SOURCE: Richmond, Hugh M. “Much Ado About Notables.” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 49-63.

[In the following essay, Richmond traces the historical precedent for the villainous Don John in Much Ado about Nothing and proposes literary analogues for the play's comic lovers, Beatrice and Benedick.]

From Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, with its bitter warnings to his colleagues against upstart plagiarists, down to Geoffrey Bullough's recent encyclopedic account of Shakespeare's sources and analogues,¹ Shakespeare's capacity to build on other men's work has been recognized as intrinsic to his mode of composition as an Elizabethan dramatist. As we shall see, even such a play as Love's Labor's Lost, which lacks literary sources, reflects detailed and systematic exploitation of the lives and personalities of the contemporary French aristocrats whose names recur in the majority of the play's principal characters. Shakespeare's procedure in composition shows Elizabethan “invention” to have been more syncretic than wholly original in nature: the adjustment of a series of pre-existing resources to form a fresh pattern. Characteristically, he excerpts provocative motifs from some archetypal legend or history which is rich in bizarre incident; then he interpolates diversifying characters and incidents from other sources to provide contrast or reinforcement; and finally he heightens the contemporary immediacy of the whole by an overlay of disconcertingly modern allusions whose anachronism is offset by the witty self-consciousness of the author. Overall nothing could be further from Aristotle's prescription that “it is not the poet's province to relate such things as have actually happened, but such as might have happened … according either to probable or necessary consequence,”² for ironically, in view of his seemingly improbable themes, many of Shakespeare's plots and characters also have at least faint precedents or analogues in history, if not fully historical prototypes. This is true of elements in plays which we are not accustomed to considering documentary—whether it be the Orsino of Twelfth Night, the Berowne and Longueville of Love's Labor's Lost, or the curious coincidences between Lear's misfortunes and those of the aging Brian Annesley in 1603-04, involving the inheritances of his three daughters, among them his favorite, Cordell.³ Such analogues and resonances may encourage us to see that, despite the apparent archaism which Shakespeare often favored in taking plots from sources like Plutarch, Holinshed, or Painter, many of their details do hold “the mirror up to nature” and serve as “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time,”⁴ paralleling or alluding to the experience and first-hand observation of his Elizabethan audiences. This surface realism of his plays makes them vivid and convincing and is intrinsic to his theatrical technique.

Keeping these considerations in mind, we can better understand the procedures and aims of Shakespeare when they appear to elude modern understanding, as they do at times in even his most popular plays. For example, a lively, realistic comedy like Much Ado seems to such critics as its Pelican editor to suffer from the fact that “the Hero-Claudio story must be regarded as the main plot because of its melodramatic and spectacular character, yet Shakespeare carefully keeps us from entering into the emotions of either Hero or Claudio.”⁵ Similarly Bullough feels that this quaint episode, cut from the thirteenth-century setting established by Bandello's novella, is “the core” of the play;⁶ but he also asserts that Shakespeare does adjust it to Elizabethan taste, because “natural villainy was becoming more desirable, more popular—in the second lustrum of the nineties, with its Malcontents and men of strange Humours. … So he invented Don John, ‘bastard brother to Don Pedro,’ ‘a plain-dealing villain’ and a Malcontent of a kind just emerging in satire and the theatre.” Bullough contemptuously adds that “Don John is a very small villain to cause so Much Ado.”⁷ However, the development of such eccentric characters affords useful clues to the methods of composition of Shakespeare, for it is significant that the major additions which Much Ado makes to its prototype in Bandello lie in the characters of Don John, and of Beatrice and Benedick. The three seeming “originals” turn out to share more complex derivations than Bullough allows, for they are neither well-classified as Shakespeare's entire “invention” nor do they prove as Bullough argues of the lovers, “that Shakespeare needed no specific source for his happiest creations.”⁸

That Shakespeare wanted a contemporary setting for Much Ado rather than a medieval one is evident in all three characters added to the Bandello story, but most overtly in the choice of name for his villain. For the appearance of the portentous figure of Don John the Bastard at Messina is no theatrical accident but a fact of sixteenth-century history, whose ingenious introduction into Much Ado gives us an excellent miniature illustration of Shakespeare's characteristic mode of composition. While no personality resembling Don John appears in the Bandello source, and he has no association with the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers with which that novella begins, nevertheless Don John was not only closely linked with Messina during Shakespeare's lifetime—he stands there to this day, before the cathedral. The reason that the fine statue by Calamech was placed there in 1572⁹ is more than adequate, for Shakespeare's Don John the Bastard bears the name and shares many of the attributes of Don John of Austria, the illegitimate son of Charles V, half-brother of the King of Aragon (and the rest of Spain), who led the fleets of Christendom from Messina to the defeat of the Turks at Lepanto—one of the turning points of European history. And he returned to Messina after his victory on the 7 October 1571, under conditions analogous to those at the play's start.

Nor has the dramatic potential of this figure been wholly ignored outside literary criticism; indeed, in his magnificent study of The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II, Fernand Braudel with unconscious irony salutes Don John as “a Shakespearean hero,” even while detailing many of the sinister traits which Shakespeare's villain shares.¹⁰ However, Braudel does not stress the concerns which transformed the hero of Lepanto into a monster for all loyal Englishmen of Shakespeare's generation. To them he seemed to “surpass Circe,” and an English ambassador could write that he made “such earnest and vehement offers of his faith and service to our sovereign, as I doubt him more than others trust him; for I see his deeds contrary to his words, using concert in secrecy with Her Majesty's rebels.”¹¹ Although Don John's brutal triumph over the Turks marked a decisive reassertion of European supremacy over Mohammedan sea power, his character was by no means simply positive. Raised in obscurity under another name and acknowledged only in 1559, Don John had many of the more oppressive traits of his time and culture. He was acutely sensitive to his ambiguous status, and this led to many painful episodes with his half-brother, King Philip II. Thus he fled the Spanish court in 1565 in an attempt to assert his will to pursue a military career and returned “embarrassed and humiliated” without success: “in the knowledge that if he persisted in his intention Philip's officers had instructions to place him under arrest, Don John surrendered.”¹² His career was full of such abortive attempts at self-assertion echoed by Shakespeare's Don John, who admits “I cannot hide what I am” (I.iii.11), only to be admonished by Conrade: “but you must not make the full show of this till you may do it without controlment. You have of late stood out against your brother, and he hath ta'en you newly into his grace, where it is impossible you should take true root but by the fair weather that you make yourself” (I.iii.17-22). The historical prototype frequently failed to recognize such necessities.

Don John's career was deeply conditioned by the ambivalent social standing resulting from his bastardy, and his touchiness on points of honor was as acute as any other Spaniard's. At the funeral of Queen Isabella his pride “received a wound which to his sensitive imagination seemed mortal. By the neglect of a Court chamberlain, or possibly the malice of the Prince of Eboli, Don John was given a place in the church unbecoming to his rank. Deeply mortified, the young admiral requested permission of the King to retire from Court and to withdraw to the austere discipline and sombre cloisters of the Franciscan monks of Abrojo … in his hour of humiliation and injured vanity.”¹³ It is not surprising that Braudel considers him “the most volatile” of Philip's ministers and “isolated from his contemporaries.”¹⁴ His primitive rigor with the rebellious Moriscoes of Granada in 1569 reached a grim climax at the conclusive siege of Galera, whose resistance provoked Don John's sinister vow: “I will take Galera and raze it utterly to the ground. Every man, woman and child within its walls shall be put to the sword, and I will sow the earth on which they stood with salt.”¹⁵ This oath he firmly achieved, except that he agreed with his protesting troops that this involved the waste of some fairly serviceable women, so that a fraction of them and their children were ultimately spared.

Despite his military prowess, Don John was never secure in his relations with his half-brother, and after Lepanto they even became exacerbated, so that some have considered “the king's chief motive was a desire to humiliate Don John.”¹⁶ Commentators have described many of the king's orders in such terms as “a stab in the back for Don John from his half-brother,” or again: “Philip's orders seemed tantamount to disgrace.”¹⁷ Other instructions so affronted Don John that “upon discovering the limits they imposed on his authority, [he] fell into a rage bordering on despair. … They showed him that his subordinate position as a bastard was irremediable and that the king placed little confidence in him.” This last episode occurred a few weeks before he first arrived at Messina in 1571, and the tensions persisted throughout his stay there, largely explaining “the single-minded passion of his temperament” thereafter, although he was often ill: “plagued by three or four complaints.”¹⁸ Like Richard III, and reinforced by motives such as Edmund's, “Don John was undoubtedly tempted by the desire for a princely throne, an overwhelming passion which gave him little rest. … In fact what tempted Don John more than effective power was the title. In a Europe besotted with precedence and hierarchy, all young princes dreamed of crowns. … Don John, bitterly resentful of his bastard status, granted only the inferior rank of Excellency, dreamed longingly of the French crown when it was briefly unclaimed on the death of Charles IX in 1574; and his last years in the Netherlands were haunted by fantasies about an English throne.”¹⁹

Such ambitions for what Tamburlaine calls “the sweet fruition of an earthly crown” (Part 1, II.vii.29) led Don John to defy Philip's orders in 1573 in order to seek the throne of Tunis, taking “measures which were subsequently to expose him to the criticism, if not the reproaches, of his brother, and to play a part in the tangled drama of secret jealousy and frustrated ambition.”²⁰ One can recognize these aggressive moods in Shakespeare's John, who bitterly insists: “I must be sad when I have cause … and wait for no man's leisure … and tend on no man's business” (I.iii.12-15), and he goes on to denounce his half-brother: “I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace … I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog … if I had my liberty, I would do my liking” (I.iii.24-32). These are the motives behind the resentment that governed the historical John's disobedience of Philip's instructions, and his restless pursuit of a kingdom of his own. It was also just this desire to become a monarch by conquest which made the hero of Lepanto a monster in the English imagination. We find that even before the failure of the Tunis enterprise in 1574, “Charles IX of France had been urging Elizabeth to ally herself to him against Spain, in fear that Don John of Austria, having secured Spain in the Mediterranean, might raise a force in the Netherlands to descend upon England, liberate the captive in Sheffield Castle, and assume with Mary Queen of Scots the dual crown of Scotland and England.”²¹ Moreover, “Mary's eagerness to marry Don John” was well established.²² Under such circumstances Don John “found himself the natural candidate of a score of eloquent conspirators” whose initiatives first define the concept of the Spanish Armada against England in practical, political terms. Don John began detailed planning for the invasion with figures like Thomas Stukeley in 1575.²³ By 1576, the whole project acquired official standing in Spain as a factor in sending Don John to supervise the restoration of Spain's crumbling authority in the Netherlands.

There is ample evidence that Europe as a whole, and the English government and people in particular, were fully apprised of the paranoid temper and ambitions of Don John from this time onwards. In the Netherlands his appointment as regent was publicly attacked by figures like the Prince of Orange who warned the States “of Don John's proud and cruel disposition,” and that “he will always be suspicious and distrustful. … He has used menaces.”²⁴ The Prince of Orange also warned Queen Elizabeth of Don John's desire “to exterminate the reformed religion” by fomenting “a rebellion in England against the Queen under colour that the Papists should demand publicly the exercise of their religion, and that there were several great people mixed up in this conspiracy. They had further taken steps to poison the Queen, and the marriage of Don John with the Queen of Scots was already arranged, so that not only would he be the head of affairs in the Low Countries, but also possess the kingdoms of England and Scotland.”²⁵ By 1577 these plans were also fully known to the common people of England, for in the spring of that year the Bishop of Chichester wrote nervously “to Mr. Secretary Walsingham: Those that are backward in religion grow worse on the report of Don John's coming to the Low Countries,” and the Bishop recommended a new administering of “the oath of supremacy.”²⁶ Henry, Earl of Huntingdon wrote even more bluntly to Walsingham, at the same time: “I trust there be no truth in what I saw in a letter this day that Don John of Austria should marry the Scottish Queen. Our Papists expect and desire it.”²⁷ English agents were warned by Secretary Wilson “to have a good eye to the Duke of Guise's doings and to learn who they are that pass between him and Don John. I fear the greatest mischief will be practised that way.”²⁸ Mary Stuart's mother was Marie de Guise, and Don John's marriage to the Scottish Queen would strengthen the Catholic League in France, as well as the Catholic cause in Britain.

English agents and ambassadors now consistently warn their government of John's erratic personality: “He is besides by blood illegitimate, young and inexperienced, and not worthy of the obedience of the nobility. … He is besides arrogant and choleric, and has more crafty speech than judgment.”²⁹ Ambassador Wilson notes to Walsingham that “assurance is there none that Don John will deal uprightly,”³⁰ and Agent Rogers reports to him that the Prince of Orange is worried that a local governor will “be corrupted by Don John,” whom another report describes as “scheming everywhere” so that “People's minds here are diversely agitated. The most part have a great fear of Don John … although he has been held of small account.” Agent Davison expresses to Walsingham his amazement that Don John can secure any trust: “The proceedings of these men are so strange that I cannot tell what in the world to make of them; if they be not wilfully blind they cannot but see the great peril which hangs over their heads by losing time in treating with him from whom they can expect no good … a practice growing from ill passion. … He may perhaps be brought to keep truth in some small things to gain the more trust in greater that he may afterwards abuse them with his greater advantage. … Yet would Don John rather hazard and try his uttermost fortune, such is his cruel and insolent nature, than depart with that note of dishonour to be expelled and chased out of his government by a sort of drunken Flemings.”³¹ Any audience must share the incredulity expressed by the Agent here, when it sees the acceptance of Don John's corrupt advances by the aristocrats in Much Ado, evil designs which are detected only by the jaded and skeptical Benedick:

The practice of it lives in John the bastard,
Whose spirits toil in frame of villainies.

(IV.i.186-87)

The historical Don John's pathological pride in the face of defeat is also shared by Shakespeare's figure: “This may prove food for my displeasure. That young start-up hath all the glory of my overthrow. If I can cross him any way, I bless myself every way” (I.ii.57-60). This kind of neurotic envy appears in another report by the English Agent Davison: “Don John doth very ill digest the receiving of the Prince into this town, for such as come thence say it doth fret him to the heart”;³² and when Davison finally reports John's death, he notes it came after the frustration of his schemes, “partly as some think of very grief and melancholy.”³³ This compulsively self-destructive nature of Don John is summed up in Walsingham's comments to “Mr. Vice Chamberlain” Hatton: “We are amazed to see Don John continue the war finding nothing to induce him to do so save some particular respects which are of more force with him than that which in duty he owes to the King his brother. If the mischief likely to ensue by his not yielding to a peace lighted only upon himself, the harm would be less: but it seems most clearly that her Majesty and the Crown of England will be partakers of it.”³⁴ Don John's morbidity of mind was even the subject of a formal address by “the States General to the King of Spain,” which observed that “We have regretted more than we can say the apprehension which has seized Don John of some plot against his person. … In spite of all we could say he persisted in his fears … in a fashion that has scandalized everybody.”³⁵ Yet if this paranoid figure died before Shakespeare ever came to the London theater and his intended Queen by then had also met as grim a fate, Don John remained a crucial reference for Shakespeare's generation, for it was his ingenious plan to reconquer England for Catholicism by force which planted the seeds of the Armada in the mind of Philip II, even if, as Ambassador Paulet reported during John's lifetime, “the time does not yet serve for the execution of it.”³⁶ So the victor of Lepanto became in the English mind the tutelary demon presiding over the doomed Armada.

There is little difficulty in seeing how Shakespeare might come to update the deeply medieval world of the Sicilian Vespers used in Bandello by introducing Don John into the play's Messina. Shakespeare alludes with precision in Love's Labor's Lost and Hamlet to episodes in Brabant when the Princess of France of the former play visited Don John and met him on the River Meuse, in a spirit reminiscent of Cleopatra's descent on Antony (another, if less successful, wager of a sea-battle below the heights of Actium).³⁷ Thus Shakespeare certainly had a detailed knowledge of events during Don John's administration in the Netherlands, as well as of his character and antecedents. He saw no point in fully recreating such characters as Bandello's “Carlo II, King of Naples” who challenged the authority of “King Piero of Aragon” when he reconquered the rebel Sicilians in 1283. However, the account of Piero's naval victory seems to have suggested the useful contemporary analogy of the bloody battle of Lepanto to Shakespeare: “He went against him with what array of ships and galleys he possessed, and meeting him in battle great was the combat, with cruel slaughter of many men. In the end King Piero defeated King Carlo's fleet, and took him prisoner; and, but better to carry on the war, he withdrew the Queen and Court to Messina.”³⁸ The pattern of Piero's activities is similar to Don John's Lepanto campaign based on Messina. Shakespeare followed his customary tactful policy around 1598, of avoiding provocative names (Oldcastle had recently become Falstaff, and the speeches of Henri of Navarre, by then Henri IV, were ascribed to “Ferdinand” in the early scenes of the quarto of LLL [Love's Labour's Lost]), so the reigning Philip II (also King of Aragon) does not openly usurp the role of Piero, even though his historically erratic relations with his now-dead bastard brother provide a ready-made resource for the emotional derivation of Don John's conspiracy in the play. This change allows Shakespeare to refocus the malevolence of the two misguided lovers required in Bandello into the single character of Claudio, a simplification no doubt also required by the fusion of Hero's story with the “new” material of Benedick's affair with Beatrice. Don John provides a more contemporary figure than Timbreo's conventionally jealous rival in Bandello and illustrates a type which clearly interested Shakespeare and his contemporaries greatly, as Bullough noted, for Don John sustains the line from the Bastard of Orleans in Henry VI, Part I, and the Bastard Faulconbridge of King John, to Thersites in Troilus and Cressida and the Bastard Edmund of King Lear.

If Don John affords Shakespeare a notorious contemporary example of the malcontent figure which he so frequently favors in developing a source, Beatrice and Benedick are no less fashionable and contemporary figures. In Love's Labor's Lost Shakespeare had drawn on the names and attributes of witty aristocratic lovers of the current Valois court, who were known personally to such of his patrons or their associates as Essex, Southampton, and Derby. Berowne and Rosaline in particular are considered prototypes for the later pairs in Much Ado,³⁹ and since Berowne at least was directly modelled on the historical Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron (not to discuss the complex precedents for the Princess, Katherine, Maria, Longueville, and Dumain),⁴⁰ we may be encouraged to feel that the later warring lovers are less unprecedented than we are usually told. However, the relationship of Beatrice and Benedick has been sufficiently misread for only the faintest analogues for this witty pair of lovers to have been proposed, the most interesting perhaps being in Castiglione's Courtier, even though the exchanges of Emilia Pia and Gaspare Pallavicino are scarcely more relevant to Beatrice and Benedick than the witty repartee of innumerable other courtiers, recorded with at least as much historical veracity both in the pages of the Heptameron and in the gossip of Brantôme's memoirs such as his Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies. There may seem to be a specific aptness in the remark of Castiglione's Count Ludovico that “I have seene a most fervent love spring in the heart of a woman, towarde one that seemed at the first not to beare him the least affection in the worlde, onely for that they heard say that the opinion of many was, that they loved together.”⁴¹ Unfortunately, as too few scholars have recognized, the love between Beatrice and Benedick is explicitly not one occasioned only by such advocacy of others as Ludovico describes. Shakespeare's conspirators merely delude themselves in hoping that they “are the only love gods” (II.i.344)—as their own later humiliation confirms. For the Penguin editor rightly detects that from the start “Beatrice's disparagement only emphasizes the fact that she can think of nothing else” but Benedick.⁴² The case for such an interpretation appears vividly in Catullus' epigram (as briskly translated by Swift):

Lesbia for ever on me rails,
To talk of me she never fails.
Now, hang me, but for all her art,
I find that I have gained her heart.
My proof is this: I plainly see
The case is just the same with me;
I curse her every hour sincerely,
Yet, hang me, but I love her dearly.(43)

Benedick's permanent attraction to his “Lady Disdain” is equally outspoken—comparing her to Hero, he says that Beatrice “exceeds her as much in beauty as the first of May doth the last of December” (I.i.170).

Far from being tricked into love, then, Beatrice and Benedick are already in love; and they are not even betrayed into admitting a love that exists without their having fully recognized it. The plot goes a whole stage further than this by establishing that they are aware of having already been mutually-committed lovers. Any idea of the virginally man-fearing Beatrice is necessarily false: she is the resentful, jilted mistress. When Don Pedro observes to her that “you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick,” she responds quite openly that “Indeed my lord he lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it—a double heart for his single one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice; therefore your grace may well say I have lost it” (II.i.249-52). It is a disconcerting fact that as late as 1900 Furness can note that “into no discussion that I can recall is any weight given, or indeed any reference made, to this speech. Enough is here told to explain Benedick's first greeting to Beatrice as Lady Disdain. Between the lines, there can be almost discerned the plot of another play.”⁴⁴ Bearing his note in mind, we may conclude Furness is surely correct that, though in his time the implications were “always overlooked,”⁴⁵ the speech establishes a complex previous relationship between Beatrice and Benedick, in which Benedick gave her his heart, but not sincerely, and later withdrew his love. So that, if he played false then, her present malice merely reciprocates his bad behavior—returning him his own bad faith (or “double heart”). This interpretation may be confirmed by her earlier observation to Benedick: “You always end with a jade's trick. I know you of old” (II.i.129-30). It needs no very subtle gloss here to suggest that Beatrice has suffered an earlier mishap from his “throwing over the traces,” and the word “end” suggests the kind of broken relationship she later claims as justifying her malice.

The neglect of this crucial aspect of the lovers' relationship explains in part why Shakespeare's historical and literary models have proved elusive. The play's plot as a whole has not always been accurately registered, and the processes of its construction are therefore less than fully understood. We need to see that Shakespeare wants to give immediacy and contemporary bite to his characterization. The result of the replacement of an amatory rival to Claudio by the political figure of Don John is to enrich the range of modern male misconduct in the play. If Don John extends the spectrum into the negative far beyond Claudio's shallow censoriousness, this is balanced by the seductive and relatively innocuous complacency of Benedick. Moreover, Don John of Austria serves to update an archaic story by a modern association in ways shared by Benedick and Beatrice, who are scarcely less authentic sixteenth-century figures and ones whose dynamism equally overshadows the archaic conventionalities of Bandello's story, with the new values of the French court. Tudor court and artistic life was lived under the shadows cast by the pyrotechnic culture and society led by the Valois dynasty, which had transposed Italian cultural supremacy to France almost as literally as Francis I uprooted Leonardo de Vinci himself and created the social modes recognized in Love's Labor's Lost. As Shakespeare was later to describe in the first scene of one of the last plays with which he was associated, Henry VIII evaluated himself by comparison with Francis on such occasions as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and was pathetically susceptible to the charms of women trained by the earlier Marguerite de Navarre, Francis' brilliant sister, whose court furnished Henry not only with mistresses like Mary Boleyn, but trained Anne herself in that sexual virtuosity which Henry (and Wyatt) initially found so irresistible. In fact, the widowed Marguerite was even proposed as Henry's wife at one point; and the youthful Princess Elizabeth's first published work was a translation of Marguerite's Mirror of the Sinful Soul, probably made from the very copy inherited from her mother, which Anne kept as a momento of her happier days in France and may even have carried with her to the scaffold itself.⁴⁶ Marguerite's reputation and influence in Elizabethan England was thus inevitably great and is reflected in innumerable ways, not least by the popular selection from her tales in the Heptameron published in William Painter's anthology The Palace of Pleasure. The Heptameron is an updating of Boccaccio's Decameron, vividly illustrating the impact on sixteenth-century social and moral values of the combined effects of the Reformation and the Renaissance. Many of the tales are thinly disguised accounts of the amatory experiences of the Valois court, and scholars have had little difficulty in identifying Marguerite and Francis themselves as characters in certain stories.⁴⁷

One of these, the fifty-eighth tale in the Heptameron, appears as the sixty-first in Painter's first volume, and we may be sure that Shakespeare read it because Painter's anthology also provides sources for The Rape of Lucrece, Romeo and Juliet, and All's Well that End Well. The Heptameron's fifty-eighth tale illustrates the dynamic social role of women which both Marguerite and her brother agreed to advance in their court. Indeed some scholars have even seen in the heroine indications that she may have been Marguerite herself, so that the lover would be one of her erratic admirers, like the talented yet obtuse Admiral Bonnivet (who supposedly figures so grotesquely in the fourth tale also): “In the court of King Francis I, there was a lady of very lively wit who, by her good nature, worthiness and pleasing conversation had gained the heart of many suitors without dishonour, entertaining them so agreeably that they did not know what to make of her, for the most confident were in despair, and the most despairing were encouraged by her. All the same, in mocking most of them, she could not avoid loving one of them a great deal, whom she called her ‘cousin,’ so that this name would justify a deeper understanding. And as nothing is fixed, often their love turned to anger, and then returned more strongly than ever, so that the court could not ignore it.”⁴⁸

The witty and elusive lady is of a temperament very like that of Beatrice. One should note that her tension-ridden relationship with her admirer also corresponds far more exactly to the full “history” of the fluctuating relationships of Beatrice and Benedick than can be recognized from the conventional viewpoint of their mere entrapment by others into a fresh and unexpected love. Yet this very theme of cathartic “deception” is also the point of Marguerite's tale, for the ladies of the court of Francis agree to trick the untrustworthy lover of the witty lady, when she proposes that he be betrayed into ridicule by a profession of unqualified passion on her part. The lady's motive is explained as bluntly as Beatrice's censure of the untrustworthy Benedick for winning her heart “with false dice” (II.i.251): “You know how many wicked tricks he has played on me and that when I loved him most, he made love to others, from which I had more pain than I let appear. Well, now God hath given me the means to revenge it.” The other court ladies are the more willing to go along with the deception in that, like Benedick in his “merry war” with Beatrice (I.i.54), the French courtier affects misogyny: “there was no gentleman more committed to war against the ladies than he, and he was so loved and admired by everyone that no one dared risk becoming the victim of his mockery.” It is thus agreed that his erstwhile mistress shall feign passion for the gallant, and entrap him into covert approach to her bedchamber, when all the conspirators shall abruptly challenge him by screaming “stop thief” at the top of their voices, so that the whole chateau shall know of his passion and thus ensure the humiliation of a professed despiser of women. In the event the aristocrat is ridiculed publicly as planned; “but he had his responses and ripostes so neatly that he made them all think that he was not keen on the enterprise and that he had agreed to visit the lady just to give them amusement. … But the ladies would not accept this truth, of which there are still good grounds for disbelief.”⁴⁹

Such merry wars as these illustrate vividly that the vagaries of the Battle of the Sexes which are so amusing a feature of Shakespeare's comedy find some of their most vivid and immediate precedents and analogues in the Heptameron—certainly closer than those in Castiglione's decorous Courtier. Indeed, Benedick's final rueful concession of his own and all male volatility is anticipated strikingly in the thirty-seventh tale of Marguerite's collection, in which an untrustworthy husband is tamed by a similar trick. The male narrator concludes with this advice: “I beg you, ladies, if God should give you such husbands, that you don't in the least despair until you have persistently tried every means to overpower them, for there are twenty-four hours in the day in each of which a man may change his opinion.”⁵⁰ Not only are we reminded of Benedick's unexpected confession that “Man is a giddy thing” (V.iv.6) but also of the admonitory song in Much Ado, with its feminine perspective:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more!
          Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore;
          To one thing constant never.

(II.ii.59-62)

An even more provocative analogue for Beatrice's behavior in Much Ado can be seen in the shared sexual psychology of its famous church scene and that in another episode of Valois history, closely associated with the Guise family which supported Don John's marriage to Mary Stuart. For in Colynet's history of France (which also affords parallels for both Love's Labor's Lost and Henry V), there is a disturbing seduction scene in which the lover of some ladies of the Guise faction is dextrously excited to “exalt the Church” and serve the cause of honor by killing a man they feel has slighted them. The women passionately exploit the same techniques of incitement used by Beatrice in serving Hero when they assert that “if they were men or if they could be so transformed into men that they might have accesse to the tirant, they would find it in their hearts to stabbe him: that is a special point of honor which they do proffer him to doo such a famous deed … hee is a man endued with strength they have been his good Ladies, they have favoured him greatly and pleasured him in anything that ever he requested. What, will he not do so much at their request: they must die … what a good deede it is to save the lives of Princesses, Ladies. …”⁵¹ One recognizes an analogy to the aggressive sentiments of Beatrice in the famous church scene, with her passionate admonition to her lover to “Kill Claudio” (IV.i.297), which she follows up with her sexist reproaches at his hesitation: “O that I were a man! … O God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place. … O that I were a man for his sake! Or that I had a friend would be a man for my sake. … I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.” In each case the male succumbs to the sexual pressure to prove less effeminate, but Benedick stalls long enough to avoid killing Claudio, while the historical Frenchman did in fact murder Henri III.

The implications of these historical precedents or analogues for aspects of the supposedly most “original” characters of Much Ado: Don John, Beatrice, and Benedick, are significant for the understanding both of Shakespeare's procedures in compiling his plays and of their curiously vivid and authentic impact. Having uncovered in Bandello yet another conventional illustration of the idealistic lover's incompetence which he had so often previously used, in plays like The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet,⁵² Shakespeare sought ways of enriching and updating this archaic material. On the one hand he ascribed the evil genesis of the Messina plot to one of England's contemporary enemies; on the other he turned to France (as he so often did in his comedies) to provide himself with a lively contemporary mode of positive, dynamic, and subtle sexual relations. If his comedies find their prototype in the transcription of historical French personalities like Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, Catherine de Bourbon, and others in Love's Labor's Lost,⁵³ it is hardly surprising if the behavior of their successors in Much Ado should prove to resemble scarcely less closely that recorded in the Valois courts. In the most literal sense, Shakespeare's play at its best proves to be “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (II.ii.512) and not just the spontaneous product of a fertile imagination. The strength of Shakespeare's art lies less in the inspiration of his own private fantasy than in alertness to established tradition and in his preference for giving immediacy to such traditions by dextrous transpositions from contemporary events and characters. Like its prototype, Love's Labor's Lost, the extraordinary vitality and convincingness of the characterization in Much Ado derives much from Shakespeare's transposition of the most picturesque personalities and manners of sixteenth-century life on to the Elizabethan stage.

Notes

1. Geoffrey Bullough, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge, 1957-75).

2. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. T. A. Moxon (London: Dent, 1949), p. 20.

3. See Bullough, II, 269; I, 428-30; VII, 270-71, respectively.

4. Ham., III.ii.20-21 and II.ii.512 in William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), pp. 949, 952. All further Shakespeare line references are to this edition.

5. Josephine Waters Bennett, in Harbage, p. 274.

6. Bullough, II, 62.

7. Bullough, II, 71-72.

8. Bullough, II, 78.

9. For excellent illustrations of the statue see William Stirling-Maxwell, Don John of Austria (London: Longmans, 1883), I, 459; II, 340.

10. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper, 1975), II, 1088.

11. George Slocombe, Don John of Austria (London: Nicholson, 1935), p. 283.

12. Ibid., p. 42.

13. Ibid., pp. 62-63.

14. Braudel, II, 1128, 843.

15. Slocombe, p. 108.

16. Braudel, II, 1116.

17. Ibid., II, 1064, 1136.

18. Ibid., II, 1098, 1130.

19. Ibid., II, 1131.

20. Slocombe, p. 225.

21. Ibid., p. 228.

22. Ibid., p. 229.

23. Ibid., pp. 244-45.

24. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1575-1579, ed. Allan J. Crosby (London: Longman, 1880), p. 511.

25. Ibid., p. 516.

26. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, 1547-1580, ed. Robert Lemon (London: Longman, 1856), p. 539.

27. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series of the Reign of Elizabeth. Addenda, 1566-1579, ed. Mary A. E. Green (London: Longman, 1871), p. 511.

28. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1577-1578, ed. Arthur J. Butler (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1901), p. 119.

29. Calendar, Foreign, 1575-1577, p. 462.

30. Ibid., p. 514.

31. Calendar, Foreign, 1577-1578, pp. 29, 166-67, 153-54.

32. Ibid., p. 206.

33. Calendar, Foreign, 1578-1579, p. 233.

34. Ibid., p. 175.

35. Calendar, Foreign, 1577-1578, p. 143.

36. Calendar, Foreign, 1575-1577, p. 576.

37. Slocombe, pp. 301-02, 346. For an outline of the detailed sources involved in LLL, [Love's Labour's Lost] see Richard David's Arden ed. (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. xxv, xxix. The curious resemblances between Ophelia's death, the Cydnus episode, and passages in LLL on the one hand and events during the visit of the French princess to Don John can be recognized in Marguerite's own account: Marguerite de Valois, Memoirs, trans. Violet Fane (London: John Nimo, 1892), pp. 174-87. Detailed discussion of the relationships can be found in Abel Lefranc, Les éléments français de “Peines d'amour perdues” de Shakespeare (Paris: Revue Historique, 1936), though many of his broader conclusions from this data are questionable.

38. Bullough, p. 112.

39. Ibid., p. 71.

40. See Abel Lefranc, Sous le masque de William Shakespeare (Paris: Payot, 1919), II, 45ff. Again the detail is accurate, but the ultimate conclusions drawn from it are quite misleading. A review of current data and views may be found in Hugh M. Richmond, “Shakespeare's Navarre,” due to appear in The Huntington Library Quarterly, 43 (1979).

41. Bullough, pp. 78-80.

42. Josephine Waters Bennett, in Harbage, p. 274.

43. The Latin Poets, ed. Francis R. B. Godolphin (New York: Random House, 1949), p. 10. Catullus' poem (XCII) begins “Lesbia mi dicit. …”

44. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Horace H. Furness (rpt. New York: Dover, 1964), pp. 88, xxi.

45. For further discussion of the implications see Hugh M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 185ff.

46. For details of the relations between Henry VIII, Anne, and Marguerite, which bear on this treatise, see the preface to The Mirror of the Sinful Soul: a Prose Translation from the French of a Poem by Queen Margaret of Navarre Made in 1544 by the Princess (afterwards Queen) Elizabeth, then Eleven Years of Age, ed. Percy W. Ames (London: Asher, 1897).

47. See Marguerite de Navarre, L'Heptameron, ed. Michel François (Paris: Garnier, 1967), pp. 134, 453, 472, etc.

48. Ibid., p. 357.

49. Ibid., pp. 358-59.

50. Ibid., p. 268.

51. Antony Colynet, The True History of the Civill Warres of France between the French King Henry the 4, and the Leaguers, Gathered from the yere of our Lord 1585 untill this present October, 1591 (London, 1591), p. 403.

52. See my Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy for further discussions of this aspect.

53. David, pp. xxv-xxx, provides a survey of scholars exploring this kind of parallelism, including Joseph Hunter, H. B. Charlton, Frances Yates, and others.