‘Where hope is coldest'

All’s Well That Ends Well stacks the deck from the start against its characters and the dictates of comedy. Helen’s allusions to the precocious wisdom of Daniel and Jesus as children, and to the miracles wrought by Moses when he struck water from the rock and caused the Red Sea to part, are veiled, but the inference they invite the King to draw is clear: Helen is the instrument of ‘him that all things knows’ and can count on ‘The help of heaven’ to effect what lies beyond ‘the act of men’. Such miracles materialize, however, Helen is at pains to stress, not when we expect them to, but precisely at the point of utter despair, ‘Where hope is coldest’ and thus, inexplicably, at its most powerful. All’s Well That Ends Well deploys the narrative templates, affective lexicon and master tropes of Christianity, but it does so neither consistently nor exclusively.