Richard Wheeler demonstrates clearly the difficult situation of a young man who escapes from a feminine family context, is immediately forced into a marriage that sucks him back into that orbit before he has attained real autonomy or confirmed his masculine sense of self, and understandably if reprehensibly runs off once more to the scene of male comradeship and achievement in battle.⁵ Such arguments tend to put considerable weight on Bertram's military success as a sign of his maturing—more weight, probably, than the text can support, in view of its problematic presentation of martial honour. Finally seeing through Paroles is advanced as another step in his education (although critics like Evans and Leggatt point out that this supposed turning-point in fact brings him no discernible self-knowledge or alteration of behaviour). Karl Elze thought that we should see All's Well as a companion piece to The Taming of the Shrew: Bertram, like Kate, is a wayward young animal being tamed into his social role. As she is likened to a falcon in training, so he is a colt being broken.⁶

In Elze's view, Bertram's character—headstrong, unripe and unformed—is what it must be to carry out Shakespeare's major decision, which was to have in this version of the taming motif a woman as the tamer. In this case as in others, the roads of critics' disapprobation have a way of leading back to the main character, Helen. She is set up by the play for their admiration, but they cannot truly admire her: her actions require this peculiar kind of hero, the bed-trick—which causes extreme unease both as a deception of Bertram and as a degradation of Helen—is her doing. Critics after Johnson, while variously displeased with the hero, have by and large given to their dissatisfaction the local habitation and name of the heroine. Their text might in unexpurgated form run like this:

I cannot reconcile my heart to Helen: a woman who pursues and captures, not once but twice, a man who doesn't want her; uses trickery in order to force herself on him sexually; and finally consolidates her hold on her husband to a chorus of universal approbation.

Such a straightforward expression of distaste is rare, however. In the face of indications that Shakespeare (as well as his characters) approves of Helen, resentment tends to be suppressed; and that suppressed resentment may energize a view of Helen at the opposite extreme, as a selfless saint who degrades herself to redeem her husband.

When the rejuvenated King enters with Helen after she has cured him, there is an odd exchange between Paroles and Lafeu:

PAROLES
Mort du vinaigre! Is not this Helen?
LAFEU
Fore God, I think so.

(2.3.45-6)

Lafeu's response is as puzzling in its way as Paroles' nonsensical oath. How can he be learning for the first time that the King's deliverer is the young woman he had met earlier at Roussillon, when he himself introduced her into the royal presence in Act 2 Scene 1? Commentators have had to posit irony, or a change in dress and mood after her success that transforms the Helen of old; I have in this edition adopted Taylor's attractive suggestion that the ‘Doctor She’ who presents herself at court in Act 2 Scene 1 is in disguise and therefore not recognized at that time by Lafeu. But the immediate sense this passage generates, that Lafeu is seeing a completely different woman from the one he sponsored just two scenes earlier, may stand as an emblem for the critical history of this play, which projects at least two quite different heroines.

The key to both the major versions of Helen is the upsetting of the gender role system created by having the woman rather than the man take the sexual initiative. Objections to the ‘indelicacy’ of Helen's banter with Paroles on virginity have tended to fade along with Victorian standards of propriety, but her appropriation of the male role as sexual aggressor has continued to give offence. No other heroine in Shakespearian comedy goes after the man she wants without some prior attachment initiated by the man. Even Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose pursuit of the unwilling Demetrius as well as her name links her with the Helen of All's Well,⁷ is trying to win back a man who initially courted her (Dream, 1.1.106-8). Portia in The Merchant of Venice, in other ways as aggressive as the Helen of All's Well and a bigot to boot, attracts neither the chorus of disapprobation nor the nervous defences that Helen does, perhaps because in the crucial area of initiating marriage she lets Bassanio take the lead. However spirited and ready to take control, the Portias and Rosalinds wait to be wooed. If they love before they are asked, they nevertheless further their desires by strategies of reception and encouragement that are in keeping with their traditional gender role. Both heroines of The Two Gentlemen of Verona follow the men they love, but only after they have been courted and won. Silvia is bridging distance rather than reversing sexual initiative when she goes after the banished Valentine; Julia is doing the same as far as she knows, thinking herself sure of Proteus' welcome. Even in male disguise (assumed for protection rather than as conferring male aggressive prerogatives, and maintained as a means of access to Proteus), she is not a pursuer but an object of pursuit waiting for renewed attention. Helen alone makes her beloved a sexual object.⁸

Anxiety on this score may be as old as the story itself. Giletta, we are told, fell in love with Beltramo ‘more than was meet for a maiden of her age’ (Boccaccio, ‘oltre al convenevole della tenera età’). No one voices such a reservation in the play, where only Bertram and Paroles hold out against the universal admiration of Helen. Yet we may wonder if the misogynistic ramblings of the Clown in Act 1 Scene 3 were not called forth by some anxiety felt by Shakespeare at his own transgressions of gender convention. The Clown elsewhere is one of Helen's admirers (4.5.17-18), but sometimes, as we have seen, he speaks for others besides himself. Perhaps in this third scene not only the sexual nausea noted in my previous discussion but the following ballad of Troy with its antifeminist commentary were generated by nervousness about Helen's actions, distant as they are from the accepted norm for good women.

In any case, patriarchal anxieties are unmistakable in the concerns of some adapters and critics. In refining the playtext in the last years of the eighteenth century, John Philip Kemble disallowed for his heroine not only unseemly banter about virginity and competence with fistulas but also husband-hunting initiative: he ends the first scene with Helen's passive, despairing words of love for the ‘bright particular star’ who is impossibly far above her, and delays the contrasting soliloquy of energetic resolve that should end the first scene, ‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie’, for inclusion in the third scene, so that Helen appears to be acting under the Countess's sanction rather than striking out on her own. Helen does not in his version flaunt her prerogative as chooser of her mate by speaking with each of the King's wards in turn but presents herself directly, and meekly, to Bertram. Critics show the same anxieties. E. K. Chambers's assumption that women should be ancillary to male activities rather than initiating action on their own is apparent when he finds Helen degraded by an inordinate desire, which ‘turns man's tender helpmate … into the keen and unswerving huntress of man’. John Masefield thinks Shakespeare shared his outrage at ‘a woman who practises a borrowed art, not for art's sake, not for charity, but, woman fashion, for a selfish end’, who puts ‘a man into a position of ignominy quite unbearable, and then plot[s] with other women to keep him in that position’. Andrew Lang hoots at Hazlitt's contention (see below) that Helen, whom he calls ‘this female D'Artagnan’, does not violate modesty. His effort at evenhandedness, asserting that her behaviour would be just as reprehensible in a man, does not convince: do we expect modesty in a male D'Artagnan?⁹

Since patriarchalism shapes women's values as well as men's, it is no surprise to find Charlotte Lennox as an early (1753) denouncer of Helen. Her indictment has many counts, but the main charges of arrogance, cruelty, and guile are informed by a sense that Helen violates feminine propriety. The same is true for the hard, predatory figure discerned by Helen's most fervent recent attacker, Bertrand Evans: while he rails against her deceptions, a deeper antipathy emerges in assertions like ‘her pilgrimage was never meant for [Saint] Jaques, but for Priapus’. Dismay at Helen's sexual aggressiveness also lurks in the background of other charges: ambition (Clifford Leech), religious hypocrisy (Cole), conspiracy (Richard Levin), even quackery (Henry Yellowlees).¹⁰

Masefield and Lang take particular exception to Coleridge's frequently-quoted pronouncement that Helen is ‘Shakespeare's loveliest character’. But Coleridge is in fact a good example of the ambivalence called forth by this masterful heroine. In a more private moment, he sympathized with Bertram at being forced to marry Helen, and added, ‘Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it requires all Shakespeare's skill to interest us for her.’¹¹ Even the ‘loveliest character’ tag occurs in a problematic context: commenting on Helen's statement to the Florentine women (3.5.50-1) that she knows Bertram by reputation only, he asks, ‘Shall we say here that Shakespeare has unnecessarily made his loveliest character utter a lie?’¹² Should we perhaps also say that Coleridge's ‘loveliest character’ superlative is a kind of compensation, energized by the force of his own suppressed revulsion at Helen's indelicacy? Something of the sort is clearly at work in Hazlitt, who keeps defending Helen against unstated but persistent accusations:

The character of Helen is one of great sweetness and delicacy. She is placed in circumstances of the most critical kind, and has to court her husband both as a virgin and a wife; yet the most scrupulous nicety of female modesty is not once violated. There is not one thought or action that ought to bring a blush into her cheeks, or that for a moment lessens her in our esteem.¹³

The gentleman protests too much. He also writes as if the plot of the play were imposed from outside on an unwilling protagonist, and not generated by her own desire. Anna Jameson too sees Helen ‘placed’ by her marriage in a degrading situation, glossing over the fact that it was Helen's own initiative that brought about the marriage against Bertram's will.¹⁴ Separating the character from her plot in this manner allows critics to bury their doubts in superlatives of veneration. It is one way to ‘save appearances’, in the scientific as well as the social sense: they account for troublesome phenomena and behaviour outside the code by manoeuvres that resemble in their complication those of the pre-Copernican astronomers.

Saving appearances has been a major motivation for critics of Helen, and the anxious idealization first displayed by Coleridge and Hazlitt in the early nineteenth century was long the favoured method. Dowden, who first finds Helen the embodiment of will and energy, recuperates her from this potentially amoral position by demonstrating how she shapes the double action of the play through her role as providential healer, first of the King's sick body and then of Bertram's sick spirit. Helen's unseemly desire is thus obliterated by altruistic love, and her dubious actions are justified by their purpose (asserted by Dowden with no textual evidence) of serving her husband. H. B. Charlton too, backing off from an initial vision of Helen as a ‘nymphomaniac’ who casts decency aside to get her man, eventually comes up with a combination saint and social worker. Wilson Knight pushes the sanctification further, allying Helen in purity with Joan of Arc and in her salvific function with Christ. Her assuming, ‘for once, the male prerogative of action’ is vindicated allegorically in that ‘she goes out as a Saint Joan to fight for the female values, for the female honour, for “virginity” as a conquering power’. The potentially interesting notion of ‘female values’ posed against the male valourizing of prowess in battle is thus completely desexualized to equate with religious spirituality.¹⁵

Knight is, nevertheless, more comfortable with Helen when she is grovelling to Bertram: ‘the woman is at her finest in submission’. The recurrent position of self-abasement before her ‘bright particular star’ that we see in Helen's first soliloquy, in the careful phrasing by which she turns ‘I choose you’ into ‘I give myself into your power’, in her humble acceptance of his dismissive cruelty, and in her blame of herself for endangering his well-being by driving him away to the wars, offers all-important support to the sanctifiers. Several point to the bed-substitution as itself a self-humbling act, thus resourcefully turning a potential negative to positive advantage.¹⁶ It must be observed, however, that even in the most generous interpretation Helen's submissive posture is recurrent, not constant. It alternates with episodes of self-assertion, so that the passivity of her first soliloquy is, after her conversation with Paroles, replaced by the confident plans of her second soliloquy, still in the same scene. Her submission to Bertram follows hard upon the unmaidenly forwardness of choosing her own husband, and indeed may well be a reaction to it. Her announced withdrawal to leave the scene clear for Bertram's return somehow takes her to the very place where he is; and her passive mode quickly converts to active as she arranges and carries out her stratagem for getting Bertram's ring and conceiving his child. Confronting Bertram in the last scene, she both pleads and asserts her claim. Schücking and others have judged these pendulum-swings as internal contradiction, a basic compositional flaw;¹⁷ perhaps we should see them rather as deliberately constructed to render the waverings of a woman driven to transgress gender proprieties by overpowering desire, but embarrassed by that transgression and trying to cover or redeem it with extreme humility—another version of the compensatory mechanism I have observed variously in the Clown's misogyny and the critics' beatification.

That beatification also draws support from the eulogies of Helen we hear from the Countess, the King, Lafeu, the French lords, and even the Clown. Indeed, this universal approval, unqualified by any character whose opinion we are invited to trust, seems to forbid reservation or mixed reaction on the part of the audience. On the other hand, they praise her for the quality of her being rather than specifically for her actions. Their summations present her as good in herself and as good for Bertram, if only he would value her properly. That is, they tend to redefine Helen out of the subject-position she has appropriated in such an unorthodox way, back into a more ideologically acceptable role as valuable object—or, viewed as a channel of heavenly grace, as a vehicle for a more exalted Subject rather than acting in her own interest.

The idealized Helen is ultimately just as inadequate in expressing our experience of this complex play as the debunked and degraded one. Indeed, the action of All's Well itself, as Joseph Westlund reminds us, ‘fully reveals the danger of inventing what one wants’ in displaying the nature and consequences of Helen's uncritical adoration for Bertram. Idealization of Helen by the other characters and by critics, though applied to less intractable material, should be suspect too, when we see how her obsession creates the perfect love object by neglecting all his qualities except high birth and good looks. In order to achieve their ends, the sanctifying critics must in turn neglect this very obsessiveness, which renders inoperable where Bertram is concerned the moral judgement and good sense she applies to everyone else, and drives her to focus totally on her own feelings with no attention to his.¹⁸ It is worth noting that, while the haloed Helens created by some actresses are remembered only for their beauty, if at all, obsessiveness and intensity help to make Helen a compelling figure on the stage; they were at the centre of two highly successful recent performances, by Angela Down on television, and by Harriet Walter in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1981.

Psychological approaches to Helen's situation, working apart from the extremes of moral evaluation that have distorted much past criticism, have recently been more fruitful. Robert Ornstein sees her as a figure comparable to Angelo, uneasy with her own desire and striving to repress it. He stresses her initial psychological isolation as one who has grown up on the fringes of a noble household with no assured place in it. Only later in her alliance with the Widow and Diana does she learn to reach out to others; her experience also engenders a more realistic attitude to sexual passion.¹⁹ To Ornstein's we may add several other readings in which Helen grows in the course of the action, her development being in some sense parallel to that of Bertram. Some of these are attractive, for example the notion advanced by John Russell Brown and later Michael Shapiro that Helen must get beyond the arrogance that tries to compel love. But developmental readings of Helen, like those of Bertram, tend to crumble at the resolution stage, unable to show either of them as clearly arrived at a new and better understanding.²⁰

Another approach to the contradictions in Helen's stance—not only between aggressive and submissive lover but between miracle-worker and down-to-earth arranger of the sexual rendezvous—is through the demands of the hybrid plot rather than the nuances of psychological portraiture. Carol Thomas Neely notes that in the folk-tale analogues ‘the entire burden of sexual union is symbolically placed on the woman, who must contrive to fill both halves of it. In order to do so, she must be … both “clever” [in gaining access to her husband] and a “wench” [unformidable and seduceable, thus allaying her husband's sexual anxieties].’²¹ Peter Ure would have Helen as well as Shakespeare aware of the contradictory roles required of her, so that the passionate woman consciously transforms herself into the ‘remote, thaumaturgic heroine’ required to win Bertram against all mundane probabilities.²² But it is Shakespeare, according to a popular line of reasoning, who has effected the main transformation: fearing that Helen's descent from working miracles in Act Two into something like procuring in Acts Three and Four may lose her the audience's sympathy, he displaces her from the centre of attention in this second phase. We are variously invited to concentrate on Diana and her mother, Paroles, and Bertram, while Helen operates more in the background, offering no access to her thoughts and motives.²³ The shift from the early, soliloquizing Helen to the later, more reticent one certainly calls for attention. A crucial question of motivation is left in doubt when Shakespeare has Helen apparently announce a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain and then arrive in central Italy in the town where she knows Bertram to be. The very silence of the text on her intentions has encouraged contrasting critical inscriptions; the detractors suspect that the penitent pilgrimage is a ruse from the beginning, veiling an intention to hunt down and capture Bertram, while the sanctifiers are enabled to see divine providence once more assisting Helen, leading her where she may further the larger plan of Bertram's redemption. It is not clear, though, that Shakespeare found this ‘de-characterization’ of Helen necessary to deflect audience disapproval of her doings and thus save the schematic happy ending.²⁴ Such readings are also suspect in tending to play down or gloss over Helen's considerable aggressiveness in the earlier acts, highlighting only the self-abnegating side of her pendulum swings.

Notes

1. Joseph G. Price thoroughly canvasses the stage history of All's Well in The Unfortunate Comedy (Toronto, 1968); J. L. Styan examines twentieth-century productions in ‘All's Well that Ends Well’, Shakespeare in Performance series (Manchester, 1984).

2. ‘Fail the play does, when read; but who of its judges have seen it acted? Not I at any rate; and I suspect that it acts far better than it reads’: E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (1950), p. 89.

3. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. vii (New Haven, 1968), p. 404.

4. Hugh Richmond, Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy (New York, 1971), pp. 152-3.

5. Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies, pp. 35-45.

6. Elze builds on suggestions from Kreyssig and Schlegel: ‘All's Well that Ends Well’, Essays on Shakespeare, trans. L. Dora Schmitz (1874), pp. 118-50. Bertram is several times associated with horses: he complains at being ‘fore-horse to a smock’ (2.1.30), is threatened with ‘the staggers’ for disobeying the King (2.3.164), is encouraged in revolt by Paroles' comparison between ‘jades’ who remain in France and ‘Mars's fiery steed’ in Italy (2.3.283-5), is soon made general of the horse for Florence (3.3.1), is to be sold off at market like an unsatisfactory horse when found unworthy of Lafeu's daughter (5.3.148-9), is seen to ‘boggle’ like a horse taking fright when Diana produces the ring (5.3.232).

7. See Susan Snyder, ‘All's Well that Ends Well and Shakespeare's Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object’, English Literary Renaissance, 18 (1988), 66-77; some of the material following is also adapted from this article.

8. The patriarchal discomfort this creates receives clarification in Laura Mulvey's study of the way films in directing the ‘curious gaze’ enact a gendered active/passive division of labour. ‘According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. … Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen’: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16, no. 3 (1975), 6-18; p. 12.

9. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (1925), p. 203; Masefield, William Shakespeare (New York, 1911), p. 148; Lang, ‘All's Well that Ends Well’, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 85 (1892), 213-27.

10. Lennox, Shakespear Illustrated (1753), i. 190-2; Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), pp. 145-66, quotation from p. 157; Leech, ‘The Theme of Ambition in All's Well that Ends Well’, ELH, 21 (1954), 23-9; Cole, pp. 114-37; Levin, ‘All's Well that Ends Well and “All Seems Well”’, Shakespeare Studies, 13 (1980), 131-44; Yellowlees, in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (1959), pp. 175-7.

11. T. M. Raysor, ed. Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism (1930), ii. 356-7.

12. Raysor, i. 113; he goes on to pose an alternative question about the necessity of deceit but never resolves the doubt.

13. Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London and New York, 1902-4), i. 329. A. P. Rossiter noted similar signs in comments by Dowden and Tillyard of ‘holding something down’—something negative about Helen. He himself advises us not to look too closely at her character, but goes on to do just that, and to find her virtue is really ‘virtù’, a strong will and an aptitude for scheming: Angel With Horns, ed. Graham Storey (1961), pp. 82-107.

14. Jameson, Characteristics of Women, 2nd edn. (1833), i. 109.

15. Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), p. 86; Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (1938), pp. 217, 258-65; Knight, The Sovereign Flower (1958), pp. 95-160.

16. Frances M. Pearce sees another parallel to Christ, who employed humiliating means to save mankind as Helen does to save Bertram: ‘In Quest of Unity: A Study of Failure and Redemption in All's Well that Ends Well’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 25 (1973), 71-88; pp. 84-5. See also William B. Toole, Shakespeare's Problem Plays: Studies in Form and Meaning (The Hague, 1966), p. 150.

17. Levin L. Schücking, Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays (London, Calcutta, Sydney, 1922), pp. 195-6. Donald Stauffer agrees that the inconsistency between Helen's Patient Griselda side and ‘the ruthless self-made woman’ makes her fail as a character: Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, 1949), p. 119.

18. Westlund, Shakespeare's Reparative Comedies: A Psychoanalytic View of the Middle Plays (Chicago and London, 1984), pp. 121, 128-9, 134. R. A. Foakes also sees Helen as ‘in her own way … as self-centred as Bertram and Parolles’, pursuing Bertram without reference to what he really is or whether he wants her; but he sidesteps any judgement by likening Helen to Ann Whitefield in pursuit of Jack Tanner in Shaw's Man and Superman, a natural force allied with the vigour of life itself: Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays; From Satire to Celebration (Charlottesville, Va., 1971), pp. 16, 29.

19. Robert Ornstein, Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery (Newark, Del., London, and Toronto, 1986), pp. 172-94.

20. James L. Calderwood, ‘The Mingled Yarn of All's Well that Ends Well’, JEGP [Journal of German and English Philology], 62 (1963), 61-76; Price, pp. 137-72; Ruth Nevo, ‘Motive and Meaning in All's Well that Ends Well’. On compelling love, see J. R. Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies (1957), p. 187, and Michael Shapiro, ‘“The Web of Our Life”: Human Frailty and Mutual Redemption in All's Well that Ends Well’, JEGP, 71 (1972), 514-26. Brown, trying to see an evolution away from pushiness, hedges on the question of how and why Helen gets to Florence; Shapiro thinks Helen repeats her error of trying to win love by force in engineering the bed-trick, but has to lean on her ‘untriumphant entry’ in 5.3 to show she has attained humility.

21. Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven and London, 1985), p. 78.

22. Peter Ure, William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays (1961), p. 14.

23. The case is argued most fully in Harold S. Wilson, ‘Dramatic Emphasis in All's Well that Ends Well’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 13 (1950), 217-40. ‘It is the idea of Helena [as noble, humble, virtuous] that sustains our impression of the consistency of her character in the second episode, up to the moment when she reappears in her old role of the humble and devoted wife’ (p. 226).

24. This position is argued or assumed by Kenneth Muir in Shakespeare's Sources, vol. i (1957), pp. 100-1, and R. L. Smallwood in ‘The Design of All's Well that Ends Well’, Shakespeare Survey 25 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 52-5, as well as Elze, Wilson, and others. De-characterization is often a strategy for ‘saving appearances’.