Shaw was reacting to the very mixed reception that had long been accorded to Helen, the fact that some had idealized her and others demonized her. Samuel Taylor Coleridge did both: on one occasion he described her as Shakespeare’s “loveliest character,”4 while on another he suggested that “Bertram had surely good reason to look upon the King’s forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakespeare’s consummate skill to interest us for her.”5

For Anna Jameson, writing in the 1830s as the first female critic to reflect at length upon Shakespeare’s women, Helen exemplified the virtue of patience in the face of adversity and male infidelity: “There never was, perhaps, a more beautiful picture of a woman’s love, cherished in secret, not self-consuming in silent languishment … but patient and hopeful, strong in its own intensity, and sustained by its own fond faith.”6 A couple of generations later, the great actress Ellen Terry begged to disagree, describing Helen as belonging to the “doormat” type: “They bear any amount of humiliation from the men they love, seem almost to enjoy being maltreated and scorned by them, and hunt them down in the most undignified way when they are trying to escape. The fraud with which Helena captures Bertram, who has left his home and country to get away from her, is really despicable.”7

Bertram, by contrast to Helen, has always been roundly condemned by the great majority of critics. As already noted, Dr. Johnson set the tone of the debate with his remark that he could not reconcile his heart to Bertram. Coleridge tried to mount a defense, but resorted to special pleading on the grounds of status and alleged partial knowledge:

I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram … He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth, and appetite for pleasure and liberty, natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course, he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependant in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other respects, Bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant.8

For twentieth-century critics, the main problem with the play was more a matter of genre and tone than of the morality of the central characters. It was suggested that there was an incongruity between the realistic characterization and the folktale or even fairy-tale plot:

Shakespeare transferred the Decameron story [the main source of his plot] from sunlight into shadow, not abandoning Boccaccio’s naturalism, but making it problematic, turning its social and sexual givens into occasions for moral reflection and private anguish. As a result, character and motive become contradictory, and standards of judgement other than the right and natural claims of love make ironic and questionable the implications of the original.9

The plot contains strong folktale motifs, such as those that have been described as the Healing of the King, the Fulfillment of Tasks, and the Clever Wench. Some critics have accordingly suggested that this gives primacy to structure and plot over psychology and interior life. The play can be read as a “romantic fable” in which

the intrigues and deceptions of the plot are stressed. In order to bring out the traditional basis for the story, the movement of the play builds to three peaks, the cure of the King, the use of the bed-trick, and the redemption of Bertram. Each is accentuated as the fulfilment of a task which will lead to the resolution of the dilemma … Since psychological motivation is relatively unimportant, the other characters fill out the play as stock figures.10

Yet at the same time, a much more hard-edged reading is possible:

Considered as the basis for a serious play, the plot may expose the moral problem of birth versus merit, the social problem which explores the legitimacy of female aggression, or the domestic problems of the unwanted wife … If the play is regarded as satire, then cynicism infects the realism. The dark mood is established in the first scene by the stress on disease, old age and death.11

So it is that “the characterization of the major dramatic persons is at odds with the final tendency of the action, in which a tone of irony and often satire conflicts with the ‘all’s well’ complacency implied by the fairy-tale elements, and in which a concrete, realistic presentation works at cross purposes with the romantic image of experience which the play seems trying to project.”12

Such difficulties and variation in interpretation, and the perceived contradictions within both the action and the characterization, resulted in twentieth-century critics’ identifying All’s Well as one of Shakespeare’s “problem” plays. This term was first used to describe the realistic dramas of the nineteenth century, those of Ibsen especially, that confronted controversial social issues by means of onstage debate, often with characters representing conflicting attitudes and points of view. The critic F. S. Boas, writing under the influence of Shaw, applied the term to All’s Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, three sex-charged plays that he thought shared an interest in social problems. Subsequent criticism applied the term more loosely, and corralled more Shakespearean plays within it, often emphasizing problems of form as well as content. All’s Well and Measure for Measure in particular were seen as “problem comedies” because they did not conform to the supposed comic norm of a light touch and a happy ending. The related term “dark comedies” has also been used. So, for example, the ending was seen as a special problem. What were Shakespeare’s intentions? Critics have fiercely debated “whether he meant Helena to be regarded as noble and admirable, or as a schemer and a harpy, why he blackened the character of Bertram and yet rewarded him at the end, and whether he meant the final reconciliation of Bertram and Helena to be taken as a prelude to future bliss, or ironically, as a union which must ultimately result in disaster.”13

More recent criticism has continued to emphasize “problems” even as the terms of the debate have been converted into those of modern gender politics. The play has been especially amenable to analysis on these lines because it inverts the literary and dramatic norm whereby it is customarily the man who pursues the woman:

Helena has been a puzzle and provocation to critics because she occupies the masculine position of desiring subject, even as she apologises fulsomely for her unfeminine forwardness and works desperately to situate herself within the feminine position of desired object. Bertram, too, poses problems because he occupies the feminine space of the Other, even as he struggles to define himself as a man by becoming a military and sexual conqueror. He is the desired object, the end of the hero’s—or in this case heroine’s—gendered journey of self-fulfilment.14

By this account, Helen becomes one of Shakespeare’s most interesting comic heroines, not least because she is given genuinely introspective soliloquies:

The intensity and extremity which have come to her from folktale … combine with the quality of female self-containedness with which Shakespeare seems to have been more and more concerned in the mature comedies. And from the fusion of these two things there emerges a radically new comic heroine. For Helena is inward … She is much given to secrecies and reticences.15

The richness of her interior life makes it surprising that the role has not been taken on by more of the major female actors of modern times.

It has long been recognized that the parallel between Bertram and Parolles is central to the structure of the play:

Both are “seemers.” Grant this, and the whole sub-plot of the exposure of “Mr Words” has its place and point: Parolles is there to be stripped; and stripped at just the very moment when Bertram’s fortunes reach their apogee (in his suppositious conquest of Diana) and begin to turn retrograde—towards his own exposure.16

With the advent of explicit feminism and the late twentieth-century war between the sexes, it became easier for critics and audiences to see not just the shadowing of Bertram in Parolles but also the broader parallelism between the sex plot and the war plot:

The shaming of Parolles runs counterpoint, in carefully matched scenes, to Bertram’s attempt to seduce Diana and his own deception by the bed-trick … Bertram is trying to satisfy sexual relations impersonally in terms of war, translating male aggression into promiscuity, in which sex is treated as the taking and possessing of a woman’s “spoil,” repudiating responsibility and abandoning the woman as soon as she has surrendered.17

The play’s explicit concern with social mobility seems equally modern in its application. Northrop Frye, one of the great twentieth-century critics, argued that All’s Well is almost the only Shakespearean play in which there is an explicit social promotion in the foreground of the action: “It is emphasized that Helena is below Bertram in social status, and that it takes direct intervention of the king to make her marriage possible.