SOURCE: Myhill, Nova. “Spectatorship in/of Much Ado About Nothing.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39, no. 2 (spring 1999): 291-311.

[In the following essay, Myhill observes that Much Ado about Nothing is centrally concerned with the problems related to knowledge and perception, and argues that the depiction in the play of numerous deceptions highlights Shakespeare's methodology for creating different modes of interpretation.]

In the past twenty years, a great deal of criticism has focused on concerns about appearances in the early modern period, particularly in terms of “self-fashioning”;¹ in this article, I want to look at the other side of this issue: the fashioning not of the self but of others through theatrical display. The debate over the stage in early modern England was also a debate over the ways in which audiences perceived and were affected by spectacles. This debate, at its most polemical, led the theater's detractors to claim that audiences would “learne howe … to beguyle, howe to betraye … howe to murther, howe to poyson, howe to disobey and rebell agaynst Princes,” and its supporters to claim the theater “teach[es] the subjects obedience to their King … shew[s] the people the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions and insurrections … present[s] them with the flourishing estate of such as live in obedience, exhorting them to allegeance, dehorting them from all trayterous and fellonious stratagems.”² These claims can easily be applied to the same plays; the “trayterous and fellonious stratagems” that Thomas Heywood claims the theater teaches its audience members to avoid are the same as those John Northbrooke claims it teaches them to perform. But playwrights recognized the power of the audience over the play as well as the converse that so agitated the theater's opponents.

For the antitheatrical tracts of the 1580s, the threatening power of the stage lies in the inevitable interpretive failure of its audience—in the way in which “straunge consortes of melody … costly apparel … effeminate gestures … and wanton speache … by the privie entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, and … gaule the minde, where reason and vertue should rule the roste.”³ Playwrights seem to have shared the antitheatrical writers' interest in, though not their despair of, the ways in which their audiences perceived spectacles. Much Ado about Nothing is centrally concerned with problems of knowledge and perception. The representation of multiple deceptions reveals a mechanism of creating methods of interpretation—the process by which narratives ensure particular readings of spectacles, at times in the face of other equally possible interpretations. The theater audience's assumption of its own privileged position as eavesdropper is undercut by the frequency with which the play's characters are deceived by their assumptions that eavesdropping offers unproblematic access to truth.⁴

When Claudio denounces Hero at their abortive wedding, he asks as a means of confirming his accusation, “Leonato, stand I here? / Is this the prince? Is this the prince's brother? / Is this face Hero's? Are our eyes our own?”⁵ If, as Leonato admits, “All this is so,” then Hero is guilty of seeming unchastity and Claudio's denunciation and repudiation of her is acceptable within the social framework of the play (IV.i.66). But Leonato is wrong; all of this is not so. In supposing that our eyes are our own in the same unarguable way that he “stand[s] here,” Claudio implies that only one interpretation of a spectacle is possible—a position the play is at some pains to dispute. Claudio sees Hero's face, but it is not the same face he saw the previous night at Hero's window because, in the deception of Claudio and Don Pedro, their eyes are extensions of Don John's vision, not their own. Moreover, the theater audience is denied direct access to the pivotal moments in Don Pedro and Claudio's courtship of Hero—Don Pedro's wooing of her at the masked ball and the scene of Margaret and Borachio at Hero's window—and instead must cope with multiple and contradictory narratives it can only measure against each other. In its dependence on frequently false narratives, the theater audience also sees with eyes that are not its own.

From the first scene, Much Ado presents a world of differing interpretations which cannot be reconciled. Claudio says of Hero that “In mine eye, she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on,” but Benedick “can see yet without spectacles, and [sees] no such matter” (I.i.139-40). While a difference in taste does not indicate a fundamental difference in perception, this emphasis on sight reappears throughout the play in describing the assumptions that characters bring to their observations. When Don Pedro asks Claudio about his feelings for Hero, Claudio answers that he “looked upon her with a soldier's eye” (I.i.224) before he went to the wars, but now that

war-thoughts
Have left their places vacant, in their rooms
Come thronging soft and delicate desires,
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying I liked her ere I went to wars.

(I.i.227-31)

The way Claudio saw Hero before he went to war and the way he sees her at the start of the play seem to differ only situationally. In attributing his new view of Hero to the promptings of his “delicate desires,” which seem to function independently from the “me” they prompt, Claudio defines his vision as involuntary and unquestionable. Benedick marvels at Claudio's new way of seeing, wondering “may I be so converted and see with these eyes?” (II.iii.18). Eyes in Much Ado are not what one sees with, but what one sees through—the filters that lead characters to see people in particular, conventionalized ways. At the play's end, Leonato claims that Benedick has “the sight” of his “eye of love … from me, / From Claudio and the prince,” and that Beatrice's “eye of favor” for Benedick “my daughter lent her” through the false narratives of each other's passion that Beatrice and Benedick overhear (V. iv. 23-6). This essay examines how characters in the play come to “see with these eyes.”

The possibility that spectacles can “convert” their audiences against their wills is the basis of a persistent anxiety in antitheatrical writing. In Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), Stephen Gosson warns that “as long as we know ourselves to be fleshy, beholding those examples in Theaters that are incident to flesh, we are taught by other men's examples how to fall. And they that came honest to a play may depart infected.”⁶ The language of infection, which appears frequently in antitheatrical writings, implies an audience helpless to avoid the influence of the plays. Gosson's final “action” of Playes Confuted is a discussion of “eye Effects yt this poyson works among us … These outward spectacles effeminate and soften ye hearte of men, vice is learned in beholding, sense is tickled, desire pricked, & those impressions of mind are secretly conveyed over to ye gazers, which ye players do counterfeit on ye stage.”⁷ He describes these “effects” as entirely outside the playgoers' control. In his example of the effect of Bacchus's seduction of Ariadne on its spectators, Gosson claims that the audience reproduces what it sees: “when Bacchus rose up … the beholders rose up … when they sware, the company sware … when they departed to bedde; the company presently was set on fire, they that were married posted home to their wiues; they that were single vowed very solemly to be wedded.”⁸ While the first set of imitations, rising up and swearing, are physically identical—imitation in the simplest and most literal sense—the second set involves a replication of the mental state, not the physical. “Vow[ing] very solemly to be wedded” is not the same thing as having sex, but in this context it suggests that the effect of seeing Bacchus and Ariadne was to compel the audience to replicate not the physical action of seduction, but the mental state that enabled this action.

Gosson's example suggests that “we” will all have no choice but to learn from the same examples. His formulation implies a stable relationship between spectator and spectacle, in which the spectator is always at the mercy of his (for Gosson's spectator is always male) involuntary responses.⁹ But John Northbrooke, in the earliest pamphlet directed specifically against the London public theaters, recognizes what Gosson attempts to deny—that members of the theater audience are simultaneously spectators and spectacles, and vulnerable on both accounts. His anxieties about female theatergoers stem from their positions as spectacles for and spectators of the male theatergoers and actors: “What safegarde of chastitie can there be, where the woman is desired with so many eyes, where so many faces look upon her and again she upon so many?”¹⁰ For Gosson, whose spectators all become like Bacchus, not like Ariadne, spectatorship is a male province, and his expressed concern for female playgoers is that “you can forbid no man, that vieweth you, to note you and that noteth you to judge you.”¹¹ In becoming spectators—a role that Gosson implicitly denies them—women make spectacles of themselves and are vulnerable to the judgment of the male spectators. But if spectacles shape the viewer, as Gosson and many other writers claim, does not the woman have as much threatening power as the play? And if the opposite is true, then is not the play threatened as much as the woman?

The “nothing” about which there is much ado in Shakespeare's play is simultaneously the female genital “nothing” and “noting”—habits of observation and interpretation.¹² “Noting” becomes a problem in the play because the male characters accept that women should be, as Hero is, silent and defined by the ways in which they are seen.¹³ Hero is defined visually not only for Claudio, but for the theater audience, which has more access to her than her lover, but still cannot see or hear her response to Don Pedro's offstage wooing, cannot hear her response to Claudio's declaration of his own silence, “the perfectest herald of joy” (II.i.232). Hero characteristically lacks a voice and “becomes in effect a sign to be read and interpreted by others.”¹⁴

The contested territory of Much Ado about Nothing is not action, but interpretation, and while the theater audience occupies a privileged position in relation to the action of the play, the play presents it with audiences that also believe their position privileged and shows how that assumption leaves them vulnerable to having their readings controlled by the play's internal dramatists Don John, Borachio, and Don Pedro.¹⁵ The represented audience's perception of an event is based on both what it is allowed to see and hear and what it expects—an expectation created by a narrative like the one of Hero's falseness that Don John provides Don Pedro and Claudio or the narratives of the other's love and their own shortcomings to which Beatrice and Benedick are exposed. While much criticism examines the difference between Don Pedro's benevolent and Don John's malevolent deception, the similarity both of methods and of results is striking.¹⁶ The represented audience's perception of its spectatorial power allows it to accept an externally imposed narrative over the evidence of its senses. By presenting the manipulation of interpretation and questioning the privileged status of the spectator, the play challenges the idea of omniscience in any spectator, or the possibility of any spectator having the sort of automatic access to truth that the position implies for both characters in the play and the theater audience.

Don Pedro, Claudio, Beatrice, and Benedick all observe and overhear scenes actually predicated on their presence, which they believe to be predicated on their absence; the deceptions are based on the victim's assumption that he or she is seeing and hearing a private scene. In conceiving of themselves as subjects making discoveries, they become the objects of deception; they are not simply spectators, but spectacles of their gullers. The gulling scenes emphasize how visible the supposed eavesdropper is; Benedick's access to Don Pedro, Claudio, and Leonato's conversation in the orchard is based not on his success in “hid[ing] me in the arbour,” but his failure (II.iii.28). Three lines after Benedick conceals himself, Don Pedro asks Claudio “See you where Benedick hath hid himself?” (II.iii.32) and Claudio has, “very well, my lord” (II.iii.33). In the parallel scene involving Beatrice, Hero tells Ursula to “look where Beatrice like a lapwing runs / Close by the ground, to hear our conference” (III.i.24-5), and Borachio, describing the unrepresented scene at Hero's window, tells Conrade that “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” between himself and Margaret (III.iii.121-4). The discrepancy between their spectatorial position and the one they believe they occupy leads characters to accept what they hear as truth, and model themselves accordingly. With the sole exception of the watch's overhearing of Borachio and Conrade's conversation in act III, scene iii, all other represented eavesdropping occurs with the contrivance of those being overheard; the positions of performer and audience are reversed.

All of the upper-class male characters in Messina are quite aware of the possibility of deception; they recognize that the world around them is not transparent and that other characters may wish to show them a false version of events. Benedick twice considers and rejects the idea that he is being gulled, Borachio knows that Claudio and Don Pedro “will scarcely believe this [that Hero is false] without trial” (II.ii.30-1), and even the perennial dupe Claudio fears that Don Pedro praises Hero “to fetch me in” (I.i.165). But Claudio's very awareness that he may be deceived ensures that he will be, causing him to distrust his own experience of Don Pedro and Hero, and to accept both the news of Don Pedro's betrayal that he hears “in name of Benedick” and his observation spying on Hero's window (II.i.128). S. P. Cerasano claims that “the natural tendency of the residents of Messina is toward gullibility, inconstancy, unpredictability and slander,” but this gullibility is less a “natural tendency” than a product of characters' awareness of their vulnerability to deception.¹⁷

Eavesdropping, rather than conversation, is established as the accepted model for receiving credible information throughout the play; to see or hear an action and believe yourself to be unobserved or unrecognized is to see that action as authentic and unstaged. Most characters in Much Ado believe that the awareness of audience is what creates “performance”: people cannot act for an audience if they are unaware of it. Thus, assuming (correctly) that “Hero” is unaware that he is watching her window, Claudio reinterprets all of her previously displayed behavior as a staged action. The “exterior shows” cease to be an indicator of maidenhood and Claudio rereads Hero's blushes when he accuses her of unfaithfulness as “guiltiness, not modesty” (IV.i.35-7).

Claudio and his fellow eavesdroppers are correct in believing that the awareness of audience is what creates “performance,” but not in the way that they, as audiences who believe themselves invisible, suppose. Don Pedro and Don John both take advantage of the belief that eavesdropping constitutes authentic experience. As Anthony Dawson observes, “for most of the characters, eavesdropping … is a natural, spontaneous gesture,” a habit of placing themselves at one remove from conversation so that they can have the perspective that they believe guarantees access to truths that other characters would not tell them to their faces.¹⁸ In the parallel scenes in which first Benedick and then Beatrice believe themselves to be secretly observing the discussion of the other's passion, they assume that since the spectatorial position is one of power, they know more than the characters they watch because only they know of their presence at this private conference.

In both cases, the gullers insist that their victim should not be told of the other's love because they would “make a sport of it” (II.iii.134, cf. III.i.58). In gulling Benedick, Don Pedro and his assistants raise the specter of deception in order to dispel it; Don Pedro suggests that Beatrice “doth but counterfeit” so that Leonato may describe her passion (II.iii.92). Benedick's judgment that “this can be no trick” is based on outward signs of reliability (II.iii.181); he “should think this a gull, but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it: knavery cannot sure hide himself in such reverence” (II.iii.106-7). His explicit consideration of what constitutes reliable evidence emphasizes that belief is not a default condition in Much Ado; everything is open to the accusation of “counterfeit,” which must be explicitly refuted.

The circumstances of Benedick making his “discovery” convince him of its veracity, and lead him to reinterpret Beatrice and himself. Resolving to love Beatrice, Benedick explicitly reacts against the description he has heard of himself as a man who “hath a contemptible spirit” (II.iii.153-4), proclaiming that “happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending” (II.iii.187-8). He constructs himself as a lover, resolving to be “horribly in love with her” (II.iii.191-2). Just as he redefines himself in opposition to the unflattering portrait he has overheard, Benedick reads in Beatrice's unaltered behavior toward him “some marks of love in her” (II.iii.199-200), reinterpreting her sentences to make their meaning consistent with what he has heard: “I took no more pains for those thanks than any pains you took to thank me: that's as much as to say any pains I take for you is as easy as thanks” (II.iii.209-11). Beatrice's language, like Hero's blush when Claudio refuses to marry her, is subject to reinterpretation to make it fit into the idea Benedick has received about her from outside agents. Benedick, having accepted Claudio, Don Pedro, and Leonato's narrative, reads Beatrice's avowed indifference as a form of acting which he, as an audience member with access to more information than she believes he has, can now penetrate and interpret correctly.

Benedick's labored reinterpretation of Beatrice's summons to dinner points not to the new clarity of his perception as he claims, but to his newfound determination to read her as Don Pedro, Leonato, and Claudio have suggested that he should. When Benedick, in asking Leonato for Beatrice's hand, tells him that he “with an eye of love requite[s] her,” Leonato seems justified in answering, “The sight whereof I think you had from me, / From Claudio, and the prince” (V.iv.24-6). Benedick's reading of Beatrice is socially constructed, and his shift in vision is the one Don Pedro arranges.

Don Pedro's plan for winning Hero for Claudio assumes a less complex response from her than from either Beatrice or Benedick. While he expects both of them to react against a negative reading of themselves, Hero is to be won almost without her consent. Don Pedro proposes to “take her hearing prisoner with the force / And strong encounter of my amorous tale,” implying that his speech will exercise absolute control over Hero (I.i.250-1); once he has taken her hearing prisoner, “the conclusion is, she shall be thine” (I.i.253). The possibility of failure, or even of a response from Hero, never crosses Don Pedro's mind. Hero, Don Pedro's audience, is to be molded by “the force / And strong encounter of my amorous tale” (I.i.250-1); her hearing, as separable from her reason as Claudio's “delicate desires” are from his, is to form her response (I.i.229). Don Pedro's confidence in the power of speech seems justified by the success of narratives throughout the play in changing their hearers' methods of interpretation. Benedick and Beatrice are persuaded to regard each other “with an eye of favor” (V.iv.21) through the conversations among their friends that they imagine they overhear by chance, and Claudio and Don Pedro accept the sight of Hero as “every man's Hero” after hearing Don John's account of what they will see (III.ii.78). But Don Pedro's success in winning Hero is not necessarily the testimony to his eloquence that he imagines; well before he takes her out to dance, Hero, as Leonato tells her, “know[s her] answer” to any proposal from the prince (II.i.49).

The theater audience, in the presence of Don Pedro and Claudio's explicitly “secret” communication onstage, supposes itself to have a more complete narrative than the play's other characters who are unaware of the scene (I.i.151). But this privilege is undermined throughout the first act, as Antonio's servant and Borachio, both invisible to the theater audience, Don Pedro, and Claudio, are retroactively introduced into the scene, and bring back varying reports to their masters. If Claudio and Don Pedro suppose their conversation secret, then so does the theater audience suppose its access to it unique. The two scenes following Don Pedro's revelation of his plot make the audience position progressively more crowded. By the time the first act has finished, the “secret” of Don Pedro's plan is known, in one form or another, to almost every character in the play, and the theater audience's position as privileged observer has come into question.

Despite Don Pedro's faith in his ability to manipulate perception through narrative, his impersonation of Claudio, which he believes will win Hero through “the force / And strong encounter of my amorous tale” wins her instead because of her obedience to her father (I.i.250-1). After Antonio tells Leonato what his servant has overheard, Leonato resolves to “acquaint my daughter withal, that she may be the better prepared for an answer, if peradventure this be true” (I.ii.17-8). Hero's response is determined before the performance begins, not by Don Pedro's eloquence in the role of Claudio but by Leonato and Antonio's instructions to Hero, based on the assumption that Don Pedro is her suitor. The wooing scene which Don Pedro wishes to enact becomes a scene in which his audience knows far more than he supposes, and the presence of multiple narratives of Don Pedro's “secret” conversation with Claudio, which was not to produce any, allows Don John and Borachio to suggest to Claudio, plausibly enough, that Don Pedro “is enamored on Hero,” particularly when Don Pedro's performance of wooing Hero becomes a secret scene to which Hero alone, not Claudio and not the theater audience, has access (II.i.121-2).

When Don John and Borachio tell Claudio that Don Pedro woos for himself, the theater audience, although it can be sure of their motives, cannot have the immediate certainty that they are lying. Don John's claim that “Sure my brother is amorous on Hero, and hath withdrawn her father to break with him about it” (II.i.115-6) before he makes clear that he and Borachio are performing for Claudio causes editors to insert notes explaining that Don John does not actually believe this,¹⁹ and “Garrick's text (1777) makes this explicit by inserting ‘Now then for a trick of contrivance’ at the beginning of the speech.”²⁰ But the play text offers no such certainty; Don Pedro's courtship is inaccessible to any audience, including the paying one, until it is over. Claudio instantly believes, and Benedick later is willing to consider the possibility, that Don John and Borachio are telling the truth. The possibility of Don Pedro wooing for himself is at least voiced by every man at the ball except Don Pedro.²¹ Don John's falseness is no guarantee of Don Pedro's truth.

Believing that Don John and Borachio mistake him for Benedick and are thus transparent conduits of information, Claudio accepts without question their claim that Don Pedro woos Hero for himself, reasoning that “beauty is a witch, / Against whose charms faith melteth into blood” (II.i.135-6). Claudio supposes that rather than taking “her hearing prisoner with the force / And strong encounter of my amorous tale,” Don Pedro has himself been bewitched in looking at Hero (I.i.250-1). Hero's status suddenly and dangerously shifts, from the audience which can be controlled by what she hears, Don Pedro's words entering her ear, to the spectacle before which he is similarly powerless. But Hero's consistent position as a spectacle does not endow her with witchlike powers; it only allows the men who observe her to read her as having them.

Upon Don John's accusation, Claudio instantly reveals (or develops) a distrust of his own “agent” Don Pedro, claiming that “all hearts in love use their own tongues. / Let every eye negotiate for itself, / And trust no agent” (II.i.133-5). This is not only a disclaimer of the efficacy of wooing by proxy, but a distrust of proxies in general. The “negotiation” of the eye is the way in which the eye observes as well as the way in which it seduces. But in Much Ado, all eyes seem ultimately to “trust agents”; sights and sounds are filtered through the characters who first bring them to mind.

Although the characters of the play have great faith in their own abilities to “see a church by daylight” (II.i.59), the scene in which Claudio denounces Hero as “an approved wanton” (IV.i.39) is the most forceful reminder of how easily interpretation can be guided. The “eye of love” which Benedick claims he and Beatrice see each other with is something that can be “lent” (V.iv.23-4), as Leonato says. And it is lent in almost precisely the same way as “conjecture” is placed on Claudio, “to turn all beauty into thoughts of harm” so that “never shall it more be gracious” (IV.i.100-1). Borachio tells Conrade that Don Pedro and Claudio have been deceived “partly by [Don John's] oaths, which first possessed them, partly by the dark night which did deceive them, but chiefly, by my villainy, which did confirm any slander that Don John had made” (III.iii.127-30). The possession by the oaths is the necessary precondition to everything else: what makes Borachio's “villainy” serve as “confirmation” in the same way as Beatrice's statement that she was not Hero's bedfellow the previous night although she had been at all other times becomes confirmation for Leonato of Hero's falseness rather than of the impossibility of Borachio's confession of “the vile encounters they have had / A thousand times in secret” (IV.i.87-8).

When Borachio claims that he “can at any unseasonable instant of night, appoint [Margaret] to look out at her lady's chamber window” (II.ii.14-5), Don John sees this as an insignificant event, as Borachio agrees it is, but “the poison of that lies in you to temper” (II.ii.17).²² The event will only have meaning that can “be the death of this marriage” if Don John provides Don Pedro and Claudio with that meaning (II.ii.16). Both Borachio and Don John recognize that their main problem is to get Don Pedro and Claudio to believe Don John's story—the production of “proof.”

The visual proof that Borachio tells Don John to offer is identical to his narrative; the syntax of Borachio's sentence transforms Don John's promise of what Don Pedro and Claudio will see into what they will actually see:

tell them that you know that Hero loves me, intend a kind of zeal to both the prince and Claudio … who is thus like to be cozened with the semblance of a maid … that you have discovered thus: they will scarcely believe this without trial: offer them instances which shall bear no less likelihood, than to see me at her chamber window, hear me call Margaret Hero, hear Margaret term me Claudio, and bring them to see this the very night before the intended wedding … and there shall appear such seeming truth of Hero's disloyalty, that jealousy shall be called assurance and all the preparation overthrown.

(II.ii.26-37, my italics)

The deictic “this” refers to a scene that exists only in Don John's accusation: the sight of Hero with Borachio. The verbal “instances” that Don John is to offer become precisely the same as what he is to “bring [Don Pedro and Claudio] to see,” and what they, under the influence of his narrative, do see.

The absence of the theater audience from this scene prevents any knowledge of whether Margaret, in the guise of Hero, calls Borachio “Claudio” as the text insists, or not. The appearance of “Claudio” rather than the more logical (at least for Borachio and Don John's plan) “Borachio” can be explained, as the Riverside Shakespeare does, as “apparently a slip,” but forcibly demonstrates that no matter how often the theater audience may hear the events of “the very night before the intended wedding” described, it cannot know what Don Pedro and Claudio saw and heard, only what they were prepared to see and hear (II.ii.33-4).²³ In this instance, description and preconception replace sight on the most literal level. Indeed, the theater audience's conspicuous exclusion from the scene of Borachio and Margaret at Hero's window, combined with the seven distinct descriptions of the event that replace it, suggest both the uncertainty of the theater audience's position and the impossibility of any scene having a transparent meaning.

When Don John tells Don Pedro and Claudio of Hero's disloyalty, he does not, as Borachio instructs him, describe what they will hear, preferring to tell them what they will see: “go but with me tonight, you shall see her chamber window entered, even the night before her wedding day … If you dare not trust that you see, confess not that you know” (III.ii.82-8). Don John implies to Claudio and Don Pedro that “knowledge” is acquired through becoming a part of the same group of spectators, but what they see will be materially different from what Don John (or the theater audience, were the scene visually represented) sees.

Don John plays upon Don Pedro and Claudio's belief in their ability to understand what they see, to be in the position of power that eavesdropping implies. The deception works because he constructs it as a choice that they can make, based on the evidence of their senses, between himself and Hero. The choice offers Don Pedro and Claudio the chance to prove their own ability as observers, to see through the mask of Hero's “seeming” (IV.i.50). To see Hero's disloyalty is to confirm Don John's loyalty. Don John represents his speech as insufficient, insisting that Hero cannot be adequately represented in language: “she has been too long a-talking of,” “the word [disloyal] is too good to paint out her wickedness” (III.ii.76, 80).²⁴ In promising to “disparage her [Hero] no further, till you are my witnesses,” Don John claims that Don Pedro and Claudio's acuteness as spectators, rather than his suspect testimony, will prove Hero's unchastity (III.ii.95). As in the case of Don Pedro's plan to have Benedick “overhear” the discussion of Beatrice's love and his own misgovernment, the promise of the ability to see through a deception—Hero's chastity, Beatrice's indifference—assures the interpretation for which the spectator has been prepared.

In the first description the theater audience (and the watch, “stand[ing] close” in the play's only instance of successful eavesdropping [III.iii.88]) hear of the incident at the window after it has happened, Borachio tells Conrade that Claudio and Don Pedro are deceived “partly by [Don John's] oaths, which first possessed them, partly by the dark night which did deceive them, but chiefly, by my villainy, which did confirm any slander that Don John had made” (III.iii.127-30). The action only serves as confirmation; Don Pedro and Claudio have previously been possessed by Don John's story. Placed as they are “afar off in the orchard” in the dark night, Don Pedro and Claudio's senses are as unreliable as Don John's oaths, but their senses and his story, neither of which can be believed, confirm one another (III.iii.123).

In telling Conrade (and the watch) what has just occurred in Leonato's orchard, Borachio illustrates the shift from spectator to spectacle that threatens all of the play's audiences; he first tells Conrade that he has “tonight wooed Margaret, the Lady Hero's gentlewoman, by the name of Hero: she leans me out at her mistress' chamber-window, bids me a thousand times good night” (III.iii.118-21). To this point, he describes what he saw, but realizes this is insufficient to explain how he has earned a thousand ducats from Don John, and backs up to explain that “the Prince, Claudio, and my master planted, placed and possessed, by my master Don John, saw afar off in the orchard this amiable encounter” (III.iii.121-4). This is the unrealized perspective of the theater audience; Borachio speaks first as the object of scrutiny that Don Pedro and Claudio think him, the spectacle unaware of observers, then as the omniscient audience member, aware of how all of the characters involved in the scene see it.

The theater audience's exclusion from the scene at Hero's window insists that its members must, like the characters in the play, accept narratives which color their interpretation. The scene at the window is finally inaccessible, vanishing behind the screen of multiple narratives which are never quite in agreement.²⁵ The theater audience's relationship to Hero is established as one of observation; its position is established through its access to the information that will allow it to read Hero correctly—Don John and Borachio's plot to show Don Pedro and Claudio “Hero” at the window. But this is precisely the scene to which the theater audience is denied access. At other points in the play, the theater audience sees the same scene as the designated audience (Beatrice or Benedick, for instance), but is able to interpret it differently because it knows that the scene is staged only so that the designated audience will hear it. But the most crucial staged action is not staged for the theater audience—and as it is reported seven separate times for seven distinct audiences, the theater audience's knowing exactly what happened becomes increasingly impossible.

Almost all critical descriptions of the scene at Hero's window mention that Margaret is wearing Hero's clothes, as if this is the sign that explains Claudio's credulousness. And it may be; for an audience observing the action from “afar off,” costume is an exceedingly useful indicator of who is who.²⁶ But this piece of information does not come to light until Borachio confesses to Leonato in act V, when the theater audience has already judged Don Pedro and Claudio's spectatorship. Claudio's immediate response to this revelation is to return to his original idea of Hero: “now thy image doth appear / In the rare semblance that I loved it first” (V.i.220-1). Hero remains a visual construct, now purified by her retroactive absence from the scene; Claudio simply switches from one way of seeing, which he now perceives as incorrect, to his earlier view.

Claudio's understanding of Hero in purely visual terms is obviously problematic in that it allows the success of Don John and Borachio's plot, but only Beatrice seems to have any other way of understanding her. Even at the very beginning of the play, when Leonato makes the old joke “Her mother hath many times told me so” in answer to Don Pedro's “I think this is your daughter” (I.i.76-8), Don Pedro takes Hero's physical appearance, not the word of Leonato's wife, as a guarantor of her paternity.²⁷ Despite Beatrice's best efforts to convince Hero to have some voice in choosing her husband, Hero seems to accept her father's choice: “if the prince do solicit you in that kind, you know your answer” (II.i.48-9). Despite Leonato and Beatrice's attempts to put words into her mouth, Hero never directly responds to the debate around her. The silence that leaves appearance as the only indication of female significance is established as culturally and socially desirable; Claudio praises Hero for being “modest” (I.i.121) and Benedick at first ignores Beatrice's beauty because he “cannot endure my Lady Tongue” (II.i.207-8).²⁸ But, in the absence of speech, and thus in the absence of narrative, interpretation becomes ever more important, particularly since female characters are then only to be looked on as spectacles. In this model, to be exclusively a spectacle is to have no power, to be completely subject to interpretation as Hero is at the wedding.

Hero's appearance, rather than her words, speaks for her; Claudio accuses her of being “but the sign and semblance of her honor: / Behold how like a maid she blushes here” (IV.i.28-9). Certain visual cues, outward appearances, are assumed to signify truth; when Benedick speaks of Leonato's credibility, he bases this not on personal knowledge of Leonato but on his white beard, the “reverence” in which knavery cannot hide itself (II.iii.106-7). Claudio's condemnation of Hero is particularly violent because he identifies her as “the sign and semblance of her honor,” as being “like a maid” without being one. Hero cannot defend herself from this charge because only her physical exterior has been available; if this is a lie, no clear way to read her exists.

Readings of Much Ado that focus on right and wrong methods of interpretation generally find the model for proper interpretation in Beatrice's certainty of Hero's innocence and in Friar Francis's “noting of the lady” (IV.i.150). Richard Henze says that “this combination of intuitive trust and careful observation seems to be the one that the play recommends,” but to whom and under what circumstances?²⁹ How is one to make judgments simultaneously based on faith and careful noting? According to Henze's argument, if Claudio is wrong about Hero, and Beatrice and Friar Francis are right, then they look in the right way and Claudio looks in the wrong. way. But Friar Francis's “noting” consists of interpreting the meaning of Hero's blushes, just as Claudio's and Leonato's do. Until Friar Francis allows Hero to speak, quite late in the scene, her body is the only available object of interpretation.

All of Hero's accusers, but especially Claudio, are preoccupied with the disparity in what they have seen “Hero” do and what her outward appearance suggests. Claudio insists that she is “but the sign and semblance of her honor” and remains preoccupied with her exterior (IV.i.28): “Would you not swear / All you that see her, that she were a maid, / By these exterior shows?” (IV.i.33-5), “O Hero! What a hero hadst thou been, / If half thy outward graces had been placed / About thy thoughts and counsels of thy heart?” (IV.i.93-5). Claudio's experience outside Hero's bedroom window has led him, by accepting Don John's version of ocular proof, to distrust his sight and the appearances of those around him. As a result, he says that “on my eyelids shall conjecture hang, / To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm, / And never shall it more be gracious” (IV.i.99-101). Claudio has learned a new way of seeing, one in which appearance is now branded as seeming, and everything must be observed through the filter of “conjecture”; Don John is no longer necessary as an external creator of preconception because he has been replaced by “conjecture,” a purely internal filter which assures that Claudio's eyes are no longer his own.

Even assuming that “any man with me [Hero] conversed, / At hours unmeet” (IV.i.175), Claudio's accusations that she is

more intemperate in your blood,
Than Venus, or those pampered animals,
That rage in savage sensuality

(IV.i.53-5)

and “knows the heat of a luxurious bed” seem to have little to do with what he saw (IV.i.36). Don Pedro, although much less hysterical, still accuses Hero of being “a common stale” (IV.i.59). Hero's supposed, and Margaret's actual, “crime” has been to place herself on view—to, as Borachio says when describing his plan in the most neutral way possible, “at any unseasonable instant of the night … look out at her lady's chamber window” (II.ii.14-5). Gosson's warning that “you can forbid no man, that vieweth you, to note you and that noteth you to judge you” becomes a threat in this context.³⁰ But while Hero cannot forbid the “noting of the lady” in which Claudio, Don Pedro, Don John, Friar Francis, and Leonato engage, and is as vulnerable to ill report as may be imagined, the play is not comfortable with this vulnerability of spectacle (IV.i.150). Claudio and Don Pedro's view of the situation seems skewed, especially for a theater audience that did not see any woman “talk with a ruffian at her chamber window” (IV.i.85).

Hero's accusers, particularly Claudio, are, as Beatrice forcefully insists, not only incorrect but cruel; their accusations are out of proportion with what they have actually seen. They respond not to their own observation but to Don John and Borachio's narratives, and to their own fears of being disgraced. In accusing Hero, Don John, Don Pedro, and Claudio provide very limited descriptions of what they saw the previous night; their focus on vituperation outweighs any desire to convince others of the justice of their accusation. Claudio spends nearly fifty lines abusing Hero before he provides a specific accusation, and Don Pedro only says that

Myself, my brother, and this grieved count
Did see her, hear her, at that hour last night
Talk with a ruffian at her chamber window
Who hath indeed like a most liberal villain,
Confessed the vile encounters they have had
A thousand times in secret.

(IV.i.83-8)

The final proof that Don Pedro offers is Borachio's confession, a confession unnecessary to confirm what they have seen, but necessary, as it confirms the implications of Hero speaking to a man outside her window. Once again, a narrative gives meaning to an ambiguous staged event, and Hero, who has never produced narratives except those Don Pedro told her to in the gulling of Beatrice, is faced with Claudio's, Don Pedro's, and Don John's readings of her—readings her own father accepts with startling readiness.

In accepting Claudio and Don Pedro's reading, Leonato asks, “Could she here deny / The story that is printed in her blood?” (IV.i.114-5). Like Claudio's rhetorical questions, “Leonato, stand I here? / Is this the prince? Is this the prince's brother? / Is this face Hero's? Are our eyes our own?” (IV.i.63-5), Leonato's questions establish his certainty, even as their possible answers establish the problems with his interpretation. The structure of the question whose speaker thinks it is rhetorical reveals the assumptions he will not question.³¹ Despite Hero's insistence thirty-five lines previously that she “talked with no man at that hour,” Leonato is sure that he can read “the story that is printed in her blood” (IV.i.80). Her characteristic silence becomes another reason for believing her accusers: “Thou seest that all the grace that she hath left, / Is that she will not add to her damnation / A sin of perjury, she not denies it” (IV.i.164-6). Hero's rescue in this scene comes when the friar speaks of his “noting of the lady” (IV.i.150); again, this is an observation of physical signs: the

thousand blushing apparitions [that] start into her face, a thousand innocent shames,
In angel whiteness beat away those blushes,
And in her eye there hath appeared a fire,
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.

(IV.i.152-7)³²

Friar Francis is one of a group of men who read Hero's body, and that he is correct can be read as chance. Carol Cook observes that “Benedick's act of ‘marking’ [Beatrice] is clearly a projection, but the question then arises whether the friar's marking of Hero is not equally so.”³³ Much can be said in Friar Francis's favor, but, if his observation is privileged, it is through his willingness to let Hero speak in her own defense, not his “careful observation.”

The friar's reading of Hero's appearance ultimately leads him to question her after stating his belief in her innocence; and her answer, not Friar Francis's faith, is what finally removes Leonato's certainty of her guilt, although the certainty of her innocence does not immediately follow. Leonato's acceptance of the testimony of “the two princes” whose social position authorizes their accusation, exemplifies some of the most problematic viewing in the play, as he chooses to read Hero in light of their accusation although he has not seen the proof they have (IV.i.145). Leonato never asks for Hero's story; from the moment Don Pedro and Don John join Claudio in his accusation, Leonato sees her as having “fallen / Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea / Hath drops too few to wash her clean again” (IV.i.132-4), asking “Would the two princes lie, and Claudio lie” (IV.i.145). In the face of two opposing readings, Leonato is unable to decide:

I know not: if they speak but truth of her,
These hands will tear her, if they wrong her honour,
The proudest of them shall well hear of it.

(IV.i.183-5)

Although his eventual determination to believe Hero is obvious in act V, his last word on the subject as he leaves the wedding scene is that the “smallest twine may lead me” (IV.i.243); belief in either version seems to him equally well, or poorly, grounded.

Comparing the ways in which Don Pedro and Claudio look at Hero with the ways in which Beatrice and Friar Francis do ultimately seems impossible because none of Hero's defenders has seen what Don Pedro and Claudio have, and, if Benedick and Beatrice will accept a less well-supported tale of the other's love, Don Pedro and Claudio's belief in Don John and their own eyes indicates more of a problem with the vulnerability of spectatorship in general than a fault particular to those two. Benedick's acceptance of the words of his friends (although his trust seems based on Leonato's participation rather than that of Don Pedro), describing a scene he has not seen and his rereading Beatrice's speech to conform to what he has heard, exemplifies the same problems as Leonato's initial acceptance of the accusations against Hero, in which he reinterprets Hero's silence as guilt.

In representing Margaret at the window only verbally, and in leaving the content of the dialogue that occurs at the window entirely obscure, Much Ado avoids a number of problems for the theater audience. To observe a staged action that one recognizes as such is to be complicit, voluntarily or involuntarily, with the character who produces that action, sharing knowledge that the represented audience does not possess. The position of shared superior knowledge defines the represented audience's position as credulous. The problem is acute in Much Ado because, if Margaret were represented at the window, the theater audience would be in a position to decide exactly how credulous Don Pedro and Claudio are and how good the deception is. Like Don Pedro's and Claudio's, the theater audience's view of Margaret will be from “afar off,” and the question arises of exactly how much Margaret looks like Hero. Costumes are primary markers of identity on the early modern stage (hence the unbreakable disguise convention), and Margaret in Hero's clothes may look enough like Hero to convince an unprepared (or differently prepared) audience of Hero's guilt—or she may look enough unlike her to suggest that observation has no power over narrative.

The scene of Borachio and Margaret at Hero's window has not always remained inaccessible in production. Michael Friedman discusses Michael Langham's 1961 Stratford-upon-Avon production, which featured a dumbshow in which Don John, Don Pedro, and Claudio saw Borachio climb up to the balcony where he was joined “by ‘Hero.’” In fact, the actress on stage was not Margaret disguised as Hero, but Hero herself, “heavily cloaked [promptbook's phrase], pretending to be Margaret pretending to be Hero.”³⁴ This interpolation justifies Claudio to the point of making Don John's accusation accurate. But the absence of the chamber window scene from the play makes this sort of identification with, or sympathy for, Claudio's position at the wedding rather improbable. A slightly less determined, but probably more influential, attempt to excuse Claudio's behavior through the representation of the window scene, appears in Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film of Much Ado. Branagh explains his decision to include the scene on the grounds that “if we saw this occur on screen, it would add a new dimension to our understanding of Claudio,” saving him from being dismissed for his gullibility.³⁵ But this anxiety about Claudio's gullibility seems to leave him peculiarly vulnerable to it; the actress playing Margaret in Branagh's film bears almost no physical resemblance to the actress playing Hero. And Claudio's gullibility is not unique to him but part of a larger range of issues of problematic forms of spectatorship.

If Margaret is represented as very similar to Hero, Claudio and Don Pedro's reaction at the wedding becomes understandable, although not laudable. More significantly, deception becomes impossible to detect visually, an uncomfortable position for a play whose resolution depends on Friar Francis's “noting of the lady” (IV.i.150), Claudio's willingness to accept Leonato's offer of his niece, “Almost the copy of my child that's dead” (V.i.256), and Beatrice and Benedick's seeing each other with the eyes of love Leonato says their gullers “lent” them (V.iv.23). One of the reasons Don Pedro and Claudio believe Don John is that “his lie … easily passes in Messina as a truthful reading of women,”³⁶ but if the visual proofs he gives them are irrefutable at the distance of a theater audience member from the acting area above the stage, then his lie will pass anywhere, and the position of spectator is no more one of control than that of spectacle.

Notes

1. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980).

2. John Northbrooke, A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Playes or Enterluds … Are Reproved by the Authoritie of the Word of God and Auntient Writers, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974), pp. 67-8. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York: Scholars' Facsimilies and Reprints, 1941), sig. F4v.

3. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse (London: T. Dawson, 1579), sig. B6v-B7.

4. The representation of audiences, rather than mirroring the behavior of theater audiences, presents reception codes in an exaggerated form for scrutiny in the same way that inset spectacle presents performance codes. For a discussion of performance code, see Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), pp. 49-97. Michele Willems discusses how inset plays present performance code for scrutiny in “‘They do but jest’ or do they? Reflexions on the Ambiguities of the Space Within a Space,” in The Show Within. Dramatic and Other Insets, English Renaissance Drama (1550-1642), ed. Francois Laroque (Montpellier: Publications de Universite Paul-Valery, 1990), pp. 51-64, 53.

5. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. F. H. Mares (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), IV.i.63-5. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text.

6. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582), sig. G4.

7. Gosson, sig. G4

8. Gosson, sig. G5, Laura Levine argues that the Bacchus/Ariadne passage suggests not only that “watching leads inevitably to ‘doing’ … [b]ut … the more radical idea that watching leads inevitably to ‘being’—to assuming the identity of the actor” (Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994], p. 13).

9. Levine argues that the antitheatrical writers envision “a self which can always be altered not by its own playful shaping intelligence, but by malevolent forces outside its control” (p. 12).

10. Northbrooke, p. 63.

11. Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, sig. F2. For a discussion of the letter “to the Gentlewoman Citizens of London” appended to the end of The School of Abuse, arguing that Gosson's anxiety is motivated as much by the possibility of women looking at their fellow theatergoers as by the way that male theatergoers look at them, see Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 76-80.

12. For some early discussions of this double meaning, see Dorothy Hockey, “Notes Notes, Forsooth …,” SQ 8, 3 (Summer 1957): 353-8, 355, and David Horowitz, “Imagining the Real,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Much Ado About Nothing,” ed. Walter R. Davis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), pp. 39-53, 39.

13. The only character in Messina to encourage female speech directly is Don Pedro, who tells Beatrice that “Your silence most offends me” (II.i.252). This response to Beatrice's “I was born to speak all mirth, and no matter” (II.i.251) suggests a sanctioned form of female speech, but one that cannot construct the narratives that shape perception. I am grateful to the anonymous reader for SEL for drawing my attention to this exchange.

14. Carol Cook, “‘The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor’: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado about Nothing,” PMLA 101, 2 (March 1986): 186-202, 194.

15. Laurie Osborne observes (“Dramatic Play in Much Ado about Nothing: Wedding the Italian Novella and English Comedy,” PQ 69, 2 [Spring 1991]: 167-88) that “the purpose [of staged actions] is not to manipulate events so much as to control the way that others perceive them” (p. 184).

16. See, for instance, Richard Henze's “Deception in Much Ado abut Nothing,” SEL 11, 2 (Spring 1971): 187-201. For a discussion of the way in which this argument naturalizes Don Pedro's deceptions as revelatory rather than constitutive, see Howard, pp. 59-65.

17. S. P. Cerasano, “Half a Dozen Dangerous Words” in Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 167-83, 175.

18. Anthony Dawson, “Much Ado about Signifying,” SEL 22, 2 (Spring 1982): 211-21, 215.

19. See, for instance, Mares's edition of the play, p. 72.

20. Mares, p. 72, n. 115-6.

21. Mark Taylor, “Presence and Absence in Much Ado About Nothing,” CentR 33, 1 (Winter 1989): 1-12, 4.

22. Margaret is here represented as an observer herself, but to “look out at her lady's chamber window” is to be seen at that window (II.iii.15). As in Gosson's formulation of the female theatergoer, to be a spectator is to become a spectacle.

23. G. Blakemore Evans, ed. The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), p. 341, n. 44.

24. For a discussion of Don John's use of and representation of language, see Dawson, p. 214.

25. Taylor argues that “the play focuses our attention on [the] blank space[s of Don Pedro's wooing and the scene at Hero's window] as a way of showing how various characters perceive themselves in that blank spot” (p. 5).

26. Beyond this, Stephen Orgel argues that costume on the early modern transvestite stage constitutes the identity of the characters that wear it; in Twelfth Night Viola cannot return to her original identity until she recovers her original costume. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 103-5.

27. Claire McEachern observes, “Hero's physical resemblance to her father guarantees her mother's fidelity, and with it her father's honor” (“‘Fathering Herself’: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism,” SQ 39, 3 [Autumn 1988]: 269-90), but I think it significant that Hero must “father herself” with her body rather than her mother's words. Michael D. Friedman, in “‘Hush'd on Purpose to Grace Harmony’: Wives and Silence in Much Ado About Nothing,” TJ 42, 3 (October 1990): 350-63, discusses the stage directions in both the quarto and folio texts which give an entrance in act I, scene i and act II, scene i to “Innogen [Leonato's] wife,” and the possibilities of staging Hero's perfectly silent and unacknowledged mother.

28. For discussions of the relationship between silence and gender roles in Much Ado, see Howard, pp. 65-70 and Friedman.

29. Henze, p. 194.

30. Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, sig. F2.

31. Many of the accusations against Hero are couched in terms of rhetorical questions. In addition to the examples above, Claudio asks, “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?” (IV.i.32-5). Leonato finds confirmation in asking, “Would the two princes lie, and Claudio lie, / Who loved her so, that speaking of her foulness, / Washed it in tears?” (IV.i.145-7). Hero's attempt to use this structure, asking “Is it [my name] not Hero? Who can blot that name / With any just reproach?” (IV.i.74-5), collapses when Claudio instantly answers her, “Marry, that can Hero” (IV.i.75).

32. For a discussion of the ambiguity of Hero's blushes and the multiple interpretations available, see David Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 96-7.

33. Cook, p. 192.

34. Friedman, “The Editorial Recuperation of Claudio,” CompD 25, 4 (Winter 1991-92): 369-86, 373. Friedman's account of the production comes from Pamela Mason's “‘Much Ado’ at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1949-1976,” M. A. thesis (University of Birmingham, England, 1976). In his more recent “Male Bonds and Marriage in All's Well and Much Ado” (SEL 35, 2 [Spring 1995]: 231-49), Friedman also discusses the introduction of the scene of Margaret and Borachio at Hero's window into Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film (pp. 240-1).

35. Branagh, “Much Ado about Nothing” by William Shakespeare: Screenplay, Introduction, and Notes on the Making of the Film (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. xv.

36. Howard, p. 61.

I am grateful to A. R. Braunmuller, Rebecca Jaffe, Claire McEachern, and Robert N. Watson for comments, advice, and encouragement on this article.