SOURCE: “‘That Your Dian / Was Both Herself and Love’: Helena's Redemptive Chastity,” in Essays in Literature, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Fall, 1990, pp. 160-78.

In the following essay, McCandless sees Helena as a compelling romantic heroine whose chastity and sexual passion are inseparable elements of her character and important components of the play's theme of redemption.

Any discussion of chastity might well start with the simple assertion that, while often mistaken as a synonym for virginity, chastity actually connotes a kind of achieved purity, an absence of sexual corruption rather than an abstinence from sexual experience. Indeed, sexuality and chastity are not necessarily antithetical. Theoretically, at least, one might lose one's physical virginity and still remain spiritually pure. As Juliet Dusinberre explains, this was precisely the point that the humanist reformers of Shakespeare's era endeavored to make.¹ They opposed to the Catholic ideal of monasticism the Protestant ideal of marriage...