Bertram, in "All's Well that Ends Well," is under the influence of Parolles, "a snipt-taffata fellow," who goes buzzing around like a "red-tailed humble-bee" in a vile yellow suit all stuck over with bows and trimmings. Bertram has been often advised to cast him off: "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." Bertram is a raw boy for discernment, and insists that Parolles is very valiant, and has a good knowledge of the world. His friends are obliged to lay a plot, and invite him to be witness to Parolles's cowardice and knavery: not till then will he confess to the crudeness of his judgment.
But Helena, though well disposed to like a man who is Bertram's companion, has read him thoroughly, and, moreover, has the instinct to perceive that the man's knavery is so inbred that it suits him better than honesty. Her observation is full of subtlety:—
"I know him a notorious liar,
Think him a great way fool, solely a coward;
Yet these fix'd evils sit so fit in him,
That they take place, when virtue's steely bones
Look bleak in the cold wind."
The "evils" have a congenial place in such a temperament: a bleaker one would discourage the finest virtues. His nature fortunately cannot be reformed, since reform would turn a most satisfactory and harmonious miscreant into a scrubby gentleman. "And that's the humor of it," as Nym would say. Shakspeare puts this rare breadth of judgment into the mouth of a woman.
Imogen's step-mother, the Queen and wife of Cymbeline, is a strong-minded woman, who "bears all down with her brain." She rules the king by force or craft, and has arranged to marry Imogen to her own shallow-pated son Cloten. This ancestress of all the plotting step-mothers carries poison in her heart: her relatives may expect to find it in their food; for she is curious in distilling the essences of noxious herbs, under a scientific pretext to watch their effects in creatures not worth the hanging. But the compound that is ostensibly for rats is intended to dispossess Imogen of all her watchful liegemen, including her husband; and then, after getting her married to Cloten, the "mortal mineral" was meant to waste the King by inches to a grave that should be a royal footstool for her son.
Now the King has no suspicion of the simmering deviltry that he embraced. When all her projects are discovered, he exclaims,—
"O most delicate fiend!
Who is't can read a woman?"
Not he, certainly; for he had been fooled in the time-honored way of crafty women.
"Mine eyes
Were not in fault, for she was beautiful;
Mine ears, that heard her flattery; nor my heart,
That thought her like her seeming."