[In the following essay, Ormerod examines how the word “fashion” functions as an alias for the word “nothing” in certain instances in the play, and contends that fashion “is the real villain of the play, and that its destructive function is recognised to a greater or lesser extent by many of the play's characters.”]

Most critics who have written on the subject of Much Ado about Nothing seem agreed that the play must take its place in Shakespeare's incessant debate about the conflict between appearance and reality, and the difficulties which beset an individual when he attempts to make a right choice, particularly in love, between superficial seeming and inner truth. Few readers, I imagine, would quarrel with the following verdict:

Shakespeare's ideas about love's truth—the imaginative acting of a lover and the need for our imaginative response to it, the compulsion, individuality, and complexity of a lover's realization of beauty, and the distinctions between inward and outward beauty, appearance and reality, and fancy and true affection—all are represented in Much Ado about Nothing; they inform its structure, its contrasts, relationships, and final resolution; they control many of the details of its action, characterization, humour, and dialogue. Indeed, in fashioning these elements into a lively, dramatic whole, Shakespeare achieved his most concerted and considered judgment upon love's truth.¹

I agree with this reading, and would like to attempt to amplify it by using a methodology pioneered by Miss Dorothy Hockey.² Taking her stand upon Helge Kökeritz's treatment of Richard Grant White's suggestion that the play's title may contain a pun upon ‘Nothing’ and ‘noting’,³ Miss Hockey reads the play as an extended treatment of the implications of this pun, and examines in detail all the occasions during the play when attention to the act of ‘noting’, of eavesdropping and observing, enhances our understanding of the play's structure and morality.⁴ I do not wish to quarrel with Miss Hockey's conclusions.⁵ Rather, I would like to draw attention to an occasion in the play when Shakespeare makes an explicit identification of the word ‘Nothing’, and then to follow the appearances of ‘Nothing’s' alias throughout the play. Here, in a scene of central importance for the resolution of the story, and at almost the exact centre of the play's extent in time, we hear Conrade and Borachio in earnest discussion. They are talking about the conspiracy directed against Hero and Claudio; they are also choosing to talk about it, very incongruously, in terms of fashion.

Borachio. … Thou knowest
that the fashion of a doublet, or a hat, or a cloak, is nothing to a man.
Conrade. Yes, it is apparel.
Borachio. I mean the fashion.
Conrade. Yes, the fashion is the
fashion.
Borachio. Tush, I may as well say
the fool's the fool.
But seest thou not what a deformed thief this fashion is?
(2 Watchman. I know that Deformed,
a’ has been a vile thief this seven year, a’ goes up and down
like a gentleman: I remember his name …
Borachio. Seest thou not, I say,
what a deformed thief this fashion is? how giddily a’ turns about all
the hotbloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? sometimes fashioning them
like Pharaoh's soldiers in the reechy painting, sometime like god Bel's
priests in the old church window, sometime like the shaven Hercules in the
smirched worm-eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems as massy as his club?
Conrade. All this I see, and I see
that the fashion wears out more apparel than the man … But art not
thou thyself giddy with the fashion too, that thou hast shifted out of thy
tale into telling me of the fashion?
Borachio. Not so neither …

(III, iii, 114-39)⁶

Several facts strike us. Borachio insists that the plot against Hero is intimately linked with the idea of fashion, and firmly repudiates Conrade's suggestion that, by invoking the machinations of fashion, he is digressing. We note, in passing, that fashion is associated with the decline of Hercules (see below, pp. 96-7, 99-100, 104-5). And, again, the Watch, in its own fumbling way, immediately recognises the villainous role which fashion plays in society, and elevates it to the stature of some Spenserian allegorical figure. An attentive reading of the play fully confirms Borachio and the Watch in the importance they attach to fashion. This essay contends that fashion, in its guise of Deformed, the vile thief, is the real villain of the play, and that its destructive function is recognised to a greater or lesser extent by many of the play's characters.

According to Bartlett, Spevack, and the Oxford Concordance, the word ‘fashion’ occurs nineteen times in Much Ado About Nothing; ‘fashions’, ‘fashioned’, and ‘fashioning’ each occur once. The only other plays in which the word figures at all prominently are Hamlet and Julius Caesar, with seven occurrences each. In Much Ado, Shakespeare has used the word in a number of senses, all of which are pejorative, and which seem to encompass the following meanings, as given by the OED.

As a noun—

1. The action or process of making. Hence, the ‘making’ or workmanship as an element in the value of plate or jewellery.

2. Make, build, shape. Hence, in wider sense, visible characteristics, appearance.

7. Conventional usage in dress, mode of life, etc., esp. as observed in the upper circles of society; conformity to this usage. Often personified, or quasi-personified.

10. The fashion: a. The mode of dress, etiquette, furniture, style of speech, etc., adopted in a society for the time being.

And, in a verbal sense—

3b. To counterfeit, pervert.

[OED here cites Much Ado, I, iii, 27]

Just as Othello's Venice (and Shylock's Venice, too) provides us with an icon of a society totally given up to gross commercial criteria, a society which assess human beings in terms of money, jewels, and outward appearance, so Messina is ruled by fashion, and the individual must learn to distinguish between externals, which are misleading and often downright vicious, and the internal truth. So, Beatrice, in her search for a husband, is in a dilemma—how is she to see through the fashionable exterior in order to attain a true assessment of the real man beneath? In antithesis to ‘fashion’, which must be recognised and shunned as a corrupting force, the play establishes the opposing entity of ‘faith’.⁷ This is, of course, but one aspect of Shakespeare's perennial love-ethic, which relies closely on the faculty of independent choice.

Things base and vile, holding no quantity
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind …

(MND, I, i, 232-4)

In Much Ado, faith and mind seem to be synonymous, in contrast to appearance, which deceives. This motif is too well recognised to need elaborate development, but we will immediately think of Desdemona's unselfish and virtuous love (she ‘saw Othello's visage in his mind’ (I, iii, 253)), of Cressida's lament upon the fickleness of women, easily led astray by the evidence of their eyes,⁸ and of the aphoristic treatment of the doctrine in The Merchant of Venice—

So may the outward show be least ourselves
The world is still deceived with ornament.

(III, ii, 73-4)

Faith is judgement and eyesight supplemented by imagination, so that we can ‘apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends’ (v, i, 5-6). The opposite, romantic love,⁹ is ultimately bestial: Venus urges Adonis to adopt the ethic of his horse, and Titania becomes a sort of Pasiphae—in the midst of a labyrinthine wood (there is even a character called Theseus) we encounter a monster with a human body and an animal's head.

So, ‘the fashion of a doublet … is nothing to a man’—appearances don’t count. The man, not his clothes, is what matters. But Claudio is deceived by Margaret's disguise, for fashion, which deforms, is a thief, and Margaret disguises herself to steal Hero's honour. As Hero is deceived by Don Pedro's disguise, Claudio is deceived by the disguises which the ladies adopt at the end of the play.¹⁰ Don John, in accordance with his role of ‘plain-dealing villain’, is not fooled by disguise, but rather, he employs disguise—hence he pretends to be duped by Claudio's disguise at the masked ball, in order to confide a secret to him. Fashion is a sinister conspiracy. Don Pedro's plot to bring Beatrice and Benedick together—‘I would fain have it a match—and doubt not but to fashion it’ (II, i, 344-5)—counterpoints Borachio's plot to alienate Claudio and Hero—‘… I shall so fashion the 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, 43-6). The sinister aspect of the word is amply conveyed by Don John, for ‘… it better fits my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob love from any …’ (I, iii, 27-8)—yet, in a sense, this is just what he does.

To step outside the criteria of the fashionable world is to invite its censure. So, for instance, Hero speaks critically of Beatrice's contempt for her foppish suitors—

Ursula. Sure, sure, such carping
is not commendable.
Hero. No, nor to be so odd and from
all fashions,
As Beatrice is, cannot be commendable.

(III, i, 71-3)

It is most appropriate that the bride Hero should condemn the unfashionable Beatrice in such jargon, for, to the frivolous characters of the play, marriage is equated with a fashionable garment. Leonato wishes to see Beatrice ‘one day fitted with a husband’, which, if we discount the lewd joke, is tantamount to saying that a man is no more than the clothes he wears. Beatrice peremptorily dismisses this attitude when she rejects Don Pedro's jocular offer of marriage—‘your grace is too costly to wear every day’ (II, i, 307-8). This discussion is paralleled quite soon by the discussion which Hero and her attendants have on the subject of her approaching marriage, for their attention is concentrated, not upon the institution itself, but upon an external—

Margaret. I like the new tire
within excellently if the hair were a thought browner: and your gown's
a most rare fashion i’faith. I saw the Duchess of Milan's gown
that they praise so—
Hero. O, that exceeds, they say.
Margaret. By my troth's but
a night-gown in respect of yours—cloth o’gold and cuts, and laced
with silver, set with pearls down sleeves, side sleeves, and skirts, round
underborne with a bluish tinsel—but for a fine quaint graceful and excellent
fashion, yours is worth ten on’t.

(III, iv, 12-22)

Hero's wedding preparations (‘… I’ll show thee some attires, and have thy counsel / Which is the best to furnish me tomorrow’ (III, i, 102-3)) should prepare us for the tragic and violent outcome of the wedding day, as should the words of Don Pedro to Claudio when the latter offers to escort him to Aragon immediately after the ceremony, for Pedro, too, speaks of marriage as a garment: ‘Nay, that would be as great a soil in the gloss of your marriage, as to show a child his new coat and forbid him to wear it’ (III, ii, 5-7). Claudio and Hero are entirely creatures of the eye, not of the mind. Claudio can mistake Margaret for Hero because the latter is only a dressed-up nothing, identifiable only by her clothes. Hero's name (which does not occur in any of the sources)¹¹ is pathetic—the devoted Leander is contrasted with the fickle Claudio. As we might expect, Claudio is a slave to fashion, and Benedick elaborates on this:

… I have known when he would have walked ten miles afoot, to see a 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 he is turned orthography—his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes. (II, iii, 12-21)

In the terminology of the play, this is very strong condemnation indeed, and serves to lead us to a discussion of a minor but insistent motif—the function of the frequent allusions to Hercules and Blind Cupid, whom I take to be the tutelary deities associated with faith and fashion respectively. Hercules is, of course, synonymous with courage, manliness, and honesty, and Beatrice laments that the society of Messina will not tolerate the Herculean virtues, but speedily corrupts them. The virtuous Hercules was, of course, an iconological figure which was instantly recognisable to Shakespeare's audience. ‘In the Renaissance Hercules was one of the two or three best-known mythological personages, the subject of paintings, tapestries, engravings, drawings, sculptures, plays, poems, learned treatises, emblems, adages, schoolboy essays, and countless incidental allusions.’¹² The immediate significance of the Hercules allusions is obvious, and springs from his association with the Twelve Labours.¹³ So, when the characters of Much Ado point out that Hercules is an unpopular deity in Messina, they are also indicating that the values associated with him are in desuetude. Borachio has pointed out that in Messina the cod-piece of ‘shaven Hercules’ takes precedence over his club, but it is Beatrice who indicates the reason for this decline.

Princes and counties! Surely a princely testimony, a goodly count, Count Comfect—a sweet gallant surely. O that I were a man for his sake!¹⁴ or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into complement, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones too: he is now as valiant as Hercules, that only tells a lie and swears it …

(IV, i, 314-21)

The speech is crucial. Perhaps, as Benedick indicates, Claudio was once a Hercules—at the beginning of the play, after all, we hear of him ‘doing in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion’ (I, i, 14-15)—but Messina has proved his Omphale. Dressed in elegant, fashionable clothes, the young men of Messina have been metaphorically castrated, their former valour metamorphosed into trivial social accomplishments; fashion, the thief, has deformed them. As Omphale clad Hercules in feminine garments and set him to spin amongst her women, so has Messina unmanned her warriors, and Beatrice in search of a husband finds herself surrounded by effeminate boys.¹⁵ Such a one is of no use to her—‘What should I do with him? dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting gentlewoman?’ (II, i, 31-2). She has no desire herself to play Omphale,¹⁶ for ‘he who has no beard is less than a man,’ and such a one is Claudio. Benedick so taunts him to his face—‘My Lord Lackbeard’ (IV, i, 187). We note that when the plan, conceived by Pedro and Claudio, to bring Beatrice and Benedick into ‘a mountain of affection’ seems to be succeeding, the conspirators discuss Benedick's alleged symptoms in terms of appearance, clothes, fashion, disguises, and the shaving off of beards (III, ii, 29-45).

But effeminacy and fashionableness are not just trivial lapses from grace—they are heinous sins, and from the fashionable syndrome can come bloody events. In the play, this is conveyed partly by the antagonism between generations. While Leonato and Antonio share in the general moral decline, there is yet a sense in which they are not as far gone in triviality as is Claudio himself; it is the younger generation which has most completely succumbed to the temptation to pursue the fashionable, which is, by definition, ephemeral and mutable. Leonato, for instance, sees himself, however waywardly, as embodying older, simpler, and more virtuous modes of conduct. Hence, when he challenges Claudio to a duel, and derides his ‘nice fence’, he is not only being contemptuous of the new-fangled rapier (a young man's weapon), but is taking the two contrasting styles of fencing to embody a moral antithesis. Antonio develops this line of thought:

Leonato. If thou kill'st
me, boy, thou shalt kill a man.
Antonio. He shall kill two of us,
and men indeed—
… Win me and wear me! Let him answer me.
Come follow me, boy, come sir boy, come follow me.
Sir boy, I’ll whip you from your foining fence …
Content yourself, God knows I loved my niece,
And she is dead, slandered to death by villains,
That dare as well answer a man indeed
As I dare take a serpent by the tongue.
Boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks, milksops! …
Hold you content. What, man! I know them, yea,
And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple—
Scambling, out-facing, fashion-monging boys,
That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave and slander,
Go anticly, and show outward hideousness,
How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst,
And this is all.

(V, i, 79-99)

It is significant that Antonio identifies Claudio's treachery directly with his subservience to fashion; he is capable of slandering a woman to death in this cowardly way, but loth to fight real men, precisely because he is a ‘fashion-monging boy’. The same phrase is used to identify moral turpitude with fashion among the young when Mercutio denounces Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet:

The pox of such antic lisping affecting fantasticoes, these new tuners of accent! By Jesu a very good blade—a very tall man—a very good whore! Why, is not this a lamentable thing, grandsire, that we should thus be afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these pardon-me's, who stand so much on the new form that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench?

(II, iv, 28-35)

And the fashionable fantasticoes are ubiquitous—Claudio has many of their accomplishments. Challenged to a duel by Benedick, Claudio paraphrases his acceptance in a peculiar jargon ‘… he hath bid me to a calf's-head and a capon, the which if I do not carve most curiously, say my knife's nought’ (V, i, 151-3)—for presumably he prides himself on his ability to carve intricately at table, another fashionable accomplishment. The orchard, in which so much of the eavesdropping and conspiring takes place, is ‘pleached’, recalling the Spenserian and Shakespearian commonplace of the moral antagonism embodied in the nature versus art antithesis, almost as if we can see, in the pleached branches, a faint analogy to the Bower of Bliss, with its rejection of nature for artifice; to the artificial court of Leontes rejecting the pastoral simplicity of Bohemia, and so on. Don Pedro says something in much the same vein when he commends Leonato for his hospitality, for ‘… the fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it’ (I, i, 92-3), and the fashion of the world (presumably at least in part the dictates of contemporary social mores) is opposed to hospitality and solicitousness. Don Pedro continues to harp on the difference between seeming and being when he asserts his belief in the sincerity of Leonato's wish that something should occur to prolong the visit to Messina—‘I dare say he is no hypocrite, but prays from his heart’ (I, i, 144-5).

Yet the play provides a polar opposite to the vices of shallowness, triviality, pettiness, volatility, and wrong choice embodied by fashion. This antithesis is contained in the word ‘faith’. To distinguish between faith and fashion is the task which Beatrice has imposed upon herself, and her initial inquiries about Benedick indicate that she is seriously concerned to discover whether he is a man of fashion or a man of faith, for, if he is the latter, he is worthy of her regard and her love. The deep commitment with which she undertakes this dialectical search contrasts dramatically with the opportunistic and trivial questions with which Claudio initiates his own courtship. Thus she questions the Messenger concerning Benedick in the following way: ‘… I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? for indeed I promised to eat all of his killing. … He is a very valiant trencherman, he hath an excellent stomach’ (I, i, 36-49). She wishes to know if Benedick is a braggart soldier, a fashionable fop who only pretends to be manly. How is one to know the real man from his words? She goes on to accuse Benedick of fickleness in friendship, and introduces the fashion image in one of its most important guises by making it synonymous with inconstancy:

Beatrice. … Who is
his companion now? he hath every month a new sworn brother.
Messenger. Is’t possible?
Beatrice. Very easily possible. He
wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat, it ever changes with the next
block.

(I, i, 67-72)

This is obviously an important passage. Benedick, she alleges, equates faith and fashion. This he should not do. In the play's moral framework, it is a very grave offence. A man of faith is a moral Hercules; so, when Benedick professes his friendship for Beatrice after the church scene, she is quick to turn the conversation into the channel already discussed:

Benedick. Is there any way
to show such friendship?
Beatrice. A very even way, but no
such friend.
Benedick. May a man do it?
Beatrice. It is a man's office,
but not yours.

(IV, i, 262-5)

For manhood is melted into curtsies; by her gibes, Beatrice attempts to spur Benedick into manly action—to prove he is no Count Comfect. Benedick himself seems to realise the import of Beatrice's order to ‘Kill Claudio’, for when events absolve him of his promise to fight Claudio, he regards the challenge, in retrospect, as a very basic test:

Antonio. Well, I am glad that
all things sort so well.
Benedick. And so am I, being else
by faith enforced
To call young Claudio to a reckoning for it.

(V, iv, 7-9)

Fashion implies wrong choice; faith implies the ability to thread one's way through the moral labyrinth and to attain to right choice. The process, though, is a difficult one. It is hence doubly appropriate that the party of faith should owe allegiance to Hercules, for, although Hercules was important to the Renaissance as a result of the moral glosses traditionally applied to the Twelve Labours, his main importance stems from the story of Hercules's Choice (The Hero at the Fork in the Road).¹⁷ The tale was a commonplace in Shakespeare's day; Cicero's popular De Officiis contains a reference to Xenophon's version of the Choice (I, 118),¹⁸ and was a widespread school Latin text. Nicholas Grimald's translation was printed nine times between 1553 and 1600.¹⁹ Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblems represents Hercules's dilemma graphically,²⁰ and ‘The plainness of Lady Virtue and the gaudiness of Lady Vice led to allegorical interpretations of the two figures beyond their obvious significances'.²¹ The story was originally derived from Hesiod's Works and Days,²² which adumbrates the idea of two roads in life. The addition of making the roads cross, placing the hero at their intersection, and providing each road with its advocate, was effected by the sophist Prodicus, and Socrates's account in Xenophon's Memorabilia presents Vice and Virtue in contrasting robes.²³ Athenaeus goes so far as to elevate the choice of Hercules to the level of the most famous of such dilemmas.²⁴ But the most appropriate version of the story for our purposes, emphasising the garb of Hercules's suppliants, is provided in the third century by Philostratus. ‘You have seen in picture-books the representation of Hercules by Prodicus; in it Hercules is represented as a youth, who has not yet chosen the life he will lead; and vice and virtue stand on each side of him plucking his garments and trying to draw him to themselves. Vice is adorned with gold and necklaces and with purple raiment, and her cheeks are painted and her hair delicately plaited and her eyes underlined with henna; and she also wears golden slippers, for she is pictured strutting about in these; but virtue in the picture resembles a woman worn out with toil, with a pinched look; and she has chosen for her adornment rough squalor, and she goes without shoes and in the plainest of raiment, and she would have appeared naked if she had not too much regard for feminine decency.’²⁵ Ben Jonson, in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, presents the demi-god's choice simply and didactically—

First, figure out the doubtfull way,
at which, a while all youth shold stay,
where she [i.e., Pleasure] and Vertue did contend,
which should haue Hercules to frend.(26)

The issue of making a correct choice in such complex matters is hence central to the play's morality; Beatrice, for instance, initiates her courtship by denigrating Benedick with the object of finding out what inner qualities he possesses. Claudio opens his courtship of Hero by inquiring after, and remarking upon, her external qualities. For instance, he has ‘noted’ the daughter of Leonato. Benedick ‘noted her not, but I looked on her’ (I, i, 155-6)—a reproach, which he amplifies in answer to Claudio's further queries: ‘Would you buy her, that you inquire after her’ (I, i, 171). Claudio significantly betrays his materialism in his reply, ‘Can the world buy such a jewel?’ (I, i, 172). He goes on to praise Hero in sinister language—‘In mine eye, she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on’ (I, i, 178-9)—an outrageous remark in Shakespeare's world, where love should look not with the eyes but with the mind. Since Claudio is the acme of fashion, which, by definition, stands for all that is ephemeral, then his love will be subject to Time's ravages, and he confesses as much—‘If my passion change not shortly’ (I, i, 207). Again, in the same vein, Claudio announces ‘That I love her I feel’ (I, i, 216), but this is inadequate. He should know, not feel. Don Pedro replies ‘That she is worthy I know’ (I, i, 217), but Benedick reproves them both when he implicitly points out that neither is as yet in any position to make such sweeping statements; ‘That I neither feel how she should be loved, nor know how she should be worthy, is an opinion that fire cannot melt out of me—I will die in it at the stake’ (I, i, 218-20). In other words this opinion is, metaphorically, an article of faith for which he is prepared to suffer martyrdom. Claudio, Leonato, and Don Pedro all lack faith in Hero, and can therefore believe her to be unfaithful to Claudio. Beatrice and the Friar, on the contrary, are paragons of faith, and adhere to a belief in Hero's innocence when the evidence points to the opposite. Claudio, too, easily loses faith in his leader over the business of the courtship, for he is a creature who knows only the outward appearances of things. He can talk of Hero's ‘show of truth’—‘you seemed to me as Dian …’ or ‘If half the outward graces had been placed …’ Claudio often mixes semblance and reality. Hero was fair and virtuous ‘in my semblance’; from this she can speedily degenerate to ‘but the sign and semblance of her honour’. Claudio's remark to the effect that ‘I love her I feel’ is a great self-indictment. A man who makes such a remark asks others to confirm his judgement and to act for him; appropriate in view of the man of fashion's subservience to the dictates of society. He provides a great contrast to Benedick, who requires no official imprimatur from society to sanctify his intentions:

… since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to
any purpose that the world can say against it.

(V, iv, 103-5)

Against this sturdy pronouncement we might set Claudio's vacillatory and crab-wise approach to the same truth:

Let every eye negotiate for
itself,
And trust no agent: for beauty is
a witch
Against whose charms faith melteth
into blood

(II, i, 165-7)

culminating in his eventual determination to honour his vow to marry an unknown bride: ‘I’ll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope’ (V, iv, 38—my italics).

The Shakespearian virtues do not reside in princes' courts. Guiderius and Arviragus grow up in naive but robust innocence in the harsh pastoral of the Welsh hills; the exiled Duke of As You Like It finds the winter pastoral of Arden more conducive to virtue than the court he has lost, and Sicily, the traditional home of pastoral, is blighted by the suspicions of Leontes and becomes a wasteland, only to be renewed by the Bohemian pastoral figures of Perdita and Florizel. There is no pastoral scene in Much Ado to provide an antidote to the sterile and fashionable court, no setting for the vita contemplativa to which the characters can retire in order to understand themselves better. Instead, we have the laughable but laudable simplicity of the Watch. These people may be unlettered, but their unfashionable uncouthness, their upside-down euphuism, ensures that they keep the basic virtues intact. As Borachio realises bitterly: ‘What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light’ (V, i, 226-9). Fashionable people are less perspicacious than the Watch, who are fully informed of the machinations of Deformed, the fashionable thief, and who are introduced at the first line of their appearance by Dogberry's question, ‘Are you good men and true?’ and by Verges's affirmative ‘Yea’ (III, iii, 1-2). Their simplicity is echoed by the Friar, who is a visual icon of faith, refusing to be deceived by appearances. In his home-spun raiment, the Friar provides a simple visible exemplum of the abjuration of fashion, and his religious faith parallels the more secular faith of Beatrice. We think of the Duke-as-Friar of Measure for Measure, repairing Angelo's broken faith with Mariana. The Friar and Claudio, faith and fashion, stand over the prostrate Hero like some emblem graphically representing sagacity and credulity. The whole image is a fitting culmination to the plot which Borachio concocted, a plot held together by the recurring words ‘appear … paint … show … seem … seeming truth’. The very language of the play embodies this urgent dichotomy. ‘The body of your discourse is sometime guarded with fragments …’ (I, i, 268-9), for truth is disguised with elegant rhetorical fol-de-rols, just as Claudio is ‘turned orthography’. Hence the often noticed contrast between the masculine strength of the play's prose, and the strained, feeble nature of the verse.

We have constantly attempted to identify faith and its attendant values with the mythological figure of Hercules. Fashion also has its patron deity, and it is hardly surprising for the student of Renaissance iconology that this should be Blind Cupid. Don Pedro and Claudio at one point taunt Benedick that he will one day be in love, despite his protests. But they predicate of love all the symptoms of the Petrarchan madness: ‘I shall see thee, ere I die, look pale with love’ (I, i, 233). Benedick retorts that if ever he is in such a state, then ‘hang me up at the door of a brothel house for the sign of Blind Cupid’, for to him the passion they champion is associated with brothels and Blind Cupid. ‘According to the standards of traditional iconography … the blindness of Cupid puts him definitely on the wrong side of the moral world.’²⁷ The love which Claudio and Don Pedro recommend must therefore be accorded its place in the whole Renaissance pageant of illicit love for which Blind Cupid is the patron, and which is most vividly represented by Spenser's ‘Masque of Cupid’. The debate is a constant one in Shakespeare; Claudio and Don Pedro are the allies of one of the poet's earliest creations, the Venus who attempts to convert the chaste Adonis to her metaphysic of lust. Don Pedro even seems to give a grudging approval to Benedick's stand: ‘… if ever thou dost fall from this faith, thou wilt prove a notable argument’ (I, i, 240-1). It is appropriate that Claudio should ask if Leonato has a son. He is told that Hero is Leonato's only heir, and indulges in words reminiscent of Gloucester (who was literally deformed) at the beginning of Richard III: ‘War thoughts / Have left their places vacant … in their rooms / Come thronging soft and delicate desires, / All prompting me how fair young Hero is …’ (I, i, 279-89). We do not hear the lascivious pleasings of a lute, but Claudio has unconsciously elaborated on Benedick's gentle denunciation. He lusts after Hero's body, and will marry her for her fortune—lust and money, Blind Cupid and brothels. Soon Claudio is the embodiment of the state which has been maliciously predicted for Benedick, and in his Petrarchan attitudinising he remarks that Don Pedro is one of those ‘that know love's grief by his complexion!’ (I, i, 296). And Don Pedro is as blind as his protégé. ‘If Cupid have not spent all his quiver in Venice, thou wilt quake for this shortly’ (I, i, 255-6), he threatens Benedick, locating his deity firmly in the city of commerce and courtesans. Don Pedro's matchmaking is a fashionable pastime—Blind Cupid's love-in-idleness, to borrow an attitude from Venus and Adonis—and he wishes to bring Beatrice and Benedick into ‘a mountain of affection’ (II, i, 343), just as Claudio ‘affects’ Hero. Indeed, Don Pedro goes so far as to hope that he surpasses his deity—‘If we can do this, Cupid is no longer an archer … for we are the only love gods' (II, i, 361-3).

Claudio's headlong and precipitate rush into a fashionable marriage is the sort of conduct we would expect from a devotee of Blind Cupid:

And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind
Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste;
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguil’d …

(MND, I, i, 235-9)

Cupid is traditionally alatus et caecus, and Claudio and Benedick must be associated with ‘blind’ and ‘clear-sighted’ love respectively, with Eros and Anteros.²⁸

Yet Eros and Anteros are aspects of the same personality. Panofsky cites a representation (by Lucius Cranach the Elder) of Blind Cupid removing his own blindfold—passing from moral blindness to enlightenment. In this representation, Cupid is standing, very significantly, upon a large volume labelled Platonis Opera.²⁹

Platonic thought was familiar with the concept of two loves, one base, the other admirable, and in the Symposium Plato, through the words of Pausanias, describes these under the guise of two Venuses. ‘The elder one, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite—she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione—her we call common, and the love who is her fellow-worker is rightly named common, as the other love is called heavenly.’³⁰ Iconologically, there was a precedent for depicting the higher goddess as nude, to denote not eroticism, but freedom from vanity.³¹ The lower goddess could be depicted as clothed in opulent, fashionable garments, to denote her involvement with the passing vanities of this world. ‘… the clothed Venus is the Venere vulgare or Aphrodite Pandemos, whom Plato and the Platonists opposed to the Aphrodite Urania (Venere celeste) …’³² Yet the two goddesses are not polar opposites. Rather, man can ascend to the higher love through the agency of the lower. Being distracted by the beauty of garments is itself a Platonic metaphor denoting preoccupation with the body (the soul's garment) at the expense of the soul. Hence Claudio, who must rise above considerations of flesh and fashion, pursues within the confines of the play a process of initiation commonplace in Platonic thought, and most accessibly described in Castiglione's The Courtier or Spenser's Platonic Hymns. The aspiring lover must learn to spurn amore bestiale, transcend amore umano, and attain the heights of amore celeste (to borrow the terminology of Pico della Mirandola). So, the first two steps up the Platonic ladder, as described by Bembo, constitute a transition from the purely physical craving for the beloved object, to a realisation of the beloved's image in the mind's eye:

To avoide therefore the torment of his absence, and to enjoy beautie without passion, the Courtier by the helpe of reason must full and wholy call backe againe the coveting of the bodie to beautie alone, and (in what he can) beholde it in it selfe simple and pure, and frame it within in his imagination sundred from all matter, and so make it friendly and loving to his soule, and there enjoy it, and having it with him day and night, in every time and place, without mistrust ever to lose it: keeping alwaies fast in minde, that the bodie is a most diverse thing from beautie, and not onely not encreaseth, but diminisheth the perfection of it … And beside, through the vertue of imagination, hee shall fashion with himselfe that beautie much more faire than it is in deede.³³

Hence, the Friar's plan takes on a new significance:

When he [i.e. Claudio] 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 apparelled in more precious habit,
More moving-delicate and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul,
Than when she lived indeed …
Let this be so, and doubt not but success
Will fashion the event in better shape …

(IV, i, 222-34)

Thus the play's scheme proposes that out of the evil of fashion should be brought forth the good of a higher faith, and the two entities whose antagonism we have scrutinised eventually meet to work in conjunction. We reached this synthesis through an examination of the forces accumulating around the figure of Blind Cupid, but we could perhaps equally well have done so by examining the Hercules-motif in greater detail, for as Wind observes,

Voluptas is appointed to tempt the hero with her specious allurements, while Virtue acquaints him in all her austerity with the arduous prospect of heroic labours: and it may be expected of a reliable Hercules that he will not remain suspended between them. The choice is clear because the two opposites, having been introduced in a complete disjunction, obey the logical principle of the excluded middle: tertium non datur. It is the absence of any transcendent alternative which renders the moral so respectable; but although the humanists used it profusely in their exoteric instruction, they left no doubt that, for a Platonic initiate, it was but the crust, and not the marrow … In Ben Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, a sequence of ‘knots’ is introduced by the dancing master Daedalus, who interweaves the two opposites in a perfect maze; and his labyrinthian designs are accompanied by a warning that while the ‘first figure’ should suggest the contrast of Virtue and Pleasure as in the Choice of Hercules, it is the purpose of the dance to ‘entwine’ Pleasure and Virtue beyond recognition:

Come on, come on! and where you go,
So interweave the curious knot,
As ev’n the observer scarce may know
Which lines are Pleasure's, and which not.(34)

I am not necessarily trying to contend that Much Ado is a neo-Platonic homily. I would simply like to suggest that the play may be profitably examined against the background of such modes of thought. In this way the faith-fashion antithesis may be seen as one aspect of the age's preoccupation with the conflict between eternity and mutability, and with the right resolution of this conflict, a resolution which Spenser has mapped in detail in Epithalamion, the ‘Garden of Adonis’, and the ‘Mutability Cantos’. This solution argues that, by loving chastely and wisely, man can conquer time, flux and mutability, and transcend them to attain a state wherein he will be, like Spenser's Adonis, ‘eterne in mutability’. Shakespeare's Ulysses, of course, has asserted that the arch-villain of the age, time, the Saturnian edax rerum, is ‘like a fashionable host’, but our investigation can perhaps be most suitably concluded by Hallett Smith's oddly apt assertion that, in the heroic poetry of the Renaissance, ‘the guiding and predominating motive was that of Virtue, pictured symbolically as the lady whose path Hercules chose to follow, as a kind of Venus-Beatrice of a neo-Platonic scheme’.³⁵

Notes

1. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies (London, 1957), p. 109 [my italics].

2. Dorothy Hockey, ‘Notes, notes, forsooth …’ Shakespeare Quarterly, VIII (1957), 353-8.

3. Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven, 1953), pp. 132, 233, 320.

4. For a detailed examination of the ‘Nothing’ of the play's title, see P. A. Jorgensen, Redeeming Shakespeare's Words (Berkeley, 1962), pp. 22-42.

5. Her verdict that ‘The play … is a dramatization of mis-noting—a sort of dramatized, rather than verbal, pun’ (‘Notes, notes, forsooth …’, p. 354), seems to me impeccable.

6. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (eds.), Much Ado about Nothing (Cambridge, 1923, repr. 1953), to which edition all subsequent citations refer. Quotations from the other plays are from Charles Jasper Sisson (ed.), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (London, 1953).

7. This semantic antithesis, upon which the remaining analysis of the play rests, was pointed out to me more than ten years ago by Mr E. L. Jones, of Magdalen College, Oxford, and I most gratefully acknowledge my debt to him. I would also like to thank Professor Jay L. Halio and Mr John Ingledew, who have read the manuscript with friendly severity.

8. Ah poor our sex, this fault in us I find,
   The error of our eye directs our mind.
   What error leads, must err. O then conclude
   Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude.

   (V, ii, 109-12)

9. I employ the term as it is understood, passim, by Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World (New York, 1956).

10. There is a slight parallel with The Winter's Tale. Hermione and Hero feign death in order to awaken shame in the lovers who suspected them unjustly; Leontes and Claudio find reborn love and greater self-knowledge when they have supposedly learnt their lesson, and the awakening of Hermione's statue parallels the removal of Hero's mask.

11. See Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London, 1958), II, 61-139.

12. Richard Knowles, ‘Myth and Type in As You Like It’, E.L.H., XXXIII (1966), 3.

13. ‘In the Renaissance Hercules’ physical power came to symbolize any other kind of heroic strength, whether moral, religious, or intellectual. This wide range of symbolic meanings had grown within the medieval tradition of allegorical commentary on pagan myths that culminated in the encyclopedic Ovide Moralisé and Pierre Bersuire's Ovidius Moralizatus. In the Renaissance, Ovidian commentaries by Raphael Regius and Georgius Sabinus, mythographical compendia by Alexander ab Alexandro, Lilio Giraldo, Natalis Comes, Vincenzo Cartari, and Cesare Ripa, and treatises like Coluccio Salutati's De Laboribus Herculis and Giraldo's Herculis Vita, not to mention the countless artistic treatments that these helped engender, represented Hercules as the supreme exemplar of moral fortitude … and of virtuous works, as typified by his twelve or more Labors' (ibid., pp. 14-15).

14. In Ovid's Ninth Heroic Epistle, Deianira upbraids Hercules for allowing Omphale to steal his arms and masquerade as a man. ‘To her passes the full measure of your exploits—yield up what you possess; your mistress is heir to your praise. O shame, that the rough skin stripped from the flanks of the shaggy lion has covered a woman's delicate side!’ (Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman [Harvard, 1921], p. 117.)

15. ‘Largely because of Ovid's Ninth Heroic Epistle, well known in George Turberville's translation, Hercules brought from club to distaff … had become the proverbial example of the power and folly of love’ (Knowles, ‘Myth and Type’, p. 8).

16. Unlike Cleopatra, who clothed Antony in her own garments at one juncture (II, v, 17-21). Antony, of course, is closely identified with Hercules (I, iii, 84; IV, iii, 16; IV, xii, 43-4). See Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero (London, 1962), pp. 113-21. However, Benedick at one point fears that Beatrice, because of her shrewishness, may prove a very dynamic Omphale: ‘She would have made Hercules have turned spit, yea, and have cleft his club to make the fire too … You shall find her the infernal Ate in good apparel’ (II, i, 235-8).

17. See Richard Knowles, ‘Myth and Type’, passim, and Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Harvard, 1952), pp. 295-7.

18. Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (London, 1913), p. 121.

19. Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, p. 295.

20. See Henry Green's reprint (London, 1866) of the Plantyn edition of 1586, p. 40.

21. Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, p. 297.

22. See Richard Hooper's edition of George Chapman's translation (London, 1888), I, ll. 449-63.

23. See Xenophon, Memorabilia and Oecomicus, trans. E. C. Marchant (London, 1923), p. 95: ‘And there appeared two women of great stature making towards him. The one was fair to see and of high bearing; and her limbs were adorned with purity, her eyes with modesty; sober was her figure, and her robe was white. The other was plump and soft, with high feeding. Her face was made up to heighten its natural white and pink, her figure to exaggerate her height. Open-eyed was she; and dressed so as to disclose all her charms.’

24. See Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, trans. C. B. Gulick (Harvard, 1933), V, 295: ‘And I for one affirm also that the Judgement of Paris, as told in poetry by the writers of an older time, is really a trial of pleasure against virtue … I think, too, that our noble Xenophon invented the story of Heracles and Virtue with the same motive.’

25. Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, trans. F. C. Conybeare (London, 1912), II, 33-5.

26. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds.), Works of Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1941), VII, 488, ll. 257-60.

27. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (Oxford, 1939, rev. ed. New York, 1962), p. 109. See esp. ch. IV, ‘Blind Cupid’, pp. 95-128. For a list of Shakespeare's allusions to this deity, see p. 112, n. 55.

28. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, pp. 126-7.

29. Ibid., p. 128.

30. Irwin Edman (ed.), The Works of Plato (New York, 1956), pp. 343-4.

31. Cf. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 155: ‘Nuda virtus is the real virtue appreciated in the good old days when wealth and social distinction did not count, and Horace speaks already of nuda Veritas, though the Greek writers, characteristically enough, rather imagined Truth as dressed in simple garments.’

32. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958), p. 118.

33. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1928), p. 317. Hoby's translation first appeared in 1561, and was re-issued during Shakespeare's lifetime in the editions of 1577 and 1588, of which the latter edition is trilingual in Italian, French, and English. It has, incidentally, been suggested (somewhat implausibly) that Benedick and Beatrice are modelled on two of Castiglione's characters, the Lord Gaspare Pallavicino and the Lady Emilia Pia. See Mary Augusta Scott, ‘The Book of the Courtyer: a Possible Source of Benedick and Beatrice’, PMLA, XVI (1901), 475-502. Since the initial composition of this current essay, however, an important and convincing article on the relationship between The Courtier and Much Ado has appeared in the form of B. K. Lewalski's ‘Love, Appearance and Reality: Much Ado about Something’ (Studies in English Literature, VIII (1968), 235-51). Lewalski's conclusions substantially parallel (and, in my opinion, vindicate) my own, although she arrives at them by a different route. Noting the ostensible absence of the pastoral element in the play, Lewalski locates it in the higher area of consciousness described by Bembo in Book VI of The Courtier, and not, as I do, in the Watch, for whose activities she invokes I Cor. i 27 (‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise’). Lewalski identifies Claudio with Bembo's ‘young lover’ misled in love-judgments by ‘judgement of sense’ (p. 240), one who ‘acts primarily in terms of sense knowledge rather than reason, and is moved by desire and passion rather than the higher love’ (p. 246). Hero's epic death-and-rebirth pattern is seen as an image of Christ's passion and resurrection—‘the archetype of sacrificial love for the restoration of others' (p. 251), and the neo-Platonism is almost explicitly Christianised in the well-observed words of the Friar: ‘But on this travail look for greater birth’ and ‘Come, lady, die to live’ (idem). Lewalski's conclusion seems to me wholly admirable: ‘Only because of these new terms—love as redemptive sacrifice and knowledge as faith—is the Platonic ascent possible for such as Claudio.’

34. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, pp. 168-9. For our own purposes, an alternative passage from Jonson's masque (Herford and Simpson, Works of Ben Jonson, VII, 486-7, ll. 200-13) might be even more appropriate:

                        Pleasure, for his [i.e. Hesperus'] delight
    is reconcild to Vertue: and this Night
    Vertue brings forth twelue Princes haue byn bred
    in this rough Mountaine …
    Theis now she trusts with Pleasure, and to theis
    she gives an entraunce to the Hesperides,
    faire Beuties gardens: Neither can she feare
    they should grow soft, or wax effeminat here,
    Since in hir sight, and by hir charge all's don,
    Pleasure the Servant, Vertue looking on.

35. Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, p. 324. Don Pedro, the play's most ambivalent character, speaks with unconscious irony when he pronounces what might serve us as an alternative epigraph: ‘What a pretty thing man is, when he goes in his doublet and hose and leaves off his wit’ (V, i, 194-5).