Early in All's Well That Ends Well, Helena, upon being told that she “must [up]hold the credit of [her] father,” declares that she cannot remember him:

This is just one moment among several in the first eighty-five lines of the play that concerns the loss of fathers. Helena here reacts to the Countess's inaccurate assertion that, for Helena, “The remembrance of her father never approaches her heart but the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood from her cheek” (1. 1. 49–51). What the Countess takes as evidence of sorrow for a dead father, Helena reveals to be grief over unexpressed love. The status of her tears, however, is complicated. Helena tells us both that she cries over Bertram and that the tears she spills “grace [her father's] remembrance more / Than those [she] shed for him” in the past, presumably at his funeral. She has “forgot” her father, but she also “grace[s] his remembrance”: how do we explain this paradox? The answer lies in the disjunction between the public effect Helena's tears produce and the unseen longing that motivates them.