Original: Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Modern: The solutions to our problems often come from within us

Original: Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Modern: But we blame fate or God instead of taking responsibility

Original: Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Modern: Fate actually gives us freedom to act, and only holds us back

Original: Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
Modern: From achieving our plans when we’re being lazy or foolish.

Original: What power is it which mounts my love so high;
Modern: What force is it that makes my love reach so high

Original: That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye?
Modern: That lets me see what I want but can’t satisfy my desire?

Original: The mightiest space in fortune nature brings
Modern: Nature creates the greatest opportunities in luck

Original: To join like likes, and kiss like native things.
Modern: To bring together similar people, like natural matches.

Original: Impossible be strange attempts to those
Modern: Bold attempts seem impossible only to people

Original: That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose
Modern: Who carefully calculate their effort and assume

Original: What hath been cannot be: who ever strove
Modern: That what has happened before can’t happen again: but who has ever tried

Original: To show her merit, that did miss her love?
Modern: To prove her worth and failed to win her love?

Original: The king’s disease, –my project may deceive me,
Modern: The king’s illness—my plan might fail,

Original: But my intents are fix’d and will not leave me.
Modern: But my intentions are set firm and won’t abandon me.

In Act I, scene i of “All’s Well That Ends Well,” the Countess of Rousillon prepares to send her son Bertram to the French court to serve the ailing King of France. The scene opens with the Countess bidding farewell to Bertram, accompanied by his friend Parolles and Helena, the daughter of the Countess’s deceased physician Gerard de Narbon. Lafew, an old lord and friend to the Countess, facilitates the departure arrangements. The Countess expresses her maternal concerns about Bertram’s youth and inexperience as he ventures into court life, while offering him advice about conduct and virtue.

After Bertram’s departure with Parolles and Lafew, Helena remains behind and reveals her deep love for Bertram through a soliloquy. She acknowledges the vast social gulf between them - she being a physician’s daughter and he a count - making her romantic aspirations seem impossible. Helena then encounters Parolles, who has returned briefly, and they engage in a witty exchange about virginity and its preservation versus loss. Following Parolles’s final departure, Helena resolves to travel to Paris, inspired by her father’s medical knowledge and her belief that she might cure the King’s illness, potentially earning a reward that could elevate her social status and bring her closer to Bertram.

“All’s Well That Ends Well” follows Helena, a physician’s daughter living in the household of the Countess of Rousillon, who is deeply in love with the Countess’s son, Bertram. When the King of France falls gravely ill, Helena travels to court and offers to cure him using remedies learned from her late father. She succeeds in healing the King, who grants her any husband of her choosing as reward. Helena selects Bertram, but he reluctantly marries her and immediately departs for the wars in Italy, declaring he will never consummate the marriage until she can obtain his ancestral ring and bear his child - conditions he believes impossible to fulfill.

Helena returns to Rousillon, where she learns of Bertram’s conditions through a letter. Disguising herself as a pilgrim, she travels to Florence, where Bertram is staying and pursuing Diana, a young woman whose mother keeps a lodging house. Helena reveals her identity to Diana and her mother, proposing a bed trick: Diana will agree to meet Bertram secretly, but Helena will take her place in the darkness. During their encounter, Helena obtains Bertram’s ring and gives him another ring that the King had previously given her.

Helena spreads word of her own death and returns to France, where Bertram has come to seek a new wife with the King’s blessing. When Bertram presents Helena’s ring to his prospective bride, the King recognizes it and suspects Bertram of murdering Helena. Diana arrives and presents Bertram’s ring as proof of their relationship, leading to confusion until Helena appears, pregnant with Bertram’s child and wearing his family ring. Faced with the fulfillment of his impossible conditions, Bertram accepts Helena as his true wife, and the King promises to arrange Diana’s marriage to a suitable husband.