SOURCE: Slights, Camille Wells. “The Unauthorized Language of Much Ado About Nothing.” In Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealth, pp. 171-89. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Slights asserts that one of the main concerns of Much Ado about Nothing is the social nature of language and its relationship to hierarchical social and political power.]

‘and two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind’

(III.v.36-7)

In the first scene of Much Ado About Nothing, when Claudio and Don Pedro make fun of Benedick's use of a conventional verbal formula, Benedick retorts: ‘Nay, mock not, mock not. The body of your discourse is sometime guarded with fragments, and the guards are but slightly basted on neither. Ere you flout old ends any further, examine your conscience’ (I.i.285-9). When Benedick accuses his friends of guarding their discourse with fragments that are ‘but slightly basted on,’ his attack is both rhetorical and moral. Assuming the value of elegant language, he claims that Don Pedro and Claudio also resort to ‘old ends’ of conventional verbal formulas and, moreover, fail to integrate them gracefully into their own language. At the same time, he implies that these ‘fragments’ that ‘guard,’ that is, decorate and/or protect, are inauthentic embellishments on the true body of their discourse. The pun registers Benedick's awareness that the rhetorical authority invoked by proverbs, classical allusions, and traditional tropes and figures is a means both of self-display and of self-protection. More significant is the ambivalence towards language implicit in his metaphor. ‘Guards’ suggests that words are extrinsic to truth, but ‘the body of your discourse’ acknowledges that words also constitute the meaning that is decorated or hidden. Benedick understands language as the material of the social self, the means by which people present themselves to others, and prides himself on his witty, elegant language. At the same time, he is deeply suspicious of the capacity of language to obscure truth.

Benedick's interest in language and his ambivalent attitude towards it are not individualizing traits but typical of the characters in Much Ado About Nothing. In the opening scene that introduces Shakespeare's Messina, almost all the characters speak with self-conscious artfulness, ranging from the Messenger's rhetorical flourishes to Beatrice and Benedick's exchanges of wit. That the Prince's messenger should speak with elegant formality and the young aristocrats with spirited wit is, of course, entirely decorous; what is striking is the frequency with which characters talk about the problematics of language. The Messenger protests, in a standard rhetorical figure, that he is unable to do justice to Claudio's merits: ‘He hath borne himself beyond the promise of his age, doing in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion. He hath indeed better bett'red expectation than you must expect of me to tell you how’ (I.i.13-17). Benedick calls Beatrice ‘a rare parrot-teacher’ (I.i.138), implying that she speaks meaningless chatter, learned by rote. Beatrice's response—‘A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours’ (I.i.139)—implies that Benedick is sub-human, incapable of rational speech.

These gibes at falling short of a human standard of discourse are based on a conception of language as the distinguishing human trait and as the basis of civilization. These, of course, are Renaissance commonplaces. According to Ben Jonson, for example, ‘Speech is the only benefit man hath to expresse his excellencie of mind above other creatures. It is the Instrument of Society.’¹ But if the characters in Much Ado assume that language is the basis of harmonious social relations, they also know that it can be the source of misunderstanding and conflict. They are acutely aware of a potentially dangerous disjunction between the literal sense of words and the meaning of a discourse. Don Pedro, for example, assumes a general skepticism about the identity of tongue and heart when he reports Leonato's invitation to hospitality with the assurance ‘I dare swear he is no hypocrite, but prays from his heart’ (I.i.150-2). And Benedick assumes a gap between truth and ordinary social discourse when he asks Claudio: ‘Do you question me … for my simple true judgment? or would you have me speak after my custom … ?’ (I.i.166-9). Conscious of the misunderstandings arising from such ambiguities of tone, Leonato anxiously apologizes for Beatrice's barbed references to Benedick: ‘You must not, sir, mistake my niece. There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her’ (I.i.61-3). Claudio, too, as he confides his love for Hero to his friends, is careful to avoid misunderstanding, replying to Benedick: ‘Thou thinkest I am in sport. I pray thee tell me truly how thou lik'st her’ (I.i.177-8) and tentatively accusing Don Pedro: ‘You speak this to fetch me in, my lord’ (I.i.223). Similarly Benedick asks Claudio: ‘But speak you this with a sad brow? or do you play the flouting Jack … ? Come, in what key shall a man take you to go in the song?’ (I.i.182-6).

The characters, then, both distrust and delight in the multivalency of the language they use to engage and to struggle with each other. In addition, as Leonato's concern that the Messenger not misunderstand Beatrice and as Claudio's suspicion that Don Pedro's speech is intended to ‘fetch [him] in’ indicate, they are also aware that language is inextricably implicated in relationships of power. For example, Leonato's concern with the nuances of social discourse is nicely illustrated in his short exchange with the Messenger. Leonato's first speeches are straightforward and stylistically plain: ‘I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Arragon comes this night to Messina’ (I.i.1-2); ‘How many gentlemen have you lost in this action?’ (I.i.5-6). In contrast, the Messenger speaks with elaborate artifice, reporting, for example, of Claudio's uncle: ‘I have already deliver'd him letters, and there appears much joy in him, even so much that joy could not show itself modest enough without a badge of bitterness’ (I.i.20-3). In response, Leonato first anxiously checks whether he has interpreted the metaphor correctly: ‘Did he break out into tears?’ (I.i.24). Then he replies in the same euphuistic style: ‘A kind overflow of kindness. There are no faces truer than those that are so wash'd. How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!’ (I.i.26-9).² Leonato's eagerness to understand and to speak the language of the court shows not only his use of language to create social bonds, but also his awareness of the ambiguity of language and of its involvement in hierarchies of power.

I have examined what Kier Elam calls metadiscourse³ in the first scene of Much Ado in order to suggest that the play is centrally concerned with the social nature of language—with the power of language and with language as an articulation of power. The witty repartee, elaborate rhetoric, compliments, accusations, and apologies function as means of social cohesion, establishing relations between people, and simultaneously as expressions of relative power. The Messenger, reporting on the casualties in the recent battle, equates language and power, explaining that Don Pedro's forces lost ‘But few of any sort, and none of name’ (I.i.7). To have a name in Messina is to be recognized as a participant in its power structure; to be powerless is to be nameless.

While all the characters are aware of language as an expression of social and political hierarchy, it is Don John who illustrates most clearly the Renaissance association of speech and sociability. In his popular commentary on Aristotle's Politics, for example, Louis LeRoy explains that men are ‘naturally Civill and publicke, that is to say, by their naturall disposition, enclining to live in societie: as it appeareth by Speech, which was in vaine bestowed upon them if they should live solitarily without companie and conversation. And if by chance there be any such monster extant, which by a particular inclination should shun and avoid Civill societie, hee ought to be reputed as most wicked, a lover and stirrer up of warres and seditions …’⁴ In the first scene Don John signals his anti-social nature by announcing his laconic style: ‘I am not of many words’ (I.i.157). When he next appears, in private conversation with his companion Conrade, he identifies himself as ‘a plain-dealing villain,’ who, on hearing of an intended marriage, immediately wonders whether it will ‘serve for any model to build mischief on’ (I.iii.32, 46-7). And he explains his rejection of social discourse as an expression of his anti-social nature: ‘I cannot hide what I am: I must be sad when I have cause, and smile at no man's jests; eat when I have stomach, and wait for no man's leisure; sleep when I am drowsy, and tend on no man's business; laugh when I am merry, and claw no man in his humor’ (I.iii.13-18). For Don John, adapting to other people is a painful infringement of freedom: ‘I am trusted with a muzzle, and enfranchis'd with a clog, therefore I have decreed not to sing in my cage’ (I.iii.32-4). While Don John's determination ‘not to sing in [his] cage’ is the converse of Benedick's desire to figure out what key Claudio is in so that he can ‘go in the song,’ they are talking about the same thing: the discourse that enables social relationships also controls individual expression.

Beatrice and Benedick, whose verbal battles are clearly power struggles, understand the power of language. Hence Beatrice describes Benedick as ‘too like my lady's eldest son, evermore tattling’ (II.i.9-10), and he calls her ‘my Lady Tongue’ (II.i.275). When Benedick addresses Beatrice as ‘my Lady Tongue’ or ‘Lady Disdain’ (I.i.118) and when Beatrice renames Benedick ‘Signior Mountanto’ (I.i.30), they are utilizing the connection between naming and power deeply embedded in Western culture. Adam's ability to name the creatures was interpreted as demonstrating his knowledge of their natures and thus as evidence of his right to dominion over them.⁵ According to most Elizabethan language theorists, Adam's descendants inherited this power collectively: custom, not individual genius, is the basis of language.⁶ Thus, the logician Ralph Lever warns, ‘no man is of power to change or to make a language when he will.’⁷ Beatrice and Benedick, then, by exercising the power to create names, not only try to claim dominion over each other but pretend to an Adam-like independence from social control.

Their name-calling and reciprocal accusations of talking too much are significant indications of their understanding of themselves and of each other in relation to society. Beatrice recognizes that, while language is an expression of power, it can also function to create the illusion of power. She suspects Benedick of words without substance. He talks a good war, but she is skeptical about his prowess as a soldier. He is like a child, ‘evermore tattling,’ not a man of action. He is the ‘Prince's fool’ (II.i.204), whose verbal wit amuses but does not command respect. He is gregarious and likable, but shallow and fickle: ‘he hath every month a new sworn brother’ (I.i.72-3). If Don John's taciturnity indicates a monstrous incivility, Beatrice fears that Benedick is too socially compliant. He is ‘the Prince's jester,’ who becomes ‘melancholy’ if his jokes are not laughed at (II.i.137, 148).

Even though Beatrice interprets Benedick's loquacity as evidence of unmanly weakness and dependence on social approval, she uses her own verbal dexterity to gain independence in a male dominated society. When Leonato warns her that her shrewish tongue will prevent her from getting a husband, she protests that spinsterhood is a blessing. She does not want a husband, she tells her uncle, ’till God make men of some other mettle than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmaster'd with a piece of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none. Adam's sons are my brethren, and truly I hold it a sin to match in my kinred’ (II.i.59-65). Beatrice's witty speech defines a genuine dilemma: her society urges her to marry but structures marriage so that she must submit to a master whose superiority she does not admit. Men are not made of a different clay, but of the same stuff as she. More specifically, she complains, a man such as Don John ‘says nothing’ (II.i.8), while Benedick talks too much. Beatrice, then, must either subordinate herself to an equal, or, as she jokingly suggests to Don Pedro, marry her social, though not her sexual, superior. And that alternative she rejects on the grounds that ‘Your Grace is too costly to wear every day’ (II.i.328-9). Beatrice, then, is aware of the coercive power of the hierarchical society, but instead of responding with Don John's sullen resentment, she exploits the gap between literal and actual meaning to mock masculine pretensions without offending the victims of her wit: ‘But I beseech your Grace pardon me,’ she apologizes gracefully, ‘I was born to speak all mirth and no matter’ (II.i.329-30).

Like Beatrice, Benedick warns his listeners against interpreting his wit literally, and in his customary role as ‘a profess'd tyrant to their sex’ (I.i.168-9) condemns women in general and Beatrice in particular. While Beatrice interprets Benedick's talkativeness as an unmanly substitution of words for deeds, Benedick condemns hers for its intimidating power: ‘She speaks poniards, and every word stabs … I would not marry her, though she were endow'd with all that Adam had left him before he transgress'd. She would have made Hercules have turn'd spit, yea, and have cleft his club to make the fire too’ (II.i.247-54). By characterizing Beatrice's discourse as emasculating aggression, Benedick accuses her of inverting the hierarchy of the sexes. His antipathy is not limited to ‘my Lady Tongue’ but includes all women, basically because a woman's word cannot be trusted. ‘Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any,’ he declares, ‘I will do myself the right to trust none’ (I.i.242-4). Benedick, of course, is voicing traditional attitudes. If the talkative woman is a rebel against the orthodox sexual hierarchy, she is also a recognizable cultural stereotype—the shrew. Similarly, the association of women with duplicity is inscribed clearly in Western culture at least since the story of Eve's tempting Adam to eat the apple. In this misogynistic tradition, the charge of female duplicity usually is associated with sexual promiscuity.⁸ Certainly Benedick's mistrust of women is essentially skepticism about their sexual fidelity. He invariably associates marriage with cuckoldry. ‘Cuckoo’ is a word that strikes terror into the heart of the bachelor Benedick, not so much because he fears personal betrayal, as because he imagines vividly the public shame of being labeled a cuckold. If he should ever submit to marriage, he tells his friends, they are entitled to: ‘pluck off the bull's horns, and set them in my forehead, and let me be vildly painted, and in such great letters as they write, “Here is good horse to hire,” let them signify under my sign, “Here you may see Benedick the married man”’ (I.i.263-8).

Beatrice and Benedick, then, epitomize the ambivalence towards language endemic to their society. Like the other inhabitants of Messina, they use language to create engaging social presences with which to establish relations with other people and also to protect and distance themselves from others. They delight in wordplay and admire people, as Benedick says of the ideal woman, ‘of good discourse’ (II.iii.33-4); at the same time they are skeptical of the veridical force of language and fear its powers of deception and coercion. And they associate these dangers with gender and with sexual relationships. Benedick's cuckoldry jokes echo Leonato's. In the first scene, when Don Pedro politely remarks, ‘I think this is your daughter,’ Leonato responds, ‘Her mother hath many times told me so’ (I.i.104-5). And Beatrice's accusation ‘He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat’ (I.i.75-6) applies to Benedick the generalized sentiments of Balthasar's song: ‘Men were deceivers ever … To one thing constant never’ (II.iii.63-5).

By the fashion in which they guard their own and criticize the other's discourse, Benedick and Beatrice make evident the contradictions inherent in their culture's definition of marriage. It is the expected norm of social behavior, encouraged by figures of authority like Leonato and Don Pedro. But it requires women to subordinate themselves to fallen Adam's sons, prone to deception and inconstancy, and requires men to entrust their honor to untrustworthy women. These contradictions are brought to a crisis by Don John's plot to disrupt the marriage of Claudio and Hero by accusing Hero of infidelity.

The deception responsible for Hero's disgrace is a verbal construct. As Borachio confesses, it was done ‘partly by [Don John's] oaths … but chiefly by my villainy, which did confirm any slander that Don John had made’ (III.iii.156-9). The slander consists of and is nourished by the attitudes encoded in the cultural discourse. The association of female speech with sexual promiscuity underlies the charge against Hero—that she did ‘Talk with a ruffian at her chamber-window’ (IV.i.91). And the stereotype of female duplicity makes the charge credible and prevents her from defending herself. Everything she says is used against her literally. Her denial—‘I talk'd with no man at that hour, my lord’—convicts her: ‘Why then you are no maiden’ (IV.i.86-7). By denying that Hero's speech has any relation to truth, the male authorities—her betrothed husband, her father, and her ruler—try to destroy her. Claudio tells her that the purpose of his accusations is ‘To make you answer truly to your name’ and insists that her name itself is proof of her guilt: ‘Hero itself can blot out Hero's virtue’ (IV.i.79, 82). Dehumanized by being deprived of language, Hero to her father's eyes becomes not a speaking subject but the objectified printed text of the story Claudio has told: ‘the story that is printed in her blood’ (IV.i.122). And so Leonato mourns that:

                                                                                she is fall'n
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again.

(IV.i.139-41)

Hero's helplessness under this bewildering attack is total because not only is she effectively silenced but no one speaks to defend her. Beatrice never doubts her cousin's innocence, but she remains silent. Her distrust of glibness has become disdain for language as a tool of feminine weakness. She is contemptuous of men who substitute words for physical force: ‘men are only turn'd into tongue … He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie, and swears it’ (IV.i.320-2). Her strongest wish is to be a man who could avenge her wronged cousin's honor, and her only strategy for fighting the injustice is to persuade Benedick to kill Claudio. Beatrice, who earlier claimed to be the equal of any man, shows that she is controlled by the patriarchal values of her society when she despairs: ‘I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving’ (IV.i.322-3).

If Beatrice has been co-opted by the collective prejudices of her culture, Hero's other potential defenders, her father and her lover, have also been colonized quite literally. Although most critics who comment at all on the setting of Much Ado perfunctorily characterize it as a sophisticated, courtly world, the most significant fact about Messina is that it is an Italian city-state ruled by Spain.⁹ Leonato, the Governor of Messina, is subject to the authority of Don Pedro, Prince of Arragon. In Shakespeare's source for the Hero and Claudio story, Bandello's Novella 22, the relations between the natives of Messina and their Spanish rulers provide a framework for the plot. Bandello begins by describing the political context of his story:

During the year of Grace mcclxxxiii the Sicilians, no longer able to endure French domination, rose one day of the hour of Vespers and with unheard of savagery murdered all the French in Sicily—for so it was treacherously concerted throughout the island. Nor did they massacre only the men and women of the French nation, but on that day slew all Sicilian women who could be suspected of being pregnant by Frenchmen … whence arose the melancholy fame of the ‘Sicilian Vespers.’ King Piero of Arragon hearing of this came quickly thither with his army, and made himself lord of the Island.¹⁰

In the happy ending, after the calumniated heroine has been exonerated, Bandello emphasizes the integration of the Sicilian and the Spanish nobility. King Piero provides the heroine's dowry as if she were his own daughter and gives her father an honorable office in Messina. In the final paragraph, Bandello links the story to contemporary political circumstances by praising the political and military deeds of descendants of Sir Timbreo of Cardona, who ‘was the first who in Sicily founded the noble race of the lords of the House of Cardona, of which there live today both in Sicily and in the Kingdom of Naples many men of no little esteem. In Spain also flourishes the noble breed of Cardona, producing men who do no shame to their ancestors both in arms and in the senate’ (2:134). In Bandello's narrative, Messina welcomes King Piero's victory, but there are tensions between the citizens of Messina and their Spanish rulers.¹¹ Sir Timbreo (the Claudio figure) first tries to seduce Fenecia (the Hero figure), the daughter of a poor Messinese nobleman. Only when Fenecia virtuously rejects him does Timbreo decide to marry her, ‘although he thought that he was demeaning himself by so doing’ (2:113). When Timbreo is duped into believing that Fenecia is unchaste, her father assumes that his accusations are an excuse not to marry a woman who is his inferior in wealth and rank.

In Shakespeare's version, the historical details are vague (we do not know the year or the enemy in the recent battle), but the setting and political structure are insistently clear. The repetition of the name ‘Messina’ four times in the first few minutes of dialogue (I.i.2, 18, 39, 114) alerts us that the action takes place in a remote provincial city ruled by Spanish overlords.¹² The epithets ‘Don,’ for the Prince of Arragon and his brother, and ‘Signior,’ applied consistently to the Italians, are frequent reminders of the political situation. As in Bandello, the relations between the Spanish and the Messinese are cordial. Indeed, in Much Ado, although the Sicilian setting is a reminder of the infamous Sicilian Vespers and the potential for violence in the colonial enterprise, the emphasis is on the Italians' eager acquiescence to Spanish domination. While Sir Timbreo is Spanish, Claudio and Benedick are Italian followers of the Spanish Prince. Leonato, a native of Messina, is delighted when he hears the rumor that the foreign ruler intends to court his daughter and apparently just as pleased to accept the son-in-law that Don Pedro actually proposes to him. Equally as significant as the Italians' deference to Don Pedro is the ruling Spaniards' control of Messinese society. In Bandello, a Messinese nobleman approaches Leonato on Sir Timbreo's behalf, and King Piero figures only as the authority who rewards the virtuous at the end of the story. The plot to discredit Fenecia originates in sexual jealousy: a Messinese nobleman in love with Fenecia deceives Sir Timbreo in hopes of winning her after Timbreo renounces her. In Much Ado, of course, Don Pedro himself is the matchmaker, and Don John is responsible for the slander.¹³ Hero is not the primary object of the plot but an expendable casualty in the murky hostility between the two Spanish princes.

The control of society by a colonial authority is dramatized in the first scene by Don Pedro's appropriation of Claudio's discourse. As soon as they are alone, Claudio begins to tell Don Pedro of his love for Hero. Don Pedro cuts him short, mocking his bookish wordiness:

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

(I.i.306-11)

Overriding Claudio's protest that his love requires ‘a longer treatise’ (I.i.315), Don Pedro plans to disguise himself as Claudio and to woo Hero in his stead, promising to

                    take her hearing prisoner with the force
And strong encounter of my amorous tale.

(I.i.324-5)

Don Pedro insists on being the author of Claudio's story and has no doubts about the effectiveness of the tale he will tell.

Don Pedro's control of social discourse results from the deference paid to his political power and serves as a means of exercising and maintaining that power. Controlling language is an effective way of controlling the people who use it. After arranging Claudio's marriage with his consent, Don Pedro decides to make a match between Beatrice and Benedick without their knowledge. This time, instead of speaking for someone else, he directs the speech of others, teaching Hero, Leonato, and Claudio what to say. Although Don Pedro uses his power altruistically, the misunderstanding when Benedick and Claudio think that Don Pedro has courted Hero for himself warns of the dangers inherent in being appropriated into someone else's discourse.

These dangers are realized in Don John's plot. As Borachio outlines the plan, its object is to convince Don Pedro that ‘he hath wrong'd his honor’ (II.ii.23) by arranging Claudio's marriage to Hero. When Claudio was told that Don Pedro had betrayed him, he suffered passively and privately, and the mistake was easily corrected. When he is told that Hero is unchaste, he reacts to the dishonor to his Prince as well as to himself and immediately plans Hero's public disgrace. Instead of coming to nothing as had the previous deceptions and misunderstandings, the slander of Hero has serious consequences, partly, as I have already argued, because of the presuppositions about Hero as a woman, and partly because of political relationships. Claudio feels his first loyalty to Don Pedro, not to Hero and not to Leonato. In this situation, Don Pedro can assert his power and vindicate his honor without needing to speak or even to direct Claudio how to speak; he can rely on Claudio, who identifies his own interests with those of his Prince, to speak for him.

Even Leonato, who in Bandello's story defends his daughter, in Much Ado makes common cause with Hero's accusers. At the beginning of the wedding scene, he is a proud father whose only child is marrying a nobleman in an alliance arranged and blessed by the Prince himself. His sense of patriarchal authority is expressed in his assumption of control over language. He opens the scene peremptorily: ‘Come, Friar Francis, be brief—only to the plain form of marriage …’ (IV.i.1-2). When Claudio answers ‘No’ to the friar's first question—‘You come hither, my lord, to marry this lady’—Leonato presumes to interpret Claudio by criticizing the friar's diction: ‘To be married to her. Friar, you come to marry her’ (I.i.4-8). And when the friar asks Claudio whether he knows of any impediment to the marriage, Leonato interrupts: ‘I dare make his answer, none’ (IV.i.18). But when Claudio savagely denounces Hero, Leonato's expansive confidence collapses, and he appeals to Don Pedro: ‘Sweet Prince, why speak not you?’ (IV.i.63). And when Don Pedro pronounces Hero guilty, Leonato accepts his word. Denying that ‘the two princes’ (IV.i.152) and Claudio would lie, he laments the outrage to his honor and wishes for his daughter's death.

Hero's disgrace, then, exposes problems already present in Messinese society. The conventional rhetoric of Claudio's denunciation associates Hero's supposed wantonness with the stereotype of female duplicity and sensuality:

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 pamp'red animals
That rage in savage sensuality.

(IV.i.57-61)

And the cruelty of Don Pedro and Claudio justifies Beatrice's disdain and fear of established authority. ‘Princes and counties!’ she exclaims with sarcastic contempt. ‘Surely a princely testimony, a goodly count, Count Comfect, a sweet gallant surely!’ (IV.i.315-17). At the same time, the characters' distrust of language intensifies. Claudio's outrage is directed as much at Hero's deceitfulness as at her sexual misconduct, and Beatrice is overwhelmed by the power of the ‘public accusation’ and ‘uncover'd slander’ (IV.i.305) that have dishonored her cousin.

If events in the church seem to confirm the characters' worst fears, to the audience aware of their source in lies and deception the scene is an even more devastating critique of social discourse. Language, which according to Renaissance theory should bind people together in a civilized community, is portrayed as an unreliable guide to truth and a powerful instrument of coercion. The citizens of Messina, by speaking with the collective voice of their patriarchal culture and by articulating the desires of their foreign ruler, have lost the authority to order their own lives. Just how deeply encoded in language are the relationships of dominance and submission becomes clear when Leonato, finally persuaded of Hero's innocence, accosts Claudio and Don Pedro. Although Leonato shows contempt for Claudio by calling him ‘boy’ and using the familiar ‘thou’ form of the pronoun (V.i.79), he calls Don Pedro ‘my lord’ and continues to observe the pronominal convention by addressing him respectfully as ‘you’ (V.i.48). During this encounter, Don Pedro condescends to Leonato as an ‘old man’ (V.i.49-50, 73) and brushes him aside: ‘I will not hear you’ (V.i.107). As soon as Leonato and his brother withdraw, Don Pedro joins Claudio in laughing at their impotent rage.

This dramatic representation of sovereign political authority as a callow young man mocking the ineffectual anguish of a subject obviously provokes a critical attitude toward the uses of power. Just as obviously, as I have tried to trace Shakespeare's portrayal of the role of language in the dynamics of power, my own rhetoric has become misleading. Talk about the dangers of colonialist verbal appropriation comes out of twentieth-century, not sixteenth-century, discourse.¹⁴ Shakespeare's contemporaries recognized the threat of foreign domination, and Shakespeare was aware, as was Francis Bacon when he analyzed the idols of the market place, that language is implicated in dangerous confusions of thought. But Shakespeare's Messina is not an Orwellian image of thought-control, and Much Ado About Nothing is not propaganda for a Sicilian liberation movement. Like the other comedies, Much Ado celebrates human community and the cohesive power of language even as it exposes dangers inherent in both. The pathos of Hero's disgrace and Leonato's grief is contained by knowledge that Dogberry and his friends are on the way to deliver Borachio's sworn statement that will reveal the truth.

Language, which creates the crisis, also resolves it. The collective nature of social discourse, which makes it a powerful coercive force to frighten Benedick with the name of cuckold and to drive the disgraced Hero from society, also limits authoritative control. In Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, language is a heteroglossia, an unsystematic collection of the voices of diverse social groups that guarantees the dispersion of creative authorship and authority throughout society.¹⁵ In addition, the inherent imprecision and fluidity of language create spaces where unknown and unofficial truths can emerge. The diversity of social discourse and the polysemic fluidity of language, its capacity for irony and resonant ambiguity as well as misunderstanding and deception, prevent total control of the community by any univocal authority.

I have already noted one form of this verbal creativity in Beatrice's parodies of hierarchical power: when, for example, she tells Don Pedro that he is ‘too costly to wear every day’ (II.i.328-9), or when she instructs Hero how to deal with patriarchal authority in selecting a husband: ‘it is my cousin's duty to make cur'sy and say, “Father, as it please you.” But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another cur'sy and say, “Father, as it please me”’ (II.i.52-6). The plot to trick Beatrice and Benedick into love enacts more fully the benign results of the multivalency of social discourse. Not only are the staged conversations fictions created to deceive their unwitting audiences, they are cooperative efforts that depend for their success on their listeners' susceptibility to other voices. Beatrice and Benedick are able to fall in love because they trust their friends' praise of the other's merits, because they believe their friends' report that they are loved by the other, and because they accept their friends' accusations that their own speech misrepresents the truth.¹⁶ The possibility of verbal ambiguity, moreover, allows their love to flourish—a potential exploited most delightfully perhaps in Benedick's imaginative deconstruction of Beatrice's invitation to dinner: ‘Ha! “Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner”—there's a double meaning in that. “I took no more pains for those thanks than you took pains to thank me”—that's as much as to say “Any pains that I take for you is as easy as thanks”’ (II.iii.257-62).

Just as Benedick's discovery of double meanings in Beatrice's words allows him to requite the love he finds there, misunderstandings and ambiguities contribute to Hero's vindication. Midway through the scene of the interrupted wedding, Friar Francis announces his belief in Hero's innocence. ‘By noting of the lady,’ he explains, he has ‘mark'd’ (IV.i.158), as evidence of her innocence, the blushes that Claudio had interpreted as a sign of ‘guiltiness, not modesty’ (IV.i.42). The friar presents his ‘noting’ and ‘marking’ as at once a reading of ambiguous signs and as a writing, with himself as an author of more credible authority than Claudio:

Trust not my reading, nor my observations,
Which with experimental seal doth warrant
The tenure of my book; trust not my age,
My reverence, calling, nor divinity,
If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here
Under some biting error.

(IV.i.165-70; italics added)

He then counsels Leonato to hide Hero away and ‘publish it that she is dead indeed’ (IV.i.204).

The friar's book, of course, is only partly accurate. When the news of Hero's death is published, Claudio does not feel remorse or regret for his lost love as predicted. But the fiction is also intended for the community as a whole, and in that object the plan succeeds. When the watchmen tell the sexton about the plot to slander Hero, he believes them because their account fits the facts as he knows them: ‘Hero was in this manner accus'd, in this very manner refus'd, and upon the grief of this suddenly died’ (IV.ii.61-3). The line from Borachio's confession of his part in the plot to the full revelation of the truth is hilariously circuitous. In his drunken ramblings, Borachio deplores men's subservience to social conventions and fads, exclaiming on ‘what a deformed thief this fashion is’ (III.iii.124). The watch who overhear him are more concerned to arrest the notorious thief named Deformed than to reveal Don John's treachery. Master Constable Dogberry, hearing the accusation against Don John, is indignant: ‘Why, this is flat perjury, to call a prince's brother villain’ (IV.ii.41-2). But eventually, through the attempt to apprehend the thief Deformed and to record the full extent of the ‘perjury’ against Don John, Borachio's story is told. By repudiating Hero publicly, Claudio and Don Pedro involve the whole community that includes the friar, Dogberry and the watch, Borachio, and the sexton. Social discourse, then, in addition to courtly formality and sophisticated wit, includes the friar's fiction, Borachio's drunken ramblings, Dogberry's malapropisms and homely aphorisms, and the sexton's conscientious recording of the testimony of the watch. Out of this strange mixture, truth emerges. Significantly, the society that in the beginning of the play counted only those ‘of name’ is saved by its most despised members, most effectively by the efforts of a nameless sexton.

The power of Don Pedro's authoritative discourse, then, is limited, as Dogberry understands in his own muddled way. Instructing the watchmen in their duties, he tells them: ‘This is your charge: … you are to bid any man stand, in the Prince's name’ (III.iii.24-6), but, he continues, if the culprit will not stand: ‘Why then take no note of him, but let him go … and thank God you are rid of a knave’ (III.iii.28-30). They should, for example, ‘call at all the alehouses, and bid those that are drunk get them to bed’ (III.iii.42-3), but if the drunks decline to obey, Dogberry's advice is to ‘let them alone till they are sober’ (III.iii.45-6). What Dogberry recognizes is the futility of attempting to impose control over those who do not accept your authority. Or, as he explains, as representatives of ‘the Prince's own person’ (III.iii.75), the watch are empowered to detain any man at all, even the Prince himself, but in practice they can stop the Prince only if ‘the Prince be willing, for indeed the watch ought to offend no man, and it is an offense to stay a man against his will’ (80-2). Although originally it seemed that Don Pedro and the collective values of society constituted authority in Messina and that Don Pedro would compose the ‘amorous tale’ of Claudio and Hero, it has emerged that Don John, rejecting that authority, has told another story. As Ursula tells Beatrice, ‘Don John is the author of all’ (V.ii.98-9). With the attribution of authorship comes responsibility. Don John is held accountable, and Hero is vindicated.

Hero's vindication is also a vindication of language. While her name is blackened, words seem useless. Leonato rejects Antonio's consolatory advice as hollow:

                                                                                                                        brother, men
Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief
Which they themselves not feel, but tasting it,
Their counsel turns to passion, which before
Would …
Charm ache with air, and agony with words.

(V.i.20-6)

If speech is only air to Leonato in his grief, the written word is equally powerless:

For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods.

(V.i.35-7)

Yet before the scene is over, Borachio's confession testifies to the power of words: ‘My villainy they have upon record, which I had rather seal with my death than repeat over to my shame’ (239-41). And Don Pedro and Claudio understand that power: ‘D. Pedro. Runs not this speech like iron through your blood? Claud. I have drunk poison whiles he utter'd it’ (V.i.244-6).

Appropriately, the reparation that Don Pedro and Claudio must make for the damage their words have done is verbal. ‘I cannot bid you bid my daughter live—/ That were impossible,’ Leonato says,

                                                                      but I pray you both,
Possess the people in Messina here
How innocent she died, and if your love
Can labor aught in sad invention,
Hang her an epitaph upon her tomb,
And sing it to her bones, sing it to-night.

(V.i.279-85)

Human language is not omnipotent—it cannot resurrect the dead—but it is, in Jonson's phrase, ‘the instrument of Society’ that can restore Hero's good name in the community, her life in society.¹⁷ To object, as critics have done, that Claudio's observances at Hero's tomb seem too formal and conventional to express love and remorse convincingly is, I think, to miss the point. Events have demonstrated the radical uncertainty of individual perceptions, which are inextricably involved in cultural codes and conventions and susceptible to ignorance and error. This treacherous instability can be controlled at least partially by the openness and permanence of communal and written forms of discourse.¹⁸ By writing an epitaph and participating in a communal ritual, Claudio gives formal shape to his obligations to Hero, demonstrating not intense romantic feeling but commitment and responsibility. The necessary complement to Claudio's epitaph is the song that Balthasar, as representative of the social group, sings, asking forgiveness for Hero's detractors.

Much Ado About Nothing achieves its happy ending not by resolving conflicts and coming to rest on a harmonious major chord but by dramatizing a dynamic tension between impulses towards freedom and towards responsibility and order. While social discourse constitutes an unavoidable, arbitrary authority, its diversity and multivalency also limit its power to enforce conformity. If the slipperiness of language exerts a centrifugal force that threatens social cohesion, the written word and the collective nature of language provide a measure of stability. When Benedick and Beatrice would disclaim their love, they are protected from their own skittishness through the efforts of their friends and the stabilizing power of the written word. Their friends produce sonnets each has written as evidence of their mutual love. Beatrice and Benedick fall in love in the terms available in their culture, but they continue to resist the rigidifying, coercive force of linguistic formulas and cultural norms. Benedick, the dedicated bachelor, decides to accept the yoke of marriage, but he speaks of his decision as defying rather than conforming to social expectations and conceives of marriage in terms of change rather than permanence: ‘since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it, and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion’ (V.iv.105-9). He acknowledges authorship of his ‘halting sonnet’ (V.iv.87) as evidence of his love for Beatrice, but he knows that the conventional love sonnet is not his style. As he tells Beatrice, they are ‘too wise to woo peaceably’ (V.ii.72), and the linguistic forms appropriate to them are the destabilizing ones of parody, ambiguity, irony, and paradox. They first declare their love in language that is a triumph of ambiguity: ‘Bene. I do love nothing in the world so well as you—is not that strange? Beat. As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I lov'd nothing so well as you, but believe me not; and yet I lie not: I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing’ (IV.i.267-72). In the last scene, they reaffirm their love in language that denies it: ‘Bene. Come, I will have thee, but by this light, I take thee for pity. Beat. 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.92-7). And Benedick's last word on marriage is a mock encomium of cuckoldry: ‘Prince, … get thee a wife. There is no staff more reverent than one tipp'd with horn’ (V.iv.122-4). Benedick's paradoxical valuing of the cuckold's horn over the staff of office does not constitute a rejection of political authority or of male dominance, but his playful, ironic language acknowledges the contingency of both authorities.

Claudio and Hero do not speak with the ironic wit of Beatrice and Benedick, but their marriage too embodies a tension between acceptance and defiance of social hierarchy. Claudio's acceptance of an unknown and unseen bride from Leonato revises the form of the earlier betrothal by asserting Leonato's authority at the expense of Don Pedro's. This modification of the way the political hierarchy functions is not, of course, a repudiation of Spanish hegemony any more than Benedick's encomium of cuckoldry is a repudiation of male dominance. But both gestures imply limits to hierarchical power.

Much Ado About Nothing is not an attack on the principle of hierarchy, but it does reveal hierarchical structures as often arbitrary, contradictory, dangerous, and irrelevant. In one of the ‘old ends’ with which he guards his discourse, Dogberry suggests that hierarchy is unavoidable: ‘and two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind’ (III.v.36-7). But Dogberry has also suggested the theory that political authority governs by the consent of the governed: ‘it is an offense to stay a man against his will’ (III.iii.81-2). The ordering, centralizing language of official hierarchy is only one of the competing voices heard in Messina. No one defies Don Pedro's authority at the end of the play, but no one listens to him much either. Whereas Bandello's story of the slandered bride moves from an account of the violent overthrow of a political authority to a description of the integration of the rulers with the ruled, Shakespeare's moves from a dramatization of excessive deference to political authority to a kind of marginalization of that authority. At the end of the play Don Pedro is addressed respectfully as Prince, but his voice is only one among many and a relatively minor one at that. After discovering that he has been repeating slanders authored by Don John, Don Pedro is noticeably chastened and silent, but his experience is only an especially humiliating version of the common one. Even Don John is not in fact ‘the author of all’ as alleged: Borachio invents the story he tells. In one sense, all the characters in Much Ado are ‘parrot-teachers.’ Their speech is made up of old ends of common linguistic usages, rhetorical conventions, and social customs that compose an authorless discourse which they have only the illusion of creating and controlling. But there is another sense in which they are all authors, who, out of the ambiguous, polysemic fluidity of social discourse, create the texts of themselves and, through their dialogues with each other, authorize their society.

Notes

1. Timber, or Discoveries in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 8:620-1.

2. Brian Vickers points out that Leonato creates his effect by using an image, a polyptoton, and an antimetabole; The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (London: Methuen, 1968), 174.

3. ‘Language used to comment directly on language itself is generally know[n] as metalanguage … And by analogy, a use of language which in turn frames, or “goes beyond”, language in use can be termed metadiscourse.’ Kier Elam, Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19.

4. Louis LeRoy, Aristotles Politiques or Discourses of Government (London, 1598), 12.

5. See Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis 1527-1633 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 81. Williams quotes Francis Bacon's prediction that when man ‘shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them.’ Of the Interpretation of Nature in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, Douglas Heath (London, 1857), 3:222. Alastair Fowler's notes to the naming of the creatures in Paradise Lost, VIII, 343-56, cite Andrew Willet's opinion that one of the purposes for the naming of the creatures in Genesis 2 is ‘that mans authoritie and dominion over the creatures might appeare: for howsoever man named every living creature, so was the name thereof.’ Andrew Willet, Hexapla … Sixfold Commentary upon Genesis (London, 1608), 36. The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, 1968).

6. See Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 32.

7. Ralph Lever, Arte of Reason (London, 1573), vi, as cited in Donawerth, 32.

8. A sizable body of recent scholarship describes sixteenth-century ideas about women. On the association of deceit and sexuality, see, for example, Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983), Chapter 4, and Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984).

9. ‘Messina. A city in N.E. Sicily … Pedro of Arragon took it from the French, and it remained a possession of the Spanish royal house from 1282 to 1713.’ Edward H. Sudgen, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), 343. A sixteenth-century account is included in The Historie of Philip de Commines …, trans. Thomas Danett (London, 1596), 24-5.

10. La Prima Parte De Le Novella Del Bandello (Lucca, 1554), trans. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 2:112.

11. The French translation of Bandello's story in Francois de Belleforest's Le Troisiesme Tome des Histories Tragiques Extraictes des oeuvres Italiennes de Bandel', Histoire XVIII (1569) emphasizes this tension, describing the prince as ‘ce roy inhumaine Pierre d'Aragon.’ See A. R. Humphreys' ‘Introduction’ to the Arden Much Ado, 14.

12. The infamous Sicilian Vespers seems to be the most common association with Sicily for sixteenth-century Englishmen. Although Englishmen visited Venice, Milan, Padua, Florence, Rome, and Naples as centers of culture, few ventured to Sicily. See E. S. Bates, Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education (New York: Burt Franklin, 1911), 113; John Walter Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604-1667: Their Influence in English Society and Politics (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 124.

    Although such notable Elizabethan tourists as Thomas Coryat and Fynes Moryson did not go to Sicily, George Sandys stopped there on his return from the Levant in 1611. His account emphasizes the violent history of foreign control and contemporary colonial status: ‘… at length Clement the fourth did give it from Conradine, unto Charles of Aniou the French Kings brother; betraying him [Conrad] to the slaughter, who was overcome neare Naples in a mortall battell, and his head stricken off by Clements appointment. So fell the Germans, and so rise the French men to the Kingdome of Naples and both the Sicilias. But here some seventeene yeares after they were bid to a bitter banquet: al slaine at the tole of a bell throughout the whole Iland, which is called to this day the Sicilian Even-song. A just reward (if justice will countenance so bloudy a designe) for their intollerable insolencies … Don Pedro King of Aragon, had married Constantia the onely daughter of Manfroy. In whose right (although Manfroy was a bastard, a parricide, and usuper) he entred Sicilia in this tumult whereunto he was privy, and was crowned King with the general consent of the Sicilians: it continuing in the house of Aragon, untill united to Castile. So it remaineth subject unto Spaine … They [the Sicilians] have their commodities fetch from them by forrainers, and withall the profit … The chiefe of the ancient Sicilain Nobility attend in the Court of Spaine: a course of life, rather politickly commanded, then elected’ (237-8).

    In Messina, Sandys was most struck by the Spanish influence and by the violence of the society: ‘The better sort are Spanish in attire … The Gentlemen put their monies into the common table, “for which the Citie stands bound” and receive it againe upon their bils, according to their uses. For they dare not venture to keepe it in their houses, so ordinarily broken open by theeves (as are the shops and ware-houses) for all their crosse-bard windowes, iron doores, locks, bolts, and barres on the inside: wherein, and in their private revenges, no night doth passe without murder … The Duke of Osuna their new Vice-roy, was here daily expected; for whom a sumptuous landing place was made …’ (245-6). George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey begun An: Dom: 1610 (London, 1615).

13. In all other versions of the story, a rival lover is responsible for the slander. See Charles T. Prouty, The Sources of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 34.

14. Of course, anxiety about foreign domination, specifically fear of Spanish power, was intense in England. The possible application of Sicilian history to English politics is illustrated by John Hoskyns' speech in Parliament in 1614 which compared England dominated by James I's Scottish favorities to Sicily under the French at the time of the Sicilian Vespers. Hoskyns was committed to the Tower the following day. Louise Brown Osborn, The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566-1638 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 38. I am indebted for this reference to Annabel Patterson, ‘All Donne,’ in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Harvey and Katharine Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 57.

15. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 263.

16. Carl Dennis points out that the deception successfully appeals to Benedick and Beatrice's social natures: ‘They want to fulfill the values of their community’ (228). See ‘Wit and Wisdom in Much Ado About Nothing,’ Studies in English Literature, 13 (1973), 223-37.

17. Joyce Hengerer Sexton observes that the emphasis on publicizing the truth about Hero in the denouement represents a significant divergence from the sources and analogues; see ‘The Theme of Slander in Much Ado About Nothing,’ Philological Quarterly, 54 (1975), 423, 428.

18. Anthony Dawson points out that Dogberry's desire to be ‘writ down an ass’ (IV.ii.87) alludes to writing as a mark of cultural validity. ‘Much Ado About Signifying,’ Studies in English Literature, 22 (1982), 218-19. On sixteenth-century respect for the stability of the written word in contrast with ephemeral speech, see Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1974), 38.