[In the following essay, Hunt studies the characters' usage of patriarchal speech in Much Ado about Nothing, demonstrating the way in which this type of speech establishes social dominance through the transformation, dismissal, or oppression of the words and thoughts of others.]

Interpreters of Much Ado about Nothing have often remarked that Shakespeare focuses in this middle comedy upon the faculty of hearing. And indeed “nothing,” in its senses of listening and eavesdropping, does much to complicate and unravel the play's fable.¹ What is rarely noted in accounts of Much Ado is the dependence of hearing upon speaking, the possibility that Shakespeare may also dramatize the potential of speech to exasperate and resolve humankind's wishes and schemes, especially as they involve romantic love. Repeatedly the language of Much Ado illustrates the fact that expression often becomes disjoined from meaning. “The body of your discourse is sometime guarded with fragments [trimmed with odds and ends],” Benedick tells jesting Don Pedro, “and the guards are but slightly basted on neither” (1.1.265-66).² Anne Barton takes Benedick's quip to mean that “the trimmings” of Don Pedro's speech “are very insecurely stitched on too (i.e. they have little connection with what is being said).”³ A. P. Rossiter has remarked that in Much Ado Cupid does not work by slander, but by hearsay.⁴ “Of this matter / Is little Cupid's crafty arrow made,” Hero pronounces, “That only wounds by hearsay” (3.1.21-23). The word has two parts. In Much Ado, “[l]ove by hearsay,” according to René Girard, “means love by another's voice.”⁵ Love arises when stratagems of eavesdropping make Benedick, Beatrice, and Claudio fall either in or out of love, but they do so only because of what other characters say, only because of the speech uttered and the attitude of members of the trio toward it. One would assume that a gap of some kind naturally exists between Beatrice's, Benedick's, and Claudio's original self-generated (in some cases faint) amorous inclinations and the romantic love created by others' speech and the speech of lovers molded by their utterances. It is another version of the disjunction between inward meaning and spoken words that we hear in Benedick's quip about the “slightly basted” rhetorical “trimmings” of Don Pedro's speech.

At stake in these examples is what we are accustomed to call the truth. Shakespeare unforgettably invites the question of the relation of spoken language to the truth by showing how easily the words of others cause Benedick and Beatrice to fall in and out of love. In Much Ado, Shakespeare suggests that the desire to exert power over another in a way that flatters or amuses the wielder often determines both the use of speech and the control of conversation and monologues. To achieve and exercise personal power, Don Pedro, Benedick, Claudio, and other male characters in Much Ado capitalize upon inherent disjunctions between expression and meaning, upon auditors' distrust of an interlocutor's words, and upon speakers' inability to govern their tongues (and thus the language they speak). In this process, patriarchal speech almost always triumphs by mandating its construction of the truth. Marked by irreverence, aggressiveness, and an authoritarian tone and content, Shakespearean patriarchal speech is designed to establish social dominance by twisting, dismissing, or oppressing the words and ideas of others. Moreover, it is not exclusively the property of men. In Much Ado, Beatrice's acerbic speech, compared to the qualities of patriarchal language, appears at times more conventionally male than conventionally female. Because the seekers after power in the play often cannot manage problematic language or rule their own tongues, they generally become the verbal and literal victims of someone else's power stratagems, and social prestige shifts distressingly within the community of Messina.

Early in Much Ado, Shakespeare represents a paradigmatic image of exemplary speech and speaker. In act 2, scene 1, Beatrice wittily conceives of authentic manhood in terms of moderate speech. “He were an excellent man,” she quips, “that were made just in the mid-way between [Don John] and Benedick: the one is too like an image and says nothing, and the other too like my lady's eldest son, evermore tattling” (2.1.6-9). Beatrice's assertion sets up a standard of modulated, tempered speech that she herself cannot practice. “By my troth, niece,” Leonato tells sharp-tongued Beatrice, “thou wilt never get thee a husband, if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue” (2.1.16-17). Nevertheless, Beatrice's linguistic analysis applies, strictly speaking, to the attainment of excellent manhood. Thus the tempering of speech that she recommends could possibly rectify certain absolutist traits of patriarchal speech. But self-destructive consequences entailed by the compulsion to acquire and exert social and physical power over others preclude the attainment of this temperance. At least they do so until, suffering adversity, characters such as Benedick learn to modulate significantly their quest for power and thus the speech associated with it. The relatively sanctified, integrated speech of the powerless Hero and that of Friar Francis, who has piously relinquished the pursuit of self-congratulatory power, become guides toward this end for Shakespeare's audience. An appreciation of the melding of their expression and intended meaning depends upon initially grasping the extent of Shakespeare's depiction of the manifold, subtle foibles of language.

Patriarchal speech is often edgy, distrustful, because male speakers frequently imagine that male interlocutors may have competitive designs upon them, or because they are hyperconscious of losing among men a masculine persona. When Claudio asks Benedick, “Is [Hero] not a modest young lady?” (1.1.153),⁶ Benedick's response reveals his habitual distrust of the wholesome, straightforward meaning of a friend's speech: “Do you question me as an honest man should do, for my simple true judgement, or would you have me speak after my custom, as being a professed tyrant to their sex?” (1.1.154-57). Benedick implies that he has two kinds of speech—an honest, simple discourse, rarely spoken, and a customary caustic, witty idiom that (by the logic of his own question) is dishonest and false. Benedick has cultivated the reputation of being a tyrant to women in order to enhance his stature (his power) primarily among his male friends. Yet he has become an ironic victim of this strategy, a prisoner of his circulated, anti-feminist sayings. With a life of their own, these witty sayings have created a persona that he believes he must inhabit and maintain. To venture outside of it (as he here intimates he might) is to gamble the loss of a self-fashioned identity and imagined respect. In the present case, Benedick suggests that the risk of simple, relatively honest speech is too great. When Claudio protests, “I pray thee speak in sober judgement,” Benedick jokes, “Why, i'faith, methinks she's too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise, and too little for a great praise: only this commendation I can afford her, that were she other than she is, she were unhandsome, and being no other but as she is, I do not like her” (1.1.158-64). Benedick's clever paradoxes are sufficiently ambiguous to keep Claudio uncertain of the speaker's feelings. “Thou thinkest I am in sport,” the thoroughly frustrated Claudio complains; “I pray thee tell me truly how thou lik'st her” (1.1.165-66). Benedick's linguistic suspicion proves deep-seated, however. He asks Claudio, “But speak you this with a sad brow, or do you play the flouting Jack, to tell us Cupid is a good hare-finder, and Vulcan a rare carpenter? Come, in what key shall a man take you to go in the song?” (1.1.169-73). Benedick's concluding metaphor suggests his notion that talk with Claudio amounts to no more than a kind of duet valuable for its harmony rather than its content, a creation in which one finds one's part in conjunction with other artistes of language.

Benedick never does directly answer Claudio's question about Hero's modesty. (He says instead that he sees no sweetness in her.) His reluctance to conform to Claudio's expectation of the rules governing conversation constitutes a comic, poetically just punishment of Claudio. “God help the noble Claudio!” Beatrice has exclaimed concerning Benedick's company; “[i]f he have caught the Benedick, it will cost him a thousand pound ere a be cured” (1.1.80-82). In terms of our subject, Claudio can be said to have “caught the Benedick,” for he himself shares his companion's distrust of forthright speech. Responding to Claudio's qualified declaration of love for Hero, Don Pedro pronounces, “Amen, if you love her, for the lady is very well worthy” (1.1.204-5). “You speak this to fetch me in, my lord” (1.1.206), Claudio anxiously replies. “By my troth, I speak my thought” (1.1.207), Don Pedro assures him. When Claudio responds, “And in faith, my lord, I spoke mine” (1.1.208), Benedick cannot resist joking about the extralinguistic guarantee of their words that Don Pedro and Claudio seek in Christian invocations: “And by my two faiths and troths, my lord, I spoke mine” (1.1.209-10).⁷ Whatever effective communication Don Pedro and Claudio have achieved gets derailed by Benedick's ingenious witticism about his (and humankind's) double—deceitful—faith and truth. His joke—in his mind, at least—for the moment makes him the dominant speaker among male friends wary through speech of giving auditors an advantage.

The masked ball of Much Ado provides characters suspicious of direct speech an opportunity to speak without hesitation or subterfuge, simply because they believe that their visors absolve them from the responsibility of owning their utterances. No longer do they feel compelled to worry about how their words might gain or lose them respect. In such a context, they risk speaking imagined truths. Recognizing Benedick behind his mask (but thinking that he does not recognize her), Beatrice unleashes the aggression that her anxious feeling of vulnerability to men has created by directly, painfully telling him of the foolish ass his self-conceit makes him (2.1.127-33). In other words, she powerfully compensates for her usual secret sense of powerlessness in a decidedly patriarchal society. Admittedly, Beatrice's frustrated affection for Benedick contributes to her aggressiveness, her criticism a personally safe attempt to encourage him to reform himself and his langauge. But the painful extremity of her portrait of him reveals the deeper source of her aggression in the dynamics of power and powerlessness, which distort the truth of her utterances. “She speaks poniards,” Benedick complains, “and every word stabs” (2.1.231-32). Benedick has his flaws, but her verbal portrait of him as “the Prince's jester, a very dull fool; [whose] only gift is in devising impossible slanders” (2.1.127-28) misrepresents—skews—the whole man. Beatrice's criticism of Benedick's “gift,” moreover, could just as easily apply to her everyday, ridiculing self.

Characters' inability to control their speech, their failure to shape it to their wills, can be heard throughout Much Ado. Benedick's “double” faith reflects his “double tongue”; at least, it does so in Don Pedro's report of Benedick's opinion of Benedick's verbal duplicity. When Don Pedro tells Benedick that he praised Benedick's knowledge of foreign languages to Beatrice (“‘Nay,’ said I, ‘he hath the tongues’”), he says that she responded, “‘That I believe … for he swore a thing to me on Monday night, which he forswore on Tuesday morning; there's a double tongue; there's two tongues’” (5.1.164-66). Benedick's double tongue, a characterization reminiscent of that of Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream,⁸ manifests itself not only in his swearing and forswearing of love for Beatrice, but also in his punning jests, which require the ability to speak two disruptive meanings at once. Swearing, forswearing, and punning in Much Ado, as in life, usually involve the imagined acquisition or consolidation of social prestige. The stress in this judgment falls upon the word “imagined.” Often punning jokes escape the jester's control, wounding him in the poor opinion of others, even as his swearing and forswearing painfully work eventually against the swearer's image in others' eyes.

Few characters in the Messina of Much Ado consistently rule their tongues to their advantage. Underscoring this impression is that of Beatrice's and Benedick's runaway tongues. Both of these characters suffer from logorrhea. “I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick,” Beatrice quips; “nobody marks you” (1.1.107-8). She, however, in Benedick's chauvinistic opinion, is “my Lady Tongue” (2.1.258), a “dish” whose garrulousness makes her unpalatable. Surprisingly, the play's memorable analysis of humankind's inability to govern its tongue belongs to its low-life personage, Borachio. Concerning Borachio's claim that he can tell a story of intrigue, Conrade, uttering a phrase repeated later in The Tempest, exclaims, “and now forward with thy tale” (3.3.99-100).⁹ The pun latent in this statement—the notion of putting forward something naturally belonging to the rear (“tale” / “tail”)—predicts the preposterousness (literally, the backward-firstness) of Borachio's narrative.¹⁰ The beginning of Borachio's tale—“Therefore know, I have earned of Don John a thousand ducats” (3.3.106-7)—is actually its conclusion: the reward that the trick to be narrated brought him. Then, by holding forth on the truth that “the fashion of a doublet, or a hat, or a cloak, is nothing to a man” (3.3.114-34), Borachio makes Conrade complain, “But art not thou thyself giddy with the fashion too, that thou hast shifted out of thy tale into telling me of the fashion?” (3.3.136-38). Thus rebuked, Borachio explains that he has just wooed Margaret by the name of Hero and that she repeatedly bid him good night from the window of Hero's bedchamber. Despite this conformity to Conrade's request, Borachio catches himself up: “I tell this tale vilely—I should first tell thee how the Prince, Claudio, and my master, planted and placed and possessed by my master Don John, saw afar off in the orchard this amiable encounter” (3.3.143-47). Borachio has giddily gone forward with his tale, again telling a later part first. Throughout Much Ado, Shakespeare uses forms of the word “giddy” to refer to humankind's inveterate inconstancy (its defining trait, according to the Player King in act 3, scene 2 of Hamlet). “For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion” (5.4.106-7), Benedick summarizes near the end of Much Ado.¹¹ Humankind (especially mankind), in this play, reveals its essential giddiness chiefly in inconstant, fickle speech, which often entails the loss of control over logical discourse. Giddy Borachio exemplifies this phenomenon with his wordy, backward-first tale.¹² His loss of linguistic control amounts to a semicomic instance of the flaw that Benedick and Beatrice mutually accuse each other of committing in the form of subversive, irrelevant jests.

The inevitable ambiguity of public speech complicates in Much Ado problems of linguistic distrust and loss of control. Beatrice's and Benedick's verbal cleverness allows them to both inject and read what they will into an inherently imprecise symbolic medium of communication.¹³ Believing that Beatrice secretly loves him, Benedick often misinterprets her utterances. “Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner,” she tells Benedick; when he thanks her for her pains, she coldly replies, “I took no more pains for those thanks than you take pains to thank me” (2.3.238-42). Left alone, Benedick's fertile imagination falls prey to his self-conceit working on the mismatch between a speaker's apparent intention and the broad language that never exactly registers it:¹⁴ “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.’ If I do not take pity of her, I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew. I will go get her picture” (2.3.248-54).¹⁵ The inherent imprecision of language thus serves an anxious need to magnify the self's importance. Having taken pleasure in his double tongue (see above, 1.1.209-10), Benedick suffers the poetic justice of misconstruing to his later embarrassment the radical double meaning of Beatrice's speech. At this point, my reader might object that Benedick has in fact not misconstrued the basic tenor of Beatrice's utterance; he or she might argue that Beatrice's hostile and neutral statements serve to mask her conflicted but nevertheless authentic attraction to Benedick and that he intuitively has picked up on this concealed resonance and somehow heard it for what it affectionately is. While this argument carries weight, I would point out that the inevitable ambiguity of Beatrice's and Benedick's dialogue, working with feelings of self-importance, causes each of them much more suffering and public embarrassment concerning their hidden feelings for each other than relatively unambiguous, trusted words of affection would. This is true simply because in the latter case a mode of communication which the world assumes, even if it does not usually practice, would allow their love to bloom naturally.

The physical and social contexts of utterances can significantly affect the designs of speakers intent on using ambiguous language to forge or strengthen social identities.¹⁶ Antonio states that his servant, “in a thick-pleach'd alley in mine orchard” (1.2.9-10), overheard Don Pedro telling Claudio that he plans to propose to Hero. Evidently the density of the foliage warps or muffles Don Pedro's speech, permitting Antonio's man to hear only part of the truth (that Don Pedro woos Hero on behalf of Claudio). In this instance, the context of an utterance determines its meaning as much as the simple mode of hearing does. That the villain Borachio hears the whole truth about Don Pedro's wooing indicates that the arras behind which he hides in a musty room, unlike the garden's foliage, does not in this case significantly damage acoustics. Hero's gentlewoman Margaret demonstrates the extent to which a speaker sometimes goes to neutralize a distorting interpretive context and recover an imagined integrity of self. When Margaret jokes that Hero's heart will “be heavier soon by the weight of a man,” Hero exclaims, “Fie upon thee, art not ashamed?” (3.4.25-26). Somewhat indignant, Margaret disavows the bawdy meaning of this jest: “Of what, lady? of speaking honorably? Is not marriage honorable in a beggar? Is not your lord honorable without marriage? I think you would have me say, saving your reverence, ‘a husband.’ And bad thinking do not wrest true speaking, I'll offend nobody. Is there any harm in ‘the heavier for a husband’? None, I think, and it be the right husband, and the right wife; otherwise 'tis light, and not heavy” (3.4.29-36). Margaret tellingly makes the point that a jest's innocuousness lies in the ear of the auditor. If a wife genuinely loves and respects her husband, nothing necessarily salacious attaches to her expression of the thought of her husband's weight during sexual intercourse. “A jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it,” Rosaline authoritatively pronounces in Love's Labour's Lost, “never in the tongue / Of him that makes it” (5.2.861-63).¹⁷ Margaret revises this truth so as to suggest that the existential context of a speaker's and auditor's thinking invests the broad ambiguity of speech with relatively accurate meaning.

Still, Margaret has made an obscene jest (to Hero's and our ears, at least), and the troublesome instability of speech has allowed her to escape responsibility for a possibly coarse intention. That Margaret should articulate the above-described principle of language interpretation is heavily ironic. Her bidding Borachio “a thousand times good night” (3.3.142-43) in the name of Hero (given her by Borachio) corrupts Claudio's faith in his beloved. Language is so imprecise that an auditor, suspiciously hearing it in a vile context, can wrench it to conform to a fantasy. Margaret vainly takes pride in her linguistic virtuosity and ability to wiggle out of responsibility for her words' meaning, but she suffers the consequences of Borachio's duplicity when her honestly meant good night (she seems to care for Borachio) goes awry and Leonato later faults her for her part in Hero's slander (5.4.4-6).

Such a nonessential property is speech that socially empowered characters such as Don Pedro and Leonato can appropriate (steal) subordinates' voices, reducing Claudio and Hero to either ventriloquism or silence. In the patriarchal hierarchy of Messina, empowering voices tend to concentrate in the Prince of Aragon, Don Pedro, and Leonato, the governor of Messina and Hero's father.¹⁸ Don Pedro autocratically wrenches Claudio's words of courtship away from the young lover. “Thou wilt be like a lover presently,” he tells Claudio, “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” (1.1.286-90). Not only will Don Pedro conduct Claudio's suit to Leonato (a typically Elizabethan patriarchal arrangement), but he will also, unconventionally, speak Claudio's words of love to his beloved's own ears. Claudio's muteness includes the nonverbal signifier of his face, pale with love, which he thinks speaks his meaning far better than his own words could. “How sweetly you do minister to love,” he gratefully tells Don Pedro, “That know love's grief by his complexion!” (1.1.292-93). Still, he would like to speak on his own behalf: “But lest my liking might too sudden seem, / I would have salv'd it with a longer treatise” (1.1.294-95). Don Pedro, however, peremptorily silences him: “What need the bridge much broader than the flood?” (1.1.296). The “flood,” of course, is Claudio's imagined passion for Hero; by saying that the lover need not describe it, and that he might briefly “bridge” it, Don Pedro patronizingly suggests that Claudio's love is narrow, relatively unsubstantial. What Claudio could never have supposed when he agreed to Don Pedro's “gracious” offer is the prince's plan to woo Hero on Claudio's behalf from behind a mask, a situation that makes his words of love indistinguishable from Claudio's to Hero's ear. “And in her bosom I'll unclasp my heart,” he tells Claudio, “And take her hearing prisoner with the force / And strong encounter of my amorous tale” (1.1.303-5). Don Pedro's powerful metaphor of the tyranny of speech includes as its victim not simply Hero, but Claudio too. Don Pedro has robbed Claudio of his voice in a way that neither Hero nor Claudio could ever have supposed.

Hero's father Leonato and her uncle Antonio generally dictate her speech and enforce her silence. Beatrice makes clear that Antonio's advice to Hero—“Well, niece, I trust you will be rul'd by your father” (2.1.46-47)—chiefly pertains to her speech. “Yes, faith,” Beatrice sarcastically responds: “it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say, ‘Father, as it please you’: but yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say, ‘Father, as it please me’” (2.1.48-52). Beatrice's facetious putting of words in silent, obedient Hero's mouth serves to stress the verbal dependency of Claudio's beloved in a patriarchal society. The second imputed utterance—“‘Father, as it please me’”—strengthens this negative impression, mainly because no one, onstage or off, could imagine dutiful Hero voicing it.¹⁹ Recognizing Beatrice's insubordination, Leonato coarsely tries to quell it: “Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband” (2.1.57-58). As the obscene connotation of the word later more extensively indicates in Cymbeline,²⁰ “fitted” implies a physical conformity of shape to the complementary male phallus that symbolizes female subordination in a patriarchy. In effect, Leonato crudely suggests that Beatrice's husband will one day, through the effect of his sexual power, reform her language.²¹ Cast as a solicitous wish, Leonato's utterance is in fact a harsh threat. That Beatrice ignores this warning and continues her witty, mutinous protest in no way liberates Hero's speech. Ignoring Beatrice's rebellion, Leonato reminds Hero that he has scripted the language of her courtship: “Daughter, remember what I told you: if the Prince do solicit you in that kind, you know your answer” (2.1.61-62). That we never hear Hero's response to this reminder—Beatrice speaks up again, telling Hero that she should “dance out the answer” to Don Pedro (2.1.63-73)—confirms Leonato's linguistic supremacy and her voicelessness.

The presence of socially privileged speakers continues to mute Claudio and Hero even in their betrothal. After Don Pedro has told Claudio that he has “woo'd in thy name” and won both Hero's and her father's consent to the wedding (facts that Leonato immediately confirms) (2.1.298-304), Beatrice must prod the lover: “Speak, Count, 'tis your cue” (2.1.305). Claudio's all-important pledge of love, however, minimizes the agency of language: “Silence is the perfectest herald of joy; I were but little happy, if I could say how much! Lady, as you are mine, I am yours. I give away myself for you, and dote upon the exchange” (2.1.306-9). Regarded in light of his distrust of other speakers' words, Claudio's opting for silence in the midst of several potent, linguistically aggrandizing men is understandable. As is Hero's. She speaks not an audible word in reply to her lover's proposal. “Speak, cousin,” irrepressible Beatrice urges, “or (if you cannot) stop his mouth with a kiss, and let not him speak neither” (2.1.310-11). All that shy, dutiful Hero can do is whisper; “My cousin tells him in his ear that he is in her heart” (2.1.315-16), Beatrice remarks. “And so she doth, cousin” (2.1.317), Claudio confirms. Suddenly Hero's silence, which has become a sign of patriarchal oppression in playgoers' minds, acquires positive value. Beatrice and Benedick's previously quoted dialogue indicates that Hero's unheard whispers constitute a private language whose privateness insures the communication of the purity of her thoughts and insulates them from the degradations of a totalitarian codification of verbal meaning. At this moment in the public context, Hero's language is, paradoxically, an eloquent silence. At the beginning of King Lear, Cordelia represents (and preserves) an integrity of speech in the midst of a rigged totalitarian discourse. But while attractive, her frank, public utterances begin a disastrous chain of events. Hero, in an admittedly different context, succeeds where Cordelia fails because she forgoes public speech. For the moment she escapes danger because she enfolds a fine private language within an expressive public silence, a strategy apparently unavailable to Cordelia.

Paradoxically Hero's clipped, unconventional language of the heart positively contrasts with the more attractive (because amusingly witty) effusive language of Beatrice that delivers her over to and imprisons her within a patriarchy. After some “masculine” banter with Don Pedro, Beatrice begs his pardon for its license. “I was born to speak all mirth and no matter” (2.1.330), she explains. “Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you” (2.1.331-32), Don Pedro patronizingly replies. Beatrice's male banter paradoxically works to subordinate her in a male circle. Obviously the prince applies a double standard here. The socially presumptuous badinage that a woman like Beatrice engages in with men would be offensive in Hero, whereas a silent wiseacre like Beatrice would deprive him and his comrades of amusement. Leonato firmly puts Beatrice in her place when he abruptly says, “Niece, will you look to the things I told you of?” (2.1.337-38). Beatrice's submissive reply—“I cry you mercy, uncle. By your Grace's pardon” (2.1.339-40)—reveals that at this moment she adopts an early modern woman's idiom and accepts her socially and linguistically subordinate role.

The public nature of Hero's nuptials precludes an integrity-preserving private language; consequently, she finds herself forced to participate, with personally disastrous results, in a compromising public dialogue ruled by men with masculinist assumptions. Patriarchal attempts to control the wedding ceremony immediately become apparent. When Friar Francis asks Claudio, “You come hither, my lord, to marry this lady,” and the groom abruptly answers “No” (4.1.4-5), the linguistic autocrat Leonato takes charge and reinterprets his blunt reply: “To be married to her, friar: you come to marry her” (4.1.6-7). Uncertainty about the relation of speech acts to one another, and the plausibility of hearing an utterance within related but different social contexts, make language interpretation ambiguous. This fact permits Leonato to hear Claudio's negative in an ingenious but incorrect way, prompting him to remind the friar that the speech act of marriage is properly the churchman's and not Claudio's. Rattled, Leonato appropriates Claudio's voice when the ceremony reaches a potentially dangerous requirement:

FRIAR:
If either of you know any inward impediment why you should not be conjoin'd, I charge you on your souls to utter it.
CLAUD:
Know you any, Hero?
HERO:
None, my lord.
FRIAR:
Know you any, count?
LEON:
I dare make his answer, none.

(4.1.11-17)

This patriarchal appropriation of speech sends Claudio into the rage that shatters the wedding ceremony and ends in his cruel claim that Hero has fornicated with Borachio. Claudio's following words incidentally describe Leonato's presumptuous theft of his own speech as much as they do Borachio's bold stealing Hero's honor: “O, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do!” (4.1.18-19). Leonato's appropriation makes Claudio feel powerless, and he compensates by redirecting his angry frustration onto Hero, who seems generally powerless and so someone lesser than himself at this moment. Thus he explodes against the supposed fornicator perhaps before he had planned to do so. In keeping with the play's emphasis on the appropriation of speech, even body language is seized upon and misconstrued. During their wedding ceremony, Claudio claims that Hero is “but the sign and semblance of her honour”:

Behold how like a maid she blushes here!
O, what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal!
Comes not that blood as modest evidence
To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear,
All you that see her, that she were a maid,
By these exterior shows? But she is none:
She knows the heat of a luxurious bed:
Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

(4.1.32-41)

Hero does not even get to translate the “speech” of her blushes—that she is shyly modest. Interpreted by angry Claudio, her vascular language proclaims blood corrupted by guilty lust. Likewise, disconsolate Leonato later exclaims, “Could she here deny / The [supposedly damning] story that is printed in her blood?” (4.1.121-22).²² Privileged males rob mute Hero even of the speech of her body—yet it was that physical language, in the form of Margaret's embrace of Borachio, that they were all too ready to “hear” and credit, to Hero's demise.

Labeled a “rotten orange” (4.1.31), Hero manages only one utterance in the midst of Leonato's and Claudio's dialogue concerning her supposed promiscuity. When Claudio asserts that he loved Hero as a brother might, with “Bashful sincerity,” she protests, “And seem'd I ever otherwise to you?” (4.1.54-55). Her remark, however, only serves to launch Claudio into a condemnation of her imputed seeming. Finally, Don John insists that Claudio's nasty allegations are true (4.1.67). Picking up Don John's last word, stunned Hero can only echo “‘True’! O God!” (4.1.68). This three-word utterance captures the essence of Hero's integrity. Ironically, the exclamation “O God!” reflects the piety that makes Hero's utterances true. Her three words “speak” her nature as no other words could. And yet they include a man's word (“true”) put in her mouth, in this case by false Don John.

Hero's discourse, even in this utterance that genuinely expresses her, thus partly derives from a socially privileged male statement (Don John's). More important, when heard within the public arena of masculinist prejudgment and condemnation, Hero's exclamation can be misheard as an admission of guilt. When the agonized Hero asks, “What kind of catechizing call you this?” (4.1.78), Claudio coldly replies, “To make you answer truly to your name” (4.1.79). Claudio would fit Hero with the name “common stale,” but she protests that her name reflects her inner purity. Only in her name does Hero find a word her own, all her own: “Is it not Hero? Who can blot that name / With any just reproach?” (4.1.80-81). But even this apt, potentially ennobling word is reinterpreted and devalued by the malicious Claudio. “Marry, that can Hero,” he snarls; “Hero itself can blot Hero's virtue” (4.1.81-82). It can do so because the name of Hero, in Claudio's estimation, is “now the name of an unchaste woman.”²³ Viewed from one perspective, the Hero of Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1598) appears an idealized heroine of love (e.g., ll. 1-50, 117-30). But the celebrated Elizabethan epyllion took the representation of Ovidian eroticism to new extremes, and the on-a-pedestal heroine also appeared a gamesome young woman (e.g., ll. 494-96, 502-16, 529-36). In fact, like the name Cressida, Hero in a matter of months during 1598 had come for Shakespeare's playgoers to denote a commonplace—a literary stereotype—of an idealized woman of surprisingly erotic behavior.²⁴ Shakespeare's Hero could be considered a “stale” in two senses: as Claudio's whorish woman and as a familiar commonplace of eroticism. In this latter case, Hero's very name (a staleness) conspires against her, muffling in Claudio's ears the singular integrity of her utterances.²⁵ Stripped finally of even the protective grace of her name, Hero in despair swoons in a death-like trance.²⁶ “Hath no man's dagger here a point for me?” (4.1.109), her father moans just before her collapse. Men's words, however, have amounted to seemingly lethal equivalents in his daughter's case. Hamlet's spoken daggers in the ear threaten to become an equally lethal metaphor in Much Ado about Nothing.²⁷

Granted Shakespeare's portrayal in Much Ado of the several inadequacies and failures of speech analyzed in the preceding pages, the play's audience wonders how words, which after all constitute a primary medium of drama, can effect the prosperous outcome of comedy. The reification of language, first as a talismanic name and then as authoritative writing, appears to offer a solution. Throughout Much Ado, characters insist upon virtues inherent in name, initially understood to be that of reputation. Concerning Leonato's question about gentlemen lost in the recent battle, a messenger responds, “But few of any sort, and none of name” (1.1.6). Later, during the gulling of Beatrice, Ursula says that “For shape, for bearing, argument, and valour,” Benedick “Goes foremost in report through Italy” (3.1.96-97)—a fact (rather than a fabrication) that urges Hero to say, “Indeed he hath an excellent good name” (3.1.98). The powerful condensation of reputation in name leads Claudio, albeit wrongheadedly, to try to make Hero, in the tradition of church catechism, “answer truly [in a negative spirit] to [her] name” (4.1.79).

Historically, the prince's name compresses many more efficacious virtues than simply that of his reputation. Most of these additional attributed virtues in late medieval/early modern cultures possessed quasi-supernatural properties.²⁸ At first Shakespeare in Much Ado skeptically dramatizes this dimension of the word. In the punchy dialogue of Dogberry with the Watch, the playwright appears intent on satirizing characters' stereotypic trust in the magical nature of the royal name. Told that they are to “comprehend” (apprehend) all vagrants, the Watch hears Dogberry conclude that they “are to bid any man stand, in the Prince's name” (3.3.25-26). But the supposed talismanic power of the prince's name disappears in the ridiculous dialogue which follows Dogberry's injunctions:

2. Watch:
How if a will not stand?
DOG:
Why then, take no note of him, but let him go, and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of a knave.
VERG:
If he will not stand when he is bidden, he is none of the Prince's subjects.

(3.3.27-32)

Here the Second Watchman, George Seacole, the literate neighbor, reveals a distrust of the purportedly essential force of the prince's name. This skeptical attitude gets reinforced by Dogberry's and Verges' absurd advice that the Watch should ignore a vagrant commanded to stop in the prince's name who instead walks away from them. Despite this skeptical staging, later, when Seacole “present[s] [represents] the Prince's own person” (3.3.73) and orders Conrade and Borachio, “in the Prince's name, stand!” (3.3.159), the villains obey his command. Since the Watch (Seacole included) immediately reveal to the villains their stupidity by believing that Deformed is a flesh-and-blood thief, and since Conrade and Borachio meekly obey the order to accompany the constable, playgoers deduce that the arresting force lies not in these obvious bumpkins, but in the prince's name. To the considerable degree that the play's comic resolution hinges on the apprehension of Borachio and his forthcoming recorded admission of guilt, the prince's name uttered by his deputy proves redemptive.²⁹

Seacole's ability to reify a truth-producing word is not limited to his role as the prince's deputy. “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune,” Dogberry tells him, “but to write and read comes by nature” (3.3.14-16). By nurture—not nature—Shakespeare and his contemporaries would most likely say. By being able to freeze through writing the evanescent, shifting, unreliable word, Seacole adumbrates a remedy for the near-tragedy wrought in Much Ado by slander and inherently imprecise speech.³⁰ It is his “pen and inkhorn” (3.5.54) that fix the verbal testimony of Borachio and provide the record by which Leonato, Don Pedro, and Claudio conclusively learn that an innocent woman has been roundly slandered.³¹ “Only get the learned writer to set down our excommunication [examination, communication],” Dogberry ebulliently commands Verges, “and meet me at the jail” (3.5.58-60). Shakespeare stresses the salvatory effect of the reified word by staging the written transcription of testimony in act 4, scene 2, the comic episode of the malefactors' examination.³² Despite the egregious malapropisms of Dogberry and company on this occasion (a reminder of the play's several problems of language), the Watch's indictment is recorded (4.2.39-59).³³ And it is done so, appropriately enough, in the prince's efficacious name: “Masters,” Dogberry addresses the Watch, “I charge you in the Prince's name accuse these men” (4.2.37-38). Nevertheless, one must realize that the pronouncement of the prince's name in Much Ado does not, strictly speaking, ideally state the truth or contain a truth; rather, it is an agent of secular power that helps discover or determine the truth. Shakespeare throughout his plays implies that the exercise of secular power to some degree always diminishes or impairs some kind of truth. The marks of physical abuse apparent on the pinioned Conrade's and Borachio's faces at the beginning of the interrogation scene in Kenneth Branagh's recent film version of the play tell audiences that the power of the prince's name may have limits, may need an even more powerful supplement for the complete revelation of a social or a romantic truth. Violated sadistically in this case is a truth about Christian charity (or one about humane treatment). More promising for the reclamation of language in Much Ado than the prince's name is the written poetic word.

The beneficial results of freezing unreliable, unconfirmable speech by writing it down also appear in Benedick's and Beatrice's tumultuous courtship. At play's end, Don Pedro's plot to cause the pair to fall irrevocably in love through hearsay comes to nothing when they tell one another that their reported and overheard protestations of love meant nothing. The unconfirmability of uttered speech, vanished into air without a trace, holds hostage the actually affectionate but once again distrustful pair. That is, it does so until Claudio and Hero produce stolen love sonnets of Benedick and Beatrice (5.4.85-90). Their secret writings arrest their words for all to read, conclusively trapping them and giving them the blessed relief of being able to acknowledge their genuine but hitherto denied love. “A miracle! here's our own hands against our hearts,” Benedick exclaims; “Come, I will have thee, but by this light I take thee for pity” (5.4.91-93). Rather than showing their hands against their hearts, however, Beatrice's and Benedick's amorous handwriting complies with the hidden yearnings of their hearts. The concord that the written legal record creates for the community of Messina has its counterpart in the relatively integrated personalities that the written poetic word makes possible in Beatrice and Benedick. In keeping with its biblical—especially Johannine—power, the imaginative word in Much Ado can make a man and woman, in the sense that the lovers' poetry gives them the first basis for the ultimate confidence to recreate themselves through the sacrament of marriage into one sanctified flesh. If spoken slander undoes them, the written poetic word promises their recreation.

But does spoken language have any restorative capability in Much Ado? Answering this question involves the subject of physical language. Friar Francis' ability to read the “words” of silent Hero's face leads to a declaration that ultimately saves her marriage. Whereas Claudio misinterprets the message of Hero's blushes (4.1.33-41), the friar correctly “hears” what they “utter”:

                                                                                          I have mark'd
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness beat away those blushes,
And in her eye there hath appear'd a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth. Call me a fool;
Trust not my reading nor my observations,
Which with experimental seal doth warrant
The tenor of my book; trust not my age,
My reverence, calling, nor divinity,
If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here
Under some biting error.

(4.1.158-70)

Friar Francis silently reads the words “encoded” in the “book” of Hero's face.³⁴ Benedick was fooled by Leonato's white beard as the guarantor of Hero's father's words (2.3.118-20).³⁵ The friar, however, explicitly invokes the nonverbal signifiers of his own advanced age, his priesthood, and the facts of his scholarly, reverent life as validators of his uttered judgment. He, of all the principal male characters in the play, is least caught up in the power games that distort and falsify what is said and heard. Playgoers gather that his piety, his wise chastity of life, determines his ability to perceive and speak the truth. Leonato initially rejects the friar's conclusion, perhaps because the churchman's authority does not derive from the political/sexual patriarchy that Hero's father represents. Nevertheless, Leonato eventually credits the friar's scheme for either reviving Claudio's love for Hero or disposing of her among a religious sisterhood. This scheme entails the advice that Leonato broadcast Hero's “death,” the report prompting Claudio's imagination to revalue what has been lost. Friar Francis' formulation of the dynamics of revaluing what has been lost amounts to the most eloquent, moving speech in Much Ado (4.1.210-43). It does, with Benedick's urging, win over Leonato, and it is a qualified success.³⁶ These facts testify to the source of the speech's authority, a learned, relatively pure speaker, disinterested in whether his scheme might bring him social prestige. In this respect, he contrasts sharply with his counterpart, Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, whose similar scheme is hatched partly to bring him credit for reconciling the Capulets and Montagues. Its failure theoretically is in keeping with the impurity—the vanity—of its conception.

The qualified success of Friar Francis' language contradicts Leonato's opinion about the ineffectuality of similar spoken advice. This opinion deserves quotation. Suffering from the imagined sin of his daughter and the ruin of his name, Leonato tells his brother Antonio that he could only credit the uttered counsel of a man exactly like himself, one who has been wronged by the sexual lapse of a daughter once dearly loved. “But there is no such man,” Leonato moans,

                                                                                          for, 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 give preceptial medicine to rage,
Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,
Charm ache with air, and agony with words.
No, no, 'tis all men's office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow,
But no man's virtue nor sufficiency
To be so moral when he shall endure
The like himself. Therefore give me no counsel:
My griefs cry louder than advertisement.

(5.1.20-31)

Leonato has apparently forgotten that a man most unlike himself, Friar Francis, counseled patience in language so charged that Leonato agreed to defer immediate judgment and participate in the saving plan proposed. A relatively dispassionate priest who has never had a daughter successfully inculcates a patience within Leonato that gives the friar's plan time to work. In one sense, Friar Francis' sayings have proved medicinal.

Given the role of the friar's language in Leonato's ultimate rehabilitation, playgoers conclude that Hero's father's part in the subsequent linguistic process of Claudio's recreation of Hero is fitting. As part of the friar's stratagem for renovating Claudio's love, Leonato commands the young man to compose a poetic epitaph, hang it on Hero's tomb, and “sing it to her bones” (5.1.279), actions which amount to recompense for participating in potentially lethal slander. Act 5, scene 3 stages this ritual behavior. Claudio's epitaph immortalizes Hero through the proclaimed fame of her chastity, slandered by villains. Like those of Shakespeare's sonnets, the text of Much Ado has survived time's ravages. In both cases, the poetic word grants a kind of eternity—to the Young Man of the sonnets and to Hero, “praising her [even after the Renaissance Claudio is] dumb” (dead) (5.3.10). Claudio's recreative words compensate for his earlier destructive language. His song has an effect both cathartic (for the speaker) and resurrectional (for the subject):

Pardon, goddess of the night,
Those that slew thy virgin knight;
For the which, with songs of woe,
Round about her tomb they go.
          Midnight, assist our moan,
          Help us to sigh and groan,
                    Heavily, heavily:
          Graves, yawn and yield your dead,
          Till death be uttered
                    Heavily, heavily.

(5.3.12-21)

The notion that this song should be sung “Till death be uttered” has purgative overtones. While “uttered” may mean “fully expressed, i.e. adequately lamented,”³⁷ the word also connotes “finally articulated, finally expelled.” The idea that speech can triumph over mortality gets reinforced by the proximate command that graves open to yield their dead. The conceit entails enlisting wraith-like mourners who can augment the volume of laments. By circling the tomb chanting the song and vowing to repeat the ceremony yearly (5.3.23), Claudio and Don Pedro, through incantatory means, intend to purge their sin and cast out (off) death. This last effect involves not so much a miracle as it does permanent release from feelings of morbidity and despair.

Nevertheless, metaphoric resurrection gets attached to Claudio's and Don Pedro's conceit in the suggestion of death's expulsion. Playgoers sense that privileged speech (elevated by being sung poetry) is beginning to work in Claudio's mind the resurrection of Hero. Intellectually, the charming effects of this self-begot language stimulate Claudio's imagination in the idealizing of Hero's image and the reclamation of his love. What was dead comes alive. And it does so through the force of poetic words, further empowered by their utterance in a ritual context. Late in the play, when Claudio and Don Pedro insist that Antonio's “daughter” is “Another Hero!” “The former Hero! Hero that is dead!” (5.4.62, 65), Leonato calmly explains, “She died, my lord, but whiles her slander liv'd” (5.4.66). His remark reemphasizes the main fact of the epitaph scene—that Hero was reborn when near-magical words of repentance and catharsis superseded (killed) the slander with which Hero's loss was synonymous.³⁸

Likewise, adversity and the self-examination that arises from it reform, partially at least, Benedick's speech. Together they work to dissolve the self-importance that distorts and inflates language. Benedick experiences an uncharacteristic impoverishment of speech as a result of Claudio's brutal destruction of the marriage ceremony and slander of Hero: “For my part I am so attir'd in wonder,” he admits, “I know not what to say” (4.1.144-45). Related to this inarticulateness, his love for Beatrice makes him realize, perhaps for one of the first times in his life, that he can have feelings that the most clever playing with language cannot convey. Attempting to express his passion for Beatrice in the form of a sonnet, he discovers, “Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried. I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby’—an innocent rhyme; for ‘scorn,’ ‘horn,’—a hard rhyme; for ‘school,’ ‘fool’—a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings! No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms” (5.2.34-40). The “halting” sonnet that Benedick finally manages to write is valuable as inscribed public proof of his love rather than as an adequate conveyor of that love. In this respect, he contrasts with Claudio, renovated through the vehicle of poetry. Nevertheless, love—as it does in a somewhat different way for Claudio—joins with adversity to correct, that is to say, to chasten and simplify Benedick's speech.

Like Shakespeare's King Henry V with regard to Katherine Princess of France, Benedick eschews “festival terms” and becomes disposed to woo Beatrice in plain, direct, unequivocal language. This plain idiom is heard almost immediately in Benedick's unprecedented declining a match of jests with Beatrice. When he says that only foul words passed between himself and Claudio and demands a kiss, she jokes: “Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkiss'd” (5.2.49-51). Benedick, however, protests, “Thou has frighted the word out of its right sense, so forcible is thy wit. But I must tell thee plainly, Claudio undergoes my challenge, and either I must shortly hear from him, or I will subscribe him a coward” (5.2.52-56). Significantly, Benedick objects for the first time in Much Ado to the disruptive, scornful jesting that has distinguished his language. The key phrase in Benedick's quoted protest is “tell thee plainly”—a mode of speech auditors would never have predicted from Benedick. His criticism of jesting necessarily entails an abatement of the vain need to call attention to himself through the supposedly amusing (but actually hostile) punning disruption of others' speech meanings. Don Pedro earlier foresaw Benedick's capacity for authentic speech. “He hath a heart as sound as a bell,” Don Pedro asserted, “and his tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks, his tongue speaks” (3.2.11-13). While in its local context Don Pedro's remark has slightly negative overtones (Benedick lacks an internal censor of impulsive speech that consequently rings a bit brazenly), his judgment forecasts Benedick's ability to articulate genuine heart-felt speech that is not overly calculated.³⁹

The negative connotations of Don Pedro's statement suggest that speech in Much Ado can be tempered but not wholly reformed. Benedick could be said, at play's end, to approximate roughly Beatrice's model of a tempered speaker midway between Don John's sullen silences and terseness and an uneducated Benedick's disruptive, oblique garrulousness. Benedick does not completely exorcise his jesting spirit after his criticism of Beatrice's punning word associations (see, for example, 5.2.82-86, 5.2.102-4, and 5.4.48-51), but his manifestation of a new confidence to withstand barbed witticisms without responding in kind reflects his tempering of a problematic speech trait. Hearing Don Pedro tease him with being “‘Benedick, the married man’” (5.4.98), he steadfastly pronounces, “I'll tell thee what, Prince; a college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humour. Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram? No: if a man will be beaten with brains, a shall wear nothing handsome about him. In brief, 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” (5.4.99-107).

Benedick realizes that a person may with genuine impunity contradict one of his or her previous statements, as long as the speaker understands that the fault lies not in language but in the essentially inconstant humanity of the speaker. This inconstancy—this “giddiness”—will always preclude the ideal tempering of one's speech. Nevertheless, a less-than-perfect tempering of speech and the kind of verbal contradiction represented by Benedick can be harmless and blameless as long as speakers' self-awareness of their own inconstancy breeds the humility in everyone not to make too much of a linguistic inconsistency or fault.⁴⁰ Coupled with this humility is the self-respect that allows scornful jests to never influence one's settled opinions and behavior, ridiculous though these attributes at times may be. Benedick, with these insights expressed in relatively unadorned, direct speech, fulfills in Much Ado the secondary etymology of his name: “Speak Well” (“Bene-Dic”).⁴¹ While Benedick's name will never achieve the talismanic power of the Prince of Messina's, it does at last truly capture and express a palpable new understanding refined in the crucible of hearsay and slander.

Notes

1. See, for example, Paul A. Jorgensen, “Much Ado about Nothing,” in Redeeming Shakespeare's Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 22-42.

2. All quotations of Much Ado about Nothing are from the Arden text, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1981).

3. Anne Barton, introduction to Much Ado about Nothing, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 369. Since the word “guarded” for Shakespeare's contemporaries could mean both “protected” and “ornamented,” the secondary connotation of the word in Benedick's quip ironically conveys the speaker's use of puns and facetious speech to protect a vulnerable, straight-thinking, straight-talking self. Here he imagines that Don Pedro uses jests for the same purpose.

4. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), 65-81, esp. 68: “Cupid is not responsible for calumny; but ‘hearsay’ is a main force in both love-plots: each is about its effects on proud, self-willed, self-centered and self-admiring creatures.”

5. René Girard, “Love by Hearsay: Mimetic Strategies in Much Ado about Nothing,” in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 82.

6. Carol Thomas Neely, in Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), notes that “Claudio protects himself from Hero's sexuality by viewing her as a remote, idealized love object who is not to be touched or even talked to: ‘she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on’ (1.1.183)” (44).

7. For the extralinguistic properties of the speech act of a spoken oath, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1969; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 83; and John Searle, “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts,” in Language, Mind, and Knowledge, ed. Keith Gunderson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), 344-69, esp. 354.

8. See Maurice Hunt, “The Voices of A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 218-38, esp. 222-23.

9. For the dramatic importance of this idea in The Tempest, see Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare's Romance of the Word (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 117-19.

10. For the centrality of preposterousness in this literal sense in the design of Love's Labour's Lost, See Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Reversals: Love's Labor's Lost,” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 435-82.

11. That the theme of human “giddiness” (radical inconstancy) is central to the design of Much Ado has been argued by Ejner J. Jensen, Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 71; and by Graham Storey, “The Success of Much Ado about Nothing,” in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1959), 128-43, esp. 142.

12. Mark Taylor, in “Presence and Absence in Much Ado about Nothing,” Centennial Review 33 (1989): 1-12, has argued that Borachio's violation of chronology in telling his tale merely betrays the Spanish etymology of his name—“borracho” (drunkard). But while Borachio may have just emptied several cans of ale, he remains sufficiently sober to make his purported digression on fashion illustrate humankind's propensity for giddiness, for inconstancy in all things. When impatient Conrade interjects, “But art not thou thyself giddy with the fashion too, that thou hast shifted out of thy tale into telling me of the fashion?” (3.3.136-38), Borachio carefully answers, “Not so, neither; but know that I have tonight wooed Margaret, the Lady Hero's gentlewoman, by the name of Hero” (3.3.139-41). Borachio's reply strongly implies that he calculated his anatomy of fashion to exemplify the universal trait of inconstancy that Margaret practices when she abandons loyalty to her mistress for participation in her lover's strange charade of switching names. In other words, Borachio's strategy may be partly designed to excuse Margaret's behavior. For other arguments that Borachio's account of fashion does not constitute a digression, see John A. Allen, “Dogberry,” Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 35-53, esp. 40-43; and David Ormerod, “Faith and Fashion in Much Ado about Nothing,” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 93-105, esp. 93-95.

13. “In the sixteenth century,” Margreta de Grazia argues, “it was assumed that defects in man brought about confused speech; in the seventeenth century, it became widely held that confused speech brings on many of the defects in man” (“Shakespeare's View of Language: An Historical Perspective,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 [1978]: 381). De Grazia's judgment is uncannily justified by the facts that Much Ado most likely straddles the two centuries and that in it, Shakespeare depicts both of the relationships that De Grazia describes.

14. The definitive (and original) major study of this aspect of Shakespeare's art—the problematic difference between a character's singular intention and the less specific public, social language that necessarily distorts (or perverts) it to some degree—appears in Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), esp. 22-46 and 260-84. Francis Bacon, in his well-known description of the Idols of the Market-Place in Novum Organum anticipates Burckhardt's linguistic thesis (see The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 15 vols. [London, 1875], 4:54-55 and 61).

15. Anthony B. Dawson, in “Much Ado about Signifying,” Studies in English Literature 22 (1982): 211-21, esp. 215, also claims that this dialogue is about Benedick's preoccupation with making others' words mean what he would have them signify. Dawson asserts that “[i]n general [in Much Ado], language, as a system of messages, is consistently, comically, called into question: further messages are intercepted, misinterpreted, overheard in a variety of ways that move the plot forward and pose problems of interpretation for the characters” (212).

16. See J. R. Firth, Papers in Linguistics: 1934-51 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 27 and 182; M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), 27-35, passim; and Fernando Peñalosa, Introduction to the Sociology of Language (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1981), 23.

17. The Riverside Shakespeare (See note 3).

18. Camille Wells Slights has argued that Much Ado “is centrally concerned with the social nature of language—with the power of language and with language as an articulation of power” (“The Unauthorized Language of Much Ado about Nothing,” in The Elizabethan Theatre XII, ed. A. L. Magnusson and C. E. McGee [Toronto: P. D. Meany, 1993], 116). Slights anticipates several of my points—such as that about this comedy's characters' “talk about the problematics of language” (114) in the play's opening scenes (113-15)—but her line of argument and evidence remain essentially different from mine.

19. Michael Taylor, in “Much Ado about Nothing: The Individual in Society,” Essays in Criticism 23 (1973): 146-53, argues that the dialogue presently under analysis (2.1.46-52) joins with other passages in the play to associate certain traits of Beatrice with more extreme, pernicious counterparts in Don John: “Like Don John, she appears to be totally antagonistic to any compulsion from without, jealously guarding the freedom of her individual will” (146-47). I would add that in the present case, that freedom involves the right of a woman to speak and be heard in her own right, a deserved liberty that makes Beatrice's rebellion different in kind from Don John's.

20. See David Bergeron, “Sexuality in Cymbeline,” Essays in Literature 10 (1983): 159-68, esp. 163.

21. David Ormerod alternatively judges that Leonato's harsh remark (2.1.57-58), “if we discount the lewd joke, is tantamount to saying that a man is no more than the clothes he wears” (“Faith and Fashion,” 96)—in this case the “fashionable” woman “fitted” to him.

22. Citing these lines, John Drakakis claims that Leonato “transforms Hero's body into a ‘writing’ … lamenting her loss of value as a signifier in the masculine discourse of possession” (“Trust and Transgression: The Discursive Practices of Much Ado about Nothing,” in Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry, ed. Richard Machin and Christopher Norris [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 77).

23. The quoted opinion is that of Anne Barton in The Riverside Shakespeare, 386.

24. For this stereotyping of Cressida's name, see Maurice Hunt, “Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Christian Epistemology,” Christianity and Literature 42 (1993): 243-60, esp. 255-56.

25. Like Drakakis, Slights concludes that Hero, “dehumanized by being deprived of language … 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’” (“Unauthorized Language,” 121)—printed also, I would add, in a text written by Christopher Marlowe.

26. Jean Howard concludes that “when Hero hears herself named whore at her wedding, she does not contest that construction of herself; she swoons beneath its weight. It is as if there were no voice with which to contest the forces inscribing her in the order of fallen ‘woman’ women. … What Claudio gets [at play's end] is the still-silent Hero, the blank sheet upon which men write whore or goddess as their fears or desires dictate” (“Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of Gender and Rank in Much Ado about Nothing,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor [New York: Methuen, 1987], 179 and 181).

27. The motif of imperfect speech in Much Ado symbolically condenses in Balthasar's claim that his “bad … voice” slanders the musical songs that he sings (2.3.44-45). After he sings “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,” Benedick jokes, “And he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged him, and I pray God his bad voice bode no mischief” (2.3.79-81). Benedick confirms the notion of a bad voice ruining an exquisite message. The episode assumes an emblematic significance in the flawed Messinan world of words.

28. Focusing upon Genesis 2:19-20, wherein God parades the animals by Adam to encourage him to name them, early modern commentators such as Richard Mulcaster (1582) and Joshua Sylvester (1592) extrapolated the idea that Adam's intuitive naming the creatures instantaneously gave him knowledge of their essences. (For the historical development of this idea, see William C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in “Love's Labour's Lost” [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976], 12-13). Richard II constitutes Shakespeare's fullest analysis of the theory that the ruler's name (and his naming) have supernatural properties and effects. In respect to this, see James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad: “Richard II” to “Henry V” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 13.

29. Phoebe S. Spinrad, in “Dogberry Hero: Shakespeare's Comic Constables in Their Communal Context,” Studies in Philology 89 (1992): 161-78, judges that “[s]ince Dogberry invokes ‘the Prince's name’ when briefing his deputies, he is obviously aware of the bureaucratic channels to which he is responsible” (165). My analysis, however, indicates that this invocation involves much more than bureaucratic deference. Nevertheless, René Girard asserts that “there is one more reason for the general instability of opinion in Much Ado about Nothing. This is the prince himself, around whom everyone revolves, but who cannot provide a stable center for the very reason that he is just as decentered and mimetic as everybody else” (“Love by Hearsay,” 88). My analysis concludes that while the Prince of Messina may to some degree be “decentered,” his name becomes a central deed in the play. In this respect, he contrasts with Don John who, as John Drakakis has pointed out, lacks a legitimate name, a fact which precludes the lasting power to name socially or create verbally (“Trust and Transgression,” 73).

30. Jonathan Goldberg, in Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), provides extensive evidence for the early modern English belief that the word inscribed by handwriting invests the oral word with diverse social energies and efficacies.

31. While 3.5.53-55 clearly indicates Shakespeare's intention to make Seacole the recorder of the malefactors' examination, the staging of that event (4.2) suggests that the Town Clerk (or sexton) may have performed the role in original performances. While Seacole is present in this latter episode, Dogberry exclaims, “where's the sexton? Let him write down ‘the Prince's officer coxcomb’” and “O that he [the Town Clerk] were here to write me down an ass!” (4.2.67-68, 72-73). (Dogberry's second utterance occurs moments after the Town Clerk's exit, at 4.2.63.) Nevertheless, my point about the value of the written as opposed to the spoken word in Much Ado's subplot stands irrespective of the identity of the transcriber in act 4, scene 2.

32. Spinrad remarks that Dogberry does not appear “to be liable to an unpopular constable's problem of having literate but malicious neighbors falsify what they are reading and writing for him. Dogberry's literate deputies obey his orders, and the Sexton (or Town Clerk) who transcribes the testimony in the examination of prisoners is careful to guide the testimony into the correct channels” (“Dogberry Hero,” 164).

33. Throughout his career Shakespeare implies that truth in speech has something to do with rationality and then something to do with qualities beyond (or apart) from rationality: qualities such as the madness of King Lear, the stupidity of Bottom, and the piety, virtually muted in Hero's case, of Leonato's daughter and of Friar Francis in Much Ado. In his denseness and malapropisms, Dogberry invites comparison with Bottom, but a search of the text of Much Ado turns up no speech of Dogberry's comparable to Bottom's garbled yet nevertheless authoritative echo of passages from 1 Corinthians in his awestruck formulation of supernatural mysteries that he has experienced (A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Riverside Shakespeare 4.1.203-17). Shakespeare gives certain marginalized characters—the biblical last who will one day be first—an inside track on true speech (which is close to silence) because their authority appears guaranteed by something other than socially privileged male statements, in short, by God. Dogberry joins Friar Francis and Hero as one of the more pious characters in Much Ado (God's name is repeatedly on his lips), and he approaches the truth-speaking of the other two characters but he does not quite match their achievement, perhaps because a vain insistence on social prestige (power) afflicts his speech. The nature of Dogberry's comic malapropisms betrays his pitiful desire that auditors perceive him to be more educated and socially prominent than he will ever be (e.g., 4.2.75-83). Jean Howard has concluded that Dogberry's and Verges' “gift of intuition is bought at the price of speech and rationality. Dogberry and Verges exist almost outside of language, and this displacement denies them any real social power” (“Renaissance Antitheatricality,” 177).

34. For the literary topoi of the human face as a “book” to be read, see Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 334-37.

35. Benedick receives comic poetic punishment for his engrained distrust of others' speech when, during the scene of the trick played upon him, Leonato's white beard seems to him to confirm the truth of the old man's actually deceitful words of Beatrice's amorous behavior. “I should think this a gull, but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it. Knavery cannot sure hide himself in such reverence” (2.3.118-20). But knavery does lurk behind this cliché of truthfulness. Despite his verbal acumen, Benedick labors under some mistaken stereotypes of kinds of speakers and their language, one of which is that elderly years and the whiteness of a beard always promise the truth of speech by a possessor of these attributes. In this respect, Benedick appears verbally naive.

36. The friar predicts that Claudio will revalue Hero when he hears that “she died upon his words” (4.1.223). In fact, he repairs his idea of her only after he learns from Borachio that she was the victim of Don John's slanderous plot (5.1.225-46). The report of her wronged innocence, not the narration of her death from his rejection, moves Claudio to reimagine her worth. “Sweet Hero!” Claudio concludes; “Now thy image doth appear / In the rare semblance that I lov'd it first” (5.1.245-46). This notorious discrepancy does not override Claudio's general conformity to the friar's psychological script. Among the many commentators on the play who have remarked this discrepancy are Barbara K. Lewalski, “Love, Appearance, and Reality: Much Ado about Something,” Studies in English Literature 8 (1968): 235-51, esp. 249-50; Carol Cook, “‘The Sign of Her Honor’: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado about Nothing,” PMLA 101 (1986): 186-202, esp. 196-97; and Neely, Broken Nuptials, 51-53. Neely remarks that “only in Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline does the mock death by itself lead to the guilt, penitence, and forgiveness predicted by the Friar [of Much Ado]” (52).

37. The Riverside Shakespeare, 394.

38. My argument for the importance of the tomb/epitaph scene for the potential success of Claudio and Hero's later marriage questions the negative overtones of Neely's claim that “Claudio performs a ritualistic but impersonal penance” (Broken Nuptials, 55).

39. Several critics have charted a reformation of Benedick's character in the latter acts of Much Ado. Among them is Jensen, who notes that “[s]omewhere between Beatrice's account of Benedick as boaster, coward, trencherman, and affliction and the messenger's report of a ‘good soldier’ and one who ‘hath done good service … in these wars’ … exists the Benedick who will emerge later in the play” (Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy, 50).

40. Lewalski identifies Benedick's play-ending assessment of humankind's “giddiness” as an insight comparable to the Neoplatonic mode of knowledge that love brings: “Benedick explicitly renounces foolish consistency, and his observation that ‘man is a giddy thing’ (V.iv.108) signals the lovers' new affirmation of the whole range of human life and activity” (“Love, Appearance, and Reality,” 245).

41. Critics generally agree that the primary Latin etymology of Benedick's name is “‘Benedictus,’ he who is blessed” (Humphreys' Introduction of Much Ado 87), a counterpart to “‘Beatrix,’ she who blesses” (88). Considered in light of the two characters' painful mutual gibes, the complementary primary etymologies appear highly ironic.