One of my enduring memories of Primary School is of a moment, I think in Year 3, when one of my classmates attempted to convince a group of us that he could speak French.  At the time none of us knew anything of French (except of course for the highly amusing French word for Yes), so we were initially convinced by his flow of foreign-sounding words.  Only when another boy, who had actually been to France, answered him fluently in his supposed language, did we realise that all our friend had been doing was stringing together random syllables.  I distinctly remember that the one he relied on most was something like ‘vogh’, which he pronounced with a very dramatic emphasis.

I was reminded of this moment when I was preparing a teaching session for my History of English module recently.  I was looking for the places in Shakespeare’s plays where he uses other languages, or introduces different dialects of English, or simply foregrounds language itself as a concept.  There are some well known passages that furnish such material.  But I was delighted to discover that there is also a moment, hidden away in one of Shakespeare’s least known plays, where he actually makes his characters do exactly what my schoolmate did – not speak another language but make up meaningless words to pretend to be speaking one.   

It happens in Act 4 Scene 1 of All’s Well That Ends Well, when the disreputable character Parolles, venturing out of the Florentine military camp, is seized and blindfolded by a group of soldiers all shouting foreign-sounding words he does not recognise.  Terrified, he jumps to the conclusion he has fallen into the hands of a group of Russian mercenaries, whose language he does not know:

“O ransom, ransom!  . . .
I know you are the Muskos’ regiment,
And I shall lose my life for want of language.”   (4.1.54-57)

Parolles is a version of the stock comic character, of whom Shakespeare’s Falstaff is a more famous example, the boastful or ‘braggart’ soldier who is eventually exposed as a coward.  He does not know what the audience knows, that his captors are not in fact ‘Muskos’ (Muscovites) but his fellow soldiers, who are playing this rough trick to prove that he cannot be trusted.  Before Parolles walks into their ambush, they carefully plan that on a given signal they will disorientate him by shouting out what their leader calls ‘terrible language… gabble enough, and good enough’.  When the moment comes he leads the way by shouting ‘Throca movousus, cargo cargo cargo’ and the others are similarly inspired, coming out with phrases like villianda par corbo, Boskos vauvado, Kerelybonto, manka revania, oscorbidulchos volivorco…

I can’t help wondering whether, on the rare occasions when All’s Well That Ends Well is performed, the actors playing this scene are encouraged to add some words of their own invention.  Or could a primary school class not have some fun doing the same?  Shakespeare’s words are ‘good enough’, but in this situation children could probably invent others that are just as good.      

Shakespeare Week is about helping primary school aged children to engage with Shakespeare, and as a play All’s Well That Ends Well does not seem like the ideal starting point for this.  It has lots of problematic features: difficult dialogue, a long conversation about virginity, a ‘bed trick’, a hero who is not remotely heroic, a clown who is not funny.  These are things which readers who already love Shakespeare can learn to relish, but what makes us start loving Shakespeare?  The ‘terrible language’ scene, in its own way, goes to the heart of the answer: his endless creativity with words.  This scene gives us meaningless words to have fun with, but every scene in every Shakespeare play is capable of surprising us with memorable and beautiful words.  There is something haunting, for example, about Parolles’ line ‘And I shall lose my life for want of language’, especially when we remember that his French name literally means ‘languages’.  And after he has been finally exposed and humiliated, two scenes later, Parolles has one of the most potent lines in the whole play when he resolves to adapt and survive nevertheless: 

“Simply the thing I am
Shall make me live…”      (4.3.280-1)

In the context of the play this perhaps means that he will survive in society by still being good with words – talk is what he is.  But in a modern context the lines seem to stand out as something more profound - a kind of existential affirmation that what gives us purpose in life is to be ourselves.   It does not really matter that Shakespeare may not have thought quite like this in his own time.  His words can still do the work.  And any encounter with Shakespeare which starts with savouring his words, meaningless or loaded with meanings, is surely likely to end well. 

Dr Richard Storer is Senior Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity.  The modules he teaches include ‘History of English 2: From Shakespeare’s English to Global Englishes’, and ‘Victorian Culture: Shakespeare and the Victorians’.  

Learn more about Shakespeare Week on their website.

The Royal Shakespeare Company have a new production of ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ opening in August 2022. For more details, visit their website. 

Bibliography

Russell Fraser (ed.), All’s Well That Ends Well.  New Cambridge Shakespeare.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.