SOURCE: “All's Well That Ends Well, and ‘All Seems Well’,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. XIII, 1980, pp. 131-44.

In the following essay, Levin argues that Helena accomplishes her goals in All's Well That Ends Well through guile and deceit, thus contributing to the play's categorization as a “problem comedy.”

Critics have offered two very different assessments of Helena, and hence of All's Well That Ends Well.¹ Some regard her as a genuine romantic heroine—resourceful, yes, but also virtuous, feminine, charming, and modest. She never behaves cynically, and her motives are above reproach. She cures the king's physical ailment and later brings Bertram to spiritual health. This daughter of a middle-class physician is rewarded, like patient Griselda, with a man of high degree. The alternative view is that Helena mercilessly pursues Bertram. Whether she is at first motivated by love, sex, ambition, or, in Tillyard's fine phrase, “the humour...