All’s Well That Ends Well’s Paroles and the Bisexual Miles Gloriosus: Early Modern Expectations, Modern Stagings

ABSTRACT

Productions of All’s Well That Ends Well increasingly portray Paroles as gay, bisexual or queer. This article argues that such stagings are not unjustified in that early modern audiences would expect to associate Paroles with same-sex attraction. While it is a critical commonplace that Paroles displays the traits of the classical miles gloriosus or braggart soldier, modern discussions of early modern braggart soldiers omit one trait of the classical version: an open, shame-free bisexuality. This article argues that an awareness of the classical miles gloriosus’ bisexuality established expectations and reception frameworks in early modern audiences when they encountered early modern dramatic braggart soldiers, including Paroles. It then demonstrates textual traces of this. However, if staging Paroles as gay, bisexual or queer today might be justified in terms of this reception history, the ways in which this is done are not always as progressive as they might seem. This is particularly so when evidence of same-sex attraction no longer serves primarily as pleasurable corroboration that Paroles is a miles gloriosus, but instead is framed as a psychological-realist problem, a source of shame to be overcome, and when Paroles’ humiliation scene is staged as sexualised homophobic violence not grounded in the text.

KEYWORDS:

• Parolles
• braggart soldier
• Plautus
• Terence
• early modern reception of roman comedy
• same-sex attraction

Productions of All’s Well That Ends Well increasingly portray Paroles as gay, bisexual or queer. This article argues that such stagings are not unjustified in that early modern audiences would expect to associate Paroles with same-sex attraction. It is a critical commonplace that Paroles displays the traits of the classical miles gloriosus or braggart soldier, surviving examples of which are found in Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus and Terence’s Eunuchus [The Eunuch]: he is a soldier who boasts, exaggerates his experience and competence, uses fancy vocabulary, dresses extravagantly, and is apparently cowardly. But both Plautus’ and Terence’s miles gloriosus have a further trait: an open, shame-free bisexuality.

Martine van Elk notes that, when introducing elements of ancient comedy into their plays, early modern playwrights created expectations in their audiences. Playwrights could then ‘confirm those expectations, subtly transform the model, or radically shift directions, all of which [might] get the audience to reflect on its own relationship to the drama’.¹ Although van Elk does not mention them, I argue here that Terence’s and Plautus’ bisexual milites gloriosi established expectations and reception frameworks in early modern audiences when they encountered early modern dramatic braggart soldiers, including Paroles.² However, if staging Paroles as gay, bisexual or queer today might be justified in terms of this reception history, the ways in which this is done are not always as progressive as they might seem. This is particularly so when evidence of same-sex attraction no longer serves primarily as pleasurable corroboration that Paroles is a miles gloriosus, but instead is framed as a psychological-realist problem, a source of shame to be overcome, and when Paroles’ humiliation scene is staged in terms of sexualised homophobic violence not grounded in the text.

In what follows, I use ‘bisexuality’ and related terms as shorthand for attraction to people of one’s own and other genders, drawing on usage within the contemporary bisexual community that aims to avoid naturalising binary gender identities and that does not assume that such attraction necessarily relates to a consciously adopted bisexual identity. The usage here is intended to be sufficiently flexible to cover sexual attraction in at least three contexts: first, the expressions of sexual attraction of adult men in Roman comedy whose attraction goes beyond a relatively conventional attraction to women and young men to include attraction to adult men and an apparent eunuch; second, the ‘sexual type’ of early modern comedy that Mario DiGangi defines ‘not as the bearer of a sexual identity or subjectivity, but as a familiar cultural figure that renders sexual agency intelligible’; and third, contemporary identitarian sexuality as well as contemporary resistance to identitarian sexuality.³ The flexibility and fluidity of the term within the contemporary bisexual community, the flexibility and fluidity of theatrical responses to the classical miles gloriosus, and the (at least) double set of temporal references that almost all early modern braggart soldiers and some contemporary stagings of Paroles invoke create provocative tensions in understandings of historical and contemporary sexuality.

The Bisexual Miles Gloriosus in Roman Comedy

A stock character in Roman comedy, the miles gloriosus survives in Pyrgopolynices, the title character of Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus, and Thraso in Terence’s Eunuchus. Thraso is unusual in Terence’s plays in expressing same-sex attraction; Pyrgopolynices is unusual in Roman comedy in that he appears to be attracted to apparently free, adult men, rather than only to younger men and slaves. Both plays see the miles gloriosus outwitted by a love rival in his pursuit of a woman; both contain scenes that display the soldier’s attraction to other men. Plautus has the following scene, in which Pyrgopolynices is being trapped in a plot about a fictional pair of twin sisters:

Pyrgopolynices. How do you know they’re here?

Palaestrio. Because I’ve seen her sister here with my own eyes.

Pyrgopolynices. Did she meet her?

Palaestrio. She did.

Pyrgopolynices. Did she seem good-looking?

Palaestrio. You want to get hold of everything.

Pyrgopolynices. Where did the sister say their mother was?

Palaestrio. The captain who brought them here said she was lying on the ship, with bleary and swollen eyes. This captain is lodging at these people’s place.

Pyrgopolynices. What about him? Is he good-looking?

Palaestrio. Go away, will you? You’d have made a proper stallion for the mares, you who pursue both males and females.⁴

That Plautus uses fortis (‘good-looking’ with overtones of strength and power: colloquially ‘hot’) instead of other available terms for attractiveness is presumably not by chance: fortis has the same masculine and feminine form, giving a sense of a lack of differentiation in Pyrgopolynices’ attractions to women and men.

In Terence’s Eunuchus, Thraso repeats a tale of a banquet at which he took to task a young man when the latter began flirting with a prostitute who was accompanying Thraso. Note the grammatically neuter scortum, meaning a prostitute of either sex, and the corresponding neuter pronoun id: it is never clarified whether this is a same-sex or mixed-sex triangle.⁵ I translate scortum as ‘escort’ with a singular ‘they’ pronoun to maintain this effect:

una in convivio erat hic quem dico Rhodius adulescentulus. forte habui scortum. coepit ad id alludere et me irridere. ‘quid ais’, inquam ‘homo impudens? lepus tute’s: pulpamentum quaeris?’⁶

[This young Rhodian man I’m talking about was with me at a banquet. I had an escort along with me, as it happened. He [the Rhodian] began to flirt with them and make fun of me. ‘What are you saying’, said I, ‘you impudent man? Are you on the prowl for a piece of meat when you’re a hare yourself?]⁷

The final line has been taken since antiquity to imply that the Rhodian is himself the object of male sexual attraction (presumably Thraso’s), i.e. is himself a scortum. Aelius Donatus’ fourth-century commentary adds the belief that hares changed sex, ‘modo mas, modo femina’ [sometimes male, sometimes female].⁸ Later, Thraso expresses his attraction for a character whom he believes to be a eunuch, but who is in fact his disguised male love rival: ‘ego illum eunuchum, si opus sit, vel sobrius –’ [I’d [–] that eunuch if it came to it, even if I were sober’].⁹ English word order makes the Latin difficult to translate theatrically while maintaining the literal meaning: Thraso breaks off before completing his sentence with a verb, presumably related to sex.

Plautus in Latin was central to the early modern classical canon, while study of Terence was an integral part of lower grammar-school education, with Latin and bilingual English-Latin editions available.¹⁰ If Thraso’s bisexuality appears less obvious today than that of Pyrgopolynices, early modern Latin and bilingual English-Latin Terence editions drew attention to those passages in which it appears. Jodocus Badius Ascencius’ 1502 Lyon edition, with subsequent sixteenth-century reprints in Lyon, London and Paris, condemns them for immorality. A note to ‘lepus tute’s: pulpamentum quaeris?’ reads ‘sed hic sub eo dicto infamia fœda multa intellegitur quae potius est reticenda quam nimis patefacienda’ [but here beneath this expression lies a very disgusting disgrace about which one should rather keep silent than disclose too much].¹¹ Thraso’s line about the eunuch is glossed as ‘ego indigne tractarem super illum eunuchum si sit opus’ [I would handle that eunuch shamefully if it came to it], with the note ‘fecit aposiopesim propterea quod fedissimum dignum erat et indignissimum auditu' [he broke off his speech because it was extremely disgusting and very shameful to hear].¹²

The 1598 Cambridge English-Latin edition with translations by Richard Bernard is more explanatory and apparently less judgmental. ‘Lepus tute’s: pulpamentum quaeris?’ is translated with a paraphrase, ‘O shamelesse brasen-faced fellow, seekest thou that in another, which thou hast in thyselfe’.¹³ That line in the Latin text is explained as ‘proverbium in muliebria patientem. Ridicula militis verba. [A byword for ‘taking the woman’s part’ [i.e. sexual penetration of a man by another man]. The soldier’s words are laughable].¹⁴ The line is then set for memorisation by learners.¹⁵ Thraso’s ‘ego illum eunuchum … ’ comment is translated as ‘I will downe with that Eunuch, euen when I am fasting, if neede require’, with the comment on the Latin text ‘verecundia eclipsis ob Thaidis præsentiam, ad moderandum obscænum dicta inepti militis’ [the omission of words from coyness is due to the presence of Thais [a female prostitute and Thraso’s lover], in order to restrain the silly soldier’s obscene words].¹⁶ As Demmy Verbeke puts it, ‘the mise-en-page seems to indicate that the publication could be used as a textbook for schools, but also as reading material for lay people who could apply it for self-tuition and moral instruction’.¹⁷ Given both Terence’s and Plautus’ widespread early modern popularity and Thraso and Pyrgopolynices’ shared characteristics, it is difficult therefore to see how the Roman miles gloriosus’ bisexuality could pass unnoticed by readers with a grammar school education, as well as interested others.

Early Modern Textual Traces of the Bisexual Miles Gloriosus

If early modern audiences familiar with Plautus and/or Terence were likely to associate Pyrgopolynices and Thraso with bisexuality, we might expect to find textual traces of this association circulating around early modern braggart soldier characters. Although no early modern dramatic braggart soldier is as forthright about his sexuality as Pyrgopolynices or Thraso, these traces are indeed there. The following examples show a relatively wide variation in how the association of the early modern character with the classical bisexual miles gloriosus relates to plot points or to extended characterisation. This variation runs from an invitation to intertextual recognition with little relevance to plot, through ambiguous references in single scenes available to audience members but not, apparently, to those in the dramatic world and through similar references that seem to be at least potentially available to those in the dramatic world, to more extended characterisation that might comfortably be described in terms of DiGangi’s sexual types. In many cases, a reference to either Plautus or Terence guides the pleasure of recognising references to a trait that corroborates an understanding of the character as a miles gloriosus.

In George Peele’s Old Wives Tale (pub. 1595), the framing story sets up a lens of ‘unnatural’ same-sex sexuality. Three pages lost in the woods are welcomed into the home of Clunch and his wife Madge, who tells the story of the play-within-a-play. However, Madge will only tell the story to two of the pages, sending the other to bed with Clunch: ‘one of you goe lye with him, he is a cleane skind man I tell you, without either spavin or windgall’ (equine disorders, with suggestions of ‘riding’?).¹⁸ When one volunteers, Clunch replies ‘Come on my Lad, thou shalt take thy unnaturall rest with me’.¹⁹ In the play-within-a-play, the braggart soldier Huanebango is literally descended from Plautus’ miles gloriosus: his father is ‘Pergopolyneo’.²⁰ Huanebango uses masculine, feminine and neuter Latin possessive pronouns in the same sentence to refer to a prospective female love object, in contempt, as he says, of all grammar: ‘if this Ladie be so faire as she is said to bee, she is mine, she is mine. Meus, mea, meum, in contemptum omnium Grammaticorum’.²¹ An awareness of Pyrgopolynices’ bisexuality in Miles Gloriosus both activates and adds to the humour of his ‘son’ Huanebango’s unconventional use of gender in Latin in a sexual context. Pleasure thus arises from recognising a direct link between Plautus and Huanebango; although the link is obvious to those who know Plautus, it is not directly related to a plot point, with the result that little beyond the pleasure of recognition is lost if the association is not noted.

Don Adriano de Armado, a Spanish knight in love with Jacquenetta in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (pub. 1598 (Quarto)), is another braggart soldier, this time related to Terence rather than Plautus. Here comedy arises from quibbling references to anal sex in dialogue between men, playable for overt laughs if Armado uses a comic Spanish accent with an emphasis on unintentional meaning-making. Audiences may receive these references as reinforcing the link between Armado and Terence’s Thraso, or as referring to same-sex attraction on Armado’s part, or as both, or indeed may derive pleasure from the ambiguity of meaning that language and intertextual references provide. Before Armado enters in 5.1, Nathaniel describes him in terms of Terence’s Thraso: ‘His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous and thrasonical’.²² This evocation of Thraso then frames a comically extended series of apparently unintentional references to anal sex once Armado arrives. Woudhuysen notes a potential quibble on ‘arse-man’ in Armado’s first words in the scene – ‘Arts-man, perambulate’.²³ A long conversation peppered with similar quibbles follows. As Woudhuysen puts it, ‘Armado’s and Holofernes’ exchange (dunghill … finger’s ends … barbarous … charge-house … mountain … pleasure … posteriors … culled … inward … excrement) and the many “ass” sounds […] may suggest banter about sodomy and excretion’.²⁴ This culminates in Armado’s long boast about his intimacy with the king that includes the following: ‘For I must tell thee it will please his grace, by the world, sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder and with his royal finger thus dally with my excrement, my mustachio’.²⁵ Even if the excretion- and sodomy-related quibbles are understood as unintentional on the part of the speakers, Armado’s description of the king is understandable as a boast of same-sex romantic intimacy if not sexual practice. Significantly, for our purpose, Armado’s boasts here are ‘thrasonical’ in that they reflect Thraso’s boasts in Eunuchus about his intimacy with the king, delivered, moreover, immediately before his banquet anecdote.²⁶

Sir John Falstaff is another Shakespearean braggart soldier; references to his wide-ranging sexual attraction provide an element of character consistency across the history plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and are at least arguably recognised within the dramatic world. In Henry IV, Part 2 (pub. 1600 (Quarto)), for example, Mistress Quickly says of Falstaff: ‘’A cares not what mischief he does; if his weapon be out, he will foin like any devil. He will spare neither man, woman nor child’.²⁷ James Bulman glosses ‘foin’ as ‘a fencing term meaning lunge or thrust with a pointed weapon – hence, pierce or prick – here with phallic overtones […]. In Falstaff’s willingness to spare no one when his weapon is out, the Hostess grants him a kind of indiscriminate sexual appetite’.²⁸ A few lines later Mistress Quickly addresses Falstaff as ‘Ah, thou honeyseed rogue! Thou art a honeyseed, a man queller and a woman queller!’²⁹ While Bulman glosses ‘queller’ as ‘killer (OED quell v. 1), with a bawdy pun on woman queller as a man who quells, or subdues, a woman’s lust’, the strict division of the meaning of homophones by gender (and therefore sexuality) of the referent is neither compulsory nor controllable in the hearer, especially if the quibble on Falstaff’s bisexuality only a few lines earlier has been appreciated.³⁰ Indeed, that the quibbles are placed so close together suggests they are designed to reinforce each other.

A further such trace occurs in The Merry Wives of Windsor (pub. 1602 (Quarto)) in dialogue between Falstaff and Pistol, another braggart soldier:

Falstaff. My honest lads, I will tell you what I am about.

Pistol. Two yards, and more.

Falstaff. No quips now, Pistol – Indeed I am in the waist two yards about.³¹

Although Falstaff aims to curb potential ‘quips’ or quibbles, it is not clear whether these refer only to Pistol’s ‘about’ (the common critical position) or also to ‘yards’.³² A non-bawdy version finds a quibble on ‘about’ as meaning both ‘occupied with, attending to’ and ‘in circumference’.³³ ‘Yards’ then refers straightforwardly to units of measurement. However, ‘yard’ was a common and not necessarily bawdy term for the penis. A potential combined quibble on both ‘about’ and ‘yards’ is thus available with the additional meaning of ‘to be principally concerned with; to be in favour of or fond of’ for ‘about’ and ‘penises’ for ‘yards’: Falstaff is fond of situations that bring two penises together and lead further.³⁴ The standard Merry Wives editions note the quibble on ‘about’ but are silent on ‘yards’, although bawdy quibbles on ‘yard’ are relatively frequent in early modern drama. Beyond an editorial blindness to the potential for same-sex attraction or a heterosexualising desire to avoid discussing this, it is difficult to see why bawdy quibbles on ‘yard’ should be restricted to heterosexual contexts. This is especially so in relation to two braggart soldiers, one of whom has already been associated with bisexuality-related quibbles in an earlier play.³⁵

Captain Bobadill in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (perf. 1598; pub. 1601 (Quarto), 1616 (Folio)) is relatively unusual in that his reception as a sexual type extends throughout the play. For those familiar with Terence in Latin, the Quarto sets up Eunuchus as a potential reception framework with a quotation from that play: ‘But there’s the question now, if he should prove, rimarum plenus, then, ‘sblood, I were rook’d’.³⁶ From their first meeting, an atmosphere of both opposite-sex and same-sex romance and sexuality surrounds Bobadill and Mathew, an incompetent poet, who become inseparable after bonding over a love of The Spanish Tragedy.³⁷ Mathew then appears to flirt with Bobadill:

But when will you come and see my study? Good faith, I can shew you some very good things I have done of late. – That boot becomes your leg passing well, captain, methinks.³⁸

The scene then proceeds to physical comedy as Bobadill gives Mathew a fencing lesson in which, as James Bromley puts it, ‘the homoerotic charge […] is only thinly veiled’.³⁹ Further apparent openness to the possibility of same-sex attraction occurs when Bobadill and Mathew leave at the end of the scene, with Bobadill saying ‘and then we’ll call upon young Wellbred: perhaps we shall meet the Corydon his brother there, and put him to the question’.⁴⁰ ‘Corydon’, here referring to Wellbred’s countryfied brother Downright, is a stock name for a rustic, with classical homosexual associations: the herdsman Corydon of Virgil’s second Eclogue is in love with the young man Alexis. Act Three begins with an odd one-sided argument in which Bobadill seems to fear that Wellbred will attack him for making amorous advances on Downright:

Mathew [To Wellbred]. Yes, faith, sir, we were at your lodging to seek you too.

Wellbred. Oh, I came not there tonight.

Bobadill. Your brother delivered us as much.

Wellbred. Who, my brother Downright?

Bobadill. He. Mr Wellbred, I know not in what kind you hold me, but let me say to you this: as sure as honour, I esteem it so much out of the sunshine of reputation to throw the least beam of regard upon such a –

Wellbred. Sir, I must hear no ill words of my brother.

Bobadill. I protest to you, as I have a thing to be saved about me, I never saw any gentlemanlike part –

Wellbred. Good captain, faces about: to some other discourse.

Bobadill. With your leave, sir, an there were no more men living upon the face of the earth, I should not fancy him, by St. George!⁴¹

Later, Downright refers to Mathew as Bobadill’s ‘consort’.⁴² However, Bobadill’s sexual attractions are not understood as being restricted to men: Kitely and Cob both suspect him of at least having made sexual advances on their wives. This extended characterisation of the braggart soldier as a sexual type with his own recognisable and expected sexual ‘speciality’ allows Bobadill to find his place in a play populated with other character types.

Further evidence that an association of the miles gloriosus and bisexuality was expected in early modern England can be found beyond stage drama in three different seventeenth-century English translations of a 1607 bilingual French and Spanish satire, Rodomontades espagnoles: Rodomuntados castellanos, consisting of outrageous boasts by a Spanish soldier. The first, from 1610, was followed in 1630 by one with accompanying French text, entitled Miles Gloriosus, the Spanish Bragadoccio, a clear link to Pyrgopolynices. The third appeared in 1672, also with accompanying French text. While, predictably, the soldier’s boasts include his sexual irresistibleness, in the 1607 French and Spanish texts, the 1610 translation and the French text accompanying the 1630 and 1672 translations he only claims to be irresistible to women. The French reads:

Qui sera ceste tres grande eshontée, qui ne deuiendra amoureuse de ceste forte cuisse, de ce bras puissant, de ceste poictrine de toutes forces et vaillantises, de ce visage plus beau que celuy de Ganimede de celuy de Didon, ni encore de celuy d’Absalon?⁴³

The 1630 translation, however, translates ‘ceste tres grande eshontée’ [this great shameless woman] as ‘shamelesse fellow’, thus setting up all men as potentially open to same-sex desire:

What shamelesse fellow shall there bee, which shall not bee enamoured of this strong thigh, of this puissant arme, of this breast full of all strength and valiantnesse, of this countenance more beautifull then that of Ganymede, then that of Dido, then that of Narcissus, yea then that of Absolon?⁴⁴

The 1672 translation then removes any reference to the gender of the hypothetical person immune to the soldier’s attractions, beginning ‘Who is so shamelesly impudent, as not to fall in love with this strong thigh of mine […]’.⁴⁵ If Pyrgopolnices and Thraso are wide-ranging in their sexual attractions, the 1630 and 1672 anglophone soldiers set themselves out as wide-ranging in their sexual attractiveness. That these changes from the original occur in translations that are otherwise accurate suggests the strength of the expectation of an association between bisexuality and the miles gloriosus throughout the early modern period.

Paroles as Miles Gloriosus

Not every early modern dramatic miles gloriosus leaves textual traces of same-sex attraction – the title character of Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (pub. 1567), the earliest known English dramatic miles gloriosus, for example, does not. However, if we accept a date for All’s Well of between 1605 and 1608, theatregoers already had sufficient examples of early modern milites gloriosi in earlier plays to expect Paroles to be associated with bisexuality, even for those with no direct experience of Plautus or Terence.⁴⁶

As we have seen above, traces of same-sex attraction relating to Shakespeare’s earlier braggart soldiers such as Falstaff, Pistol and Don Armado tend to occur in a single passage in their play, are usually associated with or expressed by one other character, and are not intrinsically linked to plot. In contrast, such textual traces associated with Paroles are spread more widely throughout the play and are raised by multiple characters, including, perhaps, by himself, and, as I argue below, help reinforce a plot point. In one case, the association is rather recherché, relying on an audience member’s knowledge of Aristophanes. Paroles therefore appears closer to Jonson’s Bobadill in his construction than to other Shakespearean braggart soldiers.

Paroles is also an unusual Shakespearean miles gloriosus in that, rather than audiences recognising the type by observing traits of the miles gloriosus in action, Helen sets the soldier up as such immediately before we meet him: ‘I know him a notorious liar, / Think him a great way fool, solely a coward’.⁴⁷ This framing prompts audiences to set up reception strategies alert to corroborating evidence of Paroles-as-miles-gloriosus as well as of Helen’s ability to judge character. Indeed, Gossett and Wilcox’s Arden 3 edition suggests that a string of quibbles on ‘under Mars’ and Paroles going ‘backward’ made by Helen in her first scene with Paroles may be ‘a hint that Paroles engages in anal intercourse, as one who goes Under or backward to a stronger man, a Mars’.⁴⁸ On a cold reading, as quibbles go these seem rather inert. However, when approached through a combination of Helen’s framing of Paroles as a miles gloriosus and early modern expectations for that type, early modern audiences might well have found these quibbles more easily activated.

To modern ears, the most obvious moment of apparent same-sex attraction occurs when Paroles addresses Bertram twice as ‘sweet heart’.⁴⁹ While Gossett and Wilcox gloss ‘sweet heart’ as ‘a general term of affection’, Shakespeare uses it in romantic and sexual senses elsewhere, and an actor’s delivery is likely to determine how audiences receive the expression.⁵⁰ It is worth noting that Shakespeare’s only other male character to use the term or its variants to address another man is Don Armado, another miles gloriosus.⁵¹ While, as I show below, the term is sometimes used to justify staging Paroles as gay, bisexual or queer, I would argue that it is a tool for staging Paroles in this way, rather than firm evidence that he should be staged this way.

Less obvious is Lafeu’s description of Paroles as ‘a snipped-taffeta fellow there whose villainous saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of his nature in his colour’.⁵² For those familiar with Aristophanes, saffron in relation to dress has obvious resonances with homosexuality. Knowledge of Greek was not necessary to read Aristophanes in early modern England: Andreas Divus’ Latin translation of all his surviving plays, first published in 1538, was reprinted multiple times throughout the sixteenth century. Two passages link homosexuality to males wearing saffron robes, usually worn by women in ancient Greek ritual contexts. In Frogs, Dionysus wears a lionskin over a saffron robe. When questioned by Hercules about his get-up, Dionysus replies that he has been ‘struggling’ with Clisthenes, noted repeatedly in Aristophanes for his effeminate homosexuality, with a play on ‘struggling’ (‘bellabam cum Clisthenes’).⁵³ In Thesmophoriazusae, Euripides and Mnesilochus, aiming to infiltrate women’s rites, visit Agathon, a cross-dressing homosexual male poet, to borrow a female disguise. On trying on a saffron robe, Mnesilochus exclaims that it smells sweetly of penis (‘suave quidem olet membrum virile’).⁵⁴ While those familiar with Aristophanes will have been significantly fewer than those familiar with Terence, for the former the specificity of Lafeu’s ‘saffron’ is likely to have provoked associations with homosexuality.

The most significant textual traces, both in terms of their density and their ability to clarify a potentially confusing moment in the plot, are clustered in Paroles’ humiliation scene when his abusers read his letter in the form of a truncated sonnet warning Diana of Bertram’s intentions and character. Before the letter is read, Paroles tells its purpose, and refers to Bertram as ‘a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity and devours up all the fry it finds’, at which Bertram exclaims in an aside ‘Damnable both-sides rogue!’.⁵⁵ Frankie Rubinstein’s Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns defines ‘both-sides’ as ‘ambisexual; lechery’ and glosses Bertram’s outburst as ‘he is a traitor and an ambisexual: damned by the Bible and by law’; Gossett and Wilcox quote Rubinstein in notes to Bertram’s line.⁵⁶

Part of Paroles’ sonnet-letter reads ‘And say, Dian, a soldier told thee this: / Men are to mell with, boys are not to kiss’. As Edward Capell noted in the eighteenth century, the jarring rhyming lines of the couplet where we would expect alternating rhymes ‘break out into a different topick, that has no relation to what goes before it, nor with what it is follow’d by’ in a sonnet that otherwise ‘is advising Diana to make a real and present profit of [Bertram’s] impatience, and not depend on his promises’.⁵⁷ While Capell concludes that Shakespeare must have intended to remove these lines on revision, and that later editors should omit them, their oddness makes them stand out for consideration in terms of other expectations.⁵⁸ Although an age difference between Bertram and Paroles is never explicitly mentioned, a common reading of the second line represents an older Paroles’ deceiving young Bertram and wooing Diana for himself: Paroles is the man with whom Diana should ‘mell’, i.e. have sex. However, an equally plausible reading of the whole couplet has Paroles advising Diana from his own experience of melling with men: ‘and tell him that I, a soldier, told you to take it from me that you’ll have a better time having sex with a man than kissing a boy’. This of course does not preclude the possibility of the lines also being meant to woo Diana. Indeed, if we receive Paroles through the frame of the bisexual miles gloriosus it appropriately does both.

If we rely on Shakespeare’s text alone for character creation, Bertram’s ‘Damnable both-sides rogue!’ seems more appropriate after Paroles’ ‘men are to mell with’ rather than before. However, if Paroles is received with the full set of early modern expectations of a miles gloriosus, the interjection can function in comic metatheatrical terms. Bertram, alone in not seeing through Paroles’ miles gloriosus traits, finally recognises what is obvious to all: an unexpected accusation of bisexuality would indicate that he shares with the audience a framing of that recognition not only in terms of the onstage world, but in terms of the miles gloriosus. We might also see this as a prompt to be alert for further indications of bisexuality, an alertness soon rewarded in the ‘And say, Dian’ couplet.

Rubinstein suggests that ‘When [Shakespeare’s] lines seem trite, self-evident, repetitive, or even lacking in sense, it may be that a pun carries the meaning’.⁵⁹ Bertram’s line ‘I could endure anything before but a cat, and now he’s a cat to me’ after the letter has been read, and subsequent repetitions of ‘cat’ as an epithet for Paroles therefore suggest a quibble.⁶⁰ Rubinstein argues here for ‘cat’ as ‘catamite’.⁶¹ A reception of Paroles’ ‘Men are to mell with’ couplet informed by a framing of Paroles as a bisexual miles gloriosus might plausibly be advanced as evidence for Bertram’s cat-as-catamite reaction.

I propose that the fate of another early modern dramatic miles gloriosus, Captain Face in Lording Barry’s Ram Alley, corroborates the sense of cat-as-catamite and also clarifies Shakespeare’s approach to Paroles. Although the span of their likely dates is almost identical, the lack of precise dating for either All’s Well or Ram Alley makes it impossible to attribute influence of one play on the other. In both plays the miles gloriosus is subjected to a scene of humiliation at a similar point in the action (4.3 in All’s Well, 4.2 in Ram Alley), but the treatment of that humiliation differs.⁶² At the beginning of his humiliation scene, Face is described to other characters as ‘an outlandish beast / That has but two legs, bearded like a man, / Nosed like a goose, and tongued like a woman, / Lately brought from the land of Catita’.⁶³ As Robert Fraser argues, this presents Face as ‘an androgynous catamite’ with ‘Catita’ as ‘the land of sodomites, as is suggested by Marston in The Malcontent, when Malevole refers to “a knight of the land of Catito [who] shall play at trap [i.e. commit sodomy] with any page in Europe” (I iii 57-8)’.⁶⁴ Face’s humiliation follows this description and seems clearly related to it: as Fraser puts it, Face ‘is being represented as an androgynous sodomite, and he is clearly, on that account, persona non grata. There is no sympathy for him amongst the characters, and there will be no sympathy for him, we can safely assume, in the audience: this is the sodomite as the excluded person, and there can be little doubt that the laughter will be at his expense’.⁶⁵ Face’s humiliation, consisting of being treated as an animal trained to jump at the sight of a shaken whip, does not implicate his tormentors in a critique of their own behaviour.

In contrast, Paroles’ humiliation is designed both to expose and punish his military cowardice; there is no suggestion that it is linked to same-sex attraction. Bertram’s ‘cat to me’, occurring late in the scene, is a result rather than cause of that humiliation, and is not taken up by other soldiers. Further, Paroles’ descriptions of their poor hygiene, cowardice, criminality and disreputable heterosexual behaviour potentially humiliate Bertram and the Dumaine brothers, although only Bertram seems to take offence. Paroles’ exposure of his fellow-soldiers’ faults ensures that if audiences laugh at him in his humiliation scene, they, like at least the first Dumaine brother, are also likely to laugh with him. While Face is not heard of again after his humiliation, Paroles’ remaining scenes leave us in no doubt that such actions have physical and mental consequences for the victim if not for the perpetrators. Nonetheless, Paroles is not excluded at the end of the play. If London’s Ram Alley cannot accommodate Face, in All’s Well’s France ‘there’s place and means for every man alive’.⁶⁶

Modern Stagings

Polish director Konrad Swinarski’s 1971 Wrocław staging appears to be the first overtly homosexually-themed All’s Well. Grzegorz Niziołek writes:

In Shakespeare’s play, homosexual relationships are not explicitly mentioned, but here Swinarski made them clear in stage actions. No one in the audience could have any doubts regarding the feelings between Parolles and Bertram in the first act or the reason Lafew decided to take care of Parolles when he was abandoned by Bertram.⁶⁷

Niziołek reports that one critic attacked the production for importing a ‘complex about homosexual impairment’ into what should be ‘an incarnation of the swaggering soldier’.⁶⁸ Although this critic’s approach is clearly homophobic, in one respect it is justified: the shame-free bisexuality of the classical miles gloriosus is far from a ‘complex about homosexual impairment’. Swinarski’s approach was not unprecedented. While not widespread, critical attempts to solve some of All’s Well’s apparent characterisation difficulties by theorising a sexual or romantic relationship between Paroles and Bertram have existed since at least the mid-twentieth century (although if we accept Bertram’s cat-as-catamite reaction, he and Paroles appear not to have had a sexual relationship, however much this would create psychologically plausible motivations for both men). In 1951, for example, Harold Goddard in his influential The Meaning of Shakespeare writes that as ‘seducer of Bertram, [Paroles] becomes centrally important’.⁶⁹ Caldwell Titcomb then argued in the Harvard Crimson for 30 July 1959 that ‘the first two acts make real sense only if one assumes a homosexual relationship between Bertram and Paroles; yet the last half of the play precludes this situation’. This was unusual, however: Jules Rothman in his 1972 ‘Vindication of Paroles’ simply rejects Goddard’s description without discussing it further. Paroles could not be ‘vindicated’ and have a history of same-sex attraction.⁷⁰

Polish-trained director Helena Kaut-Howson subsequently introduced Paroles-as-homosexual to British theatre from the late 1980s (Haymarket, Leicester, 1987; Theatr Clwyd, 1993; Regent’s Park, London, 1997), with presentations of Paroles’ sexuality varying across her productions. At Leicester,

Kevin McMonagle portrayed a sleek, decadent Parolles wearing his black clothes, beads, chains and scarves like a homosexual uniform. Traditionally played with blustering bravado, this Parolles remained coolly superior even to Lafeu: “You are too old Sir” was a sexual rejection.⁷¹

Reviews of the Theatr Clwyd production describe Paroles as ‘a cross between Adam Ant and Gary Glitter with a liberal dash of fishnet and chiffon’ and complain that John Baxter’s Paroles ‘makes virtually no use of the words but presents a monochrome impersonation of Julian Clary, a camp cliché visiting every scene with blatantly felonious intent’.⁷² In the London production ‘homosexuality was hinted at in the relationship between Parolles and Bertram as well as in that between Parolles and Lafew. The torture of Parolles, who was stripped to his underpants, included the threat of homosexual rape, and Nigel Planer as Parolles played this moment as completely traumatic’.⁷³

While certainly not ubiquitous, twenty-first-century gay, bisexual or queer Paroles have been staged across the world. How Paroles’ sexuality is signalled to the audience varies. A review for the Berkshire Fine Arts blog of Tina Packer’s 2008 production in Lenox, Massachusetts, for example, described Paroles’ performer as using ‘every gay cliché that has ever existed’. In contrast, Nancy Meckler’s 2013 Royal Shakespeare Company version took a psychological-realist approach to sexuality and character, with a Paroles who, as The Telegraph’s review for 28 July 2013 put it, ‘clearly has the hots for’ Bertram. The production’s prominent press coverage widened the awareness of the potential for staging Paroles as gay. Michael Billington’s Guardian review of 27 July 2013, identifying Paroles as ‘a closeted gay man’, found that Paroles’ ‘palpable relief when his true nature is revealed, and he learns that “simply the thing I am shall make me live”, is particularly moving’. Non-professional reviews echoed this: for instance, the Civilian Theatre blog for August 2013 believed that Shakespeare had not intended a gay Paroles but that

the sense of his sexuality as subtext is reinforced during Parolles’ soliloquy and the subsequent ‘interrogation’ scene. Watching Parolles’ prattle it is remarked that ‘Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?’ (IV.I), which can be clearly understood to have a dual meaning in this context and is reinforced later by the emphasis placed on Parolles’ ‘Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live’ (IV.iii). To a modern audience it is clear that we are watching someone wrestling with the truth about himself and a reflexive acknowledgment of the need to face his own nature.

A plotline that moves Paroles from closeted to self-accepting gay man reflects a specifically contemporary understanding of sexuality, and one that is not in itself particularly liberating. Instead of the temporary liberation from identity construction that Paroles’ soliloquy might appear to invoke and that, as David Ellis puts it, allows ‘the audience to share in the utopian escape from the necessity of having any character at all’, this overlaying of a now highly conventionalised narrative of sexual self-acceptance places a fixed, essentialising identity at the centre of the scene.⁷⁴ Nonetheless, it provides a ready point of empathy for audiences used to both an acceptance of homosexuality as a marker of liberal modernity and to the coming-out story as the archetypal gay narrative. If Paroles’ closeted sexuality makes the character dramaturgically more palatable to modern audiences by creating a coherent psychology for a stage character notable for his disjunctive character traits, it is also a problem underpinning and explaining his other lies: alongside the dropping of his bravado act, Paroles’ sexual self-acceptance following his humiliation at the hands of his fellow soldiers then leads to his finding his appropriate place in society. The onus is on the closeted homosexual, not society, to change.

Ted Witzel’s 2016 Toronto All’s Well staged another closeted Paroles in love with Bertram (a ‘loud, arrogant, overbearing, woman-chasing bro type, but with a secret’, as the Digital Journal’s 16 July 2016 review put it). Here Paroles’ humiliation scene was related to Paroles’ perceived sexuality: staged as a gay-bashing by his fellow soldiers, it saw Paroles tortured with a butt-plug attached to a drill. Following his ‘simply the thing I am’ soliloquy, Paroles signalled his self-acceptance and public ‘coming out’ by ending the play in a zebra-print dress. While Reto Winckler has argued convincingly for Paroles as a critique of masculine honour in that his ‘embracing “effeminate” folly [brings about his] liberation’, the production in twenty-first-century terms risked reinforcing oppressive externally-focused stereotypes rather than showing an inner pathway to liberation.⁷⁵ In Cape Town, also in 2016, Geoffrey Hyland’s production took a wider view of sexual attraction, staging a perhaps bisexual Paroles ‘with a limp wrist, a tendency to flirt with everyone on stage, and a hint of unrequited love in his interactions with Bertram possibly inspired by a moment in the text where Parolles addresses his friend as “sweetheart”’.⁷⁶ As with Witzel’s production, Paroles’ humiliation scene featured sexualised men-on-man violence, ending with Paroles abandoned and naked. Tara Leverton’s review notes the difficult line that stagings walk when ‘the perpetrators escape chastisement while the victims are forced to amend their errant ways’.⁷⁷ This is particularly the case where these errant ways appear to include, as with Meckler’s and Witzel’s productions, failing to embrace one’s homosexuality publicly. Even (or especially) in productions featuring a finally happy Paroles, the more the humiliation scene is characterised by sexualised violence, the more important it is that directors signal clearly whether the lack of consequences for Paroles’ soldier tormentors should be received as provocative social commentary (and whether on contemporary society or on the past) or as approbation of their action. Given that lesbian, gay and bisexual people have been able to serve openly in the Canadian and South African armies since the 1990s, productions with apparently contemporary settings risk seeming anachronistic and reactionary.

Two 2022 productions depicted Paroles’ sexuality in ways that relied less on creating empathy in straight audience members or on signalling sexuality in terms recognisable to them, and that did not straightforwardly identify Paroles’ humiliation and soliloquy as a turning point in his sexual self-acceptance. Blanche McIntyre’s Royal Shakespeare Company All’s Well did not obviously portray Paroles in terms of sexual attraction. However, appropriately enough in a production with selfies and memes as a visual theme, for viewers familiar with gay popular culture Paroles’ at-least-not-straight sexuality became readable in the final scene through costume, blocking and intertextual referencing. Dressed in a white bathrobe and with his head wrapped in a towelling turban, Paroles sat next to Lafeu and assumed the ‘pajama party position’ (torso upright, legs to the side and tucked under), a meme originating in the American sitcom Will & Grace in 2017: Sean Hayes’ gay character Jack Macfarland named and demonstrated the position while wearing a kimono and shower cap with the line ‘No heterosexual man ever sat this way’. For the Utah Shakespeare Festival, non-binary performer Kevin Kantor played Paroles as secretly in love with Bertram but also as openly, readably queer throughout, wearing make-up and a corset under their uniform and with their long hair contrasting with the other soldiers’ short Edwardian-era haircuts. Although at the end, Kantor’s Paroles had ‘been stripped of some of [their] fabulousness’, they still wore a corset and still presented as recognisably queer. They were also still angry about their earlier treatment by their fellow-soldiers: as Kantor, put it, they were ‘not interested in telling a reformation story’.⁷⁸ Kantor has discussed the complications of playing the humiliation scene with a queer Paroles: while actors playing other characters may have motivations for their actions based, for example, on ‘Paroles’s perceived proximity to power in their relationship to Bertram’, the actor playing a queer Paroles ‘thinks that their core motivation is grounded in prejudice against explicitly, visibly queer people and that that is what we will receive as an audience, at least to an extent’.⁷⁹ Kantor’s comments on this ‘important, ugly, messy truth’ are a useful reminder that staging Paroles as gay, bisexual or queer does not simply solve characterisation problems: it also comes with a responsibility to actors, audiences and the wider public.⁸⁰

Conclusion

If the description of Paroles as ‘vicious in his tastes’ in the 1908 Boswell-Stone edition of the play might refer obliquely to Paroles’ sexuality, editions of the play have otherwise been mostly silent on the matter.⁸¹ However, more recent editors have brought it to readers’ attention. For example, as part of a textual analysis exercise, the Cambridge School edition quotes Swinarski’s view that ‘the whole story between Bertram and Parolles is really a homosexual story’.⁸² The Arden 3 edition notes that Paroles’ ‘misuse of his role as companion and advisor and his denigration of marital intercourse may have a homoerotic subtext that forms another aspect of the play’s exploration of sexuality’ and, as mentioned above, glosses some lines with reference to potential same-sex attraction.⁸³ Such editorial discussions, combined with increasingly common staging practices and media accounts of these, are likely to result in audiences again approaching the play with a reception framework open to finding a gay, bisexual or queer Paroles.

The varied ways in which bisexuality is associated with the early modern miles gloriosus offer a range of ‘justifications’ for what might seem presentist and interventionist staging options. However, for those concerned with textual justification, a Paroles-as-closet-case who finds sexual self-acceptance through his humiliation, and soldiers who subject Paroles to homophobic sexualised violence appear to be the most difficult to justify textually, however much this creates psychologically plausible character motivation and provides straight, liberal audiences with a recognisable gay storyline and an opportunity to feel empathy. Given the difficulties in creating examinations of contemporary sexuality tailored to local contexts while remaining within the play’s structure, this form of staging is also difficult to justify socially. By associating Paroles with sexualised homophobic violence and portraying same-sex attraction as a problem to be overcome, productions risk investing these approaches to sexuality with Shakespearean authority and a sense of historical naturalness, especially as many audience members will be unfamiliar with All’s Well.

There are, however, more positive and more imaginative ways in which gay, bisexual or queer Paroles might be staged that revive early modern approaches to the miles gloriosus. For example, McIntyre’s ‘pajama party position’ meme, like several other early modern examples, relies on gay-themed intertextual knowledge to produce a non-straight Paroles whose sexuality does not need to serve a plot purpose but that provides a pleasurable moment of recognition for at least some audience members. All’s Well’s fairy-tale aspects also give productions some leeway in suggesting alternatives to assumptions that link same-sex attraction with oppression and isolation: for example, productions might draw on the classical miles gloriosus’ openness about his sexuality and link this to characterisation in others, rather than just Paroles: a Paroles who flirts indiscriminately, as in Hyland’s production, might routinely receive positive responses to his advances, with only Bertram blind to the wide range of sexualities around him. To signal Paroles as gay, bisexual or queer without implying that his attitude to his sexuality is another of his character flaws that needs to be cured by humiliation and/or violence is an opportunity to surprise, delight and challenge audiences.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 van Elk, ‘Thou Shalt Present Me’, 422.

2 Daniel Boughner’s note that Plautus’ soldier ‘is a chaser of both sexes but makes adultery his leading interest’ is a rare mention of the miles gloriosus’ bisexuality in a study of early modern drama. However, Boughner does not relate this aspect of Plautus’s soldier to early modern drama (Boughner, Braggart in Renaissance Comedy, 13n).

3 DiGangi, Sexual Types, 5.

4 Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, 263, trans. Wolfgang de Milo, translating ll.1104–1113.

5 See, for example, Smith and Lockwood, Chambers-Murray Latin Dictionary, 667: ‘scortum […] a harlot, prostitute; a lewd person of either sex’.

6 Terence, Eunuchus, 1.2.423–426.

7 Translations my own unless otherwise indicated. The major English translators translate the scortum as female and thus heterosexualise the Rhodian’s attraction to the scortum (and often desexualise the scortum’s role), masking the passage’s gender ambiguity for those unfamiliar with Latin, and, crucially, obscuring the suggestion of an equivalence of the scortum and the Rhodian in Thraso’s punchline.

8 Wessner, Aeli Donati Commentum Terentii, 363–64.

9 Terence, Eunuchus, 3.2.479.

10 For extended discussions of the early modern reception of Plautus and Terence and their influence on Shakespeare, see for example Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine; Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy; Riehle, Shakespeare, Plautus; van Elk, ‘Thou Shalt Present Me’; Franko, ‘Plautus in Early Modern England’.

11 Terence, Comedies, 79.

12 Ibid., 82.

13 Terence, Terence in English, 139.

14 Ibid., 137. Latin ridiculus [laughter-provoking] can be positive (e.g. amusing, funny) or negative (e.g. absurd, ridiculous, silly).

15 Ibid., 141.

16 ‘I will downe’: ibid.,143; ‘verecundia’: ibid., 141.

17 Verbeke, ‘Types of Bilingual Presentation’, 77.

18 Peele, Old Wives Tale, ll.93–95.

19 Ibid., ll.93–94.

20 Ibid., l.289.

21 Ibid., ll.280–282.

22 Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.1.9-12.

23 Ibid., 229.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 5.1.94–98.

26 Terence, Eunuchus, 1.2.397–410.

27 Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, 2.1.14–17.

28 Ibid., 214.

29 Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, 2.1.51–2.

30 Ibid., 218.

31 Shakespeare, Merry Wives, ed. Melchiori, 1.3.38.

32 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘quip 1b. A verbal equivocation; a quibble; a subtle or cunning argument’.

33 Ibid.,‘about I.5. In circumference […] IV.11.a. Occupied with, attending to; dealing with; interfering or meddling in; attempting’.

34 Ibid., ‘about IV.10.c(c). to be principally concerned with; to be in favour of or fond of’; ‘yard 11a. the virile member, penis’.

35 For discussions of practices of editorial glossing that close down potential references to same-sex attraction in Shakespeare, as well as for editorial strategies that avoid this, see Masten, Queer Philologies, 213–44; Traub, Thinking Sex, 171–226.

36 Jonson, Every Man in, 3.1.52–53 (Quarto). ‘rimarum plenus’: full of cracks, i.e. cannot keep secrets, quoting Eunuchus, 1.105: plenus rimarum sum, hac atque illac perfluo [I’m full of cracks: I leak all over the place]. A translation replaces this quotation in the Folio’s equivalent speech: ‘there is all the doubt. But should he have a chink in him, I were gone’ (Jonson, Every Man in, 3.3.61 (Folio)).

37 For the following I use the Folio’s character names. The Folio quotations used are found with little or no variation in the Quarto. For extended discussions of queerness and same-sex attraction in Every Man in His Humour, see Hutson, ‘Liking Men’ and Bromley, Clothing and Queer Style, 37–77.

38 Jonson, Every Man In, 1.5.61–63 (Folio).

39 Bromley, Clothing and Queer Style, 61.

40 Jonson, Every Man In, 1.3.141–142 (Folio).

41 Ibid., 3.1.1–13 (Folio).

42 Ibid., 4.7.104 (Folio).

43 Anon, Miles Gloriosus, 28 [French section pagination]

44 Anon., Miles Gloriosus, 27 [English section pagination]. The translation’s ‘Narcissus’ is not unjustified: the 1607 edition’s Spanish text includes Narcissus in the list.

45 Anon., Al-Man-Sir, 36.

46 For a discussion of dating All’s Well, see Suzanne Gossett’s introduction in Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 13–24.

47 Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 99–101.

48 Ibid, 1.1.189–197; 142n.

49 Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 2.3.266; 2.3.268.

50 Ibid., 214.

51 Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.1.97; 5.1.101.

52 Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 4.5.1-4.

53 Aristophanes, Aristophanis comicorum principis, 50r.

54 Ibid., 219v.

55 Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 4.3.215–218.

56 Rubinstein, Dictionary, 31; Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 283.

57 Capell, Notes and Variant Readings, 19.

58 Ibid., 20.

59 Rubinstein, Dictionary, x.

60 Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 4.3.233–234; 4.3.258; 4.3.268.

61 Rubinstein, Dictionary, 31. Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 284n cites Rubinstein, adding: ‘If Paroles is depicted as gay as in some modern productions, the line may emphasize Bertram’s change in feeling toward him’.

62 Ram Alley was first published in 1611, likely performed during Barry’s association with the short-lived Children of the King’s Revels (1607–1608), and possibly written before this (Fraser, ‘Ram Alley’, 86-88), placing it almost contemporaneously with assumed dates for All’s Well.

63 Fraser, Ram Alley, 4.1.148–151.

64 Ibid., 316n.

65 Ibid, 110.

66 Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 4.4.330.

67 Niziołek, ‘Homosexuals in Swinarksi’s Productions’, 3.

68 Ibid.

69 Goddard, Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 2, 44.

70 Rothman, ‘Vindication of Parolles’, 184.

71 Cochrane, ‘All’s Well’, 88.

72 ‘a cross between’, Evening Leader review, 20 January 1993, quoted in Schafer, Ms-Directing Shakespeare, 116; ‘makes virtually’, Independent review, 22 January 1993.

73 Schafer, Ms-Directing Shakespeare, 116.

74 Ellis, ‘Finding a Part’, 298.

75 Winckler, ‘Paroles, Honour’s Fool’, 383.

76 Leverton, ‘Lions and Hinds’, 95–96.

77 Ibid., 96.

78 Smith-Bernstein, ‘Acting Shakespeare’, 82–83.

79 Ibid., 83.

80 Ibid.

81 Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Boswell-Stone, ix.

82 Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Huddlestone and Innes, 110.

83 Shakespeare, All’s Well, ed. Gossett and Wilcox, 74.