SOURCE: Rose, Steven. “Love and Self-Love in Much Ado About Nothing.” Essays in Criticism 20, no. 2 (April 1970): 143-50.

[In the following essay, Rose argues that in Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare offered some serious and often somber observations on the nature of love.]

Is Much Ado really ‘about’ nothing? The throw-away title—like that of its immediate successor As You Like It, or the sub-title What You Will to the third of this central group of comedies—is surely more a challenge to the audience to think of a better one than a proclamation of the play's own triviality. Whatever Beatrice, who could see a church by daylight, may prove to symbolise by her realism, she is not a nobody. And Benedick has an equivalent stature.

The plot of Much Ado About Nothing, as has often been pointed out, revolves around ‘hearsay’:

                                                                                Of this matter
Is little Cupid's crafty arrow made,
That only wounds by hearsay.

Through hearsay Leonato is led to believe that Don Pedro is seeking Hero's hand; and later Claudio believes this of his friend too. Beatrice and Benedick are both tricked into believing the other in love with them. Through Don John's machinations Claudio and Don Pedro first think Hero is faithless and then, through the Friar's, that she is dead. Ironically, hearsay also provides the solution to both plots: the Watch overhear the details of Don John's conspiracy in the one and in the other two love-sonnets addressed to each other stolen from the pair (a kind of hearsay) finally link Beatrice and Benedick. This structure is, I think, central to an understanding of the play. For, like most of Shakespeare's comedies, Much Ado is About Love. And, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream the way in which the lovers swap partners is both comical and at the same time a comment on the essentially arbitrary nature of human passion, so here where love and hatred are governed by another kind of magic juice—hearsay—the plot carries with it a similarly serious comment. It is this which I propose to examine.

At the beginning of the play we are presented with two pairs of protagonists whose relationships are apparently clearly defined: Claudio and Hero are in love and Beatrice and Benedick are at war. This at any rate is the situation as we see it by the end of the masked ball. It is in a sense the romantic conception of love, which permits only love or enmity and nothing in between—a situation akin to that found in the opening scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Moreover these passions and antipathies are presented as spontaneous and inevitable: Beatrice and Benedick never meet ‘but there's a skirmish of wit between them’; and Claudio, though he has been away to the wars, still finds his original liking for Hero as strong as ever. Instead of thoughts of battle,

Come thronging soft and delicate desires
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying, I liked her ere I went to wars.

To this conventional view, however, Shakespeare has already inserted several important qualifications. First of all, Hero has been wooed by proxy. That is to say her love has partly been governed by another man's intepretation of Claudio's affection. It is in fact a kind of hearsay. We know it to have been important in affecting her decision because a little while earlier she was actually prepared for a proposal from Don Pedro. Secondly, Claudio's love is also qualified by the way in which at a word from Don John he suspects his friend Don Pedro of having wooed on his own behalf—thus preparing the audience for his graver suspicion later on of disloyalty in Hero herself. His affection, we see, is easily dislodged by vanity and injured pride. And love that can be moved by vanity is perhaps based on vanity. Thus what Shakespeare has done here is subtly to have undermined our belief in romantic love. From a view of it as something essentially spontaneous and ineluctable love is being shown here to depend on the vision we have of our beloved through the eyes of others. The implications of this I shall discuss in a moment.

Now at first sight Beatrice and Benedick will seem to present a parallel to all this. For just as Claudio and Hero are parted through hearsay, so Beatrice and Benedick are united by similar means. And (ironically) vanity, though it is viewed in a comic light, plays a large part in this plot also. Throughout the gulling of Benedick the conspirators constantly stress Beatrice's sufferings and at the same time praise Benedick's virtue (except in pitying her distress), all of which is nicely calculated to appeal to his very considerable male vanity. In Beatrice's case the emphasis is laid more on her pride than on Benedick's sufferings; in their verbal exchanges she had perhaps been the crueller of the two and would possibly have more to repent. She is also a little less vain:

Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell; and maiden pride, adieu.
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand.

Yet this too is double-edged. Will she love him because she loves him, or simply in order to live up to an image she would have of herself? It is a question posed by both Beatrice and Benedick in their different ways.

The implications of all this, if true—and for the moment I only want to argue the more sombre aspects—are disturbing. Shakespeare has apparently undermined not only our notions of romantic love but in a sense our notions of the integrity of the human personality. If at the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream someone had told Demetrius that before the night was out he would utter sighs of love for one whom he now spurned, like Beatrice or Benedick he would have laughed the person to scorn. And Lysander like Claudio would have found it impossible to believe that within a short space of time his beloved could appear hateful to him. Yet it was so. Which, then, was the true Demetrius—the one that loved or the one that scorned? Which the true Claudio? The true Beatrice or Benedick? Is there one? If not, love is a fiction. For a marriage of true minds implies two whole and distinct personalities, distinct both in themselves and from each other—otherwise what would they have to offer each other? In Much Ado About Nothing, however, the characters seem to be in love, not with their partners, but with convenient and fickle images of them presented by others. In Twelfth Night Orsino and Olivia suffer from a like sickness, only they are in love with images they have created for themselves. But the effect is the same in either case: subject and object merge, the beloved becomes simply an extension of the lover, to accord with his fantasies. Soon there is only self and self-love.

A deeper and more sombre exploration of this theme is to be found in a play which bears certain striking affinities to Much Ado—the domestic tragedy of Othello. The similarity is not simply one of plot, but more interestingly of the discrepancies in plot. In both cases, we note, use is made of a somewhat unconvincing innocent accomplice (Margaret and Emilia) and in both plays the heroine could not possibly have had the opportunity to commit the acts of continuous infidelity, the ‘thousand times’ (both Claudio and Othello use the phrase), of which they are accused. Now these ‘errors’ are significant because the less convincing the plot (from the victims' point of view as well as ours), the less easy it is either to understand or forgive Claudio's or Othello's being deceived. Is not the readiness, then, with which they believe the charges an important comment on the nature of jealousy and indeed of love? What Shakespeare is saying is that a man whose love can be destroyed so easily by jealousy is not, as Othello seems to believe, one ‘that loved too well’, but rather one who never loved at all. We can imagine Othello at the end denying such a charge with an almost despairing vehemence, and pointing by way of proof to his burning forehead, his raging heart, as if to say—What is the cause of this if not love? That, however, is the appeal of the emotionalist, who would judge the truth of any passion by the extent of the agitations within the lover rather than by the constancy with which the passion attaches itself to and draws inspiration from the beloved. But, as Socrates proves in Plato's Symposium, love which is not directed towards some demonstrable ideal cannot be said to exist; or, more exactly, that love devoid of any external object is necessarily only self-love. This is Othello's case (and indeed the case of Claudio and Orsino too). After all, if someone whose word we have no immediate reason to suspect slanders a loved one, in what are we to put our trust? The only answer, surely, is in our knowledge of the beloved. Othello could never have known Desdemona and therefore could never have loved her. She existed for him only within the realm of his fancy, just perhaps as the Othello she saw was an Othello of her imagination—a man whom she married ‘for the dangers he had passed.’ There was never really any point of contact between them. Desdemona's final ‘Commend me to my kind lord,’ seen as any sort of judgment on her husband, is as absurd as Othello's ‘she was a whore.’ As to Claudio and Hero, the possibility of mutual knowledge or love between two partners who literally address no more than twenty-odd words to each other during the whole course of the play is inconceivable. Thus the implication is that in neither case did the plotters, or Shakespeare, need to have to imagine any very elaborate scheme in order to part the lovers: they had only ever been united in each other's imaginations and an image has only as much resistance to calumny as its owner wishes to give it, changing from god to devil in an instant.¹

Othello's jealousy is, of course, insane and monstrous. Yet the fact that so pure a creature as Desdemona shows signs of a similar divorce from reality would indicate that Shakespeare's insights in this respect are of wider application than to the merely abnormal. Freud himself warns us that ‘the state of being in love threatens to obliterate the boundaries between the ego and the object.’² The problem, then, must be to obtain a relationship at once close and loving but where the partners still preserve their own separate identities. For to guard this jealously in oneself is to respect it in the other person. Only in such a way is it assured that the partners will love each other for what they really are—which can be the only lasting motive for love—and not out of a desire for self-aggrandisement, the inevitable corollary once the ego begins to subordinate the object of its passion to any purely personal consideration. This last can take many forms. Among them, of particular importance in the present discussion, we have to include the desire, however sincere, to love someone because we believe that they love us. What is being advocated, then, although it would appear a kind of contradiction in terms, is the idea of disinterested love. But how can we find a formula for such a proposition?

We have to turn back, I think, to Much Ado About Nothing and in particular to Beatrice and Benedick. Now the first thing to note is that their attachment was never really a result of the conspiracy. Don Pedro and the others go off well pleased with their efforts but in fact, as most audiences realise, the pair had been on the verge of love from the beginning. The very first person that Beatrice inquires after on hearing of the army's return is Benedick, albeit with the usual irony:

I pray you, is Signor Mountanto returned from
the wars or no?

It soon becomes evident from their verbal exchanges that the pair take an uncommon delight in being rude to each other. Only as in all lovers' games it is easy to overstep the bounds of mere play: thus when Beatrice takes advantage of the masked ball to say a number of particularly cruel things to Benedick he is genuinely hurt—‘O she misused me past the endurance of a block … She speaks poniards and every word stabs.’ In fact the pair are rather afraid of each other and conceal their true feelings only lest the other should take advantage of the slightest sign of vulnerability to pour scorn on them. So in the end the plotters did not have an awful lot of work to do. Only a word was really necessary to break down the defensive wall that had been set up between them. Indeed Benedick's very eagerness to be ‘tricked’ as he rationalises away all his previous objections is one of the most amusing things in the play:

When I said I would die a bachelor I did not think
I should live till I were married.

What conclusions can be drawn from all this? Well, we know that true love has not after all been tampered with. The bond between Beatrice and Benedick is something genuine and not merely a fabrication resulting from an appeal to vanity on both sides—the vanity of believing that one is the object of love. However, in order to provide a sufficent counterweight to the darker implications of the Claudio-Hero plot (which despite the happy ending are never entirely dispelled) we must know precisely in what the genuineness of this relationship consists, we must see it in action. The crucial scene here, I think, is that in which Beatrice persuades Benedick to defend her cousin's honour and challenge Claudio. In particular, her impassioned outburst against the latter is especially revealing:

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 market-places.

But the point is, she is not a man. She needs a man. Only Benedick is capable of tearing Claudio's heart out in the market-place. Here, perhaps, is our formula for a disinterested love—need. In the past Beatrice had always asserted that she was independent, that when she went to heaven St. Peter would show her the place ‘where the bachelors sit’ and there she would live in perfect contentment. Yet suddenly she is confronted by a situation to which her own resources are entirely inadequate. A woman cannot fight for the honour of her cousin. It is this situation more than anything else which provides the turning point in her relationship with Benedick, and clarifies its true nature. She loves him, we see, not because they told her he was desperate for her, or because, like Desdemona, she has created a world of fantasy around her lover which she wishes to enjoy vicariously, or because she wants someone to whom to sacrifice herself, or for any of the thousand other self-regarding and ultimately disastrous motives for love; she loves him because he is a man, because he is Benedick, the person in the world whom she knows and wants and needs. Such a need is not egocentric because it is not something which can be thought of as existing apart from Benedick. It is he who has created the need. The external situation merely brings home to Beatrice the fact that a woman can never truly be sufficient unto herself. Similarly Benedick's need of Beatrice is stressed by the fact that rather than lose her love he is prepared to challenge even his best friend. In this last there is even something a little sinister. But then a love-pact of its nature excludes the rest of the world.

The play closes thematically with the episode of the stolen love-sonnets. Here, like the name of an evil demon chanted backwards to destroy his power, hearsay is presented in an inverted guise and thus its ghost finally laid to rest. As before the lovers are influenced in their relationship by the reports of a third party but this time those reports are merely reproductions of their own inmost feelings. The decision that they should fall in love was taken by no one but themselves. Cupid's bow, belying the initial quotation, has after all struck directly, mysteriously.

Notes

1. The last stage in this aggrandisement of the self, that reached by Othello, is the point where fantasy begins to intrude upon and actually replace external reality, involving a complete loss of personality. The ego no longer having anything outside itself by which to judge and measure itself begins to lose all sense of identity. The self-dramatising tone of Othello's last speeches—is there not a parallel in Claudio's rather melodramatic funeral rites at Hero's tomb?—can thus be interpreted as the tragic attempt of a man in whom all sense of personal identity has been destroyed (which is the true Othello—the one that loved or the one that murdered?) to construct a personality for himself, or at least one that will satisfy his audience. Ironically enough, in this last respect, up to the present century at any rate, he has had a fair measure of success.

2. Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents.