In collaboration with William Shakespeare
This Shakespeare comedy is believed to have been written between 1604 and 1605 and tells the story of Helena, the orphan daughter of a famous physician, who is the ward of the Countess of Rousillon. Helena is hopelessly in love with the son of the Countess, Count Bertram, who has been sent to the court of the King of France. Despite her beauty and worth, Helena has no hope of attracting Bertram, since she is of low birth and he is a nobleman. However, when word comes that the King is ill, she goes to Paris and, using her father’s arts, cures the fistula from which he suffers. In return, she is given the hand of any man in the realm; she chooses Bertram. Her new husband is appalled at the match, however, and shortly after their marriage flees France, accompanied only by a scoundrel named Parolles, to fight in the army of the Duke of Florence.
The play is based on a tale of Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Shakespeare was likely to have read an English translation of the tale in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure. The name of the play comes from a well known English proverb.
Laurie Maguire, Professor of English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, has recently argued in ‘Many Hands - A New Shakespeare Collaboration?’ that Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare on All’s Well that Ends Well.