SOURCE: Gardner, C. O. “Beatrice and Benedick.” Theoria 49 (October 1977): 1-17.

[In the following essay, Gardner argues that Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing are not always given their full due as lively, exciting, and even weighty characters.]

Another essay on Beatrice and Benedick! … This one is offered, needless to say, in the belief that there is still more to be said about them. It is not offered, however, in the belief that most of what has been said so far is false. On the contrary, my impression is that, though misinterpretations and inadequate accounts have of course been perpetrated, a fairly large proportion of what has been written about these two characters—and perhaps indeed about Shakespeare's work in general—is valid. Shakespeare was, as Coleridge has said, myriad-minded; many different intuitions about the plays and many different points of view seem to be able to complement one another (though I don't believe, as some recent critics seem to, that two quite contradictory interpretations of a play are permissible). Moreover Shakespeare has called forth, as one might have expected, the liveliest imaginativeness in many of those who have tried to articulate their response to him.

If then this essay is in any sense a ‘revaluation’ of Beatrice and Benedick, it is certainly not an attempt to present a completely new assessment of these two characters and their significance. I am attempting, rather, to revalue them in the sense in which the word is now used by economists: I hope to increase their value, or rather (in literature it amounts to the same thing) to increase our awareness of their value. And indeed—particularly at a time when in the affairs of the mind and the heart as well as in the field of finance devaluation seems usual—there is perhaps some point in setting forth once again the notion that the best task of criticism is to add to our ability to apprehend, and our reasons for valuing, the greatest literature.

My subject is Beatrice and Benedict rather than Much Ado About Nothing as a whole. The reason for this is not that I believe that the two most important characters in the play can be completely detached from their context, but simply that it is about them—or, to be more precise, about the parts of the play which they appear in or affect—that I have something to say. A great deal has been written in the last twenty-five years about the play as a whole; the chief question that has been discussed is the success or failure of the Claudio-Hero plot. I do not propose to reopen the discussion here. I myself am content—or almost content—to acquiesce in the view of those who hold that the play is effectively unified—that it does indeed ‘come off.’

I

What I wish to suggest is that, for all the perceptive and admiring comments they have evoked, Beatrice and Benedick have still not been given their full due. No critic, as far as I have been able to discover, has sufficiently recognized and accounted for the excitement and the fellow-feeling that from the very first—it seems to me—they arouse in reader or audience. We do not associate ourselves with them entirely, of course: we know that they are only partly conscious of what they are doing—playing an aggressive paradoxical game in which, fairly clearly, for both of them, failure and success are going to coincide. But there is, within and beneath their ‘merry war,’ a node of magical, almost Dionysian delight which has not yet been given proper critical definition.

There has never been any difficulty in appreciating the liveliness, the intelligence and the wit of Beatrice and Benedick; but critics have failed properly to detect the undercurrents out of which the jets of life and humour erupt. We find J. R. Mulryne, for example, saying in a recent study:

Critics have never been in doubt as to the dominant figures of the play's first movement. … Nor is there dispute about the type of experience these two figures convey. ‘The mirth of Beatrice (and no less that of Benedick) is an outbreak of the joyous energy of life’ (Dowden); ‘… the exuberant quality of lively minds which strike fire by scoring off each other … competitive vitality’ (Rossiter); ‘gay, light-hearted critics of every illusion’ (J. R. Brown). These are phrases typical of the agreed response: abundant vitality, gaiety, self-confidence, a brilliantly witty command of language, are the qualities all of us respond to, and which bulk large in our experience of the play's initial movement.¹

These descriptions of Beatrice and Benedick are clearly very far from being false; indeed they seem to me vivid and eloquent. But they fall short of true comprehensiveness, I believe, in placing so much of their emphasis upon the spirit implied in ‘mirth,’ ‘competitive,’ ‘light-hearted,’ ‘gaiety’: they do not suggest the stature and the weight of the two comic-heroic (not mock-heroic) protagonists.

An earlier critic, George Sampson, recognizes something of this weight when he declares that ‘it is not a paradox to say that the comedy of Beatrice and Benedick is the only serious part of Much Ado.’² But then he goes on to say that ‘it is the best of human comedy, because it is near to tragedy’ and to suggest that the two ‘fine spirits’ are ‘conscious of each other's powers and therefore instinctively hostile through fear’—thus (while hitting part of the truth) misjudging the confident self-delighting energy which animates both of them at almost every moment, and which maintains a pressure and a tone that we know are never really in danger of becoming tragic.

A few recent critics bring us somewhat closer to what seems to me a fuller account of the interplay between Beatrice and Benedick. David Horowitz quotes Professor Andrew Chiappe as saying:

Benedick and Beatrice rail at each other, which is proper for civilized people in love, because love implies the greatest of indignities to be suffered: to give oneself.³

Horowitz himself adds, later: ‘The very basis of their resistance to the notion of human love was their precise knowledge of what was at stake;’ and: ‘Their critical realism gives to the bond that is between them a resilient strength.’⁴ Valuable as these remarks are, however, Horowitz does not tell us very much about the state of mind and heart from which such resistance and such ‘realism’ spring. We are told considerably more both about the protagonists and about their effect upon us by R. A. Foakes:

Perhaps it is not so much the quality of their witty exchanges that makes them such powerful and vibrant figures, as the energy and skill with which they parry each other, and so preserve a stance of tough-minded independence.⁵

The words ‘powerful,’ ‘vibrant,’ ‘energy,’ ‘skill,’ and perhaps ‘parry’ take us towards the core of the relationship; but ‘preserve a stance,’ though it is of course partly justified by the deceptions and self-deceptions that are an important aspect of what makes us laugh, fails to convey the reality of the desire, or partial desire, for ‘tough-minded independence.’ Foakes seems (to me) unable to conceptualize what he has intuitively felt. Later in his essay he slips into a more conventional and limited account of the play's concerns:

The supremity of intelligence, or wit, in the values of the world of the play helps to account for both its brilliance, and its prose. The brilliance is achieved centrally in Beatrice and Benedick, but a price is paid for it; there is a coolness about the gaiety of this world, where to score a point in conversation matters most.⁶

Perhaps the best brief account of the significance of Beatrice and Benedick is that of G. K. Hunter. In his formulations we sense a responsiveness that is both highly sophisticated and thoroughly lively:

Beatrice is admirable … as an independent person, whose high spirits express an individual control over her own happiness. It is not for her, in following the downward path described by Congreve's Millamant as ‘by degrees dwindl[ing] into a wife,’ to have the independence knocked out of her by masculine violence, however jovial.⁷

… The wariness and defensive banter of Beatrice and Benedick, their unwillingness to abandon self-sufficiency or commit themselves too far—as we may suppose Claudio does, with his ‘I give myself away for you, and dote upon the exchange’—can be seen as a proper poise.⁸

Even these statements, however, seem to me to do less than justice to what I have tentatively called the Dionysian element in the emotions and reactions of the protagonists—the startling and wonderful ferocity of their exchanges. In fact Hunter appears even to distrust this ferocity when he says: ‘But the nearness of Beatrice to a shrew must be faced and admitted if we are to preserve the balance of the play.’⁹ It is true, of course, that Beatrice, like Benedick, is shown to be wrong, or partly wrong, in some of her earlier assertions, that she can be said to change her mind; but we are, I believe, so aware—consciously or unconsciously—of the creative vitality within her earlier attitude that we cannot accept the word ‘shrew.’ Hunter himself seems a little uneasy about the sentence that I have been commenting on, for he continues: ‘Admitting the quality of aggression in her nature is not quite the same thing as condemning her. …’ The view which I shall put forward is that her aggression is an important part of what we feel to be her glory.

Useful contributions towards a full understanding of Beatrice and Benedick have been made by some of those critics who have responded to the fact that Much Ado About Nothing represents, more richly than any other play of Shakespeare's, the Renaissance spirit at its most assured and its most splendid—the spirit that we associate with Castiglione and with the portraits of young men and women painted by Raphael and Titian. Some of the statements made by D. L. Stevenson are particularly pertinent. Speaking of what he calls Shakespeare's ‘love-game comedies,’ he says: ‘Their criticism of the accepted behaviour of lovers takes nourishment from all the humanistic forces working through Renaissance life.’¹⁰ Stevenson fills out this observation in his discussion of Lady Emilia Pia and Lord Gaspar Pallavicino, the two characters from The Book of the Courtier who have often been compared with Beatrice and Benedick:

The similarity of these two attendants at the court of Urbino to two of Shakespeare's dramatic characters is, it would appear, not so much causal as parallel. That is to say, once the Renaissance assumed the social and emotional equality of the sexes, love generally became not a question of acceptance or denial (as it was to Elyot), but a quarrel between the ideal and the psychologically possible. … It was a quarrel brought about by the sturdy, critical spirit of the age. … The attempt to accommodate a romantic attitude to the life of a gentleman and to the newly apprehended lady of the court, then, represents the intrusion of Renaissance reality into medieval courtly ideals whether illustrated in drama, in conduct book or in fact.¹¹

Stevenson notes, too, that

… unlike the characters in Love's Labour's Lost and in As You Like It, Beatrice and Benedick remain as shrewdly enlightened creatures of the Renaissance after they have agreed to marry as they were before. … Benedick's statement to Beatrice, ‘Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably,’ is a fitting summary of the implications to be drawn from their particular courtship.¹²

II

BEATRICE:
I pray you, is Signor Mountanto returned from the wars, or no?
MESSENGER:
I know none of that name, lady; there was none such in the army of any sort.
LEONATO:
What is he that you ask for, niece?
HERO:
My cousin means Signor Benedick of Padua.
MESSENGER:
O, he's returned, and as pleasant as ever he was.
BEATRICE:
He set up his bills here in Messina, and challenged Cupid at the flight, and my uncle's fool, reading the challenge, subscribed for Cupid, and challenged him at the bird-bolt. I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed. For indeed, I promised to eat all of his killing.
LEONATO:
Faith, niece, you tax Signor Benedick too much; but he'll be meet with you, I doubt it not.

(I i 28)¹³

Beatrice's first, memorable question betrays the concern of a potential lover. Yet her tone is flecked with an irony that contrives to be both aloof and playful. What strikes us most forcibly, however, in the opening sentence of the ‘merry war’ is its implied challenge—a challenge which is amusing but none the less real. The war, we soon grasp, though merry, is a war indeed. Beatrice's interest in Benedick and her mocking resistance to him are communicated simultaneously; and she pictures him in a state of combat—as a fencer, as indeed a master of the upward thrust.

Beatrice's opening remarks show, as most commentators have stressed, a large degree of witty control: those actresses who have attempted to play her as a spinster with a broad streak of neurotic cantankerousness have of course missed much of the humour and much of the point. But on the other hand we are in danger of losing contact with her—and, I believe, of denying some of our own deepest responses—if we allow ourselves to think of her as merely or mainly a witty young lady. Her control is superb; but it is something important that she is controlling, something which any lively and sensitive person must have had some experience of. What I wish to suggest is that Beatrice and Benedick evoke even more excitement than has been explicitly recognized because their concerns are more significant, more centrally a part of the human condition, than critics seem to have noticed.

MESSENGER:
He hath done good service, lady, in these wars.
BEATRICE:
You had musty victual, and he hath holp to eat it; he is a very valiant trencher-man, he hath an excellent stomach.
MESSENGER:
And a good soldier too, lady.
BEATRICE:
And a good soldier to a lady. But what is he to a lord?
MESSENGER:
A lord to a lord, a man to a man, stuffed with all honourable virtues.
BEATRICE:
It is so, indeed; he is no less than a stuffed man; but for the stuffing—well, we are all mortal.
LEONATO:
You must not, sir, mistake my niece. There is a kind of merry war between Signor Benedick and her; they never meet but there's a skirmish of wit between them.
BEATRICE:
Alas, he gets nothing by that. In our last conflict four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man governed with one; so that if he have wit enough to keep himself warm, let him bear it for a difference between himself and his horse; for it is all the wealth that he hath left, to be known a reasonable creature. Who is his companion now? He hath every month a new sworn brother.
MESSENGER:
Is't possible?
BEATRICE:
Very easily possible: he wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it ever changes with the next block.
MESSENGER:
I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books.
BEATRICE:
No; an he were, I would burn my study. …

(I i 44)

Beatrice's is a remarkable virtuoso performance, and it is clear that she is deriving from it the same kind of pleasure as the audience enjoys. Yet this is far from being mere performance. As a proud and noble creature she is displaying her plumage, but she is doing so not so much in order to show how worthy she is of a mate as to show how thoroughly she deserves to remain herself. She rejoices in herself, as well she might; but she feels her self-sufficiency threatened by the man to whom she is (largely unconsciously) attracted. The relentlessness with which she pursues Benedick with her mocking tongue indicates the gay and poised half-desperation of a person for whom attack seems somehow to have become the best method of defence. With comic exuberance she resists the menace so tryingly yet so piquantly thrown before her by life itself, indeed by her own emotions. She embraces Benedick in a spirit of joyous but serious contradiction and denial.

It is conventionally assumed that young men and young women drift naturally into love and mutual devotion and mutual service. Beatrice (like Benedick) is sufficiently proud and sufficiently perceptive to discern that this ‘natural process’ is in many respects highly unnatural—that it is in fact something of an outrage. She knows that her emotional and intellectual quality, her force of personality, must be given its due, must be given its head. And in implicitly asserting this she is—even though the play proves her partly wrong in the end—neither an emotional cripple, nor a crazed blue-stocking, nor even, like Congreve's Millamant (for whom one has very considerable sympathy), a self-consciously bewitching and somewhat over-sophisticated mademoiselle. Beatrice's protest against what she feels to be the intolerable laws both of life and of society springs from the healthy and intelligent vigour of her own self-delight. And it is impossible for the audience to be deeply critical of Beatrice's valuation of herself when it finds itself largely sharing that valuation: we like Beatrice, and, though our critical faculties are not wholly converted by her, distinctly we like her as she is.

Benedick's stand (for it is a stand rather than a stance) is fundamentally the same as Beatrice's. It is perhaps slightly less astonishing than hers, since we are rather more accustomed to rebellions and surprises in the behaviour of men. But the two protagonists are fairly evenly matched in their energy and in their attractiveness, and it is this fact, of course, which makes us steadily more aware that a very fine match could be made between them.

BEATRICE:
I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor Benedick; nobody marks you.
BENEDICK:
What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?
BEATRICE:
Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signor Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence.
BENEDICK:
Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted; and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart, for, truly, I love none.
BEATRICE:
A dear happiness to women; they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor! I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that; I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.
BENEDICK:
God keep your ladyship still in that mind! So some gentleman or other shall 'scape a predestinate scratched face.
BEATRICE:
Scratching could not make it worse, an 'twere such a face as yours were.
BENEDICK:
Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.
BEATRICE:
A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.
BENEDICK:
I would my horse had the speed of your tongue, and so good a continuer. But keep your way a' God's name, I have done.
BEATRICE:
You always end with a jade's trick; I know you of old.

(I i 108)

Again, one's immediate impression is of marvellously accomplished fun. But why is it that this snatch of dialogue is obviously so much more solid and significant than any fragment that one might select from Noel Coward or from Oscar Wilde or indeed from Congreve? In the words of Beatrice and Benedick, modulating as they do from controlled disdain to vigorous and brilliant abuse, there is a touch of living fierceness, an emotional pressure, which makes us constantly aware that we are in the presence not of skilled or even consummate artifice but of something which we are made—by the art, of course—to feel as a part of everyday reality.

I have expressed my disagreement with George Sampson's view that the drama of Beatrice and Benedick is ‘near to tragedy’: the tone of their exchanges is confidently and securely comic. But it is important to remember that great tragedy and great comedy, even at their purest, have rather more in common than perhaps we are in the habit of realising. Each represents a serious mode of apprehending human life. Even a discussion between Dogberry and Verges is appreciably less distant from the world of tragedy, less a denial of it, than a conversation between Algernon Moncrieff and Lady Bracknell. In this little altercation between Beatrice and Benedick—comic as it is—there are tensions and cross-currents of feeling that can perhaps be said to inhabit the same realm of being as those which a few years later were to express themselves in tragedy:

                                                                                O, thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!

(Othello, IV ii 66)

Indeed Shakespeare's great tragic period seems to result partly from his having recognized, as many other major Renaissance artists did, some of the flaws in—maybe the ultimate insufficiency of—the exuberant self-reliant world and spirit that Much Ado celebrates.

To pursue this line of thought, however, would be to leave the play behind. But it is necessary to grasp how real are the feelings, how sharp the cutting edge, embodied in the exchanges of Beatrice and Benedick. There may be some value, too, in bringing out a similarity that has not often been noted:

No, uncle, I'll none. Adam's sons are my brethren, and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.

(II i 55)

Why Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal. 'Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.

(I Henry IV, I ii 104)

Shall I never see a bachelor of threescore again? Go to, i'faith; an thou wilt needs thrust thy neck into a yoke, wear the print of it, and sigh away Sundays.

(I i 185)

I would you had but the wit: 'twere better than your dukedom. Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a man cannot make him laugh; but that's no marvel, he drinks no wine.

(2 Henry IV, IV iii 85)¹⁴

Falstaff is, of course, incomparable; but no characters are closer to him, in some of his aspects, than Beatrice and Benedick. The movement of their lively and flexible prose cannot but remind us of his (it is interesting to note, incidentally, that Much Ado may well have been written immediately after Henry IV). Falstaff stands opposed to all the conventions of virtue and sober respectability and military honour; Beatrice and Benedick reject the norms of love and marriage. In him and in them we hear a call of nature that is wild, alarming, profound. Perhaps the chief feature of our response—if we allow ourselves to chart our feelings without prejudice—is a sense of liberation. We experience a gust of fresh and new air, not simply because it is delightful to abandon briefly the burdens of accepted knowledge and responsibility, but because Beatrice and Benedick and Falstaff are expressing and embodying a permanent, though perhaps inconvenient, facet of human truth. It is true that love and marriage—especially the conventional versions of these things—are an imposition upon decent freedom and self-respect, just as reputable life and honourable death are an affront to the ordinary human vitality which in Falstaff reaches almost titanic proportions. It is because they boldy incarnate bracing, life-giving truths that these three can be said to be heroes—albeit comic heroes.

III

It is worth asking why, if the challenge that they offer to conventional wisdom is an important one, Beatrice and Benedick should nevertheless be so richly comic.

Obviously we laugh at them partly because they are deluded or half-deluded: they erect stong and proud barriers against love, but of course amor vincit omnia. This aspect of the comedy, central though it is, I don't propose to deal with; it has been discussed often. We laugh too, with them as well as at them, because they are genial, witty, gamesome, exuberantly non-tragic. Their critique of the ways of society, for example, is pointedly different from Don John's; indeed Beatrice's shrewd comment on the latter tells us a good deal about her own quality: ‘How tartly that gentleman looks’ (II i 3). But perhaps the deepest vibration in our laughter forms part of our response to precisely that essentially serious challenge that I have been attempting to define.

Bergson stressed that comedy is born when living people, who should be alert and flexible, behave stiffly and mechanically. Beatrice and Benedick become, amusingly, if not mechanical at least predictable when they succumb to love. But in so far as they defy the norms of love and marriage (and this defiance they maintain, to some extent, to the very end of the play) they have the laugh of all the others—not only Claudio and Hero, indeed, but the reader or audience as well. Shakespeare turns comedy inside out: part of our pleasure lies in our own discomfiture; or rather, one part of ourselves mocks another part.

But the mocking of mechanical actions and reactions is perhaps only the negative side of the comedy. The humour that springs from Beatrice and Benedick does not only chastise: it rejoices. We enjoy the truth and reality of their intuitions as we enjoy all truth and reality. But we laugh, we undergo that peculiar form of nervous release, because we find ourselves in the presence of forces of life that are powerful and exhilarating, forces that bear us upwards—just as, in tragedy, we feel fearful because we encounter forces that chill us and bear down upon us. Beatrice and Benedick strike us as funny because they reveal new or partly new ways in which life, the life within us, is or may be fun; and an ancient, boisterous, partially iconoclastic recognition stirs in our depths. Laughter is a way of saluting life at its most propitious; almost effortlessly it searches out and proclaims nature beneath convention, the earth of the flesh beneath the air of theory, the heart's vital truth beneath the mind's cramped duty. Perhaps the key word or phrase is one that I have used once or twice already—self-delight. Self-delight, involving as it does relationships with other people's self-delight, is not a peaceful occupation, however: Beatrice and Benedick are ‘too wise to woo peaceably’ (V ii 66).

A maker of comedies, especially one who succeeds in getting us to laugh out at profound human truths, must write from a certain poise, a stance of relaxed humane vision. Stance and poise depend to a large extent, often, upon the state of the culture in which the writer finds himself; and yet the achievement itself must always belong ultimately to the artist himself. It is interesting to compare some of the assertions that Shakespeare formulates or enacts in Beatrice and Benedick with some rather similar assertions made or implied by D. H. Lawrence. Sometimes of course Lawrence can be very amusing in his treatment of the relationship between man and woman, as for instance at certain moments in the nouvelle The Captain's Doll. Perhaps rather more characteristic of him, however, is a passage like this, from Women in Love:

The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of conscription. What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive. He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were. … On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half. And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in herself.¹⁵

In writing these words, Lawrence is clearly feeling the need to open up a new path for human attitudes and actions. The Shakespeare of Much Ado, on the other hand, seems almost to watch the new path opening of its own accord, and he enjoys fully the implications of what he sees. Lawrence, great as he is, tends often to insist upon the validity of the vision that he is expounding (even though, when he is writing at his best, he manages to detach himself from his protagonists), whereas Shakespeare, for all the punch and fire of Beatrice and Benedick, appears content to allow their vigorous truths to unfold freely and in the end to merge harmoniously into the total meaning of the play.

And yet at the same time, Shakespeare is never guilty of that partial irresponsibility which one associates with most of the comedy of the Restoration period: his humour is always deeply life-giving and therefore serious. Indeed, if Shakespeare's vision in this play is on the whole more generous and relaxed than Lawrence's, it is obviously more wholesome than that of the Restoration dramatists. Their plays are marred by sophistication; the thought is often over-elaborated, while the feeling tends to become salacious. In Beatrice and Benedick wit and emotion, liveliness and humour are one.

The fact that the hero and heroine live and have their being in prose is not fundamentally to be explained in terms of (to use Foakes's words) ‘the supremity of intelligence, or wit, in the values of the world of the play.’ In Much Ado, as in several of the other plays Shakespeare wrote between about 1597 and 1602, prose is often the instrument of ‘nature’ as against artificiality or emotional narrowness. Our knowledge that Shakespeare is the greatest of poets seems often to blind us to the fact that in five or six of his plays he chose to make many of his most imaginative and disturbing formulations in prose rather than in verse. He seems at this time to have felt that the number of thoughts and feelings that could be crystallized in verse, or at least in his own verse as it had developed up to that point, was limited, and thus verse was able at times to become for him the vehicle for attitudes of mind and heart which lack the full weight of passionate commitment. One of Benedick's comments on the love-sick Claudio may well contain something of the playwright's own feeling on these matters:

He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier, and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.

(II iii 18)

There can be little doubt that the new vigour and flexibility that we find in the verse of the great tragedies stems from the period in which Shakespeare cultivated the virtues of prose.

IV

No critic of any importance has failed to respond to the brilliance and the power of the exchange in which Beatrice tells Benedick to kill Claudio. Its full significance and its relation to what has happened earlier in the play have not, however, been generally recognized. It is certainly true that the protagonists reveal themselves in this scene more richly and more movingly than they have done before; but—as my earlier observations imply—it is inaccurate to say that they are now for the first time ‘reacting with real feeling,’¹⁶ that they ‘shed briefly their armour of wit, and speak plainly and directly,’¹⁷ or even that they ‘in the end uncover their hearts.’¹⁸

The whole exchange pulsates with energy, with the clashing and mingling of cross-currents of vitality. At first this energy is held in, understated, touched with a little humour, as Beatrice absorbs the meaning of the harrowing scene of the broken wedding and Benedick tensely and sympathetically watches her reactions. Because Beatrice is aware of the new development in her relationship with her ‘antagonist,’ her kind concern for Hero flows naturally, inevitably, into a slightly veiled but nevertheless probing challenge:

BEATRICE:
Ah, how much might the man deserve of me that would right her!
BENEDICK:
Is there any way to show such friendship?
BEATRICE:
A very even way, but no such friend.
BENEDICK:
May a man do it?
BEATRICE:
It is a man's office, but not yours.

(IV i 258)

Worked upon by the intimacy of these insinuations, and responding (as she does too) to a sense of crisis, Benedick utters his love. Beatrice hesitates, equivocates, at first shyly, then good-humouredly, and finally brings out a passionate yet poised declaration:

I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.

(282)

At this Benedick explodes with a lover's full-flowing liberality—‘Come, bid me do anything for thee’—only to find his impulse met by what strikes him as a violent contrary force: ‘Kill Claudio’. At first, he fails to recognize the implications of what he is up against—of what he is involved with and in—and he gaily refuses to act; but the sheer power of her conviction overbears his opposition:

BENEDICK:
(taking her by the hand): Tarry, sweet Beatrice.
BEATRICE:
I am gone though I am here; there is no love in you. Nay, I pray you, let me go.
BENEDICK:
Beatrice—
BEATRICE:
In faith, I will go.
BENEDICK:
We'll be friends first.
BEATRICE:
You dare easier be friends with me than fight with mine enemy.
BENEDICK:
Is Claudio thine enemy?
BEATRICE:
Is he not approved in the height a villain that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman? O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour—O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.

(288)

By the end of the exchange Benedick is wholly convinced that his love for Beatrice must make him fight Claudio.

We see, then, that the energy of the lovers—that which they possess as individuals and that which they generate together—runs in a number of different directions. But what is most important is that the ‘field of force’ that is displayed here is precisely the one that we have seen and experienced from the first.

Beatrice and Benedick were introduced to us as creatures with an intense sense of individuality—both their own and other people's—and with therefore, among other things, a keen awareness of sexual differences. Both because of the healthy turbulence of their emotions and because of the need to ward off soul-destroying influences, they were apt to be pugnacious, to conceive of life as a war—a ‘merry war.’ Their championing of themselves, however—quite unlike Don John's embittered and envious self-indulgence—by no means dammed up the flow of sympathy and generosity towards others; freely themselves, they were always free to respond where a response seemed called for. And it turns out that, though they have their moments of comic humiliation, even falling in love is not incompatible with dynamic self-assertion. They need themselves, but they also need what their selves need—and each self requires another complementary self, partly as something to fight with, something in terms of which and against which it may live and be defined, but also, of course, as a point of focus for that welling sweetness, that strange love of other life, which accompanies and interpenetrates the robustness of merry warriors. Only those who have achieved independence can give themselves fully in love. And self-aware beings naturally expect the highest standards in their sexual partners (as indeed Beatrice and Benedick have hinted from the first); the complementing, the mutual reinforcement, must be well done, and each must value the other's distinctive pride. Moreover this enlargement, this expansion of the area of self-fulfilment, must inevitably produce not introversion but an even wider sympathy, and not sentimentality but a toughness and crispness of feeling.

The scene that we have been looking at is thus a continuation and a blossoming of the movement of feeling which was begun in the first scene of the play. Of course it surprises us, as all great art must, and as all living human responses must. But at the same time we can recognize that it is right that Beatrice and Benedick should be so alert in their emotions, so subtly mobile in their moods. It is right, too, that Benedick's sympathy should make Beatrice implicitly both call upon and mock his manhood, and that this should lead to his declaration of love, in the course of which, newly conscious of his sexual identity, he refers to his sword, that sword that as Signor Mountanto he was wielding when first Beatrice brought him before our eyes:

BENEDICK:
By my sword, Beatrice, thou lovest me.
BEATRICE:
Do not swear, and eat it.
BENEDICK:
I will swear by it that you love me; and I will make him eat it that says I love not you.
BEATRICE:
Will you not eat your word?

(270)

And the great ‘Kill Claudio,’ astounding as it is, summarizes and fulfils the whole meaning of the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick. It is in itself the most concentrated and fierce of all her rapier-like utterances; in it she demands that Benedick make real use of his man's sword. Held within Beatrice's passionate command, beside her affection for the injured Hero and her contempt for the contemptible action of Claudio, is her burning knowledge (there is no trace of lukewarm calculation in it) not only that love must prove itself by a willingness to risk all and to commit itself entirely, but that in some ultimate sense to love—to live absolutely—is to fight. Beatrice and Benedick must, in various ways, continue to live by the sword, and Claudio's base act, like his earlier mawkishness, provides an occasion for them to show the mettle of which they are made.

Beatrice takes the lead (as the heroines so often do when Shakespeare is in an untragic mood), but Benedick follows her fairly swiftly:

BEATRICE:
Princes and counties! Surely a princely testimony, a goodly count, Count Comfect; a sweet gallant, surely! O, that I were a man for his sake, or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones too. He is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.
BENEDICK:
Tarry, good Beatrice. By this hand, I love thee.
BEATRICE:
Use it for my love some other way than swearing by it.
BENEDICK:
Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?
BEATRICE:
Yea, as sure as I have a thought or a soul.

(310)

The word ‘soul’ suggests the fullness of Beatrice's humanity. And it is a largeness and complexity which impresses us in Benedick's reply; he is sternly resolved, he shows his love for Beatrice and his concern for Hero, and yet even here there is a touch of the play's pervasive humour:

Enough, I am engaged; I will challenge him, I will kiss your hand, and so I leave you. By this hand, Claudio shall render me a dear account. As you hear of me, so think of me. Go, comfort your cousin. …

(326)

V

What allows the slightest suggestion of laughter to colour Benedick's resolution is, of course, our knowledge that it can't end like this. Dogberry and Verges do their belated bit, mistakes are undone, and the proper comedy-conclusion is ushered in. The vivacity of the hero and heroine is able to stream back into the now harmonious warfare of bellicose affection:

BENEDICK:
A miracle! Here's our hands against our hearts. Come, I will have thee; but, by this light, I take thee for pity.
BEATRICE:
I would not deny you; but, by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion; and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption.
BENEDICK:
(kissing her) Peace! I will stop your mouth.

(V iv 91)

That kiss is impressive as well as funny because we know what lies behind it. And we feel the full weight of the protagonists' energy, firmly and creatively channelled, in Benedick's final invitation:

Come, come, we are friends. Let's have a dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts and our wives' heels.

(V iv 115)

Notes

1. Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing (London, 1965), pp. 15-16.

2. Much Ado About Nothing, ed. George Sampson (Cambridge, 1923), p. xlviii.

3. Shakespeare: An Existential View (London, 1965), p. 14.

4. Ibid., p. 35.

5. Much Ado About Nothing. ed. R. A. Foakes (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 8.

6. Ibid. pp. 10-11.

7. Shakespeare: The Later Comedies (London, 1962), p. 18.

8. Ibid., p. 21.

9. Ibid., p. 18.

10. The Love-Game Comedy (New York, 1946), p. 7.

11. Ibid., pp. 120-121.

12. Ibid., p. 214.

13. All quotations are from R. A. Foakes's New Penguin edition.

14. See also I i 222 and 1 Henry IV, V iii 57.

15. London, 1921, p. 208.

16. Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (London, 1968), p. 193.

17. R. A. Foakes, op. cit., p. 19.

18. John Palmer, Comic Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1946), p. 121.