ABSTRACT
In All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, especially as regards characterization, again involves the coexistence of Protestant and Catholic motifs. Shakespeare’s employment of Protestant and Catholic allusions in All’s Well indirectly bears upon characters’ reformation of themselves and others. It mainly focuses upon the issue of personal merit, which one might think of as a prerequisite in early modern Catholic theology for the reformation of character, and in its early modern Protestant counterpart as a retardant to the same. In the character of Helena of All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare represents more fully than anywhere else in the canon the problematical complication of merit occasioned by the Reformation Protestant revaluation of the term in its debate with Catholicism. Both Catholic and Protestant ideas informing All’s Well color Helena’s romantic notion of her merit.
