SOURCE: Zitner, Sheldon P. Introduction to Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare, edited by Sheldon P. Zitner, pp. 1-78. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Zitner surveys the setting and characters of Much Ado about Nothing and discusses the relationship between the Hero-Claudio main plot and the Beatrice-Benedick subplot.]

PLACE AND SETTING

Unlike many of Shakespeare's plays, Much Ado does not create a strong sense of place. Shakespeare's Messina, as Mario Praz observes, is ‘senz'altro una città imaginaria’.¹ It bears no resemblance to Renaissance Messina or any other Italian city of the day. What it does resemble, however, is an Elizabethan town with a simple municipal organization operating under royal charter. Shakespeare's Messina is something of a social backwater; compare the gorgeous wedding gown of the Duchess of Milan with Hero's modest wedding dress which, according to her fashionable gentlewoman, is appropriate to the occasion. There is a provincial overtone in the strain felt by Leonato on receiving Don Pedro and his party; the formality is excessive and observed to be so. Leonato is unused to such exalted guests or to such entertaining. Public rooms, evidently not often open, must be perfumed by specially hired staff (Borachio); for music Leonato must depend on the Prince's man Balthasar. This is hardly Bandello's upscale Messina of the banquets. What Leonato is used to are easy, informal relations with townsfolk such as Dogberry, whom he can address as friend and neighbour. Evidently he is also used to a household without a wife's control, hence to a rather permissive domestic scene dominated by his teenage daughter, Hero, her two gentlewomen, and the unconventional Beatrice. This makes easier Don John's plot to discredit Hero, something that could have taken place only with difficulty in All's Well, whose household organization left no wall without ears.

In other plays the impression of place derives from mutually defining contrasts; town against country, court against tavern, and from evocative scene-setting. Much Ado has little of such poetry—Hero's description of her garden, a few words from Don Pedro on the beauty of the night—and no great removals of the action from place to symbolic place, to a Dover Cliff or a forest of Arden, for example. Social rather than physical ambience concerns the dramatist, but picturesque settings blur rather than clarify that ambience. As a text Much Ado implies a classical spatial economy and a radically stylized setting. With the exception of the church scene in which Claudio denounces Hero, and possibly the supposed penance in 5.3, the action takes place in or near Leonato's mansion.

Earlier editors often attempted to locate the action of individual scenes in the play, usually following Capell, Theobald, and Pope. Of the play's seventeen scenes, at least nine are localized differently by different editors. Generally the issue is whether to place the scene inside Leonato's house, before it, or in the adjoining garden. In only a few instances does the choice seem significant. For example, the depth of Leonato's anxiety and of the deference he shows Don Pedro can be indicated to some extent by the choice of locale: a public room in the governor's house, with its suggestion of Leonato's status, or a more deferential welcome outside.

How casual Shakespeare could be about location unless it affected meaning is clear from 1.2 and 1.3. Scene 1.2 opens with Antonio's second-hand account of Don Pedro and Claudio speaking of Hero when walking ‘in mine orchard’. Thus we also ought to locate all of 1.1 in Antonio's orchard, an unlikely place for receiving the Messenger, unless we think Pedro and Claudio repeated elsewhere their exchange of twenty lines earlier in 1.1. In 1.3 Borachio also claims to have overheard Claudio and Don Pedro discussing the proxy wooing, this time in a musty room. These are knots to be cut by directors, not untied by editors.

Where there is a need to define a place, it takes only a few descriptive lines (Hero's in her garden), minor props (trellis and tree for arbour and concealment), or only the stage architecture itself—as in 3.3 when Borachio and Conrad shield themselves from the weather under a ‘penthouse’, presumably the canopy over part of the stage. The action of Much Ado takes place largely in virtual rather than ‘real’ space, and the properties Shakespeare required for Much Ado were all on hand, an indication of his professional concern for easy transfer to different venues.

ORGANIZING THE DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The story of Hero and Claudio does not require the whole cast of Much Ado. Hero and Claudio yes, but why Beatrice and Benedick? Leonato, but why Antonio? Margaret, but why Ursula? And why both Conrad and Borachio? Characteristically, the Shakespearian dramatis personae goes beyond the necessities of narrative, constituting a system of contrasting dyads and triads (Hal and Hotspur, Lear's three daughters), and even more sophisticated thematic variants (Hotspur as Time's fool, Hal redeeming it, Falstaff wasting it, Henry IV ‘serving’ it). In part, this systemic pairing reflects a view of character, specifically the Pauline voluntarism that prompts us to ‘look here upon this picture and on this’ in order to judge the characters resulting from the life-choices of Claudius and Hamlet's father.

There are further consequences arising from this process of doubling and tripling. In ‘Emotion of Multitude’, his seminal remarks on Lear, Yeats observes that the reverberations of parallel lives suggest to the audience the universality and hence the likelihood of what is occurring on stage. Shakespeare does with character what he does with scene and incident, maximizing the differences, here between characters brought together by incident (Leonato and Dogberry) or family or occupation (Hero and Beatrice, Dogberry and Verges). The result is vivid delineation, not only for its own sake, but for rapidity in orientating audience attention and easing the writer's task of generating dialogue.

Finally, the playwright is something of a company manager. In writing the play Shakespeare distributes the burden of work so as to sustain the enterprise, demanding of actors only what they can perform, bringing along novices by creating parts that stretch their talents.

LOVERS

Hero and Leander, with George Chapman's continuation of what Christopher Marlowe had left undone, was published in 1598. Even without this jog to memory, Shakespeare might have named his ingénue Hero after the faithful young woman whose lover is drowned swimming to an assignation. Benedick's ironic reference to ‘Leander the good swimmer’ in 5.2 suggests that allusions to the story would have been widely understood. Shakespeare's dependence on its associations is clear from Claudio's puerile repetition of Hero's name as he denounces her.

The Hero of Much Ado is one of Shakespeare's passive young women: obedient, unquestioning, well brought up, thoroughly conventional and rather prudish. As is Polonius speaking of Ophelia, Leonato can be confident when he says of Hero, ‘My daughter tells us all’. With the gardener in Richard II, Hero can gather politically correct platitudes (hers are naïve and unambiguous) from her garden in 3.1; she is uneasy at the sexual innuendo in Margaret's reference in 3.4 to the coming marriage; in 2.1 she is prudently specific in offering to do any ‘modest’ office to unite Beatrice and Benedick. In the brief self-defence she makes in 4.1, she responds with delicate obliqueness to the implicit charge of fornication, but directly to the apparently mentionable charge of conversation ‘At hours unmeet’.

Shakespeare seems at times to do everything but make Hero disappear; unlike Beatrice, this is a part requiring only a second-best boy actor. In 1.1, in answer to Claudio's request for an opinion of her, Benedick, an admittedly unreliable judge of women, finds Hero merely Leonato's ‘short daughter’, ‘too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise, and too little for a great praise’. Even Hero's most intense reactions (she blushes and goes pale) are conveyed by someone else, by the Friar, who describes her innocence, her shame, and her rage. Later in the scene it is the Friar who provides an apologia which invents more than describes the ‘lovely’ life of a Hero who speaks so little in her own right. No wonder Shakespeare chose a name that was a label. But even so evocative a name as Hero could not compete in implication with ‘Beatrice’, yet another indication of Shakespeare's curious reversal of traditional priorities in subordinating his ‘main plot.’

Shakespeare's Hero is both a foil for Beatrice and a partial explanation of her character. In 2.1 Antonio asks Hero if she will be ruled by her father in the choice of a husband. Beatrice intervenes, saying that it is Hero's duty to curtsy and act as it pleases her father—adding however, that if the man chosen for her is not handsome, Hero should curtsy again and say ‘“Father, as it please me”’. Beatrice, unlike Hero, is not a highly placed heiress. Older, with no father, and moving toward what was thought an unmarriageable age, she has developed tough—if not single-minded—views which question the constraints imposed on women. She tries to stake out a position of modified obedience for Hero, a position hardly radical when The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, to use the title of a popular play performed by Shakespeare's company in 1607, had long been acknowledged. For Hero, however, Beatrice's compromise might have been unsustainable. The instant change from Hero's preparation for Leonato's ‘dream’ of a match with Don Pedro to her acceptance of Claudio suggests complete pliability.

Yet Hero's loyalty is not witless acceptance. Like her discreetly flirtatious responses to the Prince during their turn around the dance floor, her answer in 3.1 to Ursula's question, ‘When are you married, madam?’ shows some wit: ‘Why, every day, tomorrow.’ Perhaps this also hints at a long-prepared dedication to the social role that might make her ultimate marriage to Claudio plausible. However, Hero is not all conformity and quiet. Beatrice is a fool and you're another, she tells Margaret after Margaret questions her taste in clothes, a matter not of prime interest to Hero. Perhaps the outburst is pre-nuptial jitters. Hero obviously looks to Beatrice as to an older sister, but there may be truth as well as feigning in the critique she makes of Beatrice when trying to trick her into accepting Benedick. Beatrice, Hero says, is ‘self-endeared’; her being ‘so odd from all fashions’ is not commendable; her spirits are as coy and wild as the haggard of the rock.

From the perspective of conformity those who forsake it must always seem to assert an egotistical superiority. Looked at positively, Hero's choice is to be ‘other-endeared’, and so she can be portrayed but this, one can argue, is precisely the self-sacrifice that has been imposed on her. Hero's reference to the ‘haggard’, the female falcon in the wild, need not mean that she accepts a wholly instrumental role. In Shakespeare and His Social Context, Margaret Loftus Ranald, who discusses the term ‘haggard’ in relation to The Taming of the Shrew, points out that the art of falconry distinguished between training and taming, and recognized that training altered both master and bird, whose native wildness it sought to preserve if only for the sake of the hunt.² The analogy reduces a human to an animal relation, an exploitive one at that, and encourages the male master's illusion that women can be ‘mastered’ without ‘breaking their spirit’. Yet to deny the distinction that was made through the analogy is to ignore a small, ameliorative point of argument in the current discussions of marriage.

By the turn of the century matches like that between Hero and Claudio were already looking out of date or at least rather high aristocratic. Shakespeare had been on safe ground with social opinion in questioning parental interference with a love-match, even in the society of Romeo and Juliet. Yet it was (and still largely is) thought unlikely that a Hamlet would ‘carve for himself’. The matching of a governor's daughter and a count—especially a young count so near a prince—comes close enough to a power transaction to ‘place’ if not extenuate Leonato's heavy-handed management and Hero's acquiescence.

The frequent appearance of dukes and counts in Elizabethan drama may lead to underestimates of the steepness of fortune's hill. Sir Thomas Wilson, describing ‘The State of England’ in a contemporary treatise,³ estimated that in 1600 there were only 60 peers, 500 knights, and 16,000 lesser gentry in a population of 4,000,000. It would have been easy enough for an Elizabethan audience to set the Hero-Claudio match to one side, accepting its rather bloodless quality as highly probable and well observed. The situation of Beatrice and Benedick, unusual as the two and their wooing were, would have seemed closer to courtships the audience actually knew.

At least some of those courtships were influenced by a degree of clerical support for more latitude for women in the conduct of marriage, though not for their parity. Paul's often quoted Letter to the Ephesians 5: 22 (‘Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord’) could be countered with Galatians 3:28 in which Paul himself had said that ‘in Christ there is no male or female’. But popular sermons teased an appropriate moral from texts with more picturesque images: Eve was created not from Adam's foot but from his rib, and so it was the divine intention that she walk by Adam's side, not be trodden underfoot. The term ‘helpmeet’ suggests both the limitations and advances implicit in the sermons. Milder attitudes toward women were reflected in the sentimental Frauendienst of romantic plays and poems, more substantially in sermon and homily and, some speculate, in individual marriages, particularly among couples with puritan sympathies.

It is unlikely, however, that Elizabethan marriages were any closer to the norms of advice and preachment than are marriages now. A passage from I. G.'s 1605 Apologie for Women-Kinde⁴ seems plausible if only because it seems familiar. According to I. G., women gave way to their husbands' authority ‘Only for order’, but ‘the authority is vain’ as ‘every one can tell’. Though clearly partisan, I. G. believes that the God who refrained from casting Eve into slavery or servility also ‘left her guidance to her husband's will’. The result is a familiar blur. The kind of marriage it implies is hardly egalitarian, but as a formula it probably represents, historically, a turn for the better. Progressive humanists could be even more optimistic about the possibilities for mutual contentment in the sexuality and companionship of marriage, as was Erasmus in A Ryght Frutefull Epistle in Laude and Praise of Matrimonie, written about 1530. The actualities of Elizabethan marriage in general are impossible to know and, as Carol Thomas Neely points out,⁵ there is inadequate evidence for choosing among contradictory assertions about women's improved or worsened lot during the period.

If we are to draw conclusions from what we know of Hero's off-stage aristocratic sisters, it is doubtful that Hero could even look forward to the kind of marriage I. G. described. Don Pedro, a bachelor, had to remind Claudio of the minimal behaviour expected of a husband. In English Society 1580-1680, Keith Wrightson describes the marital fate of young women of the high aristocracy.⁶ Their lives could be quite empty, and they themselves merely ‘ornamental and idle’ as they stitched away solitary hours while their husbands warred or governed.

Shakespeare has given us a submissive Hero, yet he has also given the actor enough to create a more subtle role. Neither her apparent enthusiasm for her ‘own dear Claudio’, nor her conformity precludes apprehensiveness and regret. When her gown is praised in 3.4, Hero replies, ‘God give me joy to wear it, for my heart is exceeding heavy’. This can be played as virginal jitters but, alternatively, it can also express a pang of resignation to a narrow fate. Hero's answer to Margaret's question about when she is to be married, ‘Why, every day, tomorrow’ may be spoken with grim anticipation, a tone Leonato's heavy-handedness could easily motivate.

Hero's vulnerability is due as much to youth as to social status. Shakespeare remembered Bandello's adolescent heroine in creating what Don John sourly calls this ‘forward March chick’ and in matching her with a ‘start-up’ suitor. Extreme youth is not unusual in engaged couples of the high aristocracy. There is one other young Claudio in Shakespeare, the unfortunate prisoner of Measure for Measure. The two Claudios share only their ordinariness and lack of moral distinction. (The Claudios of the commedia dell'arte were young lovers; perhaps Shakespeare recalled them wryly.) In Much Ado Claudio is addressed as ‘young Claudio’, ‘Lord Lackbeard’, and ‘boy’. He does not bridle at epithets that would have drawn Coriolanus' sword, for the epithets are undeniable.

Immaturity explains and extenuates Hero's passivity, as it does Claudio's too-quick suspicions and his ready acceptance of Don Pedro's offer to woo Hero in his stead. Even Claudio's military prowess, like that of Bertram in All's Well, seems connected with immaturity; indeed, Claudio is a first sketch for Bertram. The Erasmian scepticism about war Shakespeare develops in All's Well through Parolles' follies and Bertram's astounding feats as a teenage Alexander touches Beatrice's tart comments on killing and eating in 1.1 and her deprecation of Benedick's need to associate with some ‘young squarer’, some preocious master of brawling like Claudio. Through Bertram's career Shakespeare will imply that war is as much a boy's as a man's game; Claudio's victory over Don John suggests that the idea was already formed.

Alone onstage at the start of 2.3, Benedick tells us that Claudio in love has ‘turned orthography’ and that his words are a ‘very fantastical banquet’. No one familiar with the play will believe it. Having denied Claudio the sighing and sonneteering of the conventional stage lover, Shakespeare repeats the strategy he used in creating Hero. He makes Claudio in love the matter of someone else's virtuoso soliloquy. The description is a rehearsal of the Benedick-to-be who speaks it. It applies to no Claudio we have seen and it only underscores what he lacks. Claudio does make a brief declaration in 2.1, just after Leonato has offered him Hero in marriage. ‘Lady,’ he says to Hero, ‘as you are mine, I am yours. I give away myself for you, and dote upon the exchange.’ The speech is provoked by Beatrice's prodding of the lovers to declare themselves. It is weakened rather than justified by Claudio's insistence that his silence is ‘the perfectest herald of joy’, and by two rather cool formulations: ‘as you are mine’ and I ‘dote upon the exchange’ (italics mine). Why posit what sounds like a condition, and why not dote on the lady herself?

Anyone unfamiliar with Elizabethan marriage laws and customs would not realize that the words Claudio speaks constitute, as do the two other such exchanges in the last scene, espousals de praesenti, a form of union then considered virtually indissoluble. Thus there may be some slight extenuation for Claudio's later misbehaviour in the legal character of the commitments here, in the handfast—a probable piece of stage business—and the kiss. But Shakespeare does nothing to underline the point. Later he will neglect it again in the case of the Claudio of Measure for Measure, where the stakes are even higher.

As aristocratic suitor, if not as young lover, Claudio is highly plausible. He consults his elders, Benedick and the Prince, describing to his commander his subordination of his initial ‘liking’ of Hero to the ‘task in hand’. Now that ‘warthoughts / Have left their places vacant’, ‘soft and delicate desires’ have ‘come thronging’ in, ‘All prompting me how fair young Hero is, / Saying I liked her ere I went to wars’. This is a report to a superior rather than a confession of love; Claudio's thoughts and feelings come curiously self-propelled and nicely prioritized; nor do they overflow their categories. It is tempting to imagine Don Pedro with tongue in cheek when he warns Claudio that he will be ‘like a lover presently, / And tire the hearer with a book of words’. Don Pedro's offer to intercede with Leonato has the right cachet, and Claudio does not hesitate. Nevertheless he is still concerned about appearances: ‘lest my liking might too sudden seem, / I would have salved it [prepared for his declaration of love] with a longer treatise’.

Claudio can hold his own in scenes of soldierly ragging (indeed he must if Shakespeare is to write them without introducing more characters), but the verbal leanness of a minor part accords with this limited sensibility whose thoughts and feelings come from narrow conceptions of soldierliness and personal honour. As David Cook points out, in both 1.1 and 2.1 Claudio is on stage for sixty lines before he speaks a word.⁷ But when he thinks that his honour is at stake, as in the church scene, he can find words enough.

When he does speak at length, Claudio is unsympathetic. Like his mentor Don Pedro and some of Shakespeare's other command-figures (Henry V, the Duke in Measure for Measure, Prospero), Claudio is an instigator of spectacle. An unpleasant self-satisfaction prompts both his decision to denounce Hero before all the congregation and the denunciation itself. ‘But fare thee well, most foul, most fair; farewell / Thou pure impiety and impious purity’: the rhetoric is mechanical and absolute. That it has as its primary aim the advertisement of Claudio's own still spotless honour only makes it worse. However, Don Pedro and even Leonato accept the charges as proved. This may not be the exoneration of Claudio for which T. W. Craik argues,⁸ but at least it demonstrates that Claudio is not unique, not exclusively the ‘hateful young cub’ Andrew Lang thought him. However, the Friar's plan to lead Claudio to remorse through Hero's supposed death simply fails, as his behaviour and the Prince's in 5.1 show. Any expression of remorse has to be projected into the two lines (5.1.245-6) in which Claudio tells of the return of Hero's image ‘In the rare semblance that I loved it first’. No matter how impressive the ritual at Hero's shrine, wishfulness cannot explain away Claudio's defects, but criticism that isolates Claudio overlooks the ideological breadth of Shakespeare's unpleasant portrayal of Hero's accusers.

Propriety, plausibility, laconic speech and cliché, absence of intimate feeling, a touchy concern for (male) opinion—in all these Claudio exemplifies the social style of Honour. Add to this his youth, and his ready suspicion first of Don Pedro and then of Hero becomes ‘natural’. Yet both suspicions are suspicions of Hero, not ‘natural’ but exaggerations of accepted misogynist absurdities, here given a romantic coloration: if Don Pedro has betrayed him it is not because Don Pedro is disloyal but because, as Claudio bitterly observes at the ball after being taken in by Don John's lies, ‘beauty is a witch / Against whose charms faith melteth into blood’, blood being our common sexuality. W. H. Auden wrote that had Claudio's love been ‘all he imagined it to be, he would have laughed in Don John's face’.⁹ But Claudio loved honour, not only more, but almost exclusively.

Yet even with honour as a motive for his blindness, can one accept Claudio's excuse, ‘sinned I not / But in mistaking’? And does his response to Leonato's second offer of a bride (‘Your over kindness doth wring tears from me’) give us at last a Claudio ‘fit’ for marriage; or only a Claudio grateful for any way out of a situation in which his honour is at risk? Auden, already generous to Claudio even in condemnation, thought him fit, as have others, if only because exonerating Claudio, according to Robert Grams Hunter, allows audiences to have the ‘comic experience’.¹⁰ Yet the question is not whether ‘we’ exonerate Claudio, although we are free to do so. We can find him innocent and Don John the only guilty party, as does Craik.¹¹ We can forgive his youth; view the death of Hero as a symbolic purging of Claudio's offence, as does David Cook;¹² or stage it, as did Trevor Nunn, so that ‘Claudio's penance at the tomb [would] not be undervalued’.¹³ Or we can take our cue from Leonato and Hero. But if the plot ‘forgives’ Claudio, the script seems less ready to do so. How is the actor to speak and behave in 4.1 and 5.1? How make his eagerness to wed even an Ethiope contrition rather than only care for his honour, which marriage into Leonato's family will clear? The treatment of Claudio in performance is a measure of how far directors are willing to risk the dark side of the play.

It is a mistake to dismiss Hero and Claudio as merely ‘ordinary’ and ‘uninteresting’. The ordinary has its own interest; it is where nature puts her bets on survival. Further, Hero and Claudio are painful historical portraits, and if their attitudes are commonplace they are necessarily so in order to define the rare luck of their quarrelsome intellectual superiors. There is, in addition, a canny irony in Shakespeare's enlisting such agents in a romantic plot. As John Russell Brown observed, Much Ado will not ‘betray its secret to … piecemeal criticism’.¹⁴

Beatrice and Benedick are older, more experienced, less constrained socially and intellectually, more sensitive and more expressive. They were also intended to be more active physically. In her book On Some of Shakespeare's Characters, one of the great nineteenth-century Beatrices, Helen Faucit, conceived of Beatrice as ‘tall, lithe, quaint and sportive’.¹⁵ The parcelling out of traits among the lovers is a nice instance of theatrical pragmatism. An older (and taller) boy would have been needed for the older, more difficult role of Beatrice; hence a diminutive Hero for the sake of contrast as well as the impression of extreme youth. A tall Benedick was needed as a physical match for Beatrice, and further attributes, such as his being a ‘valiant trencherman’, followed. Beatrice's remark in the last scene that she had been told that, for love of her, Benedick was ‘in a consumption’ may be a joking allusion to the actor's size. Perhaps Thomas Pope, the large comic actor who played Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch, created the role.¹⁶

Beatrice and Benedick are more than unconventional contrasts to the younger couple's conventionality. They are blessed, not in being the Perfect Conduct-book Couple, but as individuals singled out for unusual gifts, among them their talents, their second chance, and each other. Beatrice, however, is more thoroughly blessed; the gift to Benedick seems centred on words. Appropriately, his name entered the language as a now obsolete generic term for newly married bachelors of long standing; it served as a compliment in the days when that status had a sentimental import.

Beatrice and Benedick are best remembered as linguistic marvels. For aspiring actresses, the role is a pinnacle, like the role of Hamlet for men, and for the same reason: there are so many fine things to be said, and in the theatre the play stands or falls on the role. Beatrice's first words, like Hamlet's, have a tart, cryptic quality that sets her apart as distinctly an individual with private concerns, with a public group, but not of it. From then on she too is a social critic, orientating our understanding, expressing herself through irony, and, at a crucial moment, regretting her inability to act.

Helen Faucit, who preferred the gentler role of Rosalind, nevertheless inveighed against the ‘heresy’ of Mrs Pat Campbell's portrayal of Beatrice as a tomboy, a shrew, and in general an ‘odious woman’.¹⁷ The heresy still surfaces in the theatre as an apparent confusion between Much Ado and The Taming of the Shrew, although there are few similarities between ‘curst Kate’ and Beatrice. Indeed, after overhearing Hero's Kate-like ‘character’ of her in the arbour scene, Beatrice is appalled. In any case, ‘curst’—for Antonio at least—is a code-word for Beatrice's failure to obey her male relatives. Ellen Terry took pains to indicate from the beginning that Beatrice was half in love with Benedick; her devotion to the single life is queried before it is expressed since her interest in Benedick is obvious from her first words, despite their sarcasm.

As Helen Faucit observed, there is an edge to Beatrice's wit that ‘sorrow and wrong’, far from removing, had sharpened. The resistance Shakespeare attributes to Beatrice is not the soft-spoken resignation Faucit tacitly accepts as the proper feminine response to adversity. Despite this verbal edge, a star danced at her birth and she has been thoughtfully amused ever since. Inevitably her thoughts have centred on the situation of women, and her amusement on men, whom she finds both intolerable and desirable.

An intellectual history can be gathered from the order of the topics on which Beatrice exercises her wit. In 1.1 her initial target is Benedick as lady-killer (he ‘challenged Cupid at the flight’), then Benedick as courageous soldier (‘a good soldier to a lady’), Benedick as intellectual opponent (‘four of his five wits went halting off’), then Benedick as faithful companion (‘O Lord, he will hang upon [a male friend] like a disease’). A little later Beatrice calls him ‘a pernicious suitor’. Decoding these complaints requires only Don Pedro's statement that Benedick had ‘cut Cupid's bow-string’, or Beatrice's that Benedick had won her heart ‘with false dice’.

Evidently Beatrice thinks the barrier between them is Benedick's commitment to the all-absorbing male cults of war, comradeship, and honour. It was the assurance held out by those cults, an assurance of a nobler intimacy and of protection from enervating sentiment and sexual betrayal that prompted the cutting of Cupid's bow-string and led him to become ‘a professed tyrant to women’. Benedick is not so much older than Claudio as to be free of the adolescent fears, so evident in his misogynistic wit, that lead to false idealisms such as those of the young men in Love's Labour's Lost. Against such cults Beatrice has set her wit: for Beatrice war is what riding to hounds was for Oscar Wilde, a hunt for the inedible; male alliances are mercurial and superficial, with ‘every month a new sworn brother’; honour is the treacherous ‘princely testimony’ of the likes of Claudio and Don Pedro. For these Benedick has rejected all that women offer with marriage, which is in every way superior. From hurt and self-concern Beatrice develops both targets and a mechanism of wit.

Yet Beatrice is neither a malcontent nor a radical. Her ‘How long have you professed apprehension?’ is a self-serving bit of class condescension to Margaret. Beatrice, about whose personal fortune we learn nothing (some productions suggest she is an heiress; Michael Langham's tried her as a poor relation), is as keen as the other lovers on remaining in the circle of privilege. Messina as it is—this is the world in which she has given her heart and in which she must live. There is no contemptus mundi in her, no generalized vituperation, no pining; she will enjoy even leading apes to hell, should it come to that.

The role is frankly physical. In her exchange with Benedick when they are alone after the denunciation in church, the kinetic energy that generates her brief, probing sentences, as much as her cause and her love, is irresistible. Benedick is overwhelmed. According to the Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving by the creator of Dracula, Bram Stoker, Ellen Terry played the scene ‘striding to and fro with long paces’;¹⁸ Helen Faucit combined forthrightness with delicacy. One wonders what in the world Dorothea Jordan did on stage that led her to say, admittedly after ten years of acting it, that the role was ‘a very easy quiet part’.¹⁹ Beatrice has little of Hero's maidenly reserve. She wants as handsome a man for herself as for Hero (a claim she makes for all women), and she can trade off-colour repartee with Margaret while keeping her moral distance. Shakespeare may be taking a certain risk to make a point when Beatrice says of Benedick ‘I would he had boarded me.’ The sexual innuendo is now diminished, but it could hardly have been lost on the audience.

Beatrice's mode of wit is typically ironic, though she is neither afraid to strike nor unwilling to wound. Indeed at one point she seems willing to kill. Yet irony itself, with its cryptic quality that forestalls reaction and its flattering appeals to laughter and intelligence, indicates that Beatrice speaks under constraint. Despite her position in Leonato's household and the latitude granted her as an amusing ‘original’, she is ‘merely’ a woman. Antonio and Leonato, even Benedick, simply leap away (the ‘jade's trick’) when they've had enough. To be listened to at all, a woman must amuse, or at least observe limits. Her engaging self-deprecations—Beatrice leading apes to hell, sunburnt Beatrice crying ‘heigh-ho for a husband’—these are Beatrice's recognition that she understands the game. But the self-deprecatory element in Beatrice's wit also reflects long-term anxieties. If Beatrice fears marriage she is also fearful and chagrined at being single: on the one hand she faces the prospect of being ‘overmastered’; on the other the pains of rejection, sexual denial, and exclusion from what was, outside the church, the only career with status open to women.

Though Beatrice objects to much of what men have made of themselves and of society, she also accepts much of it. She wants to marry Benedick, and when this seems possible after the deception in the arbour, she falls at once into the wildness-taming clichés of marital submissiveness. Typically, however, it is Beatrice herself who will do the taming. From her intellectual and moral domination of the play and from the parody obedience test of 5.2, we can guess that Beatrice's obedience will be qualified at best, and that it is not a sentimental anachronism to see the play hinting at something for Beatrice rather different from strictly patriarchal marriage.

In the modern theatre these issues can rarely arise; audiences sense the future of fifth-act marriages as happy or unhappy according to current standards. Criticism, however, puts the question of Beatrice's future on the agenda of interpretation. Beatrice's language and behaviour argue that her view of marriage is not extreme. Men are valiant dust (no cleric would quarrel), but women are overmastered by them nevertheless. (Even Goneril will legitimize male rule when she speaks contemptuously of her husband as a fool who ‘usurps’ her body.) Beatrice says she would have women exert power through a veto, and then during courtship, but Beatrice would not be the first of Shakespeare's characters to present orthodox credentials and then speak, act, or simply be in ways that question convention. An elegiac tone enters criticism that sees ‘the masculine world’ of Much Ado ‘unquestioned from within’ or sees Beatrice entering a repressive patriarchal marriage. Carol Cook's article is instructive on this point.²⁰ Yet though the play does more, only to have created a Beatrice questions her future total subordination, and her mental force, which brings Benedick to some understanding, suggests a continuity of instruction beyond ‘I do’.

Yet if the marriage of Beatrice and Benedick may not be conventional, it is unlikely to outrage opinion. Beatrice's strictures against ‘honour’ rest on scepticism born of the violations of the code. In 4.1 when Benedick seems to defend his comrades, Beatrice scorns Claudio as ‘a sweet gallant’, and deplores the decline of manhood, which has become only ‘curtsies’ and compliment; ‘men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones, too.’ It is the conventional ideal that Beatrice admires; moreover it is a conventionally aggressive ‘man of honour’ that she wishes she were: ‘O God that I were a man! I would eat his [Claudio's] heart in the market place.’ (This echo of Beatrice's scornful offer in 1.1 to eat anyone Benedick killed in war is awkward.) Perhaps Beatrice's wish ‘to be a man’ reflects a self-denigrating accommodation to the idea of male superiority; more likely it is simply an outraged recognition of the way things are. Though something of the feminist that Ellen Terry, truly a feminist and perhaps the greatest of Beatrices, praised her for being, Beatrice is of her class and day. Occasionally her statements have connotations that time has made more radical than the character.

This tug of motives dictates the strategy of her wittiest remarks, which mock conventional ideas, especially those on the role of women, by appealing to conventional sources that usually support those ideas. The strategy allows for both the thrust and the drawing back that comprise irony. Beatrice, still ‘orthodox’ in objection, will not marry because Adam's sons are her brothers and she refuses to violate the Anglican Table of Affinity by a ‘match in [her] kindred’.

Inevitably, we take Beatrice's wittiest remarks less seriously than those—such as her sharp thrusts at Benedick in the first scene—in which the balance tips from ingenuity toward scorn. Her manifestos of bachelorhood come from too lively and sexually inclusive a sensibility not to undermine themselves, at least in that historical context. She proposes to remain single because of the imperfections of men. But she concludes by acknowledging that, like Adam's sons, she too is a kind of valiant dust, so her demand for male perfection is suspect. The acceptance of mutual imperfection, necessary to sustained love, is already implicit in her continuing interest in Benedick, despite his past errors. Before the play ends that acceptance becomes explicit. ‘For which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?’ Benedick asks in 5.2. ‘For them all together’, Beatrice replies.

In phrases like ‘valiant dust’ and ‘wayward marl’, with the amusing metaphysical upset of noun by adjective, and the repetitions that suggest opulent verbal resources, Beatrice's wit comes close to Benedick's. Freud's Jokes and the Unconscious reworks traditional distinctions between humour and satire as distinctions between innocent and tendentious wit. Humour, Freud argues, has no reformist tendency, accepting its nominal object as it is. Misogynist jokes are an attractive store of wit to some of those otherwise underendowed who would regret losing them through changes in the condition of women, even though they might welcome those changes. Jokes generate a minor interest in their survival somewhat apart from their social origins or social effects. Shakespeare makes us aware that Benedick, who is not underendowed, has none the less assumed misogyny as a persona, in part as a thematic aid to his wit. When solicited for an opinion of Hero, he asks Claudio, ‘Do you question me as an honest man should do, for my simple true judgement, or would you have me speak after my custom, as being a professed tyrant to their sex?’ Apparently Benedick thinks himself capable of providing true judgements of women apart from his ‘tyrannical’ comic turn. Yet when Claudio asks him to speak ‘in sober judgement’, he does not. His negative portrait of Hero is a wit-cracker's set-piece directed not at her intellect, where a charge of mediocrity might have held, but at her physical appearance—against the evidence of the play. Benedick's mask of misogyny is evidently difficult to remove, a telling observation. His consciousness of his self-division, acknowledged in the mocking word ‘tyrant’, is small excuse, though it does prepare us for his later turnabout.

Anyone fed up with girl-friend, wife, and mother-in-law jokes will no doubt bridle at the notion that Benedick's wit is self-protective and largely of the ‘innocent’ sort. It takes the rapid elegance of a Gielgud or the brio of a Sinden to focus attention on Benedick's language as adroit performance rather than on its social implications. But marriage and Beatrice are as much its occasions as its targets. It is a rhetoric of masked fear, and it flourishes where there is no opposition to query it, as in soliloquy or in the extended treatment of a single subject to which there is no reply; otherwise it would collapse at once. Beatrice, however, is at her best in contention, and always victorious.

Typical of Benedick's good moments are his ingenious variations on the theme of Beatrice's attacks on him. His exotic offers to go to the ends of the earth to avoid her say less about Beatrice than about Shakespeare's store of picturesque allusion. None of this lessens our (or Benedick's) admiration of the lady who can inspire such distinguished nonsense. What gives the game away—in addition to Benedick's sheer extravagance—is his repetition of Beatrice's description of him as ‘duller than a great thaw’. The comparison is suggestively different in its homeliness, yet so much in his own vein of witty metaphor that he cherishes it verbatim.

Most innocent of his ‘innocent’ witticisms is an exemplary sentence in Benedick's soliloquy after the deception: ‘When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.’ The gentle self-mockery of this verbal sleight suggests how Benedick's tyranny to women is to be taken. When his guard is down Benedick reveals a saving modesty. Beatrice is wise, he says, ‘but for loving me’. This prepares for the self-questioning in his question to Beatrice: ‘Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?’ Knowing what the audience knows, the question must seem naïve, but it shows why Benedick has no need of the tendentious and reformist strategies of Beatrice's wit. Frustration and disadvantage are obviously not his themes.

Yet ‘language is always a matter of force; to speak is to exercise a will for power; in the realm of speech there is no innocence’—so Barthes observed.²¹ Finally Benedick's wit rests on the self-serving clichés of male victim and persecuting virago. These are, however, qualified by the intimation that they are not deeply held, and mask both his fear of marriage and an attraction to Beatrice so great as to need disguising, especially from Benedick himself.

Another strain of wit in Much Ado deflects its social implications almost as well as does Benedick's. Dogberry's rationales for avoiding police duties are impeccable: contact with criminals defiles, and so the police should avoid it; only those subject to police jurisdiction may be arrested, so those who refuse arrest are obviously not subject to it. This logic recalls Beatrice's strategy for marshalling conventional morality and legalism to mock both. Dogberry's physical prudence is matched by his judicial caution. Of Conrad and Borachio, by now clearly guilty, he says that they are ‘little better’ than false knaves, or at least ‘will go near’ to being thought so (italics mine). The Dogberry scenes are hardly intended to prompt reform, and Dogberry droll is only perfected by being also Dogberry insufferable. What he is and his not knowing what he is flatters the observer, and for a moment rights the social balance. The presence of the Watch alone is proof that crime does not pay in Messina.

The almost constant wittiness of Much Ado—even Conrad and Borachio execute multiple puns as they are led off by the Watch—has been judged a defect, making Messina a cold and artificial place where what Johnson called the ‘reciprocation of smartness’ seems to some critics to dampen authentic passion and justify cruel remarks. It is difficult to convey cleverness as an index to feeling, and actors sometimes manage only half the task, in itself a considerable achievement. Yet read backwards from the moment when Beatrice and Benedick are alone after the denunciation of Hero, Much Ado hardly fits the charge. Moreover, as Rossister²² observes, ‘It is a notable point in Shakespeare's contrivance that he gives both wits their off-day, as soon as love [which Rossiter sees begun only after the deception scenes] has disturbed their freedom.’ It is only a step to recognizing earlier connections between wit and love. The wit serves as shield against vulnerability; when the shield is less needed, it can be lowered.

Like Dogberry, Beatrice and Benedick are vain of their wit. Wit is their mode of being and since it allows so epicurean a response to life, evidently something of a raison d'être. Through their rhetoric we come to know a great deal about Beatrice and Benedick, especially about their self-deceptions and vulnerability. Their instant capitulation to the plots to unite them is a sure-fire cliché of comedy, but nonetheless psychologically sound. We learn just enough about their earlier estrangement to make sense of this mutual capitulation in their ‘merry war’.

Explaining his determination not to marry Beatrice (but how did marriage to her pop up on his agenda? or to him on hers?), Benedick says that ‘She would have made Hercules have turned spit …’. Is this fear of domination only another patriarchal conceit? The context here is the story of Hercules' three years' expiatory bondage with Omphale. (Benedick unwittingly states not only his fears but his guilt.) Yet Beatrice seeks no expiation. For all her condemnation of Benedick's male alliances, Beatrice is also solicitous of them. When the need to right the wrong done Hero arises in 4.1, Beatrice answers Benedick's question, ‘May a man do it?’ with ‘It is a man's office, but not yours.’ I do not think that Beatrice's answer turns only on Benedick's extra-familial status. Not until the two have made their mutual declarations of love and she has a right to assume that Benedick's alliance with Claudio is now secondary is she free to say ‘Kill Claudio’. But such alliances are not broken in an instant. To Beatrice's credit she persists after Benedick's initial refusal, and to his credit he soon recognizes the absoluteness of the new commitment he has made.

For all their sophistication, the most likely cause of their obscure earlier difficulties is a common one, consistent with the text: a woman ready for marriage, a man for courtship. Yet the two continued to care for each other as is indicated by the mutual resistance it requires all their wit to sustain. Most of Benedick's wit has this resistance as its obvious theme; Beatrice's confession of love in 4.1 barely pierces an armour-plate of equivocation. But if words obscure their love, words—their matched sonnets—finally reveal it. Their resistance breached, what we know of them promises the self-completion that comes from mutual acceptance.²³ In this lies their difference from Hero and Claudio who, as Joan Rees observed, ‘seem to have no principle of growth in them’.²⁴

BROTHERS

The two pairs of brothers, Don Pedro and Don John, Leonato and Antonio, are as ingeniously differentiated as the two pairs of lovers: Don Pedro and Don John noble and powerful bachelors with no significant age difference, both of them initiators of spectacle and intrigue, assured, intelligent and formal in speech, at odds—one apparently trusting, the other full of the dangerous discontent attributed to illegitimacy; Leonato and Antonio both apparently widowers, privileged but in a lesser sphere, older and with a pronounced age difference between them, slightly inept and provincial in manner, deferential and unable to act as they would like, eloquent but in an old-fashioned idiom, mutually supportive and loyal.

Shakespeare evidently wasted little thought on the names themselves. Leonato he inherited from Bandello; Antonio is Shakespeare's common name for fathers or father figures. In any case, he abandoned Q's ‘Old Man’ only when it became useful to do so. In the speech-prefixes Don John is plain English, as was Don Peter (Bandello's King Piero) before Shakespeare Hispanicized the name.

Leonato and Don Pedro are the significant members of the two pairs. Antonio is necessary as brotherly support and intensifier; a younger man could not have served these ends. Confronting Claudio and Don Pedro alone in 5.1, Leonato would have elicited a pathos Shakespeare thought undesirable; or so the caricature dialogue for Antonio seems to demonstrate. Antonio's description of errant youth is yesterday's Letter to the Editor, doubly amusing if Antonio were played by a boy, as was quite possible. Elsewhere he is a convenient voice for exposition, as in 1.2; and in the ball scene exchange with Ursula for some of the geriatric humour that Shakespeare had used in Richard II.

Don John is necessary but not important; his fate and nature are clear at once. Defeated rivals for power had no future, as Machiavelli and the history plays demonstrated, and Don John's illegitimacy is as much a marker as Hero's name. Although we do not learn of it until 4.1, Shakespeare's speech-prefixes show what was uppermost in his conception of the character. Don John is a plausible, ‘plain-dealing villain’, something he tells us ‘must not be denied’. The actor is helped to create the proper effect by portentous runs of monosyllables like, ‘I know not that when he knows what I know’, spoken just before Don John slanders Hero. There is a sturdiness in his determination to ‘claw no man in his humour’, but a sinister undertone in the violence of ‘claw’, which in this context should mean ‘stroke gently as if to placate’. Just the sight of him gives Beatrice heartburn. John Russell Brown relates how the Prospect Company's 1970 production of the play in Edinburgh dealt with the villain.²⁵ Don John was brought onstage at the very end and shot by Don Pedro just before the jolly command, ‘Strike up, pipers.’

Don Pedro himself is another matter: legitimate, triumphant, honourable, helpful, well-spoken—if rather formally so—and on occasion humorous. Yet his share in the denunciation of Hero, his proxy courtship, his stage-management of the deceptions, his trial offers of a husband to Beatrice—all these add up to a less competent figure than his entrance or the sources promise. Much Ado ends with Don Pedro, like his brother, an odd man out.

Shakespeare often dissociates power from sexual intimacy and makes the point in plays as different as 1 Henry IV and Antony and Cleopatra. But Don Pedro is not as limited a personality as a Henry IV or an Octavius and in Much Ado the point is made in a way that suggests loss rather than tacit choice or native coldness. His ‘Will you have me, lady?’ in 2.1 may be interpreted as only a light-hearted rejoinder, but Beatrice is taking no chances. Yet Don Pedro's later declaration that, were Beatrice interested, he would have ‘doffed all other respects and made her half [him]self’ can be spoken truly, even though it is intended for the eavesdropping Benedick.

More revealing is Don Pedro's readiness to ‘win’ Hero for Claudio. Neither Claudio's youth nor the political importance of the alliance are invoked overtly in the play as reasons for Don Pedro's offer. The possibility that Don Pedro woos for himself is taken seriously by Leonato and by Benedick, as well as by Claudio. When Benedick's rather callous hints draw an explanation from Don Pedro, his ‘I will but teach them to sing, and restore them to the owner’ suggests that the Prince, if unwittingly, may be doing something more than eliciting a simple yes.²⁶ At the ball Don Pedro's ambiguous introduction of himself to Hero as ‘your friend’ sets a flirtatious tone she then maintains and he does nothing to correct. Hero has every reason to believe that the Prince is approaching her on his own behalf.

Yet Shakespeare's handling of the Don Pedro-Hero material is not loose or careless. The speech that ends 1.1 is further evidence of a strategy to cloud intention. Don Pedro tells Claudio that he will ‘assume thy part’, ‘tell fair Hero I am Claudio’, and ‘take her hearing prisoner’ with his ‘amorous tale’, all of which seems uncomfortably like an anagram of Don John's later deception. Don Pedro's efforts to help his juniors are to his credit, but some lack in him feeds vicariously on the courtships of the four lovers. This is preferable to his brother's preying on them as ‘medicinable’ to his ‘sick … displeasure’. Yet against the glitter of the double wedding the figure of the Prince can seem rather sad.

Leonato is more recognizably literary (an echo of Kyd's anguished elders), more commonplace (the stock father of a marriageable stock daughter), and more surprising (a father who immediately accepts his daughter's guilt). There is a congenial side to Leonato, who can address the Watch as ‘friend’ and ‘neighbour’, appreciate Beatrice, forgive Margaret, and raise a laugh at the end with his vain effort to ensure that his daughter is safely off his hands before the dancing begins. He can make a snappy reply in 1.1 to Benedick's uncalled-for query about cuckolding, but this is the familiar men's-club topic and everyone knows the jokes. Yet in the deception of Benedick Leonato's awkward turning to others when he cannot think of useful lies is amusing.

The rest is unpleasant senex. Leonato's welcome to Don Pedro is sycophantic. The rhetoric of Elizabethan formal greeting of superiors was sycophantic, but here the excess is underlined by the Prince's dry response: ‘You embrace your charge too willingly’. Later in 1.1, the Prince tells Claudio and Benedick that he has told Leonato they will stay in Messina at least a month, and that Leonato ‘heartily prays some occasion may detain us longer’. This is said in Leonato's presence, and whether delivered as an intended small cruelty or as matter of fact, reflects well on no one. Such entertainments were a notorious burden.

Leonato's response to Hero's distress is a disaster. Treating her as an appendage, he has little sense of Hero as a person, hence nothing of Beatrice's—or even the Friar's—grounds for thinking Hero innocent. Leonato depends on what he thinks he knows, that princes and counts are men of honour and women sexually unreliable. When Claudio has finished his accusations, Leonato wonders why no one has stabbed him, wishes Hero dead, regrets her birth and nurture, insists that two princes would not lie, rebukes the Friar, relents only when Benedick accuses Don John, then claims he will avenge Hero and boasts of his wealth, strength, friends, and ‘policy of mind’. His last speech in the scene insists on the extremity of his grief. This theme is congenial; he elaborates it in a thirty-line speech at the start of 5.1. It is as though Shakespeare were determined to forestall audience sympathy for him. Leonato's confrontation of Claudio and Don Pedro later in that scene goes some way to redeeming him, but in the offer of another bride to a chastened Claudio, Leonato as a character succumbs to the necessities of the romantic plot.

Clearly, such speeches as Leonato's are as little to the modern taste as the attitudes they express. Productions generally trim them. However, Shakespeare's audiences enjoyed grand declamation and sententious wisdom. The tawdriness of what grand declamation could express, here as in Hamlet, must not have been lost on the author or on the ‘wiser sort’. But the primary implications of Leonato's speeches are ideological rather than literary. The deliberate organization of the negative reactions to Hero emphasizes their common misogynist premisses. Against an indifferent Don John, a benighted, self-centred Leonato, and both Claudio and Don Pedro, Shakespeare poises Beatrice, a humane Friar—remote from gender alignments yet a male, hence authoritative voice—and a Benedick slowly able to believe in the criminality of a prince and, later, in a close friend's outrageous behaviour, inexcusable though the friend has been duped.

GENTLEWOMEN, CONSPIRATORS, AND OTHERS

Ursula and Margaret, and Conrad, Borachio, and Balthasar have in common their consciousness of social position. Ursula ‘knows her place’ and forgets it only once; Margaret cannot forget hers and would like to leave it. Conrad insists he is a gentleman; Borachio is critical of gilded youth and reveals qualities above his conspiratorial calling; Balthasar is a minor retainer whose forte is apology for being less than he thinks he ought to be.

To Hero, Ursula and Margaret are Ursley and Meg. The homely English intimate forms suggest an easy-going relationship between a young mistress and what, despite the title of ‘gentlewoman’, were essentially upper servants. (The social origins and social prospects of gentlewomen were various, as the Marias and Helens in Shakespeare's plays can testify. In effect, their title was a reflection of the rank of their mistresses. A suggestive modern analogy is the notion of ‘assimilated rank’ given temporarily to certain civilians on military assignment during wartime.)

Ursula and Margaret are rough parallels of Hero and Beatrice; Ursula apparently the more sober of the two, less imaginative and less articulate. Oddly, it is Ursula who is the more active in helping Hero in the deception of Beatrice. Claudio states in 3.2 that it was Hero and Margaret who ‘played their parts with Beatrice’. This accords with the ingenious character of Margaret. Perhaps making Ursula Hero's co-conspirator was a simple error, perhaps a mis-step taken in an effort to balance two minor roles.

Both women fetch and carry for their betters. The contrast lies in social attitudes. Ursula seems to have accommodated herself to her place; not so Margaret. At the masked ball, Ursula partners old Antonio, saying that she knows him by his dry hand and tremor. Antonio denies his age. When Ursula persists, he becomes testy. She backs off at once, prudently admiring Antonio's wit. Dressing Hero for the wedding, Margaret criticizes her mistress's rebato. Hero, for once, rebukes her sharply. Margaret mollifies her mistress by praising Hero's new head-dress but, unhappy in retreat, risks wishing the ‘tire’ were ‘a thought browner’.

Margaret is one of a trio of aspiring gentlewomen Shakespeare created—all of them sympathetically—at about the same time. Margaret is less fortunate than either Maria in Twelfth Night, who marries Sir Toby Belch, or Helen in All's Well, who is presented as at once manipulative and submissive. Like Helen and Maria, Margaret is a woman of superior intelligence and wit and, like Helen, she can be frank, though at times also tasteless and ill-considered about sexual matters. Indeed, Shakespeare seems to pit Margaret's innuendos in 3.4 and elsewhere against Hero's prudish reticence in order to locate Beatrice's views on sex as a proper mean. But Margaret's situation is hopeless. During the exchange that opens 5.2, Benedick praises Margaret's wit and beauty, but when she asks if she will always ‘keep below stairs’ for want of a proper husband, he provides more compliments but no reply. In addition to coveting status obtainable only through a husband, Margaret covets pretty things. Her description of the Duchess of Milan's gown is detailed and enthusiastic; her opinions on ‘rebatos’ and ‘tires’ have the assurance of envious observation. Such a Margaret would have been delighted to serve unwittingly in Borachio's plot, playing the engaged heiress and in her mistress's gown. Leonato's forbearance toward her is gracious, but it consigns Margaret, as before, to living below stairs on grace and favour. In the last scene she says nothing. Perhaps she should not be present at the wedding at all, but the scene would be poorer without her pathetic silence.

Margaret's unwillingness to take up with Balthasar is to her credit. Balthasar emerges from Shakespeare's early false starts with possible relatives for Leonato (see the Textual Introduction below). Balthasar apparently becomes a member of Don Pedro's retinue. His precise social status is unclear, but he seems to have aristocratic pretensions, or so commentators conclude from his disclaimers of musical ability before he sings in 2.3. Such disclaimers follow the advice of Castiglione, among others, against being vain of talents for which one can hire clerks and fiddlers. But Balthasar's disclaimers are so excessive as to be ludicrous; hence Don Pedro's punning rebuke.

There is no reason to disbelieve Benedick's comparison of Balthasar's singing to a dog's howling. Benedick is hidden and has no one on stage to amuse. In a neat comic manœuvre Shakespeare has Don Pedro respond to this criticism by addressing Balthasar as though Benedick were not in hiding: ‘Yea, marry, dost thou hear, Balthasar? I pray thee get us some excellent music’ for serenading Hero, clearly a rebuke. Balthasar's talent is apparently too small to warrant so great a disclaimer. If he sings again in 5.3, he can be neutralized by other voices. There is some slight evidence that this may have been the case. The attribution of the song at 5.3.12 is Dover Wilson's; Q has only the introductory title ‘Song’. Margaret's rejection of Balthasar during their turn at the ball prepares for this comedy; his first words to her are the pathetic, ‘Well, I would you did like me’.

Don John's tools, Conrad and Borachio—after the Spanish for wine-flask—are a complementary pair. Conrad functions as an ear for Don John's complaints in 1.3 and for Borachio's commentary in 3.3. His birth under Saturn presumably induced the sullen manner that sets off Borachio's tipsy energy. Conrad's initial advice to his master is intelligent and moderate, but his loyalty, ‘To the death, my lord’, has no reservations. Beyond this, his behaviour in resisting the Watch at the end of 4.2 shows him more pugnacious than Borachio, and when aroused by Dogberry's ‘sirrah’, Conrad insists that he is a gentleman, another marker for Messina's social dimension.

Borachio is more interesting. His response when called to account in 5.1 is full acceptance of his guilt: ‘Yea, even I alone’, and a generously specific exoneration of Margaret. His insistence on paying for his villainy with his death recalls his earlier moralizing on the subject of fashion. There is a hint of the déclassé in the attitudes and circumstances of both Conrad and Borachio. Like Margaret, Borachio is one of a group of related characters Shakespeare created within a few years of one another. With Falstaff, Sir Toby, and Michael Cassio, Borachio is a difficult alcoholic; the others have fallen socially or are in the course of doing so. In his case alone (Sir Toby is universally incontinent) is drink made the central attribute, and so something of an explanation for his circumstances. In Shakespeare and the Experience of Love Arthur Kirsch details the sacred allusions in Borachio's speech to baptism, redemption, and idolatry.²⁷ The passage has been cut or played as merely tipsy chatter, but Kirsch is right about the seriousness of the moment. It is a brief lifting of the curtain on a possibly unelected anguish different from the self-chosen unhappiness of love and politics elsewhere in the play.

Borachio's strictures against that ‘deformed thief’ Fashion in 3.3 were conventional, and would have have elicited agreement. The application of those strictures to both sexes precludes misogynist inferences from the discussion of women's fashions in the scene that follows.

The Textual Introduction below discusses the logistics and individuation of the Watch, whose prime figures are Dogberry and Verges. ‘Dogberry’ can refer to either the red European dogwood or to its berry, or it can be an excremental metaphor. Verges may refer to the ‘verge’ or staff of office, and ‘verjuice’, the sour-tasting juice of unripe fruit such as grapes. The names suggest the hearty ordinariness and the ‘verjuice face’ (OED sb. 2b cites the phrase from Marston's 1598 Scourge of Villainy), respectively of the popular comic actors Will Kemp and Richard Cowley (see Commentary 4.2.1, 2). Dogberry provides Verges with sufficient occasion for sourness. The Watch appears in the nick of time, and Borachio's slightly vain observation that ‘what your wisdoms could not uncover these shallow fools have brought to light’ becomes a sobering mockery of comedy's artifice of Utopian endings.

Amusing as he is, Dogberry is also arrogant, smug, and sycophantic. His patronizing of Verges is dismaying as well as sadistically funny. When Leonato ironically praises Dogberry for his superior wit, Dogberry's delicately modest, ‘Gifts that God gives’, is delicious. The Dogberryism from whose practical consequences its fictionality protects us is recognizably one of the nastier faces of minor authority. Yet Dogberry's confident, unearned jollity is something like the wonderfully cosseted omnipotence of infancy. What need for such vanities as reading and writing? All one needs is to be ‘a rich fellow enough’ with ‘two gowns and everything handsome about [one]’. Is there perhaps an explanatory personal survival hinted at in Dogberry's proud reference to his ‘losses’ and in his surprising and funny response with the traditional beggar's thanks, ‘God save the foundation’, when Leonato gives him money?

Finally, the roles of Messenger and Friar fix the moral boundaries of male Messina even more clearly than do more important characters such as Don John and Benedick. The Messenger begins the play with news of victory, but he defines a formal, hierarchical male world in which birth, rank, and military prowess are of supreme importance, and a common soldier counts for nothing, even in death. At the opposite end of male moral possibility is the Friar, urging moderation, reason, and faith, but within the bounds of custom. That this requires yet another lie is a sombre qualification, as is (feminists would insist), his vow of celibacy.

PLOT CONSTRUCTION

In his Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama, Richard Levin has a detailed analysis of the formal connections between the two plots of Much Ado.²⁸ The Hero-Claudio courtship is initiated by Don Pedro, who also proposes the deception to unite Beatrice and Benedick. Hero and Claudio help in the deception, and in the last act their evidence finally seals the match. The crisis in both plots occurs at almost the same point for it is the plight of Hero after the denunciation that leads Beatrice and Benedick to their declarations of love. Moreover, Benedick's commitment to Beatrice and her acceptance of him are predicated in part on his understanding of Claudio's behaviour. Without the intervention of the Watch, of course, neither marriage might have taken place.

In addition to these causal connections, the two plots are bound by formal devices, the most important of which are the variant scenes of deception and ‘noting’, deliberate eavesdropping or casual overhearing. Leonato and Antonio receive a false idea of Don Pedro's intentions toward Hero. Claudio thinks he has overheard proof of Hero's infidelity. Beatrice and Benedick accept without question deceptive (yet not unfounded) accounts of their feelings for one another, and the Watch overhear Conrad and Borachio discussing Don John's plot against Hero and Claudio. The device pervades even details: in 5.1 Don Pedro mishears Benedick's sotto voce challenge to Claudio. These instances of noting occupy the spectrum of possibility: speakers without motive or malice or deliberately deceptive; hearers merely unfortunate in mishearing, naïve, or perverse in interpreting, or—like the Watch—just lucky; and information conveyed that is disastrous or happy in its effect.

The three narrative centres are connected and contrasted by their distinctive social ethos. The Claudio-Hero courtship is conventional, upper-upper-class, and thoroughly serious. These two are handbook personalities caught in a romantic plot. Beatrice and Benedick are a notch lower socially—she no governor's heiress, he no count; both are rather unconventional high-comedy sophisticates with a rather commonplace story. The Watch are predictably farcical low-comedy proles.

Taken together, the lovers exemplify the alternatives of gender behaviour: female passivity and female assertiveness, male control and male concessions to power-sharing. At the end of the play extremes are, however briefly, suspended, or seem to be so: a subdued if not chastened Claudio is on good behaviour that Hero need not assert herself to demand; Beatrice seems only nominally and humorously ‘obedient’, and Benedick may dwindle gracefully to a husband. Fears that his assertiveness in demanding dancing before the wedding may signal a second tyranny seem exaggerated. …

Notes

1. M. Praz, Shakespeare e l'Italia (Florence, 1963), 91: ‘above all, an imaginary city’.

2. M. L. Ranald, Shakespeare and His Social Context (New York, 1987), ch. 4.

3. Edited by F. J. Fisher for the Camden Miscellany, 3rd ser., 52 (1936), pp. i-vii, 1-47.

4. Quoted in L. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance (Brighton, 1984), 76.

5. C. T. Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven, Conn., 1985), 1-23.

6. K. Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (1982), ch. 4.

7. D. Cook, ‘The Very Temple of Delight: The Twin Plots of Much Ado About Nothing’, in A. Colman and A. Hammond (eds.), Poetry and Drama 1570-1700 (1981), 41.

8. T. W. Craik, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, Scrutiny (1953), 314.

9. W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York, 1962), 518.

10. R. G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York, 1965), 108.

11. Craik, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, 314.

12. Cook, ‘The Very Temple of Delight’, 35.

13. R. Berry, On Directing Shakespeare (1977), 71.

14. J. R. Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies (1957), 121.

15. H. Faucit, On Some of Shakespeare's Characters (Edinburgh, 1885), 376.

16. As suggested by T. W. Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton, NJ, 1927), 246.

17. Faucit, On Some of Shakespeare's Characters, 364.

18. B. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), i. 101.

19. Quoted from B. Fothergill, Mrs. Jordan (1965), 181.

20. C. Cook, ‘The Sign and Semblance of Her Honour: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado About Nothing’, PMLA (1986), 186-202.

21. See R. Barthes, in S. Sontag (ed.), A Barthes Reader (1982), 381.

22. A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (1961), 69.

23. The style of this mutuality may be suggested in a passage from a 1992 Observer interview: ‘[The author and his wife] have a specialized Darby and Joan act all their own, a continuous line in back-chat—mutually solicitous, happily contradictory. You can see that they're sufficient social life for each other most of the time.’ This is what Leonato had in mind when he predicted in 2.1 that if Beatrice and Benedick ‘were but a week married, they would talk themselves mad’.

24. J. Rees, Shakespeare and the Story (1978), 29.

25. J. R. Brown, Free Shakespeare (1974), 39.

26. The sexual overtones of ‘sing’ are clear in the example from Troilus and Cressida cited by Eric Partridge in Shakespeare's Bawdy (1947), 187.

27. A. Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge, 1981), 53.

28. R. Levin, Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1971), 90-3.