SOURCE: “Anticipation and Retrospect in Much Ado about Nothing,” Essays in Criticism, Vol. XLI, No. 4, October, 1991, pp. 277-90.

[In the essay that follows, Edwards considers Much Ado about Nothing as “a play much preoccupied with … the narrative ordering of human life.”]

The relationship between life and stories about life has exercised a number of philosophers, theologians, literary critics and experimental novelists in recent years. Barbara Hardy, who has already made an important contribution to these discussions, now draws our attention to Shakespeare's interest in the ‘narrative motions’ of the human mind (‘Shakespeare's Narrative: Acts of Memory’, E in C, XXXIX. ii. April 1989, pp. 93-115).¹

A leitmotif of Barbara Hardy's analyses has been that works of narrative art reflect and explore the everyday (and night) activities of the human mind: narrative form is derived from rather than imposed upon real life. With the intention of countering this view Louis Mink has argued that

stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends; there are meetings, but the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell ourselves later, and there are partings, but final partings only in the story. There are hopes, plans, battles, and ideas, but only in retrospective stories are hopes unfulfilled, plans miscarried, battles decisive, and ideas seminal. Only in the story is it America which Columbus discovers.²

Mink and Hardy would undoubtedly agree that the retrospectiveness of stories goes deeper than the fact that most of them happen to be told in the past tense. But Mink—like Sartre's Roquentin—wishes to identify an element of bad faith or sleight-of-hand at the heart of narrative. If beginnings only exist in retrospect then stories, which seem to begin at the beginning, can only do so by silently anticipating the retrospective view. The essence of narrative plotting, argues Peter Brooks, is ‘the anticipation of retrospection’.³ Louis Mink is of course arguing, against Hardy, that life is one thing and story another; but it is clear from his examples that the processes he describes—the anticipation of retrospection, the retrospective construction of the past as prelude to the present—are endemic in human mental life even if (as he claims) they originate in our experience of storytelling.

Barbara Hardy's emphasis on Shakespeare's interest in retrospection, anticipation, and the anticipation of retrospection—‘We look before and after, look before at looking after, and after at looking before’—prompts a fresh look at Much Ado About Nothing, a play much preoccupied with anticipation, retrospection, and the narrative ordering of human life.

Early on in the play Claudio tells Don Pedro how he has come to love Hero:

                                        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.

To which Don Pedro replies:

Thou wilt be like a lover presently
And tire the hearer with a book of words.
If thou dost love fair Hero, cherish it,
And I will break with her and with her father
And thou shalt have her. Was’t not to this end
That thou begans’t to twist so fine a story?

(I. i. 277-91)

Don Pedro's rhetorical question (‘Was’t not to this end … ?’) echoes the bringing together of beginnings and endings in Claudio's ‘When you went onward on this ended action’. Of course by ‘end’ Don Pedro means purpose and anticipated consequence, rather than terminal point, but these meanings cannot be clearly separated since the anticipated consequence will be the terminal point of the autobiographical story Claudio has started to tell. In any case, part of Don Pedro's meaning is that Claudio's story constructs the past conveniently as prelude to the present and to the desired future: the story, Don Pedro suggests, is an essentially retrospective view of the events it describes.

One thing which makes it easy for Claudio to present his life as a story is that he thinks of it, in a wholly conventional way, as constituted by what Jacques in As You Like It calls ‘ages’: a human life is a finite sequence of distinct episodes or stages, with a beginning and an end.⁴

What might lead Don Pedro to see Claudio's story as indeed too much like a story to be wholly true is the way in which it repeats itself. Claudio starts by describing his early liking for Hero, a plain fact about his past that we have no reason to doubt. Then the fact of this past liking is repeated: Claudio is telling us that his present ‘desires’ are ‘saying I liked her’. There are two ways we can take this repetition. On the one hand what his new desires are telling him can be believed because it echoes what Claudio himself has already presented to us as a fact. On the other hand, since the whole story is being told by the man who is feeling these new desires, the repetition may damage the initial claim: perhaps it is only now, in retrospect, that he believes he used to like Hero, the story conveniently fabricating the past as antecedent to the present. Now that the audience and Don Pedro hear the end of Claudio's autobiographical sentence do we all start to doubt, in retrospect, the beginning? Perhaps, as Mink says, ‘the beginning of an affair belongs to the story we tell ourselves later’, but we cannot be sure.

Don Pedro makes his point via a traditional association between story-telling and spinning (the association that gives us ‘yarn’ and the ‘thread’ of a story). What his use of this metaphor leaves tantalizingly open is whether all stories are deviously retrospective (that is to say, morally twisted) or only some are.

The play presents certain kinds of fairly uncomplicated anticipation. The schemes devised to cause Beatrice to love Benedick, Benedick to love Beatrice, Claudio to hate Hero, and Claudio to love Hero again, obviously involve an anticipation, on the part of the schemers, of the likely consequences of the deceptions practised on their fellows. Furthermore, Shakespeare is clearly interested in the variable relation between the expected results and the actual results when they arrive. The schemes to get Beatrice and Benedick in love with one another are successful: the anticipated and the actual outcomes co-incide. Similarly, Don John the Bastard is correct in his anticipation of the effect on Claudio of overhearing what the latter takes to be evidence of Hero's infidelity, but because the truth does eventually seep out via Dogberry and Verges his scheme is foiled.

The eventual failure of Don John's plan may also have something to do with the Friar's scheme to get Claudio back in love with Hero. It is this scheme of the Friar's which is in many respects the most interesting of all. The extent of its success is hard to assess, and partly for that reason it makes us think especially hard about the relation between anticipation and retrospection.

After the climactic episode in which Claudio ruthlessly throws his wedding into reverse by giving Hero back to her father, Leonato the Friar suggests the swift conversion of Hero's broken nuptials into her mock funeral. ‘Pause awhile’, he says to the despairing Leonato and Benedick,

And let my counsel sway you in this case.
Your daughter here the princes left for dead,
Let her awhile be secretly kept in,
And publish it that she is dead indeed;
Maintain a mourning ostentation,
And on your family's old monument
Hang mournful epitaphs, and do all rites
That appertain unto a burial.

‘What shall become of this? What will this do?’ asks Leonato. The Friar argues that this course of action

                    well carried shall on her behalf
Change slander to remorse; that is some good:
But not for that dream I on this strange course,
But on this travail look for greater birth.
She dying, as it must be so maintain’d,
Upon the instant that she was accus’d,
Shall be lamented, pitied, and excus’d
Of every hearer; for it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost,
Why then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours: so will it fare with Claudio
When he shall hear she died upon his words,
Th’idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparell’d in more precious habit,
More moving-delicate and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul
Than when she liv’d indeed: then shall he mourn—
If ever love had interest in his liver—
And wish he had not so accused her:
No, though he thought his accusation true.
Let this be so, and doubt not but success
Will fashion the event in better shape
Than I can lay it down in likelihood.

(IV. i. 200-236)

What Barbara Hardy says of Shakespeare—‘As he imagines memorial, he looks ahead to contemplate recall’—is true here of Shakespeare's Friar, except that neither the memorial nor the recall are the Friar's own.

All the schemes in the play anticipate an alteration in the victims' feelings; but the Friar's scheme specifically anticipates the effect on Claudio's feelings of his seeing Hero's life in retrospect, as a remembered and ritually memorialised person. One consequence of this is that our own temporal experience, as readers or spectators of this dramatised story, can be drawn into the play's investigation of temporality in an especially complex and puzzling way. We are led to ponder what Hardy calls ‘the process through which events and persons are turned into narrative’.

Is the Friar's scheme successful? Is his anticipation of the effect on Claudio of retrospection accurate? There is no easy answer to these questions. In some respects the scheme works and in some respects it doesn’t, and our sense of where the balance lies will alter as we proceed through the play from Act IV, Scene 1. As the play unfolds we are surely prompted to remember the Friar's initial speech differently or to remember different parts of it, altering our recollection so as to make the past a plausible prelude to a changing present. These are processes in which all readers and spectators are always involved, but we may become unusually conscious of them when, as in this case, they are also the subject matter of what we are reading or watching.

The Friar anticipates that when Claudio hears of Hero's death he will not only feel remorse but, caught up in the public rituals of memorial, will come to idealise her life even ‘though he [still] thought his accusation true’. But in fact when Claudio hears of Hero's death he does not change his feelings about her. At this point in the play therefore we must conclude that the Friar has anticipated the future incorrectly, although we may at the same time remind ourselves that the Friar did also seem to hedge his bets by allowing that things might not turn out as he anticipated. A few scenes later however, after he has learned that Hero is innocent as well as (he believes) dead, Claudio does come to do and feel exactly what the Friar anticipated. He goes to Hero's family monument, reads the ‘mournful epitaph’ hung upon it and engages in those ‘rites of burial’ which cause him to ponder and idealise ‘the idea of her life’ in precisely the way the Friar suggested that he would.

The Friar anticipated that Claudio would think well of Hero again because he would be affected by her supposed death; in fact he is affected by her supposed death because—discovering that his accusations against her were not true—he thinks well of her again. Nevertheless, as Claudio engages in rites of mourning at Hero's family monument readers and spectators are likely to revise their judgement both on the accuracy of the Friar's anticipation and on their own earlier assessment of that anticipation. We may at this point forget that the Friar was ever wrong in any respect (forget that reality has reversed the sequence of cause and effect envisaged in his scheme), or we may consider that he was only partly wrong. We may also retrospectively revise our understanding of that later section of the Friar's speech in which he appeared to hedge his bets:

Let this be so, and doubt not but success
Will fashion the event in better shape
Than I can lay it down in likelihood.

This, we can now believe, is exactly what has happened. The degree to which the event has diverged from the anticipated event actually increases, in this later retrospect, our sense of the Friar's wisdom. After all, the Friar's scheme is based on his insight that things seem (are?) different after the event from how they seem before or during the event. And if this insight is to be taken seriously it must apply to the Friar himself just as much as to the other characters in the play. So to be really consistent and wise the Friar must say, as a correlative to his scheme, that it may well work out quite differently (better or worse) than anticipation can forecast.

As we have seen, none of the play's other schemes aim to alter feelings by forcing their victims to see things retrospectively. Nevertheless, the alteration of feelings which these other schemes successfully effect does itself prompt retrospection—on the part of the characters whose feelings have been altered, and on the part of readers and spectators.

When Beatrice is left alone after she has overheard the conversation between Hero and Ursula about Benedick—the conversation which Hero and Ursula plan she should overhear—she says:

What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell, and maiden pride, adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand.
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in a holy band;
For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly.

(III. i. 107-116)

By saying ‘maiden pride, adieu’ Beatrice is announcing that she is moving from one stage of the female life-cycle to the next stage, but she is doing more than that. She is acceding—in a way she has always aggressively refused to do before—to the notion that human life is indeed a cycle, a sequence of prescribed stages or episodes in which individuals play a succession of parts or characters with predictable characteristics. She now sums up her previous recalcitrance, her unconventionality, as merely one kind of conventional behaviour, ‘maiden pride’. This categorization of herself is explicitly retrospective; and this is not surprising since the notion that life is a sequence of prescribed stages is more congenial to people at some stages—later stages—of life than at others. Adolescents do not usually think of themselves as adolescents and young people do not normally start youth clubs. It is when Beatrice sees herself as a woman who will be married that she quickly defines her previous behaviour, in which she stood out against marriage, as characteristic of an earlier episode in a temporal schema, as the prelude to this very different next episode.

Benedick's response to overhearing the conversation between Leonato, Claudio and Don Pedro—a conversation he is meant to overhear—is rather more complex. Like Beatrice he reconciles what he now feels with what he used to feel by linking them as predictable episodes in a narrative sequence, but his retrospection also involves the memory of anticipation:

I may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me because I have railed so long against marriage: but doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age. Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humour? No, the world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

(II. iii. 227-35)

In railing against marriage Benedick had not in fact argued that he would die before he reached that stage of life: he had not spoken as if life was necessarily made up of such prescribed and obligatory stages. He had resisted his friends' anticipation of the title ‘Benedick the married man’. But he now explains his previous attitudes in just such terms and commits himself to a conventional narrative view according to which a person's life is made up of linked stages in which one plays the part of ‘bachelor’, ‘married man’, ‘youth’, ‘age’ and so on. Nevertheless, Benedick's final remark here—‘when I said I would die a bachelor, / I did not think I should live till I were married’—has an interestingly paradoxical air. Benedick's formulation somehow acknowledges that it may not now be possible even to understand the point of view from which he used to see life. His altered mental landscape has put the place he used to live quite out of sight. To reconcile his past and his present attitudes by allocating them to two contiguous stages in a necessary and universal process of growing up is perhaps a form of self-deception forced upon the world by those who conform to it.

As Beatrice and Benedick are pushed into falling in love with one another, we ourselves, as readers and spectators, may well find ourselves reinterpreting the protagonists' present affection as the inevitable and predictable outcome of their previous hostility. In the Introduction to his Penguin edition of the play, R. A. Foakes argues that ‘the tricks practiced on [Beatrice and Benedick] to make them fall in love merely bring into the open what is already implicit in their attention to each other’. Beatrice and Benedick do not claim this themselves of course; nevertheless Foakes is, like them, being drawn into interpreting the past as prelude to the present, interpretations more subtly retrospective than any of them realise.

The idea that the love between Beatrice and Benedick was latent in their previous mutual hostility is of course ethically convenient. The uncomfortable similarity between the benign deceit which brings Beatrice and Benedick together and the malign deceit of Don John which temporarily drives Claudio and Hero apart is easier to accept if you are convinced that the former only draws out a love latent in the relationship from the start. Some feeling of this kind is surely inevitable, for any reader or spectator, but so is a degree of scepticism about this feeling—a realization that their bantering hostility could, in other circumstances, have continued, or turned to indifference, or to hatred, or to friendship.

To speculate in this way about how a relationship might have turned out is itself bound to be problematic. As Stephen Greenblatt says,

theatrical performance is distinct from most other social practices insofar as its character is predetermined and enclosed, as it forces its audience to grant that retrospective necessity was prospective: the formal necessity disclosed when one looks back on events that have already occurred was in fact the necessity disclosed in the existence, before the performance itself, of the script.

Some (though not all) of the feeling, shared by R. A. Foakes with many other critics, that Beatrice and Benedick were destined for one another from the start, must derive not from the particular character of their relationship but from the fact that it is a relationship in a story of a particular kind: a comedy. Correlatively, to say that ‘in other circumstances’ their relationship could have turned out differently can only mean ‘in another play’ or—as Greenblatt puts it—in a performance where the actors ‘forget their lines or blurt them out before their cue or altogether refuse to perform’.⁵

Some people believe that the retrospective view has a privileged relation to truth and that the predetermined character of stories only reveals the narrative order that underlies the apparent confusion—or freedom—of real life. And we do not need to accept that philosophical position to see that there are some specific features of real life which resemble stories and which stories may be said to imitate and explore. This has been argued not only by Barbara Hardy, but in Shakespeare criticism by Anne Barton, Stephen Greenblatt and others who have noted Shakespeare's preoccupation in his plays with play-like aspects of life outside the theatre. There is one species of play-like behaviour which is more prominent in Much Ado than in any of the other plays, and in which the narrative aspect of drama is especially prominent. Much Ado shows that this behaviour is an important part of the ‘process through which events and persons are turned into narrative’. This play-like behaviour is the ritual practice known as a rite of passage. Shakespeare brings such rites directly onto the stage in the two weddings of Claudio and Hero and in the memorial acts performed by Claudio at Hero's supposed tomb.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in the course of an argument with Louis Mink's contention that ‘in life there are no beginnings, middles, or ends’, asks ‘but have you never heard of death?’⁶ It has frequently been suggested that it is death, more than anything else, that binds life and story together by enforcing that sense of an ending which generates the sense of beginnings and middles. But it is a moot point whether it is death alone or its ritual marking which generates the sense of an ending: even here culture may be required to supplement nature. In contemplating the effect on Claudio of Hero's supposed death, the Friar puts considerable emphasis on ‘the rites / That appertain unto a burial’. Hero's friends' ‘mourning ostentation’ at the ‘family's old monument’ is to lead Claudio himself to ‘mourn’ and Claudio's eventual ritual acts at the monument are directly staged.

If it is the ritual marking of death as much as death itself which generates the sense of an ending, it is most certainly weddings which begin marriages, and do so partly by anticipating their end (‘till death do us part’). Louis Mink may be right to say that ‘the start of an affair belongs to the story we tell ourselves later’, but the same is not true of a marriage. A function of weddings, and of the marriages they bring into being, is to give life something of the shape of a story while it is still going on. Weddings, like baptisms, funerals and other rites of passage, work to divide the lives of individuals into distinct segments and link the segments together into a finite sequence, to give life a narrative order. When Beatrice bids ‘maiden pride, adieu’ she is saying goodbye to the role of maiden in order to greet the role of wife. Her speech articulates her sense of being in transit between ages. This transition will actually be effected by the event which her speech implicitly anticipates: the wedding ceremony in which her uncle Leonato will give her away to Benedick. This event does not appear on stage but the equivalent moment in the lives of Claudio and Hero does. The so-called ‘church scene’ at the start of Act IV shows Leonato giving his daughter to Claudio who then tries to throw the ritual sequence brutally into reverse, telling his almost-father-in-law to ‘take her back again’. It is a shocking moment, both for the other characters and for us, and for a number of critics the maimed rite of Hero's wedding, together with the grief of her uncle and father which immediately follows it, moves the play to the borders of tragedy.⁷ The climactic position of the scene and its specially disturbing impact, are best explained in terms of the play's preoccupation with the relation between life and narrative.

Claudio commits an act of great psychological violence against Hero, and it is a sacrilegious act (the subversion of a sacred event in a sacred place). But these factors do not in themselves explain the unsettling force of the scene, which derives from the ways in which it draws upon the relationship between the event which it is (a scene in a play) and the event which it represents (an episode in a—subverted—rite of passage).

In the first place we need to remind ourselves that the wedding rite does more than move a person from one stage of the life cycle to another (from daughter to wife, for instance). It also, in so doing, helps to establish life as a cycle, or sequence of stages. By making Claudio disrupt the rite, attempting to reverse the sequence of the rite and of Hero's life, Shakespeare vividly emphasises its narrative function and the threat to life's narrative order which its disruption involves.

Secondly, the church scene is as J. R. Mulryne has noted ‘consciously and overtly “theatrical”’⁸, and the principal reason for its theatricality is that the rite which it represents on stage is—when performed in a real church by people really getting married—already a quasi-theatrical event, involving costumes, symbolic objects, the learning of parts, the following of a script. Shakespeare emphasises both the differences and the proximities between the on-stage and off-stage performances by using as part of his own script words that are (as the Arden editor puts it) ‘close to, but not exactly, the English marriage service’.⁹

If a real wedding and its representation in a dramatic narrative are thus complicated in their relationship to one another, it is worth pondering the implications of defining the church scene's impact by invoking the concept of ‘tragedy’. Tragedy is both a kind of human situation and a literary genre, the two meanings being neither identical nor easily separable. To describe the church scene as taking us to the borders of tragedy suggests that while it happens we wonder whether this is the kind of play in which an intensity of anguish and discord develops that, contrary to our previous expectations, will not be redeemable by any subsequent concord. The scene threatens that particular sense of anticipated retrospect which is essential to our sense of genre. I have suggested that to say the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick could have turned out differently ‘in other circumstances’ can only mean ‘in another play’: in the church scene we feel we may be in another play.

Of course, while we may be in a different play from the one we thought we were in, we are not in a different play from the one Shakespeare wrote. Nevertheless, the power of this scene may partly derive from a subliminal feeling that the actor playing Claudio has somehow refused to follow Shakespeare's script. He has not really done so, and the feeling that he has could not survive for a moment if it became more than subliminal. But we should recall Greenblatt's description of a hypothetical performance in which the actors ‘forget their lines or blurt them out before their cue or altogether refuse to perform’. That would describe quite well the way in which Leonato, the Friar, Claudio and Hero stumble through, and then in Claudio's case reject, their parts in the rite of passage. In suddenly refusing to play the bridegroom's part, the actor playing Claudio is still playing his part in Much Ado, but the similarities between the on-stage and off-stage performances are so real that the former secretly borrows some of the emotional charge that would result if the actor were to destroy the narrative order of the play itself by ‘altogether refusing to perform’.

Notes

1. Barbara Hardy's principal theoretical statement is ‘Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach Through Narrative’, Novel, II (1968), pp. 31-40, revised for Tellers and Listeners (1975).

2. ‘History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension’, New Literary History, I (1970), pp. 541-58 (p. 557).

3. ‘The very possibility of meaning plotted through sequence and through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending … the anticipation of retrospection’. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford. 1984), pp. 93-4. See also Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York, 1967).

4. Jacques' speech makes it hard for us to use the word ‘stage’ in this modern sense without punning anachronistically on its theatrical sense.

5. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988), p. 17.

6. After Virtue: a study in moral theory (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1981), p. 197.

7. ‘Much Ado may be called a tragi-comedy … the clouds gather in the fourth Act and look like breaking into tragedy, only to pass away in the fifth’. J. Dover Wilson, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (1962), p. 121.

8. Shakespeare: ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (1965), p. 18.

9. A. R. Humphreys (London and New York, 1981), p. 172.