SOURCE: Dawson, Anthony B. “Much Ado About Signifying.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 22, no. 2 (spring 1982): 211-21.

[In the following essay, Dawson discusses how messages and their interpretation (or, more often, misinterpretation) not only propel the plot in Much Ado about Nothing, but also act as signs, or clues, to the play's major themes.]

Thinking about Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing led me to thinking about messages and the process of interpretation imposed by the delivery of messages. The play takes up this perfectly ordinary, everyday activity and subjects it to comic scrutiny. In doing so, the play highlights the act of message-sending itself, as well as the subsequent act of interpretation or, more often, misinterpretation. The characters certainly make much ado about such acts, which are indeed a kind of “nothing,” if we regard nothing in a paradoxically active sense, as a free form, an act liberated from content. The title's well known pun on “noting” coalesces with this sense of “nothing”:¹ observing, and the interpretation that goes with it, becomes not only an action that impels the plot, but the very subject of the play, the nothing about which there is, indeed, much ado. A sentence in Barthes's Sade/Fourier/Loyola is appropriate here: “I listen to the message's transport, not the message.”² “Transport” (emportement) carries the double sense of the act of delivery and the delight (for the spectator) attendant upon that act. For us who contemplate Much Ado, the pleasure resides in the transport rather than the content of messages, and the world the play creates is one in which attention is directed as much to the way meaning is produced as to what the meaning is.

The play begins with news, with a messenger. All plays begin with news of some sort; they have to tell us something in order to get us started. but Much Ado, unlike most plays by Shakespeare, begins with a messenger actually bringing news from somewhere else. We could say, for one thing, that this opening schematizes the dramatist's need to provide us with initial information. But the messenger does more. He poses the problem of reliable meaning, of interpretation. We know this only in retrospect, once we have become familiar with the multiplicity and ambiguity of messages that this play contains. But at the very outset, both characters and audience receive and assess news, and are thus put in the same structural position that they will be in throughout the play. In general, language, as a system of messages, is consistently, comically, called into question: further messages are intercepted, misinterpreted, overheard in a variety of ways that move the plot forward and pose problems of interpretation for the characters.

Eavesdropping is, in fact, a favored form of activity in this play, even more than it is in Hamlet. Theatrically, the play offers its audience the dominant, recurrent spectacle of one character, or group of characters, overhearing another group, and interpreting, re-interpreting, or misinterpreting what has been seen or heard. The pervasiveness and fallibility of such activity are first suggested by Antonio in the second scene when he describes how his man “overheard” how “The Prince discovered to Claudio that he loved my niece your daughter” (I.ii.9-11).³ In the next scene, Borachio tells Don John how he has overheard the Prince and Claudio “in sad conference” (unlike Antonio's man, he gets his facts almost right). Later, Borachio is in his turn overheard by the Watch, whose comic misinterpretations nevertheless yield accurate results. Benedick and Beatrice eavesdrop on their friends and are won to each other by falsehood. Claudio and Pedro eavesdrop on “Hero” (offstage) and are also deceived by falsehood. They proclaim their plain truth (they are less cautious about the reliability of messages than Beatrice and Benedick), are equally plainly wrong, and are only dismissed into truth through being deceived once more by false report.

The central action of the play, then, is delivering messages, and we may start our investigation with a question about one of the most puzzling instances of this. Why does Claudio have Pedro do his wooing for him? This is not a question about character or motivation. From that point of view, it seems easy to solve. An actor, of course, has to find an answer (Claudio is young, shy, inexperienced or whatever), but that isn't what concerns us here. Our question might be re-phrased as follows: what is the pattern that, from the point of view of the play as a whole, will reveal the contextual appropriateness of Claudio's action (presuming for the moment that it is appropriate)?⁴ The indirectness of the act makes it peculiar, especially in the light of Shakespeare's other comedies, where normally wooers energetically pursue their own wooing. (Where they don't, as with Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night, or “Mr. Brook” in Merry Wives, the effect is to discredit the lover; Sir Andrew is a fool, “Mr. Brook” a stock jealous husband with ulterior motives.) At the outset, Claudio lets someone else woo for him; later he lets someone else woo him out of love; and at the end he allows himself once more to be led, and bound, to a veiled bride who, by an appealing semiotic shift, becomes once again the original target of the indirect pursuit. His passivity and gullibility are obvious enough, but in themselves are not very interesting. What makes this indirectness significant is its relation to the other forms of interaction in the play—notably the tricking of Beatrice and Benedick (they don't really woo for themselves either—they are won first and woo later), and the apprehension and examination of the villains by Dogberry and his cohorts.

In all of these cases the action and discourse are indirect. The indirectness is linked to the persistent dramatic image of eavesdropping which, as I said, is what most of the characters are doing most of the time. To eavesdrop is to be at one remove from the dialogue (even when, as in the scenes where Beatrice and Benedick are gulled, the eavesdropper is involved in a plot laid by those to whom he listens), just as wearing a mask is, as an action, oblique, off-center, not straightforward. Hence the masked ball, where the process of penetrating or not penetrating a mask is enacted, is the perfect setting for the indirect wooing of Hero. She expects, because of previous misinformation, to be wooed by Pedro. She is wooed by a man in a mask who is in fact Pedro, but an oblique Pedro wooing in the name of Claudio. Claudio is, in a sense, Pedro's mask. Pedro is Claudio's voice. As audience, we don't know whether Pedro is pretending to be Claudio or simply speaking on Claudio's behalf. What, we may wonder, does Hero think? The scene, to make matters more impenetrable, takes place offstage, while onstage Claudio, masquerading as Benedick, hears a false report of what is happening offstage from Don John and Borachio, who know perfectly well they're talking to Claudio, not Benedick. The discourse and the dramatic movement could hardly be more elliptical and indirect. As an audience we are necessarily conscious primarily of the oblique quality of this interplay.

The appeal of Don John in Much Ado's world of masks and mistaking is that he offers certainty—what Othello will later call “ocular proof.” He promises “further warrant” for his slander of Hero in III.ii, and challenges Claudio and Pedro with the words “If you dare not trust that you see, confess not that you know” (III.ii.115-16). Like certain pronouncements of Iago, this sentence appears more meaningful, even portentous, than it actually is. It cheats the listener by pretending a meaning that it fails to deliver, thus giving the impression that Don John knows what he is talking about. His messages are often of this type—they lure their hearers with the promise of directness and certainty in a world of uncertainty and obliqueness. Hence slander is the appropriate crime for this villain in this world. And the stance he adopts of a pretended concern for the purity of language is consistent with this false promise: “The word [‘disloyal’] is too good to paint her wickedness” (III.ii.105-106). Hero's sins, he claims at the aborted marriage, are “not to be named. … There is not chastity enough in language / Without offense to utter them” (IV.i.94-97). Language is vulnerable, easily tainted, its chastity needs protection. Again, Don John promises a wholeness of meaning, opposed to the malleability of meaning current in the rest of the play, where the emphasis is on the process of signifying rather than on the fixed meaning. Don John's falsified certainty thereby offers a threat to the very basis on which reality is constructed in this world.

Thus, the messenger who enters at the beginning may be seen in retrospect as problematic, in one particular sense. He introduces a world of messages, a world in which the act of message-sending and receiving is itself highlighted and in which the processes of interpretation and misinterpretation are integral to both the comic obstacles (those features which retard the resolution of the comic action), and to the resolution itself. Hence messages become in themselves signs, as well as vehicles, of the major concerns of the play. This process is revealed most clearly and fully in the eavesdropping scenes with Benedick and Beatrice, and in the Dogberry scenes.

The gulling of Benedick in II.iii begins with Benedick's comic soliloquy in which he declares his own immunity to love and ridicules Claudio for becoming a lover and, accordingly, turning his language into a “fantastical banquet,” a gourmandizing love rhetoric which carries its own sexuo-culinary message (cf. The Joy of Cooking—Joy of Sex association, and, too, the many instances in the language of the play of a connection between food and love).⁵ But Benedick quickly falls prey, not so much to love, as to the seductiveness of the message itself. The soliloquy over, he spots his friends and hides in the arbor to listen. As for most of the characters, eavesdropping for Benedick is a natural, spontaneous gesture. He prefers it to saying hello. But a complex game is being played. He thinks he is eavesdropping on Leonato, Pedro, and Claudio, but in actuality they are spying on him. He is aware of the possibility of the game, but rejects it: “I should think this a gull but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it” (II.iii,121-22). He listens intently. His interest sparks Claudio's comment, “He hath ta'en th' infection” (124). This last word is a significant one since it implies a symptomatology, a sign language. It is of course a conventional metaphor, but in this semiotically charged context, it has added force. “Infection” carries its own sign system: symptoms on the surface are an index of the infection below. But the infection that Benedick has caught is not that of love, or not only that of love, but of the sign itself, the message. He is not yet showing the traditional signs of love. Rather the symptoms he is showing, his posture, the strain to overhear, the comic surprise (the theatrical “take”), indicate a fascination with the act of overhearing what is being said, with the message's transport as much as with the message itself. By the time he has been fully “infected,” he is able to reinterpret Beatrice, to “spy some marks of love” (II.iii.241-42) in her that he had not perceived before. The final part of the scene gives us a wonderfully comic enactment of this process of reinterpretation. Beatrice, in line with the pattern we have been tracing, brings a message (one, significantly, connected with food): “Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner” (243-44). But Benedick interprets it as a message of love: “There's a double meaning in that” (255). He thanks her for her pains. “I took no more pains for those thanks than you take pains to thank me” (246-47), she replies, which he later construes to mean, “Any pains that I take for you is as easy as thanks” (257-58). Thus is the plain message made ambiguous; and thus does misinterpretation lead to love.

In a theatrically daring move, Shakespeare treats us to the gulling of Beatrice in the very next scene. Here, the emphasis is less on the seductiveness of the message itself and more on the possible transformation which can be the message's most vivid consequence. The scene begins with a speech which merges the motifs of message-sending and eavesdropping, both within a deliberately delusive context. Hero tells Margaret to go whisper in Beatrice's ear

                                        and tell her, I and Ursley
Walk in the orchard, and our whole discourse
Is all of her. Say that thou overheard'st us.

(III.i.4-6)

Hero's message is false (since it is part of the plot), but it looks true to Beatrice when she arrives, since their discourse is of her. Within the plot, the game that they are constructing, Hero and Ursula speak of Beatrice's very real disdain, her pride and scorn, which “ride sparkling in her eyes, / Misprizing what they look on”—misprize in the sense of not understanding (misinterpreting), as well as contemning. She misconstrues Benedick and therefore mistakes his worth. Failure of perception, as it is in King Lear, is failure of valuing. But the context is comic, the tendency to misprize can be reversed, and sight transformed through the false message. Beatrice comes to see both Benedick and herself better. The dominant metaphor of the scene is one of trapping, but the metaphor seems deliberately inapposite. Beatrice isn't trapped, she is interpreted, and Benedick is reinterpreted for her and, subsequently, by her. The result is that her discourse is transformed through the false discourse which she has overheard:

For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly.

(III.i.115-16)

The concern of the whole play with signs is reflected whenever love becomes the subject of conversation, since love is manifested primarily in a series of signs: “If he be not in love with some woman,” says Claudio of Benedick, “there is no believing old signs; 'a brushes his hat o'mornings … the barber's man hath been seen with him … 'a rubs himself with civet. … That's as much as to say, the sweet youth's in love” (III.ii.39-51). The greatest note of it, as Pedro observes, is Benedick's melancholy, which, like love, is itself registered in a code, a prescribed repertoire of gestures (cf. Democritus Junior and Jaques). Love, then, is a kind of language; but it also has a language, one which Benedick, after mocking Claudio for adopting it, tries unsuccessfully to master.

Love is like fashion, another sign system whose arbitrariness and instability are alluded to in the play (“But seest thou not what a deformed thief this fashion is” [III.iii.124-25]). But it is language itself, as the most fully elaborated of all sign systems, that provides the paradigm (“I know that Deformed; 'a has been a vile thief this seven year”);⁶ and it is Dogberry who most pointedly fixes the problem of language and its interpretation at the center of the play.

Dogberry and Bottom make an interesting contrast. Bottom is involved in drama, he seeks to play all roles, he is transformed in the course of a metadrama which reflects the concern of A Midsummer Night's Dream with metamorphosis and the art of the drama. His blithe unawareness of the conditions and constraints of theatrical “reality” (in contrast to, say, Puck's very sharp awareness) is a large part of his humor. Dogberry, on the other hand, is involved in investigation, in seeking out the truth. His language is peppered with malapropisms, which distort language as, analogously, Bottom distorts dramatic conventions, and which reveal Dogberry's proud concern with language just as Bottom's theatrical bravado reveals his egotistical interest in the drama. Dogberry, again like Bottom, is blithely unaware of his humorous incompetence. Thus, at the very core of what makes each of them funny we can perceive the central concerns of the plays they inhabit.

The gap between Dogberry's professional involvement with investigation, with clues that lead to truth, and his evident failure to master the relations between reality as he perceives it and language (his malapropisms frequently mean the opposite of what he “means”), is central to the comic irony of the play as a whole. It is precisely gaps between modes of interpretation which give structure to the plot and fascinate both the characters and the audience. Language is central to interpretation, both as a model for it, and as the medium in which it is carried out. This double function is one of the sources of confusion and uncertainty in the play.

Dogberry's speech on being called an ass offers an illustration:

Dost thou not suspect my place? Does thou not suspect my years? O that he were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an ass. Though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness. I am a wise fellow; and which is more, an officer; and which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina. … Bring him away. O that I had been writ down an ass!

(IV.ii.73-86)

The humor in the substitution of “suspect” for “respect,” “piety” for “impiety,” is itself a sign of insufficient control over the process of signification; but this failure of control becomes most explicit and most humorous in the play with the word and concept “ass” and the application of that word to Dogberry. Again a contrast with Bottom is instructive. In keeping with the codes of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom is turned literally (or should we say, “theatrically,” as part of the show) into an ass. Here, in order to bring out the analogous asininity of Dogberry, a linguistic rather than a theatrical code is invoked. In both plays, too, an ironic truth is discovered in asininity, in A Midsummmer Night's Dream as a result of Bottom's dream (I am thinking of the underlying sense of value, of concord generated out of discord, that ultimately emerges from his dream and his hilariously confused discourse about it);⁷ in Much Ado as a result of the success of Dogberry's investigation. In the speech under discussion, Dogberry's syntax and the oppositions he creates (“I am an ass … I am a wise fellow”), leave us momentarily uncertain whether he truly understands the word “ass.” We know he does, but the syntax works against our accepting the fact—“yet forget not that I am an ass.” Alternatively, one could say that the word Dogberry misunderstands in “am”; he uses it as if it could have only one kind of locutionary force, or only one tone (as in “So I'm an ass, am I?”) or one meaning (“he says I am”). Just as we have to supply the right word in order to get the humor of “Dost thou not suspect my place,” so we have to supply the right construction in the sentences that follow. In order to laugh, we have to remind ourselves of what Dogberry “really” means, and at the same time be aware of the appropriateness of what he actually says. Hence the simple correlation, ass-Dogberry, is complicated by a series of interpretative interventions on our part, a series which goes something like this: he is saying he's an ass; he doesn't mean what he says; this is not because he doesn't understand the word “ass” or the word “am,” but because he lacks the linguistic power to achieve control over his meaning; nevertheless, what he is saying is true; in fact saying it shows him to be an ass. Thus the process of signification itself, so crucial to this play, is brought into humorous relief, exactly as in A Midsummer Night's Dream the process of dramatic representation is highlighted by Bottom's transformations.

The distinction between spoken and written language is another of Dogberry's concerns. The exaggerated respect of the unlettered for the written word is part of what is behind Dogberry's desire to be written. But beyond that, he alludes to the primacy of writing in the law, and by extension in culture in general. “It is written” is the mark of cultural validity. To become part of a text is to become official; to be writ down an ass would, ironically, fix Dogberry, making him an ass for all time. This, of course, is exactly what Shakespeare has done, though in a slightly different sense than that Dogberry has in mind when he seeks his own textualization.⁸

The problem of the transference of messages is raised most cunningly within the play in the scene in which Dogberry comes with his report to Leonato just before the wedding. The audience cannot help feeling tantalized here, knowing the importance of Dogberry's message and yet becoming increasingly aware of the fact that Dogberry does not realize its importance, and is probably ignorant of what the real crime, and hence the real message, is. As we watch, we begin to realize that he will not be able to get the message across to Leonato in time to prevent the breaking of the nuptial—except by chance, through some random statement that Leonato will suddenly be able to perceive as significant. But the more Dogberry rambles on, the more likely Leonato is to dismiss him; as an audience we are thus caught in a squeeze, knowing that Dogberry has to be allowed to ramble in order to stumble into revealing the crime and yet realizing that Dogberry's vice of rambling is likely to lead to his quick dismissal. Wanting the message to come through, we are yet caught between the logic of that desire and our enjoyment of the comedy of misinterpretation. The difficulty of getting the message across thus enters directly into our response—we are teased, desiring the discovery and resisting it at once.

As much as the Dogberry scenes, though in a different way, the wedding scene focuses on the process of signifying. It offers us the spectacle of a dramatic clash of interpretations. Hero's appearance and behavior are textualized, raised to the level of a sign, and interpreted. Claudio's is the subtlest reading, but also the most naive. He sees the sign as disconnected from its proper referent, as an appearance only:

She's but the sign and semblance of her honour.
Behold how like a maid she blushes here!
.....Comes not that blood, as modest evidence,
To witness simple virtue? …
.....Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

(IV.i.32-41)

Denying the accepted relation between signifier and signified, he reinterprets the sign, investing it with new semiotic value, as proof of his contention that “she knows the heat of a luxurious bed.” He is, we might say, redefining the language of the blush. Claudio's relation to signs, though he thinks it subtle, is in fact acutely misguided. He continually misreads his closest acquaintances. His mistaking of Hero in the wedding scene is confirmed in his next appearance, not only by his callous response to the news of her “death,” but by his misreading of Benedick's message and intent when the latter comes to challenge him. Benedick's pallor and intensity (V.i.130, 139-40), like Hero's blush, are symptoms whose source Claudio is unable to fathom. Claudio, in fact, seems unaware of the possibility of misreading. His reinterpretation of Hero stems from the fact that he has been tricked by what Othello longs for, “ocular proof,” but such “proof” is itself a kind of message and hence obscure and subject to misreading, as Othello, to his horror, finally learns. The friar, unlike Claudio, sees the signs in context and interprets differently (as does Beatrice)—his “noting of the lady” reveals her “maiden truth” (IV.i.156, 163).

In Othello, to digress briefly, eavesdropping and misinterpretation lead not to comic redefinition but to tragic mistaking. As has been frequently observed, Othello can in many respects be seen as the tragic converse of Much Ado;⁹ in it, the play of signification becomes very serious indeed. Exactly as Claudio redefines Hero's look, seeing her blush as guiltiness not modesty, so Othello redefines Desdemona's beauty, seeing it as a mark not of faithfulness but of treachery: “Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write whore upon?” And just as Claudio justifies himself at the end of Much Ado, “Yet sinned I not / But in mistaking” (V.i.275-76), so Othello excuses himself by pleading that he was perplexed in the extreme, that he loved not wisely but too well. The process of investigation is central to Othello as well, and the key scene is once again one of eavesdropping. The grotesque comedy of Iago questioning Cassio about Bianca, while Othello hovers in the background, misinterpreting every leer and giggle, seems almost like a dark parody of the scene in Much Ado where Benedick is won to Beatrice through the lure of the message. Othello's deafness in the scene signals his defeat, the abandonment of investigation. The sign for him is empty, he fills it with his own debased meaning. He, like Benedick, is “infected” by the message but of course the causes, symptoms, and consequences of infection are utterly different. Misinterpretation leads to hate, and finally to murder.

In Much Ado, the breakdown of the wedding prompts Benedick's remark, “This looks not like a nuptial” (IV.i.67). The broken nuptial, in this as in many of Shakespeare's plays,¹⁰ poses a semiotic problem. The critical term “broken” is apt—it suggests the fracture of a complex social sign into fragments and shards. The highly unorthodox wooing that follows the “wedding,” based on the injunction “kill Claudio” and leading to a repudiation of the traditional language and forms of courting, continues the motif of a fracturing of conventional signs. Eventually Claudio is led to a blind reacceptance of the traditional form in which “Another Hero,” who turns out to be the same Hero, is represented; hence the original ritual, once again intact, is reinstated, now, presumably, free of the threat of breakage. Beatrice and Benedick, by contrast, move to an enlightened acceptance of the unorthodox deceptions which have brought them together. Like the signs by which he sustains himself and constructs meaning, “Man,” as Benedick observes, “is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion” (V.iv.107-108).

The play ends, as it began, with a messenger. Like the first one, this messenger is a pure function of plot. He signals the end, totality, all the strands tied together (Don John is captured), just as the first messenger signalled the beginning—an arrival. But the framing of the action of the play by these messengers signals more than that. It suggests that the “jeu de signification” (Derrida's term) exceeds what is signified, that Much Ado as a whole, is itself a play of signification.

Notes

1. Dorothy Hockey, in “Notes, Notes, Forsooth …” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 8, no. 3 (Summer 1957): 353-58, was I believe, the first critic to discuss this pun in any detail. She argues that noting and mis-noting constitute the primary theme of the play.

2. Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 10. The French text reads as follows “J'écoute l'emportement du message, non le message, je vois dans l'oeuvre triple le deploiement victorieux du texte signifiant.” Barthes is talking about the text in relation to its reader or audience; I am extending his sense to include the interactions within the work as well as those between the work and the audience.

3. The text of Much Ado About Nothing referred to here and throughout the essay is the Signet edition (New York: New American Library, 1964), ed. David L. Stevenson.

4. Both Hockey and Bertrand Evans, in Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 69, discuss this incident, Hockey in terms of the pervasiveness of “noting” and Evans in terms of the “alacrity to perpetrate a practice which infects people of this world.”

5. See Richard Henze, “Deception in Much Ado About Nothing,” SEL [SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900] 11 (Spring 1971):196, for a discussion of this aspect of the play's language.

6. The way the word “deformed” becomes the elaborately described character Deformed is one of the funniest instances in the play of the power of the sign to slide away from its meaning and take on a reality of its own. See V.i.308-13, and see also William Carroll's Comments in The Great Feast of Language in “Love's Labour's Lost” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press 1976), p. 35-36.

7. I have explored this point further in my book Indirections (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 68-70. See also, David Young, Something of Great Constancy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966).

8. The idea of the primacy of writing, of the social function of the written “text,” is elaborated by Lotman and Pjatigorskij in “Text and Function,” Soviet Semiotics, ed. Daniel Lucid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 125-36.

9. Critics often mention, but usually don't develop, the connections between Much Ado and Othello. Rosalie Colie, for example, in Paradoxica Epidemica (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), p. 240, calls the former a “comic rehersal” for Othello while Bertrand Evans, p. 81, contrasts Othello's and Claudio's reactions to similar circumstances.

10. The “broken nuptial” in this and other plays was the topic of a paper delivered by Carol Neely at the conference of the Shakespeare Association of America in 1979.