All’s Well exercises a recurrent fascination for criticism, because so many things about it are of striking, and contemporary, interest. Yet despite that fact (or possibly partly because of it, because it can be difficult to correlate ‘contemporary’ with supposedly ‘Elizabethan’ interests) the play never quite takes, never quite seems to work. The problem–it’s always called a ‘problem’ play in one sense or another – is just what ‘working’ should, for this play, consist of. This paper has no more specific title because its aim is simply the play itself, not any single aspect of it; but if it is to have a well-ending, it must respond to G. K. Hunter’s challenge that ‘criticism of All’s Well has failed, for it has failed to provide a context within which the genuine virtues of the play can be appreciated’. That is an ambitious aim, and the ambition in my love (of the play) thus plagues itself and must take refuge in the obvious scepticism of Shakespeare’s title; a perfectly satisfactory conclusion is hardly probable, however much I believe it to be possible.