[In the following essay, Richard traces Shakespeare's transition from comedies of plot to tragedies of character through an examination of the comedic villains of the problem plays, focusing in particular on Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well.]

If, as F. P. Wilson puts it, Shakespeare at the start of the Jacobean decade is looking for a “style that could express the mind as it was in action,” then the “problem” comedies illustrate the troubled labor that will forge that style.¹ The earlier “festive” comedies depend on characters overcoming obstacles that the outside world places in the way of a happy ending. Caskets must be properly judged before there can be a marriage, groups of twins must assemble before families are reunited, and younger sons must prove their merit before acceding to their proper public status. Such plots are predicated on characters who maintain a generally constant personality, though it may mature in the course of the action; it is the world that finally relents, in a sequence of plot developments. Comedic dialogue aims at a clear definition of the current status of the plot rather than at the depiction of what Henry James might call a free associative life. But in the world of tragedy, characters realize the way the world is—the unbridgeable abyss between heroic intention and grim actuality. Tragic worlds are tragic in that they refuse to adapt to man and instead force man to accommodate to their indifference. The resulting tragic awareness presupposes a dynamic formation of character, which in turn requires a style that “could record thought at the moment it arose in the mind”²: to chart the reality of the thwarted intention, the dramatist depicts the minute-by-minute response to an unchangeable or deteriorating situation. The problem plays represent a transition between Shakespeare's comedies of plot and his tragedies of character.

The metamorphosis of the comedic villain signals the change in Shakespeare's dramatic intentions. In the early comedies, either the villain is dismissed from the plot by being circumvented, as happens to the Duke of Milan in Two Gentlemen of Verona, or he is given a change of heart, at times scarcely credible, as is the case with Proteus in the same play. Though dramaturgically weak, the latter method corresponds to the general change in Shakespeare's dramatic style. The early villains live in a responsive world, a world that adapts to the strong personalities of the heroes and heroines. But the responses of the world grow harsher and more obscure as Shakespeare's vision darkens. Shylock, who reveals scenes of an extraordinary inner life juxtaposed with moments of the shallowest simplification, emblematizes the pattern recurrent in plays of this period. Despite the generally harmonious conclusions of these festive comedies, a subtext of doubt, failed vision, and thwarted intention prevents any complete resolution. When Oliver is forced to admit that he does not know why he so dislikes Orlando, when the Falstaff of Merry Wives is made to look ridiculous and old, and when Olivia confesses that Malvolio has been most notoriously abused, the easy victories of the happily paired lovers whose marriages ring down the curtain seem false. In the course of the play the villains have come to realize the inadequacy of the world. To dismiss the lovers into that same inadequate world, even with their mutual support, undermines the value system of the play. It is a tribute to Shakespeare's genius that the songs and poetry of the fifth acts can cover over the uncomfortable moments of the fourth acts. But the villains of the problem plays have discovered the world that resists all efforts to thrive, as the tragic heroes Hamlet, Macbeth, and Antony will come to realize.

The most suggestive line of development, then, is not Proteus-Parolles-Iago, but rather Shylock-Parolles-Othello.³ Such villains as Shylock, Malvolio, and especially Parolles are Shakespeare's experiments in the depiction of psychological immediacy. He is concerned with how they respond to the resistance that the outside world mounts to their intentions. A comedic villain who engages the audience through an emotional complexity rather than through a one-dimensional manipulation of the plot certainly establishes the direction of Shakespeare's drama in this decade: our very inability to dismiss Parolles and the manner in which he suggests that all is not well that ends well creates a new Shakespearean drama of the pitfalls of the mental world rather than the pratfalls of the physical.⁴

Parolles, the villain of All's Well That Ends Well, stands near the end of these lines of development.⁵ He, like Falstaff, a stock character of Plautine comedy—the miles gloriosus—bursts the limits of his type. For Parolles is a man in the process of becoming himself. The ambiguities of his character are first indicated by the name: Parolles would not be out of place in the dramatis personae of a Jonsonian comedy of humors.⁶ When Rowe, in his listing of the characters, underlines Parolles' “parasitical” relationship to Bertram, he raises the question of the relationship of language to action, of language as a proper medium to reflect or record action. That question will haunt this character throughout the play. When language is unmasked as a faulty medium for conveying truth—in this case, the wretched personality of the fellow—language joins the ranks of love-making, marriage, or the solid wedding ring itself as an inadequate vehicle for trust. Furthermore, when Parolles discovers how his tongue is his own worst enemy, he relates the inadequacy of language to the uncertainty of his own identity. For although language should be the bridge by which the world of intentions helps shape the resistant outer worlds of society and nature, Parolles' words cannot support the necessary weight.

At his entrance, Helena carefully defines Parolles for the audience:

                              I know him a notorious liar,
Think him a great way fool, soly a coward.(7)

(I.i:100-01)

Because Helena's brief appearance on the stage has already established as a credible witness, she determines the audience's point of view. But her positioning of Parolles within the miles gloriosus tradition (foolish boast as a cover for actual cowardice) is offset by other remarks that indicate unusual problems with the character:

Yet these fix'd evils sit so fit in him,
That they take place when virtue's steely bones
Looks bleak i' th' cold wind.

(I.i.102-04)

Her moralizing emphasizes our privileged position: she admits that most observers, without her insight into personality, will be swayed by Parolles' appearance to giving him precedence and to depressing those who merit advancement. The imagery, drawn from clothes, emphasizes the carriers of meaning over the meaning itself and is a metaphor not unworthy of Parolles, who will call into doubt the very functions of language. She reinforces the visual aspects when she adds, “full oft we see / Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly” (I.i.104-05). But the moralizing takes place in a vacuum. Helena sees wisdom playing the servant to folly, yet is incapable of doing anything to change the situation (an attitude that parallels her hopeless love, the subject of the preceding soliloquy). Most important, even Helena's perception, buttressed as it would seem to be by moral insight, is not to be trusted. She has prefaced her remarks by identifying Parolles as the bosom companion of Bertram, and thus the braggart soldier is one “I love … for his sake” (I.i.99). Her emotional life, along with the faulty perception of others, waits upon folly. The reader or viewer becomes aware of the ambiguities of the situation. Bertram, in his first brief appearance, has sounded the note of immaturity that will make him an unworthy object of Helena's love. And Helena further corrupts her reason by loving Parolles, the fool, liar, and coward, for the sake of Bertram. So before Parolles utters his first line, he has been established as a problematic character, one who demonstrates a clear discrepancy between appearance and reality, but also one who exists in an atmosphere that refuses to afford a clear definition, an atmosphere aptly defined by Helena's yearning to remake reality to satisfy the hunger of her own imagination. What she knows must wait on what she loves.

During the scene itself, an elaborate parody of the interview between Hamlet and Ophelia (“Nymph, in thy orisons …”), Parolles reveals the tenuousness of his position. He indulges in a combination of sexual innuendo, the sort of bawdy appropriate to servants, and extravagantly overstated courtly compliment, probably intended to remind Helena of her subordinate position by its very exaggeration. The opening exchange emphasizes the gap between language and reality:

PAR:
‘Save you, fair queen!
HEL:
And you, monarch!
PAR:
No.
HEL:
And no.

(I.i.106-09)

The admission that the world of courtly compliment is out of place for these two speakers sets the tone for the dialogue, one in which insult scarcely remains beneath the surface. Parolles' initial inquiry, “Are you meditating on virginity?” (I.i.110), is as abrupt and unmotivated as Hamlet's turns of thought and phrasing when he confronts Ophelia. But Helena takes up the ball and despite a simple beginning (“How may we barricado [virginity] against him?” “Keep him out.” [I.i.112-14]), the atmosphere darkens as Helena considers the question as it exists over a period of time. Time in its complicated form (the memory of the past coloring and infecting the present and future) is not a comedic convention: in a straightforward comic farce such as The Comedy of Errors, all the action takes place helter-skelter, as quickly as possible. The idea of people having to endure whole lifetimes of turmoil, dislocation, and enchantment is foreign to the genre, inviting a more tragic rendering of the situation. Comedy reveals what is really happening at the moment: who should love whom, who should rightfully be restored to which public position. Tragedy needs the impact of passing time, be it the extended pressure of the delayed vengeance in Hamlet, the disintegration of the kingdom in Lear, or the extended twilight of a romance in Antony and Cleopatra. But even where logic tells us that some time must be passing—the education of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew or of Orlando in As You Like It—time appears to be compressed. Both Katherine and Orlando are allowed to discover their true natures and are not forced to grow into something different. So when Helena asks what to do about the repeated assaults of men against virginity, she is insisting on problems that have not occupied Shakespeare before, either in tragedy or comedy: Can one endure in a changing world? Can one indeed change in harmony with that world?

Parolles, unskilled at arguing on Helena's level, insists on the quick, cataclysmic event that comedy delights in: “Man, setting down before you, will undermine you and blow you up. … Virginity being blown down, man will quicklier be blown up” (I.i.118-19, 123-24). In three prose speeches he runs away with his metaphors, leaving sense behind and twisting logic to unleash a barrage of empty words upon Helena. She has her own ideas, and in asking for a “policy” and for a way “to lose it to her own liking,” she requires of Parolles the kind of advice he might seem to be well qualified to deliver. Yet he can only see things from the point of view of a particularly licentious man of the world. In love with the sound of his own voice and his ability to make the most tenuous connections between ideas, Parolles runs on as if afraid to stop.

Virginity is an ambiguous topic for these two enemies, Bertram's good and evil consciences. Virginity is an enemy to Helena because it implies a life without Bertram; yet it is her only comfort because it insists on the integrity of her desire. Parolles attacks virginity because it both keeps him out as a man and suggests a realm where his weapons of words are powerless. But he also prizes it because he himself hides behind a shield of language—behind a facade that will barricade the self against the intrusions of reality. In the next passage (after some kind of a gap in the text), Helena seeks a language in which “wishing well” (I.i.181) had a body; even so, Parolles fears to commit his shaky bravado to the acting out of his own words. Helena wants to lose virginity in her own way, hoping to find a body in the world of action that will not thwart the desires of her world of imagination. Parolles, a weaker character, so mistrusts the outside world that he refuses to commit his desires to the body of reality. Helena complains that her “baser stars do shut [her] up in wishes” (I.i.183). The strength of will behind her desire should eventually overcome the “baser stars,” leading to a comedic end. (Tragedy insists on the stars having the last word: Romeo and Juliet die “star-cross'd;” Bosola informs the dying Duchess of Malfi that “the stars shine still.”) But at present, she fears that her physical situation (her low birth) will limit her to wishing (the internal world of intention), despite the strong influence that her sense of self exerts on the world of action and proof. Perhaps she sees Parolles as a parody of herself—a thing of words (wishes) that has no real substance.

Parolles slips in a thrust at Helena by declaring that he will, if he can remember, think of her at court (where she wishes to be). Such words occupy a dubious middle ground between thought (wishing) and action. But Helena's final words to him draw him into her own fears of being caught in a potentially tragic astrological situation. When Parolles insists that he was born under Mars, he is retreating to the safety of his comedic type (the miles gloriosus) and is defining himself in a nonthreatening way. But Helena points out that Mars may not only define, but also limit Parolles' sphere of action, specifically to the humiliating worlds of petty rank (“the wars hath so kept you under”) and dishonorable retreat (“You go so much backward when you fight” [I.i.195, 200]). Parolles relies upon his skill with language to reinterpret her words: going backward is “for advantage” (I.i.201). Helena caps the argument by pointing out that fearful “running away” is also an indictment of Parolles' cowardice. Parolles then falls back upon sententiousness and indeed beats a swift and, for him, advantageous retreat.

At his most basic, Parolles is a Jonsonian character illustrating the pompous and meaningless language of courtly compliment. Parolles encourages Bertram to “use a more spacious ceremony to the noble lords” (II.i.50-51). Alive to the potentialities of the world of compliment and ceremony, he insists on its ability to produce a reality that, divorced from the real wars, can answer the requirements of the imagination. That such a reality poses moral ambiguities he refuses to consider: “and though the devil lead the measure, such are to be follow'd” (II.i.55-56). His own pose of derring-do and a martial past is a thing of rags and patches, as is implied by his reference to Captain Spurio (again, a Jonsonian name). Parolles is comfortable in this world.

But the Countess and her Clown, parodying this world in the following scene, bring out the treachery of courtly language: since it means anything, it means nothing. “O Lord, sir!” the Clown's tag, seems a perfect code phrase, communicating something to both parties, yet saving the speaker from clarifying his intentions (and the listener from responding to them). That such a procedure will eventually backfire becomes clear when the Countess feels free to interpret the “O Lord, sir!” as a summons to the whip. The Clown admits the failure of his courtly language: “I ne'er had worse luck in my life in my ‘O Lord, sir!’ I see things may serve long, but not serve ever” (II.ii.58-59). Yet the interchange foreshadows not only Parolles' fall but also his problematic reintegration into society.

COUNTESS:
I play the noble huswife with the time,
To entertain it so merrily with a fool.
CLOWN:
O Lord, sir!—Why, there't serves well again.

(II.ii.60-62)

The Clown, after having flirted with disaster, does not drop the language that has almost cost him a whipping. Rather, he is delighted to show that he can continue to thrive with it. Although he has been recognized as a fool and has made the Countess, worried over Helena's departure and her son's absence at Court, recognize her own foolishness in so spending her own time, he does not fear resorting to the silly, strutting codes again. Having been unmasked, he will no longer have to bear responsibility for them; he has forced language into its meanest guise—a nonsensical refrain that convinces no one but amuses all.

Members of an older generation, the King and Lafew can distinguish language from truth, a distinction lost upon younger characters. For instance when the King tries to persuade Bertram to marry Helena willingly, he warns Bertram of the dangers of relying on an autonomous language. Just as Bertram's father had made his own character clear by forcing his tongue to obey his hand (I.ii.41), making his language a reporter of his actions and not using language to create an alternative reality, so the King values those who do not confuse the essence with the name. He knows that names are generally false and that one must look to the identity as proven by action: “The mere word's a slave / Debosh'd on every tomb, on every grave / A lying trophy …” (II.iii.137-39). Language can be created out of nothing. If it is pleasing language Bertram wants, the King can provide the insubstantial background to set off the essential worth of Helena: “If thou can'st love this creature as a maid / I can create the rest” (II.iii.142-43). That Bertram has been corrupted appears in his lines of compliance (II.iii.167ff). Faced with personal injury he bends to the King's will and indeed delivers a hypocritical speech, later admitting to Parolles, “Although before the solemn priest I have sworn, / I will not bed her” (II.iii.269-70). The split between his words and his actions is complete.

Lafew recognizes Bertram's insincerity and does not share Helena's hesitation in denouncing Parolles. He turns on Parolles, vexed at the man for the faults of the master. The braggart is not “a vessel of too great a burthen” (II.iii.205); he charges his language with an import that reality cannot bear and is “not worth another word” (II.iii.262-63). Lafew departs, and Parolles collapses into empty invective—he cannot finish his comparisons: “I'll have no more pity of his age that I would have of—I'll beat him, and if I could but meet him again” (II.iii.239-41). Lafew's anger at Parolles might seem excessive, but his insistence on Bertram as Parolles' “lord and master” provides the key to understanding his state. Parolles has clearly corrupted Bertram, the scarves and bannerets of his costume symbolizing the shoddy and immoral language that has snared the impressionable Bertram's imagination. Parolles himself has been shaken by the preceding events, and knows that Lafew blames him for Bertram's failings. He hedges and refuses to answer questions in a straightforward manner. He dislikes Lafew's language because it is too close to reality—to the “bloody succeeding” (II.iii.191) that Lafew's words imply. Yet Parolles has no trouble in bending language to fit the situation: “A young man married is a man that's marr'd” (II.iii.298); and he sums up the situation from his—not the audience's—point of view: “The King has done you wrong” (II.iii.300). But then, as if he knew instinctively that the world of reality (in which Bertram should love Helena and be thankful to the King for making the match) is stronger than the world of wishing and language (in which Bertram has been wronged by the King and forced into a hateful marriage), he admits, “But hush, 'tis so” (II.iii.300).

A Jonsonian analysis of Parolles as corrupt language would probably emphasize language as a weak vessel for the truth of reality, and therefore as a corrupter of others. But Parolles' fatal aspect is his inability to recognize or define himself in his language. This failure charts his deviation from the villains of the earliest comedies and his movement toward the tragic heroes of the first decade of the seventeenth century. The excessive and almost disproportionate contempt of Lafew and the French Lords for Parolles finds an ironic mirror in his own admission, “I love not many words!” (III.vi.84). A character named Parolles will be on shaky ground indeed after such an admission, as the French Lords realize when they sum up his character:

Is not this a strange fellow, my lord, that so confidently seems to undertake this business, which he knows is not to be done, damns himself to do, and dares better be damn'd than to do't?

(III.vi.85-89)

Parolles' words have redefined reality (“this business, which he knows is not to be done”) and used language as a spur to force himself into this made-up reality (“damns himself to do”), all while admiring the impossibility of the linguistic reality (“dares better be damn'd than to do't”). Thus he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't—a usable definition of tragedy, especially as he has brought this situation upon himself. Parolles yearns to plot out his desires—the “real” Parolles—on the matrix of the natural world. Thus far he has described, in his customarily inflated and self-serving language, the formula for such a reality. Unlike the universe of mathematics, however, Nature withholds unambiguous support for the curve that would illustrate Parolles' private formula.

The very resistance of reality to the world of desire condemns Parolles to an ambiguous resolution. All's Well is a comedy, and as such there is little chance that Parolles should encounter reality at all. Just as Shylock enters a courtroom that appears real but actually contains Portia in disguise, a Portia who knows the quibble on which to make Shylock's case founder, so Parolles enters not the enemy's camp—the field of reality—but rather a heightened and ultimately artificial world. In this camp he has no chance to make his intentions come true: all is rigged against him. And just as Shylock finds the courtroom an externalization of his own villainy (the insistence upon the letter of the law, with no thought of extenuating mercy), so Parolles enters a camp where the improbability of his own language is mocked by the unintelligibility of his captors' nonsense. Their prattle in effect isolates him with the “real” Parolles: because he cannot use his own language to deceive them, he is reduced to whatever makes up Parolles when he is shorn of words. Indeed, each soldier speaks a tongue of his own making, highlighting the subjective nature of language and its inherent difficulty—impossibility, rather—as a medium of understanding in a graceless world. The scene parodies the terrible questions and inadequate answers traded by Lear and his daughters. The Lords can agree that merely to “seem to know, is to know straight our purpose” (IV.i.18-19), but only because they are in a comedy; in a tragedy such a remark inevitably leads to ruin.

As the Lords comment on Parolles' preparations, Shakespeare divides the stage world into two arenas. In the visible one the Lords and the audience know what is going on—and Parolles thinks he does. But a more important debate is occurring within Parolles himself. He has landed in this mess because of his own lies, but idiotically seeks to save himself by lying more. His “plausive invention” (IV.i.26) seeks to link language with reality, though all the time he knows (and this is the first time he has been willing to admit it to himself) that he does not dare do the things he has boasted—and lied—about. That his position is treacherous the Second Lord makes clear: “This is the first truth that e'er thine own tongue was guilty of” (IV.i.32-33).

To be guilty of speaking the truth underlines the self-destructive nature of Parolles' introspection. One or another of his selves must suffer: either he is a fraud or his true self of “fears” must encounter the enemy and take the consequences. Unlike most of Shakespeare's other villains, he asks himself how he got into this mess, and the question strikes at the core of his being: “What the devil should move me to undertake the recovery of this drum, being not ignorant of the impossibility, and knowing I had no such purpose?” (IV.i.34-36). He is aware of more inside of himself than he has ever acknowledged. He lives in a world not of lies but of intentions. The intentions can find some resolution in language, but language is a tightrope that can send the walker spinning downward into the real world of death, where all intentions finally are tested. The contrast with Helena is notable, for she too has led a life of intentions but pushes herself out into a real world and performs them. At no moment does Helena doubt her own efficacy, though Shakespeare is careful to keep her offstage between her exit with the ailing King and the healed King's return.

Parolles' overheard soliloquy (IV.i.24-31) charts the path toward the tragic heroes, who are forced to consider how they can balance their own intentions against the resisting reality. Parolles admits, “they begin to smoke me, and disgraces have of late knock'd too often at my door.” The world of his intentions, defined by his tongue, is at war with the real world, the natural world that has serious claims on his heart, since his physical being must live in it. When he asks himself why he dared to undertake the recovery of the drum, he is recalling the soliloquy of Oliver, who is unable to give himself a reason to hate Orlando. A rational world eludes him, and the darkness of his intentions is more than matched by the darkness of the outside world. The speech likewise foreshadows Hamlet's first soliloquy, when the Danish prince himself is puzzled about why the events of his life are so destructive to his general well-being, and he knows not why he is so sad.

Parolles understands all too well his own limitations, but the Second French Lord's comment on the soliloquy underlines the tension between the comic and tragic modes at work in this scene. Indeed, it seems scarcely “possible he should know what he is, and be that he is” (IV.i.44-45). The French Lord is working from a comedic perspective where knowledge leads to an easy resolution: when the Syracusan twins are identified, all falls into its proper place. But Parolles has entered the nightmare world of tragedy, where knowledge does not guarantee a respite from suffering. As the extreme example of Hamlet demonstrates, knowledge leads too often to immobility in the face of conflict, not to the heroic action that would resolve all dilemmas. Parolles does know himself, but the knowledge does not cure his infected will. Instead, he is repeatedly seduced by the power of language to serve as a substitute for reality, and in lines 46ff he teases himself by conjuring up all that he might do to appear to have controlled reality. He repeats “any drum of the enemy's … a drum now of the enemy's,” as if the repetition of the sounds could conjure up reality. The mere repetition of sounds—language at its most irresponsible—is what ensues as his captors garble and gabble madly. Parolles instinctively cries out for them not to blindfold him (“hide my eyes”) because he knows he cannot trust language, and without the additional security of his eyes he will be truly isolated. He will lose his life “for want of language.” The French Lord sums up Parolles' situation: Parolles will tell the truth to save his life, but in a situation in which telling the truth is the least honorable course of action. The words he will use to develop that truth will actually be his undoing and he “will betray us all unto ourselves.” So the poet underlines the relative nature of language and the treacheries that dog our intentions.

As Parolles is cross-examined in the “enemy's” camp (IV.iii), he illustrates Shakespeare's attempt to depict “thought at the moment it arose in the mind.” Analogous earlier scenes come to mind: Shylock seeing his legal maneuvering collapse under Portia's wit, Malvolio growing mad as the Illyrian court contradicts itself to his face. But this scene intensifies those earlier confrontations. Parolles seems to be telling the truth: none of his examiners admits that Parolles is doctoring the evidence. (The First Lord claims that Parolles' estimate of the troop strength is “very near the truth.”) Parolles is afraid of torture—that focusing of the whole resistance capability of the external world—and insists upon the autonomy of the truth that he will present. Unfortunately, Parolles begins to realize that the truth he is telling is independent not only of the pain of the torturer's screw but also of any verification by the enemy camp. So when it comes to describing Captain Dumaine, he begins to embroider freely upon the truth (at least, his listeners imply that Dumaine is guiltless of the low birth, rape, and general dishonesty with which Parolles lards his description). But gradually a pattern emerges: Parolles is loading Dumaine with all of his own faults: “He professes not keeping oaths; in breaking 'em he is stronger than Hercules. He will lie, sir, with such volubility, that you would think truth were a fool. … He has everything that an honest man should not have; what an honest man should have, he has nothing” (IV.iii.251-54, 259-61). Is Parolles trying to confess his own weaknesses? Or is he trying to transfer them onto the autonomous world that the unverifiable confession offers? In any case, his “truth” is a self-realization. In his whispered aside (ll. 298-302), Parolles begins to register the impact of his disaster: “Only to seem to deserve well … have I run into this danger.” The effort to make the real world respond to one's desires leads to destruction. A Portia can win Bassanio, and a Rosalind can educate Orlando. But by the time of All's Well, the mood has darkened. Parolles cannot create a noble impression, much less a noble actuality.

Parolles is unmasked and his initial response confirms the tragic awareness: “Who cannot be crush'd with a plot?” Shakespeare is more interested in those who fall prey to conspiracies than in those who escape them. Unlike virtually all other comedic villains, Parolles remains onstage, responding to his situation and continuing to register the impact of his downfall on what will be the remainder of his life. Shylock is dismissed to happiness with an extorted (if hardly credible) “I am content.” Malvolio is allowed “I'll be reveng'd on the whole pack of you”—dangerously near the end of the play, although the effect is neutralized by his disappearance and the melodies that round out the action. But Parolles (who, perhaps unlike Shylock and certainly unlike Malvolio, has not been “most notoriously abus'd) remains onstage, taking stock. He is left with only his clothes (that scarf with its emblematic knots) and his words (the sonnet that appeared to be telling Diana the truth about Bertram, but only to allow Parolles to seduce her himself). Yet these are enough to shelter him in the new world he will inhabit: the demilitarized zone between the combating armies of comedy and tragedy. For Parolles has seen the truth, and the truth has made him wise. His is to be neither a tragic wisdom that might force him into a final burst of heroic energy (such that motivates Hamlet), not the elemental splitting asunder that forces Lear to neutralize his energies by dying into nature. Parolles will live by abjuring all ambition. He will give up bragging and take up “fool'ry,” living “safest in shame.” He will renounce the attempt to make the outside world receive the pressure of his own character. For he now knows how the world works: It gives way at just that point where one has applied pressure, so the trick must be to play as balanced a game oneself.⁸ Parolles will accept the world as it is, knowing that he need only find the “place and means” guaranteed “for every man alive.” It is a particularly low-key resolution.

Parolles' tragic acceptance of the world is illustrated in his two final appearances. In the earlier of these, Lafew recognizes him as the contrite and reformed hypocrite, and he reassures the man who seems to be accepting Lafew as both his God and his devil (V.ii.49): “though you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat” (V.ii.53-54). So Parolles' prophecy of soft living as a fool is coming true. The world thinks him a fool, so now he will act the fool, humbugging Lafew and accepting his charity, but still preserving his own core of identity, unaltered by outward circumstance. Parolles is through with boasting; he is instead using language in a more pernicious way, to allow others to verify the world of their intentions by his (false) correspondence to that world. This does not make Lafew a gull for harboring Parolles, it only points up man's reliance on appearance and a man's inability ever to penetrate the core of being.

In the later scene, Bertram's interrogation before the King, Parolles' very appearance makes Bertram start to blurt out the truth. Parolles' approach is not to get caught by overreaching himself. Therefore, he plays the fool, taking back with one hand what the other has appeared to offer: “He lov'd her, sir, and lov'd her not,” and “I know more than I'll speak” (V.iii.248, 256). He appears to be taking refuge in silence, but he has been reading his Cicero, and his paraleptic testimony (which caps a long list of Bertram's wrongdoings with “therefore I will not speak what I know” [V.iii.265-66]) characterizes Parolles' hard-won revelation. He is becoming a poet—he is telling the truth, but from the mouth of a fool. Likewise, he is a tactical survivor: his evidence is “too fine”—hairsplitting, not to mention ambiguous—and therefore disqualifies him from the world in which greatness and happiness may be achieved. But it is a world in which one may be well fed in return for letting those who will know greatness make sport with one.

Parolles has come to recognize the treacherous and self-destructive nature of consciousness itself. Since consciousness and the outside world are bridgeable only by language, and since language will refuse to bear the weight of so strong a burden, the self is isolated in a prison. Parolles agrees to submit to the imprisonment, knowing that he will be well fed. Thus Shakespeare comes to realize the futility of investing a character with tragic awareness in a comedic setting. Psychological credibility derives from the awareness of one's limitations, and a comedic plot is founded upon the transcending of those limitations. The botched ending of this play is botched precisely because the same court cannot hold both a Helena, who molds the outside world into her image, and a Parolles, who discovers the rigid nature of reality. The French Lords must witness both Bertram's conversion into a loving husband and the entrapment of Parolles, which they have defined as

a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipt them not, and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherish'd by our virtues.

(IV.iii.71-74)

Such a webbed life requires a continuous psychological maintenance. Unlike Bertram, who looks forward to a stable future (“I'll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” [V.iii.316]), Parolles—and we—know that life requires a constant recalibration of our sensibilities. Under such pressure, the ordinary mortals of the comedic world seem ill-resolved; only a tragic hero, whose greatness is measured by the height of his own achievements and the depths to which his isolated consciousness brings him, can summon up the energy to achieve a truly remarkable resolution, finally escaping both contentment (the comedic resolution) and recalibration (the everyday resolution). Such resolutions are out of place in comedy: they belong only to the world of Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Antony.

“As we are ourselves, what things we are!” The French Lord, having condemned Bertram's romantic follies, generously includes himself and the entire sinful world in his expression of wonder and doubt at the mysterious, botched nature of man. The implications of the line that self-discovery will lead to self-condemnation are both comedic and tragic. In the earlier plays, it means that Kate will become a true, loving wife; that the runaway lovers in the wood outside Athens will pair up properly; that Bassanio will grow worthy of Portia; that Orlando will come to deserve Rosalind. But if we apply it to the dark and glorious plays to come, it means that Cressida will live in shame and Angelo in self-disgust. Even worse, Othello and Lear will be unable to support the awful consciousness of their true natures and will stifle their tragic awareness in death. Parolles, tentatively expanding the role of the miles gloriosus and equally tentatively exploring his own sense of identity, falls prey to doubt and self-analysis. Aware of the gap between intention and response, he prepares us for those tragic personalities who are unable to bridge the chasm between will and conscience.

Notes

1. Frank Percy Wilson, Elizabethan and Jacobean (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1945), p. 26, as quoted in M. C. Bradbrook, “Shakespeare the Jacobean Dramatist,” in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), p. 141. This essay has benefited from the pointed comments of many readers; I especially thank G. Blakemore Evans for his careful and encouraging scrutiny.

2. Wilson, p. 141.

3. Warner Berthoff has studied the common ground of the plays of this decade in “‘Our Means Will Make Us Means’: Character as Virtue in Hamlet and All's Well,” New Literary History, 5 (1974), 319-51. His study of language and freedom concentrates on the problems of heroism in comedy and tragedy and finds the poetic ambiguities and resolutions strikingly similar. William B. Toole has also studied the three problem plays and Hamlet, but so emphasizes an ethical structure derived from Dante that the actual language of the plays is obscured: Shakespeare's Problem Plays: Studies in Form and Meaning (The Hague: Mouton, 1966).

4. Despite close argumentation and a sensitive attention to the ambiguities of the solution, W. L. Godshalk relies too heavily on a standard categorization of roles at a period when Shakespeare is emphasizing instead a fluid characterization: “All's Well That Ends Well and the Morality Play,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1974), 61-70. As long as Parolles—or Helena, for that matter—is seen in the framework of the morality Vice figure, he will be distanced from the audience's notion of a realistic character wrangling with reality in an heroic manner. Likewise, Frances M. Pearce is too intent on the religious sensibility to argue convincingly for a “truly comic harmony at the close”: “In Quest of Unity: A Study of Failure and Redemption in All's Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1974), 87. At least such studies pay attention to Parolles. Peter Ure asserts that “Parolles is depicted by methods that hardly suit with the rest of the play and certainly do not minister to Bertram's moral needs”: William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays (London: Longmans, 1961), p. 17. An equally extraordinary approach to the play is that of Alexander Welsh, who emphasizes the biological imperatives of the characters at the expense of their language in this, probably the wittiest of the problem comedies: “The Loss of Men and Getting of Children,” Modern Language Review, 73 (1978), 17-28.

5. J. Dennis Huston has contributed to the reevaluation of Parolles in a sympathetic light, though he perhaps finds too much “new life” in Parolles' actions at the end of the play: “‘Some Stain of Soldier’: The Functions of Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), 431-38. Likewise, Jules Rothman emphasizes the sympathy produced by the character during performance: “A Vindication of Parolles,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 23 (1972), 183-96. The recent Royal Shakespeare Company performances of this play in London and New York have likewise done much to bring this character to the forefront of the action.

6. Robert Hapgood suggests that the plural form of Parolles' name underlines the “conjunction of liveliness with shame”: “The Life of Shame: Parolles and All's Well,” Essays in Criticism, 15 (1965), 269.

7. AWW, I.i.100-01. This and all subsequent quotations from Shakespeare's text are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

8. One of the few critics to recognize that Parolles is indeed not reformed by his trial is R. A. Foakes: Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays, From Satire to Celebration (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1971), p. 14.