SOURCE: “Mistaking in Much Ado,” in William Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, pp. 123-32.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1985, Newman explores the mingling of comedy and tragedy in Much Ado about Nothing, and compares it toMeasure for Measure.]

Many readers of Much Ado about Nothing have remarked that its tragicomic pattern sets it apart from Shakespeare's other romantic plays and links it with the so-called problem comedies. I want to turn finally to Much Ado because it brings us full circle to Measure for Measure. Unlike the threatened tragedy of Measure for Measure, however, the tragedy of Much Ado is apparent rather than real. Things appear to happen; all the characters at one moment or another are seduced into believing in appearances, and its two plots are linked by this common theme of credulity and self-deception. Readers of both plays have been troubled by the uneasy union of vehement and lifelike passions with the conventions of comedy, in Much Ado in 4.1, and in Measure for Measure in the shift from the first three acts to the last two. Of Much Ado, J. R. Mulryne complains that “the unlovable Claudio is too vividly and realistically portrayed (in the manner of a figure in tragedy).” Tillyard argues of Measure for Measure that the change to the conventions of comedy from the “more lifelike passions is too violent” and that the bed trick is not “a case of modern prudery unaware of Elizabethan preconceptions but of an artistic breach of harmony.” Shakespeare's persistent use of substitution, disguise and the language of mistaken identity in both plays establishes from the outset comic expectations in the audience which are ultimately fulfilled, but as Jean Howard has recently argued of Measure for Measure, the play

Strains and distorts a comic paradigm Shakespeare had used many times before, and in so doing calls attention to the way in which any set of conventions, generic or otherwise, can betray its basic function of mediating between audience and author to create lifelike illusions and becomes instead a sterile mechanism inadequate to its task.

She goes on to claim that Measure for Measure is an experiment in which Shakespeare attempts to escape from conventional comic formulas without losing his audience's “power to comprehend.” Though I find this view persuasive, I would like to qualify it by suggesting that the “problem” of Measure, and that of Much Ado as well, is not so much the inadequacies of art and its conventions “to create a satisfactory illusion of lifelike complexity,” but the uneasy union of the traditional comic plot designed to call attention to artifice, coincidence and wonder, with the conventions of realistic characterization, particularly the rhetoric of consciousness. In Much Ado, 4.1, and in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare uses such conventions so forcefully that our willingness to accept the artifice of their comic plots is undermined. Instead of extending the metaphorical power of mistaken identity by shifting its emphasis from plot to character, from external to psychological or internal mistaken identity, Shakespeare undermines our comic expectations by exaggerating the conventions of lifelike characterization in these plays. In Much Ado, Claudio is presented as a type common to Shakespeare's comedy, the courtly lover, but in 4.1, Shakespeare endows him with an inner life which conflicts with the type. So also in Measure for Measure the conventions of realistic characterization Shakespeare uses in portraying Angelo and Isabella conflict with the duke's intrigue plot. The “problem” of the two plays is not real passions versus comic conventions, as is so often claimed, but two kinds of opposing conventions, one which calls attention to itself and its artifice, the other which conceals itself by seeming “real.”

There are, of course, obvious differences between the two plays which make the labels romantic comedy and problem play appropriate. Much Ado does, after all, have the strictly comic plot of Beatrice and Benedick, which embraces rather than disapproves of sexuality; it has Dogberry and the watch strategically placed to assure us that all will be well instead of the problematic Duke whom Lucio slanders and whose improvisations with Ragozine's head seem uncomfortably forced. And Much Ado ends with the marriage of its lovers, not with a judgment scene in which the Duke calls for and administers an Old Testament vengeance to Lucio and proposes marriage to the silent Isabella. But we need to look first at Shakespeare's portrayal of Claudio before we can compare Much Ado and Measure for Measure and assess their similarities and differences.

In Much Ado, Claudio mistakes Hero's true nature, discovers his error, and believing it has caused Hero's death, must atone for his “sin.” Mistaken identity provides the means whereby both the mistake and Claudio's subsequent development is communicated to the audience. Like so many comic heroes, Claudio must lose in order to find. This fundamental pattern, which we have seen elsewhere, is juxtaposed with Beatrice and Benedick's parallel discovery of their mutual love.

Claudio's character, like Angelo's, has always seemed to trouble readers of Much Ado. Cynics claim he woos Hero for her money; romantics counter that his query about Leonato's family stems from timidity and embarrassment. It is perhaps anachronistic to fault Claudio because he asks about Hero's financial expectations, for even the cynical Benedick believes his friend's devotion is real. But our discomfort with Claudio's repudiation of Hero in the church scene is less easily dismissed. Before we consider 4.1, however, we need to look at how Shakespeare introduces Claudio and establishes the romance plot.

The play's first lines present Claudio as the courtly ideal: “he hath borne himself beyond the promise of his age, doing, in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion: he hath indeed better bettered expectation” (1.1.12-15). His falling in love with Hero is equally conventional. Before she utters a word, he loves her, and though not at first sight, from the moment of seeing her after his return from the wars. His language is that of the courtly lover: “In mine eye, she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on” (ll. 174-75). He asks “Can the world buy such a jewel?” (l. 168), and as his verb suggests, he betrays a mercantile attitude toward love. Claudio needs assurance that others value his “jewel of price” and seeks confirmation of his love from Benedick.

Don Pedro's offer to woo Hero for Claudio triggers the first “suppose” of the play. A servant overhears this conversation, reports it to Leonato, who then believes Pedro woos Hero for himself. Claudio in turn believes Don John's tale of Pedro's love for Hero so that the action of the masked ball, as many have noted, prepares for the villain's intrigue by demonstrating Claudio's credulity and lack of self-confidence. His excessive idealism, untempered by compassion or by the sense of play which characterizes Beatrice and Benedick, explains how he can be duped by Don John's disguise plot. Though he participates in the game of gulling the two would-be lovers, he hasn’t the imagination to include play in his own lovemaking.

John Anson argues that the balcony scene is a fantasy enactment of Claudio's own fears and subconscious desires which he displaces onto the object of his idealized passion. Just as Don Pedro indulges Beatrice and Benedick in a fiction which corresponds to his own secret wishes, so his brother Don John indulges Claudio in a vision of his ambiguous desires: a lustful Hero whose sexuality both attracts and repels. The vehemence of Claudio's public slander, his “public accusation” as Beatrice condemningly calls it, testifies to that same excess of passion which made him idealize his beloved. Claudio has no sense of human weakness and therefore responds with selfish cruelty to the disappointment of his imagination. His world is an imaginative construct which has encompassed reality by halves—only its romance and none of its frail humanity. His sense of self is so dependent on his imagined ideal vision of love that when that vision is disappointed, his own identity is threatened. We in the audience are doubly aware of his lack of human compassion because we know Hero is falsely accused. Her “sin” endangers him because on some level it corresponds with his own repressed desire.

Neither the historical argument that the Elizabethans expected such a public repudiation, nor the attempts to excuse the count's behavior at the church on the grounds of a lofty idealism and disgust toward sexuality, exonerate Claudio. Most readers agree with Chambers that “Claudio stands revealed as the worm that he is.” His rejection of Hero is somewhat roundabout, a combination, it would seem, of his own desire for a shocking revelation and the bystanders', particularly Leonato's ignorance. Shakespeare casts the opening interchange into the “plain form of marriage” so that Claudio seems to comply with a code even in his repudiation. When the friar asks if he comes “to marry this lady,” the count says no, but he is interpreted by Leonato to be quibbling over the way in which Friar Francis poses the question. Claudio lets this interpretation stand. After another such exchange, he takes over from the friar and proceeds with the ritual forms himself, but his questions are as misleading as his earlier responses. His ambiguous question at 4.1.26-27, with its ironic reference to Hero as “this rich and precious gift,” and Pedro's similarly deceptive response, allow Leonato once again to misinterpret his intentions. Finally, Claudio openly repudiates his bride, but his compliance with the ritual forms of the ceremonial occasion confirms our sense of the count's character as bounded by conventional codes.

Having returned Hero to her father, Claudio's anger and passion break forth. The emphasis shifts from the ceremonial occasion and its ordained participants—priest, father, bride and groom—to Hero herself. The demonstratives (“this rotten orange, that blood, these exterior shows”) and the appeals to the audience (“Behold,” “all you that see her”) bespeak the count's determination to achieve an effect. Again Leonato misinterprets Claudio's words, for he believes the young man himself to have “made defeat of her virginity.” Claudio's claim of bashful sincerity and comely love brings Hero's innocent but unfortunate reference to “seeming,” which prompts his passionate denunciation. Critics have noted the similarity between Claudio's language here and that of Hamlet and Othello:

Out on thee, seeming! I will write against it.
You seem to me as Dian in her orb,
As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown;
But you are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus, or those pamper’d animals
That rage in savage sensuality.

(4.1.56-61)

Claudio focuses in these lines on Hero rather than the assembled audience, a change which makes his feelings seem more intensely personal and less determined by forms and codes. Shakespeare uses the rhetoric of consciousness to endow Claudio with an inner life that breaks the confines of literary convention and ceremonial decorum. Instead of the courtly lover of the previous action, he becomes an individual of psychological complexity whom we both pity and despise. His description of Hero is based on the paradoxical contrast between what she seems and what he knows she is: “Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty” (4.1.41). The irony is that the opposite is true, for what “seems,” is, and what he “knows,” is false. As in earlier speeches in which we find such rhetoric creating an inner self, paradox and antithesis represent Claudio's divided mind. Though addressed to Leonato, the series of questions beginning at line 69 are rhetorical and establish the pronomial contrast between “I” and “you.” They also situate Claudio firmly in the moment and the real world, a necessary feature of dialogue. The count makes of Hero two persons, a Diana and a Venus, “most foul, most fair” (l. 103), and this divided Hero represents in language the poles of his own divided self. His lament, “O Hero! What a Hero hadst thou been” betrays genuine emotion. Here he is oblivious to family and friends, preoccupied with feelings, not forms. From an excess of idealism in love, Claudio is transformed into a suspicious misogynist who knows himself no better than before. Until he learns how he has been deceived, he cannot know himself, recognize his failures, and love properly.

Friar Francis restores sanity and reason to the impassioned scene of denunciation by recognizing Hero's honesty and by proposing still another “suppose,” her feigned death. He argues the fundamental comic perspective of losing to find:

                                        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—

(4.1.217-30)

The friar understands that Claudio has loved the idea of Hero; when the count learns of his mistake, he says “Sweet Hero! Now thy image doth appear / In the rare semblance that I lov’d it first” (5.1.245-46, emphasis added). Friar Francis expects to transform Claudio's imagination and lead him to a more just judgment of Hero, but the “idea of her life” never has time to “sweetly creep / Into his study of imagination.”

Immediately following the scene in which Claudio learns of Hero's death, Benedick gives his challenge. Critics have been disturbed by the jesting in this scene, but Claudio's callousness would not claim our attention had Shakespeare not set up expectations for his development which are never met. Friar Francis's prediction that the count will mourn Hero “though he thought his accusation true” leads us to expect a repentance like Flamminio's in Gl’Ingannati where Lelia's beloved condemns his past behavior even before he learns of her love and loyalty. Even more important, our sense of Claudio's inner life, of his passionate disappointment, genuine emotion and divided mind, leads us to expect a different, more feeling response to the news of Hero's death. Though there are sound theatrical reasons for delaying Claudio's response to the more dramatic moment of confrontation with Leonato after Borachio has confessed the crime, the count's heartlessness is troubling because it fails to fulfill our expectations for the comic plot.

If we compare Shakespeare's presentation of Claudio with that of Beatrice and Benedick, we can see how he extends the convention of mistaken identity to add depth and interest to their characters, but without transgressing the carefully defined limits of their comic plot. In Benedick's soliloquy in 2.3, immediately preceding the eavesdropping scene, Shakespeare presents a character already aware of love's transforming potential. Speculating on Claudio's transformation, Benedick remembers how his friend had once “no music with him but the drum and the fife, and now had he rather hear the tabor and the pipe” (ll. 13-15). He questions his own identity, wondering whether he may, “be so converted and see with these eyes?” “Yet I am well,” he repeats, trying to convince himself. The modal verbs he uses are shall and will, not should and would, future rather than subjunctive; his language betrays his openness to loving Beatrice.

Pedro, Leonato and Claudio present Benedick with the strong evidence of Beatrice's attachment he needs to admit his love. The deceivers spend very little time talking of Benedick's scorn. Instead, they recount the signs of Beatrice's love: she is up twenty times a night to write to him, beats her heart and tears her hair. Hero even fears she may do herself harm. They wish Benedick “would modestly examine himself, to see how much he is unworthy so good a lady” (2.3.200-201). And that is exactly what he does. The ease with which Benedick is “converted,” or in the language of the play, “caught,” makes it clear how close to the surface his love has been: “Love me? Why, it must be requited” (ll. 215-16). In his previous soliloquy he asks “can I be so converted”; here he has been converted indeed. Benedick is willing to change: “Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending.” His vision altered by knowledge of Beatrice's love, Benedick now begins to interpret her differently. What was once judged quarrelsome is now thought loving. His notion of himself and of her has changed, and consequently her words have different meanings.

Despite this change, his character still conforms to the broad outlines of a comic stereotype, the miles gloriosus. His boasting of success with women and his martial reputation connect him to the miles tradition just as Claudio's language and actions have connected him to the tradition of the courtly lover. After the slander of Hero, when he and Beatrice admit their love, Benedick's avowals imply his martial talents: “By my sword, Beatrice, thou lovest me,” (4.1.272) and “I will swear by it that you love me, and I will make him eat it that says I love not you.” But unlike the Plautine braggart, Benedick is truly a martial hero and his engagement to Beatrice to fight Claudio is real. In Benedick Shakespeare has created an individual character who is also a comic type, a talent for which we should remember Donatus and other commentators praise Terence.

The deceit of Beatrice presents a very different fiction. Hero and Margaret emphasize not Benedick's love, but Beatrice's disdain. They exaggerate her scorn for the opposite sex, describe her derision of a man's love and compliment Benedick's worth and valor. Their fable portrays a Beatrice whose wit protects her from emotional involvement. The deceits perpetrated by the other characters satisfy the individual needs of each other: Benedick's fragile ego needs the safety of Beatrice's love in order to admit his own; Beatrice's fear of male domination makes her scorn love. Her soliloquy, like Benedick's, is filled with rhetorical questions, paradox, and the juxtaposition of past, present and future, all features of dialogue. But there are significant differences in the two lovers' speeches. Beatrice speaks in verse, and the shift to poetry, the first she uses in the play, marks the liberation of her desire. Whereas Benedick wonders whether he can change and love Beatrice, she questions whether or not he loves her. Their individual responses bear out the differences in the way they are gulled: Benedick through his self-love; Beatrice through her “wild heart” which makes her fear domination by men.

Even with these visions of the other's affections, however, it takes the heightened emotion of the church scene, an impossible moment for their usual self-protective repartee, for Beatrice and Benedick to let down their defenses and admit their mutual love. When Leonato tells them they were “lent eyes to see,” he telescopes the way in which the play juxtaposes mistaken identity with mistaken insight. Mistaken identity, role-playing and alternate identities are therapeutic instruments which lead the characters to self-knowledge, for these comic devices are not simply tools for developing plot, but springboards for experimentation whereby men and women escape from self-delusion to the self-understanding which enables them to live and love.

Comic decorum, which dictates the lovers' conversion to love, also prohibits Claudio's being made into a tragic figure who undergoes a psychologically “real” development. He cannot, argues M. C. Bradbrook, be “allowed more than a pretty lyric by way of remorse.” Critics have claimed that Claudio's behaviour can best be understood within the context of a Decameron-like story, but as we have seen in 4.1, Shakespeare endows him with a psychological complexity in excess of what such a plot requires. No reading of the play can excuse the brutality of his treatment of Hero, but the conventional comic action does demand that he be forgiven. When he learns of his mistake, Claudio asks of Leonato, “Impose me to what penance your invention / Can lay upon my sin; yet sinn’d I not / But in mistaking” (5.1.267-69). But for Shakespeare, mistaking is enough; the play asserts that the sins of ignorance and credulity have consequences as dire as Don John's sins of will. Claudio's explicitly religious penance at Hero's tomb, though only sketched, is a conventional means of dramatizing his movement through sin and confession to repentance and self-knowledge. Though certainly a “pretty lyric,” Claudio's lines also unite Much Ado with the dark comedies and late romances in their emphasis on ritual forgiveness.

Much Ado about Nothing richly deserves the frequently drawn comparison with Measure for Measure. Just as the intensity of Angelo's appetite for Isabella and her vehement rejection of her brother's plea to live threaten our sense that comic conventions are adequate to our experience of that play, so Claudio's repudiation of Hero in the church scene, and his untractable unwillingness to conform to Friar Francis's comic vision of losing to find, trouble our satisfaction with Much Ado's comic resolution.

In both Much Ado and Measure for Measure, the careful balance between the conventions of comic plotting and those of lifelike characterization which Shakespeare maintains in his earlier comedies is upset. The rhetoric of consciousness which he employs adds depth and complexity to his comic characters and to the convention of mistaken identity, extending it from a plot device to a means of representing character development on stage. This inner life receives an emphasis more characteristic of tragic than of comic drama. In the criticism of tragedy, comic intrusions were once called “comic relief,” but both the pejorative term itself and its correspondingly reductive view of such scenes in tragedy have been rejected in favor of a larger claim for the tragic vision, its expansiveness and complexity. A similar prejudice has troubled the criticism of Shakespeare's comedies, and to a limited extent those of his predecessors. Too often, critics have judged his use of a deliberative mode of comic characterization as a kind of bumbling intrusion of the tragic into comedy, whether in terms of Renaissance readers and audiences such as Sidney and Johnson, who labeled such plays “mongrel tragicomedy,” or modern Shakespeareans who criticize Claudio's outburst in the church scene, or the problematic generic status of Measure for Measure.

Angelo is, of course, more interesting and complex a poetic creation than Claudio. In part this difference can be explained in simple quantitative terms—Angelo has a much greater portion of the lines and share in the action of Measure for Measure than Claudio has in Much Ado, in which the displacement of the main plot maintains our sense that the “ado” is about “nothing.” But there are more significant differences. Shakespeare's portrayal of Claudio as courtly lover is less interesting than that of Angelo as ascetic and judge. Angelo is not bound by the conventions of type character which Shakespeare found so useful in creating Claudio and making his gullibility believable. Most important, of course, is Angelo's self-consciousness, the recognition of his own shortcomings and failures which Shakespeare renders so vividly in the soliloquies in 2.2.167ff. and later in 2.4.1-30. By making Angelo self-conscious about his desire for Isabella, by having him debate its merits and consequences, Shakespeare creates a complex comic character who arrests our imaginations.

Generic complexity is a feature of Shakespeare's dramatic practice, and as Rosalie Colie has argued, of Renaissance habits of reading and writing generally. Many have remarked that the comedies and romances contain within them tragic actions; recently, Shakespeareans have identified comic matrices in the great tragedies. I have argued that the generic boundaries of characterization are as flexible in Shakespeare's dramaturgy as those of plot and structure; because he often uses deliberative strategies common to tragic characterization within the dramatic boundaries of his romantic comedies, we perceive his comic characters as complex and lifelike.