Playful Subversion in Shakespeare’s

Playful Subversion in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well And Other “Problem Plays”

O me, with what patience have I sat,
To see a king transformed to a gnat!
To see great Hercules whipping a gig,
And profound Solomon to tune a jig,
And Nestor play at push-pin with the boys
And critic Timon laugh at idle toys.


(Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV iii 161-166)Plato’s well-known dialogue Symposium ends with a dramatic note. Aristodemus is the original narrator of this dialogue. He was one of the participants in the party, which Agathon had hosted to celebrate his being adjudged the best tragedian that year. He had had one too many, and had dozed off for some time. While struggling to keep his eyes open, he found Socrates,Aristophanes and Agathon engaged in some serious discussion on drama, still “drinking out of a largegoblet”. He heard Socrates compelling the other two“to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also”(Plato, 392-393).Aristophanes, the writer of comedy and Agathon, the writer of tragedy, were supposed to speak on the subject, but they were totally drunk. They were not in a position to comprehend what Socrates was talking about, let alone disagreeing with him. They had no other option but to fudge a reply by nodding their drowsy heads to express their consent. Particularly in this scene, Plato shows his skill as playwright by shrewdly dodging the issue. Socrates is prevented from conducting his dialogue.The inconclusive ending of an important issue suits a player some creative piece rather than a philosophical discourse. But one thing is certain: According to Socrates, a playwright can write both tragedies and comedies if he wants to. He means to say that the so-called exclusiveness of artistic sensibility is more a myth than a fact. This statement goes against the actual practice of the ancient dramatists.Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Agathon never wrote any comedy; Aristophanes presumably did not write any tragedy. Plato makes Socrates raise that controversial issue when the two practicing playwrights are too inebriated to give their “sober”opinion on it. Their agreement with Socrates negates their own practice as playwrights. In Rome also the same thing happened. Plautus and Terence never wrote tragedy, and Seneca a comedy. The truth of Socrates’statement - “that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also”- was vindicated, after more than two thousand years, in Shakespeare who not only wrote comedies and tragedies, but was able to accommodate comic scenes in tragedies and serious scenes in comedies cocking a snook at classical purity of genres. The critical opinion has it that he did all that inadvertently.Samuel Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare, while defending Shakespeare for mingling tragic and comic elements in the same play, writes that the playwright“indulged his natural disposition” while writing comedy and produced “without labour what no labour canimprove”, whereas he struggled while writing tragic scenes (Johnson, 17). Johnson’s comments on theplaywright’s handling of, or struggling over, tragic scenes are open to debate. It is difficult to agree with Johnson when we consider Shakespeare’ssatisfactory management of tragic scenes in his major tragedies. However, his observation on theplaywright’s natural bent for comedy seems to be an insightful discovery difficult to dispute. While presenting serious action or developing the plot in his comedies, histories and tragedies (particularly,Hamlet), Shakespeare seems to be on the look out for an opportunity to accommodate a comic scene and Witty exchange of dialogues or to explore the comic potential of a scene or the characters involved in that scene. Once he gets one such occasion, he changes gear, makes a jolly detour around the cliff-hanger ahead, does not hesitate to interrupt all the pressing engagements for some time, pulls all possible strings of his imagination and presents that comic scene with such élan as to make Plautus appear profound. This natural proclivity for comedy also enables Shakespeare to handle the classical as well as the historical material with unrestrained freedom and relative ease.He indulges his native impulses without feeling intimidated by, and reverential to, the larger than life heroes, sanctimonious sages and the seriousness of issues which antiquity has been investing them with. He finds great delight in gulling the likes of Malvolio, who are intolerant of revelry and laughter and make a fetish of seriousness. Sir Toby Belchvoices this sentiment when he tells Malvolio: “Dostthou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (Twelfth Night, I iii109-111). Shakespeare sees to it that there “shallbe” not only “cakes and ale”, but a lot of merry laughter as well, that too at the expense of such censorious characters. A study of Twelfth Night andAll’s Well That Ends Well clearly reveals that the“gulling” plots involving Malvolio and Parolles are constructed with extraordinary care.Shakespeare honed his comic instinct by his reading of the comedies of Plautus and Terence, Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel,Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and, of course, by his exposure to the native folk dramas, particularly Interludes, flourishing in English countryside. Hi splays offer ample evidence of his knowledge about these writers and their works, and his familiarity with the native dramatic tradition. Celia needsGargantua’s mouth to answer Rosalind’s nine questions in just one word. Rosalind: What did he (Orlando) when thou saw’st him?What said he? How look’d he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he?How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again? Answer me in one word.Celia: You must borrow me Gargantua’s mouth first;‘tis a word too great for any mouth of this age’ssize. (As You Like It, III ii 205-212)Another interesting aspect of Shakespeare’s comic genius is that he frequently treated classical characters and themes in such a manner as to make them appear less dignified, grand and heroic than conventions allowed. Such unusual and brave treatment is assumed to be a pointer to his originality as well as the vindication of his comic genius. What intention, what sensibility did compel Shakespeare to make light of the serious issues and to trifle with the august personages of antiquity? It is attempted here to answer these questions without transgressing the Shakespeare canon, without imposing on the plays that which they do not contain. To start with, it is assumed that Shakespeare was playful, or playfully subversive. This assumption uncorroborated by some important (and general)observations made by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his treatise on Gargantua and Pantagruel,called Rabelais and His World (1984) about the spirit of the Carnival that entered and replenished European literature during the Renaissance. Merry laughter was mode of counteracting the repressive forces of theological dogmas and official culture that held sway over medieval Europe for more than a thousand years.Cannibalization was not invented. It simply emerged out of the inner necessity of ordinary people to free themselves from the suffocating darkness of the Dark Ages that was characterized by its inflexible social and ecclesiastical hierarchies, its repression of spontaneity in the name of religious discipline and the political status quo. It emerged in the marketplace, in the folk theatre, in the remote countryside,that is to say, in the places where ordinary life was being celebrated in its entirety.Shakespeare was at the peak of his performance between1600 and 1605. If we go by Professor Peter Alexander’sdating of the plays, Shakespeare wrote all his major tragedies during that period. In addition to his tragedies, he came out with some “quaint” and bizarre plays whose very category is difficult to determine.They are taxonomic conundrums. Instead of calling them comedies or tragedies, the critics find some other names for them, such as, dark comedies,tragi-comedies, problem plays and comical satires (ala Ben Jonson). These plays are: All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus And Cressida, and Measure for Measure.It is not unusual to find some comic scenes and characters in his tragedies, and serious scenes in his comedies. In a serious tragedy like Hamlet, there are scenes with Polonius (Lord Chamberlain), Clowns (theGrave-diggers) and the foppish courtier Osric, which are capable of arousing a great deal of laughter. Bu tin these so-called problem plays, the situation is different. Seriousness is not confined to some scenes or to some characters. They seem to contain the stuff from which tragedies are made. A somber mood pervades the entire play. Menace builds up to a climax. The weather is generally muggy. The major characters frighten us by their proclivities for evil, by their imperfections, by their complete reversal of attitudes and principles, or at least by their vulnerability to temptations. Then towards the end of the play, the menace is diffused. Circumstances are so contrived and the endings are so ingeniously circumvented as to render their schemes ineffective, their villainies innocuous, and their potential for evil unrealized.Even after their exposure, they are not only allowed to go scot-free, they are even assured of rehabilitation. They are forgiven even before they ask for forgiveness. And the plays end happily. Their happiness seems even more undeserving than the suffering of the Aristotelian tragic protagonists. A spirit of boundless lenience sums up these plays. Novice is considered unpardonable. No virtue is considered strong enough to withstand temptation. The nature of the middle is not in sync with that of their endings. But the sweetness of the reconciliation at the end does not completely remove the unpleasant taste, which lingers in the mind of the spectators and readers. On the contrary, the readers and spectators are more or less coaxed or forced to relax their moral stiffness and to broaden their horizons of sympathy in order to accept these characters warts and all, and take part in the sumptuous wedding feasts at the end of All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.But these weddings are not occasioned by love. It is the willingness of two bullocks or horses to be yoked together. Angelo and Bertrand would be willing to runaway from their brides if they are given a chance.Love, particularly in these two marriages, is aone-sided affair; it belongs to women only, and theyare entitled to happiness for their constancy.That apart, these plays contain some utterlydisposable characters who are made to appearindispensable. They are the railing knaves, whose onlyjob is to debunk and calumniate other characters,sometimes with reason, sometimes without any. Butthese characters turn out to be no better than thecharacters they debunk. These calumniators also debasethemselves abysmally just to keep their body and soultogether, both in the figurative and real senses ofthe term. Their coarseness is casual; their cynicismis shocking; their desire to survive at all costs ismean; their spite for mankind is gratuitous; theirscurrility is an outrage on good taste; their functionas entertainers is not so engaging, for they offendmuch more than they amuse; and yet their acceptance inthe Shakespearean scheme of things is surprisinglyassured. They so “out-villain villainy” that their“rarity redeems them.” It is true not only forParolles, but for many others of his tribe as well.They are: Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well,Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, Apemantus in Timonof Athens and that irregular fantastic Lucio inMeasure for Measure. The subject matter andcharacterization of these plays as well as thepresence of these characters all combined problematizethese plays. The very conflicts in these plays sendout conflicting signals. While admitting that theabsence of these characters will not clarify theambiguity of these plays, it may be assumed that theirpresence tunes in to the playwright’s hidden intentionto project a radically altered picture of the world aswell as the complexity of human nature. In these playsin particular, the unstated agenda of carnivalizationis not confined to comic situations and ranting of theparasitic malcontents like Parolles and Thersites; itrather penetrates the substratum of themes andcharacterization, and by so doing subjects them tosevere examination, which inevitably leads to themind’s conversion to a more liberal faith. In fine,it factors in a radical revaluation of values.All’s Well That Ends Well, a play written during 1600– 1605 period, may be cited as a case in point. Itsvery title clearly demonstrates the spirit of theplay. W.W.Lawrence calls it a “supremely cynicaltitle” (79). This title derives from the dialogues ofHelena who is one of the most important characters inthe play. A more persevering and unstoppable woman inlove than Helena is hard to meet in the dramatic worldof Shakespeare. So what if Bertrand spurns her,employs all methods to get rid of her and throws agala feast to celebrate her supposed death; she mustforce herself on him. The title Troilus and Cressidais no less cynical if we consider the condition andconduct of the eponymous lovers at the end of theplay. Cressida, the beloved is footloose andfancy-free in so far as her affair with Troilus isconcerned. She deserts her lover Troilus without anyreason. She simply finds another young man moreattractive. She flirts with a Greek soldier Diomedes,and gifts him the very sleeve that she had received asa token of love from her first lover Troilus. Sheremembers her old lover without feeling the twinges ofconscience. But she feels pity for her doting oldlover. Troilus is made to watch this scene of betrayaland overhear their love whispers. And then Troilus thefighter takes over Troilus the lover after his initialdiscomfort for being so cruelly jilted. As Troilusand Diomedes fight over the sleeve that Cressida hasgifted to her new lover, Thersites, the roguecommentator, is hugely amused. As “lechery eatsitself”, he observes wryly, these two “wenchingrogues” would swallow one another. “Hold thy whore,Grecian; now thy whore, Troyan - now the sleeve, nowthe sleeve” (V iv, 34-35, 23-25). That comment soundsmore symbolic than cynical, because the very cause oftheir combat is a fickle woman, quite unworthy ofbeing an adequate cause for mutual slaughter.Thersites' comment is equally applicable to the largerfeud of which he himself is a part, that is, theGreco-Trojan War. The attacking Greeks and thedefending Trojans are fighting over an equallyunfaithful woman called Helen. He tells Margarelon(who introduces himself as the bastard son ofPriam’s): “If the son of a whore fight for a whore, hetempts judgment. Farewell, bastard.” (V vii, 22-24).When he sees Menelaus and Paris fighting, he comments:“The cuckold and the cuckold-maker are at it” (V vii,11-12). The playwright and Thersites make it clearthat these two pairs of lovers (Thersites calls them“wenching rogues”) are fighting among themselves overtwo unworthy and untrustworthy women. As the men canbe as great as the causes they champion, thesefighters are not as great as they are projected to be.Thersites observes:“Here is such patchery, such juggling, and suchknavery. All the great argument is a whore and acuckold- a good quarrel to draw emulous factions andbleed to death upon. Now the dry serigo on thesubject, and war and lechery confound all” (II iii68-73).All is well that ends well may be a simple statementspoken by a character in self-defense. But it acquiresprofound significance when the playwright uses it asthe title of his play. It destabilizes thetime-honoured association of ends and means. Most ofour value systems are based on their interdependence.It begs such questions as: Is it ethically permissibleto achieve a fair end by adopting unfair means? Isn’tthe value of what has been achieved integrally relatedto how one achieves it? But the title as well as thetheme of the play clearly privileges the end over themeans. In Measure for Measure, Claudio, a young gentleman ofnoble birth, compels his sister Isabella to offerherself to Angelo, the “outward-sainted deputy”, tosave his life. If the aim is to avert death, anymethod adopted to achieve that aim is justifiable.There is no room for any ethical qualms. Claudio says:The weariest and most loathed worldly lifeThat age, ache, penury, and imprisonment, Can lay on nature is a paradiseTo what we fear of death.Sweet sister, let me live.What sin you do to save a brother’s life,Nature dispenses with the deed so farThat it becomes a virtue (III I 130-137).The case is not any different with the legendary heroAchilles in Troilus and Cressida. Hector is thegreatest threat to the Greeks. Troy will not fall solong as Hector lives. That apart, he has killedPatroclus, Achilles’ boon companion. Avenging hisfriend’s death by killing Hector is the “noble” aim ofAchilles. So he kills him when he is unarmed,unguarded. Hector requests him to hold on till he putson his coat-of-arms and holds his sword. But Achillesturns down his request. Yet no infamy visits Achilleswho so brazenly compromises with the means to achievehis end. The battlefield resounds with the big news:Achilles killed Hector. Nobody bothers to inquire: Inwhat way? Was it a fair fight? Had Achilles faced sucha question, he might have defended himself by saying(like Helena) that the great good has been achieved;that all’s well that ends well.In Measure for Measure, Angelo is forgiven andrewarded with a wife. Claudio, the young man condemnedto be hanged, is desperate to live. Vincentio, theDuke of Vienna, disguised as a priest, delivers asolemn diatribe against life. He advises Claudio tohate life and love death: He says: “Reason thus with life,If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep…Thou hast nor youth nor age,But, as it were, an after-dinner sleep, Dreaming on both…What’s yet in this That bears the name of life? Yet in this life Lie hid moe thousand deaths” (III i 05- 41). The disguised Duke’s persuasive jeremiad against lifeis totally wasted on Claudio. It is meant to be so. Inspite of its solemnity and irrefutable factuality, thespeaker of this speech knows that the condemned manwill finally live. He will declare his identity andcome to his rescue just in time. Its satirical aspectis apparent. His condemnation of life cuts both wayslike a double-edge sword. The Duke, well known for hisliberal views and indulgent attitude towards vices,only parodies a confessor who tries to cheer up aprisoner in his death throes by sermonizing on thedisadvantages of living and advantages of dying,though with his tongue firmly in his cheek. In All’sWell, Bertrand is presented as a timid man, a breakerof oaths, a seducer of women and an inveterate liar.But for his noble birth and young age, he is asdissolute a character as his boon companion Parolles.He does not possess a single good quality that canendear him to the audience or the reader. But in spiteof all these negative qualities, he is not even reprimanded, let alone punished. Samuel Johnson sumsup this character admirably. He writes:“I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram: a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; whomarries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as aprofligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneakshome to a second marriage, is accused by a woman hehas wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and isdismissed to happiness” (Campbell, 17).Coleridge, however, defends Bertrand saying that “Hewas a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birthand appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to sucha character so circumstanced” (Campbell, 17).Coleridge is undoubtedly romanticizing this character.Some of his actions cannot pass muster, such as his readiness to lie and to marry Lafeu’s daughter evenwithout seeing her. As a broadminded uncle takes easy the spats ofchildren with an indulgent smile and an expansiveshrug, believing that there is nothing serious toworry about, the Dukes and Kings quite avuncularly patthe aggrieved characters and wrong-doers, the heroesand the villains (and they are indeed indistinguishable from one another) and ask them to forget their quarrels and be agreeable to each otherin order to be happy together. That is to say, if your aim is to be happy in this trouble-torn world,whatever methods you employ to achieve happiness ispermissible and pardonable. Now the question arises: Does Shakespeare want tostand an ethical system on its head? Or is he positingthat conventional certitudes against practical compulsions of life in order to test their resilience,their relativity? In this sense, these plays may be called satires; for they seem to undermine our complacency by showing how accommodative human naturecan be when it comes to negotiating our self-interestto the abstract requirements of virtue and truth. Foulcan be fair when the goal is achieved; and the crownwill conceal the bald head. In these plays satire is understated. It moves invisibly just below thesurface. One has to dredge deep to locate it. ButShakespeare’s satire is different from that of BenJonson’s. Unlike Jonson’s, Shakespeare’s satire israther gentle, subtle, indulgent and multi-layered. Inthe limited space of this essay, it is attempted to discuss the multi-layered nature of Shakespeare’streatment and testing of sanctified universals, suchas, love, honour, hierarchy, ethics, etc. in the aforesaid plays. It is not possible to assume with any degree ofcertainty what intention inspired Shakespeare tosubject our much acclaimed notions of life, our piousnotions of love to such “reality” test; to tell us howflexible our ethical definition can be under pressingor tempting circumstances, particularly when itinvolves our self-interest; when the going gets tough.But it is certain that such radical departure from thetime-honoured conventions cannot take place without aconscious design, a deliberate intention and a hiddenor unconscious agenda. In Troilus and Cressida, he hasto alter the Homeric story in order to turn Achillesinto a black-guard by making him kill an unarmed Hector, that too with the help of his Myrmidons; hemakes Cressida (who is so charmingly portrayed byChaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde) a coquettish turn coat; he also makes Angelo who claims to be acustodian of public morality, a betrayer of trust andan unscrupulous lecher; and he makes Helena, theheroine of All’s Well That Ends Well, a “clever wench”who stoops quite low to chase and catch hold of herdesired man Bertrand totally oblivious of the moralimplications of her procedures and the unworthiness ofthe count.These problem plays share certain qualities with themajor tragedies, some of which had been written duringthe same period, i.e., between 1600 and 1605. As ithas been stated, Shakespeare was at his most maturestage in that period. For that reason, the moralambivalence and his playful experimentation withvalues and ideas cannot be written off as mereattempts of a fledgling writer to introduce bold andunconventional themes (like Christopher Marlowe) inorder to appear iconoclastic and to draw attention. Aclose reading of these plays reveals a highly committed mind at work. There seems to be a deepstructure supporting the apparent one. Critical opinion has it that Shakespeare is reflectingthe public attitude of his times. The Christianworld-view of the medieval Europe did not, to someextent, accord an exalted or privileged position tothe classical heroes and themes. It is, however, truethat in the popular comedies and Interludes writtenand enacted in English country sides during the middleages and the pre-Renaissance era we find a waning ofawe and lessening of reverence towards the mythological heroes and biblical personages, as wellas towards the value system they represented. MikhailBakhtin offers an interpretation of the Renaissanceworld order, which may explain why Shakespearean canoncontains such a subversive and unofficial attitudetowards classical ideologies and character portrayals. According to him, folk culture and popular forms ofentertainment liberated human mind as well as literature from the strait jackets of classical absolutes and medieval categories. Shakespeare’s comicmuse found its raison d’etre and impetus in the nativefolk literature of his times. Local scribes and lesserwriters wrote those comic dramas and interludes moreto amuse their rural audience than to promote asystematic desecration of the sublime. Even thoughtheir characterization was rudimentary andpresentation coarse, their achievement wassignificant. In spite of their conscious endeavour,they helped create a congenial hotbed for theunofficial humour. They planted the seeds of thisliberated, gay laughter. These seeds grew to theirwonted proportion in the able hands of Shakespeare.That unofficial point of view is accommodated in amore systematic body of thought, as well as in a widercontext. All’s Well, one of his typical problem plays, can bediscussed in detail with a view to illustrating hismanner of handling the borrowed material. Shakespeareborrowed the story of All’s Well from Boccaccio’s TheDecameron, and fleshed it out to suit his dramatic andideological purpose. [It is not attempted here to showthat Shakespeare was guided by a particular ideology,political, economic, social or otherwise, to present characters and dramatic situations as he did in hisplays. Ideology simply means a set of personalbeliefs, attitudes, preferences, etc., which expressthemselves spontaneously refracted through thewriter’s sensibility and genius. Sometimes the writermay not be fully aware of his inner implosions, whichinfluence his creative oeuvres. This type of ideologyis different from the political or social ideologies.While adhering to a political ideology, a writer may have to surrender his personal preferences to belongto, and to act in accordance with, an alien ideology;whereas while adhering to one’s inner ideology, thewriter simply yields to his own impulses, allows hiscreative faculties to be guided by his inner calling.]Shakespeare, interestingly, added a sub-plot to themain plot. The cosmetic changes in the plot structureor story line might have been introduced for dramatic convenience and the conventions of the ElizabethanStage, but introduction of ‘new’ characters that donot figure in the original story is Shakespeare’s veryown invention. It is worth while to figure out what motive necessitated that invention. The plot outline of All’s Well is taken from the Third Day, Ninth Story of The Decameron. In the story by Boccaccio, Gilette, the daughter of a deceased physician, lives as a dependent in the house of the Count of Roussillon. She and the young Count Bertrandare childhood friends. Gilette loves Bertrand, but Bertrand treats her as a friend. He has no special liking for her. As Gilette’s social status is much inferior to that of Bertrand’s, she has little hope ofmarrying him. In course of time Bertram becomes a handsome youth, and goes to Paris to stay in theking’s court. The King of France suffers from chesttumor. The doctors treat it maladroitly. As a result,the king develops a fistula. The fistula does notrespond to any treatment, and gets aggravated when new medicines are tried on it. So the king is unwillingto allow any new experiment. Gilette, now a young and beautiful lady, has acquired an amount of knowledge inmedicine from the notes of her father, Master Gerard.She finds a ray of hope in the king’s ailment. Shesets out for Paris, hoping to cure the king of his fistula and to meet Bertrand. The king is initially reluctant to allow a young lady to treat his disease.But she succeeds in convincing him of the efficacy ofher preparation. She puts the condition that she would court death if she failed and if she succeeded,the king should give her a free hand in choosing herhusband from among the nobles of the court. The kingagrees to her condition. She cures the king, anddemands the hand of Bertrand as her fee. The gratefulking forces Bertrand to marry Gilette. Bertrand ispredictably outraged. Unwilling to consummate hismarriage with his bride, Bertrand goes off to Florencewhere he offers his services as a soldier to the Dukewho is at war. He is determined not to return toRoussillon. He sends a message to Gilette, now theCountess, that unless she acquires his ancestral ring(that he wears) and gives birth to his own child, heis not going to treat her as his wife. They areimpossible conditions, but Gilette does not give uphope. She dons the garb of a nun and pretends to goon a pilgrimage. She announces that she is renouncingthe world, but she actually goes to Florence in searchof her husband. While there, she learns from aninnkeeper that Bertrand is infatuated with a poorwidow’s pretty daughter named Diana and is trying tolay her by offering attractive promises includingmarriage. Gilette befriends the widow and herdaughter, wins their confidence, tempts these two poorwomen with bribes, and finally manages to get theancestral ring from the amorous Count through Diana.She sleeps with him impersonating the widow’s daughterand gets impregnated in the process. She livesincognito in Florence. In due course of time, shedelivers two sons and spreads the news of her death. The count Bertrand returns to his country on hearingthat news, and celebrates his home coming with alavish feast. At that time, Gilette presents herselfwith Bertrand’s ancestral ring and two sons fatheredby him. She has fulfilled his two difficultconditions. The count is now honour-bound to accepther as his rightful wife. The story ends happily.Now Shakespeare has taken the broad outline ofBoccaccio’s story, and introduced at least four newcharacters, such as The Countess of Rousillon(Bertrand’s widow-mother), Lafeu, an old lord,Lavache, a clown (servant to the Countess), and, mostimportantly, Parolles, a confidant and boon companionof Bertram’s. By introducing a mother for the youngcount and as uncle figure Lafeu, Shakespeare wasguided by dramatic exigencies, which require thecredible characterization and the motivation foraction. The audience and readers of this play aremade to look at Helena (Boccaccio’s Gilette) throughthe appreciative eyes of the Countess and thewell-considered opinions of the old lord Lafeu. Thereaders of a story, as a rule, are in a swirl ofmotion, chasing the swiftly moving incidents, oneleading to the other, to reach the suspense-resolvingclimax. They have hardly any inclination to brood overcharacterization and ethical dimension of an actionperformed. But the watchers and readers of a play,even though they are equally absorbed in the movementof the plot and curious about what happens next, aresimultaneously interested in the realism of characterportrayal, the adequate motivation for, and theethical aspect of, action. That is to say, drama hasto be a faithful representation of life and believablepicture of reality, which a narrative genre of limitedlength (such as this story by Boccaccio) may managewithout. At this point, the introduction of unsmiling, cynicalclown Lavache and the braggart soldier Parolles, theboon companion of Bertrand’s becomes significant. What motive, what creative compulsion, and what dramatic necessity do compel Shakespeare to introducethose two characters? The job of a professional clownis to amuse others by the flashes of his wit. But poor Lavache lacks natural wit and sense of humour. Heshocks the Countess by his forward manners, his sauciness, and his inappropriate comments. Parollesis a Captain, not a clown. He is the companion of thecount Bertrand. But he is sometimes made to performthe role that is generally assigned to the Fools and Clowns in other Shakespearean plays. Helena desires to recreate herself by engaging Parolles in aconversation on virginity. He is a social climber.Though of common stock, he tries to belong to thenoble society by dressing himself fashionably and being on equal terms with the count. Lafeu seesthrough his tricks and treats him with disdain. Yet he swallows that humiliation without much protest. Suchan unenviable job was entrusted to a more carefullycrafted character, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida,and to Lucio, a fantastic in Measure for Measured.Thersites is also a Captain. They are unlicensed clowns who appropriate the roles of acerbic commentators on life at large. They are cynical denigrators of such virtues as considered unquestionable by other characters. Instead of relieving the gloom that the incidents generate, theymake it heavier and darker by the endless wagging oftheir tongues, by mixing truth with their fibbing andby their spiteful interpretation of characters andsituations. Whatever they say cannot be called lies,because the conduct of the privileged characters in these plays appears unbecoming of their station in life and unacceptable in the contexts of convention and propriety. In Troilus and Cressida, Cressida switches her affection from her devoted lover Troilus to Diomedes. While handing over Troilus’s sleeve to Diomedes,Cressida is not oblivious of the moral dimension ofher action. A woman cannot remain faithful if sheallows her mind to be guided by her eyes:One eye yet looks on thee;But with my heart the other eye doth see.Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find,The error of our eye directs our mind.What error leads must err; O, then conclude Minds sway’d by eyes are full of turpitude. (V ii104-109).The sense of sight is a treacherous guide. As a result, errors and turpitude are there galore, and themore important characters are full of them. But these clowns like Thersites and Parolles do not cause themto happen. They do not generate evil; they simply deepen it and make it appear more pervasive. They find some pleasure in commenting on the folly and immorality of other characters, meaning: “Look you,they are as base as we are, may be worse”. This type of pleasure visits a depraved valet when he discovers,to his great delight, that his master has all thevices that he himself possesses. Though a captain,Parolles has a tendency to run away from the dangersof armed confrontation saying it is advantageous tohim. When very abjectly treated by the old lord Lafeu,he frequently vows to avenge his humiliation, butchooses to swallow it. When he is tricked into aconfession (by two Lords from Rousillon), he fabricates stories about the baseness and cowardice of these lords, betrays his friend count Bertrand,supplies the supposed enemy with such strategic information as would prove disastrous to his own side and makes a virtue of his brazen volte-face with: “Who cannot be crush’d with a plot?” (IV iii 302). That isto say, all would have behaved just as he himself had behaved under similar circumstances, because all areas afraid of dying as he is; all are capable ofbetraying their own side, their friends andbenefactors to save their lives; all do entertain suchpoor opinions about one another in private while publicly treating one another as friends. G.K.Huntercalls him “the superfluous man.” According to thiscritic, “there is no depth to his (Parolles’s)follies; the follies are the character” (Hunter,xiviii). In spite of his shallowness, he is given agood deal of importance and attention in the play. Thecount Bertrand and the two lords take great care tohatch and execute an elaborate plot to test him, totrap him. So far as the play is concerned, Parolles isthe most carefully sketched character, and hissoliloquy after his exposure contains the mosteloquent consolation for the dispossessed: “Beingfool’d, by fool’ry thrive. There’s place and means forevery man alive” (IV iii 315-316). Professor Hunterwrites: “King Charles I’s view that Parolles is the centralattraction of All’s Well (and that Malvolio is the central attraction of Twelfth Night) is not unreasonable; such theatrical success as the play hasenjoyed has largely depended on Parolles; he is drawn with considerable care and his role as a tempter isworked out in detail. Too often he is regarded as awatered-down Falstaff” (Hunter, xlvii).Apparent similarities between Parolles and Thersites on the one hand and Sir John Falstaff on the other areeasily noticeable. They all are in the militaryservice, that is, captains; they, like Plautine MilesGloriosus, are expert at fibbing and boasting. Theirbehaviour on the battlefield is more or less similar.Thersites demeans himself to escape enemy soldiers.Parolles is not only a timid rogue, but a traitor aswell. And Falstaff counterfeits death to escape Douglas. On opening his eyes he sees the dead body of Hotspur (Percy), slain by Prince Hal. He picks up thebody and claims to have slain him and hopes to be madean earl or a duke by the King. The Prince calls him “aglobe of sinful continents.” But their resemblancestops there. Both as a comic character and as a man ofwit, Sir John stands head and shoulders above suchcharacters as Parolles, Thersites and Apemantus.W.W.Lawrence categorically rejects the view that Parolles is an “early sketch of Falstaff” or a“diminished replica” of Falstaff (69).Maurice Morgann, in his celebrated essay (“An Essay onthe Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff”, 1777)defends Falstaff against the charge of cowardice. Hewrites: “We look on Falstaff as the same kind of character asParolles, yet we preserve for him the respect and goodwill which we deny to Parolles. Falstaff is atease in danger, and we do not blame Shakespeare for departing from the truth. Perhaps his real character differs from his apparent, and this difference is thetrue point of humour. Perhaps he was intended to be drawn as a character of much natural courage and resolution” (Ralli, 74). All these swaggering soldiers may claim their ancestryto Plautus’s famous character Pyrgopolynices in Miles Gloriosus. But Shakespeare presented Falstaff as asingular type, a complex mixture of bravado and cowardice, cunning and charm, resourcefulness and witand a strong weakness for wine, women and fun. Thegeneral impression he gives is: a man with a healthy,hearty sense of humour, a swaggering old boy, with a foul mouth but without any trace of malice. He is acharacter to whom people would be irresistibly drawnwhile strongly disapproving of his conduct. “With sogenial and agreeable a misleader of youth asFalstaff,” writes W.W.Lawrence feelingly, “the Prince’s wild nights in the London stews seem excusable. No one can wonder at his falling under thespell of a man who fascinates every one about him”(69). He is a character whose rejection by the newking, Henry V (Prince Hal of yesterday) is capable ofprejudicing the audience and the readers against theking. There is general agreement that he deservedbetter treatment than what he received from his booncompanion turned king in Henry V. William Hazlitt sumsup this sentiment in his panegyric on Falstaff:“No more substantial comic character than Falstaff wasever invented…The secret of his wit is masterlypresence of mind and absolute self-possession…Wecannot forgive the Prince’s treatment of Falstaff-though Shakespeare must have known best, according tothe history- yet Falstaff is the better man” (Ralli,151).In fine, he is the embodiment of the carnival spiritand gay laughter Mikhail Bakhtin writes about in his Rabelais and His World. In the two Henry IV plays heis surely a Shakespearean version of Plautus’sPyrgopolynices, the inveterate swaggering Captain whoclaims to be “a grandson of Venus” and says that notonly women, but also armed men shake with fright whenthey see him (Plautus, 204). In The Merry Wives of Windsor, he strikingly resembles Pyrgopolynices in his amatory exploits: his infatuation for, and his seduction of, someone else’s wife, his ability to begulled and consequent loss of his face. Though undoubtedly influenced by Plautus, Shakespeare transformed this Plautine stereotype (Miles Gloriosus)into a full-blooded individual investing him withlocal flavour, eccentric charm and all too human complexity. Parolles and Thersites, on the other hand, eventhough they share a lot of qualities with the fatKnight, they lack his variety, his warmth, his ebullience and his boisterous, bohemian wit. They arecynical rather than comic. Their self-conceit arousesuniversal revulsion; their indiscriminate raillery against one and all, and their utter lack of self-esteem do not endear themselves to the audienceand the readers. In these characters, Shakespeare gives a new twist to Rabelaisian or carnivalesquelaughter; he adds a new dimension to it. The character of Apemantus (in Timon of Athens) comesto mind when we meet Parolles. Apemantus, theparasitic follower of Timon, no honour for himself,but his own physical safety; does not wish to be richbecause “Rich men sin” (I ii 69). When he tries toingratiate himself to Timon by despising mankind, the victimized hero is not amused. Timon tells him bluntly that a fellow, who thrives on others charity and scrounges off humanity, has no good reason to condemn humanity. Timon tells him:“Why shouldst thou hate men? They never flatteredthee. What hast thou given? If thou hadst not beenborn worst of men, thou hadst been a knave and flatterer” (IV iii 268-275).The job of the characters like Parolles, Thersites and Apemantus is not to entertain the audience by their sardonic wit and their own viciousness. They hardlyentertain. They darken humour. They do not discriminate. They tar and feather one and all. Theymock at virtue and vice. They love to bitch, to quarrel, and to profane the sacrosanct. They areanathemas, human hedgehogs. They mark out the levelsto which human nature can sink; yet they are full ofvituperation for the foibles of others. Then, whydoes Shakespeare release these barking mongrels intothe stage where a mingled group of imperfect mortals are engaged in endless intrigues and conflicts? We will do these character great wrong if we call them fools and clowns whose sole function is to perk up asleepy audience to their irreverent loose talk and totheir coxcombs. They themselves do not want to playthat role. They do not want to be taken lightly byothers. Apemantus is a philosopher, more correctly aCynic philosopher, and a coarser avatar of Diogenes.Like that Greek Cynic of 4th century B.C., he sneersat the idea that goodness exists in human nature. Hisbeing called “a dog” too often by Timon may havesomething to do with the Greek origin of the word“Cynic.” The Cynics were called dogs, and Diogenes wasalso called “The Dog.” Both Parolles and Thersites are rank holders in the army. They are captains.Though their reasons to be angry are vague, they project themselves as non conformists. But their nonconformity is not supported by the espousal of an alternative system of values. That’s why their angryraillery looks like a posturing; they try to bite, butthey lack teeth to injure. As they are unable to bite,they find some satisfaction by barking. But do theybark in vain? Do they calumniate others without anycause what so ever? Not really. May be, their reputationas nay-sayers and their lack of discrimination reducetheir credibility. It may appear these three characters in particularare not only the monstrous productions ofShakespeare’s mood-flares, but also they seem to possess the authorial license to do what they aredoing, to profane the sacred, to undermine the hierarchical arrangement of the feudal society which the people belonging to the higher class celebrate, to redefine the conventional notions of virtue and to blur the boundary separating the official from the unofficial.As a neoplasm has no physiological function in thehuman body, Apemantus, the cynical philosopher, has no dramatic inevitability in Timon of Athens. Or, atleast, it seems so. He picks up a nasty quarrel withTimon when the latter refuses his offer of food andasks him to leave. His causeless misanthropy infuriates Timon. Harsh insults are exchanged, eachtrying to outdo the other. Finally Timon drives him away by pelting stones at him, an activity asdeserving of Apemantus as unusual for the distraught Roman lord.Thersites, in Troilus and Cressida, is another case ofa demented, foul-mouthed misanthrope. He is unsparingin his spite for one and all. He tells Achilles: “Agamemnon is a fool; Achilles is a fool; Thersites isa fool; and, as afore said, Patroclus is a fool” (IIiii 54-56). He denigrates virtue; he denigrates vice;he detests discrimination. Although A chilles dissuades Patroclus from thrashing him saying he” is aprivileged man”, he is repeatedly thrashed by Ajaxwhom he abuses most relentlessly. He does not get his‘license to rail’ from the characters in the play; heseems to be in possession of the playwright’ssanction. All the choicest epithets hurled at him (byAjax, by Achilles, by Patroclus, by many others) donot hurt his pride, for he is proud of not having anypride; he wears their animal epithets as his trophiesof conquest. Thersites has none of the qualities,which designate a Shakespearean Fool. Lear’s Fool, oreven Fool in Timon of Athens, is always partial to the sufferers who are on the receiving end. But Thersitesloves no one but himself. His own safety is uppermostin his mind; and he does not hesitate to cringe and cower before the Trojan soldiers in the battlefield just to save his life. He is the ultimate coward. Yet, paradoxically, people he vilifies tolerate him. Achilles greets him with “How now, thou core of envy! Thou fragment”. Ajax calls him a dog, a bitch-wolf’sson, toadstool, porpentine, whoreson, stool for awitch, etc., etc. (II i). He exasperates Ajax byholding back the proclamation he carries, and, instead, goes on abusing him. Achilles intercedes when infuriated Ajax threatens to beat him: “I will beatthee into handsomeness” (II i 15). But soon he turnshostile to his protector Achilles with: “Hector shallhave a great catch an he knock out either of yourbrains: ‘a were as good crack a fusty nut with nokernel” (II i 97-99). He continues:“There’s Ulysses and old Nestor – whose wit was mouldyere your grandsires had nails on their toes – yoke youlike draught oxen, and make you plough up the wars.Yes, good sooth. To Achilles, to Ajax…” (II i101-105).In spite of all his vituperation, Thersites is notonly tolerated, he is well loved by Achilles. On oneoccasion when Thersites pays a visit to Achilles’tent, Achilles is very pleased to see him: “Art thoucome; why, my cheese, my digestion, why hast thou notserved thyself in to my table so many meals?” (II iii37-40). The acceptability of this human “porpentine”is the point to ponder. Thersites mainly interacts with one group of characters from the beginning to theend. They are Ajax, Achilles and Patroclus and, tosome extent, with Pandarus and Troilus. He only refers to Ulysses, Agamemnon, Nestor and Menelaus. The latter group constitutes a relatively more balanced, more astute people who occupy a higher position in the hegemonic structure. Thersites servesas their courier, errand boy, and pours venom against them behind their back. But he is most uninhibited inthe company of the former group. The characters belonging to this group – Ajax, Achilles, Patroclus,etc. are flawed ones, or, more correctly, they areportrayed as such by Shakespeare. Ajax is a mind less hunk, pathetically jealous of Achilles. He is driven to desperation by his jealousy. Achilles loves flattery and to hear irreverent insinuations against the king Agamemnon and his coterie. He is presentedin this play as a show-off, a sulking school boy enjoying the company of his doting Myrmidons and chiefly, his friend Patroclus. He violates the rulesof war and kills Hector when the latter is off hisguard. Not he alone, but all his Myrmidons pounce onan unarmed, unprepared Hector and kill him. Patroclusis presented as the “masculine whore”, the “malevarlet” of Achilles. What Homer had implied in The Iliad about Achilles’ relationship with Patroclus,Shakespeare makes it absolutely clear. Thersites tells it when both Achilles and Patroclus are present. And they seem to have taken it easy. Thersites thrives inthe company of these highly “faulted” characters. His nutty abuses, it seems, have tangy kernels of truth.Thersites barters away his honour for hisself-preservation. Twice in the battlefield, he comesface-to-face with strong enemies. When Margarelonchallenges him, he inquires about his identity. Margarelon tells him that he is the bastard son ofPriam’s. Thersites finds an escape route. He tellshim: “I am a bastard too. I love bastards….One bearwill not bite another, and wherefore should onebastard? Take heed, the quarrel’s most ominous to us;if the son of a whore fights for a whore, he temptsjudgment” (V vii 16-23). After some time, Hectorconfronts him and inquires about his “blood andhonour” only to ascertain whether he is worthy of hissword. Thersites replies: “No, no – I am a rascal; ascurvy railing knave; a very filthy rogue.” Hectorspares his life: “I do believe thee, Live” (V iv25-29). His self-debasement endows him with apeculiar immunity against physical danger. Given achoice between honour and life, he unabashedly choosesthe latter. If life is to be preferred to death, allacts performed, all methods employed to secure life are quite in order.Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well is the booncompanion of Bertrand, the count of Rousillon. Hisassociation with Parolles surprises those who, likethe old Lord Lafeu, know only the good side of Bertrand. Lafeu is clever enough to see through Parolles. That’s why he treats Parolles with disdaineven before the latter has shown his evil potential.Lafeu tells him contemptuously: “By mine honour, if I were but two hours younger, I’dbeat thee. Methink’st thou art a general offence, and every man should beat thee …you are a vagabond, and notrue traveller; you are more saucy with lords and honourable personages than the commission of yourbirth and virtue gives you heraldry. You are notworth another word, else I’d call you knave” (II iii247-256). When Bertram insists that his companion Parolles is avaliant soldier, Lafeu expresses his grave doubts:“Then my dial goes not true; I took this lark for abunting” (II iv 4-6). He advises the young count notto trust that man in important matters: “There can beno kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man ishis clothes” (II v 33-35). The other two Lords, FirstLord and 2nd Lord, say the same thing about thischaracter when they seek Bertram’s permission to testhis companion’s courage and trustworthiness. TheSecond Lord tells Bertrand: “Believe it, my Lord in my own direct knowledge,without any malice, but to speak of him as my kinsman,he’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endlessliar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no onegood quality worthy of your lordship’s entertainment”(III vi 8-14). Parolles extols the value of a drum that was left inthe battlefield. Bertrand tells him to recover it ifhe could. An elaborate plot is hatched to expose thetrue nature of this man who has effectively concealedall his weaknesses from his companion Bertrand. Hewould be attacked, captured and blind folded by these lords and their men when he goes to the battlefield inthe middle of the night to recover the drum. Then he would be given the impression that the enemy side hascaptured him, and that his life would be spared if he supplied all secret, strategic information about hisside to his captors. The count assures Parolles that if he succeeded inrecovering the drum (that instrument of honour) he would be suitably rewarded by the Duke of Florence and by himself for his bravery. At ten O’clock night,Parolles sneaks into the battlefield and is capturedas planned, and brought to the camp blind-folded. Believing that by betraying his own side he would beable to save his life, he supplies his captors withall vital information without much coaxing. Then,they search his pockets and get an undelivered letterthat he has written to Diana. He informs the gathering that his intention is to warn the poor virgin to be aware of “one count Rousillon, a foolishidle boy. Very ruttish … a dangerous and lasciviousboy, who is a whale to virginity.” But his rhyming letter shows him in lesser light. He advises her toprefer men like him to the boys like the Count. It is not his concern for the poor virgin that makes him write that letter, but his own self-interest. Theletter reads:“He never pays after-debts, take it before And say a soldier, Diana, told thee this:Men are to mell with, boys are not to kiss” (IV iii210-12).Parolles presents the two Lords in worse light. Whenasked about the honesty of the 2nd Lord, Parollessays: “He will steal, sir, an egg out of a cloister; forrapes and ravishments he parallels Nessus. Heprofesses not keeping of oaths; in breaking ‘em he isstronger than Hercules. He will lie, sir, with suchvolubility that you would think truth were a fool.Drunkenness is his best virtue …and in his sleep, hedoes little harm, save to his bedclothes about him …He has everything that an honest man should not have;what an honest man should have he has nothing” (IV iii233-243).It is unlikely that those two lords are as bad as hedepicts them. In so far as the play is concerned,these lords carry themselves with dignity and possessa good amount of generosity as well. The 2nd Lord sosavagely vilified by Parolles seems to have been moreamused than offended. He is even ready to spare theman for his uniqueness as a villain. He says: “He hathout-villain’d villainy so far that the rarity redeemshim” (IV iii 254-25). Parolles possesses most of thequalities that he has attributed to the Second Lord.After pouring venom against one and all, after informing them about the strategic secrets of his ownside, he comes to know that a clever plot hatched byhis protector-cum-companion Bertrand and the two lordshas duped him. He justifies his desperate situationwith “Who cannot be crush’d with a plot?” Thisstatement, though given in self-defense, attests tohis inability or unwillingness to feel ashamed undermost trying of circumstances, and also to hisextraordinary ability to feel happy for havingsurvived the ordeal. He feared death, and death is theworst thing that could have happened. Now that he isalive, all other problems can be taken care of. Hethinks aloud (when left to himself)Yet I am thankful. If my heart were great,‘Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more;But I will eat, and drink, and sleep as softAs captain shall. Simply the thing I amShall make me live…Rust, sword; cool, blushes; and, Parolles, liveSafest in shame. Being fool’d, by fool’ry thrive.There’s place and means for every man alive (IV iii 307-316).In the world of Shakespeare there is always place andmeans for all types of characters, including the likes of Parolles. But this exposed rogue’s self-consoling words have a special and particular significance,which may adequately sum up the ethical dimension ofthe play. The tone and the tenor of this speech match,to a great extent, Helena’s observations on her ownmethod of winning over her reluctant husband and onthe male duplicity. Her husband Bertrand hates herand is unwilling to consummate his marriage with her. Yet again, he makes love to her without knowing thatit is she, his despised wife. She says: O; strange men!That can such sweet use make of what they hate…So lust doth playWith what it loathes….All’s Well that Ends Well. Still the fine’s thecrown. Whatever the course, the end is the renown” (IV iv21-36).For Parolles, survival is the ultimate success. Instead of feeling wretched when exposed, he feels exhilarated for having preserved his life. All is wellthat ends well. Just as Parolles loves his life,Helena loves Bertrand. She is fired by one nobledesire to be united with him. The means she adopts toachieve that aim will not matter much at the end. The sweetness of success will make the means appearunimportant. Shakespeare has vastly improved upon Boccaccio’s Gilette, endowing her with requisite feminine determination to overcome all odds by meansfair and not so fair, a trait noticeable in the emerging modern women. In spite of her spirited and brash maneuvers to achieve her end, she still retainsher feminine charm. Coleridge admires her. She is thefighting woman, “the clever wench”, a type mostnoticeable in the English Interludes. Moralsqueamishness is not one of her virtues. She must win,if not by hook, then by crook. That is the spirit. Onthe other hand, Parolles is a subtle manifestation of Shakespeare’s unstated agenda; he represents anindomitable instinct for survival. Shakespeare is interested to show humanity warts and all. Thisintention may, to a certain extent, answer thepuzzling question why the motiveless malcontents, suchas, Parolles, Apemantus and Thersites are soelaborately portrayed, and that too with some amountof sympathy. The honest old lord Lafeu, who is thefirst to point out Parolles’s villainous nature and towarn the young count to be aware of that rogue,finally accepts the same rogue in his illustriouscompany: “Though you are a fool and a knave, you shalleat” (V iii 14-18). In the last scene, when Lafeu ismoved by Helena’s pleadings and the final acceptanceof Bertrand, he repeats his assurance and givesParolles the freedom to ignore formality and go onrailing as ever.Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon.(To Parolles) Good Tom Drum, lend me a handkercher. So, I thank thee. Wait on me home, I’ll make sportWith thee; let thy curtsies alone, they are scurvyones” (V ii 14-18).By calling him Good Tom Drum, Lafeu makes it clear toParolles that he is in the know of the drum incident;that he would not be accepted by Bertram any more. Sohe comes forward to feed and nurture him. He becomes“the privileged man” like Thersites. In absence ofTimon, Apemantus goes to other lords of Athens topinch and scrape. His reputation as a railing knaveand his immunity to shame will enable him to survive.He does not ask for more. Sheer survival is his onlyambition. Like proverbial cats, these three characters roam on the earth, pinching their sustenance from the tables of the rich and thepowerful, but never feeling grateful, nor any belongingness, to their hosts. They are truly unattached. Bertrand has a pathological spite forcats, and he calls Parolles a cat: “I could endure anything before but a cat, and now he’s a cat to me”(IV iii 21-22). One possible good reason for Shakespeare to create and nurture these “bitter fools”is that he intended to relativize the apparently absolute value system which has been accepted unquestioningly by the Elizabethan public. InShakespeare’s scheme of things, the king even thoughhe occupies the highest rung in the hierarchical ladder shares the same common fate with the rest of humanity. Agamemnon suffers from a common boil that gives him unbearable pain and makes him holler. TheKing of France has a fistula, which does not respondto medicine. Shakespeare’s representation of ethicalabsolutes and choices in the plays under discussionhas a distinct flavour. A particular virtue pushed toits logical extreme is prone to collapse under its ownweight. It may even take after its opposite. When it comes to glorifying love, a few writers will surpass Shakespeare. But no writer has treated this magnificent obsession with greater dramatic irony thanhim. Troilus and Cressida can be cited as the supreme example of demystifying sentimental love. Again, thevice, pushed to its extreme limit, is surprisingly redeemed by some kind of virtue. In some other plays,such as Love’s Labour’s Lost and Henry IV (Part I andPart II), the intermingling of vice and virtue, as well as the unstable foundation on which social hierarchies and certitudes are based, has been presented with casual comedy. But in some others,such as, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, All’sWell That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida, thisintermingling of the high and the low, the good andthe bad, the noble and the ignoble, the heroic and theanti-heroic, love and physical lust, virtue and vice,etc. is done with a view to examining and underminingtheir absolutist ethical claims, and, in the process,relativizing them. Mikhail Bakhtin observes that during the Renaissance gay laughter and carnival spirit entered the realms of high literature. Although Bakhtin claims that gay laughter is a partand parcel of the process of carnivalization, in theseplays commonly known as ‘dark comedies’ or ‘problemplays’ this gay laughter is somewhat subdued andloaded with another motive: carnivalization ofconcepts. Playful subversion of concepts is theunstated agenda, which is adroitly carried out by theambivalent characters, known otherwise as “the bitterfools,” like Thersites, Parolles and Apemantus.Carnivalesque laughter becomes indistinguishable fromthoughtful laughter. This reflection or realizationdawns upon the laughing audience or reader when theirlong-cherished notions about love and lust, about viceand virtue, the lowly and the courtly, the margin andthe center, the cloister and the marketplace, etc. areturned inside out and subjected to cold and relentlessscrutiny, not with a scalpel, but with liberated laughter. This laughter-loving imagination has begunwith Boccaccio’s The Decameron. This 14th centuryItalian writer has set a trend and a mood, whichinfluenced many important writers of EuropeanRenaissance who came after him. Geoffrey Chaucer wasthe first English writer to be acquainted with The Decameron and adopted some of the choicest stories inhis Canterbury Tales. That liberated imagination roseto new heights in the writings of Rabelais’s Gargantuaand Pantagruel (1532-54) and Cervantes’s The Historyof the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant Don Quixoteof the Mancha (1605). It reached its absolute perfection in the plays of Shakespeare who added a newdimension to this continuing surge of carnivalization,which, as Bakhtin rightly claims, liberated literaturefrom the straitjackets of dogmatism, didacticism andsentimentality. He writes in Rabelais and His World:“In world literature there are certain works in whichthe two aspects, seriousness and laughter, coexist andreflect each other. …(T)he most important works inthis category are, of course, Shakespeare’s tragedies. True ambivalent and universal laughter does not denyseriousness but purifies and completes it Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry,from fear and intimidation, from did acticism, naivetéand illusions, from the single meaning, the singlelevel, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permitseriousness to atrophy and to be turn away from theone being, forever incomplete. It restores theambivalent wholeness. Such is the function of laughterin the historical development of culture andliterature” (122-23).This perhaps, is the secret, unstated reason for Shakespeare to people the stage with fools, clowns,braggarts, sardonic wits, grousing parasites, harmless malcontents, swaggering soldiers, etc. Most of ten these characters are not borrowed straightaway from the stories and historical accounts, which Shakespeare adopts for the stage. Nor are they his pure inventions. They are the progeny of entertaining characters who were present in the folk literature and dramatic interludes of the English countryside. Shakespeare does not use them for purely entertainment purpose. He invests them with an additional role asthe agents of catalysis, as debunkers. Nonentitiesthemselves, they go around telling others ad nauseamthat the so-called hegemons and lords, those upholdersof virtue, those claiming to be men of substance andof ideals, are actually having “botchy cores” and,most often, get too big for their boots. Their notbeing taken seriously is an indispensable part of theprogramme, for nothing is truly altered in acarnivalistic situation. The very nature of carnivalis a moderation of the radical and the mellowing ofthe stiff. These radical and stiff attitudes inform not only huaman nature, but the social and religious systems as well. Nothing is treated with seriousness,because seriousness is itself questioned and contestedin the acts of carnivalization. The purpose and modeof operation of the carnivalistic laughter are to makelight of seriousness without relapsing intoseriousness. The aim of carnivalization, accordingto Mikhail Bakhtin, is to relativize the absolute andto enable us to re-examine our inherited notions ofgood and evil, vice and virtue, margin and center,etc. with apparent playfulness, with subversivelampooning, not to change the world per se but toalter our attitude to it. That is the reason why thechief agents of carnival laughter and temporarydestabilization of official culture are themselvesfrivolous, even flippant. They are on the fringe ofthe society. They more or less resemble the peoplethey rail against in so far as vices are concerned.The whole game is conducted with a mood ofaccommodation: Virtue making room for human lapses,and vice making room for the innate goodness of humannature. Each side is made to make allowances for theother. Such accommodation and allowances are possiblewhen human nature reveals itself in its totality andmultiplicity. The Second Lord puts it accurately: “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good andill together. Our virtues would be proud if ourfaults whipt them not; and our crimes would despair ifthey were not cherish’d by our virtues” (All’s Well IViii 67-70).This world-view is the quintessence of Renaissancehumanism that Shakespeare’s plays not only contain abundantly, but draw their strength from. Thisworld-view is brave. It requires the raw courage to contest the traditional certitudes. It requires thegenial sensibility to understand the trickiness of human nature. And, above all, it requires the ability to present, on the stage, all the forces at work, bothin the society and in the interior landscape of man,not with a stern frown, but with a compassionate smile. “This belief in the possibility of a complete exit from the present order of this life” writes Mikhail Bakhtin, ” determines Shakespeare’s fearless, sober (yet not cynical) realism and absence of dogmatism. This paths of radical changes and renewals is the essence ofShakespeare’s world consciousness. It made him see thegreat epoch-making changes taking place around him andyet recognize their limitations” (Bakhtin, 275).Works cited:Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, (trans.)H. Iswolsky. New York: Indiana University Press, 1984. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron, trans.G.H.McWilliam. New York: Penguin, 1980.Campbell, Oscar James (ed) The Reader’s Encyclopediaof Shakespeare. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company,1966.Hunter, G.K. (edt.) All’s Well That Ends Well (TheArden Shakespeare Paperbacks). London: Methuen & Co.,1966.Johnson, Samuel. The Preface to Shakespeare (1765).Edited by C.T.Thomas. Delhi: MacMillan India Ltd.,1986.Lawrence, William Witherle. Shakespeare’s ProblemComedies.London: Penguin Books, 1969.Plato. The Works. Selected and Edited by Irwin Edman.New York: The Modern Library, 1956Plautus, Titus Maccius. The Pot of Gold and OtherPlays, Trans. by E.F.Watling. New York: Penguin Books,1978.Ralli, Augustus. A History of Shakespearian Criticism, (Vol.1 & 2)New York: The Humanities Press, 1965.Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works, (ed.) PeterAlexander. London: The English Language Book Society,1964.