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Summary
Outside the army’s camp, the First Lord and Second Lord Dumaine wait with a party of their men to capture the unfortunate Parolles. They decide to disguise their voices by speaking nonsense, and they pick a soldier whose voice is unfamiliar to their victim to act as “interpreter.” Parolles comes along soon enough, debating with himself how to make it look like he attempted the recovery of the drum without exposing himself to any danger. He considers giving himself a flesh wound, or ripping his clothes, and then wishes aloud that he had one of the enemy’s drums so he could pretend to have taken it. Then, calling out nonsense words, the group of soldiers falls upon him, binds him, and blindfolds him. The ruse works, and Parolles believes himself to be captured by the enemy.
In the Widow’s house, Bertram pleads with Diana to agree to sleep with him, professing his love for her. After much prodding, she agrees to allow him to come to her bedroom late that night, but she demands the ring of his finger as a token of his love. He reluctantly gives it, telling her that the ring is the emblem of his family; in return, she makes him wear a ring of hers. In fact, the ring Diana gives him comes from Helen: it was a gift given to her by the King of France after his recovery. Bertram departs, convinced that he has won a pleasure-filled evening for himself.
Back at the camp, the two Lords Dumaine discuss Bertram’s conduct. His mother’s letter, condemning his behavior, has arrived, and so has the false news that Helen has died in a monastery—a rumor spread, no doubt, by Helen herself. When Bertram returns from visiting Diana’s bedroom, where he has been successfully duped into sleeping with Helen, the Lords take him to the location where Parolles lies pinioned and tell him to watch. Then the soldier acting as “interpreter” threatens Parolles with torture unless he tells all the secrets of his army. Parolles, terrified, complies, and then goes on to give extremely unflattering descriptions of Bertram and both Lords Dumaine. His bags are then searched and a letter is found addressed to Diana, urging her to demand payment from Bertram, and to do so before they have sex. Finally, they declare that they will kill him anyway, and Parolles, completely undone, weeps and begs for his life. Amid much laughter, his blindfold is removed, and Parolles is left a ruined, friendless man. Nevertheless, he is not entirely discouraged—he has lost his position at Bertram’s side, but he expresses a feeling of relief now that his cowardice is out in the open.
Analysis
These scenes unfold the two plots devised earlier in the play: the Dumaines’ plot to expose Parolles as a coward, and Helen’s plot to entrap her husband. The latter would seem to offer the greatest opportunity for laughs, but Elizabethan decorum requires that the sex take place offstage. Thus, the audience is left to infer the success of Helen’s ruse, since when Bertram returns to camp, he behaves as though his seduction of Diana was a triumph. However, what we actually see in scene 2 isn’t Bertram seducing Diana, but rather Diana seducing Bertram, using her honeyed words to convince him to give up his ring. Her gifts as a conspirator make her an equal to the Countess and Helen. So far in All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare has repeatedly shown women as accomplished manipulators of men. In doing so, however, he has also implicitly underscored how their capacity for manipulation lies as much in their intelligence and resourcefulness as in men’s apparently inherent sexual insatiability.
The ongoing exposure of Bertram’s foolishness reaches a curious climax in scene 3, where the focus ostensibly shifts to Parolles and his cowardice. The interrogation of Parolles is deliberately written for comic effect, as indicated by the fun Shakespeare clearly had in inventing his own nonsense language. But something quite serious is happening beneath the humor. Prior to his arrest, as he wanders alone, we overhear Parolles reflecting plainly on his own cowardice. At first glance, his speech merely confirms what we already know about his penchant to be bolder in speech than in action. But also significant is the simple fact that he’s sufficiently self-aware to recognize this trait. To be sure, his self-consciousness isn’t enough to excuse his treachery. Indeed, the eagerness with which he gives up his companions to the “enemy” is villainously self-serving. However, it’s notable that Parolles emphasizes what is most hypocritical about his companions in their apparent nobility. He denounces both Lords Dumaine for their lack of honor, and he reserves special contempt for the way Bertram treats women. Bertram may rightly curse Parolles as a “damnable both-sides rogue” (4.3.236), but at least Parolles knows this. Bertram, by contrast, remains foolish in his lack of self-knowledge.
Parolles’s response to the humiliation of his unmasking is also important to consider, since it speaks to a more general vulnerability that faces many of the characters in the play. Near the end of the scene, Parolles utters his famous question: “Who cannot be crushed with a plot?” (4.3.346). The reference to plotting here is, for Shakespeare, characteristically twofold. Most immediately, it alludes to the plot that Parolles’s companions have played on him, pretending to arrest and interrogate him to expose his cowardice. Yet in alluding to this plot, Parolles’s words also implicitly reference the plot Helen and Diana have contrived against Bertram. The dramatic irony is therefore palpable as Bertram, a chief coconspirator in the Parolles plot, is also the unwitting object of the bed-trick plot. Bertram is therefore in equal danger of being “crushed.” This point brings us to the second aspect of plotting, which calls to mind the theatrical mechanism of plot. Before the play is over, the audience is sure to see how Helen’s plotting against Bertram will result, just like it did for Parolles, with him being publicly chastened for his villainy. In this way, Bertram has something to learn from the way Parolles accepts his fate by acknowledging his shortcomings and moving on.
