SOURCE: McGrady, Donald. “The Topos of ‘Inversion of Values’ in Hero's Depiction of Beatrice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 4 (winter 1993): 472-6.

[In the following essay, McGrady reviews the way Beatrice inverts rhetorical tradition through her persistently negative appraisal of her suitors, and argues that upon overhearing Hero's description of her, Beatrice is made aware of her flaws and is finally able to open herself up to love.]

In act 3, scene 1, of Much Ado About Nothing, Hero incites Beatrice to love Benedick by staging a scene for her to overhear in which Hero censures Beatrice's custom of criticizing all her suitors, of turning their spiritual virtues or physical characteristics into defects:

                                                                                          … I never yet saw man,
How wise, how noble, young, how rarely featur'd,
But she would spell him backward: if fair-fac'd,
She would swear the gentleman should be her sister;
If black, why, Nature, drawing of an antic,
Made a foul blot; if tall, a lance ill-headed;
If low, an agate very vilely cut;
If speaking, why, a vane blown with all winds;
If silent, why, a block moved with none.
So turns she every man the wrong side out,
And never gives to truth and virtue that
Which simpleness and merit purchaseth.

(ll. 59-70)¹

Hero's tactic is to point out to her cousin that she is hypercritical, being unfair with all the men attracted to her. Hero and her maid Ursula have already stated that Benedick loves Beatrice (ll. 37-43) but that she is so “self-endeared” as to be incapable of requiting his affection (ll. 49-56). They therefore conclude that Benedick should forget Beatrice (ll. 41-43 and 77-86) and end by praising Benedick's qualities (ll. 91-99). Hero's strategy works to perfection, as the eavesdropping Beatrice becomes aware of her mistakes (“Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much? / Contempt, farewell, and maiden pride, adieu! / No glory lives behind the back of such” [ll. 108-10]) and yields her formerly scornful heart to love (ll. 111-16). From this moment on, Beatrice is a changed woman, as love's flame refines her temperament, turning arrogance to sweetness (see 3.4.38-73); the proverbial illness of love makes her yearn for “a hawk, a horse, or a husband” (ll. 39-40, 67-70, and 50), all interchangeable, since the hawk and the horse traditionally symbolize eroticism.²

That Hero's stratagem proves so effective with Beatrice may in part be due to its use of an ancient rhetorical tradition, although Beatrice, as an incorrigible man-hater, has turned that tradition inside out. The immediate inspiration for Hero's speech (as George Steevens pointed out two centuries ago³) appears in two passages of Lyly's Euphues. In the first of these passages, Lyly, like Shakespeare, accuses women of describing men's positive or neutral characteristics in negative terms:

Dost thou not know that women deem none valiant unless he be too venturous? That they account one a dastard if he be not desperate, a pinchpenny if he be not prodigal, if silent a sot, if full of words a fool? Perversely do they always think of their lovers and talk of them scornfully, judging all to be clowns which be no courtiers and all to be pinglers [i.e., farm-horses] that be not coursers. … Do you not know the nature of women, which is grounded only upon extremities? Do they think any man to delight in them unless he dote on them? … If he be cleanly then term they him proud, if mean in apparel a sloven, if tall a lungis [i.e., long, slim person], if short a dwarf, if bold blunt, if shamefast a coward. …⁴

Four of Shakespeare's ten examples (tall, low, speaking, silent) are listed in Euphues. (Those missing are the corporeal fair-fac'd and black and the spiritual truth, virtue, simpleness, and merit.) Shakespeare undoubtedly recognized Lyly's critique of feminine faultfinding as an echo of a classical topos.

The original form of the motif—which to the best of my knowledge has never been studied—reverses the version that Beatrice employs: it consists quite simply of a lover who characterizes his beloved's various physical or spiritual defects as laudable attributes.⁵ Naturally this form applies to young boys rather than to women:

“… Glaucon,” said I, “… It does not become a lover to forget that all adolescents … sting and stir the amorous lover of youth and appear to him deserving of his attention and desirable. … One, because his nose is tip-tilted, you will praise as piquant, the beak of another you pronounce right-royal, the intermediate type you say strikes the harmonious mean, the swarthy are of manly aspect, the white are children of the gods divinely fair, and as for honey-hued, do you suppose the very word is anything but the euphemistic invention of some lover who can feel no distaste for sallowness when it accompanies the blooming time of youth? And, in short, there is no pretext you do not allege and there is nothing you shrink from saying to justify you in not rejecting any who are in the bloom of their prime.”⁶

Plato here begins a tradition that has lasted more than two millennia. Not suprisingly, his attention to the imperfect nose did not find favor with subsequent imitators, but the beloved's complexion (swarthy, too fair, or honey-colored) became one of the standard characteristics often repeated by later writers.

From Plato the motif passes to Lucretius, who adds to the meager list in the Republic many more instances of lovers' blindness:

For for the most part men act blinded by passion, and assign to women excellencies which are not truly theirs. And so we see those in many ways deformed and ugly dearly loved, yea, prospering in high favour. … A black love is called “honey-dark”, the foul and filthy “unadorned”, the green-eyed “Athena's image”, the wiry and wooden “a gazelle”, the squat and dwarfish “one of the graces”, “all pure delight”, the lumpy and ungainly “a wonder” and “full of majesty”. She stammers and cannot speak, “she has a lisp”; the dumb is “modest”; the fiery, spiteful gossip is “a burning torch”. One becomes a “slender darling”, when she can scarce live from decline; another half dead with cough is “frail”. Then the fat and full-bosomed is “Ceres' self with Bacchus at breast”; the snub-nosed is “sister to Silenus, or a Satyr”; the thick-lipped is “a living kiss”. More of this sort it were tedious for me to try to tell.⁷

Lucretius retains Plato's swarthy and honey-hued skin, but introduces additional blemishes perceived by the suitor as positive qualities; of these, the most enduring have proved to be excessive thinness, shortness, tallness, and taciturnity. Plato lists only a few purely physical faults; Lucretius expands this list considerably and then adds the mental characteristics of reticence and loquacity (ll. 1164-65), which will reappear in Lyly and Shakespeare.

Horace, the next cultivator of the motif, barely alludes to the lover's propensity to excuse his beloved's defects before proposing that we extend our benevolent evaluations of our sweethearts to our friends and offspring as well:

Let us turn first to this fact, that the lover, in his blindness, fails to see his lady's unsightly blemishes, nay is even charmed with them. … I could wish that we made the like mistake in friendship and that to such an error our ethics had given an honourable name. At any rate, we should deal with a friend as a father with his child, and not be disgusted at some blemish. If a boy squints, his father calls him “Blinky”; if his son is sadly puny, like misbegotten Sisyphus of former days, he styles him “Chickabiddy”. … But we turn virtues themselves upside down, and want to soil a clean vessel. Does there live among us an honest soul, a truly modest fellow? We nickname him slow and stupid. Does another shun every snare and offer no exposed side to malice, seeing that we live in that kind of a world where keen envy and slanders are so rife? Instead of his good sense and prudence we speak of his craftiness and insincerity. Is one somewhat simple … ? “He is quite devoid of social tact,” we say.⁸

Although most of Horace's treatment of the motif falls outside our principal area of interest, focusing as it does upon the faults of offspring and friends, rather than on those of the beloved, it is important in the evolution of our topos, for it juxtaposes the figure of the indulgent suitor with the crucial notion of unjust criticism of the virtuous. In other words, to the lover's natural tendency to depict his sweetheart's faults as positive qualities, Horace adds the idea that that same wooer may describe moral merits as blemishes—a concept borrowed from the larger motif of the “inversion of virtues and vices.” With this fundamental accretion, our amorous motif of the reversal of values nears its complete form.

The last known classical instances of our theme appear appropriately enough in Ovid; one such passage is in the Ars Amatoria:

Particularly forbear to reproach a woman with her faults, faults which many have found it useful to feign otherwise. Her complexion was not made a reproach against Andromeda by him on whose either foot was a swift moving pinion. All thought Andromache too big: Hector alone deemed her of moderate size. … With names you can soften shortcomings; let her be called swarthy, whose blood is blacker than Illyrian pitch; if cross-eyed, she is like Venus; yellow-haired, like Minerva; call her slender whose thinness impairs her health; if short, call her trim; if stout, of full body; let its nearness to a virtue conceal a fault.⁹

Unlike his predecessors, Ovid here makes no original contribution whatsoever to the development of our motif; he simply repeats the notion that lovers praise their girlfriends' physical flaws. Four of the blemishes enumerated by Ovid—swarthiness, thinness, shortness, and stoutness—coincide with items from Lucretius's list, and he does not include any mental faults, as do Lucretius and Horace. Subsequently, however, in his Remedia Amoris, Ovid introduces a fundamental change in the motif; here he recounts how his advances were rejected by a certain girl, and he describes a remedy that he used to forget her:

“How ugly,” would I say, “are my girl's legs!” and yet they were not, to say the truth. “How short she is!” though she was not; “how much she asks of her lover!” that proved my chiefest cause of hate. Faults too lie near to charms; by that error virtues oft were blamed for vices. Where you can, turn to the worse your girl's attractions, and by a narrow margin criticise amiss. Call her fat, if she is full-breasted, black, if dark-complexioned; in a slender woman leanness can be made a reproach. If she is not simple, she can be called pert: if she is honest, she can be called simple.¹⁰

Ovid's remedy for rejection consists, then, in persuading himself that the disdainful lady's qualities and virtues are but so many faults and blemishes. That is, Ovid here turns inside out the original motif of the lover who perceives all his beloved's imperfections as positive qualities: the suitor who once regarded his sweetheart with rose-tinted glasses, when rejected by her, should exchange those spectacles for others that present her in a wholly jaundiced light. This Ovidian passage was incorporated by Lyly into his Euphues, in a paragraph that immediately follows the passage from Euphues quoted above; in response to a woman who turns his qualities into failings, the man should do the same:

Be she never so comely, call her counterfeit; be she never so straight, think her crooked; and wrest all parts of her body to the worst, be she never so worthy. If she be well set then call her a boss [i.e., fat], if slender a hazel twig, if nut-brown as black as coal, if well coloured a painted wall; if she be pleasant then is she a wanton, if sullen a clown, if honest then is she coy, if impudent a harlot.¹¹

Here, then, we have the background for Beatrice's negative depiction of her suitors. The classical commonplace was for the man to perceive even his lady's faults as endearing qualities. Ovid—who apparently knew all there is to know about love—initially registers this masculine trait and then gives the antidote for it; if a girl rejects you, reverse your attitude, construing her good points as bad. Lyly reproduces this Ovidian remedy, but without mentioning its opposite, the lover's natural tendency to turn his lady's faults into positive attributes.

It is only when Lyly's satire is set against the background of the ancient writers that his use of an old device—as well as the distinctiveness of his treatment of it—become apparent. It was in Euphues that Shakespeare found just the model he needed for Beatrice's posture toward men. (Indeed, it is even arguable that the conception of this man-hater came from Lyly.) The influence of Euphues on Hero's portrait of Beatrice is clearly established by the style: Shakespeare follows Lyly in prefacing each phrase of reversal with the conjunction if (“if fair-fac'd,” “if black,” “if tall,” etc.). Moreover, Shakespeare's “if tall” and “if silent” are identical to characteristics in Lyly, while his “if low” and “if speaking” are equivalent in meaning to Lyly's “if short” and “if full of words.”

It would be a mistake, however, to ascribe to Lyly the exclusive inspiration for Hero's description of Beatrice's negativity; the closest parallel to Shakespeare's contrastive pair “if fair-fac'd … if black …” remains Plato's “the swarthy … the white. …” It is reasonable to assume that both Shakespeare and Lyly knew the classical texts cited above, given the standard educational readings of the time and these authors' level of cultural literacy;¹² however, I believe that Shakespeare imitated the motif found in Euphues because it coincides exactly with the character he wished to portray in Beatrice.

An awareness of the age-old topos of the “inversion of values,” as applied to lovers, allows us to identify—for the first time—Beatrice's criticism of her wooers as a rhetorical commonplace. An acquaintance with the motif also tells us something about Beatrice's personality: since the time of Plato, it has been considered natural for lovers to excuse their beloveds' faults, praising their physical and mental blemishes as positive attributes; by inverting that tradition, Beatrice reveals a serious psychological flaw of her own. Seeing herself harshly reflected in her cousin's verbal mirror, Beatrice lowers her defense and allows herself to fall in love with the accomplished (though of course imperfect) courtier that is Benedick. Although this denouement is placed in doubt by Beatrice's habit of reversing the ancient custom whereby lovers turn their sweethearts' defects into virtues,¹³ the fact that the name Beatrice means “she who blesses,” while Benedick means “he who is blessed,” hints from the very beginning of the play that these two will end up happily wedded.¹⁴

Notes

1. Quotations are from the edition by A. R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1981).

2. See, for example, Ad de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, 2d ed. (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1976), 14 E and I 4, respectively.

3. See The Plays of William Shakespeare, with notes by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, ed. Isaac Reed, 15 vols. (London: Longman, 1793), Vol. 4, pp. 463-64. Since that time, however, few scholars have appreciated the significance of the parallel. Two editors of Much Ado who have reproduced the passages from Euphues are George Lyman Kittredge ([Boston: Ginn, 1941] p. 113) and Humphreys (p. 146), although neither mentions the motif of the “reversal of values” or the classical antecedents. The most recent editor of the play, F. H. Mares (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), follows the great majority of his predecessors in failing to cite the Euphues parallels.

4. Quotations are from Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit. Euphues and His England, ed. Morris William Croll and Harry Clemons (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), pp. 95-96 and 102. Other instances of the motif of the “inversion of values” are found on pp. 26 and 103 (the latter reflects the influence of Ovid's Remedia Amoris).

5. This limited motif of the indulgent suitor is an offshoot of the much larger topos of the “inversion of values,” which usually deplores the decadence into which a state or society has fallen, with corrupt or weak individuals being preferred over more worthy ones. This broader commonplace is likewise much older than the more restricted amorous motif, going back to Thucydides (III, 82, 4-8) and reappearing in such writers as Isocrates (Areopagiticus, 20; Antidosis, 283-84), Plato (The Republic, VIII, 560 D), Cicero (Partitiones Oratoriae, XXIII, 81), Sallust (LII, 11), Seneca (Epistles, XLV, 7), Quintilian (III, vii, 25; VIII, vi, 36), Plutarch (Moralia, “How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,” 74 B), and Juvenal (VIII, 30-38). The device continued throughout the Middle Ages (scattered documentations have beeen gathered for Spanish literature, for instance), and in the Renaissance was cultivated in particular by Erasmus (e.g., Enchiridion, LB V 16A: “We must merely be careful not to disguise a vice of nature with the name of virtue, calling depression gravity, harshness sternness, envy zeal, stinginess frugality, adulation friendliness, or scurrility wit” [The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1988), Vol. 66, Spiritualia, ed. John W. O'Malley, p. 45]).

   The subject is deserving of a monograph (one is suprised not to find it in Ernst Curtius's excellent European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [New York: Harper, 1963]), but the task is rendered awesome by the topos's very ubiquity throughout more than two thousand years of European historiography, philosophy, and literature. Besides the scattered cross-references recorded below (nn. 6-9), I am aware of no studies in English. More attention has been paid to the motif in the field of Spanish literature; for documentation, see my edition of Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna (Barcelona: Crítica, 1993), ll. 292-347 nn.

6. Plato, The Republic, V, 474 D-E. The translation is from the bilingual edition by Paul Shorey, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam, 1930), Vol. 1, p. 513. Shorey points out the parallels in Lucretius, Horace, Shakespeare, and Molière.

7. De Rerum Natura, IV, ed. and trans. Cyril Bailey, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), Vol. 1, ll. 1153-70, pp. 421-23. Bailey notes the parallels in Plato, Horace, Ovid, and Molière (Vol. 3, p. 1311).

8. Satires, I, iii, 38-47 and 55-66, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 34-37. Fairclough refers to the analogues in Plato, Lucretius, Ovid, and Molière.

9. II, 641-46 and 657-62, in The Art of Love, and Other Poems, ed. and trans. J. H. Mozley (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 110-11. Mozley lists the parallels in Lucretius and Horace.

10. ll. 317-30, in The Art of Love, pp. 198-201; Mozley does not see the relationship between the two passages (which was pointed out to me by my friend and colleague Marvin Colker).

11. p. 103. The Ovidian sources are registered by Croll and Clemons.

12. We have already alluded to Lyly's use of Ovid (see nn. 4 and 11, above). Shakespeare's acquaintance with the general motif of the “inversion of values” is apparent in Beatrice's subsequent tirade against the lack of manliness (“But manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into compliment, 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” [4.1.317-21]), and in a phrase from his Sonnet 66: “And simple truth [is] miscall'd simplicity” (cf. Horace, 63 and 66).

13. The motif of the “reversal of values” appears in two other celebrated European plays: Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna (ca. 1612), ll. 292-347, and in Molière's Le Misanthrope (1666), 2.5711-30. In Fuente Ovejuna the topos is largely divorced from the amorous context; Molière's usage is amatory, and his source was Lucretius (see Molière's Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton, 2 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1971], Vol. 2, p. 1337). The motif likewise occurs in Robert Davenport's play entitled A New Tricke to Cheat the Divell (1639), Act 1, scene 2, wherein Slightall describes how he euphemizes women's physical defects; his examples are taken from the passage in Ovid's Ars Amatoria, II, 641-46 and 658-61. See Old English Plays, ed. A. H. Bullen, New Series, 3 vols. (London: Wyman, 1890), Vol. 3, pp. 203-4 (cited by Humphreys, ed., p. 146).

14. These meanings are noted by Humphreys and Mares in their editions (respectively, pp. 87-88 and 52), but neither draws any conclusions from them.