It’s best to read ‘Why did Shakespeare write All’s Well that Ends Well?’
and
first.
Samuel Johnson wrote:
Parolles is a boaster and a coward, such as has always been the sport of the stage, but perhaps never raised more laughter or contempt than in the hands of Shakespeare.
Parolles – design by Osbert Lancaster.
Also:
Parolles has many of the lineaments of Falstaff and seems to be the character which Shakespeare delighted to draw, a fellow that has more of wit than virtue.
It is The Shakespeare Code’s belief that Parolles featured in the original Love’s Labour’s Won and has been re-written in All’s Well to make him darker and more loathsome.
He is sometimes similar to the braggart Spaniard, Armado, in Love’s Labour’s Lost…..
………who started off life as a satire on Sir Walter Raleigh…..
…….and even uses some of the same words and phrases.
But is the Parolles of All’s Well a satire as well?
The Code believes he is.
First of all, he is a satire on a ‘type’.
Harry Southampton had a taste for lower class young men, just as his mother had.
In his famous ‘They that have power to hurt’ Sonnet (94) Shakespeare warns Harry of the political, moral and sexual consequences of mixing with – and making love to – men outside his class.
It is better to masturbate than go to bed with a pleb!
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die
But if that flower with base infection meet
The basest weed outbraves his dignity.
‘Base infection’ here means both moral contamination and the very real chance of contracting venereal disease.
The final couplet graphically nails this idea home:
For sweetest things [!] turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Parolles contaminates Bertram.
Old Lafew describes him as…..
a snipt-taffeta fellow whose villanous saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his colour
By the time Shakespeare came to write All’s Well, he had a real Captain in mind – Piers Edmondes.
A manuscript in the Marquis of Salisbury’s collection states:
Captain Piers Edmondes was also known to the Earl of Essex: he was so favoured as he often rode in a coach with him, and was wholly of his charges maintained, being a man of base birth in St. Clement’s Parish.
The Earl of Essex pursued a secret gay life from his own private bath house on the Strand…..
The Earl of Essex’s bath house in the Strand. It is said to still exist!
For a man to ride in a coach at the time was considered the height of effeminacy: for two men to ride together was an act of gross indecency. A….
coach-companion
…..according to Francis Bacon’s mother, was a synonym for a…..
bed-companion.
During the trial of Essex and Southampton after the Rebellion a letter was produced from William Reynolds (probably brother of Essex’s secretary, Edward) in which he…
marvelled what had become of Piers Edmondes, the Earl of Essex’s man, born in the Strand near me, who had many preferements by the Earl. His villainy I have often complained of. He was Corporal General of the Horse in Ireland under the Earl of Southampton. He ate and drank at his table and lay in his tent. The Earl of Southampton gave him a horse which Edmunds refused a hundred marks for him, the Earl of Southampton would cole and huge [embrace and hug] him in his arms and play wantonly with him. This Piers began to fawn and flatter me in Ireland, offering me great courtesy, telling me what pay, graces and gifts the Earls bestowed upon him, thereby seeming to move and animate me to desire and look for the like favour.
Just after the Rebellion, Edmondes himself had written to a Mr. Wade, explaining that….
….he had spent 20 years in the Queen’s service and when his old hurts received in that service burst out afresh, he was enforced to come to London for remedy but two days before that dismal day [the Rebellion] by which mischance, being among his Lordship’s people innocently, he stands in the like danger they do.
Hugging and kissing Harry to get presents from him, fawning and flattering Reynoldes to recruit him as a rent boy, sucking up to the two Earls for cash and favours and explaining to Wade that he may have been physically present at the Essex Rebellion but was NOT part of it, is pure, pure Parolles.
Simply the thing he was made Edmondes live…..
Two Academic Footnotes:
(1) Samuel Taylor Coleridge…..
……loved the character of Helena but was disturbed that she told a lie when she said to the widow:
His face I know not.
This was not a lie – it was an equivocation!
The word…..
face
…….for the Elizabethans and Jacobeans could mean the genital area.
As King Lear says at the height of his madness and sexual disgust…..
Behold yon simpering dame whose face between her forks presages snow….
And as Shakespeare says in his own voice in Sonnet 94, in praise of chaste people who do not sleep around:
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense [seminal emission]
They are the lords and owners of their faces
Others but stewards of the excellence.
So, as Helena had not yet been to bed with her husband at that point in the play, she was telling ‘the truth’!
(2) The Shakespeare Code has established that the text of All’s Well has NINE words or phrases that Shakespeare never uses again – but which Thomas Nashe does……
…..once, twice and even three times!
See: Thomas Nashe was Shakespeare’s collaborator on ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’
Thomas Nashe died in 1601 – which means that parts of the All’s Well text MUST have been written before that date.
This is further proof that All’s Well that Ends Well was originally entitled Love’s Labour’s Won…..
….and was first performed in Titchfield, at Christmas, in 1592.
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