[In the following essay, King maintains that Much Ado about Nothing is a comedy of manners, and that like other plays of this genre its central theme is the examination of a morally “flabby” aristocratic class that accepts the established social codes without question.]

I

What to do with Much Ado About Nothing has bedeviled Shakespearians for longer than one likes to think. And no wonder, when critics dismiss the play, if only by implication, as a charming potboiler, archly comic for the most part, but, in Acts IV and V, oddly tragicomic and melodramatic, and unconvincing.

Reaction against this usually disguised conviction varies, of course. G. B. Harrison shrugs the whole thing off as a diverting entertainment, “but for all that, as it turns out, ‘much ado about nothing’”.¹ John Palmer is somewhat more complimentary; “this most brilliant but least profound” of Shakespeare's comedies is one of his “greatest triumphs as a dramatic craftsman, showing what he can do when his genius is not half engaged and he falls back on his technical skill as a playright.”² C. L. Barber in his study of Shakespearian comedy is almost cavalier in his light-hearted apology for ignoring the play altogether, except for comments en passant: “What I would have to say about Much Ado About Nothing can largely be inferred from the discussion of the other festive plays.”³ In short, Much Ado is pigeonholed as a tour de force for consummate actors like Sir John Gielgud and Pamela Brown, while critics hasten on to Twelfth Night, which everyone agrees is profound as well as brilliant, and which after all has Feste and Sir Toby Belch to spice up the action.

Some of us, nevertheless, cannot dismiss Much Ado quite so nonchalantly. Shakespeare's riddling title teases us into the belief that he had something to say about man and the world he lives in, or at least about some types of men and women and the social world that shapes them into what they are, worthy of the craftsmanship he lavished upon this merriest of all his comedies. “Nothing” must imply something, and the suspicion is hard to down that that something embraces every part of the play, informs every part, unites every part. What to do with the word “nothing” is, in fact, a paramount critical issue, though it is astonishing how few critics have paid serious attention to it. Among these few is Dorothy C. Hockey, who suggests, because of the pun on “nothing” and “noting”, for which there is sound phonological support, that Much Ado is the dramatization of a series of mistakes produced by the recurrent failure of key characters to use their eyes and ears accurately when assessing themselves, each other, and events and situations. The play is thus a study of “a common human frailty—the inability to observe, judge, and act sensibly.”⁴

No one will quarrel with this sober conclusion; a verbal eye and ear pattern is indubitably central to the play's structure, and mistaken judgments are certainly skeletal to the developing action. But what do the key characters misjudge? Simply themselves, others, events as they occur, as Miss Hockey suggests? Or more fundamentally, do they misjudge all these things by preferring poor values to better ones, as great comic characters seem duty-bound to do? With respect to values Miss Hockey is not very explicit, and so her interpretation falters just when it should rise completely to what John Russell Brown calls “the implicit judgement” so necessary to conceptual interpretation of Shakespearian comedy.⁵

On the other hand, one can concentrate upon the meaning of “nothing” to the exclusion of almost everything else, as have Paul A. Jorgenson and Harold C. Goddard. Renaissance theological treatises, Jorgenson points out, affirmed “the original nothingness surrounding creation and the essential nothingness of all temporal things.” “Nothing” is harmless “when compared with the miscry occasioned by things”, yet “nothing, in a more positive sense, did produce all things; and its formidableness in the genesis of man's affairs and dreams became for Shakespeare, as for all his contemporaries, a fertile obsession.”⁶ In particular, Shakespeare was attracted to the metaphorical implications of the word when applied to the poet's craft. According to the psychological authority Laurentius, “The understanding part of the minde receiveth from the imaginative the formes of things naked and voide of substance”⁷—so that “nothing” symbolized for Shakespeare the imaginative faculty of the artist. Or as Goddard puts it, “nothing” is a Shakespearian synonym for creativity.⁸ “Much Ado About Nothing is saturated with this idea of the power of Nothing (of the creative ingredient of the imagination, that is) to alter the nature of things for good or ill …”.⁹

Neither Jorgenson nor Goddard asserts, of course, that Much Ado, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, is a celebration of the poet's imaginative capacity to create out of “airy nothing” something solid and local that can be contemplated objectively (see Theseus' speech on the imagination, MND V.i. 2-22). Indeed, they scant interpretation of the play as a whole. No doubt it is true that in terms of Shakespeare's broad development as an artist “nothing” does have the symbolic implications they suggest, but as to what “nothing” alludes to specifically in Much Ado, they say rather little. That “nothing” can “alter the nature of things for good or ill” is provocative, but what precisely is meant by “the nature of things”? Metaphysical things? Ethical things? Psychological things? And how do these things, whatever they are, relate to the play as a fully structured entity?

The point I have been edging toward is that criticism of Much Ado has become far too greatly entangled in the solving of an assortment of problems by now as much a part of the play as the text itself,¹⁰ or has been introductory to discussion of wide-ranging issues in Shakespearian studies. Aside from a few people like Miss Hockey, hardly anyone has bothered to suggest what the particular comic issues in Much Ado are, perhaps because there has been no agreement about what kind of comedy it is. Yet without some consensus as to genre, it seems difficult to get at a synoptic interpretation that eliminates problems and obviates any need for apologetic comments. I venture now to suggest the proper genre—comedy of manners; and I venture the further assertion that, if we read Much Ado as comedy of manners, we can discover rather easily what Shakespeare meant by the “nothing” in the title.¹¹ An adequate descriptive definition of the word will be meaningful, of course, only if it exposes values that penetrate into every nook and cranny of the play.

II

Central to Much Ado, as to all great comedies of manners, is the critical inspection of a leisure-class world grown morally flabby by thoughtless acceptance of an inherited social code. All of the principal characters are presented in typical social situations that imply unexamined behavior close to abnormality, in that they react time and again as if they have lost all sense of proportion. Throughout they are being measured against a suitable norm of conduct that is only gradually revealed, but is implied obliquely from the beginning, often by means of the behavior of characters acting automatically in ways that appear to be superficially correct. In the denouement the proper norm is finally established, with the excesses of the major characters brought to a point of manageability or total cure.¹² This gradual readjustment depends upon Shakespeare's deft treatment of the two counterpointed sub-themes into which he splits his major theme: love, courtship and marriage, as felt (or not felt) and verbalized upon in a highly aristocratic society; and the folly of elevating wit into a primary value in the daily life of that society.

Urbane to the point of absurdity, the aristocrats of Messina have canalized natural instinct (love, the battle of the sexes, marriage) according to a prescriptive code which almost everyone takes for granted and which almost no one has the intelligence to question. Exempt from daily labor, these sophisticates have little to do but fall in love, get married as social routine decrees, and squander whatever mentality they can lay claim to upon verbal high-jinks. As usual in such societies, wit is lavished upon two characteristic topics: love and sex (bawdry is a recurrent leitmotiv); and sharp, sometimes cruel, criticism of each other. The result is an extreme artificiality. Wit has degenerated into the smart crack; social custom has petrified into the hard-headedness stressed in the betrothal of Claudio and Hero; and love has been turned into a set of conditioned reflexes that smack of sentimentality, melodrama, and sheer eyewash.

Of the two sets of lovers, Claudio and Hero are the ultimate products of a fashionable code—thoughtless conformists who question nothing, least of all themselves. The most laconic of all Shakespeare's heroines, Hero speaks only six times in the first two acts, and then murmurs banalities or responds perfunctorily to insignificant, factual inquiries. Yet she is not a full-fledged object of satire. A well trained upper class Elizabethan daughter (Messina is simply a name for an aristocratic English locale), she muzzles her tongue in public, obeys her father implicitly and accepts (one supposes gratefully) the husband chosen for her. Obviously she is not much in love with Claudio, whom she barely knows, nor is she supposed to be. Nubility is her sole characteristic and her only asset. Her duty is to look charming, conduct herself decorously, and be a virgin—in order to maintain a high value on the international marriage mart. (Don Pedro is Prince of Aragon; Claudio and Benedick are citizens of Florence and Padua.) For marriage in aristocratic circles such as hers was largely, during the Renaissance, a business matter, in which love totted up to little in pounds and pence.¹³

Claudio is depicted with equal realism and with a minimum of satire. A desirable catch himself, he is out shopping for a suitable wife, “modest” and “sweet looking” (the criteria he harps on when consulting Benedick about Hero in I.i)—and well-to-do. “Hath Leonato any son, my Lord?” (I.i.296) is the only question he asks Don Pedro, after requesting his services as a go-between, a question blandly materialistic and surprisingly unknowledgeable about Hero's family situation. Young but not shy, he wastes no time in romantic palaver. To Don Pedro he confesses that before the wars he “liked” Hero “with a soldier's eye” and apologizes “lest my liking might too sudden seem” (I.i.300-313). When Benedick asks flatly, “Would you buy her, that you enquire after her?” he replies, “Can the world buy such a jewel?” Benedick's answer, “Yes, and a case to put it into”, tells the full monetary story (I.i.181-184).

His lack of sentiment is further emphasized by the supine manner in which he accepts the false report that Don Pedro has won Hero for himself. Unwilling to condemn his social superior, he consoles himself with the platitude that a man should woo for himself (II.i.181-189), and when he discovers that Don Pedro has not been double-dealing, he accepts Hero without any romantic protestations.¹⁴ Leonato is equally unsentimental: “Count, take of me my daughter, and with her my fortunes” (II.i.313-314). Natural instinct counts for both of them only insofar as “liking” can blossom into love after the marriage has been arranged. Claudio will “be like a lover presently”, Don Pedro had jested earlier, “and tire the hearer with a book of words” (I.i.308-309). Love, then, has been devalued into verbal formulae in line, presumably, with the required decorum of the occasion.

But if the social homogeneity of Messina is typified in Claudio and Hero, Don Pedro and Leonato, it is offset by heterogeneous streaks of character in Beatrice and Benedick, whom Shakespeare presents ambivalently throughout.¹⁵ Frank, lighthearted, self-conscious to the marrow, they oscillate between acquiescence to the social norm and tart criticism of it. In part, their disapproval, especially of the ossified attitudes toward love of their fellow aristocrats, is mere pose; in part, objective assessment of social folly; in part, unconscious cultivation of self-esteem. Of the two, Benedick is the more conscious of the role he is playing. “Do you question me, as an honest man should do, for my simple judgment [about Hero]?” Benedick asks Claudio, “or would you have me speak after my custom, as being a professed tyrant to their sex?” (I.i.167-170). Beatrice is far less aware that she is a superb illustration of self-admiration. “I have a good eye, Uncle”, she congratulates herself, “I can see a church by daylight” (II.i.85-86). But singly or together, in spite of their failure to know themselves, these two serve as yardsticks for measuring the disproportionate in others, while missing the disproportionate in themselves.

Their psychological astigmatism produces subtle complications of moral character. They play the game of misogamy as if it were the acme of social wisdom, but from the start they are driven by emotional impulses absent in Hero and Claudio. Though they ridicule the love conventions honored mechanically in Messina (see Benedick's soliloquy, II.iii.7-38), they are themselves stunning examples of Petrarchan stereotypes: Beatrice the disdainful woman of courtly love (“too curst” to Antonio and “my Lady Tongue” to Benedick—II.i.22 and 284), and Benedick the anti-feminist windbag (as Beatrice understands very well—I.i.117-118 and II.i.142-156). Their destiny is the conventional punishment for misogamists: to fall in love with someone not (ostensibly) in love with them, though Shakespeare revitalizes this tired convention by means of the two orchard scenes, during which each is gulled into believing that the other is ill with love for him. Like Bernard Shaw's Bluntschli they epitomize on one level the romanticism they have made a profession of mocking in public.

On another level, their merciless railing against marriage and Petrarchan blarney amounts to a realistic revolt against the sentimentalizing of courtship that has become a social blight in Messina. Unhappily, their cure for it has hypertrophied into an aggravation of the blight itself: a reveling in wit for its own sake. Beatrice and Benedick are, thus, another ultimate product of the artificiality of their environment. Though vexed by it in each other, they are unaware that their genius for repartee has grown tiresome and that their disgust with the follies love induces in others has taken the form of a serious under-valuation of love itself. Resolved not to be fools in love, they have mutated into fools of words, to which they ascribe the value that should be attached to things. Intellectual alertness, their finest quality, has catapulted them into the disease of self-love, a social abnormality that for some time has undermined their judgment.

The witlessness that often accompanies the gift of wit is repeatedly emphasized by means of the verbal pattern Miss Hockey has isolated: the motif of true and false seeing. Though Beatrice and Benedick pride themselves on the acuity of their mental eyesight, one of their most striking traits is a kind of tunnel vision not far removed from blindness. During the masque in Act II Beatrice cannot identify Benedick as the masked gentleman she is dancing with, although Ursula, dancing with Antonio, also masked, identifies him at once “by the wagging of your head” (II.i.119). Nor can Benedick understand why, during his dance with Beatrice, she derides him as “the Prince's jester, a very dull fool …” (II.i.142-143). The implicit judgment to be drawn here is that people in love, as Benedick actually is, tend to see poorly, whereas in matters that permit detachment, they tend to see clearly¹⁶—hence, Benedick's clear-sighted observation that Claudio has been metamorphosed since his betrothal into the conventional lover-fool (II.iii.7-23), while failing to see that he has become one himself. Hence, also, the ease with which Benedick's friends hoodwink him into the belief that Beatrice is heart-sick with love for him. The depth of his self-delusion (and yet an ironic intuition of the truth) is reached in his sudden conviction, after the first orchard scene, that “I do spy some marks of love in her” (II.ii.255), when Beatrice brusquely bids him come to dinner.

She too is easily deceived into love, but the comic point of the two eaves-dropping scenes in the orchard is not, for Beatrice and Benedick, the discovery of love, but the shock of perceiving the unwholesome effect of misused wit on their own personalities. “I must not seem proud”, Benedick soliloquizes.

Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending. They say the lady is … wise, but for loving me—by my troth, it is no addition to her wit, nor no great argument of her folly, for I will be horribly in love with her. I may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me because I have railed so long against marriage. But doth not the appetite alter? … Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humour? No, the world must be peopled.

(II.iii.237-251—my italics)

Intelligence, without which wit shrivels into vapidity (and in Elizabethan English “wit” means mental capacity, wisdom, good judgment, in addition to apt association of thought with expression), begins to assert itself, and simultaneously natural instinct, in spite of Benedick's rationalizing, begins to destroy his inflated valuation of words as ends in themselves.

Beatrice's smug self-approval disintegrates at once under the homiletic dissection of her character by Hero and Ursula.

But Nature never fram'd a woman's heart
Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice.
Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,
Misprizing what they look on; and her wit
Values itself so highly that to her
All matter else seems weak. She cannot love,
Nor take no shape nor project of affection,
She is so self-endeared.

(III.i.49-58—my italics)

Her caustic aspersions on men amount to “carping”, to social abnormality, defined by Hero (herself a yardstick for measuring the norm at this point) as “to be so odd, and from all fashions” (III.i.71-2). And Ursula hopes that Beatrice

cannot be so much without true judgment [comic proportion]
(Having so swift and excellent a wit
As she is priz'd to have) as to refuse
So rare a gentleman as Signior Benedick.

(III.i.88-91)

Unlike Benedick's, Beatrice's rejection of wit is unleavened by rationalization and is starched with self-denunciation.

What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.

(III.i.107-110)

Comedy continues, of course. Benedick languishes in tune with the Petrarchan symptomology of the man in love: beard shaved off, face dabbed with cosmetics and lover's melancholy proclaimed as toothache. Somewhat testily he endures the hackneyed wit of his male friends (III.ii), an ironic playback of his own earlier joshing of the lover-fool, and begs to speak “eight or nine wise words” with Leonato. Beatrice hides her distress under the pretense of a head-cold that prompts bawdy jests from Margaret that Beatrice would formerly have admired in herself. “O, God help me!” she lashes out. “How long have you profess'd apprehension [wit]?” (III.iv.67-68). The cure for false wit in both these essentially sound people requires only the church scene in Act IV for completion.

This much analyzed scene has been excessively damned by some critics as stagy melodrama, and excessively defended by others, too zealous advocates of Shakespeare's honor as psychologist-philosopher. Theatricality cannot be denied, but its essential rightness can be better defended than it has been, if it be judged as the crisis of a comedy of manners (like the crisis in The Misanthrope, Célimène's exposure as a vicious backbiter) rather than as a foretaste of tragicomedy. For it is here that the social abnormality of aristocratic society in Messina is exposed once and for all for what it is—shallow and perverse application of a standard of behavior that is both automatic and uncharitable. In part, critical misunderstanding of this scene has sprung from failure to realize that the deception by Don John and Borachio of Claudio and Don Pedro into the belief that Hero is sexually loose is symbolic as well as psychological. Inability to see clearly at night is a common human trait, but in Claudio and Don Pedro it symbolizes the dominant trait of aristocratic folk in Messina, in whom failure of physical eyesight is equivalent to moral confusion. Those who marry according to the philosophy of caveat emptor, like Claudio, are bound to be predisposed to sexual distrust, while their depreciation of love and marriage to the level of the market-place inevitably leads them to believe in virginity as the principal attribute of a bride-to-be.

Claudio's determination to expose Hero in church is quite in line with the social usage of his society, which accepted as legitimate harsh reprisal for sexual fraud, but he also exposes his general moral blindness. And the immediate compliance of Don Pedro (III.ii.126-130) indicates that Claudio's decision, however lacking in Christian charity, should not be reckoned a complete social abnormality. All those who reject Hero, even Leonato, assume they are justified, and they all behave melodramatically, just as shallow human beings are always inclined to thunder for justice in a social crisis when wounded pride, far more than moral shock, begins to steam up their ethical consciousness.

Nevertheless, Claudio's self-righteousness exposes a serious flaw in the social code: the superficiality of a value system that mistakes sexual purity for love is shown up in all its heartless folly. At the same time, the concurrent movement away from superficiality in Beatrice and Benedick, already under way, suggests how witlessness can be exchanged for wisdom. Stupidity versus intelligence is the underlying theme of the church scene and is dramatized by means of a typical Shakespearian problem in epistemology: under what conditions can the senses be trusted to provide accurate data for substantive knowledge of human character? To what degree do objective and subjective ways of knowing lead to rock-bottom truth about people we think we are familiar with?

The dialectic begins in Claudio's ironic reflection upon human presumption: “O, what men dare do! what men may do, what men daily do, not knowing what they do!” (IV.i.19-21). His folly—tragedy to his social peers—is to confuse what appears to his eyes, Hero's external look of innocence, with what appears to his mind, her alleged promiscuity. “Would you not swear, All you that see her, that she were a maid, By these exterior shows?” (IV.i.29-41). The either/or mentality of the mediocre mind trying to think erupts in a burst of hackneyed metaphor:

You seem to me as Dian in her orb,
As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown,
But you are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus, or those pamp'red animals
That rage in savage sensuality.

(IV.i.58-62)

Some lines later comes a saving note of doubt: “Are our eyes our own?” (IV.i.72). Claudio is on the verge of learning the first lesson of the Platonic theory of knowledge, that the senses may deceive. (His early confession to Benedick that Hero “is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on” [I.i.189], has now been transformed into the false assumption that her “blush is guiltiness, not modesty” [IV.i.43].) But he is far from grasping the second lesson, that the senses are sometimes trustworthy. Appearance can be reality.¹⁷ As a consequence, he leaps to a false conclusion about Hero, owing to a confusion of mind that springs naturally enough from reliance upon second-rate values.

But Claudio is no worse than those who, knowing Hero better than he, take at face value the “fact” of her depravity. In twenty-three impassioned lines dripping with the sentimentality and bombast an unexamined moral code can produce, Leonato sermonizes on the theme: “Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?” (IV.i.121-144). “Let her die”, he urges (IV.i.155), and insists, “She not denies it” (IV.i.174), in the face of Hero's flat declaration to Claudio, “I talked with no man at that hour, my lord” (IV.i.87). Leonato's allegiance to a dessicated social norm continues even after Friar Francis outlines a means for retrieving Hero's reputation. As hyperbolic as Claudio, Leonato also illustrates the truth of Beatrice's summary estimate of the male world of Messina: “But manhood is melted into courtesies, valor into compliments, and men are turned into tongues, and trim ones too. He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie, and swears it” (IV.i.20-24). No longer fooled by words, she longs to be a man in a society in which the traditional concept of manhood has become debased.

She, too, along with Benedick, contributes to the dialectic. Whereas Beatrice knows instinctively that Hero “is belied” (IV.i.147), Benedick's reaction is “I know not what to say” (IV.i.146), a way to begin to know. His earlier brag, “I can see yet without spectacles” (I.i.191), has ceased to be an immodest claim, now that his faith in verbal gymnastics has vanished. His is the first sensible question to be asked, “Lady [Beatrice], were you her bedfellow last night?” (IV.i.148)—a way of knowing through research; and only he is keen-eyed enough to suspect Don John's complicity in the slander—a way of knowing through hypothesizing. Together with the behavior of Beatrice and Friar Francis, whose reasoned faith in Hero's innocence is grounded in objective observation combined with extensive experience of human nature (another way of knowing), Benedick's behavior diverges sharply from the inadequate norms of Messina toward a revitalization of the norms that will culminate in Hero's restoration.

Such revitalization is difficult, demanding as it does the development of insight in people accustomed to see dimly. Those who can be tricked into seeing what is not obvious (Hero's “guilt”) must be tricked into seeing what is plain (her innocence); hence, Friar Francis' plan, based upon the psychological fact that superficial people have only a limited capacity for change, to reform Claudio's vision (and so his thinking) by deceiving him into the belief that Hero is dead. “She dying, …

Upon the instant that she was accus'd
Shall be lamented, pitied, and excus'd
Of every hearer. …
                                                                                So will it fare with Claudio,
When he shall hear she dies upon his words,
Th'idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit,
More moving, delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul
Than when she liv'd indeed.

(IV.i.215-231)

This method of stimulating the “imagination” (i.e., one's sense of values) might be called benevolent brainwashing—a way of inducing, though the Friar is not sure that it will succeed, sounder judgment in a man lacking emotional and intellectual depth.

His modest claims are well advised. Though Leonato agrees to the scheme, he is too strongly bound by the social code he has lived by for so long to understand it. Overwhelmed by the family disgrace, he delivers a soapbox diatribe against patience (a prime Christian virtue) that leads even Antonio, as shallow as Leonato, to rebuke him for childishness (V.i.33). Their retreat to the heroics of melodrama is not the failure in characterization some critics have branded it. Having lived by words for so long, they can condemn them in “fashion-monging boys” (V.i.92-98), yet miss the fact that they overrate words themselves. Their ridiculous challenge of Claudio dribbles out into the frustrated name-calling of men who have lived and think it grand to die according to shopworn behavior patterns. “… as I am a gentleman”, says Antonio, he will whip “sir boy” (V.i.84-85), and Leonato orates: “If thou kill'st me, boy, thou shalt kill a man” (V.i.79). Their concern for Hero is admirable; their rant is as comic as Alceste's in The Misanthrope.

Friar Francis' scheme is equally ineffectual with Claudio and with Don Pedro, who is “sorry” for Hero's death, but is still convinced of her guilt (V.i.103-105). Their insensitivity to human pain is reflected in Claudio's tasteless report to Benedick, “We had like to have had our two noses snapped off with two old men without teeth” (V.i.115-118). They are “high-proof melancholy”, but not from shame, and want Benedick “to use thy wit” (V.i.122-124) as an anodyne. Their trite jests about love in Acts I to III now seem, when repeated, as insipid as they always were, and Claudio's bewilderment at Benedick's challenge and contempt for his idle blather (“Sir, your wit ambles well, it goes easily. … You break jests as braggarts do their blades, which, God be thanked, hurt not”—V.i.159 and 189-190) is an ironic measurement of their social and personal irresponsibility.

Their change of heart, such as it is, comes about, not via the “imagination”, but by the factual confession of Borachio, led in opportunely by Dogberry and the Watch (an ironic name for a constabulary in a community that refuses to see except at night). “I have deceived even your very eyes. What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light …” (V.i.238-240). Only now does Claudio begin to see imaginatively, but without any appreciable gain in depth: “Sweet Hero, now thy image doth appear In the rare semblance that I loved it first” (V.i.259-260—my italics). His apology to Leonato limps with self-defense: “Yet sinned I not But in mistaking” (V.i.283-284). And Leonato forgives him.¹⁸ So little does slander, the sin of misusing words, amount to in Messina. The conclusion seems justified that Dogberry's recurrent demand to “be writ down an ass” applies less to himself than to his betters, who have heedlessly clung to an ass's code.¹⁹ His parting wish to Leonato, “God restore you to health” (V.i.333-334), is rich in irony. The social norm of Messina has been ailing for a long time. Can the community now be brought back to social health?

A total cure for all the social abnormality in Messina, Shakespeare is too wise to posit, though cure rather than manageability is depicted in the transformation of Beatrice and Benedick. Claudio's change of heart is quite in character—a form of manageability. He delights in his “second” betrothal as pliantly as in his first and on the same materialistic terms: his new bride is “almost the copy of my child that's dead”, Leonato advertises, and she is “heir” to both him and Antonio (V.i.298-299). Claudio's acceptance of the masked Hero typifies his congenital inability to see beneath surfaces. To him one mariage de convenance is as good as another. (It is significant that Benedick inquires which of the masked women is Beatrice before asking for her hand—V.iv.72). The best that can be hoped from Claudio is that he may value better the externalities that alone appeal to him.

It is to Beatrice and Benedick that we must turn to find a yardstick for the proportionate in their reappraisal of love and wit. In their declaration of love at the end of the church scene their language is stripped bare of the wit associated with conventional love jargon. “I do love nothing in the world so well as you”, Benedick confesses. “Is not that strange?” (IV.i.269-270). And though he agrees to challenge Claudio, he refuses to kill him at the command of Beatrice, whose sense of outraged justice pushes her to extreme conformity to the social code.²⁰ Benedick's indictment of Claudio's wit after the church scene is, however, not a repudiation of wit itself. His witty acknowledgement that he cannot “woo in festival terms” (V.ii.40) implies both self-realization and the conviction that life without wit would be dull indeed. “Thou and I”, he tells Beatrice, “are too wise to woo peaceably” (V.ii.73).

The teasing ambiguity of their final wit combat is a fair measurement of the distance they have come.

BENE.
Do not you love me?
BEAT.
Why, no; no more than reason.
BENE.
Why, then your uncle, and the Prince and Claudio
Have been deceiv'd; for they swore you did.
BEAT.
Do not you love me?
BENE.
Troth, no; no more than reason.
BEAT.
Why, then my cousin, Margaret, and Ursula
Are much deceiv'd; for they did swear you did.

(V.iv.74-79)

This superb example of Shakespeare's exploitation of Lylian dialogue illustrates graphically wit become the equivalent of wisdom. “No more than reason”—but is reason an attribute of love; does it induce or qualify love; can love be measured by reason; can one love reasonably? And are love and reason as truly antithetical as traditional belief insisted? Only a keen intelligence can play with such questions, all of which imply that love, whatever it is, cannot be entirely “much ado about nothing”.

What, then, does the “nothing” of the title imply, relevant to the themes of love and wit? To the detached, because they see clearly that those in love frequently behave like fools, love may appear to be “nothing”, a mirage that deludes those whose vision has become emotionally cloudy. Conversely, to the undetached, it makes no difference, once they fall in love, if their vision is blurred and that to the detached they appear to be fools. For they perceive—and it is another form of vision—that to be in love is to surrender to a higher wisdom than the detached can ever claim: the recognition of the validity of natural instinct unsoiled by materialistic or conventional considerations. Throughout the play Beatrice and Benedick have exemplified these various distinctions and learned in the process—a dynamic, far more than a rational process—that love is “much ado about something”, however indefinable in the long run that something may be.

But the title applies most aptly to the critique upon wit. To everyone but Beatrice and Benedick, and sometimes even to them, indulgence in wit has been an unconscious embrace of meaninglessness, the canker that can eat the heart out of a society like Messina. The innocent jest and the double-bitted witticism that reveal rather than conceal meaning have got lost in the welter of daily experience, and their place has been taken by the stale joke that can be peddled from mouth to mouth until its flatulence is a stench in the nostrils of those blessed with intelligence. Natural instinct has lost its centrality in human life, as if to say that the wittier, and thus the more jargonistic, one gets about love, the further one gets from living human reality. Or to put it another way, as language depreciates into a coinage little removed from the counterfeit, those who pay their social bills with it sicken into abnormality.

Viewed in this way, Dogberry's struggle to enlarge his vocabulary is not just verbal comedy rooted in the inability of an oaf to say what he means. In Dogberry can be perceived the halting, but conscious movement upward of the near-illiterate to linguistic exactness, to that happy condition in which words, witty or otherwise, are anchored in real meaning. In the fashionable upper crust of Messina can be perceived the unconscious movement downward of the pseudo-literate to the unhappy condition in which words, especially “witty” words, have retained only the residual meaning of gobbledygook. Dogberry's bumbling hold upon the moral truth that Borachio and Conrade are villains who should be investigated is a trenchant comment upon the purblindness of his social superiors who fail to see when they should that chicanery is responsible for the slanderous charges against Hero, charges that in effect are an impeachment of their whole society. Thus, to value life in terms of wit alone is to make “much ado about nothing”.

Nevertheless, to value wit truly is to make “much ado about something”. This double way of assessing the same thing, characteristic of Shakespeare's wholeness, is implied in Benedick's ultimate witty appraisal of the value of wit.

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 purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it. …

(V.iv.100-107—my italics)

Though love may appear to be nothing, it is the final something that gives meaning to life; and though wit may decline into nothing, it can, when properly seasoned with wisdom, add a significant savor to life, without which even love would be tepid and tedious.

Social abnormality has been cured, then, in Beatrice and Benedick; in Claudio and the fashionable world of Messina, it has become manageable. More significant is the fact that Beatrice and Benedick have developed sufficient insight into themselves to become living norms for their society instead of being carping critics of their society's norms. Though their society remains essentially unchanged, this is as we should expect. In the world of comedy of manners social health depends upon compromise, adjustment, resilience, not upon fundamental social change; and wit, fully matured in Beatrice and Benedick, is the best available instrument for achieving external and internal harmony. Shakespeare knew what he was doing, therefore, when he designed Much Ado so that wit, a salient feature of all his previous comedies, became the final integrating factor. Without it the play would be the double-jointed affair, replete with problems, it has so frequently been mistaken for, a mélange of odds and ends like Love's Labor's Lost, in which wit, though a major theme, never quite pulls the play into a rounded construct. And it is because of the theme of wit that Much Ado rises to the kind of profundity to be found in all great comedies of manners in western literature. It remained for Shakespeare to show how wit can provide penetrating insights into the dark corners of human existence in the language of Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear.

Notes

1. G. B. Harrison, Introduction to Much Ado About Nothing, in Shakespeare, Major Plays and the Sonnets (New York, 1948), p. 420.

2. John Palmer, Comic Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1947), pp. 134 and 135.

3. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, 1959), p. 222.

4. Dorothy C. Hockey, “Notes Notes, Forsooth …”, Shakespeare Quarterly, VIII (1957), 354.

5. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies (London, 1957), chap. I. Miss Hockey's interpretation loses value, in my opinion, when she discusses Benedick's behavior in V. i, as if it were similar to his behavior hitherto. After the church scene Benedick's eyes are fully open; his character has changed signally; he is not “seeing” in the same way as he had before. In short, he has shifted his standard of judgment, as I point out later on.

6. Paul A. Jorgenson, “Much Ado About Nothing”, Shakespeare Quarterly, V (1954), 288 and 293.

7. Jorgenson, p. 293.

8. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1959), p. 272.

9. Goddard, p. 275. This conclusion Goddard grounds in Friar Francis' argument that, once Claudio believes Hero to be dead, “Th' idea of her life shall sweetly creep / Into his study of imagination” (IV. i. 225-226) so that she will seem more precious than when she lived. Citations from Much Ado are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. by George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1936).

10. Typical problems are the justification of the Hero-Claudio plot, the curious series of false reports stemming from eavesdropping, and the question of melodrama in Acts IV and V. Typical essays are those of Kerby Neill, “More Ado About Claudio: An Acquittal for the Slandered Groom”, Shakespeare Quarterly, III (1952), 91-107; and Francis G. Schoff, “Claudio, Bertram, and a Note on Interpretation”, Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959), 11-23.

11. Palmer, p. 113, classifies the play as comedy of manners. Charles T. Prouty, The Sources of Much Ado About Nothing: A Critical Study, Together with the Text of Peter Beverley's Ariodanto and Ieneura (New Haven, 1950), pp. 63-64, calls the play high comedy. That Much Ado is high comedy seems undeniable, but that it is comedy of manners has met with little general acceptance. The reason lies, perhaps, in the assumption that Shakespearian comedy of the middle period is, sui generis, too unique for rigid classification, and in the tendency of theorists of comedy to define comedy of manners with an eye confined to average Molière and the pseudo-Molière comedy of manners of the Restoration. These presuppositions, it seems to me, ought to be vigorously questioned.

12. For the theory of comedy on which I ground the following interpretation of Much Ado, see L. J. Potts, Comedy (London, 1949). Such abstract terms as I have used here and in subsequent paragraphs come from this excellent little book.

13. See Prouty, pp. 39-52, and Nadine Page, “The Public Repudiation of Hero”, PMLA, L (1935), 739-744, for fuller treatment of the subject of arranged marriages in Elizabethan England. I am unable to understand why their sociological treatment of the Hero-Claudio plot has been depreciated in some quarters; it seems to me to make good sense, and it will be noticed that my reading of Much Ado has been strongly influenced by both these scholars.

14. The fuss over the false report that Don Pedro is wooing Hero for himself—one of the red herrings in discussion of the play—can be cleared up by recognition of the fact that Don Pedro is pretending to be Claudio in the masque (I.i.323-7), a fact none of the characters but Claudio is aware of. I see no reason to assume that Shakespeare was guilty of poor design and awkward motivation in this instance.

15. David Lloyd Stevenson, The Love-Game Comedy (New York, 1946), pp. 209-214, has pointed out Shakespeare's double point of view with respect to Beatrice and Benedick as lovers, but he does not suggest how this ambivalence is carried through with respect to Beatrice and Benedick as fanciers of wit.

16. I am indebted for insight here to Mr. Charles Frey, a former student of mine at Yale.

17. Kerby Neill, p. 93, makes a somewhat similar comment, but in terms of the traditional conflict between reason and emotion. I find it hard, however, to accept Neill's description of Claudio as a somewhat idealistic, if naive, young man.

18. Claudio's penance, which strikes modern readers as silly in the extreme, I take to be a further illustration of his and his society's superficiality. Readers who are amused by it are, I think, reacting as Shakespeare hoped they would—comically.

19. Dogberry's misuse of words represents the obverse side of a culture that values words above deeds. All the Dogberry episodes can be read as parody of different elements of the upper plots.

20. Beatrice's sudden “kill Claudio” (IV. i. 291) has occasioned much comment upon inconsistency of characterization. It seems to me that her demand upon Benedick makes sense, if the play is read as comedy of manners. It should not be assumed that, because Beatrice and Benedick are in some matters at odds with the conventions of their world, they are at odds with them in every matter. In moments of high crisis, especially those involving strong moral shock, nonconformists frequently revert to black and white social judgments. Beatrice has always been somewhat fierce in her judgments of other people; she is uncompromising in her judgment of herself after the orchard scene; now she has a legitimate reason for a truly ferocious outburst, however melodramatic it may be.