• 1 Jürgen Habermas, “Morality and Ethical Life. Does Hegel’s Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse Ethic (...)

everyday language is ... the medium by which intersubjectivity of a shared world is maintained ... The more the subject becomes individuated, the more he becomes entangled in a densely woven fabric of mutual recognition, that is, of reciprocal exposedness and vulnerability.1

• 2 “Des Menteurs” (i.ix), in Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. J.-V. Leclerc, t. i, Paris, Garnier, 187 (...)

1In the post-war period, the cultural theorist Jürgen Habermas argued that the construction of a “shared world” of human exchange, or what he terms elsewhere as an unconstrained, but fragile “public sphere” (Öffentlichkeit), remained firmly tied to the practice of everyday language. Indeed, in the excerpt above from his discussion entitled “Morality and Ethical Life”, Habermas links explicitly the politics of subject identity-construction with the larger commitment to societal evolution – and all undertaken through the strategic medium of language. The latter is envisaged as the key instrument to be deployed for the improvement of, as well as the mending and healing of faultlines that emerge in, social discourse. In comparison with a number of post-war thinkers, Habermas’ philosophical undertaking invested prominently in the agency and dynamism of language to excite cultural reciprocity and cohesion. Speaking and action are seen to operate hand-in-hand, fully imbricated in larger narratives that a society builds of collective belonging, of engagement, response and obligation. At such moments, we may be reminded of the early modern voice of Michel de Montaigne contending that “En vérité, le mentir est un mauldit vice : nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne tenons les uns aux aultres, que par la parole”.2

• 4 All textual references to All’s Well That Ends Well are taken from Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), (...)
• 5 Ann Lecercle, “Interpretation and ‘logique du sens’: the Problem Plays’ problematizing of language” (...)
• 6 Robert Paul Wolff, “On Violence”, The Journal of Philosophy, 19 (Oct 2 1969), pp. 601–616, p. 606. (...)

3Turning back four hundred years, the early modern age can be discovered closely engaging with such enquiries and anxieties, exploring how language may enable, perplex and elsewhere impede (to name just a few strains of agency) human interaction and consensus. The present discussion focuses upon a single scene (iv.i.) in Shakespeare’s problem or bitter comedy All’s Well That Ends Well (1602–1606?) to consider precisely how these questions of social cohesion and communication – or rather, how impediments to them – are explored in a precariously constructed comic world, populated by ailing patriarchs, stalker heroines (“Doctor She” – ii.i.77),4 reluctant lovers and fractious states. Indeed, in her own intriguing account of “Shakespeare’s only sustained piece of nonsense”, Ann Lecercle has highlighted the “paradoxical” motions at work in this scene of the fool’s “comeuppance”: “for it is by hoodwinking that [Paroles’s] unmasking takes place – a hoodwinking where nonsense of tongue makes sense of image”.5 Indeed, from a variety of perspectives, Shakespeare’s entire dramatic narrative can be seen to constitute a meditation upon the recourse to violence from one form of human exchange to another; and for this discussion, in line with Robert Paul Wolff’s critical formulation, violence is construed as “the illegitimate or unauthorized use of force to effect decisions against the will or desire of others”.6 As will become evident, in unveiling the construction of social experience through violent acts, Shakespeare’s play continues to problematise the very undertaking of comedy.

• 7 Ralph Lever, The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft, teaching a perfect way to argue and disp (...)
• 8 “Des cannibales” (i.xxx), in Montaigne, Essais, ed. Leclerc, p. 178. Translation: Now, I find, to r (...)

4Wrestling with the arts of speaking and knowing in his Art of Reason (1573), Ralph Lever submitted, “I see and confesse, that there be Plura rerum, quam verborum genera, (that is, moe things, then there are words to expresse things by)”.7 Repeatedly, in both early (and late) modernity, language use is situated finely at the Nature/Culture discursive distinction and this has remained embedded in ideological projects in the West since at least the time of Homeric Greece. In antiquity, the Greeks had branded those incomprehensible aliens residing beyond the pale of the polis as βάρβαρος, barbaros, barbarian – interestingly, a word not identified in English usage before the sixteenth century – and language use continues to operate as a prime cultural operation through which we gain insights into how a given community envisages indiscipline, desire, menace, foreignness, the Other. Indeed, having duly reflected upon such debates in preceding ages, Michel de Montaigne concluded persuasively for his sixteenth-century (and twenty-first century) readers, “Or, je treuve, pour revenir à mon propos, qu’il n’y a rien de barbare et de sauvage en cette nation, à ce qu’on m’en a rapporté, sinon que chascun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage”.8

• 9 John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion and other various occurrences (...)
• 10 Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth. Or Maner of Gouernement by the Russe Emperour, (commonl (...)

5Despite the vigorous mercantile culture of early modern Britain, it seems that the xenophobic character of these island nations was distinctive even for a continent fully acquainted with (and sharing) such prejudices. Elizabeth I’s minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, counselled his young son Robert for the future, “Marry thy daughters in time, lest they marry themselves. And suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps. For there they shall learn nothing but pride, blasphemy and atheism”.9 Looking further afield in Of the Russe commonwealth (1591) and with direct relevance to the present discussion of Shakespearean dramaturgy, Giles Fletcher took little solace when reviewing the distant lands beyond the Steppes. Dedicated to the last Tudor monarch, this publication summoned up the vision of the “true and strange face of a Tyrannical state, (most vnlike to your own) without true knowledge of god, without written Lawe, without common iustice”.10 Fletcher proceeded to exploit a wide repertoire of deeply embedded anxieties concerning that remote land. At a safe textual distance, his late Elizabethan readers were invited to discover a forbidding landscape where brutality of all kinds was commonplace and the inhabitants were subject to radically imbalanced power relations:

• 12 Qtd. in Francesca Wilson, Muscovy. Russia Through Foreign Eyes 1553-1900, London, George Allen & Un (...)

6Nonetheless, information from such seemingly remote societies clearly had the power to tempt and beguile as well as estrange early modern audiences. Fascinated by official communications from Czar Ivan (the Terrible), it is reported that Elizabeth I herself sought to convince her court favourite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, to immerse himself in “the famousest and most copious language in the world”.12 Building upon such cultural narrativization for their own intrigues in the early modern playhouses, Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists regularly presented audiences with evocations of the foreign, the alien and the barbaric – frequently, as sinister and/or disorienting environments where human exchange and language itself is under severe pressure to construct the very possibility of Habermasian intersubjectivity.

• 13 John Norden, A pensiue soules delight, London, William Stansby for John Busby, 1615, p. 322. A shor (...)
• 14 “L’heure des parlements, dangereuse” (i.vi), in Montaigne, Essais, ed. Leclerc, p. 21. Translation: (...)

7At iv.i. in All’s Well That Ends Well, we are taken into the particularly volatile environment of the military camp. War is, of course, a prime example of the exploitation of violence as the very motor for social organisation and the conflict-ridden Tudor and Stuart realms often regarded with great suspicion those called to arms. Apart from learning their trade most often in dubious (read, Catholic) lands across the seas, the documentation which survives from early modern England offers ample evidence of faint praise and moral condemnation where combatants are concerned. John Norden was not an unrepresentative voice in A pensiue soules delight (1615) in insisting that “Among all other professions in the world: none is more dangerous then the militarie … no sort of people are more loosely, lasciuiously, and barbarously giuen then they”.13 Of particular interest here in this early modern debate concerning the ways in which violence, humiliation, victimisation may be practised and reserved for conflict zones and their outliers is Montaigne’s contention that “Et certes la guerre a naturellement beaucoup de privileges raisonnables, au prejudice de la raison; et icy fault la regle, Neminem id agere ut ex alterius praedetur inscitia”.14

• 15 In this context, see Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, Chicago, Chicago University Pre (...)

8The environment of the military encampment in All’s Well That Ends Well at iv.i. is particularly concerned with the creation and exploitation of foolishness, notably linguistic foolishness, in order to test the limits of this comic world. Here, in a “hedge-corner” (iv.i.2) of the society of men-at-arms, the audience becomes privy to the stage-managing of a theatrical ritual of shaming, or charivari, for more general consumption – and located at the centre-stage, we are asked to attend primarily to the performances of the “manifold linguist” Paroles, or words (iv.iii.224).15

• 16 Judith Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable, London, Verso, 2010, p. xii.

9At the opening of her broader discussion entitled Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, Judith Butler argues that “We think of persons as reacting to war in various ways, but communicable reactions to war also variably constitute and de-constitute personhood within the field of war”.16 In this way, Butler highlights how engagement with conflict zones offers key insights into the ways in which identity construction is framed and un-framed. Paroles has already been identified earlier in Shakespeare’s intrigue for his foolery and foolishness, but iv.i. remains significant in that the camp “lords” now wish to tender superlative evidence of his incompetent humanity – and, specifically, through the medium of language.

• 17 Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, p. 188.
• 18 Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, p. 196.

10In her own wide-ranging analysis of this play, Patricia Parker underlines that “in Act iv … Paroles is threatened with immediate death for want of ‘language’ before he is ‘granted space’, the extension of discourse, as of life, is linked with the creation of an intervening space”;17 and this cycle in the dramatic action begins at iv.i. with one of the elite figures, or lords, instructing the company to “speak what terrible language you will” even if “you understand it not yourselves, no matter; for we must not seem to understand him” (iv.i.2–4). Even when an “interpreter” is enlisted for this mock-king ritual onstage, the comic coup de théâtre in-the-making focuses attention upon the energies invested in managing a theatrically confected ambush, or “linsey-woolsey” (iv.i.10). The interpolation of a macaronic language associated with a perceived Other along with dramatic asides in the vernacular creates a farcical mix highlighting highly differentiated practices of telling and knowing amongst communities of auditors on- and off-stage and is in keeping, as Parker has pointed out, with the broader investment of Shakespeare’s comedy in “pyrotechnical verbal exchange”.18 Code-switching between semi-choric interventions and instructions, on the one hand, and mouthing of sonic (creatively russified) effects to the victim Paroles, on the other, all the parties in this ceremonial humiliation participate in the play’s ongoing investigation into the failing project of social communication and exchange. Instead of staging “intersubjectivity” in the social environment, we are thrust in Shakespeare’s comedy into the company of “some band of strangers i’ the adversary’s entertainment”, into a company of aliens cawing the sounds of “choughs’ language, gabble” (iv.i.13–14, 18).

• 19 Maury D. Feld, The Structure of Violence. Armed Forces as Social Systems, London, Sage, 1997, p. 18

11Maury D. Feld’s contention is timely in this context that “Military service is one area of social activity that continually calls into question the costs of commonly shared goals and that deliberately sets a price on human life”.19 Indeed, the upheaval of the Florentine wars operates as a perfect backdrop in All’s Well That Ends Well not only for the questioning of existing structures of social cohesion in this dramatic world, but also of the formulation and locus of the Muscovy Other. In the festive, and notably elite, masquing staged in Shakespeare’s military camp, we supposedly leave behind the sophisticated court and urban ideals customarily associated with contemporaneous constructions of Renaissance culture in works by Brunelleschi, Castiglione or Guazzo, for example. Instead, in this alien world of comic inversions and extravagant soundscapes, the aim is to remain supremely incomprehensible both to the victim and even to oneself: “therefore we must every one be a man of his own fancy. Not to know what we speak one to another, so we seem to know, is to know straight our purpose” (iv.i.15–17).

• 21 Ann Lecercle, “Anatomy of a Fistula, Anomaly of a Drama”, in Jean Fuzier and François Laroque (eds) (...)
• 22 Paul Ricoeur, “Violence et Langage”, Recherches et Débats: La Violence 16.9, 1967, pp. 86–94, p. 87 (...)

15In her illuminating discussion of the “dialectic of excess and lack” in All’s Well That Ends Well, Ann Lecercle has persuasively drawn attention to the contrary thematics of “presence and pregnance” in this vexed comedy highly preoccupied with characters’ desires for swelling rhetoric and swelling bodies.21 While certain, prominently placed women in Shakespeare’s intrigue seem remarkably determined to yield their “drum” in the fulfilment of their erotic ambitions, a most reluctant Paroles (later, like the beleaguered Bertram) is sent out to seize the instrument and take ownership of the offending article: “What the devil should move me to undertake the recovery of this drum” (iv.i.31–32). Nonetheless, in the punishing landscape of this bitter comedy, even before losing the power of sight, the fool acknowledges that he must first take up arms against tongues, rather than drums: “Tongue, I must put you into a butter-woman’s mouth and buy myself another of Bajazet’s mule, if you prattle me into these perils.” (iv.i.36–38). Like his Shakespearean near-contemporary Falstaff, Paroles tries to contrive some theatrical stunt by which he might showcase his derring-do: “I would I had any drum of the enemy’s. I would swear I recovered it” (iv.i.54–55). Swiftly after expressing this ambition, the hapless Paroles is taken hostage and singled out for a public shaming by his lordly predators. However, as has been appreciated above, this theatrical humiliation is not primarily staged in somatic terms (i.e. of physical mortification), but rather the cut-and-thrust of the action resides for the most part in arresting displays of verbal violence. Nor should we underestimate the tactical power of this latter practice, as Paul Ricoeur has underlined: “La violence qui parle, c’est déjà une violence qui cherche à avoir raison; c’est une violence qui se place dans l’orbite de la raison et qui commence déjà de se nier comme violence”.22

• 23 On comedy and violence, see also in this volume Nora Galland, “Armado or the Other speaking the Nat (...)

18As we have witnessed, in this encounter it is words, rather than bodies, that have been weaponised and are pressed into service to achieve the desired result. It takes little time for the “hoodwinked” victim to agree to impart “all the secrets of our camp” and thus is “granted space” to fulfil his potential to be gulled (iv.i.76, 79, 83). As so often in Shakespearean comedy, the audience may feel at this stage that it is drawn in contrary directions of sympathy and judgement through its responses of amusement. If in the earlier Twelfth Night, for example, Feste assumes the rather different garb of tormentor in the shaming of Malvolio, here in All’s Well That Ends Well the comic operation is reversed with the victimisation of the “allowed fool”.23 Nonetheless, here at iv.i. the case is also altered significantly because the imposture is situated firmly within a military context and thus engages with a recurring source of anxiety for early modern England’s authorities.

• 24 Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations. Volume iii: The Later Tudors ( (...)
• 25 Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, pp. 82, 105.
• 26 “De la gloire” (ii.xvi), in Montaigne, Essais, ed. Leclerc, p. 21. Translation: It is right to cond (...)

19Elizabeth’s government drew attention on repeated occasions in its proclamations to the dangerous propensity for masking and hoodwinking which becomes evident in the company and conversation of seemingly “armipotent soldier[s]” (iv.iii.224). Within just a four-year span, for example, in 1589 her ministers imposed martial law on vagrant soldiers in response to “the great outrages that have been and are daily committed by soldiers, mariners, and others that pretend to have served as soldiers upon her highness’ good and loving subjects”, while in 1590 a royal proclamation bore witness to the “many gross and manifest frauds and deceits daily practiced and committed by captains and officers”.24 The following year, in 1591, a proclamation reimposing martial law signalled that “the Queen’s Majesty” had been “informed of sundry great disorders committed in and about her city of London by … [amongst others] some coloring their wandering by the name of soldiers returned from the war”; and in 1592, “notwithstanding her late proclamation”, the Queen’s representatives still noted the presence of “such persons as wander abroad in the habit of soldiers … pretending to have served in the late wars”.25 Indeed, the practice of double-dealing on and off the battlefield seems have been widely in evidence on the early modern continent as, across the Channel, Montaigne contended that “On a raison de descrier l’hypocrisie qui se treuve en la guerre : car qu’est il plus aysé à un homme practique, que de gauchir aux dangiers, et de contrefaire le mauvais, ayant le coeur plein de mollesse?”.26 Ultimately, Paroles is left to exit the scene in the knowledge that he will be kept, like Twelfth Night’s Malvolio, “dark and safely locked” (iv.i.89–90). Just a little later in the intrigue and for the general entertainment of assembled companies both on- and off-stage, this remorselessly mocked fool will be heard slandering his tormentors who have conducted their revels in the world just beyond his blindfold.

• 27 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Foreword”, in Allie Terry-Fritsch and Erin Felicia Labbie (eds), Beholding Viol (...)

21In a recent, more general critical discussion of our consumption of artistic creativity, W. J. T. Mitchell has argued persuasively that “Beholding … is best understood as a special kind of attention (perhaps we should call it an ‘a-tension’) between attachment and detachment, holding and being held on the one hand, holding at arm’s length, on the other”.27 This kind of theatrical experience for the audience, oscillating between affective engagement and more distanced (moral) reflection, is one which is constructed repeatedly in Shakespearean play-making. Nevertheless, the recuperation of victims such as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, or Paroles in All’s Well That Ends Well for responses of sympathy and/or pity in more contemporary productions for the stage may not only result in a comic loss for these often unexpectedly farcical early modern intrigues, it may also impede our understanding of a former age well acquainted with rituals of shaming, public humiliation and the enactment of violence. Across early modern Europe, the battlefield, the scaffold, the bear pit, and the streets encountered in everyday life might prove the locations of sometimes harrowing scenes of violence. Furthermore, in times of political crisis, responses of mercy and compassion might be even less frequently witnessed. In such ways, the supposed singularity of the allowed fool as he makes his way through the Florentine wars should be placed in question: moreover, the fate of Paroles, or words, is constantly subjected to hard scrutiny as Shakespeare’s bitter comedy draws to a close.