[In the following essay, Hapgood studies Parolles as a representation of shame in All's Well That Ends Well and notes that the character sacrifices honor in favor of unrestrained living.]

The wit of Parolles's name is in the ‘s’—which Irvine and Kökeritz in their pronouncing dictionaries agree in sounding, along with the ‘e’. Altogether of Shakespeare's invention, the name has generally been taken to derive simply from ‘parole’ in the sense of ‘word’ (Lafew plays upon it thus, V, ii, 39). Wilson Knight suggests, in addition, a possible overtone of ‘word of honour’,¹ which seems to me apt; for Parolles is no more a man of his word than a man of few words. To his shame, he is a man of many words. Yet his vivacious talkativeness is also a form of his most redeeming trait—a love of life so strong that it can make him welcome (all too easily, it's true) even the prospect of living safest in shame. It may not be too fanciful, then, to find in the pluralness of Parolles's name, suggesting as it does a conjunction of liveliness with shame, the essence of his character, and perhaps of the play.

I

The main difference between Parolles in the study and Parolles in the theatre is the force of his vitality. In the study, one observes this as one trait among many; it is notable, for example, in his first exchange with Helena, where he dilates with relish upon his theme of virginity, not advocating promiscuity but, significantly, deploring barrenness—'tis against the rule of nature, there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost. In the theatre, on the other hand, Parolles's vitality is a dominant impression. The first thing Richard David mentions about Michael Hordern's Parolles is that he was ‘brimful of vitality’ (Shakespeare Survey 8, p. 134); Robertson Davies is even more emphatic about this feature in Douglas Campbell's portrayal of the role (Renown at Stratford, p. 58); and it is my own impression from a production I watched through rehearsals to performance at the Shakespeare festival theatre in Ashland, Oregon. The only other Parolles I have seen—played by Paul Eddington at the Bristol Old Vic—failed precisely because this quality was suppressed.

This sense of ‘felt life’ is very important in the whole play, the more so because it contrasts with an atmosphere of death that is heavier than in any other comedy I know. Mortality is everywhere. Bertram, Helena, and Diana have all lost their fathers. The opening lines of the play are extraordinarily packed with references to sickness, death, and burial, actual and metaphorical; and they continue, though less intensively, throughout. The First Lord is thoroughly in the idiom of the play, for example, when he tells the Second that he will keep a secret: ‘When you have spoken it 'tis dead, and I am the grave of it’. In a theatre, there is in addition the constant visual effect of debility in Lafew, the Countess, and especially the king when he is virtually dead. They need not, of course, be as debilitated as in the 1953-4 Old Vic version in which, according to David, the Countess was ‘bent and crabbed, her gestures had an arthritic awkwardness, her utterance was creaky, abrupt, arbitrary’; but their old age, however elegant, will make itself felt.

These reminders of death make all the more striking the play's scenes of life-renewed. After one has seen the dying king helped off the stage at the end of II, i, his sprightly return with Helena a scene later seems more than a recovery; it is a rejuvenation. As Lafew remarks at the time, ‘Why your dolphin is not lustier … why, he's able to lead her a coranto’. At the finale, Helena's ‘resurrection’ is comparable to Hermione's. It is true that in All's Well the audience has been fully let in on the surprise; yet to everyone on stage but Diana and her mother, much-mourned Helena's appearance is the return to life they have been longing for. Parolles's revival at the end of the drum-episode conveys in still another way the feeling that ‘one that's dead is quick’. It is more than an ‘escape’ from the death he was so sure his tormentors were about to inflict. It is as if the real Parolles emerges from the gallant militarist. In Ashland, he vaulted to his feet, as from the grave; Hordern, more interestingly, ‘slithered to the ground, becoming wizened and sly on the instant, and with “Simply the thing I am shall make me live” revealed an essential meanness not only in Parolles but in human nature as a whole’.

Critics have often spoken of All's Well as if it were a pre-Shavian life-force comedy; it would be more accurate to regard Man and Superman as a watered-down All's Well. For the life-force in Shakespeare's play fecklessly leads its avatars into disgraces that Shaw merely skirts. The king, Helena, Diana (in a lesser way), Bertram, and Parolles—all undergo a prolonged ordeal of some sort in which they face the prospect of death; all, for the sake of life and/or love, sacrifice or risk their honour; and all end up alive and healthy. This seems to me the dominant action of the play and worth following in its main ramifications.

The king's compromises are relatively mild. In ten lines (II, i, 113-23) he three times insists that to allow a ‘kind maiden’ to attempt his cure would show a lack of judgment damaging to his royal reputation; yet he lets himself be persuaded to take the risk, and—by promising Helena her choice of a husband—guarantees a reward which leads to further compromise. Doubtless he is within his royal rights and doubtless he is sincere when he tells Bertram, ‘Obey my will which travails in thy good’. Still one cannot forget when he demands that Bertram marry Helena that he thus fulfills the bargain by which he saved his own life.

It is hard, however, to hold these shortcomings much against a king so benevolently bemused in general and in particular so overwhelmed by the superior force of Helena. Helena (another key name, as Lavatch's song confirms) trails her honour in the dust, E. K. Chambers puts it, ‘from dishonour to dishonour on the path to her final victory’. Try as her defenders will, there is no denying that Chambers is right: Diana's poor knight chases her man, the devoted servant commands her dear lord, the daughter exploits her dear father's dying gift, the king's saviour capitalises on his gratitude, the detested wife, who cannot beg even a kiss from her husband, traps him with a bed-trick shrewdly arranged—with some money down and more later—by the pilgrim of Saint Jaques le Grand.

What Chambers misses, however, is the gallant ‘vital genius’ Helena shows in carrying it all off. Although she is very like Ann Whitefield in her absolute, feminine assurance that, however outrageous her violation of their codes, God and Society are on her side, Helena's vitality is both stronger and more varied than Ann's. At the beginning of the play, Helena restores life, ministering a medicine ‘That's able to breathe life into a stone, / Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary / With sprightly fire and motion’. At the end, she ‘feels her young one kick’. Her sense of life—enormously wider than Ann's—mediates between and encompasses that of every other character in the play. The king, the Countess, and Lafew never tire of praising her, seeing in her everything they value in life; as the king says:

Thy life is dear, for all that life can rate
Worthy name of life in thee hath estimate:
Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage—all
That happiness and prime can happy call.

(II, i, 178-81)

Yet she can think and talk about sex as physically as Parolles or Lavatch. If she speaks often of stars, as Mark Van Doren well says, ‘she is as regularly concerned with visions of herself as an animal mating’. It is no accident that she frequently talks of her love for Bertram in terms of life and death (divorce is ‘deadly’, ‘there is no living, none / If Bertram be away’) for to her, it would seem, love and life are virtually synonymous. Hence she is perfectly willing to risk her ‘well-lost’ life for the sake of fulfilling her love; hence her reunion with Bertram is appropriately rendered as a ‘return to life’.

In a sketchier way, the common pattern can be made out in the dowering of Diana. She risks her reputation as a maiden and undergoes a prolonged pilgrimage to the king. Her ordeal is completed by the last scene, in which she is publicly stigmatised, not only by Bertram but by the king (‘I think thee now some common customer’), and threatened with death, only to be royally rewarded at last by a dower and—alarmingly enough—the choice of a husband.

Unlike all the others, who are all-too zealous in its service, Bertram sins against life. Like the fair youth in the opening sonnets, Bertram—the ‘proud, scornful boy’, the ‘hater of love’, the unbedded husband—at first holds back. His sin is abundantly defined in the play, although never in words directly applied to him. ‘Virginity’, says Parolles, ‘is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love which is the most inhibited sin in the canon’; ‘'tis too cold a companion’. Lafew condemns the lords he mistakenly thinks are refusing Helena: ‘An they were sons of mine I'd have them whipp'd, or I would send them to th' Turk to make eunuchs of’. Bertram's own speech to the ‘wondrous cold’ Diana might almost have been spoken to him by Helena:

If the quick fire of youth light not your mind
You are no maiden but a monument.
When you are dead you should be such a one
As you are now; for you are cold and stern …

(IV, ii, 5-8)

Bertram's desire for Diana is his fortunate fall. Helena revealingly tells one of the ‘boys of ice’: ‘You are too young, too happy, and too good, / To make yourself a son out of my blood’. Paradoxically, it is not until the ‘quick fire of youth’ has made Bertram's blood adulterously ‘important’ (‘he persists / As if his life lay on't’) that he can be redeemed as a husband. He, then, in his turn, makes his compromise. He offers Diana ‘my house, mine honour, yea my life be thine’. In particular, he sacrifices his lineal ring, symbolising as it does the pride in being Count Rossilion that is his dearest conception of himself. The recovery of his sick desires which follows then completes the pattern; yet as if he had still not suffered enough of an ordeal, his moment of dishonour is re-enacted, publicly and with embellishments, in the last scene.

The necessary conjunction of life and human warmth with shame, which all these instances suggest, is further supported by its corollary. The only characters who come close to keeping their honour intact are the Countess and Lafew, who are so old that they no longer cling strongly to life. To the small extent that they do—by seeking vicarious satisfactions through the young—they too are involved in small compromises with honour, being at first too ready to forgive the prodigal-returned and make a match. The only one, it seems, who succeeded in keeping his honour unblemished is Bertram's dead father (cf. I, ii, 58-63).

Parolles is the extreme test to which Shakespeare puts the worth of what Isabella in Measure for Measure calls ‘shamed life’. Lavatch with his Isbel sinks deeper into shame than Parolles—‘He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to in the crop’—but he clearly enjoys wallowing in it, where Parolles has to learn to accept it. It is not as if Parolles had ever imagined that he truly was a gallant militarist and then failed; there is nothing of Lord Jim about him. He knows perfectly well that he is an impostor, and the shame he suffers in order to live is entirely that of being found out and exposed. Yet he does feel this shame; he has made no Falstaffian transvaluation that would free him of it.

Comparison with Falstaff is inevitable. Falstaff's ‘give me life’ is more affirmative, less anguished, than Parolles's ‘let me live, sir, in a dungeon, i' the stocks, or anywhere, so I may live’; but the likeness is there. Even more than Falstaff, Parolles has been vilified. H. B. Charlton calls him ‘that shapeless lump of cloacine excrement’ and T. S. Eliot finds him more disturbing and frightening than Richard III and perhaps Iago. Certainly he merits contempt; yet I cannot believe that Shakespeare intended an effect simply of revulsion. As with Falstaff, it is chiefly Parolles's vivacious tongue that makes even his worst evils sit so fit on him. In his immediate and total betrayal of his comrades, there is an exuberance which is disarming; as Captain Dumaine chorically observes, ‘He hath out-villain'd villainy so far that the rarity redeems him’. The zest with which—amid all his troubles—he warms to his theme as he enlarges on Captain Dumaine's faults (‘He will steal, sir, an egg out of a cloister … drunkenness is his best virtue’) makes us, if we again follow Captain Dumaine, ‘begin to love him for this’. His truly Falstaffian ‘Who cannot be crushed with a plot’ shows more than impudence; it reveals the resilient life of one who, as the First Soldier remarks, might well out of so much shame ‘begin an impudent nation’—the same, all-surviving tensile-strength that makes the soliloquy which follows much more than craven relief at a last minute reprieve:

Yet am I thankful. If my heart were great
'Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more,
But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live.

(IV, iii, 319-23)

Here is the prime instance of the ‘debased vitalism, as if mere existence were its own argument’ which, as Donald Stauffer finely discerns, informs the philosophy of the ‘low characters’ in All's Well (Shakespeare's World of Images, p. 118). I would suggest that such, also, is the implication of the whole play.

II

About nothing are most of the characters in All's Well less ashamed than of not telling the truth. Yet to others, especially the Countess and Lafew, truth-telling is a prime concern. The pull between telling true and telling false pervades the dialogue and does much to determine its characteristics of style.

Of course, there is a sense in which this might be said of any conversation. But in All's Well the issue is pointed in special ways. For one thing, there is an inordinate deal of lying done. Not to mention Parolles, his star-pupil Bertram equivocates in his promise to the king, misleads Helena, swears false oaths in trying to seduce Diana, and at the end—even after being repeatedly caught in his lies—continues to try to lie his way out of his difficulties. Helena's first words are an equivocation, meant to conceal the fact that her tears are not for her dead father, whom she has already forgotten, but for her departing master. Only by extended prodding does the Countess persuade Helena to ‘tell true’ about her love for Bertram and her reason for going to court. Later, amid other benevolent deceptions, she writes letters reporting her ‘holy undertaking’ to Saint Jaques and her grieving decline ‘even to the point of her death’, arranges for the rector of the place to confirm her death, and stage-manages Diana's expert deception of Bertram and elaborate equivocation at the end.

In contrast, a number of characters tell the truth in situations which make it particularly awkward to do so: one servant reluctantly reports on another, one courtier tells another that he is a fraud, two friends tell another that his friend is false. Also, we hear a great many general truths. Quantities of (unheeded) advice are given; Bertram, especially, receives sententious counsel from all sides—his mother, Lafew, the king, his friends, Parolles. And so many of the characters indulge an inclination for the gnomic that hardly an occasion is left unimproved by philosophical or theological comment.

Both the Countess and Lafew are devoted to plain-speaking and to extracting the truth about others—Lafew with Parolles, the Countess (much more gently, of course) with Helena. Lafew likes to give pungency to his frank speech by using the racy idioms of aristocratic diversions; the Countess is given to an extreme care of statement, marked by subtle and witty distinctions and a penchant for the hypothetical. At the other extreme is Lavatch, who with his instinct for the minimal, would reduce the language of court to a single response: ‘Oh, lord, sir’. Appropriately, it is the Countess who shows up its inadequacy.

Immediately after this scene, Parolles similarly reduces courtly communication to an echoing ‘so say I’. Chiefly, though, his bent is toward proliferation—to carry the refinement of language practised by the Countess and the aristocratic flair of Lafew to a snipp'd taffeta extreme of affectation. In this same exchange with Lafew, for example, he says: ‘Nay, 'tis strange, 'tis very strange; that is the brief and the tedious of it; and he's of a most facinerious spirit that will not acknowledge it’. As we've seen, nothing about Parolles is as full of uninhibited life as his tongue. To his own dismay, it leads him to boast his way into danger in the drum-adventure and, at various points throughout, to flatter, slander, fabricate, misrepresent, cant, palter, misguide, betray. His final testimony about Bertram and Diana is a remarkable attempt to talk out of both sides of his mouth at the same time:

PAR.
Faith, sir, he did love her; but how?
KING.
How, I pray you?
PAR.
He did love her, sir, as a gentleman loves a woman.
KING.
How is that?
PAR.
He lov'd her, sir, and lov'd her not.

(I take this exchange to be a clear sign, along with his scurvy curtsies at the end, that Parolles's old flamboyance is returning.) The only truths he tells are the military secrets he thinks he is revealing to the Moskos regiment; and he makes the most of the novelty, with much talk of how ‘a truth is a truth’ and swearing ‘by my truth’ and offering to ‘take the sacrament on't’.

There is fine comic nemesis in the fact that this man of words, with his smack of all neighbouring languages—German, or Dane, Low Dutch, Italian, or French—should be taken in by the gabble of his ‘executioners’: Boskos thromuldo boskos, Oscorbidulchos volivorco—choughs' language which represents the ultimate emptying of meaning from words in the play, and in Shakespeare.

III

‘The natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life’, writes De Quincey in ‘The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, ‘because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of “the poor beetle that we tread on”, exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet’. In All's Well, it would appear that the poet, with unique concentration, insists upon precisely this attitude, showing one character after another being brought to cry with Parolles, ‘Let me live!’

This is the only play in which he does so. Falstaff certainly opts for life over honour, but is shameless about it. Antony and Cleopatra feel their dishonour but incur it in the service of a transcendent love. In the last plays, the renewal of life is linked not with shame but with redemption and innocence. In Measure for Measure, in many ways a companion-piece, the issue is the same as in All's Well, but most of the characters prefer death to a ‘shamed life’. Where death is generally deplored and feared in All's Well, it is generally accepted and even welcomed in Measure for Measure. Isabella would throw her life down for Claudio's deliverance as frankly as a pin; Vincentio as Friar Lodovico counsels Claudio to be absolute for death; Claudio, although he at one point pleads ‘Sweet sister, let me live’, ends the same scene with ‘I am so out of love with life that I will sue to be rid of it’; and Angelo at the end begs, craves, entreats for death.

Since in All's Well it is life that most of the leading characters crave, at any cost, we may well ask whether life—as presented—is worth it. Helena, as Dr. Johnson pointed out, has made no great catch of a husband; her abject willingness to give so much for so little can be matched only in some of the later Sonnets. Bertram, who was ready to accept Maudlin, settles for Helena, largely, I suspect, as an out—having been forced into wedding her, tricked into bedding her, and trapped into finally accepting her. (I am unconvinced by Bertram's desperate and brief repentance and conditional reconciliation; he asked for ‘Pardon’ in much the same way when he had to before.) Parolles must be thankful for the mocking ‘grace’ of Lafew. Is all well that ends well when ending well means for the leading characters such minimal satisfactions?

In the study the answer for most readers has been ‘No’, and the play has seemed either a failure or unpalatably bitter. In the theatre, the answer seems to me to be a rueful and dubious ‘Yes’. In the context of this play, the love of life as Friar Lodovico tells Claudio, ‘is not noble’; and this is at least as evident when seen as when read. But what one feels in the theatre, to a degree unimaginable in the study, is the force of the vitality of Helena and Parolles, and of the three ‘returns to life’—first the king, then Parolles, finally Helena. In my experience, it is this physically felt sense of how good it is to be alive that makes the difference, that at last in its bitter-sweet way overcomes one's own scruples—much as it has overcome those of so many of the characters on stage.

Note

1. Sovereign Flower, p. 172. ‘Parole’ as ‘word of honour’ in the technical military sense may not yet have been available in English; the first instance in O.E.D. is Beaumont, a1616. But the more general sense of ‘verbal promise’ was present in both languages at this time (cf. Wartburg). Indeed, in English the chief usage of the word seems to have been for legally binding declarations.