[In the following essay, Roberts examines Shakespeare's use of obstacles and delay in Much Ado about Nothing and his other comedies, and contends that the delays “provide audiences with the pleasant anxieties of sustained anticipation.”]

Audiences of Shakespeare's tragic drama predictably and recurringly experience the desire to hold back the rising tide of tragic action, to arrest time, to allow a few more moments for Juliet to awaken and embrace Romeo, for Emilia to enlighten Othello, for the servants to muster the courage to save Gloucester's eyes, or for someone to rescue Macduff's wife and children from Macbeth's murderous rage. The impulse to delay persists in spite of the certain knowledge that disaster will not be averted, and indeed in spite of the grim cathartic satisfaction of being swept away by the inevitable flood of catastrophic events which converge into the mainstream of tragedy. Similarly in Shakespeare's comic theater, two conflicting impulses contribute simultaneously to audience pleasure. The overwhelming current of comedy, as Northrop Frye has demonstrated in “The Argument of Comedy,” moves toward sexual consummation.¹ It is anticipation of this happy outcome which engages audience attention and sustains interest through the progress toward this inevitable culmination, and which may arouse in audiences a desire to speed things up, to help the characters get on to the main event.

And yet immoderate speed destroys the comedy. Milton tells us in Paradise Lost that the Edenic Adam discovered very early the delights of his spouse's talent for “sweet reluctant amorous delay” (Bk. III, l. 311), and one remembers the immortal words of Mae West: “I like a man who takes his time.” One might well contend that the true “argument” of comedy is not the movement toward consummation but the elaboration of strategies to delay such consummation. Shakespeare shows impressive variety and skill in designing these strategies in his comedies and romances.

Probably the most obvious device for preventing the immediate union of the young is parental disapproval. This stumbling block is used rather conventionally in Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night's Dream to propel rebellious daughters from the comforts and convenience of conformity into the uncharted territory aptly symbolized by the wild forest, where they will help to shape their own destiny, a destiny characterized in each case by faintly unsettling but adequate new attachments. Parental plans are similarly circumvented by forest intrigue in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale parental disapproval again fractures familial relationships and precipitates journeys toward self-discovery and sexual satisfaction. In The Tempest Prospero's mild restraints serve only to prolong courtship, not to subvert it.

The flouting of paternal authority may not have been for Shakespeare primarily a laughing matter, however, for the use of this theme is not a favorite delaying technique in his comedies. It has often been observed that the shadow of death hovers over a large number of the comedies, serving either to initiate confusion or to block fulfillment. In Love's Labor's Lost and Two Noble Kinsmen death defers nuptial celebrations. In The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night's Dream the menace of death or supposed death inaugurates the action. In The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure the threat of death interrupts connubial progress. And in Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale a supposed death stretches out the central portion of the dramatic action.

Rather less ominously Shakespeare develops in several comedies the use of the play as foreplay—a device used somewhat sketchily in Love's Labor's Lost and in its full glory in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the rude mechanicals' “Pyramus and Thisbe” is especially designed as nuptial entertainment and offered in answer to Theseus's plea for some diversion “To wear away this long age of three hours / Between [our] after-supper and bed-time” (V.i.33-34). Prospero evokes a nuptial masque for Ferdinand and Miranda to amuse them while waiting for the fitting moment to untie Miranda's maiden knot, and in Much Ado About Nothing the drama on the balcony masterminded by Don John and overheard by Dogberry's watchmen temporarily prevents the expected marriage of Hero and Claudio.

Even more common than the diversionary interlude of the play-within-a-play is the more extensive and inclusive form of play embodied in games. Comic games in Shakespeare range from the masked encounters of the ladies and the “Muscovites” in Love's Labor's Lost and the masked ball of Much Ado About Nothing through the almost incidental chess game of The Tempest. Games provide opportunities for confusion and discovery, and they prolong the intervals between the inception and completion of the central courtship. In The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice games constitute the occasion for a terminal testing of lovers. In Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night games launch the Beatrice and Benedick romance and the Malvolio subplot—both of which threaten to eclipse the main action while deliciously prolonging it. And in The Merry Wives and As You Like It the “love” games of the wives and Falstaff and of Rosalind and Orlando move to the main plot—becoming in the latter case the very heart of the play.

Although all these complications—parental opposition, death and threat of death, plays, and games—serve in Shakespeare's comedies to guarantee that the course of true love will not run smooth, and to provide audiences with the pleasant anxieties of sustained anticipation, by far the most common device for complicating the action is the multiplication of lovers. Multiplication occurs in every one of the comedies and romances—if one allows for the two generations of The Winter's Tale and counts both Ferdinand and Caliban as lovers in The Tempest. The causes and the effects of this multiplication are far too numerous and too varied for detailed analysis here. Sometimes, as with the quintupled pairs of Love's Labor's Lost and the quadrupled pairs of A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, the proliferation serves mainly to emphasize the absurd, capricious, and inevitable contortions of human beings when the amorous fit is upon them. Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline use diversity of lovers to provide the impetus for self-discovery and personality readjustment. In each case sorting out all these characters takes time and fills the gaps in the comic continuum.

However, the examples of multiple lovers that interest me especially and to which I should like to draw particular attention are those where romantic figures seem curiously flat and/or schematically interrelated. These cases encourage audiences to view the stage action as a sort of psychomachia, even as they appreciate its imitation of life, and to anticipate resolutions which harmonize warring psychic elements even as they resolve complications of plot.

The affinity between the dialectical nature of drama and the allegorical habit of mind is abundantly illustrated by medieval morality plays; and it is obvious that a strong taste for allegory survived into the Renaissance. To categorize Shakespeare's drama as allegory is to diminish it; but to recognize traces there of the Renaissance proclivity for viewing human beings as composed of faculties and humours is to add resonance and historical texture to its characterizations and plots. An example of a play that invites such interpretation is The Comedy of Errors, where the female characters form a paradigm of stereotypes of women: the virgin, the whore, the virago, and the mother turned nun. It is one achievement of the play to harmonize the female fragments and to reconcile female principals with male prototypes—themselves functionally split into father, husband, and lover. Although the origin of this vision of divided psyches is in Plautus, Shakespeare responded to it enough to reproduce it; and because of it his play has an enduring mythical resonance which helps to account for its continued popularity. As I have shown elsewhere, the women of The Taming of the Shrew, particularly Katherina and Bianca, may be viewed like those of The Comedy of Errors as complementary facets of one whole—the ubiquitous fair and dark heroines of fairy tale and romance. The process of merging these two figures provides one dimension of the reluctant, amorous delay that constitutes the body of the comedy.

Much Ado About Nothing similarly rewards analysis as a study of delay caused by the need to integrate parts—in this case with emphasis on the males. Names provide some clues to the function of the parts. The name Claudio, perhaps because of its association with such Claudian emperors as Nero and Caligula, seems to be linked in Shakespeare's mind with varieties of illicit sexuality—manifesting itself in the readiness of this Claudio to imagine sordid sexual dalliance, as well as in the premature embraces of the Claudio of Measure for Measure, and culminating in the incestuous sheets leapt to with such dexterity by Hamlet's uncle. Hero's name is mythical, androgynous, and as blankly unspecific as her character. The delightful Beatrice and Benedick, apparently Shakespeare's original inventions, are universally agreed to be the soul of the play. And yet, in spite of their vitality, their very names suggest more baldly than most Shakespearean denominations their salient qualities. Beatrice, born as she says under a dancing star, is a woman who brings blessedness. And Benedick is not only blessed but also one who speaks well—he has more lines than anyone else in the play, and, as Beatrice remarks, he is (at least in the first two acts) always talking. In many ways he is the central character of the drama, even more than Beatrice since we see more of him and have more insight into the stages of his conversion. And yet Beatrice, usually a reliable witness, calls him a “stuff'd man” (I.i.58-59) and one who has lost four of his five wits and is now “govern'd with one” (I.i.66-67).² I should like to suggest that the delaying action of Much Ado is actually the process of restoring Benedick to his full faculties and that his psychic drama is played out by other male characters in the play.

Benedick arrives in Messina a successful warrior and an experienced man of the world—one whom Beatrice says she knows of old (I.i.144-145) and one who has previously won her heart with false dice (II.i.280-281). He talks wittily and well, but he harps even more obsessively than other Shakespearean males on the specter of cuckoldry which haunts his vision of the marriage bed. Beatrice says, “he hath every month a new sworn brother” (I.i.72-73) and asks of the messenger who announces the soldiers' imminent arrival, “Is there no young squarer now that will make a voyage with him to the devil?” (I.i.81-83). Such an alter ego does indeed appear in the form of the curiously characterless Claudio, whose outstanding qualities are his youth and his vulnerability to deception. One can easily imagine him to personify a younger Benedick, one who might have played his lover false out of his own insecurity when faced with the uncertain nature of sexual fidelity. This is the Claudio who watches with credulity the dumb-show of sexual betrayal on Hero's balcony and whose rash acceptance of appearance metaphorically destroys his betrothed bride. This is the Claudio who must indeed—as Beatrice later commands—be killed, or at least recognized for what he is and brought under control before Benedick can achieve a harmonious union. Benedick does successfully master this latent side of his nature, as he reveals in the final scene when, after Claudio identifies his friend with “bull Jove” in an image which joins the divine and the animal, Benedick calmly accepts the designation, signifying perhaps that godlike reason must cohabit with bestial passion, and adds that such a bull was the father of the bleating, calf-like Claudio.

If Claudio represents the callow, youthful Benedick, Don Pedro suggests a more sedate and parental aspect of his character. Don Pedro actually identifies himself with Jove when he is dancing with Hero at the masked ball. As the diviner aspect of Benedick he twice expresses a serious desire to marry Beatrice, valuing her justly and without any sense of risk in his proposal. He is declined because Beatrice wants a complete man and sees that he is only a part to be worn on Sunday. But the noble Don Pedro is brother to Don John, the darker side of rationality. Don John is a one-dimensional villain—the embodiment of lurking resentment and malice, which though once forgiven, reappears to destroy relationship. It was such a shadowy, suppressed self, we feel, who earlier could have caused Benedick to play Beatrice false. As a manipulator of unresolved doubts and suspicions, Don John orchestrates the midnight scenario which plays out Benedick's nightmare and demonstrates the consequences of mistrust. A kinship between Benedick and Don John is first signalled by Beatrice, who, noting that Don John rarely speaks and that Benedick talks too much, suggests that an excellent man could be made “just in the midway” between him and Don John (II.i.6-7). Benedick himself reveals his intuitive knowledge of John's nature after Hero's betrayal when he leaps instantly to the conclusion that “The practice of it lives in John the Bastard, / Whose spirits toil in frame of villainies” (IV.i.188-189). The process of recognizing and dealing with Don John coincides with Benedick's realization of his ability to love Beatrice, and remarkably this revelation does indeed change his pattern of speech. After more than two hundred lines in the first two acts, Benedick speaks only six lines in Act III, gradually regaining a modified and less frivolous verbal dominance in Act V. In III.ii Don John enters to reveal to Claudio Hero's reputed “infidelity” at precisely the moment when Benedick has retired with Leonato to request Beatrice's hand. It is almost as if the imminence of commitment has conjured up the previously suppressed malign agent.

But this same dangerous moment calls up another figure from the murky recesses of Benedick's mind—the valiant Constable Dogberry. If Dogberry is one of Benedick's missing wits, he is the “common wit” which grounds the other four. Bumbling, illiterate, and only dimly if stubbornly competent, he seems the obverse of the eloquent and articulate courtier, but the two men share the love of language, the experience of reverses, the hope to “comprehend all vagrom men” (III.iii.25), and the desire to have “every thing handsome about” them (IV.ii.85-86). And it is Dogberry's stumbling progress toward the revelation of truth which condemns Don John to “everlasting redemption” (IV.ii.56-57) and frees society, at least momentarily, of his presence. Dogberry is the weak but persistent voice of instinct which helps Benedick to believe Beatrice and resolve to “kill” the rejecting Claudio. Since Benedick never shares the stage with Dogberry nor Dogberry with Don John, the characters provide interesting opportunities for doubling of roles. Either Dogberry and Don John or (less plausibly) Dogberry and Benedick could be played by the same actor.

Once Benedick has, in the words of Margaret, “become a man” (III.iv.87) by uniting his own quality of speaking well with the soberer aspects of Don Pedro and Dogberry and by reconciling himself to Claudio and acknowledging Don John, the amorous delay is prolonged only by the dance which Benedick insists must precede the wedding in order, as he says, to “lighten our own hearts and our wives' heels” (V.iv.118-119). The future looks bright for both the loving couples. But it is not without a lingering shadow. Prompted perhaps by Claudio's reference to “bull Jove,” Benedick makes one last horn joke, urging the Prince to marry, and assuring him that “There is no staff more reverent than one tipp'd with horn” (V.iv.124). It is as if the word “horn” evokes the memory of Don John, and the play ends with the news that his flight has been arrested and that he will be brought back to Messina. This is not good news, and it is perhaps significant that Benedick rather than Don Pedro or Leonato promises to devise “brave punishments” for him on the morrow (V.iv.128). We are left to wonder whether he can also live at peace with this thing of darkness he has now implicitly acknowledged as his own.

In Much Ado About Nothing the slow, painfully pleasurable process of uniting Benedick's five wits and effecting his betrothal to Beatrice reminds us of the importance of reluctance as well as delay in the argument of comedy. It would be hard to imagine two more determinedly reluctant lovers than Beatrice and Benedick. This reluctance adds greatly to our pleasure in their courtship and capitulation. It is not just that easy victories are boring victories, though it is partly that. And it is not just that we enjoy seeing long-vaunted independence humanized. It is also that reluctance is a genuine and powerful component of sexual encounters. One does not give up individual identity easily or relinquish it permanently.

In Milton's description of Eve's “sweet reluctant amorous delay” the word “reluctant” sounds a jarring note in Paradise, even as it serves onomatopoetically to retard the cadences of the line and contribute to its hypnotic euphony. Milton uses forms of the word “reluctant” five times in Paradise Lost, and in every other case it is associated with serious revolt, usually resistance against God. We cannot afford to underestimate its weight in the description of Eve. We remember that she was in fact openly reluctant when, soon after her creation, she preferred the enchanting grace of her own reflected image to the less obviously attractive manly virtues of her new spouse. Reluctance is a stage of her discovery of marital bliss and remains a pleasurable dimension of its enjoyment.

A similar pattern prevails in Shakespeare's comedy, which, though it often seems to be much ado about nothing, is as deeply concerned with the business of life as his tragedy is. Shakespeare shows us in his comedies that, like Cressida and Cleopatra, and Eve and John Milton, and all the writers of so-called “new comedy,” he understood the pleasures of sweet amorous delay. But he also alerts us to the stubborn, perhaps irreducible reluctance that paradoxically enhances rather than diminishes the miracle of harmonious union.

Notes

1. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 44-45.

2. Quotations from Shakespeare refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).