[In the following essay, Osborne analyzes Much Ado about Nothing as an integration of the Italian novella and the English comedy. Osborne asserts that through his linking of these two genres, Shakespeare explored the contradictions within comic conventions and the problems inherent in combining non-comic and non-dramatic materials with comedy.]

In Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare creates two plots from a single principal source—the slandered maiden tale which Ariosto and Bandello both treat.¹ One plot, the story of Hero, up to the end of the comedy, imitates the action of the original Italian novellas and their interesting villain, while the other, the story of the courtship of Beatrice and Benedick, which is Shakespeare's creation, refashions the main plot and its dramatist manipulator according to comic principles.

The relationship between these two plots is most frequently discussed—or dismissed—in light of the two pairs of lovers. Charles Prouty claims that the couples each represent different “realistic” views of love. In the courtship of Hero and Claudio, he sees a Renaissance commonplace, the marriage of convenience, and in Beatrice and Benedick, the “realistic” rejection of outworn romantic ideals. John Traugott, in a more recent version of the same kind of argument, suggests that Shakespeare manipulates comedy and romance to expose the potential violence at the heart of the latter and to create through Beatrice “a rational Rinaldo of Benedick, a worldly Ginevra of herself.”² Both Prouty and Traugott begin by observing how Shakespeare alters his sources, specifically with the addition of Beatrice and Benedick. Their analyses rely on the premise that what interested Shakespeare most about these novellas was the courtier's code—that is, the idea of a romance courtship like that of Ariodant and Genevra in Book 5 of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.³

Up until now, examining Shakespeare's sources for Much Ado about Nothing has led almost inevitably to arguments about how Shakespeare revises or imitates their representations of romantic love.⁴ Problems of mixed genres or generic contamination, from this perspective, center around the opposition between the domestic married love of comedy and the chivalric devotion and peregrinations of love in romance. As a corrective to this limited view, I suggest that Shakespeare's principal interest in these works lies in their representation of the dangerous powers of dramatic play—staging scenes, acting roles, and creating spectacle.⁵ In my view, what Shakespeare's use of these tales reveals most strikingly is his fascination with figures who manipulate their worlds by dramatic means. Shakespeare sharpens the focus on these figures, whom I will call player-dramatists, in a variety of ways. By deliberately dulling the passionate love and jealousy experienced by the lovers in his sources, he draws attention away from Hero and Claudio and directs it towards the disinterested malevolence of Don John. Of the three characters drawn directly from the novellas—the lover, the slandered maiden, and the obsessive rival, only one, Don John, retains something of the excessive emotion of the originals.

Yet Don John is obsessed with his brother, not Hero. In fashioning his villain, Shakespeare totally abandons the jealous rivalry which motivates Ariosto's Polynesso and Bandello's Girondo to slander the chaste maidens. Whereas the other versions, one and all, focus on a rejected lover's contrivance, Don John has no personal interest in Hero at all. In fact, it is Don Pedro, not Don John, who is presented, however briefly, as Claudio's rival for Hero's affections. This mistaken conflict, which dominates the first act and a half, is one of the first hints of how crucially connected the two brothers are in Shakespeare's use of the novellas. The other sign is, of course, Don John's predominant desire to thwart his brother in any way: “I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace.”⁶ With the sole intention of opposing his brother's favorite, Don John effectively recasts the actors in Claudio's courtship, not once but twice. Yet Don John is not the first to exploit a staged scene in Messina; Don Pedro initiates the dramatic play in Much Ado about Nothing with his unexpected offer to act the role of suitor in order to further the match between Hero and Claudio.

Shakespeare singles out the slanderous player-dramatist of his source by leaving that figure involved in the extravagant emotion so common in the novellas and by creating a character who is, for all practical purposes, his mirror image. If Don John is preoccupied with crossing his brother in any way, Don Pedro is equally obsessed with making marriages, first Hero's and Claudio's and then Beatrice's and Benedick's. In fact, Don Pedro's tactics and goals in his role as comic matchmaker inspire Don John's match-breaking. For both, dramatic play becomes the expression of their needs, as each stages and restages contrived scenes to force his view on Messina.⁷

In this way, Shakespeare establishes Don Pedro as the comic impulse in Messina, creating a new version of the villain of the novellas who uses his dramatic play exclusively to achieve the comic goal of marriage. Don John's violent urge to sabotage his brother shows the lingering resistance of the Italian novellas to such comic treatment and the vitality given comedy by such opposition. Don John insists upon the villainy of dramatic play and revels in his marriage breaking as he persistently recalls Shakespeare's imitation of his sources.

By linking these two player-dramatists so strongly, Shakespeare examines the difficulties of absorbing non-comic, non-dramatic materials into comedy. Examining what role narrative from the novellas can play in comedy ultimately reveals the contradictory functions of the comic dramatist as he must not only seek to further social union but also complicate and delay that union to tell a tale. Thus Much Ado, in transforming non-comic materials into comedy, uncovers the contradictions in the comic conventions which form the basis for that revision.

My reading of Much Ado about Nothing insists upon the importance of the brothers and the other characters who take up or challenge dramatic play. In examining the relationship between the melodramatic novellas and Much Ado about Nothing, I focus on comedy as a genre in process rather than a conventional dramatic form determined by its end. As a result I look at the connections between the self-contained “comedy” of the first two acts and the rest of Much Ado in terms of Shakespeare's initial responses to his narrative materials. I also explore the way the power of dramatic play passes from the brothers to other characters like Leonato and the Friar in the course of Shakespeare's ongoing reworking of his original materials. Whereas a critic like Bertrand Evans in Shakespeare's Comedies approaches these “practices” in terms of how Shakespeare is manipulating the audience's perceptions, I am interested in how he uses these player-dramatists to draw together the discourses of different genres.⁸ The conflict between the narrative novella and comic drama forces a new consideration of the contradictions at the heart of comedy and leads to a radical shift in his use of the sources in the second half of Much Ado.

.....

The first two acts of the comedy test the power of Don Pedro's comic vision to dominate in a world where play can also effectively create an anti-comic view—the world of Ariodant and Genevra, for example, where Polynesso's dramatic play nearly results in Ariodant's suicide and Genevra's execution. The opening apparently establishes the extreme difference between the comic Don Pedro and the contrary Don John but actually implies a close relationship between the two.

In act 1, Don Pedro peremptorily usurps Claudio's courtship. Once Claudio reveals his interest in Hero, Don Pedro takes up not only the cause of forwarding the marriage but also Claudio's role as suitor: “I will assume thy part in some disguise / And tell fair Hero I am Claudio” (1.1.103-4). By the end of the first scene of Much Ado, Don Pedro has identified himself so thoroughly as a proponent of marriage that he reduces Claudio to a mere observer of his own courtship. As Don Pedro seeks to assimilate Hero to his comic vision of marriage, he becomes the first player-dramatist in Messina.

When Don Pedro turns so readily to dramatic play, his action has several results. First, instead of effectively promoting Claudio's and Hero's union, as he seems to expect, his actions lead to immediate confusion in her family. In the scene following the Prince's decision, Antonio rushes in to tell Hero's father that “the Prince discovered to Claudio that he loved my niece your daughter, and meant to acknowledge it this night in a dance” (1.2.10-12). Leonato, as a result, councils her on how to react to Don Pedro's proposal, not Claudio's. At this point, like Polynesso of Orlando Furioso, the Duke is seen as the only potential suitor for Hero.

Don John hears a more accurate description of his brother's plan and responds with his usual contrary spirit: “This may prove food to my displeasure; that young start-up [Claudio] hath all the glory of my overthrow. If I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way” (1.3.61-66). Motivated purely by the desire to cross Don Pedro and his friends, Don John looks for “any model to build mischief on” (1.3.44). In his brother's dramatic play, he finds both a cause to oppose in this marriage and a model to imitate.

As a result, Don John becomes the rival player-dramatist, and begins to act as the single-minded enemy of comic union. He doubly opposes marriage in his dramatic play during the masked dance. Not only does he destroy Claudio's anticipation of wedding Hero by asserting that Don Pedro woos for himself, but he also ostensibly seeks to ruin his brother's proposed “marriage” to the lady. Don John addresses Claudio as Benedick and begs him to intervene—“Signior, you are very near my brother in his love. He is enamored on Hero; I pray you, dissuade him from her, she is no equal for his birth” (2.1.151-53). Purposely mistaking the masked Claudio for Benedick, Don John exploits his brother's playing as he sees through Don Pedro's disguise to “discover” his wooing, thus establishing Don Pedro as Claudio's rival. Moreover, in focusing on the disparity between Hero's and Don Pedro's birth, he offers the very reason given by Fenicia's father in Bandello's story when Timbreo rejects her. Don John's passionate opposition to the lovers' betrothal links him strongly to Shakespeare's sources, while the effects of his actions, the establishment of Don Pedro as a suitor, serve to implicate his brother as the rival of the novellas.

I read the first practice of Don Pedro and Don John's corresponding deception as two aspects of the same action, an action as thoroughly grounded in the novellas as the actual slander at the end of the play.⁹ Don John and his later villainy actually come from the novellas and, in turn, inspire Shakespeare's invention of Don Pedro, who uses disguise and staging scenes for very different purposes. Paradoxically, within Much Ado itself, it is Don Pedro's immediate impulse to act the role of suitor in arranging Claudio's wedding which incites Don John. By showing Don Pedro as both the initiator and resolver of his own small comedy, Shakespeare seeks to privilege his dramatic play and the comic conventions which he espouses. Yet the first act and a half indicate his fatal connection to the source's villain when he seems to be Claudio's rival. Moreover, Don Pedro's single-minded pursuit of Hero's and Claudio's betrothal is matched and mirrored in Don John's equally dedicated opposition to it.

In the first practices of Much Ado, these two characters share the artistry of the comic dramatist, which Marvin Herrick describes in Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century, “the art of the poet is shown by his ability to weave a tangled web of threats, dangers, misunderstandings, and errors, which are then skillfully, but with an air of naturalness, happily resolved.”¹⁰ Both Don Pedro, who aims at happy endings, and Don John, who arranges “threats, dangers, and misunderstandings,” are essential in making a comedy of the first part of Much Ado, since Don John's playing leads to the near disaster which intensifies the joy of Hero's and Claudio's betrothal.

However, their persistent conflict suggests that the extreme contradiction between comedy in process, i.e. erecting threats, etc., and comedy as goal, aiming toward union, cannot be easily resolved “with an air of naturalness.” The comedy continues for two reasons. Don John persists in his efforts to break the betrothal that his brother has arranged, and Don Pedro persists in making marriages, now turning his attention to Beatrice and Benedick, a pair as resistant to marriage as Don John.

Both Beatrice and Benedick defy Don Pedro's matchmaking. When Benedick reveals his most thorough opposition to women and marriage, declaring, “I will live a bachelor” (1.1.228), Don Pedro responds to this statement as if it were a personal affront, “I shall see thee, ere I die, look pale with love” (1.1.229). Benedick's further avowal that he would not marry Beatrice “though she were endowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgressed” (2.1.235-36) both denies the validity of the Prince's comic vision and contests his power to arrange the match.

Beatrice first provokes Don Pedro by drawing attention to his orchestration of Claudio's betrothal—“Speak, Count, 'tis your cue” (2.1.287).¹¹ When she explicitly prompts the two lovers to speech as if they were actors, she shows her awareness of Don Pedro's playful control. As the woman who notes that God “send[s] me no husband, for which blessing I am at him upon my knees every morning and evening” (2.1.24-26), Beatrice appropriately calls attention to Don Pedro as the active comic principle in the comedy—and resists his vision even as she perceives its force over Hero and Claudio. When the dominance of his comic vision becomes even more obvious in his offer to marry her, she refuses him.

Don Pedro, with his curious proposal, not only reinforces the fact that he has only one possible objective in his dramatic play but also suggests that the true goal in this comedy is his own union. The real task in Much Ado about Nothing goes beyond arranging the marriages of the two couples, whose betrothals are achieved with relative ease; the real issue here is wedding the melodramatic novellas, concentrated around Don John, and comedy, represented in Don Pedro. Resolving the opposition between the two brothers is essential not only to unite the two functions of the comic dramatist which the brothers embody but also to combine the powers of narrative and drama.

As Don Pedro gets more deeply involved in pursuing comic union, his actions becomes more closely identified with drama. The most striking quality of the trick he arranges for Benedick is its overt theatricality. The display the conspirators put on is excessive, especially in contrast to the practice Don Pedro has used to bring Hero and Claudio together. What becomes clear in the dramatic play which Don Pedro orchestrates here is that the purpose is not to control events but to control the way Benedick perceives them.

Don Pedro's preparation of his audience begins with his insistence that Balthasar repeat a song which Don Pedro has had him “rehearse”—“Come, Balthasar, we'll hear that song again” (2.3.43). However, Balthasar's initial reluctance to “slander music any more than once” indicates immediately the potential problems of the co-operative dramatic play which Don Pedro has set up in his second attempt at matchmaking. It seems to me unlikely that Balthasar is aware of the role he is playing here, since he is sent away before Don Pedro initiates the topic of Beatrice's love. Moreover, Balthasar is all too obviously designing his witty self-deprecation and his performance to suit Don Pedro as his audience and patron. His unwittingly obstructive scene-stealing in Don Pedro's planned performance irritates the Prince more and more as he keeps trying to get Balthasar to sing and to stop making puns about music. Don Pedro finally exclaims, “Note notes, forsooth, and nothing!” (2.3.57). When Balthasar finally does produce the designated song, a ballad on the faithlessness of men, Don Pedro's refashioning of Benedick's perceptions begins.

In the revelation of Beatrice's affections, Don Pedro takes the role of questioner. He enacts Benedick's part in the scene by playing the person who does not exactly know the details of Beatrice's feelings but would like to know. From that position, he can act as a prompter, asking Claudio and Leonato the questions which will elicit the information he wants Benedick to know. He can also voice Benedick's doubts, “Maybe she doth counterfeit” (2.3.103). Yet again, Don Pedro chooses the suitor's position, carrying it to the point of saying, “I wish she had bestowed this dotage on me, I would have daffed all respects and made her half myself” (2.3.164-66).

However, in this scene Don Pedro is not the sole actor as he was in Claudio's courtship; he must rely heavily on Leonato and Claudio. Leonato, who presumably has much at stake in arranging a match for his niece and pleasing the man who arranged his daughter's betrothal, keeps up with Don Pedro's conversational gambits, but Claudio keeps breaking out of character to comment on Benedick's responses. His exuberant pleasure in tricking his friend almost wrecks the scene as, at first, he pays more attention to his audience than to his role. When Don Pedro asks, “Why what effects of passion shows she?” Leonato paves the way for Claudio's contribution—“She will sit you—you heard my daughter tell you how” (2.3.108, 110-11). But Claudio, who has been watching and commenting on Benedick, says only, “She did indeed” (2.3.112). It takes several more lines to bring Claudio into the conversation enough to begin his description of Beatrice's letterwriting.

Even Beatrice herself is transformed into an actress in Don Pedro's dramatic play. At the beginning of the scene Leonato has commented that it is “most wonderful that she should so dote on Signior Benedick, whom she hath in all outward behaviours seemed ever to abhor” (2.3.96-99). Much as Ariosto's Polynesso suggests to Ariodante “How cunningly these women can dissemble, / Litle to love where they make greatest show,” Don Pedro suggests that Beatrice's outward behavior is an act which hides her true feelings.¹² Moreover, Claudio and Leonato describe her behavior in acknowledging that she loves Benedick as if that, too, were a role.

In describing the scene of Beatrice's writing, the conspirators use narrative within dramatic play, yet the form their “narrative” takes is that of a play script. They quote Beatrice's words and narrate her actions, culminating in Claudio's extended stage direction: “Then down upon her knees she falls, weeps, sobs, beats her heart, tears her hair, prays, curses” (2.3.143-44). He assigns to her actions all the theatrical signals of extreme anguish. Despite the way the three men “theatricalize” their narrative of Beatrice, ultimately their description recalls both the extreme emotion of the novellas and the revealing letter of love which initiates Polynesso's raging jealousy of Ariodant in Ariosto's tale. This portrayal of Beatrice's emotional vulnerability, which is crucial in altering Benedick's perception of their relationship, also connects Don Pedro once again with the slanderous player-dramatist of the sources.

In fact, the conspirators cannot resist mentioning the possibility of counterfeiting. When Don Pedro and Claudio suggest that she feigns the emotion, Leonato insists that Beatrice loves Benedick passionately, while continuing to emphasize the possibility of counterfeit: “Oh God! Counterfeit? There never was counterfeit of passion came so near the life of passion as she discovers it” (2.3.105-6). Benedick picks up the suggestion of counterfeiting but discounts twice the possibility that he is being tricked. As soon as the conspirators suggest that Beatrice is pretending passion, Benedick comments “I should think this a gull, but that white bearded man speaks it” (2.3.118-19). Alive to the possibility of dramatic play, Benedick nevertheless looks for reasons to believe their version, accepting the word of Don Pedro's most recent ally, Leonato. After the conspirators have concluded their game, Benedick once again considers the possibility of a trick but concludes, “This can be no trick: The conference was sadly borne” (2.3.212-13). Convinced by their sincerity, he abandons his suspicions and moves to adapt his views to suit Beatrice's love—“I will be horribly in love with her” (2.3.226-27).

The comedy which Don Pedro imagines for Benedick in act 2, scene 3 has three scenes. The first is the scene of Beatrice's love-stricken anguish which Claudio and Leonato recall and recount; it establishes Benedick's character as the obstruction to Beatrice's happy acknowledgement of her love. The second scene is the one which the conspirators put on for Benedick, where they challenge him to change his view and marry Beatrice. The aim of all Don Pedro's preparations is yet a third scene. His goal is a meeting between Beatrice and Benedick: “The sport will be when they both hold one an opinion of another's dotage, and no such matter: that's a scene that I would like to see, which will be merely a dumb-show” (2.3.207-10). If Beatrice and Benedick will not act willingly in his comedy, he will trick them into it.

The excessively “dramatic” qualities of Don Pedro's scene are even more noticeable in contrast to the straightforward practice Hero enacts for Beatrice. Beatrice is similarly prepared to meet Benedick with a more accommodating spirit in act 3, scene 1, but the scene she witnesses is more direct and much shorter. Hero starts off by declaring Beatrice too disdainful to hear of Benedick's love. Hero concentrates on the characteristic play which blocks the mutual affection of Beatrice and Benedick: “She cannot love, / Nor take no shape nor project of affection / She is so self-endeared” (3.1.54-56). Whereas Don Pedro's staging is elaborate both in its production and in its descriptions of Beatrice's sufferings and Benedick's cruelty, Hero strikes directly at Beatrice's destructive role as scorner of love.

The contrast between Don Pedro's self-consciously theatrical trickery and Hero's more straightforward approach is important because of Hero's unwitting critique of the egocentricity of dramatic play. Whereas Don Pedro glories in describing Beatrice's role playing, Hero sharply criticizes Beatrice's role as inherently destructive. Whereas Don Pedro and his cohorts enjoy their production so much that they joke with “counterfeiting,” Hero reinterprets the false presentation of Beatrice's character as slander, “Truly I'll devise some honest slanders / To stain my cousin with” (3.1.84-85).¹³ Don Pedro's dramatic play may seem innocuous, but Hero's version of the same trick offers a harsher view and recalls vividly how closely all the staged scenes of this comedy are related to the slander at the heart of Shakespeare's sources. Even in Don Pedro's moment of greatest triumph, Shakespeare never lets his audience forget that he is still vitally linked to Don John.

Shakespeare's attempt in the main action to transform the melodramatic novellas into a subject for comedy meets the resistance of the necessary slander at the center of the source's plot. Juxtaposing the destructive dramatic play of Bandello's or Ariosto's version with comic conventions has had the double effect of exposing slander as a type of dramatic play useful also for comic ends and, more disturbingly, of insisting on the creation of “false” or divisive discourse as the prerequisite of comic dramaturgy. The revelation of this contradiction at the heart of comedy is figured most powerfully in Don John.¹⁴

As the player-dramatist who opposes marriages, Don John is inevitably most effective in the interim between betrothal and wedding where he can fashion difficulties. His dramatic play dominates the epitasis of the comedy where “the complications, the intrigues, are developed. More often than not, dangers arise, increase, and finally become so pressing that a drastic remedy is necessary.”¹⁵ The danger in Much Ado is the threat of dishonor, which in the courtier's code of Messina, is also the threat of death.¹⁶

Still following the source, Don John pursues the ruin of Claudio's marriage to Hero in the second half of the comedy. Once again Don John, the imitator, must turn to others for inspiration. Slow to catch the implications of Borachio's dalliance with Margaret, Don John cannot see beyond his main purpose: “What is in that, to be the death of this marriage?” (2.2.19-20). Borachio must explain the mechanism of the slander, but he points to Don John's role as crucial:

The poison of that [Borachio's meeting with Margaret] lies in you to temper. Go you to the Prince your brother; spare not to tell him that he hath wronged his honor in marrying the renowned Claudio … to a contaminated stale, such a one as Hero.

(2.2.21-26)

Instead of merely influencing Claudio, who has already proven all too susceptible to the opinions of others, Don John must now draw Don Pedro into a new interpretation of the proposed match. As Don Pedro's dramatic play has prepared Benedick and Beatrice to conform to the love which supposedly controls them both and discover the proof of that love in each other's actions, Don John prepares Don Pedro and Claudio to adjust to the new view of Hero and to perceive proof of it in Borachio's encounter with Margaret.

In fact, Don John's most effective tactic in inspiring their reversal in judgment is very similar to Don Pedro's tactics with Benedick. Don John encourages his brother and Claudio to imagine what they will do if they do discover Hero's dishonor, much as Don Pedro and his friends anticipate Benedick's playful scorn if he knew of Beatrice's love. However, while Don Pedro leaves open an alternative reaction for Benedick, Don John leaves no hint of sympathy for Hero as he obviously allows only one imagined result of his proof.¹⁷ Because Don Pedro lacks Benedick's or Beatrice's ironic appreciation of his own playing, he does not even suspect a counterfeit. Instead, he adopts this attitude toward Hero as freely as the ever-accommodating Claudio.

Whereas Don Pedro's manipulations of Benedick and Beatrice emphasize his connections with comic drama, Don John's trick is predominantly associated with narrative. Not only does the scene at Hero's window only occur in Borachio's story of what happened, but also Don John's speech to Claudio and Don Pedro bears a noticeable resemblance to the one given by the creator of the bedroom scene in Bandello's version. The nameless obsequious villain of Bandello's tale (counterpart to the nameless Messaline nobleman who acts as matchmaker and then conveys Timbreo's refusal to wed Fenicia) claims to act only in Timbreo's best interest: “Sir, I come at this hour to speak with you about matters of the utmost importance, which touch your honor and well-being, and since perhaps I may say something could offend you, I pray you pardon me; let my devotion to you be my excuse.”¹⁸ Don John's approach to Don Pedro and Claudio is similar, invoking their honor while, more improbably, asserting his devotion to them.

As a result of this conversation, Don Pedro and Claudio undergo a startling change from the beginning of the scene to its conclusion. Where they start out by playing with the lovesick Benedick and glorying in their jest, they end the scene as dupes themselves. As Don Pedro moves from playful control to being controlled by another's schema, even his language changes, and he begins to sound like Don John:¹⁹

DON Pedro.
O day untowardly turn'd!
CLAUDIO.
O mischief strangely thwarting!
DON John.
O plague right well prevented! So will you say when you have seen the sequel.

(3.2.120-23)

Having masterfully persuaded them to adjust to his view, Don John has predisposed them to perceive the “sequel” as proof, to act and speak in ways which conform to his vision. Like the anonymous evil courtier who helps Girondo arrange the slander of Fenicia and the anonymous matchmaker who starts by arranging the marriage and then joins in its destruction by reporting Timbreo's rejection of his bride, Don John and Don Pedro become one in their desire to disrupt the wedding.

When the Prince and his bastard brother move on to new practices after act 1, scene 2, both men continue to enact the same kind of play, but with very different purposes. Both seek to persuade a more sophisticated audience to accept a new view. Their activities in the second movement of the comedy once again represent two halves of a single ruse. In fact, Don John creates the exact counterpart to Don Pedro's small comedy for Benedick. His miniature tragedy also contains three scenes: the scene which prepares Claudio and Don Pedro to see Hero's frailty; the scene at Hero's window, and the shaming of Hero in the church. Here Don John poses the greatest possible threat to comedy—the disruption of the wedding and the disgrace of an innocent and unsuspecting maiden. But, most shockingly, Don Pedro, the player-dramatist who originally arranged the match, joins in transforming what should be a joyous celebration into a public disgrace which apparently results in death.

In act 4, it seems that Much Ado about Nothing gives over all comic purpose to submit to the power of the narrative source. Even Beatrice and Benedick, according to Traugott, revert to imitations of the excessively romantic novellas as she plays distressed maiden to his errant knight. As Don Pedro and Don John together come to express the anti-comic dramatic play of the source, it becomes clear that the only kind of harmony that can be achieved between the two brothers is, ironically, a union which destroys the goal of comedy.

In creating Much Ado, Shakespeare uncovers the utter dependence of the comic on the anti-comic. The enactment of that problem is displayed in the creation of one plot from the other, one player-dramatist from another. In the second section of this comedy, with the union of the two brothers, the inextricable connection between the comic and the anti-comic in the catastrophe essential to comedy becomes explicit, as the two brothers unite and in effect becomes one figure. Don Pedro becomes his own antithesis, the marriage-breaker of the source, and, as a result, Don John literally disappears when his function as the imitator of the source is absorbed in his brother's character.

At the same time, ironically, the joining of the two brothers achieves the fullest integration of narrative and drama and consequently the most powerful dramatic play up to that point in the comedy. Until act 4, scene 1, Don Pedro prefers drama and transforms the narration he must use to persuade Benedick into as theatrical a form as possible, whereas Don John consistently favors telling a story over acting it out, even though he must feign concern for his brother to tell the tale of Hero's infidelity. When the two brothers unite in support of Claudio, the three together stage the most effective dramatic play thus far in the comedy, the humiliation of Hero at the altar. Claudio and Don Pedro use and improvise upon the script of the wedding ceremony, while Don John acts as the grieving witness. They narrate the story of Hero's frailty as the crucial part of their staged punishment of Leonato and his daughter. This scene, which is unique to Shakespeare's version of the novellas, marks the point of greatest power for the two brothers as their dramatic play apparently proves Hero's frailty and results in her death. However, their united success violates comedy as well as the innocent Hero and leads Shakespeare to abandon his player-dramatists—suddenly and completely, both lose the power to play.

There are reasons for this abrupt loss. Don Pedro's faith in his own play has been undermined so he cannot return to achieve the “cheerful outcome;” his comic purpose has failed utterly. Don John, on the other hand, cannot maintain his slanderous vision of Hero, because he has not engaged enough of Messina in his dramatic play. Consequently, his view of Hero dissolves readily. Nonetheless, their unexpected powerlessness is all the more striking because it coincides and, in some ways expresses, Shakespeare's sudden departure from his sources—the disappearance of Don John, who in the other versions is always present, either to be killed as Polynesso or married off as Girondo; the disturbing silence of Margaret whose prototype, Dalinda in Ariosto's tale, is the person who reveals the trick of the bedroom scene; and perhaps the most striking changes of all, the omission of the window scene which occurs in every other version of the story.

While Don John's disappearance, which occurs because he and Don Pedro have become one and the same, occasions little comment, Margaret's silence has caused critics and students alike more anxiety. Her patent involvement in Borachio's trick and failure to vindicate Hero either at the wedding or later are frequently dismissed by the claim that she is not so much a character as a plot convenience. Her reticence would pass unnoticed on stage, or so the argument goes. Yet given the fact that almost the entire story of Ariodant and Genevra is narrated by the maidservant Dalinda, Margaret's failure to speak seems to me too important to be set aside that easily. By denying Margaret speech, Shakespeare overtly rejects the narrator of the novellas. Yet, strangely enough, he does not replace her lengthy story of the trick staged at the window by dramatizing the event.

The omission of the scene at Hero's window is perhaps the most startling change Shakespeare makes in the original narratives. All of the variations of the source tale both include and emphasize such a scene, but Shakespeare leaves it out with three crucial results.²⁰ First, the true emphasis of Don John's dramatic play, like his brother's, is concentrated more in shifting the attitudes of his audience than in controlling what they see. He prepares them to discover “proof,” rather than supplying that proof.

Second, the omission of that staged scene emphasizes still further the narrative quality of Don John's trick. While still involved in dramatic play, Don John's marriage-breaking is associated with narration in this comedy just as strikingly as Don Pedro's manipulations of Benedick are linked to theater. First Don John tells the story of Hero's frailty. Then we do not see the scene at Hero's window; we hear about it from Borachio:

Know that I tonight have wooed Margaret, the Lady Hero's gentlewoman, by the name of Hero; she leans me out at her mistress's chamber, bids me a thousand times good night—I tell this tale vilely—I should first tell thee how the Prince, Claudio, and my master, planted, placed, and possessed by my master Don John, saw afar off in the orchard this amiable encounter.

(3.3.139-47)

Borachio even draws attention to the fact that he is telling a tale rather than enacting the dramatic play which he describes. Whereas Don Pedro allies himself with comedy only to be betrayed in his connections to the narrative novellas, Don John at every point seems to be associated with the narrative and the slander of the source.

Finally and most importantly, Don John draws attention to the “sequel” of his persuasions, but Shakespeare replaces Don John's carefully contrived scene which transforms Hero to a contemptible stale with the only scene of unplanned eavesdropping in the comedy: the Watch overhearing Borachio's confession to Conrade. Borachio's incoherent, out-of-order recital of events, whose flaws he self-consciously acknowledges, becomes all the more convincing as proof of villainy because he has not crafted it carefully to persuade his audience. Indeed the Watch as his audience, prepared only with Dogberry's somewhat confusing analysis of villainy, completely misconstrues the crime. When Shakespeare takes over the very type of dramatic play which serves his player-dramatists throughout Much Ado about Nothing, he does not concern himself with making or breaking marriages. Instead he unites melodramatic narrative in Borachio's story of slander and comic drama in staging the drunken, out-of-order recital of events before a well-meaning but not-very-bright internal audience. By staging the only scene of “genuine” eavesdropping, Shakespeare deliberately invokes the narration of the sources and renders it theatrical.

Leaving aside his original attempts to transform the source's villain into a comic figure by creating Don Pedro to oppose Don John, Shakespeare unites narrative and comic drama in other ways. In place of the notable omissions from the source material, Shakespeare creates and refashions a variety of characters—Dogberry, the Friar, Leonato—to assume the burden of comic creation in Messina. Notably, all these new figures combine elements of narrative and theater as each unites an anti-comic deferral of union with the ultimate purpose of union and suggests ways of reconciling the contradiction in comic creation exposed by the two brothers.

As the task of comic assimilation passes from Don Pedro's flawed hands to Shakespeare's manipulations of the plot, the most notable assurance of comic resolution which Shakespeare supplies is his creation of Dogberry and the Watch. After the scene where Don John carefully prepares his brother and Claudio to interpret the “proof” of Hero's infamy, Shakespeare supplies the only characters in the play who do not originate in any fashion from the source—Dogberry and his Watch.

In fact, Dogberry's briefing of his Watch is quite different from Don John's preparation of his brother and Claudio. Unlike Don John, Dogberry does not urge his men to any action. In fact, if any resist their warnings, the Watch is instructed merely to leave the drunkard at the tavern, to watch the thief steal away, and to listen to the babe crying. In short, the Watch is carefully told how to react to the normal “villainies” they may encounter. Consequently, they deal with Borachio and Conrade in terms of the crimes for which Dogberry has prepared them. When Borachio offers “like a true drunkard,” to tell his tale to Conrade, the Watch, instructed to deal with vagrants and drunkards, draws close to listen to “some treason.” And when Borachio metaphorically refers to fashion as a deformed thief, the Watch has truly found out one of the great villainies they were warned against.

With the inept but inevitable mechanism of comic justice in place, Shakespeare assures us that the slander of Hero will eventually be revealed while insuring that the resolution will be delayed by the bungling of the investigators. The crucial revelation of the villainy in the court combines narration, telling the story before a judge, and comic drama as Dogberry interrupts and misconstrues almost the entire deposition. Such well meaning incompetence becomes the first explanation of how erecting difficulties in comedy does not contradict the pursuit of comic union; human fallibility becomes a natural obstacle.

After the link between Don Pedro and Don John becomes explicit and undeniable in their unity in act 4, Shakespeare also creates a new player-dramatist who both imitates the villain of the source in arranging Hero's “death” and transforms that threat to a comic purpose. The Friar recognizes Hero's blushes and death-like faint as signs of her innocence and suggests his own dramatic play: “publish it that she is dead indeed; / Maintain a mourning ostentation” (4.1.204-5). The Friar's plan demands both the public narration of Hero's death and the display of “mourning ostentation” in order to achieve its effect. This feigning at first appears to complicate the situation and delay Hero's wedding indefinitely as Leonato realizes when he demands what purpose such a pretence can serve. Friar Francis offers two goals. First her death will affect the conscience of the Count and therefore, if the accusation is misproved, pave the way to “fashion the event in better shape / Than I can lay it down in likelihood” (4.1.235-36). Or, if her honor cannot be regained, her pretended death not only “will quench the wonder of her infamy,” but also will permit further concealment as her stained reputation requires (4.1.239).

The Friar's dramatic play unites the impulse to complicate the situation and the desire to resolve Hero's dilemma, as he asserts that obstacles are necessary to promote her marriage, delay is necessary to effect union. In this new player-dramatist, Shakespeare combines the opposing tendencies of the two brothers, Don Pedro's goal of comic union and Don John's single-minded attempts to prevent the wedding. The Friar uses her feigned death so that she may “die to live” and find that her “wedding-day / Perhaps is but prolong'd” (4.1.253-54). Her presumed death, which completely thwarts her union with Claudio, will inspire him to recall his love for her; total opposition to his desires will bring them to light more strongly. Though not entirely effective, the Friar offers a single pattern which expresses the contradictory needs of comic dramaturgy—and explains away that paradox when challenged.

Dogberry's bumbling insures the revelation of the truth—after a time—and the Friar's dramatic play combines delay with the desire for union, by promising to provoke love by feigning death. Similarly, Leonato, as the character whom Shakespeare entrusts with enacting the comic resolution of Much Ado, expresses the paradoxical requirements of comedy as he exacts a penance from Claudio which requires both the telling of Hero's innocence and the enactment of mourning and marriage. Here the complications inherent in comedy are framed as the necessary expiation which precedes union.

In the series of figures who replace Don Pedro and Don John as the engineers of Much Ado's plot, we see Shakespeare gradually reapproaching his sources, this time aiming at combining the opposing facets of comedy in each character's actions. Shakespeare renews his assimilation of the sources at three different levels. Dogberry, of course, is entirely Shakespeare's invention, but a priest appears in Bandello's version of the source even if his role is not that of a player-dramatist. Leonato—the ultimate assurance that the contradiction of delaying to promote union is resolvable—is a direct imitation of the father Lionato, in Bandello's “Timbreo and Fenicia.” While Shakespeare does condense the action from a year to overnight, the tactics of Leonato in Much Ado reflect pretty faithfully Lionato's strategies—provoking mourning, demanding that the suitor marry a girl of his choice, supplying that girl who is in fact the original maid. Yet Bandello's Lionato actually carries through the marriage before revealing who the girl is, while Leonato, like the other player-dramatists in this comedy, merely prepares Claudio to marry his niece and leaves the action of marriage until after the close of the comedy.

What becomes obvious in Leonato's play—as well as in the dramatic play of other characters I've discussed—is that the purpose is not to manipulate events so much as to control the ways others perceive them. This tendency may be most obvious in Don Pedro's actions as he encourages Beatrice and Benedick to refashion their interpretations of one another, but does not try to control their meetings. Yet this insistence on recasting the characters' understanding of their situations is also evident in Don John's practice upon his brother, the Friar's plan for Hero, and even Leonato's arrangement of Claudio's new marriage. In none of these cases does Shakespeare show the player-dramatist staging the event itself—Don Pedro aims at the scene of Beatrice's and Benedick's doting which he himself does not witness, the window scene is omitted from the comedy, the Friar is noticeably absent at the marriage, and Leonato stops short of forcing Claudio to wed a veiled bride. Though all of these “non-events” actually do occur in his sources, Shakespeare chooses to leave them out and emphasize instead the way these player-dramatists prepare others to react to their situations.

This emphasis reveals that it is not the actions themselves which are so different from the novellas to the comedy—what differs is the way the characters, and, to some extent, the audience imagine their relationship to those events. In drawing together these two genres, Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing juxtaposes the discourse of the melodramatic novellas, designed (like the Friar's plan) to present disaster in order to provoke strong emotions, and the discourse of comedy, designed to present disaster that can be easily and naturally set aside to promote harmony and union. Uniting these two different sets of conventions—even though the plots both involve betrothal, misunderstanding, and reconciliation—all too vividly exposes the contradiction at the heart of comedy. The differences between narrative and theater, displayed particularly in the conflicting dramatic play of the two brothers, only further underscores the paradox of comic dramaturgy, which must erect obstacles, like Don John, while pursuing marriages, like Don Pedro.

In response, Shakespeare offers not one but three ways the contradiction which Don Pedro and Don John embody can be resolved “with an air of naturalness.” Dogberry's well-meaning ineptitude, the Friar's production of Hero's death to reveal Claudio's true emotion, and Leonato's representation of expiation as the necessary prerequisite for comic union are all attempts to explain the contradiction of comedy which disrupts in order to unite. Significantly, none of these figures is entirely successful on his own. The resulting over-determination of reasons for the combination of obstacle and goal reflects the force with which Shakespeare's use of the novella narratives, evoking the patterns of melodrama, has challenged the conventions of comic drama. The process of creating this comedy from a noncomic source exposes the contradictions at the heart of a genre which requires the manufacture of disasters and opposition in order to assert the inevitability of harmony and order.²¹

Notes

1. Both Geoffrey Bullough (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 2, The Comedies [Columbia U. Press, 1968], pp. 61-80) and Charles Prouty in The Sources of Much Ado about Nothing (Yale U. Press, 1950) cite the slandered maid tales recounted by Ariosto, Bandello, Belleforest, and even George Whetstone as the principle sources of Much Ado.

2. John Traugott, “Creating a Rational Rinaldo: A Study of the Mixture of the Genres of Comedy and Romance in Much Ado about Nothing,” Genre 15 (1982): 175.

3. In her analysis of Much Ado's sources in The Book of the Courtier, Barbara Lewalski also deals mainly with the two couples, claiming that Beatrice and Benedick “acted out of the pattern of Bembo's rational lovers … basing love on genuine knowledge, and accepting it not in terms of mad passion but by conscious choice” (Barbara Lewalski, “Love, Appearance, and Reality: Much Ado about Something,” SEL 8 [1968]: 244-45).

4. Some critics do take a different approach. Joyce Hengerer Sexton, for example, in “The Theme of Slander in Much Ado about Nothing and Garter's Susanna,” PQ 54 (1977): 419-33, argues that “Shakespeare was emphasizing not the mechanism of the trap or the feelings of those caught in it, but something else: what slander is. Out of the source material he extracted the ethical issues, bringing to the center of his play a sense of the absoluteness of the evil of slander” (p. 420).

5. Jean E. Howard takes a comparable position in discussing anti-theatrical tracts and the theatrics in Much Ado about Nothing; her attention to the sources also emphasizes the focus on dramatic play. Her reading, however, does not address the relationship between Don John and Don Pedro, between narrative and drama, so much as the theatrical representation of a politics of gender (“Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of Gender and rank in Much Ado about Nothing” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology [New York: Methuen, Inc., 1987], pp. 163-87).

6. William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, The Arden Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1981), 1.3.25-26. All further references will be to this edition and will appear in the body of the essay.

7. I take my definition of play from Jean Piaget's Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960). Piaget sees play in a spectrum of possible relationships between the child and reality; on one end of the spectrum he locates imitative accommodation and on the other end playful assimilation. Dramatic play, as I see it, tends toward an equilibrium between play and imitation as it approaches dramatic work; however, dramatic play remains predominantly assimilative and egocentric.

8. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960).

9. Bertrand Evans, in Shakespeare's Comedies, suggests that this first set of practices allows Shakespeare to demonstrate both the willingness with which the citizens of Messina engage in deception and the ease with which they are taken in by these practices—even by the very ones they are involved in (pp. 70-74). As I see it, the practices of acts 1 and 2 prepare the way for the main action of the plot; however, Shakespeare does not create Don Pedro's little comedy solely to make Hero's slander and its effects more plausible but also to explore the intimate connection between his two player-dramatists.

10. Throughout this essay I refer to Marvin Herrick's book Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century ([U. of Illinois Press, 1964], p. 121) because he catalogues so thoroughly the conventions of comedy from which Shakespeare was working.

11. When he does speak, as Alexander Leggatt notes, her intervention “makes the rightness of Claudio's speech look disconcertingly like the rightness of a wind-up toy. Beatrice is outside the convention, and her perspective provides a comically dislocating effect” (Shakespeare's Comedies of Love [London: Chatto & Windus, 1974], p. 154). In orchestrating their betrothal, Don Pedro has contrived a comic ending for Hero and Claudio, but Beatrice, recognizing this influence, challenges his power.

12. Bullough, p. 91.

13. Bertrand Evans claims that Shakespeare uses these hints to maintain the audience's awareness of the tragic overtones to these comic practices, but again I feel their purpose extends more particularly to connecting the two brothers (p. 75).

14. Ruth Nevo draws attention to Anne Barton's assertion that Don John is the official enemy of all happy endings when she comments that “it is not by chance that the malign plotter sets off a malign, potentially tragic dialectic of either/or, while the benign plotter releases a benign dialectic of both/and” (Comic Transformations in Shakespeare [London: Meuthen & Co., Ltd., 1980], p. 173).

15. Herrick, p. 121.

16. Of the critics who have drawn attention to the courtier's code and its importance in both Much Ado and its sources, Barbara Lewalski, in “Love, Appearance and Reality: Much Ado about Something,” discusses the Renaissance notions of courtiership and their implications for Much Ado most thoroughly. She notes quite prominantly the equation of dishonor with death in the courtier's code, in part as a defense of Claudio.

17. As Paul and Miriam Mueschke note in “Illusion and Metamorphosis in Much Ado about Nothing,” SQ 18 (1967): 53-65, Don John offers several ambiguous hints and slowly reveals Hero's “frailty”: “He deliberately tantalizes his victims until their nerves are raw and fear of dishonor is fomented; after their judgment is paralyzed by innuendo, he lures men reft of judgment to an immediate and irrevocable choice between tainted love and undefiled honor” (p. 60).

18. Bullough, p. 115.

19. Critics such as Alexander Leggatt notice a shift in style: “Deceiving not only Claudio but Don Pedro as well, he [Don John] produces a decisive shift to a simplified, arbitrary dramatic idiom … The style is stiffly patterned, and the expressions of intent are not only arbitrary but pat and perfunctory. Claudio and Don Pedro are now moving as Don John moves, simply as figures in a story, engaged in conventional roles” (p. 160).

20. As Bullough notes, “It is truly remarkable that Shakespeare does not present the scene in which the hero sees his ‘rival’ climbing to his betrothed's window; for such a scene is found in all the analogues” (p. 78).

21. It is only fitting that comic closure in Much Ado about Nothing restores the dramatic play of Don John and Don Pedro. The final scene restages Hero's wedding but demands an act of faith on Claudio's part which rewrites the tragic conclusion of Don John's dramatic play. Moreover, the evidence of Beatrice's and Benedick's writing of their love which forces them to acknowledge their love also restores Don Pedro's dramatic play by making good on the scene of writing which he and his conspirators describe so elaborately.