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I believe some-one who reads my reviews wanted me not to spoil this play - well I'm gonna, so stop reading now if you don't want to know any plot details!

This is considered one of the "problem" play, as far as I can tell, because it doesn't really fit neatly into any of the standard genres of the period. It certainly isn't Tragedy or History and despite having an irrelevant and silly side plot in the vein of Much Ado About Nothing or Twelfth Night, it doesn't really hold up as a Comedy in the sense of those plays either. Why not? For me at least, because everybody involved is more or less playing a manipulative game that makes them unsympathetic in my eyes. I suppose one is supposed to root for Helen who fancies a man above her station and eventually gets him - but that man doesn't want her and she wins him by any means except gaining his affections honestly. First she gets the King to arrange the marriage, then she tricks him into impregnating her. Not really the kind of woman I appreciate.

Then the husband is status-obsessed, unable to appreciate virtue or talent and he defies the King over the marriage, which he is forced to go through with - but he's a bit hypocritical and falls for the same "bed-trick" as goes down in Measure for Measure.

Eventually everything is wrapped up in a neat bow but one has to question whether there's really going to be a happily ever after in that household, given all the deceit and dislike that forms its foundation.

Heavily prose driven, the language is not that fabulous compared to the astonishing MacBeth which I read immediately previously, which just leaves the aforementioned daft subplot to amuse me. Not a great success.