The three comedies Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure used to be called Shakespeare’s ‘Problem Plays’. The initial assumption behind this description was that they (together with Hamlet) were written in a period of personal turmoil for Shakespeare, a mood of cynicism and depression which also reflected those convenient formulations of the spirit of the age, ‘Jacobean Melancholy’ and ‘The Doubt of the New Science’. But although the fallacies in the biographical concept of Shakespeare’s ‘Mythical Sorrows’ have been adequately exposed, and although critics are less prone to invoking portmanteau theories of the pessimism of the age, these three plays continue to be thought of as a group apart. Sometimes the ‘problems’ of the plays are said to be aesthetic ones, and dissatisfaction is expressed with their clumsy plot-structures, or their curious mixture of styles (especially in All’s Well): but the loose ends of plot can be detected throughout the career of a dramatist who was not punctilious over small details, and the variety of styles is perhaps the sign of Shakespeare’s subtlety in handling levels of presentation from the direct to the formal such as we do not yet fully understand. Some critics take refuge still further outside the plays, at one end seeing them rigidly in terms of the vogue for dramatic satire in the 1600s, and at the other interpreting them as Christian parables – neither approach seems helpful. Sometimes the plays are said to be transitional stages on the way to tragedy, and tragic situations are discovered in them, especially Troilus’ deception and Isabella’s dilemma. But one essential criterion for tragedy is that there should be no detachment in the attitude of the audience, and another is that we should be convinced that the tragic characters are great enough to deserve our love and admiration despite their faults. On both counts these plays suffer. Troilus and Cressida more on the first, for the effect of the ironic parallels and juxtapositions in this thoroughgoing exposure of Love and War is to distance us from everyone involved, for even at his most intense moment, the scene where he overhears Diomedes and Cressida, Troilus is undercut by the presence of Ulysses and Thersites (and also, I would want to argue, by the portentousness of his rhetoric). If Troilus’ weaknesses as an impetuous but shallow romantic lover prevent us from admiring him, then the coldness of Isabella in Measure for Measure and her manipulations of Claudio (III, i) equally make her not a character with whom we feel, and although Angelo’s situation, from doubt to ‘fulfilment’ to remorse is potentially more tragic, it is not accompanied by any more admirable qualities, nor of course is it allowed to develop tragically.
These may not be tragic situations, but they are clearly intense and uncomfortable, and as such they represent a development in the characteristic Shakespearian pattern, from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter’s Tale, of applying serious states to a comic movement which is ultimately resolved into happiness and union (Troilus and Cressida is a unique play in many respects not least in the absoluteness of its satire). I think that these three plays should therefore be thought of as serious comedies, almost as experiments to see how much seriousness a comedy can contain. For in addition to their presentation of serious human situations all three plays mount serious discussions and reflections on topics of some importance in any ethical code, Law and Justice, Virtue and Nobility, Honour and Expediency, and – through all of them – Love and Lust, Appearance and Reality. The capital letters and Hegelian antitheses there might suggest some sort of philosophical dialogue, but it is obvious that the discussions arise naturally out of the actions of the plays. Yet it is equally obvious that the dramatic presentation of these discussions goes further and deeper than that conducted in earlier plays with analogous situations (Much Ado, Henry IV), and of all critical accounts of the group that by A. P. Rossiter1 goes furthest towards defining their shared attitude of unillusioned empirical enquiry into some of the absolutes in human behaviour within society. Mr Rossiter also brings out their shared form, that of tragi-comedy, and states the attributes of this genre with economy: ‘Tragi-comedy is an art of inversion, deflation and paradox’ (p. 117), and he reminds us that its guiding power is not cynicism but scepticism.
The sustained intensity with which Shakespeare pursues his evaluations and discoveries results in a deviation from some of the norms of prose. In my preliminary discussion of the disposition of prose I said that the consequence of prose being used structurally for the sub-plot was that the images of the prose-section would be not only inferior in emotional, moral, or intellectual value to those in verse, but would also be drawn from different sources and reflect different preoccupations. Again it is generally true that the prose plot reflects the main plot at a lower level, but that in the comedies this is sometimes tenuous or merely limited to the ‘Master and Man’ pattern being applied to Love, and that in all cases the people and situations in the upper plot might have their affectations mocked by juxtaposition with a lower level but were not substantially damaged by it. In these three plays, however, both general laws do not apply: here the action of the main plot is presented in a much more unfavourable light than ever before or after, and the normally lightly deflating movement of the lower plot becomes a stronger and more destructive movement which as it were wells up into the main action, producing anti-heroes (Bertram, and perhaps Troilus) and anti-heroines (Cressida, and perhaps Isabella). It is as if the negative values of prose have conquered (for we have here little of the unalloyed wit and humanity of other prose-characters – those in Much Ado, for example), and we now find a unity of images throughout the play, both in source and preoccupation, a unity at a distinctly low human level. Furthermore, whereas in the other comedies the lower characters might make ironic or lightly mocking comments on the main movers, here in each play we find characters pouring out abuse at the upper action. Thersites is the most obvious example of concentrated abuse directed at the rest of the play, but he is closely followed by Lucio in Measure for Measure, and if Parolles only slanders Bertram in his absence then Lafeu adds the direct criticism. This is a device which looks directly ahead to the tragedies, where similar characters – Iago, Edmund – are allowed to go much further.
This inversion of the normal balance between plots and attitudes goes furthest in Troilus and Cressida, where no characters and no values are left intact, but in the other two plays although some characters remain untouched – the Duke, Escalus, Helena, Lafeu, the Countess – and the moral codes espoused by these characters finally emerge triumphant, the destructive movement of the prose covers almost everything else, and leaves a disturbing insight into some aspects of human behaviour which the final marriages do not altogether erase (I take it that Shakespeare is doing this deliberately, not revealing some subconscious imbalance or obsession). The sense that the inferior values of prose have temporarily dominated the action is seen almost symbolically in the way that in all three plays the heroes – Troilus, Bertram, Angelo – are let off relatively lightly, while the most vicious prose character in each case – Pandarus, Parolles, Lucio – receives an exposure and a violent humiliation (even Thersites, otherwise an ‘allowed man’, is twice humiliated on the battle-field). And as in two cases these prose characters have led the hero astray by following and developing his personal appetite (Parolles, Pandarus) we might almost say that Verse has been led astray by Prose, and that although Shakespeare restores the one, he punishes the other. That is perhaps too fanciful, but it does point to the close thematic parallels between prose and verse in these plays, and to the common movement towards ‘inversion, deflation and paradox’, which is seen most strongly in the imagery but also in new applications of some of the other stylistic resources.
In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare was certainly not showing any personal dislike of Homer, say, but was developing to its logical conclusion the connotations of simplicity, deceit, and lechery proverbially associated with the names of Troilus, Cressida, and Pandarus, and also expressing what T. J. B. Spencer2 has so usefully shown to be a shared Elizabethan attitude to the Greeks as voluptuaries and crooks. The devaluation of the story (and of the Trojan side of it) began long before his play, but he puts the final touches to it, and if we compare it to its probable predecessor, Twelfth Night, we can see that here too all the characters are surrounded by a current of mockery, but of an infinitely more caustic and corroding nature: it is almost as if Shakespeare were constructing with the same techniques opposed examples of comedy, sweet and sour. The division of media within the play is conventional, in that the upper world of general and counsellor speaks only verse, and the lower world of Thersites and Pandarus speaks prose except for rhymes and songs, and that other characters use the medium appropriate to the dominant mood or personality: thus Troilus and Cressida speak verse when they are serious or wish to impress, but prose when they lay their pretensions aside or are with Pandarus; the Great Lovers, Paris and Helen are given prose for their fatuous love-scene, and Thersites reduces anyone who sports with him to prose. But in the opening scene of the play an exception occurs, and a significant one, in that Troilus is given verse for his infatuated Romantic hyperboles:
But I am weaker than a woman’s tear;
Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance,
twice even ascending (or declining) to rhyme, while Pandarus is given prose: ‘Well, I have told you enough of this; for my part I’ll not meddle nor make no farther. He that will have a cake out of the wheat must needs tarry the grinding.’ Thus Shakespeare achieves a split scene, a sign of discordance and separation between characters which he has recently used for the very special circumstances of Ophelia’s madness, and before that not since the isolation of Jack Cade. The diametrical opposition in media as in personality between the two characters is strengthened by that between Troilus’ romance love-talk and Pandarus’ bawdy food-image for a negotiated love-affair: ‘here’s yet in the word hereafter the kneading, the making of the cake, the heating of the oven, and the baking; nay you must stay the cooling too, or you may chance burn your lips’. This is the first food-image, and it is very significant that the three sordid image-groups which dominate our vision of the play – from Food, Disease, Animals – are used in prose as in verse, and with possibly more force in prose. But although the presence of these three image-groups has often been noted, they can only be properly evaluated by being considered across the three worlds of the play and in terms of the character using them.
The split in media between Troilus and Pandarus helps to establish them as opposed extremes, and to any normal judgement, both flawed. But we have a clear idea of Pandarus’ level, so that when in the next scene Shakespeare presents Pandarus and Cressida together we shall be able to judge her by reference to him. But first, in the exchange between Cressida and her servant Alexander, we are given another significant change of media as Cressida’s deflating wit reduces Alexander to prose: she asks what Ajax is like:
| ALEXANDER. | They say he is a very man per se, |
| And stands alone. |
CRESSIDA. So do all men, unless they are drunk, sick or have no legs.
Her equivocation on ‘stands’ shows a quick and cynical wit, but Shakespeare now gives Alexander a long description of Ajax which is the most rhetorically structured piece of prose in the play and serves both as a grotesque introduction to him, and also to set the mocking tone for her milieu – and perhaps also to foreshadow the concept of man as animal:
This man, lady, hath robbed many beasts of their
particular additions;
he is as valiant as the lion,
churlish as the bear,
slow as the elephant;
a man into whom nature hath so crowded humours that
his valour is crushed into folly,
his folly sauced with discretion:
there is no man hath a virtue that he hath not a glimpse of,
nor any man an attaint but he carries some stain of it.
He is melancholy without cause and
merry against the hair;
he hath the joints of every thing;
but everything so out of joint that
he is a gouty Briareus, many hands and no use;
or purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight.
In fact this character-sketch comes so far in advance of Ajax that it seems more likely to be the signpost to Cressida’s wit, a quantity which is now revealed in all its pungency by the arrival of Pandarus.
This crucial first view of Cressida is developed at length (it is the third longest scene in the play, being only exceeded by the Greek council-scene and Ulysses’ attempted persuasion of Achilles), and falls into three parts: first, Pandarus’ tale of the Trojan bon mot, then their comments on the returning soldiers, and lastly Cressida’s cynical self-revelations. She is aware of his advocacy of Troilus (they have so far tarried the grinding, the bolting, and the leavening), and her first ploy is to praise Hector above Troilus; in his client’s defence the broker draws testimony from distinguished witnesses: ‘You have no judgement niece; Helen herself swore th’other day, that Troilus for a brown favour –’ But unfortunately we are never given the completion of that sentence, for Pandarus is one of those garrulous talkers with a weakness for digression, and Cressida is made to seize on his self-contradictions and make them more ridiculous:
PANDARUS.… that Troilus for a brown favour – for so ’tis, I must confess – not brown neither –
CRESSIDA. No, but brown.
PANDARUS. Faith to say truth, brown and not brown.
CRESSIDA. To say the truth, true and not true.
To re-assert the point being made Pandarus has to resort to plain statement (always a sign of defeat): ‘She praised his complexion above Paris,’ meaning ‘more than she praised Paris’, but Cressida takes it as a sign of the degree of colour in the complexion and by a species of logical reasoning reduces Troilus to the red nose of a drunkard:
CRESSIDA. Why Paris hath colour enough.
PANDARUS. So he has.
CRESSIDA. Then Troilus should have too much. If she praised him above, his complexion is higher than his; he having colour enough, and the other higher, is too flaming a praise for a good complexion. I had as lief Helen’s golden tongue had commended Troilus for a copper nose.
Pandarus’ next two defensive replies are similarly twisted back on him, as is the third, with an added spice of bawdy, as he defends Troilus’ strength: ‘Why he is very young, and yet will he within three pound lift as much as his brother Hector’, and she twists it: ‘Is he so young a man, and so old a lifter’ (that is according to Alice Walker’s New Cambridge edition, a ‘limb-lifter’ or fornicator).
The form and methods of this repartee are familiar, but the result is, I think, different. Whereas up till now repartee may have aided larger dramatic effects (as in the graveyard scene in Hamlet) or even expressed a personal relationship (as in Much Ado) it has been a game of words only, establishing the superior wit of the winner but not crushing the loser (Feste does not seriously deflate Viola or Olivia or Orsino in our eyes, nor does Beatrice damage our opinion of Benedick), here and more often in later plays repartee is directed through the words and against the personality of the opponent. No longer is wit detached from feeling: we see repartee more and more as a real conflict of personalities. It had been so for Hamlet’s attitude to Claudius and his tools, but that might have seemed a special case – however, that is again its effect here, and throughout the play Pandarus is the butt of repartee. But here also we see a new development, for instead of the winner in repartee being shown as an admirable wit, Cressida’s mocking and bawdy triumph serves not so much to glorify as to degrade her in our eyes. Thus when Pandarus launches into that banal joke which undermines both his sense of humour and that of the Trojan court (the two-and-fifty hairs on Troilus’ chin and the one forked one which was converted into a feeble reference to cuckoldry) the tale itself, which takes only ten lines or so, is inflated nearly ninefold to show his banality and her sharp wit. She interrupts him constantly and at each stage he starts again with another of Troilus’ attributes, and if we respect him less each time he loses, he is made to seem more powerless as he never stops to attack her wit but leaves each smear standing, as if he did not notice it (like those other characters insensible to parody, Falstaff, Rosalind, Osric). Thus, He: ‘Troilus? Why he esteems her no more than I esteem an addle egg’. – She: ‘If you love an addle egg as well as you love an idle head, you would eat chickens i’th’shell.’ The most effective method by which Shakespeare shows Pandarus’ vanity and indifference to parody is by that uncooperative trick of taking an image literally: Pandarus describes court laughter with a courtly metaphor: – ‘Queen Hecuba laughed that her eyes ran o’er’ – and she seizes on it: ‘With millstones’, but he does not notice and goes on – ‘And Cassandra laughed’ – and she now takes it a stage further: ‘But there was a more temperate fire under the pot of her eyes. Did her eyes run o’er too?’ but he still does not notice: ‘And Hector laughed.’ When he finally reaches the end of the tale with more repetitious listing: ‘But there was such laughing, and Helen so blushed, and Paris so chafed, and all the rest so laughed that it passed,’ she is given the coup de disgrâce: ‘So let it now, for it has been a great while going by.’
But Shakespeare has not yet finished with them, and in the second part of the scene he has the Trojan warriors pass over the stage (if I deal with this scene at some length it may redress the balance, for most accounts of the play ignore it, even though it is crucial in establishing our attitudes to the two characters). This device (which also introduces the warriors to the audience) is used to show Pandarus’ excitement awaiting Troilus and also his rather pathetic pride in the acquaintance: ‘When comes Troilus? I’ll show you Troilus anon. If he see me, you shall see him nod at me’. Of course the great anti-climax – a reversal of expectation basic to the play, having been set up from the Prologue (which promised war only to reveal Troilus unarming for love, and which reviewed a number of antique names but did not mention those of the lovers who are to be the subject of the play) – comes when Cressida sees Troilus first: ‘What sneaking fellow comes yonder?’ Pandarus now grows into such ecstatic praise that even she is embarrassed – ‘Peace for shame, peace!’ and his scorn for the common soldiers is expressed in his usual senile repetitions and with more food and animal images (it is as if Shakespeare is gradually working up the vision of the lowest elements in man): ‘Asses, fools, dolts. Chaff and bran, chaff and bran. Porridge after meat.… Crows and daws, crows and daws’. The climax of both elements in the imagery so far – his use of sordid food metaphors, and her deflation of his images – comes with his indignant listing of Troilus’ qualities: ‘Is not birth, beauty, good shape’, – another half-dozen attributes – ‘liberality and such like, the spice and salt that season a man?’ In reply she catches up the metaphor, and the fragmented nature of this ‘character’ – as if it were a list of ingredients for a recipe – and mocks it with an image that marries food and bawdy: ‘Ay, a minced man, and then to be baked with no date in the pie, for then the man’s date is out.’ Like the repartee in this play, the ‘explicit comment’ on a person’s wit is perfectly adapted to character and situation in his shocked ‘You are such another woman! A man knows not at what ward you lie’. This suggests an elusiveness which she now amplifies in a mock catechism: ‘Upon my back, to defend my belly; upon my wit, to defend my wiles … and at all these wards I lie, at a thousand watches,’ and he is caught by the hint into supplying the ‘feed’ line: ‘Say one of your watches’, thus completing the deflation of Pandarus: he is now the spectator, she the clown. She obligingly provides some more bawdy wit, reducing even him to speechless admiration: ‘You are such another!’ Thus Pandarus is a ninny, Cressida a cynical wit, and as she bids him farewell – ‘By the same token, you are a bawd’ – Shakespeare develops her cynicism in her verse sententiae on the laws of supply snd demand: ‘Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.’ In this long expository scene Shakespeare has used some of the familiar prose devices to set up our attitudes towards these characters at a very debased level, but he goes on to develop their essential nature still more.
The next time that we see Pandarus he is trying to obtain an alibi for Troilus from Helen, but before he reaches her he is made to look foolish again, by a witty servant who outquibbles him. The obstreperous device of equivocating against the sense (‘What music is this?’ – ‘I do but partly know sir, it is music in parts.’ – ‘Know you the musicians?’ – ‘Wholly sir.’ – ‘Who play they to?’ – ‘To the hearers sir.’) exasperates Pandarus into a classic explicit comment which also carries self-parody: ‘Friend, we understand not one another. Iam too courtly and thou too cunning.’ But the repartee also reveals Pandarus’ vanity, as the servant, on being told that Pandarus is a Lord observes, ‘You are in the state of grace’ (i.e. salvation), and he coyly replies, ‘Grace?’ (i.e. rank), ‘Not so friend; honour and lordship are my titles.’ He is lowered still further, and Romance at the same time, when the servant gives Helen the conventional romantic attributes (all about to be devalued): the music is being played for ‘the mortal Venus, the heart-blood of beauty, love’s invisible soul’, only for Pandarus not to recognize who is meant by them: ‘Who, my cousin Cres-sida?’ and to be mocked by the reply: ‘No sir, Helen, could not you find that by her attributes?’ The final blow comes as Pandarus screws himself to the pitch of courtliness in a horrible (unconscious?) food image: ‘I will make a complimental assault upon him, for my business seethes,’ a sordid development of the baking-a-cake image which the servant muddies still further: ‘Sodden business, there’s a stewed phrase indeed.’
All is now ready for the appearance of the being for whom Troilus has overreached Marlowe himself: ‘Why she is a pearl whose price hath launched above a thousand ships’ (II, ii, 81–2), and she turns out to be – in modern terms – a brainless blonde, The tone is set by Pandarus’ ‘complimental’ bombardment, a ludicrous piece of repetition:
Fair be to you my lord, and to all this fair company; fair desires in all fair measure fairly guide them, especially to you fair queen. Fair thoughts be your fair pillow.
The other word he does to death is ‘sweet’: ‘Sweet queen, sweet queen, that’s a sweet queen i’faith’, which is perhaps not quite as ludicrous as Paris’ abbreviation for Helen: ‘Nell’. Pandarus is again made to look ridiculous by having one of his complicated explanations constantly interrupted, as his attempts to get Paris to provide the alibi for Troilus are broken into by Helen’s playful baby-talk persuading him to sing:
PANDARUS. But – marry thus my lord – my dear lord, and most esteemed friend, your brother Troilus –
HELEN. My Lord Pandarus, honey-sweet lord –
PANDARUS. Go to sweet queen, go to – commends himself most affectionately to you.
Not only does he finally sing (and it is a song which reduces the Cupid image from the relative heights of Much Ado and As You Like It to the depths of Restoration Comedy – compare it with Dryden’s second song for Marriage à la Mode), but he also lets out the secret he is meant to keep – although he can be partly excused as this milieu is so sharply attuned to intrigue that they can scent it at once (‘I spy’ as Paris says). Two other prose devices lower the scene, the first reminding us of Shallow’s feebleness in applauding Falstaff’s crude puns. Thus Paris puns on ‘broken music’ in the most obvious way, and does even worse with ‘piece’: ‘You have broke it cousin; and by my life you shall make it whole again, you shall piece it out with a piece of your performance,’ and as Pandarus demurs with an artificial antimetabole: ‘Rude in sooth, in good sooth very rude.’ Paris coins another pun which hits both Pandarus’ pretensions and perhaps his style: ‘Well said my lord. Well you say so in fits’ (i.e., ‘stanzas’, ‘spasms’). The last and most bitter cut is when Paris explains Pandarus’ dexterity in love-songs by his fondness for the conventional romantic trappings, which are then developed from stock rhymes to aphrodisiacs: ‘He eats nothing but doves, love, and that breeds hot blood, and hot blood begets hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love.’ Even Pandarus seems shocked at this gradatio (rather degradatio): ‘Is this the generation of love – hot blood, hot thoughts, and hot deeds? Why they are vipers; is love a generation of vipers?’ He may of course be pretending to be shocked – but that would still draw critical attention to Paris’ cynical derivation, however the force of the viper image suggests that this is genuine shock at the final dispersal of our illusions about these great Romantic lovers, the cause of the Trojan war, and perhaps even about Romance itself. The revelation of the crudeness and sensuality under this mythically noble exterior is a similar discovery to that for Adonis’ courser attracted by the ‘breeding jennet’:
He vails his tail that like a falling plume
Cool shadow to his melting buttock lent.
Immediately following this scene between Helen, Paris, and Pandarus we again see Pandarus as the third party – the irritant – at Troilus and Cressida’s first meeting (III, ii), a parallel triangular structure, with Pandarus as the unifying factor. This is a masterly piece of dramatic juxtaposition, for at the centre of his play Shakespeare strengthens the impact of both scenes by placing them side by side to show the same basic elements in two famous examples of Romantic Love. It is in fact a ‘Before: After’ advertisement reversed, for we have little doubt that Troilus would in time descend to the same petty level as Paris – indeed his first words to Cressida confirm our suspicion. The scene opens with Troilus in an ecstasy of apprehension, pouring out food and sense-images: he is about to ‘wallow in the lily beds’ but fears that he will not be able to enjoy it as much as possible (this is the glutton’s fear before the meal of a lifetime): when the ‘watery palates taste indeed Love’s thrice repured nectar’ (there is a curious mixing of the human senses here) then the result may be ‘Death I fear me’. Thus the traditional sexual euphemism of Death takes on its most grotesquely concrete form ever, as Troilus in his usual hyperbolic manner sees himself stalking about the Stygian banks, with Pandarus very appropriately as Charon about to transport him to Cressida as the promised end (it is surely naïve to take ‘Death’ literally here). By sharp contrast to this inflated verse Pandarus brings the level down to prose with a most deflating animal image for Cressida:
She does so blush, and fetches her wind so short as if she were frayed with a spirit. I’ll fetch her. It is the prettiest villain, she fetches her breath as short as a new-ta’en sparrow.
This description of her excited state suggests nobody so much as Doll Tearsheet, and Mistress Quickly gives us similar informative comments at the same stage of a pimp fussing around a whore:
I’faith, sweetheart, methinks now you are in an excellent good tem-perality. Your pulsidge beats as extraordinarily as heart would desire; and your colour, I warrant you, is as red as any rose, in good truth, la!
Troilus confesses that his heart ‘beats thicker than a feverous pulse’, and we are ready for the climactic encounter.
The triumph of the lower values of prose in this play can be seen at its most ironic here, for whereas in other plays Romance is mocked by being paralleled at a lower level by a more earthy love interest, here Shakespeare combines both interests in one couple. We have seen Troilus being romantic: now we are to see him being bawdy; we have seen Cressida being bawdy: now we are to see her rising to a romantic affirmation at the end of the scene – but that posture has been shown to us (if not to Troilus) as congenitally impossible for her since her first appearance. Pandarus arrives with Cressida, scolding the lovers for their embarrassment: ‘Come, come, what need you blush? Shame’s a baby,’ that is to say, adults have none (to which we might oppose that sententia often quoted by Bacon and of which Ruskin was so fond – rubor est virtutis color: a blush is the sign of virtue). Pandarus’ short-breathed style is ideal to express the go-between’s vicarious excitement: ‘Come your ways, come your ways, an you draw backward we’ll put you i’th’fills … So so, rub on and kiss the mistress.… Go to, go to.’ The images again tell the story, for the lovers are presented as animals to be tamed: if they do not respond properly, they will be put in the ‘fills’, the shaft of a cart; they are wild birds: ‘you must be watched ere you be made tame’, more particularly: ‘You shall fight your hearts out ere I part you. The falcon as the tercel, for all the ducks i’th’river’; ‘What, billing again?’ – no more discordant accompaniment to a kiss could be imagined. Too much must not be made of this point, but the consistency of the animal images does reduce the lovers, even if they are not quite as ridiculous here as the ‘new-ta’en sparrow’. Having completed the introductions, Pandarus goes off to find a fire and sets the tone of innuendo about potency and performance: to Troilus’ first speech to Cressida, ‘You have bereft me of all words lady’ (which are the very words used by Bassanio to Portia after her declaration of love), Pandarus adds:
Words pay no debts; give her deeds. But she’ll bereave you a th’ deeds too if she call your activity in question.
Despite Pandarus’ departure they continue to talk in prose (when they go up to verse at the end of the scene their protestations seem doubly hollow), and a scene of repartee begins to build up, but not here an entertaining combat of wits so much as a further revelation of the dimensions concealed by the trappings of Romance. Troilus senses her fear and questions it with courtly images: ‘What too curious dreg espies my sweet lady in the fountain of our love?’ and in reply she takes the image brutally straight: ‘More dregs than water, if my fears have eyes’. He counters by denying her second point, and so the first: ‘Fears make devils of cherubins; they never see truly,’ but she returns it with a remarkably intricate revision (the temperature is gradually rising): ‘Blind fear that seeing reason leads, finds safer footing than blind reason stumbling without fear.’ The sharpness of wit apparent here more than holds its own in the bawdy that follows, but our admiration for the lovers, if it ever existed, now declines sharply: repartee is here a double-edged tool. Troilus tries to dispel Cressida’s fears with a well-meant animal image (one might describe the lovers’ repartee here as being conducted through metaphor, if the second meanings were not so increasingly literal): ‘O let my lady apprehend no fear; in all Cupid’s pageant there is presented no monster,’ but she deflates it, as is her wont, with a bawdy innuendo: ‘Nor nothing monstrous neither?’ He replies first with a mock of the conventional images in the Romantic lover’s protestations: ‘Nothing, but our undertakings when we vow to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers; thinking it harder for our mistress to devise imposition enough than for us to undergo any difficulty imposed,’ but then switches to a non-ironic statement of that aspect of personal insufficiency that had worried him at the beginning of the scene: ‘This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite, and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit.’ We hardly have time to wonder in what sense to take ‘act’ and ‘will’ as in Cressida’s still more bawdy and provocative reply we realize that she means ‘discharge’ in the same sense as Pistol had done – this is not the world of Belmont, but it is very near Eastcheap: ‘They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform; vowing more than the perfection of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one.’ She caps this provoking antithesis with the most degrading animal image yet: ‘They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares, are they not monsters?’ Troilus is unconcerned, and avows his ability with a characteristic taste image: ‘Are there such? Such are not we. Praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove; our head shall go bare till merit crown it’ – and in this last sequence ‘head-bare-crown’ there is surely a premonition of the disease image which is to plague the second half of the play, that of the French Crown. This is perhaps the most devastating application of repartee and equivocation yet, for it totally undermines our sympathies for Troilus’ Romantic postures before and after the event – what other lovers speak like this at first meeting? The irony of the subsequent oaths of sincerity (which are complete with a contrast of animal images, Troilus’ ‘As true as … turtle to her mate’ being outweighed by Cressida’s ‘As false as … fox to lamb, or wolf to heifer’s calf, Pard to the hind’) is almost unbearable, and Shakespeare seems determined to rub it home by repeating it two or three times, even giving Pandarus a prose version: ‘Let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokers-between Pandars; say amen.’ Did Shakespeare’s audience laugh here, one wonders? If not they probably did as he ends the scene with the bawdy with which he began it: ‘which bed because it shall not speak of your pretty encounters, press it to death; away!’
If Pandarus is the negative character who dominates the prose of the first half of the play, his counterpart in the second half is Thersites: between them Mars and Venus are thoroughly soiled. The separation is not as neat as that, for we do see something of Thersites before the battle, and we have a diseased trace of Pandarus after it, but nevertheless Thersites stands as a commentator on the later stages of the play and his vision – the worm’s eye view – begins to determine our attitude to the action. He performs the role of the abusive commentator in these serious comedies with great force, and as the effect of his scenes mocking Ajax, Achilles and the other Greeks is immediately felt in the theatre or on the page it would seem less valuable to work through these in detail than to try and pick out the ingredients which make up his abuse. Thersites’ chief weapon is imagery, and the images at this lowest level of the play continue within the three main groups of Food, Animals, and Disease, but at a consistently debased level. The food imagery for Troilus and Cressida certainly embraces a mood of disgust, but it is mainly concerned with the sensations of taste in the person eating, and only descends to the sordid for Cressida’s bawdy and for Troilus’ final disgust (‘orts of her love, The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics of her o’er-eaten faith’). In Thersites’ world the food images begin and continue at this level, being drawn almost exclusively from disgusting left-overs or inedible remnants. The animal imagery for the lovers is certainly deflating, but is so more at the intellectual level of a comparison, and is applied to their sexual abilities – which although repellent is to modern eyes at least a sign of life: at this lower level the images are of brute bestiality, animal stupidity, attached in the most concrete way to the persons mocked. Again the disease imagery in the military plot, although it expressed disgust, did so in the generalized almost abstract terms of ‘fevers’ and ‘infection’ and included the possibilities of cure: the ‘tent that searches To th’bottom of the worst’, that is, the lint used to probe and cleanse a wound, the ‘physic’ and ‘derision medicinable’ which Achilles’ ‘will shall have desire to drink’ – it was the doctor’s viewpoint. In Thersites’ world we have the patient’s, in complete opposition: incurable, and not abstract but vividly, inescapably particularized, down to the pus, the scab itself.
The force produced by the consistency of debasement within these three groups is also seen in the way that the images are applied: in the upper worlds they are more in the ‘I’ or ‘we’ form, for purposes of analysis or subjective experience; here they are in the ‘you’ form (or more insultingly, ‘thou’), and are applied solely for abuse. Thus Thersites’ first words begin a prolonged attack on the Greek generals in a unique mixture of food, animal, and disease imagery, and if we keep in mind these three groups – not for purposes of academic classification – we will see the endless variety wrung out of these basic themes: ‘Agamemnon – how if he had boils, full, all over, generally: … And those boils did run – say so? Did not the general run then? Were not that a botchy core? … Then would come some matter from him; I see none now’ (II, i, 2–5); ‘Nestor – whose wit was mouldy ere your grandsires had nails on their toes’; ‘the policy of those crafty swearing rascals – that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese, Nestor; and that same dog-fox Ulysses – is not proved worth a blackberry’ (V, iv). He attacks Achilles, though not so often, with the same weapons – ‘thou full dish of fool’ (V, i), ‘cur … dog’ (V, iv) and can be much more daring with Patroclus: ‘Achilles’ brach’ (II, i), ‘waterfly … Finch egg!’ (V, i), accusing him of lechery with a grotesque animal image: ‘the parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab’ (V, ii), and unloading on him the most horrible catalogue of diseases – ‘lethargies, old palsies, raw-eyes, dirt-rotten livers’ and many more – a catalogue which seems to have been too disgusting for the Folio editors, who cut the major part and substituted the laconic, un-Thersitean ‘And the like’. Shakespeare has deliberately constructed Thersites as a mechanism to discharge abuse on everything in sight, and some of the mud will stick – as in this general curse on the Trojan War and its cause: ‘the vengeance on the whole camp, or rather the Neapolitan bone-ache; for that methinks is the curse depending on those that war for a placket’ (II, iii), and later: ‘Now the dry serpigo on the subject, and war and lechery confound all.’ One of his most effective pieces of abuse, though, is not taken from these sources: in his comments on Diomedes and Menelaus in the battle he dehumanizes them by reducing them to their attributes, or roles – ‘here comes sleeve’ – ‘Ware horns’.
This current of foul abuse swirls round everything, for Thersites is himself attacked by the others in the running images: by Achilles – ‘crusty batch … fragment’ (V, i), by Patroclus, and especially by Ajax – ‘Thou bitch-wolf’s son’ – ‘thou vinewedst leaven’, ‘Toadstool’, ‘Cobloaf!’ ‘porpentine’, ‘owl’, and ‘dog or ‘cur’ throughout. But Ajax is Thersites’ greatest butt (especially in the earlier scenes, for later Thersites is made to abuse everything), and for him he produces unlimited variations on these three themes: ‘I would thou didst itch from head to foot; an I had the scratching of thee, I would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece,’ ‘thou mongrel beef-witted lord,’ ‘an assinego may tutor thee’ – ‘horse … camel … sparrow … draught oxen … a fusty nut with no kernel … elephant … peacock … land-fish … mongrel cur’ – Shakespeare’s invention and manipulation of Thersites is one of the most brilliant things in the play. But the abuse of Ajax through animal-images is not limited to Thersites, for these were the terms in which he was first introduced by Cressida’s servant, and as Nestor and Ulysses make him the tool of their policy they mock his bestial stupidity in deflating prose asides – significantly, the only time that they speak prose. Ajax mocks Achilles, the others mock him:
AJAX. A paltry insolent fellow.
NESTOR. How he describes himself!
AJAX. Can he not be sociable?
ULYSSES. The raven chides blackness.
AJAX. I’ll let his humours blood.
AGAMEMNON. He will be the physician that should be the patient.
(II, iii, 169–237)
But Achilles is also mocked by these Grecian rulers, and their back-biting rebounds on themselves, for in the way that Nestor describes the manipulation of Ajax against Achilles in animal terms:
Two curs shall tame each other; pride alone
Must tarre the mastiffs on, as ’twere their bone.
we see that the diagnosis of Ulysses’ speech:
The general’s disdained
By him one step below, he by the next …
in fact applies to the generals too, and that the ‘envious fever of pale and bloodless emulation’ infects the superiors, the ‘still and mental parts’ looking down contemptuously on ‘the ram that batters down the wall’: obviously both need each other, and at least Achilles can fight, whereas on the generals’ policy Thersites is given the last word: it is ‘not proved worth a blackberry’.
Although imagery is Thersites’ main weapon he is given occasional touches of the other prose-devices, and always of course to a destructive effect. Thus although the norm of his syntax is the realistic unpatterned style he is sometimes allowed to sharpen a blow with rhetoric, especially the figure antimetabole, which an Elizabethan rhetorician aptly describes as ‘a sharp and witty figure’ which ‘shows out of the same words a pithy distinction of meaning’.3 Thus for Ajax a grotesque inversion is suggested: he
| wears his wit in his belly and his guts in his head. | (II, i) |
A similar inversion is proposed in his first soliloquy on ‘the elephant Ajax’:
He beats me, and I rail at him.
O worthy satisfaction – would it were otherwise, that
I could beat him, whilst he railed at me.
In the more intense scenes of the battle more intense patterning is found, as for his contemptuous verdict on Achilles and Patroclus:
With too much blood and too little brain,
these two may run mad;
but if with too much brain and too little blood they do,
I’ll be a curer of madmen.
In the continuation of this speech he turns his attention to Menelaus, the cuckold – ‘the bull, the primitive statue and oblique memorial of cuckolds, a thrifty shoeing horn in a chain’, and after that witty series of synonyms he develops the horror of Menelaus’ situation, uniting antimetabole with a devastating food image (‘larded … forced’) and continuing with a sharply structured list of animals:
to what form but that he is
should wit larded with malice,
and malice forced with wit, turn him to?
To an ass were nothing, he is both ass and ox;
to an ox were nothing, he is both ox and ass.
To be a dog, a mule, a cat,
a fitchew, a toad, a lizard,
an owl, a puttock or a herring without a roe,
I would not care – but to be Menelaus
I would conspire against destiny. Ask me not what
I would be, if I were not Thersites; for I care not to be the house of a lazar, so I were not Menelaus.
(V, i)
There the force of the content is immeasurably increased by the parallels and symmetries of the style, sharpening and concentrating this unenviable situation – and in his closing words the estimate of Menelaus by reference to Thersites is as destructive as our earlier estimate of Cressida by reference to Pandarus. A slightly different effect is created in Thersites’ final survey of the Ancient World, for his reduction of the participants to mere definite and demonstrative articles suggests the mechanical revolution of the whole diseased puppet-show: ‘that same young Trojan ass that loves the whore there … that Greekish whore-masterly villain … the dissembling luxurious drab … A th’ t’other side … those crafty swearing rascals … that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese Nestor; and that same dog-fox Ulysses … that mongrel cur Ajax … that dog of as bad a kind Achilles … the cur Ajax … the cur Achilles’ (V, iv). The reduction of each character is now complete, for they can be confidently referred to by their attribute as if it were a definite identificatory detail – and we, unlike Pandarus with Helen, can be sure of seeing the point.
Thersites’ soliloquies (which increase in frequency – like Falstaff, he is often given the last word, but to damn others, not himself) begin to take on, as the rhetorical structure of these last two examples would also suggest, something of the nature of earlier clowns’ set-pieces – although needless to say, here they are the germane expression of this character in this situation, and have a definite relation with the play as a whole. But other details of Thersites’ part would bring him closer to the clown, and we see again Shakespeare’s skill in grafting new types and new worlds on to his own stock frames, for under the dirty rags and foul abuse we can just make out the successor to Feste and Touchstone. He is by employment an ‘allowed’ fool who is valued for his wit: ‘Good Thersites, come in and rail,’ says Patroclus, and his master Achilles is still more affectionate: ‘Why, my cheese, my digestion, why hast not served thyself in to my table so many meals?’ and protects him when he offends others: ‘He is a privileged man. Proceed Thersites.’ As a clown he is naturally given the main weapon, comic logic, but this like everything else is here put to an absolute deflation as Achilles formally asks for a riddle: ‘Come, what’s Agamemnon?’, and he answers with repartee hinting abuse at Patroclus but goes on with the formally correct schoolroom terms: ‘I’ll decline the whole question. Agamemnon commands Achilles, Achilles is my lord, I am Patroclus’ knower, and Patroclus is a fool.’ Having shown the relationship he now provides a middle term: ‘Agamemnon is a fool, Achilles is a fool, Thersites is a fool and as aforesaid, Patroclus is a fool.’ Achilles objects but in the correct scholastic terms: ‘Derive this, come’ (the terms and the relationship remind us of Armado quizzing Moth, and so we can see how the device is transformed). Thersites goes through his catechism once more with greater sarcasm, but his jibes also point directly at the insubordination in the Greek army (once more with antimetabole): ‘Agamemnon is a fool to offer to command Achilles, Achilles is a fool to be commanded of Agamemnon, Thersites is a fool to serve such a fool, and Patroclus is a fool positive.’ The last-named objects – ‘Why am I a fool?’ – and Thersites replies with a rare piece of repartee: ‘Make that demand of the Creator; it suffices me thou art.’ But this is more than amusing logic, for besides being a tart comment on the situation, Thersites’ mud sticks.
Although given clownish logic Thersites seems to be lacking in repartee, but this is in itself significant: he is often a partner in dialogue, but he is seldom involved in repartee (witty answering) because he usually ignores replies and keeps up a state of abuse (e.g. II, i), but there are some occasional twists of an opponent’s words which strike home ad hominem like Cressida’s (II, i; V, i). But he is given two other recurrent clowns’ devices, first the mockery of affected language, as he overhears Hector using the word which for us has already been done to death by Pandarus and then lowers it to his level, the refuse-bin: ‘Good night, sweet Lord Menelaus’ – ‘Sweet draught! Sweet quoth ‘a? Sweet sink sweet sewer’ (V, i – this repetition of a word to debase it is the figure tapinosis). Secondly Shakespeare also gives him brief touches of parody, as in his excellent mock of Ajax’s inarticulateness (III, iii – which is described as a ‘pageant’ – Ajax is not sufficiently advanced to provide material for a play) and his wonderfully accurate echo of Cressida’s insincere couplets (Shakespeare’s stylistic characterization is so powerful here that we tend to forget that he wrote both parts):
A proof of strength she could not publish more,
Unless she said, my mind is now turned whore.
(V, ii)
Beneath the diseased crust it is just possible to see a clown gone sour – the wisest one so far – and Shakespeare applies this ‘wit larded with malice’ to great effect in the overhearing scene, where Thersites is first of all separated off from the others by being in prose (a split effect as in the opening scene with Pandarus and Troilus) and is then made to remind us of the sordid aspects of Romance such as we have already seen, as the process is beginning all over again: ‘How the devil luxury with his fat rump and potato finger tickles these together! Fry, lechery, fry,’ and also to provide the lowest level of deflation (after Ulysses’ cooler middle position) to Troilus’ rhetoric: ‘Will ‘a swagger himself out on’s own eyes?’ – ‘He’ll tickle it for his concupy.’ But Thersites too is to be deflated, first in his self-abuse when threatened by Hector (V, iv), and still more in his fear of the bastard Margaleron: ‘I am a bastard too; I love bastards. I am a bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in every thing illegitimate.’ Even the satirist is laughed off the stage. The final deflation comes to Pandarus, as Chaucer’s courtly knight is reduced to the level of Pompey and Mistress Overdone,4 first with a ‘whoreson rascally tisick’ as he delivers Cressida’s letter (V, iii) and lastly alone as he delivers what is in effect an Epilogue and thus proclaims his dominance of the play – like Rosalind – with his jokes on impotence and the Winchester goose; and in his last words he is brought down to Thersites’ level with his curses – ‘bequeathe you my diseases’. Ironically he here ascends to verse – and even to couplets – for the first time, but the effect is much more incongrous than if he had stuck to his normal medium – even prose has been deflated.
In the serious comedy of All’s Well That Ends Well we do not find that crushing consistency of attitude which in Troilus and Cressida resulted in the same groups of images being used through the several layers of the plot, but there are significant parallels in situations and attitudes between the main characters. Thus we will find several details of the hero Bertram being reflected at the lower level of his follower Parolles, and some echoed at the still lower level of the clown Lavache; again Parolles will be satirically echoed by Lavache, and more directly criticized by the old lord, Lafeu. These parallels are often quite fluid, and are sometimes significant more in retrospection than in anticipation: but that does not invalidate them, whether Shakespeare has pre-echoed himself accidentally, or has laid too fine a trail. However it does suggest that the best approach to the play is a chronological one, and this is confirmed by the development of the plot, which – like Much Ado – involves several ironic juxtapositions which are only appreciated in the order in which they are unfolded. If Pandarus and Thersites are the twin centres of the prose of Troilus and Cressida, the corresponding poles here are Parolles and Lavache, but a development on the stratification of media there is that here several of the noble characters are allowed to speak serious prose, with no hint of indignity: Lafeu especially, but also Helena, Bertram, his mother the Countess of Rousillon, the ladies of Florence involved in Helena’s plot to deceive Bertram, and the various French lords serving under Bertram whose choric commentary does so much to establish the parallels between Parolles and Bertram. Indeed the application of media in All’s Well is perhaps the most flexible yet, for there is hardly a scene which uses prose all the way through, and the juxtaposition of prose and verse (and poetic forms moving from blank-verse to several varieties of rhyme) is often significant, especially for Parolles.
The use of prose for serious courtly conversation is seen in the opening scene, where both the exposition and the characterization of the elderly dignity of Lafeu and the Countess are aided by the Cool patterns of the syntax and the formal images. There is little to distinguish the two characters, for this is rather the style of a class or species than of an individual, a style full of dignity and with no haste:
Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead,
excessive grief the enemy of the living.
The images tend towards the personification of abstracts, especially when setting up the ideas of virtue and honour which will be so important in the play: the King will certainly maintain ‘his virtue’, for his
worthiness would stir it up where it wanted,
rather than lack it where there is such abundance.
Helena’s good qualities are formally celebrated, her noble disposition making ‘fair gifts fairer’, for
where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities,
there commendations go with pity,
they are virtues and traitors too.
The crown of this courtly union of antithetical balance and abstractly developed images comes as a comment on Helena’s tears for her father:
’Tis the best brine a maiden can season her praise in. The remembrance of her father never approaches her heart but the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood from her cheek.
This passage recalls the similar style of old Leonato at the opening of Much Ado, and like that play dignified, courtly prose at once gives way to the prose of wit, for Helena having been left alone and translated to the dignity of verse to reveal her love for Bertram now introduces Parolles to us (‘a notorious liar’, ‘a great way fool, solely a coward’) and engages him in repartee leading up to questions which as we know reveal her own position: ‘Is there no military policy how virgins might blow up men?’, and ‘How might one do sir, to lose it to her own liking?’
In reply Parolles is given a great set-piece on virginity, though he hardly answers Helena’s questions, Shakespeare preferring to give him a series of Paradoxes in dispraise of the commodity (Donne is the nearest English equivalent for this sequence of brief, witty specious arguments). After the bawdy siege imagery the initial paradox, that loss of virginity means increase of virginity, is obviously true and had even been used as a serious justification of marriage by St Jerome,5 but Parolles speciously confuses the first loser with the subsequent gainers: ‘Virginity, by being once lost, may be ten times found. By being ever kept, it is ever lost’ – antithesis is here and throughout the dominant figure to convey his ‘Profit and Loss’ reasoning. His other main argument, that virginity is worthless, is specious and is meant to be seen as such, and he is not given any logic to support it, but rather a series of brilliantly deflating images: ‘Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese; consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach.’ – ‘Virginity, like an old courtier, wears her cap out of fashion, richly suited, but unsuitable, just like the brooch and the toothpick, which wear not now.’ But rhetoric is well used for the three sentences ending on ‘withered pear’ (epistrophe). The functions of this speech are several: in terms of the play’s mood it acts as a warming-up of wit; in terms of character it establishes Parolles as a scabrous wit in the Mercutio tradition, but in terms of attitude it also undermines him, for the commodity was so clearly not out of fashion for the Elizabethans; it helps to arouse Helena to action; and perhaps most important it stresses a commodity on which the whole plot turns, for it is the loss of Helena’s virginity which triumphantly concludes the bed-trick. I say ‘perhaps’ because I do not think we should give it the full force of a parable predicting a crucial aspect of the play such as the similarly placed ‘belly fable’ in Coriolanus undoubtedly has, although it might be thought an experiment along those lines. Certainly the idea recurs in relation to Bertram, for the Clown comments that as he has run away he will not be ‘killed’; ‘the danger is in standing to’t, that’s the loss of men, though it be the getting of children’ (III, ii), and more appositely, the trapped Parolles candidly sees Bertram as ‘enemy to virginity’: ‘very ruttish … a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds’ (IV, iii). Thus in retrospect we might grant it more significance.
If Parolles triumphs in this set-piece (and it is worth remarking that this is the only ‘solo’ speech in the play, and that rhetorically structured syntax continues its decline since Twelfth Night towards more realistic conversational syntax), he does not excel in repartee, and Helena easily outwits him on the second meanings of being born under Mars – the wars have kept him under; and the planet was retrograde – hence his running away. This tiny snatch of repartee is prophetic, for Parolles is one of those characters who are always beaten in repartee, like Pandarus, only more violently. He evades the issue by claiming pressure of business, but promises to return ‘perfect courtier’ and instruct her: the movement to court, and back from it, is a vital part of this play. One of the characters who will put down Parolles is now presented, the clown Lavache, and in his scene with the Countess (I, iii) we have a repetition of the ‘chaste woman: bawdy clown’ situation already seen between Helena and Parolles, and both clowns have paradoxes. Lavache’s first function is to be the parallel lower love-interest (although it is a moot point whether Bertram is not lower than him), and although we see little of the idealized love earlier given to the Master, we are left in no doubt as to the clown’s reactions: he wishes to marry Isbel because ‘My poor body madam requires it; I am driven on by the flesh, and he must needs go that the devil drives.’ But he has more original twists, confessing to having been a sinner and that ‘I do marry that I may repent’, but with a surprise twist: not as you might expect to have sex lawfully but now not to have any at all: ‘I hope to have friends, for my wife’s sake … for the knaves come to do that for me which I am aweary of.’ This is a ludicrous inversion of marriage, but he is prepared to support it with logic reasoning with an agricultural analogy: ‘He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to inn the crop. If I be his cuckold, he’s my drudge.’ That is specious enough with its separation of ‘land’ from ‘team’ (presumably ‘the crop’ refers to his wish to have ‘barnes’), but he adds a still more ridiculous argument put into the form of syllogism by him to make it seem water-tight, and by Shakespeare to stress its stupidity:
He that comforts my wife is the cherisher of my flesh and blood. He that cherishes my flesh and blood loves my flesh and blood. He that loves my flesh and blood is my friend. Ergo, he that kisses my wife is my friend.
Despite the extended working-out of the syllogism we do not miss the fallacy in the premiss – ‘comforts’ – nor the insidious progression in the verbs, although we may laugh at the conclusion to his reasoning.
However, the clown’s ergo is here fulfilling more than its normal function of mocking a perverted skill in logic, for although the immediate effect is laughter, the long-term effect of this single piece of comic logic – like that given to Thersites at a similar stage – is more germane to the action of the play. The clown’s attitude to marriage is an ironic presentation of a general inverted idea, but a particular fulfilment of it soon occurs, for his pattern – lasciviousness beforehand, then abdication – is precisely the same as that performed by Bertram, and we may in retrospect accept his perverted reasoning as a fair comment on Bertram’s indifference to his duties as husband. I would stress again that we should not take these parallels too rigidly – I described their relationship to the main action as ‘fluid’ – because as with Parolles on virginity the utterance is entirely appropriate to the character, yet gains an added significance in retrospect or on re-reading, the parallel being rather that of a shadow or an upper harmonic. It may of course be a foreshadowing of the technique of tragic irony which is used so powerfully in the opening scenes of Measure for Measure and indeed in all the tragedies, often (especially Macbeth and Othello) with enormous intensity; but by the comparison we see how faint the parallels are here. Similarly the clown’s later witticisms on Helen and Troy also result in a statement of the rarity of feminine excellence – ‘One good woman in ten’ – which points most towards Helena.
The action of the play develops in the verse scenes, with Helena’s confession to the countess of her love for Bertram, and her announcement that she has a special remedy bequeathed her by her father (I, iii); we then see Bertram at the French court, not being allowed to go to the wars but stealing away nevertheless; and then Lafeu presents Helena to the King who reluctantly agrees to her trying the remedy on him. As an interlude to allow these various movements to develop Shakespeare returns us to Rousillon for another scene where Lavache entertains the Countess (II, ii) and although this is a naturalistically observed clown scene it too has a relevance to the development of the play. The contrast between the affectation and dishonesty of the court and the integrity of home is an important subsidiary element in the play, and as Lavache is now about to make the journey to court he demonstrates the ‘height’ of his ‘breeding’ with a mockery of court behaviour: ‘He that cannot make a leg, put off’s cap, kiss his hand, and say nothing, has neither leg, hands, lip, nor cap; and indeed such a fellow, to say precisely, were not for the court.’ However, he has an answer which ‘will serve all men’, and also fulfil the criterion of ‘say nothing’, and there is a build-up of interest for some twenty lines or so as he fobs off her enquiries with comic proverbial similes, until she provides the willing ‘feed’ line:
COUNTESS. I pray you sir, are you a courtier?
LAVACHE. ‘O lord sir’ – there’s a simple putting off. More, more, a hundred of them.
COUNTESS. Sir, I am a poor friend of yours that loves you.
LAVACHE. ‘O lord sir’ – thick, thick, spare not me.
She is given just the right ingratiating tone for one begging a favour, and his all-purpose catch-phrase avoids each issue, presumably with a different facial expression each time. The dialogue continues amusingly until she asks, “You were lately whipped sir, as I think’ – and he answers with the same appeal for more questions: ‘ “O lord sir” – spare not me,’ but she has now caught him, by taking the appeal literally: ‘Do you cry “o lord sir” at your whipping, and “spare not me?” Indeed your “o lord sir” is very sequent to your whipping.’ The point of this scene, besides the amusement and satire which it provides, emerges in the characterization of that affected courtier Parolles, at first hazily when he tries to avoid a sharp question from Lafeu with ‘Sir?’ only for Lafeu to tear it sarcastically (II, v, 17–20); but the real point emerges when Parolles, blindfold and threatened with death, appeals for mercy: ‘O lord sir let me live or let me see my death’ (IV, iii, 345). Again in retrospect we reap the fruits of a preparation of a linguistic affectation (as with Malvolio and Osric), with a sharp flash of perception when the character behaves as predicted.
Lavache’s mockery of court modishness takes on added significance in connection with the scenes on either side of it. In the preceding scene we see Parolles for the second time, now at the King’s court with Bertram, instructing him how to bid farewell as a courtier should: Bertram’s own image is mannered enough: ‘I grow to you, and our parting is a tortured body’ (II, i, 37), but Parolles, having lowered the medium to prose urges ‘more spacious ceremony’ with more affected images: ‘you have re-strained yourself within the list of too cold an adieu. Be more expressive to them; for they wear themselves in the cap of time.… After them, and take a more dilated farewell.’ That clothes image will soon be appropriate for this braggart. The character of Parolles is beginning to emerge, and after Lavache’s scene another juxtaposition of affectation with integrity takes it a stage further: he is found with the bluff old lord Lafeu (a type like Kent or Menenius) discussing Helena’s miraculous cure of the King. Lafeu’s reactions are wondering and in that vein of philosophic reflection which runs right through the play, while Parolles constantly interrupts in order to stay with the conversation, but despite his pretensions his comments reveal a banality and uninventiveness as profound as that of Slender or Andrew Ague-cheek:
LAFEU. “Why, ’tis the rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times.
PAROLLES. And so ’tis.
LAFEU. To be relinquished of the artists –
PAROLLES. So I say.
LAFEU. Both of Galen and Paracelsus, of all the learned and authentic fellows –
PAROLLES. Right, so I say.
LAFEU. That give him out incurable –
PAROLLES. Why there ’tis, so say I too.
Even Parolles must begin to notice the hollowness of his contributions, and he now tries to compensate for them by adding a longer comment: but Shakespeare shows up his pretensions still more by first giving him a banal expression worthy of Bottom: ‘Nay, ’tis strange, ’tis very strange, that is the brief and the tedious of it,’ and then overreaching himself with a pompous Latinate word which Shakespeare only uses for this occasion (as he had done with Falstaff’s ‘pusillanimity’): ‘and he’s of a most facinerious spirit that will not acknowledge it to be the – ‘ and Lafeu takes over again: ‘Very hand of heaven’. By this juxtaposition Parolles’ breeding is thus shown to be of the surface only.
The King now enters with Helena, the medium changes to verse, and the heroine is granted her side of the bargain, being given four French lords and Bertram from whom to choose a husband. Lafeu’s blunt integrity is shown again as he is made to stand outside and comment on this scene, and in prose, as he violently mocks the courtiers who seem to be rejecting Helena: ‘An they were sons of mine, I’d have them whipped, or I would send them to th’Turk to make eunuchs of’ – ‘These boys are boys of ice.’ She chooses Bertram of course, and he rejects her as a ‘poor physician’s daughter’; in an intense and poetic speech the King urges the value of virtue apart from title or ancestry, and as Bertram still refuses the King is forced to exert his power to make him submit. As the court leaves Lafeu keeps Parolles behind, and begins to vent on him our resentment against Bertram:
LAFEU. Your lord and master did well to make his recantation.
PAROLLES. Recantation. My lord? My master?
LAFEU. Ay. Is it not a language I speak?
(a similar reaction to Horatio’s when Osric tries to avoid a direct answer). The braggart continues with the ploy of ‘not marking’, and affirms his independence of Bertram, which we know to be untrue and so we are given some satisfaction when Lafeu sees through Parolles and unmasks him with some wonderfully powerful images:
I did think thee, for two ordinaries, to be a pretty wise fellow; thou didst make tolerable vent of thy travel, it might pass; yet the scarfs and the bannerets about thee did manifoldly dissuade me from believing thee a vessel of too great a burthen. I have now found thee … So my good window of lattice, fare thee well; thy casement I need not open, for I look through thee.
Here ‘Appearance and Reality’ is not some metaphysical Shakespearian questioning of the universe, but (as ever) a concrete and particular comment on an individual, and of crucial importance: this is the first time that Parolles has been seen through (as we are twice explicitly reminded later) and we must admire Lafeu’s quickness in spotting the cheat. Here again repartee is the real clash of personalities, as Lafeu’s replies are sharply ad hominem:
PAROLLES. My lord, you give me most egregious indignity.
LAFEU. Ay with all my heart, and thou art worthy of it.
PAROLLES. I have not my lord deserved it.
LAFEU. Yes good faith, every dram of it, and I will not bate thee a scruple.
Here too we have a hint of further developments in the play in Lafeu’s ironical: ‘If ever thou beest bound in thy scarf and beaten, thou shalt find what it is to be proud of thy bondage,’ and Lafeu is also made to prefigure Parolles’ role as butt and scapegoat:
Methinks thou art a general offence, and every man should beat thee. I think thou wast created for men to breathe themselves upon thee.
Shakespeare gives few more explicit descriptions of his intent towards a character.
Parolles keeps up his pretences to Lafeu’s face, but when he departs we see a further layer of pretence, as Parolles loses his composure for the first time, a change of mood well expressed in his short and angry but ineffectual repetitions: ‘scurvy, old, filthy, scurvy lord! Well, I must be patient, there is no fettering of authority.… I’ll have no more pity of his age than I would have of – I’ll beat him and if I could but meet him again.’ At which cue Lafeu re-enters with the news of Bertram’s marriage, only for Parolles to be at once ingratiating again. After another round of being abused he is left with more ineffectual repetitions (like Pistol – ‘Good, very good, it is so then. Good, very good, let it be concealed awhile’) though he recovers his resilience again to urge Bertram on to the wars and escape ‘the detested Wife’. Our resentment towards Parolles is growing, and in the next scene we find the clown Lavache now at court, who is confronted with Parolles and puts him down in sharp repartee. Parolles answers his first jest defensively: ‘Why I say nothing’ (precisely one of the attributes which Lavache had mocked as being necessary to the courtier), but the clown deflates it with a twist which will become more significant: ‘Marry you are the wiser man; for many a man’s tongue shakes out his master’s undoing’: this ironic sentence anticipates the whole development of the plot (Parolles’ unmasking of Bertram, first in private among the French lords, and then in public before the King), and also establishes the image of the tongue, which will be applied to Parolles more violently; if the sentence is ambiguous in that ‘his master’s undoing’ could refer either to the owner of the tongue or to the master of the owner, then both apply to Parolles. Lavache follows this with still more unfriendly jests, twisting Parolles’ words to call him a nothing, a knave, and a fool, and although Parolles dismisses him with the usual comment on the clowns’ wit – ‘A good knave i’faith, and well fed’, the blows have gone home, and there is irony in Parolles’ ‘Go to, thou art a witty fool, I have found thee’, coming as it does after Lafeu’s first exposal of him: ‘I have now found thee.’ Left alone with Helena Parolles delivers Bertram’s message that he cannot return home with her, and to put a false surface on the move he ascends to verse and is given images of the utmost smoothness and speciousness: Bertram puts off the ‘great prerogative and rite of love’ because of a ‘compelled restraint’,
Whose want, and whose delay, is strewed with sweets,
Which they distil now in the curbed time,
To make the coming hour o’erflow with joy,
And pleasure drown the brim.
It really needs a Thersites to parody that insincerity.
Shakespeare has already shown Lafeu penetrating Parolles’ surface, but he does so again by juxtaposing the two in Bertram’s presence (II, v). The reason for this double exposure seems to be that it is dramatically necessary to deflate Parolles early on so that the audience can gauge just how shallow Bertram’s judgment is in trusting him, and also that Bertram should be made aware of how different other people’s judgments of Parolles are from his own. As Bertram affirms his trust Lafeu sums up the discrepancy in a pungent image: ‘Then my dial goes not true; I took this lark for a bunting,’ and goes on to attack Parolles directly: ‘A good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner, but one that lies three thirds, and uses a known truth to pass a thousand nothings with, should be once heard, and thrice beaten.’ Repartee is again used crushingly: ‘It may be you have mistaken him my lord’ – ‘And shall do so ever, though I took him at’s prayers,’ and Lafeu’s final words assert the discrepancy between surface and reality in Parolles with three inescapable images: ‘believe this of me, there can be no kernel in this light nut. The soul of this man is his clothes. Trust him not in matter of heavy consequence. I have kept of them tame, and know their natures.’ That final blow is a savage one, but it is to prove true, and the parallel between the deceived trust in Parolles and that in Bertram becomes strongerf or us in his cruel words on the arrival of Helena: ‘Here comes my clog,’ and in the way he deceives her about his intentions with a smoother, less specious surface than Parolles. The kind of ironic counterpoint which Shakespeare is setting up between the various levels of the action is well shown in a scene shortly after this (III, ii), where the Clown has returned home from the court, and is made to show the same indifference towards a woman as Bertram, and for the same ‘social’ reasons:
I have no mind to Isbel, since I was at court. Our old ling and our Isbels o’th’country are nothing like your old ling and your Isbels o’th’court.
As the clown says, ‘I speak the truth the next way,’ and with these words and his subsequent bawdy jokes on ‘standing to’ and ‘running away’ the connection between his attitude and Bertram’s will be noticed by us with a sardonic smile.
The full presentation of Parolles’ deceit is reserved for the theatre of war in Florence, and once there we immediately see how his reputation has spread, for the women attending Diana (the maid who Bertram is attempting to seduce) discuss both master and man: Parolles has obviously been playing the pandar – (a filthy officer he is in those suggestions for the young earl’, a ‘jack-an-apes with scarfs’ who ‘Reports but coarsely of Helena; of Bertram they simply say “Tis pity he is not honest’ (III, v). Parolles’ behaviour has outraged others too, and in the next scene we see two of Bertram’s officers pleading for permissions to expose him, and their account of him (‘a hilding’, ‘a bubble’) has an added force in that Bertram is so obviously unaware of the ironic parallel with himself, also a ‘promise-breaker’ whose Virtue’ has deceived others:
SECOND LORD.… he’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker.…
FIRST LORD. It were fit you knew him, lest reposing too far in his virtue, which he hath not, he might at some great and trusty business, in a main danger, fail you.
They devise the plan of allowing Parolles to go off alone to recapture a drum lost to the enemy but then to capture him themselves, ‘bind and hoodwink him’ as if he is caught by the enemy, and then interrogate him. With his expert sense of dramatic preparation whenever some characters plot upon another, Shakespeare here (as for Falstaff, Beatrice and Benedick, Malvolio) predicts the exact behaviour of the duped character: ‘Be but your lordship present at his examination; if he do not for the promise of his life, and in the highest compulsion of base fear, offer to betray you, and deliver all the intelligence in his power against you, and that with the divine forfeit of his soul upon oath’, then nothing is to be trusted. Parolles at once accepts the challenge, and goes off to ‘pen down my dilemmas’, that is ‘arguments concluding both ways’ as the New Arden editor glosses it, a tiny detail but as significant for this two-faced man as Iago swearing ‘By Janus’. One detail added for later exploitation is the arrogance of Parolles ‘that so confidently seems to undertake this business, which he knows is not to be done’. More significant, as in other comic plots, is the imagery of hunting and trapping with which they dramatize the situation (we recall the description of Falstaff as an ‘embossed rascal’, a deer hunted to extremity, brought to bay):
SECOND LORD. But we have almost embossed him, you shall see his fall to-night.…
FIRST LORD. We’ll make you some sport with the fox, ere we case him. He was first smoked by the old Lord Lafeu; when his disguise and he is parted, tell me what a sprat you shall find him.…
SECOND LORD. I must go look my twigs; he shall be caught.
Even Bertram is made to scent his trail – ‘this same coxcomb that we have i’ the wind’.
The scene which follows (IV, i) is a very amusing piece of theatre, with excellent exploitation of dramatic effects. But it has a significance over and above theatrical comedy, for the exposure of Parolles works retrospectively in that it shows how easily Bertram was deceived by him, and therefore how easily Bertram deceived others; but it also works in a forward direction, anticipating just how Bertram is going to be ‘embossed’ by Helena’s plot and also revealed to be ‘a sprat’. Thus the whole process of deceit, exposure and mistaken trust is related to the action and meaning of the play in a much more profound and organic way than the similar plots in Merry Wives, Twelfth Night, or Much Ado. For this first exposure Bertram is not present, and the two lords remain in ambush to overhear Parolles, whose arrival is heralded with another splendid anticipation of the gull’s behaviour:
SECOND LORD. But couch ho, here he comes – to beguile two hours in a sleep, and then to return and swear the lies he forges.
PAROLLES. Ten o’clock. Within these three hours ‘twill be time enough to go home. What shall I say I have done? It must be a very plausive invention.
The irony of that echo is exceeded by one in which he is made to unwittingly fall into the dominant trap-image (like Malvolio, but in the opposite direction): ‘They begin to smoke me, and disgraces have of late knocked too often at my door’: he sees the general movement, but is unaware just how close it is. Yet another ironic echo is his self-accusation in the same terms in which one of the plotters had wondered at his arrogance: ‘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?’ And the last application of a previous point is his own attack on his dominant feature, his tongue, first mocking the split between his heart which has ‘the fear of Mars before it’ thus ‘not daring the reports of my tongue’, and then threatening to give it to an equally voluble talker if it continues to prattle him ‘into these perils’ – ‘into a butterwoman’s mouth’, and to exchange it for the silence of ‘Bajazet’s mule’.
By a number of stylistic parallels, then, Shakespeare continues to undermine Parolles, but the most brilliant use of prose is yet to come: for the detail of Parolles reviewing possible escape holes (‘I must give myself some hurts, and say I got them in exploit. Yet slight ones will not carry it. They will say “came you off with so little?” And great ones I dare not give’) Shakespeare applies that recurrent device, the prose aside, to a new purpose. The eavesdropping Lord has twice commented on Parolles’ trickery (the second time in words which have an equally biting application to Bertram: ‘Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?’), and the comments are now made more frequent and brought closer to the braggart:
PAROLLES. I would the cutting of my garments would serve the turn, or the breaking of my Spanish sword.
SECOND LORD (aside). We cannot afford you so.
These comments come closer still until the Lord is engaging him in dialogue, almost in repartee, with Parolles unconscious of the fact:
PAROLLES. Or the baring of my beard, and to say it was in stratagem.
SECOND LORD. ‘Twould not do.
PAROLLES. Or to drown my clothes, and say I was stripped.
SECOND LORD. Hardly serve.
The dialogue continues (if one had only this fragment of the text and did not know the theatrical situation it would read like a normal dialogue – but situation and form are played off brilliantly against each other) with Parolles almost meeting the objection, up to a most daring climax, stretching credibility but preserving it, as the Lord (anticipating his wish for verificatory detail) actually asks him a question and then dismisses the answer:
PAROLLES. Though I swore I leapt from the window of the citadel –
SECOND LORD. How deep?
PAROLLES. Thirty fathom.
SECOND LORD. Three great oaths would scarce make that believed.
This recalls the similar effect when Toby answers Malvolio back, but it outdoes even that as a theatrical experience. Finally captured, Parolles rushes up into verse out of fear and for dissimulation, with a part-symbolic comment on the function of his own name if caught by the Russians: ‘I shall lose my life for want of language’. As he is led off we are reminded of the trap image: ‘We have caught the woodcock, and will keep him muffled’.
We look forward to the comic confrontation of Parolles and Bertram, and the scene which intervenes reminds us of the trap which is closing round Bertram, as Diana justifies the bed-trick:
Only, in this disguise, I think’t no sin
To cozen him that would unjustly win.
However, an unexpected development is that the confrontation scene (IV, iii) begins with a long conversation between the two French lords, and through some ninety lines of that fluent serious court prose Shakespeare carefully exposes the evil of Bertram and the parallel between his deceit and Parolles’. These choric figures stress the ‘worthy blame laid upon him for shaking off so good a wife and so sweet a lady’ (they also reveal that Helena is reported to be dead), they recall the way in which Bertram seems to be hunting down the chaste Diana: ‘this night he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour’,6 and as one reflects on the evils that man is prone to: ‘as we are ourselves, what things we are!’ the other answers with words that apply to all men, but also to Parolles’ function as a go-between or ‘treason’ leading Bertram astray with his master’s connivance (like Pandarus), and to Bertram himself: Merely our own traitors. And as in the common course of all treasons, we still see them reveal themselves, till they attain to their abhorred ends, so he that in this action contrives against his own nobility, in his proper stream o’erflows himself.
They come closer to Parolles and Bertram in remembering the imminent way in which the treasons of Bertram’s ‘Company’ (‘companion’) will ‘reveal themselves’:
I would gladly have him see his company anatomized, that he might take a measure of his own judgments, wherein so curiously he had set this counterfeit.
The relevance of Parolles’ deception to Bertram’s, which we have long noticed, is now given an explicit statement:
We will not meddle with him till he come;
for his presence must be the whip of the other.
Thus the ‘whipping’ or ‘beating’ which has so often been applied to Parolles is now for the first time attached to Bertram too. Credibility is given to these commentators by their style, with its philosophical abstractness of language, fully developed images (tenor and vehicle are seen) and its careful dualism (‘comforts: losses’, ‘gain: tears’, ‘dignity: shame’), a tone and movement summed up with complete consistency in the concluding reflection:
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together;
our virtues would be proud,
if our faults whipped them not;
and our crimes would despair,
if they were not cherished by our virtues.
The very carefulness of the balance distances them still further.
After this serious preparation Bertram enters, and by a violent contrast his bouncy arrogant manner seems shallow, and as we have just had an unflinching moral judgment of him then the unfeeling way with which he runs together the various businesses which he has just performed must alienate him still further from us:
I have congied with the Duke, done my adieu with his nearest, buried a wife, mourned for her, writ to my lady mother …
and, we are reminded at the end, arranged a little business for that night which will also involve pleasure (so near is he to the trap). His confidence is unshakeable as he calls for ‘this dialogue between the fool and the soldier’ (as ever the production of the expected scene completing the gulling is described in theatrical terms – ‘this interlude’ in Twelfth Night, ‘a dumbshow’ in Much Ado, a ‘pageant’ for Ajax if it had succeeded), and Bertram remains sublimely unaware of the irony as he calls for ‘this counterfeit module, [who] has deceived me, like a double-meaning pro-phesier’. The scene which follows is fully worked out (it is the longest scene in the play), and I cannot record every detail of the comedy in which Parolles, as predicted, slanders everybody in sight. Nor is there any need to analyse in detail a scene which is so immediately successful in the theatre or on the page. But we should perhaps record the serious issues which Shakespeare has inserted, especially the accounts of Bertram. Parolles may be a ‘Damnable both-sides rogue’ in his master’s eyes, but after the way in which we have seen Bertram wooing Diana, then there is something admirable in the fact that Parolles has written a letter to deter her from believing this false count, and in Parolles’ description of Bertram as a ‘dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds’ although there is an element of exaggeration, it has more than a grain of truth – unlike Lucio’s ascription of lechery to the Duke in Measure for Measure, or Hamlet’s slanders of Ophelia, which we know to be false. And in Parolles’ mock of another Lord, that ‘He professes not keeping of oaths; in breaking ‘em he is stronger than Hercules’ there is an uncomfortable echo for Bertram: as one of the plotters says, ‘I begin to love him for this’. Of course Parolles is not a neutral commentator, and this is rather a case of thieves betraying each other, but some of his comments come home to roost, and although Bertram’s trust in Parolles is now shown to have been totally deceived, the unmasking is only a fully acted image of the failure of the trust which other people had placed in him. But Parolles is a professional liar (and so has to be punished more fully than one who is reclaimable – like Lucio compared to Angelo), and even when exposed maintains his resilience: ‘Who cannot be crushed with a plot?’ – ‘He who has nothing to hide’, we answer, and in his final soliloquy (now in verse to restore his front) we must not be misled by his assurance – ‘Simply the thing I am shall make me live … and Parolles live Safest in shame. Being fooled, by foolery thrive. There’s place and means for every man alive’ – this confidence must not lead us to conclude sentimentally that Shakespeare is passing a General Pardon on all humanity, whether rogues or not: surely there is something rather disturbing about his assurance, especially as he is proved right, for Lafeu says to him at the very end: ‘wait on me home, I’ll make sport with thee. Let they courtesies alone, they are scurvy ones’. This is a double-edged conclusion.
After the triumphs and deceits of the court and the war, the heroes must return home, and we are introduced to the characters back in Rousillon in a curiously mixed scene (IV, v). Lafeu and the Countess are mourning the supposed death of Helena (‘the most virtuous gentle woman that ever nature had praise for creating’), but Lavache is at his usual clownish tricks. Lafeu finds a rather incongruous image for her rarity:
’Twas a good lady, ‘twas a good lady. We may pick a thousand sallets ere we light on such another herb.
and Lavache deflates it: ‘Indeed sir, she was the sweet marjoram of the sallet, or rather the herb of grace’. Lafeu corrects him crossly: ‘They are knot-herbs, you knave, they are nose-herbs’, but Lavache has an answer ready: ‘I am no great Nebuchadnezzar sir, I have not much skill in grass’. The dramatic point thus made seems to be that as we know that Helena is not dead, it would be wrong for the atmosphere to be too serious, and so the clown dispels some of the false gloom. Yet at the same time it is right that they should not be too gay, hence Lavache’s rather laboured jesting on ‘fool and knave’, and about the Devil, although correct in that the clown is trying to cheer his master up, is deliberately unfunny, so that Lafeu can justifiably say ‘Go thy ways, I begin to be a-weary of thee’, and describe him as ‘A shrewd knave and an unhappy’. But the clown revives with the arrival of Bertram with those familiar Elizabethan jokes about patches of velvet perhaps hiding scars.
Lavache can exercise his wit properly again with the reappearance of Parolles, and yet again the braggart is put down in repartee, as he tries to excuse his disfavour with Bertram by passing the blame off on to Fortune:
I have ere now sir been better known to you, when I have held familiarity with fresher clothes. But I am now sir muddied in Fortune’s mood, and smell somewhat strong of her strong displeasure.
In reply Lavache takes up that affected image and develops its ludicrousness in the same terms:
Truly, Fortune’s displeasure is but sluttish, if it smell so strongly as thou speak’st of. I will henceforth eat no fish of Fortune’s buttering. Prithee allow the wind.
Parolles is thus reduced to the indignity of all those who have their metaphors punctured, having to admit that they spoke not literally – ‘Nay you need not to stop your nose sir, I spake but by a metaphor’. – Yet the clown can twist that too, and rightly, into a general point: ‘Indeed sir, if your metaphor stink, I will stop my nose; or against any man’s metaphor’, and he ingeniously lowers it still further when asked to deliver a letter – ‘Foh, prithee stand away; a paper from Fortune’s close-stool to give to a nobleman!’ – this cloacal imagery is a source reserved for the most mocked – Ajax, Cloten. Lafeu now appears, and the comedy of taking a metaphor literally can be applied again, and again to the braggart’s discomfort:
PAROLLES. My lord, I am a man whom Fortune hath cruelly scratched.
LAFEU. And what would you have me to do? ’tis too late to pare her nails now. Wherein have you played the knave with Fortune that she should scratch you, who of herself is a good lady, and would not have knaves thrive long under her?
And with a final twist of his complaint that Lafeu having found him out should now restore him, we leave the exposed dissembler to turn to the final scene and the as yet preserved facade of Bertram.
The Countess, Lafeu, and even the King forgive Bertram for his crime, and he is then asked if he is willing to marry Lafeu’s daughter: with some specious images (V, iii, 44–65) he agrees, but his first uncovering comes when he gives Lafeu the ring which the King had given Helena. Directly challenged, Bertram tries to lie his way out of the corner, but the King arrests him; when Bertram is confronted with Diana, the virgin whom he thinks he seduced, he first tries to laugh it off, and then slanders her as ‘a common gamester’, who actually tried to trap him: she ‘did angle for me’, thus he tries to reverse the image. Our sense that retribution would be deserved is strengthened by the fact that Parolles is now mentioned as an evidence for Bertram’s knowledge of Diana, and although Bertram protests that this is a ‘most perfidious slave … Whose nature sickens but to speak a truth’, we know that Bertram is still lying desperately, that he has learned absolutely nothing about himself from the exposure of Parolles, and that Parolles can be counted on to tell the truth although with exaggeration. But when he is brought on he tries to save his skin by equivocating, as the King (who has also been reduced to prose) questions him: ‘Tricks he hath had in him, which gentlemen have’ – ‘Did he love this woman?’ – ‘He did love her sir, as a gentleman loves a woman’ – ‘How is that?’; and in answering this question he is reduced to absurdity (although with an indirect blow at gentlemen): ‘He loved her sir, and loved her not’, thus giving the King the chance to become the last person to ‘breathe’ on him: ‘As thou art a knave and no knave – what an equivocal companion is this’. But ‘God send the companion a better prince’ we might be tempted to add, for after Parolles has revealed his pandering, it is not until Bertram is presented with Helena face to face that he finally collapses, and although Lafeu distracts us with his last piece of bluff prose we are not entirely convinced. Bertram’s last-minute redemption is needed by the plot, and he has a respectable successor in the transformation of Count Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro with his ‘Perdona Contessa’: but Shakespeare does not attempt to use the equivalent of Mozart’s melody and harmony here, and we may well go away thinking that the full exposure of Parolles is a process which not only illuminates Bertram’s deceit but which should have happened to him too. And although the prose has been the focus for all the comedy in the play, its resources have been well applied sustaining a serious dimension which may appear more impressive than anything in the verse.
In Measure for Measure Shakespeare continues the structural duplication of significant attitudes to the central experience of the play, but with a greater control of the verse – indeed the dramatic poetry here is the most intense yet written for a comedy, and if it lacks the sustained pressure of the verse of Troilus and Cressida that is largely because of the gradual decline in the intensity of the dramatic situation after ‘Sweet sister, let me live’ (III, i) as the Duke’s plot begins to redress the balance of suffering created in the first part of the play. If the verse here is much greater than All’s Well, the prose is also powerful, although the Lucio plot is not as essential to the main action as is Parolles’. However the structural patterns are important, for again there is a double unmasking of false appearances, Angelo in the upper, Lucio in the lower world, and again there is a significant repetition of situation and attitude circling around the central issue of a man’s relationship with a woman in terms of love, sex, marriage, and contract. Claudio and Lucio have both become engaged but not yet married, and both have had intercourse with the woman, who has become pregnant: but Claudio is sincere about the marriage awaited, while Lucio has broken his promise. Angelo has become engaged, not had intercourse, but has broken his promise (on finding that a dowry would not materialize); the constable Elbow became engaged and married without breaking his promise, and is outraged at the (malapropistic) suggestion that he was (like Claudio and Lucio) ‘respected with her before I was married to her’ (II, i). There is a meaningful juxtaposition of attitudes, too, Elbow’s respectable bourgeois indignation being contrasted with Lucio’s arrogant boasting, and Claudio’s frank admission of the fact being opposed to Angelo’s frosty concealment of it.
This account of the structural parallels in the situations and attitudes within the plot is not meant to describe the whole play – clearly the administration of justice is a major issue, and the dilemma of Isabella complicates the two upper layers of the plot – nor does it suggest that the duplications are carried consistently through prose and its resources, for Angelo and Claudio are above prose (and Elbow is below imagery). But it does provide an essential viewpoint of the play as a whole, and we must keep it in mind when considering the relevance of the prose-scenes, which can be described as being concerned with the two main issues of the play, either with sex (Lucio with his cronies, Lucio to Claudio, Lucio to the Duke, Mistress Overdone and Pompey), or with justice (the dispute between Elbow and Pompey, the Duke and Isabella, the executioner Abhorson and the anti-prisoner Barn-ardine). As with Troilus and Cressida an account of the prose alone could not – and does not – claim to be complete, but as the issues and situations developed in the verse of both plays are sufficiently appreciated (although the detail of the poetry has yet to be properly evaluated), I hope that a discussion of the function of prose can be taken as a complement to extant criticism, not as a substitute for it. As for organizing this discussion, the plot of the play does not have the sequential progression of All’s Well with its many ironic juxtapositions (largely because so much more of the important action takes place in verse here), therefore I think it best to isolate the three main uses of prose and discuss them separately, roughly in the order in which they develop in the play: the world of Pompey, the Duke’s disguise, and the progress of Lucio, – asking the reader to bear in mind what has been said about their significance in relation to the whole design.
Pompey is described in the Folio dramatis personae as ‘Clowne’, and his first exchange with Mistress Overdone (I, ii) shows the clown’s basic equivocation: ‘Yonder man is carried to prison’ – ‘Well, what has he done?’ – ‘A woman’.… ‘What, is there a maid with a child by him?’ – ‘No, but there’s a woman with maid by him’. His main stylistic resources are indeed clownish devices, but here he is also given two ludicrous images, first his euphemistic description of Claudio’s offence – ‘Groping for trouts, in a peculiar river’, and then his explanation that although the brothels in the suburbs of Vienna are to be pulled down, those in the city shall stand ‘for seed’. We next see Pompey in the ‘action’ of Elbow v. Pompey (Duke’s Bench division), heard by Angelo and Escalus (II, i). The general level of ignorance is set by the constable Elbow, whose malapropisms – like those of Costard, Slender, and Dogberry before him – take the extreme form of being opposite to the meaning intended: ‘two notorious benefactors’, ‘void of all profanation’, ‘my wife sir, whom I detest before heaven’ (he means ‘protest’, but it is one of those cases where the wrong word might suggest the true feeling), and who – like Bottom – has that variation on malapropism, hypallage, the right words in the wrong place: Trove it before these varlets here, thou honourable man’, a remark which receives a comment from Escalus to point out the error: ‘Do you hear how he misplaces?’ Elbow’s most amusing mistake is ‘respected’ where he means ‘suspected’, and with it he attacks Pompey’s whole milieu: ‘First, an it like you, the house is a respected house; next, this is a respected fellow; and his mistress is a respected woman’. In reply Pompey urges the same term at Elbow: ‘his wife is a more respected person than any of us all’, and even though the real meaning of the word gives Elbow the highest praise, he seizes on it and goes into a rage: ‘thou liest, wicked varlet. The time is yet to come, that she was ever respected with man, woman or child’. Mere malapropism is cleverly developed beyond the initial error, for it is irresistibly amusing to see a man indignant at having been described with a perfectly innocuous word; almost as funny is to see him joyful at an equally innocuous word, triumphing over Pompey at the end: ‘Thou seest thou wicked varlet now, what’s come upon thee. Thou art to continue now thou varlet, thou art to continue’. Nevertheless Elbow is a perversion of the alertness of justice, and Escalus’ despairing exclamation over constable and bawd is just: ‘Which is the wiser here? Justice or Iniquity?’ and at the end of the scene Elbow is quietly retired. It is as if Dogberry had been revived and put into a situation with which he could not cope.
Pompey indeed is irrecoverable, not least in his lack of rational control, a deficiency which – like all Shakespeare’s clowns – he is given time and occasion to reveal. His tale of what happened to Mistress Elbow is a masterly example of garrulousness in a rich tradition: the basic failing, moving off the point to establish irrelevant circumstantial detail, is one used for Mistress Quickly, and the technique of being constantly interrupted recalls the deflation of Pandarus. But there are some new ideas, as we shall see, and great theatrical confidence by Shakespeare in daring to prolong the joke for over a hundred lines. Pompey launches his tale smoothly: ‘Sir, she came in great with child, and longing – saving your honour’s reverence – for stewed prunes’, but the mention of the dish distracts him and he apologizes for its cheapness, having to be recalled by Escalus. When he starts again it is to recapitulate every point that he has made (and some he has not) with an ‘as I say’:
POMPEY.… but to the point. As I say, this Mistress Elbow, being, as I say, with child, and being great-bellied, and longing, as I said, for prunes; and having but two in the dish, as I said,
– a splendid effect, this punctuation, which makes the narrative seem unbearably long, as he now merges unexplained details with those already told:
Master Froth here, this very man, having eaten the rest, as I said, and, as I say, paying for them very honestly – for, as you know Master Froth, I could not give you threepence again –
FROTH. No indeed.
POMPEY. Very well; you being then, if you be remembered, cracking the stones of the aforesaid prunes –
and so he goes off on a branch-line, showing ludicrous gentility as he disguises the name of a certain person suffering from a certain disease (but in his profession any fool knows what the disease is). Two characteristics begin to establish themselves in addition to his meanderings, first the absolute stupidity of Froth who gives dead-pan approval to all of Pompey’s appeals and is later shown to be totally lacking in sense (II, i, 201–20), and secondly how each time Pompey receives confirmation (of an irrelevant point) he has a confident sealing phrase before beginning afresh: ‘Very well then’ (five times) to which he later adds: ‘I hope here be truths’. A third detail, and in ludicrous opposition to his own meanderings, is that whenever Escalus objects Pompey seizes on his words with a punctilious care for detail:
ESCALUS. To the purpose. What was done to Elbow’s wife, that he hath cause to complain of? Come me to what was done to her.
POMPEY. Sir, your honour cannot come to that yet.
ESCALUS. NO sir, nor I mean it not.
POMPEY. Sir, but you shall come to it, by your honour’s leave.
And again – ‘What was done to Elbow’s wife, once more?’ – ‘Once sir? There was nothing done to her once’ – although this in itself is excellently ambiguous. The humour of it is that the story is never told, and of all the Shakespeare clowns whose power of speech serves but to reveal their weakness of thought Pompey is the one who remains most splendidly unaware of his inabilities.
But like all clowns he is in confident possession of some faculties, most inappropriately that of logic. Thus his defence of Froth involves first getting Escalus to admit that there is no harm in Froth’s face: this agreed, he argues quite logically but from a false premiss (with malapropism):
I’ll be supposed upon a book, his face is the worst thing about him. Good then; if his face be the worst thing about him, how could Master Froth do the constable’s wife any harm?
Bacon was fond of the proverb about the cripple in the right path going faster than the sound man in the wrong one: to describe the effect of Shakespeare’s clowns using logic we would have to revise that proverb to read something like the mental cripple in the wrong road paradoxically going faster than the sound man in the right road – but towards nonsense. Pompey is later imprisoned and is not allowed to ‘prove’ that his crime does not stink (III, ii, 25) but he is given time for logic in prison and has a worthy opponent in Abhorson (IV, ii), and the sight of a bawd and an executioner arguing with the tools of Aristotelian logic is one of the choicest of Shakespearian inversions. They dispute whether hanging is a mystery, for Abhorson is afraid that Pompey’s help will debase his craft. Pompey ‘proves’ that whoring is a mystery by analogy with painting (and one wonders if the other sense of the word, as in ‘mysterious’ would also be present for the audience):
Painting sir, I have heard say is a mystery; and your whores sir, being members of my occupation, using painting, do prove my occupation a mystery; but what mystery there should be in hanging, if I should be hanged, I cannot imagine.
– at the end a laugh, as often, from putting a metaphorical expression in the context where it is literally true. Pompey now asks, in the confident way of the professional disputer: ‘Proof?’, and Abhorson replies with a syllogism which is sound enough in its own crazy way (Sister Joseph identifies it: ‘Ceratin, or the horned argument’ which ‘puts a matter in such terms that the propounder will win his point either way’, p. 201) but which here suffers from the serious deficiency of having nothing to do with the issue:
Every true man’s apparel fits your thief; if it be too little for your thief, your true man thinks it big enough; if it be too big for your thief, your thief thinks it little enough; so every true man’s apparel fits your thief.
Editors may be able to tease a significance out of this, but it seems to me to be deliberately inconsequential, and if so it defeats Pompey’s logic by carrying it to its natural conclusion, nonsense. Both here and later Pompey continues in his vein of equivocation and bawdy, the most significant parallel with the main action being his delighted discovery that most of the customers in the prison are in fact old clients of Mistress Overdone (IV, iii, 1–21): thus the two controlling interests of the play, sex and justice, come together at the lowest possible level.
In absolute contrast to the sordid, illogical, confused, and humorous nature of Pompey’s prose is the manner given to the Duke after that painful raw climax of the division between Isabella and Claudio:
Is’t not a kind of incest to take life
From thine own sister’s shame?
(III, i, 39–40)
At this point the Duke, who has overheard the confrontation, steps forward in his disguise as the Friar and is now given prose for the first time (thus, as he speaks verse as the Friar before and after this scene, the change is not one caused by disguise). The change of media has often been noticed and generally dismissed, but I think that the function of prose here is important as a contrast in mood,7 in that it has a definite dampening effect after such great emotional stress – and the detail of the language reinforces our impression of its coolness and steadiness. The Duke’s first words to Isabella are faintly metaphorical: ‘Might you dispense with your leisure’, but for the next sixty lines in which he announces his plan and explains about Mariana, there are no images: it is one of the longest pieces of serious – as opposed to clownish – prose in Shakespeare without images, comparable to Brutus’ oration, and like Brutus the Duke appeals to the intellect, but in this case with a fine sense of the nature of his audience. Thus here it is somehow reassuring that he should use such ordered language and appeal only to Isabella’s reason, not to her disturbed emotions or imagination which have had enough pressure put upon them. But when he comes to describe Angelo’s deceit, the most intense part of his narrative, images do appear, albeit rather weakly8 – they too are damped down to the prevailing mood of calm, and have that fully worked out relation between image and attribute found in the serious courtly prose of All’s Well. Angelo ‘Left her in her tears, and dried not one of them with his comfort; swallowed his vows whole’; ‘he, a marble to her tears, is washed with them, but relents not’; ‘It is a rupture that you may easily heal, and the cure of it not only saves your brother, but keeps you from dishonour in doing it’; ‘His unjust unkindness, that in all reason should have quenched her love, hath, like an impediment in the current, made it more violent and unruly’. These images are just strong enough to reinforce the point being made, but are kept well within the low emotional level of the whole.
The major stylistic resource which Shakespeare draws on for this effect of reassuring steadiness in the Duke’s prose is syntactical symmetry. At the beginning of the scene as he speaks to Claudio his prose is fluent but unpatterned, only breaking the flow to convince Claudio of his fate in brief, irrevocable clauses: ‘I know this to be true. Therefore prepare yourself to death; do not satisfy your resolution with hopes that are fallible. To-morrow you must die; go to your knees, and make ready’. But as Claudio and the Provost leave, and he is left alone with Isabella, his argument suddenly takes on a close formal pattern, setting up the distinction – which the whole action of the play illustrates – between outward beauty and inward goodness:
The hand that hath made you fair
hath made you good;
the goodness that is cheap in beauty
makes beauty brief in goodness;
but grace, being the soul of your complexion,
shall keep the body of it ever fair.
That is a remarkably careful pattern, using the familiar rhetorical devices (parison throughout, antimetabole for a crucial hinge-effect in the second clause, disjunction in the third) to define and clarify a distinction essential to the action and to the character of Isabella, one where – to revise Hamlet’s words – ‘Honesty’ may ‘admit discourse to beauty’. The passage is also soothing to Isabella, showing her that the Duke has seen the absolute nature of the dilemma facing her, and in her reply it is stated again, in different terms:
I had rather my brother die by the law
than my son should be unlawfully born.
The Duke now begins his main argument on a different course, and with different rhythms, first in an unpatterned sequence which acts as a neutral bridge-passage: ‘That shall not be much amiss. Yet, as the matter stands he will avoid your accusation – he made trial of you only. Therefore fasten your ear on my advisings. To the love I have in doing good a remedy presents itself’. His remedy is formally stated, almost like a propositio in a formal oration, and gains more clarity by its parallel structure:
I do make myself believe that you may most uprighteously
do a poor wronged lady a merited benefit;
redeem your brother from the angry law;
do no stain to your own gracious person, and
much please the absent Duke.…
This division could have been made more formal by the parts being numbered, but that would have been too precise – the essence of the Duke’s language must be that its firm control over events9 does not show too clearly.
Isabella replies willingly, but with a qualificatory distinction: ‘I have spirit to do any thing that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit,’ which he placates with a still more precise distinction: ‘Virtue is bold / and goodness never fearful.’ He can now begin to explain about Mariana, and the formal nature of Angelo’s relationship with her is conveyed by the official nature of the language: he ‘was affianced to her by oath, and the nuptial appointed; between which time of the contract and limit of the solemnity, her brother Frederick was wrecked at sea’, and with him Mariana’s dowry, and with that Angelo’s love. To stress Angelo’s mercenary nature, and to produce sympathy for Mariana, the Duke highlights her double loss in parallel clauses:
there she lost a noble and renowned brother, …
with him the portion and sinew of her fortune,
her marriage-dowry;
with both, her combinate husband,
this well-seeming Angelo.
Isabella’s rightly incredulous response – ‘can this be so?’ – is the chance for the Duke to develop both points – Mariana’s misfortune and Angelo’s hardness – using for the first time images which are given more force by the symmetrical structure and the placing of the verbs first: he
Left her in her tears, and
dried not one of them with his comfort;
swallowed his vows whole,
pretending in her discoveries of dishonour; in few,
bestowed her on her own lamentation,
which she yet wears for his sake;
and he, a marble to her tears,
is washed with them,
but relents not.
Here the symmetrical structure builds up to its highest point of anger and pathos – one clause begetting another – to convey the perversion of Angelo’s behaviour, and the same union of form and content is seen in Isabella’s reply, which expresses her disgust at the betrayal with a justly paradoxical reversal of the roles of death and life:
What a merit were it in death
to take this poor maid from the world!
What corruption in this life,
that it will let this man live!
This disgusted inversion also expresses our feelings towards Angelo, and the emotional response is the necessary reaction which the Duke can now develop, using more images to express the strength of Mariana’s love. Therefore he can revert to plain statement and rhetorical structure with a powerful contrast, as he outlines the plan in a series of sharp controlling imperatives, again with the verbs stressed:
answer his requiring with a plausible obedience,
agree with his demands to the point;
only refer yourself to this advantage;
first, that your stay with him may not be long;
that the time may have all shadow and silence in it;
and the place answer to convenience.
The plan could not have been more tautly expressed, and the certainty of form and meaning creates confidence in the Duke’s ability, which he urges with a swift reassuring parenthesis: ‘This being granted in course – and now follows all: we shall advise this wronged maid to stead up your appointment, / go in your place.’ Having thus moved from an opening proposal to the history of Mariana and Angelo to the correct emotional response to it, the wish for revenge and the crucial plan, the Duke now restates his opening proposal as a more succinct reminder of the four points to be gained, and Shakespeare makes the recollection still more precise by grouping the four points into two paired clauses which are exactly antithetical:
here, by this, is your brother saved,
your honour untainted,
the poor Mariana advantaged, and
the corrupt deputy scaled.
There is a quiet confidence about those symmetries, and after the Duke sums up the correct attitude in another balance: ‘the doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproof, the dialogue ends as it had begun, with a passage of unpatterned prose as a transition to normality. Thus at every stage within this dialogue, which is of course the turning-point of the play, the rhetorical structure has clarified essential distinctions, sharpened our emotional response, and even predicted the whole plot-movement: all four of the Duke’s plans, so clearly defined for us, can be seen to take shape.
Rhetorical structure elsewhere in the play is largely associated with the Duke, and effectively in his encounters with Lucio, as we will see. But at one point a carefully structured speech seems to be more appropriate to him in his disguise as Friar, for when Escalus asks the Duke ‘What news abroad i’ th’ world?’ the answer would fit any elderly moralist, with its bleak view and prepared antitheses:
Novelty is only in request, and as it is,
as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course,
as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking.
There is scarce truth alive to make societies secure,
but security enough to make fellowships accursed.
(III, ii)
The Duke himself is made to comment on the universally-applicable nature of that ‘riddle’: ‘This news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news,’ and although it is clearly applicable to the situation of the play our sense that it is a stock piece of moralizing is increased by the very patness of the symmetries. Another piece of rhetorical structure which moves outside the character speaking it to form a neutral, almost absolute utterance, is the speech given to describe Barnardine, the prisoner who is immune to legal punishment because he takes no heed of it, being ‘drunk many times a day, / if not many days entirely drunk’:
A man that appre]hends death no more
dreadfully but as a drunken sleep,
careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s
past, present, or to come;
insensible of mortality,
and desperately mortal.
That could stand almost as a ‘character’, or an answer to a riddle such as ‘Which man does not fear death?’ and in its content it ironically recalls the advice of the Duke to Claudio: ‘Be absolute for death’ – Barnardine does not need the advice, and is immune to justice.
Lucio prides himself on being outside the law, but that is only a surface and temporary immunity (Barnardine’s is real and eternal). He is described in the Folio as ‘a fantastique’, and at his first appearance with his cronies (I, ii) the harsh aggressive repartee, with its puns on the pox, the Ten Commandments, and on Grace – although only a short exchange – establishes the vicious wit that Lucio delights in:
FIRST GENTLEMAN. Thou art always figuring diseases in me; but thou art full of error – I am sound.
LUCIO. Nay, not, as one would say, healthy; but so sound as things that are hollow; thy bones are hollow; impiety has made a feast of thee.
Repartee, especially in its recently more violent, ad hominem form, might seem to be the natural genre for Lucio, but in fact his most abusive flights are not answered by the persons involved, for they are all unable to speak: the Duke by virtue of his disguise, Claudio and Pompey because they are being led off to prison (although he makes one jest out of Pompey’s own words, on that pathetic final appeal: ‘You will not bail me then, sir?’ – ‘Then, Pompey, nor now’ – III, ii). Lucio is mainly distinguished by his scabrous imagery, as he slanders every one he mentions, whether justly or not. He is also the character who is most set apart by his medium, for in this first-scene with Claudio (I, ii) as in the last of all, he is separated off from the verse and range of serious moods in the others by being given prose and a consistently mocking attitude: a sign of degradation comparable to that of Jack Cade, or of Pandarus in the first scene of Troilus and Cressida, or nearer still of Thersites in the overhearing scene. One exception to this norm for him is that when he meets Isabel he is translated to the higher state of verse so as not to lower her, and is given admiring and ennobling images:
I hold you as a thing enskied, and sainted,
By your renouncement, an immortal spirit;
(I, iv)
Although this transformation can be defended in terms of Shakespeare’s convention that if a prose-character is moved out of his normal cynicism to a dignified admiration in verse, then this is a measure of the potency of the person being described (as with Enobarbus on Cleopatra), there is in this scene and in the one where Lucio coaches Isabella in her plea with Angelo (II, ii) a sense of incongruity with what we have seen of Lucio’s character, and more so with what we are about to see. Although this may be looking for too much stylistic consistency, perhaps it can be suggested that Shakespeare does not have here another more positive character to perform this essential function, and that if so it is a direct consequence of his balance of good and evil in the world of the play.
At all events Lucio’s norm is mockery, as we see with his callous bawdy on Claudio’s predicament: ‘And thy head stands so tickle on thy shoulders, that a milkmaid, if she be in love, may sigh it off,’ and although he expresses his sympathy with Claudio the image he uses is oddly discordant: ‘I would be sorry should be thus foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack.’ But over the spectacle of Pompey being led off to prison, Lucio can crow with a grotesque classical image for producing money for a whore, and a cocky rattle of questions:
How now noble Pompey? What, at the wheels of Caesar? Art thou led in triumph? What is there none of Pygmalion’s images, newly-made woman, to be had now, for putting the hand in the pocket and extracting it clutched?
And with another dozen mocking questions he affirms his superiority still more. The horrible arrogance of Lucio, and the sordid nature of his world, are well brought out (the disguised Duke is looking on) in this exchange over the fate of Mistress Overdone:
POMPEY. Troth sir, she hath eaten up all her beef, and she is herself in the tub.
LUCIO. Why ’tis good. It is the right of it; it must be so. Ever your fresh whore, and your powdered bawd; an unshunned consequence, it must be so.
Left alone with the Duke Lucio turns his gifts of abuse on Angelo, and produces a devastating account of his unnatural procreation (we have already received more balanced accounts of Angelo’s coldness from other people, and so can see just how much exaggeration there is here):
Some report, a sea-maid spawned him. Some that he was begot between two stock-fishes. But it is certain, that when he makes water, his urine is congealed ice, that I know to be true; and he is a motion generative, that’s infallible.
Nevertheless we admire the speed of Lucio’s imagination, his ability to construct fantastic enlargements or diminutions (rather like that Elizabethan master of the grotesque, either large or small, Nashe). So he constructs a wonderfully inventive detail for Angelo’s hatred of sex:
this ungenitured agent will unpeople the province with continency. Sparrows must not build in his house-eaves, because they are lecherous.
At the opposite extreme Lucio is equally skilful in micro-images, with a brilliantly specious reduction of human vice to non-human images: ‘what a ruthless thing is this in him, for the rebellion of a codpiece, to take away the life of a man?’; Claudio is to die ‘For filling a bottle with a tun-dish’, and most ingenious, the sin is reduced to a mere detail of undressing: ‘Claudio is condemned for untrussing.’ As is said of the exaggerations of Parolles’ slanders ‘He hath out-villained villainy so far, that the rarity redeems him’.
Lucio’s brilliant abuse can be enjoyed on such rhetorical exercises, especially when the subject of them is absent, but when he turns to discussing the Duke, who is present, then we will see if the abuse be true or only a way of life. This is no trap, for although the Duke’s disguise naturally misleads Lucio, he has not been gulled into abusing him, indeed he starts the topic himself: ‘Would the Duke that is absent have done this? Ere he would have hanged a man for the getting a hundred bastards, he would have paid for the nursing a thousand.’ And the scabrous exaggeration seen there continues in his other abusive images for the Duke, who, he says, would even couple with ‘your beggar of fifty; and his use was, to put a ducat in her clack-dish; the Duke had crotchets in him. He would be drunk too, that let me inform you’ – ‘He’s now past it, yet, and I say to thee, he would mouth with a beggar, though she smelt brown bread and garlick.’ Lucio’s brilliance with absolutes undoes him, for the Duke is made to defend himself with images: ‘The very stream of his life and the business he hath helmed must, upon a warranted need, give him a better proclamation.’ The Duke sees himself in that divine Renaissance triplicity: ‘a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier’, and producing three possible motives for Lucio’s violence – ‘Either this is envy in you, folly, or mistaking’ – he takes up the first and third in a direct challenge: ‘Therefore you speak unskilfully; or if your knowledge be more, it is much darkened in your malice.’ Here repartee begins to develop, as Lucio denies both motives with great insincerity: ‘Sir, I know him, and I love him’, and to this specious parallelism the Duke returns a biting antimetabole:
Love talks with better knowledge, and
knowledge with dearer love.
Unabashed Lucio replies with a tighter parallelism: ‘Come sir, I know what I know,’ which the Duke crushes: ‘I can hardly believe that, since you know not what you speak,’ but Lucio remains adamant in his opinion, and once he has gone the rightness of the Duke’s description of his ‘Back-wounding calumny’ is further strengthened by the unwitting tribute which Escalus pays to the Duke: ‘One that, above all other strifes, contended especially to know himself.… A gentleman of all temperance.’ Again we see Lucio in his true colours.
Lucio is an amalgam of all of Falstaff’s bad qualities, and he sends Mistress Overdone to prison by informing against her; but his betrayal is repaid in kind as she reveals how he has deceived Mistress Kate Keep-down, and so in his next encounter with the Duke it is fitting that he should boast of the deception with a horrible image: ‘I was fain to forswear [getting a wench with child]. They would else have married me to the rotten medlar’ (IV, iii). His offer to the Friar of telling him ‘pretty tales of the Duke’ is rebuffed with an ominous rhetorical balance: ‘You have told me too many of him already sir, if they be true; if not true, none were enough.’ As the Duke tries to get rid of him Lucio replies with an unconcerned image which suggests the shameless resilience of a Parolles or a Cressida (indeed Pandarus actually uses it for Cressid): ‘Nay friar, I am a kind of burr, I shall stick.’ So he does, unfortunately for him, and this complex application of abusive imagery to character and situation (for we have left the comic butts far behind) reaches its fruition in the final scene. When the Duke reappears, undisguised, Lucio’s pretensions to dignity make him speak verse, though not without a cynical tone (V, i, 74–83, 127–36), but when he cannot resist making really crude comments he does so in prose (179–80, 261–85) and it is, fittingly, in the last of these (324–53) when he accuses the Friar of having abused the Duke with the terms that he has actually used himself, and produces more abusive images: ‘Show your knave’s visage, with a pox to you. Show your sheep-biting face, and be hanged an hour’ – at this moment, when Lucio’s style and behaviour are most characteristic, the trap finally closes. And when sentence is passed on him, Shakespeare finds the most apt image for it – ‘Marrying a punk my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging’–’Slandering a prince deserves it.’ But it is not a trap that has been deliberately laid for him, as with Parolles, and although the Duke’s disguise is the unknown quantity which ultimately betrays him, it is his own conceit which pushes him into it; nor is he constantly condemned by others, as Parolles is, but (like Pandarus, who catches the pox) Lucio is hoist by his own petard: he is condemned by his own images, ‘for many a man’s tongue shakes out his master’s undoing’.
The improvement of Measure for Measure over All’s Well on this last point is also seen in the upper level of the play, for just as Parolles is undone by others while Lucio betrays himself, the ‘bed-trick’ is here less important than it was to trap Bertram, for Angelo is made to undo himself by his perversion of justice for sex. This change of emphasis, to place faults more directly within the personality of a character, is clearly a move towards the organic concept of error within the complex personality of the tragic hero – Angelo is much nearer the true Shakespearian model than is Hamlet. But although throughout this group of serious comedies Shakespeare has been extending the intensity of personal situations and also the profundity of the issues involved, the plays remain predominantly comedies within the overall Shakespearian concept of the form, and one of the most daring transformations of a comic model must not pass unnoticed: Angelo concludes his first soliloquy with a couplet, ‘Ever till now, When men were fond, I smiled, and wondered how’ (II, ii, 187). Under the very real manipulator of sex and justice we can just detect that stock Romantic-comedy figure, ‘the scorner of love now in love’, a tradition which includes Olivia, Beatrice, Benedick, Claudio in Much Ado, Armado, and others, an adaptation which is central to the play, although of course developed to a maximum moral and emotional discordance. But the interaction between comedy and more serious forms is reversible, for just as Shakespeare has here borrowed a comic type to a serious purpose, so a serio-comical-satirical figure like the inventive slanderer – who has been developing here through Thersites and Parolles to Lucio – can be quickly adapted to tragedy, and the Duke’s description of Lucio’s attitude – knowledge darkened in malice – could be perfectly applied to Edmund and still more to Iago. The continuity of forms and resources in Shakespeare’s work is demonstrated still further in terms of probable chronology in that after these three satirical slanderers the first two mature tragedies that he writes – Othello, King Lear – are dependent for a large part of their development to a catastrophe on the figure of the vicious slanderer. Only gradually does Shakespeare evolve the figure of the tragic hero who creates destruction more from the tension between himself and society than from external villainy, and this development is a consistent extension of what he has learned in writing comedy, and in using prose.