SOURCE: “Helena's Bed-trick: Gender and Performance in All's Well That Ends Well,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4, Winter, 1994, pp. 449-68.

In the following essay, McCandless analyzes All's Well That Ends Well's concern with sexuality, and the importance of Helena's bed-trick to “the play's provocative interrogation of gender roles.”

The starting point for this essay is Susan Snyder's recent characterization of All's Well as a “deconstructed fairy tale”:¹ lurking beneath the folkloric narrative of the poor physician's daughter who deploys magic and cunning in order to overcome a dashing count's disdainful resistance are the unrepresentable specters of female sexual desire and male sexual dread. Indeed, the play invests the fairy-tale motifs that W. W. Lawrence believes undergird All's Well—“The Healing of the King” and “The Fulfillment of the Tasks”—with potent erotic subtexts.² In adapting “The Healing of the King,” Shakespeare, like his model Boccaccio, departs from...