In “All’s Well That Ends Well”, a virtuous woman, acclaimed by all, is rejected by the suitor she has chosen because he regards her as insufficiently well born. Callow youth that he is, he runs off to war and is won back only by a stratagem whereby his true bride deceives him into going to bed with her and making her pregnant and giving her a ring his mother gave to him. The denouement consists of the revelation of this scheme and his surrender to her love. That interpretation, however, has to elide many of the problems the text provides for it. Bertram, the runaway bridegroom, must be made into a total cad if he is to give up a ring his mother gave him so that he can bed someone who is no more to him than a whore. He is so obstinate and cold to Helena, the doctor’s daughter who chooses him as a husband, that one wonders what she saw in him in the first place. Stage business has to be worked in if the two “lovers” are to reconcile. In one production, Helena puts a toy hobby horse between them after the last line of dialogue has been spoken to suggest that the child she will have will bind the two together. The interpretation also posits the notion that Shakespeare thought upward mobility was a reward for merit and that warfare was a silly calling, something not apparent in his great plays, and only a grand irony in “Troilus and Cressida”.