SOURCE: “Toward Understanding Patriarchy in Much Ado,” Shakespeare Yearbook, Vol. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 193-200.

[In the following essay, Battenhouse criticizes Claire McEachern’s interpretation of patriarchal issues in Much Ado about Nothing, particularly for its lack of consideration of the play’s Christian aspects.]

My aim in this brief essay is to sketch an alternative to Claire McEachern's recent depiction of Shakespeare in “Fathering Herself” (SQ 39:269-90) as a critic of patriarchy. His portrayal of fathers, she writes, “refuses to authorize patriarchal power” (288). She offers her analysis as a contrast to that of Kathleen McLuskie, another feminist who dislikes patriarchy. In McLuskie's view Shakespeare was enbondaged to the patriarchal assumptions of his culture; an essay of hers has dubbed him “The Patriarchal Bard” to warn readers against an alleged anti-feminism in his art. McEachern, on the other hand, would insist that Shakespeare “forges a critical perspective from which to view patriarchy” (289).

Now insofar as this approach seems to promise some attention to the difference between faulty patriarchy and true patriarchy, it sounds attractive to me. But alas, it turns out that for McEachern all versions of patriarchy become problematic. Even the patriarchally ordered happy ending in Much Ado is regarded as dubiously satisfactory and “highly ironic” (280). Why so? Apparently, because McEachern reads patriarchy as an unstable social construct “founded in a profound contradiction” (273). In her view, the term is only a “rubric” which conflates two conflicting “systems.” One involves ruling the family and the other a negotiating of male alliances. The contradiction between those, she asserts, is “at the heart of patriarchy” and is what Shakespeare explores (273).

I shall test this contention by examining the patriarchy of Leonato in Much Ado. McEachern's discussion of Leonato relies on a terminology borrowed from modern sociology and psychoanalysis. I hope I may be pardoned for suggesting that these tools may be inadequate for grasping Shakespeare's assumptions.

First, permit me a few words about comedy. As I see it, comic action includes both a happy ending and some intermediate exhibits of human folly and foibles. In Much Ado the funniest moment for me is the wedding scene fiasco, for here the comedy of human folly has its most spectacular display. A deluded groom rejects his bride, not quietly and in private, but at the church altar, where he shouts at her bewildered father:

                    There, Leonato, take her back again
Give not this rotten orange to your friend.

(4.1.30-31)

Disregarded is the girl's modest testimony of innocence. Her accuser parades as the exposer of false seeming. “O what authority and show of truth,” he exclaims, “Can cunning sin cover itself withall!” (34-35). But note the dramatic irony: this speaker's own rhetoric unwittingly points his proverb at himself. For what is as comic as a speaker who intemperately denounces intemperance, while he credits hearsay yet refuses to hear? His folly is particularly out of place in a church, since the Bible, in Leviticus 19:16 and Matthew 7:1, forbids slander and blind judgment.

The response by Leonato is equally absurd. He believes Claudio's “show” and duplicates it. Rejecting his own daughter, he talks wildly of wishing to strike at her life. “Death is the fairest cover for her shame” is his comment when Hero faints on the floor. “Help, uncle!” her cousin Beatrice cries out, but only the sensible clergyman answers with a timely “Have comfort, lady.” Leonato is wholly absorbed with self-pity. Lamenting ever having loved Hero, he cries: “Hence with her, let her die.” This lack of fatherly concern is as shamefully ludicrous as Claudio's lack of loverly concern.

The comedy is enhanced, let me note, by the metaphors with which Shakespeare lets these high-society fools expose their versions of duty. Claudio vows to

… lock up all the gates of love
And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang.

(104-05)

Leonato cries, “Do not ope thine eyes” (122). To prefer closed eyes and conjecture is contrary, surely, to both husbandry and fatherhood. Through further details Shakespeare reveals the illogical reasoning of these rash judges. Claudio trusts the testimony of a “ruffian” who confessed to a thousand secret vile encounters with Hero (90-94). Is it sensible to believe a ruffian? A moment later when Beatrice is called on for testimony, she reports having been the bedfellow of Hero every night but one in the past twelve months (147-48). That should make evident that Hero has been belied. But Leonato is bent comically on a dark imagining of the one night outside Beatrice's knowledge. Grasping at this straw of non-evidence, he declares Claudio's charge “Confirmed! Confirmed!” Bogus reasoning is an old staple of comedy, and surely Shakespeare counts on his theatre audience to laugh at it here.

I have sketched the scene's comic aspects so that I can now appropriately ask how much awareness McEachern has of these. She doesn’t mention any of them when discussing the “critical perspective” she credits Shakespeare with providing on Leonato. Rather, she tells us that Shakespeare is forcing us to be indignant at Leonato:

Our knowledge that Hero did not in fact contravene her father's and her suitor's bond forces us to censure Leonato's belief in Claudio's accusation with, at the very least, indignation: He is unjust, disloyal, and too ready to sacrifice his love for his daughter to the ideal of male alliance.

(290)

I would say, instead, that our native understanding of a father's normative responsibility prompts us to feel a huge amusement at Leonato's topsy-turvy version of fatherhood. We see him as the victim of his witless imagination, making much ado about nothing. To say that he “sacrifice(s) his love for his daughter to the ideal of male alliance” seems to me inaccurate. Actually he is repudiating love, not sacrificing it, and he makes no mention of “male alliance” as his ideal. His ideal here, I would infer, is simply to maintain his honor in the public eye and in his own estimate. He is, like Claudio, a shallow man overly concerned for worldly reputation. He therefore falls into and duplicates what later he will repent of and oppose as Claudio's “fashion-monging” unmanliness (5.1.95). Momentarily, Leonato is Fashion's fool, as I read him.

But from McEachern's pages one would never guess that Shakespeare intended any comic element in these characterizations. His aim, she tells us, was “to expose the potentially destructive emotional logic of patriarchy” (275). Leonato's rhetorical lament that “mine I loved, and mine I prais’d / And mine that I was proud on” (135-6) she diagnoses as “shockingly narcissistic” (276). And then she proceeds to associate this narcissism with “the power of his love for his daughter,” his having taken “the risk of loving her,” and “patriarchy's radical investment in the affective order of the family”—all of which Shakespeare is presenting as “the ideological confusion” of the patriarchal system (276). Leonato's “fatherly love for Hero,” we are told, is in conflict with “his social need for male honor” (277). When he interprets Hero's blush as guiltiness, “It is as if Hero's very body is marked by the competing demands of patriarchy” (278). His rejection of her “testifies to his radical possession of her, a possession inappropriate to comedy and to exogamy alike, however psychologically understandable” (278). “In order for the play to end in marriage, Leonato must … acknowledge the necessity of granting his daughter's alterity” (278).

This medley of explanation seems to me mostly a loose jargon that is wide of the mark. Why equate fatherly love with narcissism? Further, I can see no evidence that Leonato's predicament is due to the competing demands of patriarchy. Family order and exogamy were both respected by him when he gave Hero to Claudio in Act Two. And in this match, made with her full consent, there was no possessive scanting of her “alterity.” I see the real cause of the ensuing trouble, rather, in the limited horizons of Leonato and Claudio. When I hear Claudio hail his betrothal with the comment, “I give away myself for you and dote upon the exchange” (2.1.295), his doting strikes me as signifying a superficial understanding of love and marriage. And Leonato's equally superficial understanding is surely signaled by his comment to the Friar as the wedding party gathers at the church: “Come, Friar Francis, be brief—only the plain form of marriage, and you shall recount their duties afterwards” (5.1.1-3).

The here-neglected particular duties, as the play's final outcome will make clear, turn about a faithful caring for the loved one. Without this religious dimension, a husband's (or a father's) love can lapse into a worldly concern for fashionable appearances. Fashionable “apparel,” appearances, is what we hear Borachio discoursing on in a key passage of the play (3.3), where he equates it with what is “nothing to a man” but deforms him. Fashion, says Borachio, turns its followers into giddy gentlemen. As examples he cites Pharaoh's soldiers (who drowned in the Red Sea), the god Bel's priests (who served thievish appetite in the guise of piety), and the shaven Hercules (when he lapsed from virtue).¹ Each of these examples is an icon of moral faithlessness—two of them, let us note, from the Bible. All three illustrate moral manhood betrayed into an action of vanity. And is not this what Shakespeare lets us see Claudio and Don Pedro and Leonato fall into? It takes a faithful friar to rescue the faithless Leonato and turn him into a proper patriarch.

The contribution of the Friar, let me point out, is threefold. First, he persuades Leonato of Hero's innocence by pointing to testimony in her face and eye which he, by virtue of his calling in “divinity,” can read. Secondly, he proposes a remedy for rescuing the broken marriage through a strategy of funeral rites to awaken remorse in Claudio for the “death” he has caused. And thirdly, he comforts the lady with an adage that encapsulates the mystery of Christian wisdom: “Die to live.” On this basis he grounds his hope that “This wedding-day / Perhaps is but prolonged” (4.1.252-3)—that is, made longer so it may be more lasting. As later events reveal, the friar himself will preside at the wedding which fulfills this hope by bringing a resurrected Hero to a penitent Claudio. That outcome not only provides the joy and wonder proper to comedy; it also reveals the “gracious” context that underlies Christian marriage in contrast to (and in correction of) the unreliable “grace of mortal men” which fashioned the match made in Act Two. (Cf. R3 3.4.96: “O momentary grace of mortal men, / Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!”) More than “male alliance” is involved in a Christian marriage. Leonato, by cooperation with a “holy friar” (5.4.57), has become a fatherly mediator of a heavenly grace.

Theological categories, unfortunately, are outside McEachern's realm. I think it significant that the only reference she makes to the friar is to quote the lines in which he correctly interprets Hero's blushes as innocence. In McEachern's view, it is Benedick who prompts a change in Leonato. “As Benedick is part of the male world he [Leonato] wishes to join,” she explains, “his endorsement of Hero's innocence allows Leonato to retract his rejection of his daughter” and exchange the vocabulary of narcissism for that of a chivalric protector (279). “In the distant, idealizing stance of the chivalric champion, Leonato can love Hero and learn to release her,” while the “macho” aspect of the challenger allows him to recover social honor (279). He appropriates “a courtly rhetoric … in which fathers are made archaic.” Shakespeare thus “re-idealizes the patriarchal system,” yet “in terms so highly artificial that they make us conscious of their presence and of the emotional life they would dissemble” (280). Further,

Disguised, and given in marriage by her uncle, Hero is safely removed from Leonato; the father is doubly replaced: first by Antonio and finally by Claudio. Leonato is relegated to spectator, … and in the macabre fantasy of Hero's death Shakespeare insists upon the costs of constructing and maintaining the patriarchy. … Leonato's arrival at the posture of patriarch is labored and highly ironic, requiring a suggestion of tragedy that can never be fully dismissed by the high artifice of a happy ending.

(280)

I have quoted lengthily from McEachern in order to indicate the flavor of her analysis. Her precise meaning I find elusive. But what she seems to be saying is that Leonato's revised patriarchy becomes highly ironic because it is achieved at the cost of displacing himself. Also, that the symbolic death of Hero is a “macabre fantasy” of tragic cost, which makes the play's comedy problematic. McEachern does not perceive, evidently, that the only cost to Hero is that of suffering an adversity with patience (as does Hermione in The Winter's Tale), thereby demonstrating her hidden virtues of faith, hope, and charity, on which any lasting happy ending depends. Nor does this critic notice that Leonato is carrying out the friar's “Look for greater birth” (4.7.212) when he gives Claudio a “penance” to reeducate him as soon as the play's wise-fool watchmen have demolished Claudio's foolish trust in his own righteousness. For if the marriage is to be mended, Claudio must not merely feel remorse for the loss of “Sweet Hero” (as he does at 5.1.245); he must also undergo a symbolic death—in his case through contrition, confession, and satisfaction, stages paralleling the penance of church ritual, as R. G. Hunter noted in his chapter on Much Ado in Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (1965). Claudio receives Leonato's forgiveness only when he accepts sight-unseen, as a final proof of good faith, the substitute bride Leonato grants him, namely, Hero's hidden self. McEachern's modern feminism apparently nullifies her ability to appreciate this kind of comedy.

I have noted deficiencies in McEachern's analysis in order to point up at the same time the Scriptural rootage of Shakespeare's sense of comedy. The gospel remedy of a penitential dying to an old or worldly self and the gospel “mystery” of a resurrection that overcomes slander inform the ending of Much Ado. Earlier, Claudio's and Leonato's absurd infidelity have as a glossing commentary the Bible's paradigms of Pharaoh's soldiers and Bel's priests. And then the untangling of this predicament involves St. Paul's paradox in 1 Corinthians, that the worldly-wise are fools who can become truly wise only by becoming holy fools. Chris Hassel's Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (1980) has explored the presence of this Pauline paradox in several of Shakespeare's comedies, and Barbara Lewalski in 1965 aptly cited 1 Corinthians 1:27 as pertinent to Much Ado.

Nowadays Hassel's book, and R. G. Hunter's on the forgiveness motif, and Nevile Coghill's 1951 essay on “The Medieval Basis of Shakespearean Comedy,” emphasizing its Christian premises, seem routinely bypassed by researchers. Why? Perhaps because the Bible is too subtly pervasive a source to be easily noted, or perhaps because our attunement to Biblical allusions is disappearing. If we pay attention to religious dimensions, McEachern's reducing of the play to a critique of patriarchal power is somewhat askew. It is not the power of patriarchy that is on trial, but rather the good sense of Leonato. We see him become utterly ludicrous when he lets his love of reputation turn him into an unfatherly father, echoing thus Claudio's lapse into an unloverly lover for the same shallow reason, an addiction to the fashions of the world which pass away, as Christians ought to know from 1 Corinthians 7:31. Providentially, these fools get rescued from their folly by the wisdom of Messina's clergyman, aided indirectly by the town's simpleton watchmen who can intuitively recognize evil on hearing its voice even though they fumble in naming it. The play as a whole is continually amusing by its exposure of human foibles, and a genuinely happy outcome is attained when, by a friar's counsel, Leonato grows into a self-effacing patriarch who fulfills fatherhood's true role. Whereas McEachern supposes the play's ending to be an ironic re-idealizing of patriarchy, readers capable of a traditional Christian sensibility either in Shakespeare's day or our own can recognize it as patriarchy's true actualization by a triumph of faith over fashion.

Notes

1. It is pertinent that Benedick is compared with Hercules by Beatrice when she is upbraiding him for lack of manhood, in 4.1.316: “… manhood is melted into cur’sies, valor into compliment, and men are turn’d into tongue, and trim ones too. He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie, and swears it.”

Works Cited

Hassel, R. Chris. Faith and Folly in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1980. Chapter 4.

Hunter, Robert G. Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness. New York: Columbia UP, 1965. Chapter 4.

Kirsch, A. C. Shakespeare and the Experience of Love. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1981. 46-54.

Lewalski, Barbara. “Love, Appearance, and Reality: Much Ado about Something.” Studies in English Literature 8 (1965): 235-251.

McEachern, Claire. “Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 269-290.

McLuskie, Kathleen. “The Patriarchal Bard.” Political Shakespeare. Eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 88-108.

Ormerod, David. “Faith and Fashion in Much Ado about Nothing.” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 93-105.