[In the essay below, Lewalski discusses the influence of Neoplatonic and Christian concepts on Shakespeare's treatment of appearance vs. reality in Much Ado about Nothing and the notion of love's ability to distinguish between the two.]

The titles Shakespeare gave to his great romantic comedies—Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, or What You Will—suggest that the works are mere divertissements, light entertainments. Naturally enough, Shakespeare's own unassuming pose has often been taken at face value. Critics have been quick to pay tribute to the charm and sheer delightfulness of these works—the witty, graceful, loveable heroines, the atmosphere charged with music and song, the wise humaneness of Shakespeare's perspective—but they have also been quick to invoke the supposed non-serious purpose of these plays to account for their alleged looseness of structure, incredible action, and mingling of realistic and flat characters.

Much Ado especially has elicited such a response. While everyone is enamored of Shakespeare's original characters—Beatrice and Benedick, Dogberry, Verges, and the "Watch"—much disparaging commentary and facile apology has been directed toward the derived Hero-Claudio plot. Even critics who find important unifying motifs in the imagery of deceptions, eavesdroppings, and masques, often argue that the substance of the play is indeed "much ado about nothing," that the love tangles are "all a game." John Russell Brown [in Shakespeare and his Comedies, 1957] is one of a small minority who find serious thematic elements in the play:

Shakespeare's ideas about love's truth—the imaginative acting of a lover and the need for our imaginative response to it, the compulsion, individuality, and complexity of a lover's truthful realization of beauty, and the distinctions between inward and outward beauty, appearance and reality, and fancy and true affection—are all represented in Much Ado About Nothing; they inform its structure, its contrasts, relationships, and final resolution; they control many of the details of its action, characterization, humour, and dialogue.

Recognition of such concerns in no way denies or undermines the gaiety and lightheartedness of the play, but only suggests that the comic gaiety has a firm underpinning of thematic and intellectual richness. This observation should seem less remarkable now that Northrop Frye [in "The Argument of Comedy," from English Institute Essays, 1948, 1949, reprinted in Leonard F. Dean, Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, 1957] and others have accustomed us to discern the profoundly serious ritual patterns of struggle, death, and rebirth which underlie comedy as a mode. Much Ado sets forth, I believe, a complex theme concerning the various levels of knowledge and love in relation to the confusions of appearance and reality in this world. The theme is grounded in neoplatonism, fused, as was usual in the English Renaissance, with Christian concepts. Such ranges of meaning are evoked through patterns of action, structural contrast, language, and visual image, giving the play both intellectual vigor and structural cohesion.

One important fact sharply distinguishes the comic world of Much Ado from that of Shakespeare's other great romantic comedies: it does not make use of what Frye has happily termed the "green world" or the "second world"—a locale which in some respects suggests the original golden age and which therefore provides a perspective from which to judge the real world. A Midsummer Night's Dream displays the fairy world of the forest; As You Like It has the forest of Arden; Twelfth Night is set entirely in the land of Illyria; The Merchant of Venice presents Belmont as an idealized contrast to the sordid commercial world of Venice. Much Ado, however, like the problem comedies, takes place entirely in the "real world." Messina emphatically does not take on the character of an ideal haven and place of festivity for Don Pedro's victorious forces, as it rather promised to do at first, but instead it remains quite recognizably the real world of intrigues, "practices," confusion, calumny, malice. Yet unlike the problem comedies Much Ado has a kind of "second world" which is a spiritual state rather than a place: the principal characters in both of the plots arrive, after some false starts, at the "state" of true love, and in that idealized condition achieve the heightened perception needed to dispel error and to reorder the confusion rampant in their world.

As several critics have recognized, the predominant feature of life in the world of Messina is the inability to distinguish between appearance and reality, illusion and truth, seeming and being. The wise and the witless, the prudent and the foolish, the rational and the passionate, the good and the bad are alike liable to misapprehension and mistaking, and alike engage in deliberate duping and pretense. This condition of life, knitting together the Claudio-Hero plot, the BeatriceBenedick plot, and the Dogberry-Verges action, is displayed especially in the four central masque or playacting sequences.

The first of these, the masquerade revels at the house of Leonato, takes place in Act II, Scene i, but has been in presparation throughout the entire first act; its primary function with reference to theme is to involve almost all the characters in the problems of pretense, deception, and faulty apprehension. When Don Pedro early in the play promises Claudio that he will woo and win Hero for him in Claudio's disguise, the mere voicing of the plan touches off a chain reaction of misapprehension. Leonato's brother Antonio receives a garbled account of it from an eavesdropping servant to the effect that Don Pedro himself loves Hero and plans to propose to her; Antonio passes on his misinformation to Leonato, who in his turn passes it on to his daughter. The villain Borachio has "whipped him behind an arras" while the plans were being discussed and then tells his erroneous version to Don Pedro's jealous Machiavellian brother Don John, to the effect that Don Pedro plans to "woo Hero for himself, and having obtained her, give her to Count Claudio" (I.iii.55-56). The masquerade then presents successive vignettes of masked dancers in various postures of pretense, disguise, and misinterpretation: Hero pretends that she does not recognize Don Pedro; Margaret and Benedick do not recognize each other; Beatrice pretends not to know the disguised Benedick and he is taken in by the pretense. This atmosphere establishes the condition for Don John's deliberate lie telling the masked Claudio (whom he affects to mistake for Benedick) that Don Pedro is wooing Hero for himself, and for Benedick's similar warning to Claudio based upon his misinterpretation of the tête-à-tête of Hero and Don Pedro during one of the masquerade dances. Though this contretemps is easily resolved when Don Pedro makes up the match between Hero and Claudio, it has been graphically shown that mistake, pretense, and misapprehension are of the very substance of life in Messina.

The second masquerade, or more properly, play-acting, consists of the two scenes acted by the friends of Benedick and Beatrice to cause those witty scorners of love to fall in love with each other, by convincing each one of the other's passion. Ironically, neither the well-meaning gullers nor the principals themselves realize that the deception is based upon a truth, that Benedick and Beatrice have already revealed more than casual feeling for each other. The third masquerade is the nocturnal impersonation by Margaret and Borachio of Hero bidding farewell to a lover on the night before her wedding. Margaret was evidently deceived as to the import of her role, thinking perhaps that she was simply impersonating the "bride of tomorrow" in an innocent pretense which according to folk superstition would bring luck to her own affair with Borachio. This scene is not dramatized but related: by a brilliant stroke the audience hears Borachio brag to Conrade of the plot's success in deceiving Claudio and Don Pedro, and at the same time sees the feckless "watch" eavesdropping and so discovering the treachery—though their witlessness points up the fact that in the world of this play even overt statement of the truth brings no guarantee that it will be understood or will prevail. The fourth masquerade, Hero's pretended death and restoration, is in three parts: first, the wedding pageant in which Don Pedro and Claudio play the roles of persons intending to participate in a wedding ceremony but then cast off these roles and denounce the bride's supposed unchastity; second, the pretense of Hero's death, culminating in the ceremony of mourning carried forth by Claudio at her supposed tomb; third, the new wedding pageant at which Claudio accepts a veiled lady whom he believes to be Hero's cousin but who is of course Hero herself.

Obviously in Messina the conditions of perceiving and knowing are inordinately complex. They are, moreover, inextricably linked to conditions of loving, and as I suggested above, the "state" of true love provides an ambiance in which heightened knowledge of reality can be obtained. These are neoplatonic commonplaces, similar to those which John Vyvyan [in Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty, 1961] finds in some other Shakespearean comedies and cogently analyzes in terms of such Renaissance neoplatonic discourses on love as Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium, Spenser's An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, and especially [Baldassare] Castiglione's [The Book of the Courtier, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561]. Also, although the question of direct sources hardly matters in dealing with neoplatonic Renaissance commonplaces Vyvyan has shown the strong possibility that Shakespeare knew The Courtier directly.

I hope to demonstrate that several of the concepts set forth in Bembo's classic discourse on love in the fourth book of The Courtier provide surprisingly apt categories for analyzing the various levels of action in Much Ado. One such concept is Bembo's relation of kinds of loving or longing to ways of knowing:

Love is nothing else but a certain coveting to enjoy beautie: and for so much as coveting longeth for nothing but for things known, it is requisite that knowledge go evermore before coveting.… Therefore hath nature so ordained that to every vertue of knowledge there is annexed a vertue of longing. And because in our soule there be three manner waies to know, namely, by sense, reason, and understanding: of sense there ariseth appetite or longing, which is common to us with brute beastes: of reason ariseth election or choice, which is proper to man: of understanding, by the which man may be partner with Angels, ariseth will.

A second important concept is Bembo's observation that "most deepe errours" attend the modes of knowing and loving most usual with the young, who tend to be principally attracted to physical beauty and to rely for knowledge chiefly upon the "judgement of sense." Also relevant is Bembo's view of the ascending scale of perfection in knowledge and love which the wise and mature man may climb. Such a man will begin as all lovers do by an attraction and devotion to the physical beauty of some one woman; at the next stage he will be able to recreate his lady's beauty wholly in his imagination, needing thus to rely less on her physical presence; then he will achieve an apprehension of and devotion to all physical beauty conceived as a unity; next he will awaken to the higher beauty of mind and spirit which can be seen only with the eye of the mind; at length he will love this inner beauty and will be led by this loftier love to a higher mode of knowledge, intuitive understanding: "And therefore burning in this most happie flame, she [the soul] ariseth to the noblest part of her which is the understanding, and there no more shadowed with the darke night of earthly matters, seeth the heavenly beautie." The remaining two stages of the scale comprise the lover's apprehension of and fusion with absolute beauty, or God.

Though these neoplatonic commonplaces have offered Shakespeare a framework for developing the themes of the play and for the articulation of its structure, I do not believe that the play becomes a quasi-allegorical treatment of the neoplatonic scale of love, such as Vyvyan finds, for example, in A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It. Rather, in Much Ado (and I think also in the other plays where they are relevant) Shakespeare uses the neoplatonic commonplaces with a radically different emphasis. The neoplatonic focus is upon the progression from the love of particular beauty to apprehension of the universal concept of beauty and finally to union with absolute Beauty itself, whereas Shakespeare always focuses upon the dramatic microcosm. The difference may be demonstrated in the passage in which Benedick relates himself to but also reverses Bembo's stage three. While still a scorner of love Benedick insists that all the excellencies he has hitherto seen in various women must be united in one woman before he will love, and then he discovers to his amazement that they are already so united in Beatrice: instead of forming an abstract concept which will draw together all varieties of beauty into one as Bembo advises, he finds that universal embodied in a living woman. Shakespeare's characters may thus represent stages of or attitudes toward love and knowledge which approximate some of the neoplatonic distinctions, and they may be involved in a progression from less to more perfect modes of loving and knowing, but Shakespeare normally incarnates the ideal states in the "real" characters and cosmos of the drama. Also, as I will argue later, the allusion to Christian archetype at the climax of the play at once points to the ultimate pattern for the incarnation of the ideal in the real, and also suggests the source of those other categories of knowing and loving which are seen in the play to supplement, and in a sense to transcend, the neoplatonic levels.

The clowns are not affected by love but they are part of the knowledge pattern of the play. They occupy a level below, or at least beside, the neoplatonic levels of reason and sense, for they do not attain to knowledge by either path. They cannot apprehend the obvious meanings conveyed to them through hearing and seeing, to say nothing of the higher processes of wit and reason, as their own speech makes clear. Dogberry selecting Seacole to take charge of the watch commends him with a delightfully apt malapropism as "the most senseless and fit man for constable of the watch" (III.iii.21-33), and he also describes Verges, in terms which Leonato turns back upon himself, as one whose "wit is out" (III.v.33). After overhearing a full account of the plot against Hero the watch cannot "make sense" of it; they can only seize upon isolated words and worry them about, as when out of a casual interchange between Borachio and Conrade about the "deformed" fashions of the day they create for themselves that notable character, the thief "Deformed." And their constant malapropisms further confuse the little knowledge they do have when they seek to communicate it to Leonato and others.

Their discovery of the plot and seizure of the villains is in fact a matter of sheer instinct—a true instinct somehow miraculously granted to fools in the very throes of their folly. That this is the level they occupy is evident when they suspect Borachio and Conrade of treachery before anything at all suspicious has been said or done: Borachio's first innocuous remark to his companion, "Stand thee close then under this penthouse, for it drizzles rain, and I will, like a true drunkard, utter all to thee," provokes the watch to immediate, instinctive judgment, "Some treason, masters" (III.iii.97-100). Fools though they are, it is given to them to be in spite of themselves the discoverers and ultimately the revealers of the truth: As Borachio puts it, "What your wisdom could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light" (V.i.220-221).

Beatrice and Benedick endeavor to come to terms with the world through wit, intellect, reason: both are frequently described by their friends as wits, and they engage in constant skirmishes of wit between themselves. As witty, sophisticated rationalists both consider that love produces foolish, mad, fantastical behavior which is quite unworthy of them. Leonato thinks that his niece Beatrice will "never run mad" with love (I.i.85), she herself lays claim to "cold blood" (I.i.120), and she delights in piercing the illusions of romantic love with such realistic comments as the following:

Wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig (and full as fantastical); the wedding mannerly modest (as a measure), full of state and ancientry; and then comes Repentance and with his bad leg falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.

(II.i.64-70)

Similarly Benedick professes himself a "tyrant" to all the female sex (I.i.157), claims that he will never "look pale with love" (I.i.227), and declares that he will never be brought by love to such foolish and absurd behavior as Claudio displays:

I do much wonder that one man, seeing how much another man is a fool when he dedicates his behaviors to love, will, after he hath laughed at such shallow follies in others, become the argument of his own scorn by falling in love; and such a man is Claudio.… He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose (like an honest man and a soldier) and now he is turned orthography: his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes. May I be so converted and see with these eyes? I cannot tell; I think not. I will not be sworn but love may transform me to an oyster, but I'll take my oath on it, till he have made an oyster of me he shall not make me such a fool.

(II.iii.7-23)

But despite all claims to clear sight by the avoidance of folly and passion, Benedick mistakes and misrepresents Don Pedro's conversation with Hero at the masquerade; both Benedick and Beatrice are taken in by each other's exaggerated railing and scorn; and most important, both are in danger of failing to see the whole rich reality of love, being put off by its foolish appearances.

Beatrice and Benedick are awakened to love through the play-acting of their friends. In the skits acted for their benefit each is told that the other is nearly mad with passion for him, and on the basis of this belief is moved to self-condemnation for the harshness of his own wit and to pity for the other. These allegations are false, for neither Benedick nor Beatrice is ever the slave of passion: love does not turn either of them into an oyster. Yet the falsehood reveals an important truth to each of the lovers—the fact that, despite appearances, the other party does indeed love. Even more important, the skits demonstrate to each that the other party is a rational object of choice for one laying claim to wit and rationality.

The development of these two lovers reflects in general terms but with some significant variations the scale of love and knowledge ascended by Bembo's wise and rational lover. Though preserved by his wit from the usual responses of the sensual lover, Benedick had in fact entered unawares upon the first stage of love, the attraction to his lady's physical beauty above all others: at the outset of the play he testifies that Beatrice exceeds Hero "as much in beauty as the first of May doth the last of December" (I.i.178-179). Just before the play-acting scene Benedick jestingly offers his revised version of the third stage of the scale as his excuse for not loving any particular lady, declaring that he will not love until he finds one possessed of all the excellencies now scattered among several: she must be rich, wise, virtuous, fair, mild, noble, of good discourse, an excellent musician, and must not dye her hair (II.iii.23-30). This catalogue includes inner qualities as well as external graces, especially in the stipulation that the lady be "wise" and of "good discourse." Benedick has testified his unwillingness to begin by loving one particular lady having only some elements of beauty in the normal neoplatonic way, and he certainly does not expect to find a lady who is the embodiment of all. But in their play-acting Don Pedro and Claudio describe Beatrice as having just the traits Benedick has mentioned, especially emphasizing that she is "exceedingly wise" (II.iii.150). Benedick, reflecting, agrees to every point, not only on the basis of their opinion but by reference to his own very considerable knowledge of her: "I can bear them witness" (II.iii.210-211). Thus immediately upon recognizing that he is in love Benedick is brought to a higher love based chiefly upon the inner qualities, and he promptly affirms this love as a conscious choice based on knowledge: "I will be horribly in love with her" (II.iii.213). Beatrice's development follows the same general pattern. In their playacting her friends accuse her of "Scorn," "Disdain," and self love, declare that these traits have kept her from recognizing true worth in others, and then praise Benedick as just the person who should approve himself to her intelligent choice:

She cannot be so much without true judgment,
Having so swift and excellent a wit,
As she is prized to have, as to refuse
So rare a gentleman as Signior Benedick.
                                 (III.i.88-91)

On reflection Beatrice condemns her past conduct, agrees that she knows Benedick's desert herself "better than reportingly" (III.ii.117), and determines to love by conscious choice: "And Benedick, love on; I will requite thee, / Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand" (III.ii.112-113).

Benedick and Beatrice have thus acted out the pattern of Bembo's rational lovers, attracted by physical beauty but regarding the inner qualities of the soul more highly, basing love on genuine knowledge, and accepting it not in terms of mad passion but by conscious choice. This higher love immediately results, as Bembo declared it would, in a new mode of knowledge, a heightened perception of reality. First of all the lovers display an expanded and humanized self-knowledge and knowledge of human nature: though they strive with delightful comic effect to uphold the old raillery and rational standard, and though even at their wedding each declares that he loves the other "no more than reason" (V.iv.76), the bad sonnets that they have tried to write to each other testify that they do indeed love on another plane than that of reason. Convicted, Benedick explicitly renounces foolish consistency, and his observation that "man is a giddy thing" (V.iv.108) signals the lovers' new affirmation of the whole range of human life and activity. Love also enables them to gain a heightened understanding of the confusions of appearance and reality in their world. Specifically, having learned of the deceptions of appearance in their own affair, they are ready to affirm Hero's innocence against all the supposed evidence of the senses. Schooled by the love of her cousin and of Benedick, Beatrice seems to attain in this case to the level of intuitive understanding which in Bembo's categories is above reason; the language of the play alludes to this knowledge as a certitude located in the soul rather than in the reason or the senses. Very soon after Claudio's accusation of Hero and before anyone else queries the judgment Beatrice declares, "On my soul, my cousin is belied" (IV.i.145). Later, when Benedick asks, "Think you in your soul that Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?" she answers instantly, "Yea, as sure as I have a thought or a soul" (IV.i.324-326).

Benedick must act in this case in terms of faith rather than of intuitive insight (after all he does not know Hero well). But through the medium of faith he also attains to the truth hidden to most of the others. Shortly after the accusation he tells Beatrice, "Surely I do believe your fair cousin is wronged," and his love of Beatrice is made the medium for firmly establishing his faith, for she commands him just after his first open avowal of love to "kill Claudio" in a duel in defense of Hero's innocence. He agrees at length, relying firmly and explicitly on Beatrice's declaration of her "soul-knowledge" against the ocular evidence attested to by his good friends; the earlier description of Benedick as one hesitant to fight a duel further emphasizes the strength of this faith. Though the challenge to the duel is not permitted to become serious (we know that the Watch have already made their discoveries) yet Benedick by this gesture shows his readiness to risk himself totally, as well as his friend, in the service of an unproved inner certitude revealed to intuition and faith and wholly opposed to the seeming evidence of the senses.

Claudio and Hero approach knowledge and love in terms of the evidence of the senses. The focus is upon Claudio: Hero is little more than an object for his affections at the beginning of the play, and at the end she is a means by which Claudio's education in love is completed. Nevertheless her "silence" paralleling that of Claudio (II.i.281-286) and her evident eagerness to be married at once (III.i.101) suggest that she is also a lover acting primarily in terms of sense and passion.

Claudio fits the pattern of Bembo's typical "young" lover who acts primarily in terms of sense knowledge rather than reason, and is moved by desire and passion rather than the higher love—one who, in short, does not advance beyond the first stage of the scale. The language of the play identifies Claudio quite precisely as such a figure. In him the irascible and the desiring portions of the soul (to invoke Plato's terms) are especially developed: he has just returned from the war where he did the "feats of a lion" (I.i.15) and he is attracted to Hero chiefly in terms of the beauties apparent to his eye, "In mine eye she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on" (I.i.174-175). He terms his attraction to her "my passion" (I.i.201); his comment, "That I love her, I feel" (I.i.210), indicates that the attraction is located in feeling rather than in knowledge; and his hesitancy to use the word "love" to describe his feeling, preferring rather to speak of his liking and his desires, is evident in his explanation to Don Pedro:

       O my Lord,
When you went onward on this ended action,
I looked upon her with a soldier's eye,
That liked, but had a rougher task in hand
Than to drive liking to the name of love;
But now I am returned, and that war-thoughts
Have left their places vacant, in their rooms
Come thronging soft and delicate desires,
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying I liked her ere I went to wars.
                          (I.ii.272-280 [italics mine])

At length, when the marriage is arranged, Claudio appeals to his "silence" as evidence of his love (II.i.277-280), though the marked contrast of this behavior to the constant speech of Benedick and Beatrice suggests that the silence is appropriate to feeling grounded in sense rather than in reason. He also uses the term "dote," suggestive of the force of his passion, though his declaration, "I give away myself for you" suggests a basis which might develop into true love. The strongest evidence that Claudio is propelled chiefly by desire is the answer he immediately blurts forth to Don Pedro's question as to when the marriage shall take place: "Tomorrow, my lord. Time goes on crutches till Love have all his rites" (II.ii.322-323). In striking contrast to Beatrice and Benedick, Claudio does not know his Lady's inner qualities and obviously feels no need to discover them through discourse of reason; significantly, he neither suspects nor expects his lady to be wise. Rather, he simply assumes that the fair exterior connotes and images forth her inner beauty and virtue.

His language makes clear that Claudio is propelled by desire and sense attraction, that he is not simply making a "mariage de convenance" as Charles T. Prouty suggests [in The Sources of Much Ado]. Yet Claudio is not naive: if reliance on sense knowledge leads him on the one hand to passion and desire (with all the errors which may attend these states) it leads him on the other hand to a prudent testing of the appearances to assure himself that they are indeed what he thinks them to be. Thus he solicits Benedick's opinion of Hero's modest demeanor and fairness, inquires delicately of Don Pedro regarding her wealth, and welcomes Don Pedro's good offices in speaking for him to Hero and Leonato.

But this alliance of desire and prudence carried forth on the basis of sense knowledge leads not to true love and true knowledge but to constant mistaking and misapprehension. Claudio mistakes and mistrusts Don Pedro on the basis of Don John's lie and Benedick's mistaken impression at the revels. And both Claudio and Don Pedro are taken in by what appears to be the clear evidence of their own eyes when Borachio and Margaret masquerade as Hero and a lover. Accordingly, the greatest irony of the play as well as a precise statement of its problem is carried in Don John's speech as he prepares them to mistake that masquerade: "If you dare not trust that you see, confess not that you know.… When you have seen more and heard more, proceed accordingly" (III.ii.105-108). In the world of this play, precisely what one dare not do is to trust the evidence of the senses and to proceed on the assumption that sense perception is true knowledge.

The interrupted wedding ceremony displays the bankruptcy of sense knowledge. Claudio thinks that he has now repudiated appearances and seemings, but in fact he only substitutes belief in one appearance (the scene supposedly showing Hero's infidelity) for belief in the "appearance" of her virtue as imaged in her physical beauty, to which he originally gave credence. His thoughts now run constantly on the opposition of seeming and being: "She's but the sign and semblance of her honor. / Behold how like a maid she blushes here! / O what authority and show of truth / Can cunning sin cover itself withal" (IV.i.31-34). Or again, "Would you not swear / All you that see her, that she were a maid / By these exterior shows? / But she is none" (IV.i.36-38). Or yet again, "Out on the seeming! I will write against it. / You seem to me as Dian in her orb, / … But you are more intemperate in your blood / Than Venus" (IV.i.54-58). He ends with a complete repudiation of external beauty as an evidence of virtue and renounces all trust in sense as a means to understanding: "For thee I'll lock up all the gates of Love, / And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang, / To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm, / And never shall it more be gracious" (IV.i.103-106). But ironically, for all his repudiations he is now more seriously confused than ever by appearances, since the external appearances of beauty and virtue in Hero are indeed a sign of true inner beauty. And he compounds his mistakes by interpreting Hero's silence and her swooning at his accusation as further indications of guilt, and by his ready belief in the false report of her death. Don Pedro is also taken in by all the errors: the alliance of desire and prudence judging in terms of sense knowledge can find no way out of the impasse of the confusing appearances.

Claudio's instruction in the better ways of knowledge and love is in two stages, both developing from the Friar's proposal that Hero feign death. The Friar himself, it ought to be noted, is not deceived by appearances, but neither does he totally repudiate them: as a good Platonist he takes the lady's physical beauty as a sign of her inner virtue, and regards her blushes and tremors as evidence of her innocence, but he interprets these external signs not merely at their face value but in the perspective provided by his age, his studies, his long experience, and his religious calling. The Friar's expectation as regards Claudio is stated in rather specific Platonic terms, to the effect that his brooding upon Hero's reported death will aid his advance along the scale of love. The Friar expects that this brooding will bring "into his study of imagination" not the false appearances of Hero's guilt but rather what he really knows of her "if ever love had interest in his liver," namely, the true Platonic form or essence of her virtue, "the Idaea of her life" which was imaged forth in "every lovely organ" of her physical beauty. And he expects that Claudio will finally come to see this not with physical sight or even with imagination but with "the eye and prospect of his soul" (IV.i.222-232). Something like this neoplatonic process of coming to recognize the inner reality does seem at length to work upon Hero's father Leonato, who believed her guilty at first but later affirms her innocence on the basis of heightened "soul-knowledge," declaring, "My Soul doth tell me Hero is belied" (V.i.42). He is ready to fight a duel to prove this, and is joined in the gesture by Antonio, who presumably has come to a similar insight. Claudio, however, can come to his Platonic recognition of the true "Idaea" of Hero's interior and exterior beauty only after the discovery of the deception: "Sweet Hero now thy image doth appear / In the rare semblance that I loved it first" (V.i.238-239). At this point he awakens, albeit belatedly, to the higher love.

But although he at last becomes a more perfect lover, with his eyes directed to the inner beauty, Claudio cannot advance to the higher stages of perception and love directly, because his former reliance on sense has led to "sin" which, though deriving from a "mistake" is yet culpable. His offer to Leonato clearly states his recognition of that fact, "Choose your revenge yourself; / Impose me to what penance your invention / Can lay upon my sin. Yet sinned I not / But in mistaking" (V.i.259-262). As these lines suggest, Claudio's advance in the ways of true knowledge and true love must now proceed through repentance, penance, and faith, and his new insight must be tested. Leonato's conditions and the new marriage constitute that penance, that advance, and that test; the many critics who complain of Claudio's insensitivity or shameful conduct in agreeing to the new marriage so soon after Hero's supposed death have not, I think, fully understood the thematic and symbolic function of these incidents.

Leonato's conditions seem surprisingly easy: Claudio is to clear Hero's reputation, to spend a night mourning at her tomb, and then to marry her cousin who is "almost the copy" of Hero and heir to a yet larger fortune. But in fact the conditions are aptly suited to the "sin." Claudio has relied heretofore solely on the knowledge of the senses; his desire for Hero had been grounded upon her external beauty, and he has wholly mistaken her nature because of such reliance and such focus. He must take the "new" lady wholly on faith, with no sensory confirmation of or prudential inquiry into the truth of Leonato's promises. His language shows that he recognizes the test for what it is: he offers to "dispose" of himself wholly in accordance with Leonato's wishes (V.i.282), and resolves to carry through the marriage "were she an Ethiope" (V.iv.38). He is offered, however, not an Ethiope but a veiled lady whose face he may not see until after he has promised to wed: the senses are not to be mortified but are to be superseded by the gesture of faith involved in accepting the veiled lady. This gesture brings Claudio to true knowledge and the reward of his now perfected love when the lady stands revealed as Hero herself.

Hero's agonizing trial, her "death" and restoration may represent her own education in the higher love and knowledge, but this motif is not developed. Rather, here as almost always throughout the play she functions chiefly as an object for Claudio's response. Her feigned "death," the ceremony of mourning at her tomb, her reappearance under a veil, and her final revelation in all her former loveliness constitute a sequence of events to which Claudio must relate by a gesture of faith and which become thereby the means for his reclamation and growth in love. The Friar had earlier suggested something of the significance of this masquerade: "Come, lady, die to live" (IV.i.252), and again, "But on this travail look for greater birth" (IV.i.212). At one level Hero's masquerade would seem to incorporate an allusion—an allusion simply; we are not in the realm of allegory—to Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, displaying thereby to Claudio the meaning of his own experience in terms of its ultimate archetype. Christ's death and resurrection presents the archetype of sacrificial love for the restoration of others, and of divine reality veiled in human form so as to be wholly invisible to sense perception and revealed only to faith.

This allusion, at this climactic moment, underscores the fact that the neoplatonic scale has been modified in the play by the addition of other categories which make it more relevant to the human condition of sin, weakness, and error. Now at the apex of the ladder of love is the concept of love as redemptive sacrifice (imaged forth in Hero); and intersecting with the Platonic categories of knowledge are two other levels—the true instinct granted to the foolish Watch, and the faith exhibited by Benedick and Claudio. Only because of these new terms—love as redemptive sacrifice and knowledge as faith—is the Platonic ascent possible to such as Claudio. These terms receive illumination not from Bembo but from St. Paul:

For the … cross is to them that perish foolishness, but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.…

God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.

(I Cor. i:18-19,27)