SOURCE: Snyder, Susan, ed. Introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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...