SOURCE: “Much Ado about Nothing,” in A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies, 1594-1603, Longman Group Limited, 1996, pp. 179-201.

[In the following essay, Mangan studies the comedic language in Much Ado about Nothing, and finds it to be a reflection of Shakespeare's conception of romantic antagonism.]

‘HUDDLING JEST UPON JEST’

Much Ado About Nothing picks up on the themes of two of the early comedies examined in Chapter 5: The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labour's Lost. The analogies with The Shrew have often been remarked upon. Beatrice, like Kate, has words like ‘shrewd’ and ‘curst’ associated with her:

Leonato By my troth, niece,
thou wilt never get thee a husband if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue.
Antonio In faith, she’s too
curst.

(II, i, ll. 16-18)

Like The Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing is a play which is at least partly based on the theme of a battle of the sexes: the sparring between Beatrice and Benedick recalls some of the sparring between Kate and her suitors, especially Petruchio. But in the years between the two plays something has changed. It is not just that Beatrice repeatedly gets the better of Benedick in their wit-skirmishes, in a way that Kate only rarely does of Petruchio. It is that the character of the independent woman is no longer demonized: in the earlier play Kate's independence was perceived as a threat to male power, and she was therefore seen as an unruly hoyden who had to be, literally, ‘tamed’. But in Much Ado About Nothing the taming metaphor would be completely inappropriate. The patriarchal authority of a Petruchio is not ascribed to Benedick; his point of view is no more valid than Beatrice's, since he is also a descendant of the love-refusing lords in Love's Labour's Lost.

In his commonplace book, published in 1598 as Palladis Tamia, the Elizabethan writer Francis Meres mentioned an unknown play by Shakespeare entitled Love's Labour's Won. A popular theory is that this is one of Shakespeare's existing plays which was published under another title, and Much Ado About Nothing is one of the favourite contenders for this honour. Whether or not this is the case is quite unknown; there is no other evidence to suggest that Much Ado About Nothing is a companion piece to the earlier play. Nonetheless, the suggestion points up ways in which themes, ideas and characters from Love's Labour's Lost are reworked in Much Ado About Nothing. The two plays share a few stock devices—poem scenes, parallel eavesdropping routines and, most notably, the mask scene—but more importantly they share a central situation, in which characters who profess disdain for romantic love end up falling in love; and although this disdain is no longer a purely male prerogative, the character of Berowne has much in common with that of Benedick.

The critic Louis A. Montrose has written plausibly of the ‘ludic’ quality of Love's Labour's Lost: its element of games-playing. He writes,

The world of Navarre has the appearance of a playground, a special place marked off from the pressures of social reality and the unpleasant implications of a world of fallen nature. Here Shakespeare explores the dimensions of the play faculty, from charming fripperies to serious products of the imagination. … Every activity in which the male quartet engages takes on the character of play …¹

Something similar is true of Much Ado About Nothing. I want to explore the functions of two kinds of ‘play’, the verbal joke and the practical joke, in this ‘play’. In an earlier chapter I looked at various kinds of laughter—the laughter of everyday life, the laughter of festivity and the laughter of scorn and ridicule—and suggested that their social uses ranged from the celebratory to the punitive, in Elizabethan society. If I now suggest that Much Ado About Nothing is a play which has much to do with laughter and laughing, it is in the light of that chapter: the laughter in Messina is problematic.

The tone is set by the blokeish camaraderie of the bachelor soldiers returned from the war, whose conversation typically comprises banter and teasing. Don Pedro, for example, teases Benedick for his characteristic pose of misogyny:

Don Pedro Thou wast ever an
obstinate heretic in the despite of beauty.
Claudio And never could maintain
his part but in the force of his will.
Benedick That a woman conceived me
I thank her; that she brought me up I likewise give her most humble thanks.
But that I will have a rechate winded in my forehead, or hang my bugle in
an invisible baldrick, all women shall pardon me. Because I will not do them
the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the
fine is (for the which I may go the finer), I will live a bachelor.

(I, i, ll. 223-37)

This kind of jokey verbal duelling characterizes the relationship between the men: it is both friendly and aggressive, relaxed and competitive. Benedick has the reputation of being the wittiest of the three, but they all take part in the banter. In the early part of the play, the joking that goes on between Claudio, Don Pedro and Benedick returns repeatedly and almost obsessively to the topic of love. In fact, it is even more limited than that; the basic joke that none of them seem as though they will tire of is Benedick's stance of the professed and committed bachelor. Their attitude towards this is actually quite complex: they laugh at him for it, and they eventually trick him out of it and into a relationship with Beatrice; yet they also encourage him in his misogyny. Their pleasure in his rôle as ‘heretic in despite of beauty’ is manifest. It is as if Benedick expresses for the whole male group within the play some of the feelings which they all share, but which they cannot always express. Beatrice refers to him at one point as ‘the Prince's jester’, and while the remark is intended primarily as an insult it has some truth to it. One of a jester's functions is to speak what others are thinking but not saying—or acknowledging.

The play begins, after all, at a moment of change for the younger men. They have returned from the wars, and are having to deal once more with being at peace; the previously shared male solidarity of the military campaign is beginning to fragment. Benedick laments this fragmentation, which he sees happening most clearly in the character of Claudio:

I have known when there was no music with him, but the drum and fife, and now had he rather hear the tabor and the pipe. I have known when he would have walked ten mile afoot to see good armour, and now will he lie ten nights awake carving the fashion of a new doublet. He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier, and now is he turned orthography. His words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.

(II, iii, ll. 12-21)

Benedick sets the worlds of love and of war in opposition to each other, and leaves it in no doubt which he prefers. Claudio, incidentally, confirms Benedick's account of his transformation; he tells Don Pedro about his sudden interest in 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 …

(I, i, ll. 270-86)

While Claudio, then, consciously changes his rôle from that of soldier to that of lover, Benedick continues to express his mistrust of women and his intention to ‘live a bachelor’, devoting himself to manly pursuits such as drinking. The other men in the play seem to find this rather reassuring.

Benedick's rejection of love and marriage is based on a particularly cynical view of male-female relationships. Love, according to Benedick, is a trap, marriage is a prison, women are deceivers and every husband an eventual cuckold.

Benedick The savage bull may
[bear the yoke] but if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pull off the bull's
horns and set them in my forehead, and let me be vilely painted, and insuch
great letters as they write ‘Here is a good horse to hire’ let
them signify under my sign ‘Here may you see Benedick, the married man’.

(I, i, ll. 245-50)

In his fantasy Benedick directs a charivari against himself, but the ‘crime’ he imagines committing is that of getting married at all. In ‘Benedick the married man’ he paints a figure of ridicule who is already wearing the emblem of shame, the cuckold's horns: to be married is to be cuckolded already. In the first part of this book it was argued that the jokes which a society tells are a significant index of that society's concerns and anxieties. The repeated ‘cuckold’ jokes in Much Ado About Nothing point to an underlying anxiety in the society of the play about the relations between men and women, one which is brought to the surface by the developing events within the play.

The presence of Beatrice feeds this anxiety. She is the rule-breaker, the woman who refuses to accept the gender rôle which the social structure provides for her. Like Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, she presents her society—and in particular her uncles, with whom she lives—with a problem: she shows no sign of wanting to find a husband who will support her. Leonato, it is true, shows none of the desperation which Baptista does in the earlier play about getting the (financially and legally, if not emotionally) dependent young woman off his hands; family structures in Messina seem more able to accommodate Beatrice than those of Padua were to accommodate Kate. Even so, Leonato does occasionally remind Beatrice what her expected destiny is:

Leonato Well, niece, I hope
to see you one day fitted with a husband.
Beatrice Not till God make men of
some other mettle than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered
with a piece of valiant dust?—to make an account of her life to a cloud
brethren, and truly I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.

(II, i, ll. 53-8)

Beatrice's last remark contains a hidden truth. Spoken by her as a joke, another excuse not to take a husband, it points to her own ‘kindred’ with the men in the play. Her wit, for example, is as sharp as any of theirs, and of a similar kind. She stands out from the rest of the women in Messina because she is as good as any of the men at the verbal banter which is their characteristic mode of conversation. Thus she threatens them, not only by being as resolutely single as Benedick, but also by annexing an area of discourse which the bachelors of Messina, and Benedick in particular, usually treat as a male preserve: the witty and aggressive wordplay which is used to ward off the prospect of marriage. The other women of Messina can laugh and joke together, and can even—when suitably masked for a ball—hold their own in flirting conversations with Don Pedro, Balthasar and Antonio. But it is only Beatrice who will openly claim her fair share of lines in a conversation with a man, and it is only Beatrice who makes their kind of bantering language completely her own. Moreover, she can do this without seeming merely to be copying the men because she shares Benedick's contempt for love and marriage. One of the things which make Beatrice simultaneously so attractive to an audience and so threatening to Benedick is the fact that she effectively steals all of Benedick's best lines. For Benedick's pose of the confirmed bachelor and reputed libertine depends on a view of society in which women can be seen as somehow predatory, wanting to ‘capture’ a man and contain him in marriage, only to torture him with subsequent betrayal. Faced with a woman who proclaims herself equally contemptuous of marriage (and for the same reasons), Benedick's rôle is immediately compromised. Beatrice even appears to agree with his most cherished article of faith: the inevitability of a wife betraying a husband:

Beatrice … it is said ‘God
sends a curst cow short horns’, but to a cow too curst he sends none.
Leonato So, by being too curst, God
will send you no horns.
Beatrice Just, if he sends me no
husband.

(II, i, ll. 22-7)

Beatrice, like Benedick, equates a husband with ‘horns’; she makes the threat explicit, that any husband of hers would indeed end up as a cuckold.

The cuckold is a familiar figure of fun in many comedies of the Elizabethan period, but there are few plays in which the idea of a wife's betrayal of her husband is so obsessively harped upon as it is in Much Ado About Nothing. In Messina there are, it appears, only two possible ways of thinking about love. One is the cynical view of love, marriage and cuckoldry which Benedick expresses. The other is the version of idealistic courtly love which appears at first to be exemplified by Hero and Claudio: romantic attraction (at a distance) followed by a happy-ever-after marriage. Claudio, newly in love with Hero, rejects Benedick's view of love in favour of this, the alternative. The jokes between the two men in the early part of the play arise from the fact that they berate, tease and insult each other about their respective points of view. But the continual jokes about husbands and cuckolds indicate the underlying anxieties about gender rôles, about women's possible sexual licence. And when Borachio's plot to discredit Hero in Claudio's eyes succeeds, the effect is to bring this anxiety into the open: the unspoken fear turns out, they think, to be well-founded, Borachio succeeds in getting Claudio to exchange one view of love—and of Hero—for the other. Thus, unable any longer to see Hero as a chaste and idealized goddess, Claudio immediately reverts to a view even more cynical than Benedick's. He concludes that she is a whore. The flood of vitriolic abuse which is subsequently unleashed on Hero by her fiancé, her father and her Prince is another, and more destructive, manifestation of those anxieties which had previously been the topic of jokes and wordplay.

‘DECEIVERS EVER’

The verbal jokes with which the play abounds have a close thematic correspondence to the practical ones which constitute so much of its plot. Practical jokes, of course, are part of the stock-in-trade of Shakespearean comedy in general. In these plays characters laugh at each other, and play elaborate practical jokes upon each other, spying, eavesdropping and gloating at their victims' discomfiture. In The Taming of the Shrew, for example, the lord plays an elaborate trick on the tinker Christopher Sly, and Petruchio plays a series of much crueller ones on Kate; in Twelfth Night Sir Toby, Maria, Andrew Aguecheek, Feste and Fabian punish Malvolio through the practical joke of a forged letter, while Toby tricks Sir Andrew and ‘Cesario’ into a supposed duel; another trick duel features in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where the main narrative is taken up by the tricks played by Mistress Ford and Mistress Page on the lecherous and opportunistic Falstaff; in All's Well That Ends Well the braggart captain Parolles is ‘captured’ on the battlefield by his own comrades, who pretend to be enemy soldiers, while Helena regains her faithless husband by the bed-trick; in A Midsummer Night's Dream the mythical trickster Robin Goodfellow (Puck) aids his master in playing a joke on the sleeping Titania, ensuring that she will fall in love with the first creature she sees on waking. This turns out to be Bottom, who has been transformed into part-man part-ass in another of Puck's practical jokes. At the risk of being reductive, in fact, it might be suggested that the practical joke lies at the root of the plotting of Shakespeare's comedies. These jokes range from the malicious to the benevolent; some are born out of desperate need, others are the whim of a moment; sometimes they are constructed for the benefit of an on-stage audience, sometimes they have no audience but the real-life one in the auditorium and the tricksters themselves.

Sometimes these practical jokes are staged in a light-hearted or inconsequential manner; elsewhere they turn extremely serious, and become the fulcrum on which the happiness or sadness of the characters depends. The priestly disguise which Feste wears in Twelfth Night reappears in a very different mood in Measure for Measure where the Duke puts on a priest's robes in order to play games of life and death with the other characters. In the late plays such as The Tempest and The Winter's Tale the practical joke takes on extraordinary new dimensions of magic and illusion. The entire plot of The Tempest is, in one sense, a huge practical joke, played by the magician Prospero upon Antonio, Sebastian, Ferdinand and Alonso in order to bring them to recognition of themselves. At the end of The Winter's Tale the penitent King Leontes is shown a ‘statue’ of Hermione, the wife whose death he had caused sixteen years before, and whose loss he has grieved ever since. But the statue comes to life, turning out to be Hermione herself; she has been hidden all this time and is only now restored to him in this fashion. On one level it is a bizarre practical joke, stage-managed by Hermione's lady-in-waiting Paulina and taking sixteen years of preparation. On another level, it is an extraordinary and moving theatrical moment, made all the more resonant for the fact that the audience is as unsure as Leontes about the nature of the reality they are witnessing.

The jokes of Shakespearean comedy frequently repeat themselves in terms of subject matter and action. The subject matter is frequently to do with the victims' own image of themselves; the action works to transform that image. Victims have their ‘true’ characters revealed, like Parolles, or else they are reconstructed in a new identity by the trick, like Christopher Sly. Sometimes it is ambiguous as to which of these processes is going on. In Twelfth Night Malvolio appears in yellow cross-garters: a figure of fun but also an incongruous emblem of ‘young love’. The trick transforms his status in the eyes of the other characters, but also reveals his desire for his mistress, which he has previously concealed. Similarly, Nick Bottom undergoes a transformation from weaver into ass; some critics have argued, however, that the spell reveals rather than transforms, merely making visible to audience and characters alike that element of Bottom's character which is in any case asinine.

In Much Ado About Nothing tricks and practical jokes are even more central to the action than they are in most other Shakespearean comedies. Like the verbal ones, these practical jokes return repeatedly to the theme of deception in love, and of swearing fidelity to one person and ending up in the arms of another. They take a variety of forms, have a variety of motives behind them, and are carried off with varying degrees of success. Among the most successful and benevolent of them are the parallel practical jokes played on Beatrice and Benedick in order to trick each of them into a relationship with the other. Within Benedick's hearing, the men discuss how enamoured of him Beatrice is:

Don Pedro Come hither, Leonato.
What was it you told me of today, that your niece Beatrice was in love with
Signor Benedick?
Claudio (aside) O ay, stalk on, stalk on. The fowl sits.—I did never
think that lady would have loved any man.
Leonato No, nor I neither. But most
wonderful that she should so dote on Signor Benedick, whom she hath in all
outward behaviours seemed ever to abhor.
Benedick (aside) Is’t possible? Sits the wind in that corner?
Leonato By my troth, my lord, I cannot
tell what to think of it. But that she loves him with an enraged affection,
it is past the infinite of thought.

(II, iii, ll. 90-101)

It is a benign version of the ‘letter’ plot against Malvolio from Twelfth Night. Benedick's self-esteem is so tickled that a few minutes later he can pluck a hidden sexual invitation out of the most unlikely of Beatrice's words: ‘Ha! “Against my will, I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.” There’s a double meaning in that.’ (II, iii, ll. 245-60).

Immediately afterwards, in a parallel scene, Beatrice overhears a similar conversation concerning her:

Hero No, truly, Ursula, she
is too disdainful.
I know her spirits are as coy and wild
As haggards of the rock.
Ursula But are you sure
That Benedick loves Beatrice so entirely?
Hero So says the Prince and my new
trothèd lord.
Ursula And they did bid you tell
her of it, madam?
Hero They did entreat me to acquaint
her of it.
But I persuaded them, if they loved Benedick,
To wish him wrestle with affection
And never to let Beatrice know of it.

(III, i, ll. 34-43)

Thus primed, the two become lovers almost immediately—as the audience expected them to all along. Part of the pleasure of the plot is that the stratagem used to catch this witty, intelligent pair is such a simple one. It is a playground trick—the sort of practical joke young adolescents play on each other: ‘so-and-so fancies you …’. And as such it is appropriate to the not-quite-grown-up world of erotic relationships in Messina. Beatrice and Benedick begin the play by proclaiming images of themselves which are overturned by the stratagems of their friends. Benedick is proud of his ‘hard heart’ (I, i, ll. 120) and Beatrice of her ‘cold blood’ (I, i, ll. 124). The practical joke which sends them into each other's arms allows them to discover other aspects of themselves: they are both transformed and revealed.

Different in tone and detail, but similar in purpose and effect, is the trick played by Claudio and Don Pedro, when the disguised Prince woos Hero for his friend. Don Pedro thinks up the plan:

I know we shall have revelling tonight
I will assume thy part in some disguise,
And tell fair Hero I am Claudio.
And in her bosom I’ll unclasp my heart
And take her hearing prisoner with the force
And strong encounter of my amorous tale.
Then after to her father will I break,
And the conclusion is, she shall be thine.

(I, i, ll. 303-10)

Again, this trick is a benevolent one: the avowed aim is not to humiliate Hero but to find a way of breaking through some of the barriers of etiquette which might otherwise keep the lovers apart. But the actual mechanism, whereby a woman is deceived into thinking she is being proposed to by one man, when in fact it is another who is speaking, is that of a practical joke. The context in which the proposal takes place makes it impossible for us to ignore this, for Don Pedro's ‘wooing’ takes place at the masked ball in Act II Scene i, a scene in which nearly everybody plays some sort of joke on somebody else. It is a rather genteel kind of inversionary festival, where the conventions of mask and disguise allow people to play comedic games with their own identities, and in which everyday hierarchies are temporarily suspended, so that the serving-girl can flirt with the governor's brother. We do not actually see the encounter between Don Pedro and Hero—that happens off-stage—but we see most of the other men and women take advantage of the masked ball to pretend to be someone else or to pretend that they do not know who they are talking to. This multiple trickery continues, for the most part, to be light-hearted and benevolent—with one significant exception.

One of the masquers is Don John, who knows Don Pedro's plan and attempts to turn it to his own advantage. He approaches Claudio, pretending to think that Claudio is Benedick, in order to impugn Don Pedro's motives for wooing Hero.

Don John Are not you Signior
Benedick?
Claudio You know me well. I am he.
Don John Signior, you are very near
my brother in his love. He is enamoured on Hero. I pray you dissuade him from
her; she is no equal for his birth. You may do the part of an honest man in
it.

(II, i, ll. 151-6)

Like nearly every one else in this scene, Don John is playing a practical joke—albeit a particularly nasty one, and one that only John himself and his henchmen are likely to laugh at. In fact, it is not even a particularly good joke, and is doomed to failure from the start. He goes out of his way to throw suspicion on Don Pedro, implying that the Prince is wooing Hero not for Claudio, but for himself. As it happens, he need hardly have bothered: Leonato and Antonio are already under this misapprehension anyway, as a result of some faulty eavesdropping by one of Antonio's own servants. And although the misunderstanding causes Claudio some momentary pain, the confusion cannot last for long: the truth is bound to come out, as soon as Don Pedro, Hero and Claudio compare notes. And indeed, so it does, a few lines later:

Don Pedro Here, Claudio, I
have wooed in thy name, and fair Hero is won. I have broke with her father
and his good will obtained. Name the day of marriage, and God give thee joy!

(II, i, ll. 279-82)

Rather more successful is the second ‘practical joke’ which Don John and his henchmen play upon Hero and Claudio. This is the balcony plot, which leads Claudio to believe that Hero has been unfaithful to him. Although Don John takes the credit and the blame for this, it actually has very little to do with him; it is thought up, arranged and carried out by his servant Borachio, and all Don John has to do is watch and keep quiet. Don John is actually a rather unsuccessful villain. This trick, however—the most malevolent trick of them all—is an elegant and sinister variation and combination of the practical jokes which have been played before.

Borachio Find me a meet hour
to draw Don Pedro and the Count Claudio alone. Tell them that you know that
Hero loves me. Intend a kind of zeal both to the Prince and Claudio as in
love of your brother's honour who hath made this match, and his friend's
reputation who is thus like to be cozened with the semblance of a maid, that
you have discovered thus. They will scarcely believe this without trial. Offer
them instances, which shall bear no less likelihood than to see me at her
chamber window, hear me call Margaret Hero, hear Margaret term me Claudio.
And bring them to see this the very night before the intended wedding, for
in the mean time I will so fashion that matter that Hero shall be absent,
and there shall appear such seeming truth of Hero's disloyalty that jealousy
shall be called assurance, and all the preparation overthrown.

(II, ii, ll. 29-45)

Borachio's plan resembles the original trick by which Don Pedro brought the lovers together, for again it depends on disguise and substitution of one of the lovers: this time, however it is not Claudio who is substituted but Hero. Moreover, it also resembles the jokes which Claudio and his friends played on Beatrice and Benedick: like them Claudio believes himself to be an unsuspected eavesdropper, when in reality the scene is being played out entirely for his benefit. Claudio, in fact, is caught in very much the kind of trap he had previously set for others.

The plot of Much Ado About Nothing revolves around these elaborate practical jokes, and it is according to the logic of jokes, rather than the logic of naturalism, that it should be understood. While Much Ado is a ‘realistic’ comedy in the sense of not being set in a world of fairy woods or pastoral retreats, it is sometimes commented upon that its plot is far-fetched, or illogical. For example, the famous nineteenth-century actress Ellen Terry once received a letter from an equally famous nineteenth-century writer, who complained:

Why in the world did not Hero (or at any rate Beatrice on her behalf) prove an ‘alibi’ in answer to the charge? It seems certain that she did not sleep in her room that night … Borachio says, after promising that Margaret shall speak with him out of Hero's chamber window, ‘I will so fashion the matter that Hero shall be absent’ (How he could possibly manage any such thing is another difficulty, but I pass over that.) Well then, granting that Hero slept in some other room that night, why didn’t she say so? … She could, of course, prove [it] by the evidence of the housemaids, who must have known that she occupied another room that night.

But even if Hero might be supposed to be so distracted as not to remember where she had slept the night before, or even whether she had slept anywhere, surely Beatrice had her wits about her? And when an arrangement was made, by which she was to lose, for one night, her twelvemonths' bedfellow, is it conceivable that she didn’t know where Hero passed the night? … With all these excellent materials for proving an ‘alibi’, it is incomprehensible that no-one should think of it.²

But once you start looking for logical inconsistencies in the plot, it is difficult to stop. The various elements of the narrative seem to vie with each other for the highest level of implausibility. It is pretty implausible, after all, that Hero should be successfully wooed on behalf of Claudio by the disguised Don Pedro. And the way in which the truth is eventually brought to light by the inept Watch (who arrest Conrade and Borachio in an impossible search for an imaginary villain called ‘Deformed’) is one of the most absurd series of events in Elizabethan drama. The whole thing is topped off by the way in which the happy ending is finally staged: this involves Leonato suddenly inventing a previously unknown ‘cousin’ of Hero, and Claudio both believing in her and being willing to marry her in order to make up for his previous bad behaviour. The entire plot of Much Ado About Nothing is basically absurd.

And this, of course, is part of the point. Comedies do not operate according to the rules of everyday likelihood, and in a play like Much Ado About Nothing the very absurdity of the events is part of the enjoyment that the audience is offered. It is ironic, therefore, that the writer quoted above, who so exasperatedly points out the holes in the plot, is none other than Lewis Carroll. The author whose own fictions display such a delight in irregularity and inconsistency, in breaking the rules of naturalism and in playing games with cause, effect, and logical narrative progression, seems almost offended when faced with inconsistencies in Shakespeare's comic narrative. It is not, after all, as if Much Ado About Nothing presented itself as a piece of dramatic naturalism. Shakespeare may have talked about the importance of drama holding ‘a mirror up to nature’, but that mirror is often a distorting one; the comic world of Messina is located somewhere through a looking glass. The Messina of Much Ado About Nothing is a world which both generates and obeys its own comic rules, just as the wood outside Athens, or the Forest of Arden, or Carroll's own Wonderland generate and obey theirs.

If the play is brought near to tragedy by means of Borachio's malevolent trickery, it is also through a sequence of tricks that it is led back towards its inevitable happy ending. It may be thought that Friar Francis's plot to hide Hero away and give out that she is dead hardly merits being called a trick or joke since the context at that point is too serious. However it, too, bears structural similarities to earlier tricks in the play: by giving out false information, the Friar intends to release the true emotion of sorrow and repentance in Claudio's breast, and force him into self-recognition—just as Beatrice and Benedick had been fed false information as their friends attempted to trick them into recognizing their true love for each other.

Friar Francis … For
it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it; but being lacked 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 appareled in more precious habit,
More moving, delicate, and full of life
Into the eye and prospect of the soul
Than when she lived indeed. Then shall he mourn
If ever love had interest in his liver …

(IV, i, ll. 216-30)

As it happens, the Friar's plot fails, for he has completely under-estimated Claudio's capacity for self-deception and self-justification. Claudio's response to the news is shockingly cold-blooded: he shows no concern at all for the person he earlier claimed to love so dearly, and denies any responsibility for her supposed death.

Leonato … I say thou
hast belied mine innocent child.
Thy slander has gone through and through her heart,
And she lies buried with her ancestors;
O, in a tomb where never scandal slept,
Save this of hers, framed by thy villainy!
Claudio My villainy?
Leonato Thine, Claudio; thine I say.
Don Pedro You say not right, old
man.
Leonato My lord, my lord,
I’ll prove it on his body if he dare,
Despite his nice fence and his active practice,
His May of youth and bloom of lustihood.
Claudio Away! I will not have to
do with you.

(V, i, ll. 67-79)

It is not until Hero's innocence is established and the truth about Borachio's plot finally revealed that Claudio accepts any responsibility for what he has done. And, as if to achieve some kind of dramatic expiation of this guilt, a final trick is constructed in order to bring the lovers together after all. This involves a shift in tone whereby the plot is taken into the realms of folk- or fairytale as Leonato invents a previously unknown ‘cousin’ of Hero, whom Claudio must not only believe in but promise to marry. Once more it is a variation of the ‘disguised lover’ motif which has featured throughout the play. The difference is that this time the motif appears both as a practical joke and as a test, and what is being tested is the sincerity of Claudio's repentance. By virtue of one of those slightly uncomfortable paradoxes in which Shakespearean comedy abounds, it is only when Claudio renounces his own free will and agrees to marry whomever he is directed, that he finally shows himself to be worthy of Hero.

Thus the verbal witticisms in the play are linked thematically to the play's sequence of practical jokes and tricks. These in turn pass through a cycle which leads from well-meaning trickery to malevolent plotting, and then back finally to the benevolent love-trick out of which the happy ending is forged.

‘I CANNOT WOO IN FESTIVAL TERMS’

Comedies end happily and the happy ending is symbolized by marriage: that, at least, is the conventional view. In Much Ado About Nothing there are two sets of couples with, initially, contrasting attitudes towards the comedic happy ending of marriage. Hero and Claudio are the conventional lovers of comedy, for whom the expected wedding day will (supposedly) symbolize the culmination of their desires. This is why the disruption of the ceremony which takes place in Act IV Scene i makes for such a painful moment, not only for Hero but for the audience: the promised ending of the narrative has been snatched away, the comedy has collapsed, and the play teeters on the brink of tragedy. And what makes it so poignant is that Hero and Claudio (but especially Hero) had believed in the message which the structure of romantic comedy implies: that the marriage ceremony offers the perfect ending to the story.

Beatrice and Benedick, on the other hand, reject the assumption that marriage makes for a happy ending. Beatrice sees it as a stage in a process of deterioration, and warns Hero that:

wooing, wedding and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure and a cinquepace. 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 legs falls into the cinquepace faster and faster till he sink into his grave.

(II, i, ll. 65-72)

They are a comic hero and heroine who, at first at least, reject the logic of comedy: the assumption that marriage will see them live happily ever after.

In other plays by Shakespeare those who turn their backs on the forces of Eros (like the lords of Navarre in Love's Labour's Lost or Kate in The Taming of the Shrew) are usually treated as proud figures heading for a fall. This is how Beatrice and Benedick's friends see them, and in the early scenes the audience is invited to share this point of view—hence the humour of the parallel tricks which are played upon them: it derives from a comfortable shared awareness that Beatrice and Benedick ought to be brought into the comedic marriage arrangements.

I have talked about the trick which their friends play upon them as being benevolent—designed to do them good. There is another way of looking at it, however, which does not contradict that but which stresses another aspect of the trick. As we saw in the early chapters of this book, laughter can be used as a weapon against those who flout the norms of a society; it can be used to discourage socially deviant behaviour. Beatrice and Benedick's ‘deviancy’ lies in their professed rejection of the pattern of comedy. The trick which is played upon them is a way of mobilizing the laughter of the audience in order to bring them back into line, and to make them behave according to the expected norms—not so much of their society as of their genre.

As the play progresses, however, the conventional model of romantic love, represented by Hero and Claudio, becomes increasingly compromised. Seen from Claudio's point of view it is compromised by Hero's supposed faithlessness; more importantly, seen from the point of view of the audience (who know the truth of the matter) it is compromised by the ease with which Claudio's adoration collapses into loathing. The audience is made more and more uncomfortably aware that Beatrice and Benedick may be justified in their original suspicions of love and marriage as they exist in Messina. And the more the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick develops, the more the one between Hero and Claudio is brought into question.

Throughout the play, the courtship of Hero and Claudio is compared and contrasted in this way with that of Beatrice and Benedick. In many respects the two courtships are each other's opposite: in one respect, though, they are similar, in that both courtships are initially frustrated by the couples' inability to express love directly. The disguised Don Pedro has to speak for Claudio, taking his place in the courtship ritual and speaking the words that Claudio himself seems unable to say. It is only when his path has thus been cleared for him that he can assume in full his rôle of the lover, and speak the poetic language of love. The moment is pointed up by Beatrice:

Leonato Count, take of me
my daughter, and with her my fortunes. His Grace hath made the match, and
all grace say amen to it!
Beatrice Speak, Count, it is your
cue.
Claudio Silence is the perfectest
herald of joy. I were but little happy if I could say how much. Lady, as you
are mine, I am yours. I give myself away for you and dote upon the exchange.

(II, i, ll. 299-306)

Claudio's ‘silence’ is eloquently expressed: when he finally manages to speak, he does so in ‘festival terms’, speaking a formal and poetic language of love. Benedick calls it ‘orthography … a very fantastical banquet’ and laments for the old days when Claudio ‘was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier’ (II, iii, ll. 20-1). In fact Claudio tends to compartmentalize his languages: he has one register for laughing and joking with the boys, and another very different one for going courting. This compartmentalizing of languages corresponds, in fact, to the way in which he compartmentalizes his emotional life. It is on a par with his idealization and subsequent demonization of Hero, and with his ability to dissociate himself from his own cruelty in rejecting her.

In the early part of the play the pattern of courtship which Claudio and Hero follow is gently satirized. It appears to be presented as a not-too-exaggerated caricature of a kind of courtship which is familiar in Elizabethan drama. It is based at least in part on economic considerations: Claudio's first question to Don Pedro concerns Leonato and whether he has a son; Don Pedro reassures Claudio that Hero is ‘his only heir’ (I, i, ll. 278). The pair do not know each other intimately, and the love that they feel for each other is one based on a sense of affinity which is formed at a distance. It is a love which has not yet developed a sexual dimension beyond that of erotic attraction: Claudio insists that he

… never tempted her with word too large,
But as a brother to his sister showed
Bashful sincerity and comely love.

(IV, i, ll. 52-4)

Even the intimacy of a person-to-person declaration of love is not initially available to them and the betrothal itself is as much a matter between Don Pedro and Leonato as it is between Hero and Claudio. Moreover, the fact that things should be done this way does not seem to cause anyone any particular surprise. Don Pedro takes on the surrogate courtship almost as a matter of course.

Don Pedro … 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 began’st to twist so fine a story?
Claudio How sweetly you do minister
to love,
That know love's grief by his complexion!
But lest my liking might too sudden seem
I would have salved it with a longer treatise.
Don Pedro What need the bridge much
broader than the flood?
The fairest grant is the necessity.
Look what will serve is fit. ’Tis once: thou lovest
And I will fit thee with the remedy.

(I, i, ll. 291-302)

And yet within these parameters Claudio's dramatic function as the ‘young lover’ remains intact: the audience is to understand that he is ‘in love’ with Hero. ‘The sweetest lady that ever I looked on’ (I, i, l. 181), he calls her, and we are meant to believe him. The level-headed Elizabethan considerations of family formation are overlaid with a passionate language of courtly love, and for a while it looks as if it will be an antidote to the cynicism of Beatrice and Benedick and the buckish jesting of the male comrades-in-arms.

But in the second part of the play the gentle mockery turns into savage irony, as Claudio's courtly love and his lyrical, distant idealizing of a woman whom he has wooed at second-hand turns out to have a sinister reverse side to it. In the scene which by rights should have marked the culmination of the love-plot, the stately, courtly language of the betrothal is replaced by the verbal violence of Claudio's public humiliation and rejection of Hero.

Claudio … Father, by
your leave,
Will you with free and unconstrained soul
Give me this maid your daughter?
Leonato As freely, son, as God did
give her me.
Claudio And what have I to give you
back whose worth
May counterpoise this rich and precious gift?
Don Pedro Nothing, unless you render
her again.
Claudio Sweet Prince, you learn me
noble thankfulness.
There, Leonato, take her back again.
Give not this rotten orange to your friend.

(IV, i, ll. 22-31)

The audience knows, more or less, what is about to happen. We are aware (as Leonato is not) that the polite civilities of the Prince and his protégé are bogus, and that the exchange between Claudio and Don Pedro contains a double meaning quite the opposite of what Leonato expects. Even so, the image of the ‘rotten orange’ which Claudio uses to describe the woman everybody thinks he is about to marry, is a shockingly violent one, and one which shatters the atmosphere of celebration. The marriage ceremony turns into a punitive shaming ritual, in which Hero is publicly humiliated as surely as if she were in the pillory or ducking-stool.

Even more violent than Claudio's insult is Leonato's almost hysterical reaction to the charge. Siding immediately with Claudio, his public rejection of his daughter takes on the intensity of a curse:

Grieved I, I had but one?
Chid I for that at frugal nature's frame?
O one too much by thee! Why had I one?
Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?
Why had I not with charitable hand
Took up a beggar's issue at my gates,
Who smirched thus and mired with infamy,
I might have said, ‘No part of it is mine;
This shame derives itself from unknown loins’?
But mine, and mine I loved, and mine I praised,
And mine that I was proud on, mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,
Valuing of her—why she, O, she is fall’n
Into a pit of ink …

(IV, i, ll. 126-39)

The fact that the daughter is the property of the father is stressed in this speech; the word ‘mine’ pounds through Leonato's lines with a drumbeat insistence. His disgust at his daughter's supposed infidelity and his desire to disown her only serve to intensify his sense that she is, indeed, his to dispose of as he pleases.

Lewis Carroll asked why Hero does not provide herself with an alibi. Yet it is significant how little notice is taken of what Hero herself says in this scene. Elsewhere in the play Hero is presented as a lively and interesting young woman, particularly when she is ‘in private’, in the company of her female friends. When Claudio is on stage, however, she becomes demure and quiet. In the scene in which she was betrothed to Claudio she was given almost nothing to say. Now, as she is rejected by him, most of her talking is once more done for her by the dominant males in her life: her future husband, her father, or her Prince. She is not, however, completely silent. In answer to Claudio's accusations she protests her innocence;

Is my lord well, that he should speak so wide? …
O God defend me! How am I beset!
What kind of catechizing call you this? …
Is [my name] not Hero? Who can blot that name
With any just reproach? …
I talked with no man at that hour, my Lord.

(IV, i, ll. 62, 76-77, 81-2, 85)

Yet her words are ignored. Claudio does not believe her; Leonato apparently does not even hear her! ‘She not denies it’ (IV, i, ll. 175), he exclaims, quite erroneously, and he deduces from her non-denial a proof of her guilt. The language of the public scene belongs entirely to men; the woman's words are not listened to.

Thus the conventional love-relationship, as exemplified by Hero and Claudio, becomes less and less attractive as the play develops. We see the interesting young woman diminished by her relationship with the man. Even in fortune Hero's role in the relationship is a passive one. Things are done to her: her marriage is arranged with her having scarcely a line to say about it, and later she is treated like a piece of faulty merchandise both by her father and her future husband as they find their projected idealization of her under threat. Her passive rôle turns into that of victim.

Claudio, meanwhile, appears increasingly repulsive: as a wooer he was unimpressive, but as a potential life-partner he is appalling. He exemplifies perfectly a kind of masculine attitude to women which can cope with them only as extremes: thus, deprived of his idealized image of Hero as pure virgin, he reacts by castigating her as a whore.

Claudio 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 pampered animals
That rage in savage sensuality.

(IV, i, ll. 56-60)

By this stage in the play the bantering, jokey language of the inhabitants of Messina is being shown in a very different light. In earlier scenes it had been presented as something quite attractive: good humour, camaraderie, high spirits. As the play progresses, however, the jokes and the wordplay are seen more and more clearly as a mode of discourse which serves to limit the characters' emotional range. The most striking example of this is given in Act V Scene i, where Don Pedro and Claudio, refusing to accept any responsibility for Hero's supposed death, try to revert to their earlier modes of speech. Having shrugged off Leonato's challenge, they turn with relief to Benedick, trying almost desperately to get him to join in with their jesting in an attempt to prove to themselves that nothing has really changed.

Claudio We have been up and
down to seek thee; for we are high-proof melancholy, and would fain have it
beaten away.
Wilt thou use thy wit?
Benedick It is in my scabbard. Shall
I draw it?
Don Pedro Dost thou wear thy wit
by thy side?
Claudio Never any did so, though
very many have been beside their wit. I will bid thee draw, as we do the minstrels:
draw to pleasure us.
Don Pedro As I am an honest man,
he looks pale. Art thou sick, or angry?
Claudio What, courage, man! What
though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care.

(V, i, ll. 122-33)

The jokes here sound increasingly hollow and forced, not because they are intrinsically any less witty than the earlier banter of the men, but because the context has turned them sour. They need Benedick to join in with their game in order to reassure themselves that things are as they always were: the language of wit is here being used by both men as a shelter behind which to hide. Claudio's resolute lack of response to the news of Hero's ‘death’ has already made us realize that he will hear only what he wants to hear. Now, as Benedick, charged with the duty to ‘kill Claudio’, attempts to challenge him to a duel, Claudio and Don Pedro try not to hear the seriousness in his tone. When Benedick not only refuses to humour them, but finally does make his challenge heard, Don Pedro (ironically) puts it down to the corrupting influence of love! But the Prince's exclamation that ‘He is in earnest’ (V, i, ll. 193) indicates his shocked realization that the camaraderie is at an end; Benedick has dropped his role of jester, and by ceasing to joke he has broken the fellowship.

And yet the language of jokes is reinstated at the very end of the play. Just as Leonato's trick about the ‘second Hero’ reclaims the practical joke as a benign device, so the jokes which seemed to turn sour in Act V Scene i become light-hearted and celebratory again in the final scene. Whereas most of the characters seem to feel that they must choose either to make jokes or to be in love, Beatrice and Benedick end up by having their cake and eating it. As Benedick says, he and Beatrice are ‘too wise to woo peaceably’ (V, ii, l. 65); they find, though, that they are able to court each other with banter and jokes—in the very terms, in fact, in which they once abused each other. They reject the language of romantic love in favour of a more everyday language. Benedick, it is true, makes a half-hearted stab at love poetry, but soon gives up:

Benedick … Marry, I
cannot show it in rhyme. I have tried. I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’
but ‘baby’, an innocent rhyme; for ‘scorn’ ‘horn’,
a hard rhyme; for ‘school’ ‘fool’, a babbling rhyme.
Very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet. I cannot
woo in festival terms.

(V, ii, ll. 34-9)

For Beatrice and Benedick, their jokes become a means to resist the kind of love-match exemplified by Hero and Claudio. By the end of the play they have constructed a loving relationship which is as much of a sparring match as their enmity was.

Benedick Come, I will have
thee; but by this light I take thee for pity.
Beatrice I would not deny you; but
by this good day I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life,
for I was told you were in a consumption.

(V, iv, ll. 92-6)

The ‘happy end’ which sees Hero married off to Claudio is fraught with contradictions, for the conventional relationship founded on romantic love which they exemplify has been severely satirized by Shakespeare. Beatrice and Benedick are offered as an alternative to Hero and Claudio. The festive ending is displaced onto the couple who have managed to deploy their jokes and their bantering not only as a defence against desire, but also as a language of desire. Their relationship—for all its anomalies—is a more equal one than either of them might have expected. In their Messina, unlike in the Padua of The Taming of the Shrew, there is no longer any need for the husband to ‘win’, for him to browbeat the wife into submission as Petruchio does. Beatrice and Benedick end the play more or less even on points, with the promise of frequent friendly re-matches in the future. And if the relationship between the pair is not presented as an ideal, it is nonetheless seen as preferable to the fragility of an idealized romantic love such as Claudio's with all its tendency to collapse into loathing and disgust. And for Beatrice and Benedick to have wrested the language—and the laughter—to their own ends in this way is in itself some cause for celebration.

Notes

1. Louis A. Montrose, ‘Sport by Sport O’erthrown: Love's Labour's Lost and the politics of play’, in Gary Waller, ed., Shakespeare's Comedies (Harlow: Longman, 1991) p. 58.

2. Quoted in Brean Hammond, ‘Suspicion in Sicily: or, a Hair off the Great Cham's Beard’, in Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey, eds, Critical Essays on ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (Harlow: Longman, 1989), pp. 63-4.