Shakespeare · Lewkenor · Soldiers and strangers
All’s Well That Ends Well: The Florentine General and the Soldier of Words
DUKE: The general of our horse thou art; and we,
Great in our hope, lay our best love and credence
Upon thy promising fortune.BERTRAM: Sir, it is
A charge too heavy for my strength, but yet
We’ll strive to bear it for your worthy sake
To the extreme edge of hazard.
All’s Well That Ends Well, III.iii.
Italian commanders, foreign service, a counterfeit capture and the wife who refuses to be dismissed.
Bertram goes to war to escape a marriage. Helena follows him to Italy to make that marriage real. Between them stands Parolles, a man whose military reputation depends upon his clothes, his confidence and his tongue. In All’s Well That Ends Well, the pursuit of honour abroad becomes inseparable from the evasion of obligations at home.
Lewes Lewkenor knew the attraction of foreign military service and the distance between its promises and its rewards. His own printed testimony names the del Monte brothers, officers who moved into high commands under Italian rulers. Read beside Bertram’s Florentine commission, those passages provide a specific historical setting for the play’s soldiers. His accounts of languages, wages, rivalries and disillusionment also illuminate the world in which Parolles is exposed.
Two captains, two Italian states
In The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), Lewkenor describes experienced soldiers abandoning Spanish service after receiving poor treatment. Among them he names Giovanni Battista and Camillo del Monte:
The sight of this hard and beggarly usage, but especially the feeling of that which they themselves received, have made many great and worthy soldiers to abandon him with mighty discontentments, as amongst the rest John Baptista de Monte, and Camillo de Monte, two notable captains, both now retained under two mighty states, the one being general to the Duke of Florence, the other bearing like charge under the Venetians, who both lie in wait to cry quittance with him.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
Four years later, Lewkenor identifies Battista as Venice’s Captain General and makes the relationship personal:
Always they do entertain in honourable sort, with great provision a Captain general, who always is a stranger born: he that now enjoyeth that place is one John Baptista de Monte a Florentine born, a notable soldier, and a very honourable Gentleman, one under whom I have served in the wars, and am in all thankfulness to acknowledge many favours that I received both from him and his brother Camillo de Monte.
Lewkenor, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599), p. 166; spelling modernised.
The first passage gives the two brothers’ later employments without individually assigning their posts. The second specifically places Battista in Venetian command. Together, they connect Lewkenor’s military experience with the Italian world of professional officers serving princes and republics. Camillo’s Florentine employment supplies the counterpart to Battista’s Venetian career.
Bertram: “A lover of thy drum, hater of love”
The Duke of Florence’s appointment makes Bertram general of the cavalry. The young Frenchman accepts the honour, then declares the purpose he has brought with him:
This very day,
Great Mars, I put myself into thy file.
Make me but like my thoughts, and I shall prove
A lover of thy drum, hater of love.
Bertram, All’s Well That Ends Well, III.iii.
“Hater of love” binds the military story to the marriage plot. Bertram imagines that service abroad will let him become the man he wishes to be while leaving Helena behind. His public advancement depends upon a prince’s confidence; his private behaviour evades the promises he has already made.
The comparison with Lewkenor is grounded in the kind of career described: a gentleman serves overseas under an Italian commander, and reputation, patronage and advancement shape his prospects. The del Monte passages give this comparison named officers and named states. They do not identify either brother as a portrait of Bertram.
The promise of experience abroad
Near the end of The Estate of English Fugitives, Lewkenor answers an argument in favour of leaving England. The appeal is recognisable: languages, military knowledge and experience of the wider world. He sets out the proposition before answering it:
Whereas you do write, that if so be there were no other benefit to be gotten in those parts, but attaining the language of foreign nations, with the knowledge of military discipline, and the state of the world abroad, wherein you hear, that even myself and others your countrymen have somewhat, it were a motion sufficient, not only to make you leave your country for a time, but also to hazard yourself to any dangers in foreign parts, I have thought it good, therein to let you understand, that howsoever I, or any other have profited therein, yet as the time doth now serve, and the case now standeth at this present, there is no possibility that you or any other may, in far longer time than I have spent, attain to the like.
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), concluding advice on foreign service; spelling modernised.
His warning is precise about the balance of risk and benefit:
And if you could, yet the dangers that in adventuring the same you shall endure, were far greater than the benefits you could possible reap, might in any wise countervail, were they such as might answer your expectation.
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
Lewkenor’s argument comes from disillusioned experience. He concedes that travel can produce knowledge, including knowledge he possesses himself, while challenging the hopeful picture offered to a prospective recruit. Bertram’s campaign belongs to that culture of expectation: foreign service promises an identity, a reputation and an escape.
Parolles: the man inside the clothes
Lafew sees through Parolles well before the soldiers stage their ambush. His judgement joins the unreliable traveller to the overdressed military adventurer:
A good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner, but one that lies three thirds, and uses a known truth to pass a thousand nothings with, should be once heard and thrice beaten.
Lafew, All’s Well That Ends Well, II.v.
A fragment of authentic experience can make a mass of invention sound plausible. Lafew’s second judgement strips Parolles down to his outward display:
There can be no kernel in this light nut. The soul of this man is his clothes. Trust him not in matter of heavy consequence.
Lafew, All’s Well That Ends Well, II.v.
Military clothing can advertise a professional identity without proving courage or judgement. The other officers decide to test Parolles by letting him believe he has fallen into enemy hands. A lost drum becomes the pretext. He has talked himself into recovering it; they arrange to discover what he will do when the danger seems real.
“Choughs’ language”: the counterfeit enemy
The soldiers’ preparations make the linguistic trick explicit. Parolles knows enough foreign speech to be suspicious, so the men must sound like a mixed company while concealing their own voices:
He must think us some band of strangers i’ th’ adversary’s entertainment. Now, he hath a smack of all neighboring languages. 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: choughs’ language, gabble enough and good enough. As for you, interpreter, you must seem very politic.
Lord, All’s Well That Ends Well, IV.i.
They rush upon him with an invented military clamour:
LORD: Throca movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo.
ALL: Cargo, cargo, cargo, villianda par corbo, cargo.
PAROLLES: O ransom, ransom! Do not hide mine eyes.
FIRST SOLDIER: Boskos thromuldo boskos.
PAROLLES: I know you are the Muskos’ regiment,
And I shall lose my life for want of language.
If there be here German or Dane, Low Dutch,
Italian, or French, let him speak to me.
I’ll discover that which shall undo the Florentine.
All’s Well That Ends Well, IV.i; Parolles is seized and blindfolded during the exchange.
The humour depends on the credibility of a multinational army. Germans, Danes, Dutchmen, Italians and Frenchmen might serve within the same military world, and an interpreter might control a prisoner’s access to his captors. The scene calls the invented speech “gabble”; resemblance to real words is part of its effect, rather than a secure basis for translating every syllable into a particular language.
Lewkenor’s soldiers and their languages
Lewkenor records the comic consequences of an actual linguistic collision when Captain John Smith demands his wages from the treasurer Juan de Lasture. Smith is drunk; the treasurer becomes furious. Each reaches for the insults he knows:
Smith had not a word of Spanish, nor any other language, but a little Dutch, wherein he requited the treasurer in as snarling terms as he could, calling him honscont, Schellam, and Turk.
Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), Captain Smith’s quarrel with the treasurer; spelling modernised.
Smith’s encounter and Parolles’s capture use language differently. Smith answers abuse with a few words of Dutch; Parolles begs for a language he can understand and offers military secrets in return. Both episodes draw their force from the practical circumstances of foreign service, where authority, payment and personal safety can depend upon who understands whom.
“All the secrets of our camp”
Once Parolles believes an interpreter has been found, his military loyalty gives way immediately:
O, let me live,
And all the secrets of our camp I’ll show,
Their force, their purposes. Nay, I’ll speak that
Which you will wonder at.
Parolles, All’s Well That Ends Well, IV.i.
The interrogation turns his speech into evidence. He supplies estimates of troop numbers, disparages his fellow officers and even insults Bertram. The men he betrays can listen because they are standing beside him. Their final revelation destroys the reputation on which he has depended.
This is a sustained test of the difference between appearing to be a soldier and remaining trustworthy under pressure. Lewkenor’s account of foreign service repeatedly makes a comparable distinction between professions of loyalty and conduct shaped by money, fear or advancement. Parolles turns that problem into a theatrical exposure: the captive manufactures his own disgrace while believing he is bargaining for his life.
Helena’s story: Painter and Boccaccio
The war is also the setting for Helena’s pursuit. The central marriage story comes from Boccaccio’s Decameron, third day, ninth tale, available in English through William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure. Painter’s heading to “Giletta of Narbonne” gives the outline in compact form:
Giletta, a physician’s daughter of Narbon, healed the French King of a fistula, for reward whereof she demanded Beltramo Count of Rossiglione to husband. The Count being married against his will, for despite fled to Florence and loved another. Giletta his wife, by policy found means to lie with her husband, in place of his lover, and was begotten with child of two sons: which known to her husband, he received her again, and afterwards he lived in great honour and felicity.
William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, first tome (1566), novel XXXVIII, “Giletta of Narbonne”; spelling modernised.
The physician’s daughter, the cured king, the reluctant noble husband, Florence and the substitution in bed are already present in the source. These elements belong to the inherited story. The extended exposure of Parolles gives Shakespeare’s play a further investigation of reputation and deception alongside Helena’s campaign to secure her husband.
The ring and the impossible condition
Bertram tries to make the marriage impossible by setting Helena conditions he believes she cannot fulfil:
When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband. But in such a “then” I write a “never.”
Bertram’s letter, read by Helena, All’s Well That Ends Well, III.ii.
He means the ring and the child to close her claim. Helena turns them into evidence. With Diana and her mother’s assistance, she takes Diana’s place in the encounter Bertram has arranged. He believes he is pursuing another woman; Helena fulfils the terms of his letter without his knowledge.
The military and marriage plots therefore question the same confidence in appearances. Bertram misjudges Parolles, misjudges Helena and assumes that he can control events by controlling what others know. His noble birth and successful service do not resolve the moral problem of his treatment of the women.
“Captain I’ll be no more”
Parolles survives the discovery. Once his witnesses have gone, he imagines an existence stripped of the rank he has performed:
Yet am I 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 soft
As captain shall. Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this, for it will come to pass
That every braggart shall be found an ass.
Rust, sword; cool, blushes; and Parolles live
Safest in shame. Being fooled, by fool’ry thrive.
There’s place and means for every man alive.
Parolles, All’s Well That Ends Well, IV.iii.
His acceptance of shame complicates the comedy’s punishment. The false captain can live once he ceases to insist on being a captain. Bertram’s reckoning is harder to settle: Helena has answered his conditions, but the ending leaves an audience to judge how much his character has changed.
Lewkenor’s writings bring the professional soldier’s world into this reading: named Italian commanders, remembered favours, hopes of advancement, foreign languages and the cost of misplaced trust. Painter supplies the marriage narrative. Between those two bodies of material, the play’s Florence becomes a place where claims to honour are tested by conduct.
Sources
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595): the del Monte brothers, Captain Smith’s linguistic quarrel and the concluding advice on foreign service. Quotations use modernised spelling.
Lewkenor, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599), p. 166: Battista del Monte’s Venetian command and Lewkenor’s acknowledgement of service and favours.
William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, first tome (1566), novel XXXVIII; Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, III.9.
William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, II.v, III.ii–iii and IV.i, iii. First printed in the First Folio (1623).
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