An extreme version of the general modern reaction to All’s Well occurs in a review of Tyrone Guthrie’s 1959 production: ‘the tone of the play and its confusion of values . . . raises a dozen issues, only to drop them all with a cynical, indifferent ‘all’s well that ends well’. No wonder Shaw liked it so much’. Now I am convinced that whatever else the ending of this play may be called—puzzling, unsatisfactory, even bungled—Shakespeare was by no means ‘indifferent’ and certainly not ‘cynical’. I think that his own personal poetry, in the Sonnets, sheds an interesting light on exactly why he thought the play ended well, and accounts, especially, for his uncompromising treatment of Helena and Bertram. G. K. Hunter rightly calls it a ‘peculiar’ play, but he emphasizes ‘the peculiar force’ of both the idealism and the satire. Forceful writing does not reflect ‘indifference’; and E. M. W. Tillyard, in finding the play ‘full of suffering’, isolates the most important characteristic of Helena’s love and Bertram’s reactions, upon which the Sonnets provide an illuminating commentary.