SOURCE: Cook, Dorothy. “Helena: The Will and the Way.” Upstart Crow 10 (1990): 14-31.

In the following essay, Cook assesses Shakespeare's portrayal of Helena in All's Well That Ends Well, contending that she generates and resolves a major portion of the play's action and establishes the play's principal values.

Like most of the heroines in the romantic comedies, Helena, in All's Well That Ends Well, creates and resolves much of the action. She establishes many of the principal values in the play. She is different from earlier Shakespearean women because she is initially less successful and generally more fallible. Appropriately, she moves in a realistic world.¹ Helena should therefore not be viewed sentimentally as wholly charming,² parochially as a shameless “harpy,”³ or cynically as a mere “schemer.”⁴ Rather she is a youthful woman who actively seeks a husband whom she desires. In the first half of the play she makes...