CHICAGO — Of all the women in Shakespeare, Helen in “All’s Well That Ends Well” is perhaps my favorite. Courageous, determined and delightfully verbose, she’s more like a character in a Jane Austen novel.
Low-born Helen — she is merely a physician’s daughter, heaven forfend — fights off any and all attempts to diminish her prospects in love. To snag her guy, she reinvents herself as a healer, sneaks into his bed, arranges to get pregnant, travels halfway across Europe, risks life and limb and, all this time, delivers some of Shakespeare’s most beautifully penned observations about relationships, mortality and life itself.
“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven,” she observes, striking one of the great blows for rational thought anywhere in Shakespeare.
