SOURCE: Drakakis, John. “Trust and Transgression: The Discursive Practices of Much Ado about Nothing.” In Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry, edited by Richard Machin and Christopher Norris, pp. 59-84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Drakakis presents an interpretation of Much Ado about Nothing informed by post-structuralist theoretical principles.]

I

In 1834 Coleridge announced the transformation of Shakespeare from a professional dramatist into an individual consciousness whose plays were the repositories of timeless truths. Hence his assertion that Shakespeare “is of no age—nor, may I add, of any religion, or party, or profession”.¹ With very few adjustments, the myth has proved durable, with those truths resurfacing recently as the “eterne mutabilitie” of the human condition, those “perennial, unhistorical variations of temperament” which comprise the irreducible core of “human nature”.² Coleridge had already laid the foundations for the removal of Shakespeare from history some twenty years earlier, in about 1813, in some notes for a lecture in which he formulated a theory of dramatic character which was to receive its most sophisticated expression less than a century later in A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). The subject of those earlier remarks was, ostensibly, the relation between “plot” and “character” in Much Ado about Nothing in which he anticipated modern formalist distinctions between sujet and fabula, and the narratological distinction between histoire and discours:

Take away from Much Ado about Nothing all that which is not indispensable to the plot, either as having little to do with it, or at best, like Dogberry and his comrades, forced into the service when any other less ingeniously absurd watchmen and night-constables would have answered; take away Benedick, Beatrice, Dogberry, and the reaction of the former on the character of Hero, and what will remain? In other writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent character. In Shakespeare so or not so, as the character is in itself calculated to form the plot. So Don John, the mainspring of the plot, is merely shown and withdrawn.³

Coleridge's comments on Much Ado about Nothing, especially his suggestion that Don John, “the mainspring of the plot, is merely shown and withdrawn”, betray an uneasiness that once the identifiable elements of fabula and discours are stripped away, then we may be left with “nothing”, implying that what may really be at stake here is an irreducibly essentialist conception of “character”. What is at risk for Coleridge is the possibility that the play may not contain that “true idea” of which the dramatic structure itself is but an ancillary support. Indeed, the very title of the play is an affront to any expressive theory of meaning, and is, in many ways, a challenge to those forms of criticism based upon such a theory. If, after analysis, the textual representations of universal truths are to be dismissed as “nothing”, then even assuming a Coleridgean intentionalist theory of character, signification will depend upon a trust which we are invited to place in the critic's own perception of a non-material reality whose essence is derived in stark opposition to textual appearances but whose ultimate location is beyond the play of difference which characterizes the act of signification itself. Thus, beyond that “nothing”, that material encounter with textual surfaces, there must be “something” more real, uncomplicated by the play of textual difference, a single meaning which it is the purpose of criticism to detach from the text.

This idealism (which lies at the root of much orthodox interpretation of Shakespearean Comedy) depends for its veracity upon a commitment to what Pierre Macherey has termed “the normative fallacy”, whereby a text may be modified, “in order to assimilate it more thoroughly, denying its factual reality as being merely the provisional version of an unfulfilled intention”.⁴ The recent placements of this critical strategy, along with aesthetics itself, within the purview of ideology—that hidden means of producing and reproducing as “natural” and “true” relations upon which particular social formations depend for their existence—has far-reaching consequences for the study of Shakespeare.⁵ Above all, it has served to bring sharply into focus the contradictions which lie at the heart of attempts to come to terms with Shakespearean Comedy in general and Much Ado about Nothing in particular. A classic example occurs in H. B. Charlton's book, Shakespearean Comedy (1938), in which he asserts, on the one hand, that “comedy is social rather than metaphysical or theological”, while, on the other, he seeks to locate “Shakespeare's comic idea” as what Charlton calls “his surest clue to the secret of man's common and abiding welfare”.⁶ At one and the same time history is acknowledged and refused, a seemingly contradictory critical strategy which has proved extraordinarily resilient in the case of Much Ado about Nothing.

Recuperative ploys such as this are symptomatic of a tendency which would negotiate away those contradictions which constitute the “factual reality” of the play, reducing drastically its complex discursive structures, smoothing over its complex web of contested significations, in the interests of locating some controlling idea secreted at its core but anterior to its structure—in short, its “transcendental signified”. For example, John Russell Brown considers the structure of the play to depend “almost entirely on one central theme … that of appearance and reality, outward and inward beauty, words and thoughts—in short, the theme of love's truth”.⁷ More recent criticism of the play has undertaken to refine this “theme”, locating the conflict as being between “right” and “wrong deception” with the latter constituting an obstacle to aesthetic and moral harmony finally being overcome by those “good” values: “with suspicion replaced by trust, and with destructive biting by a marriage feast”.⁸ This type of treatment of thematic contrast in the play aways culminates in the proposal of the total eclipse of one term by another, and is symptomatic of a more generalized ethical criticism which claims to offer an objective, empirically derived record of the dramatic conflict, but which, in fact, imposes a theological pattern on the play.⁹ As such, this kind of criticism is always caught in contradiction by what Fredric Jameson has called “the mirage of an utterly non-theoretical practice”.¹⁰

One of the most recent sustained examples of this kind of criticism is Alexander Leggatt's attempt to blend thematic unity and structural contrast together in his suggestion that the action of Much Ado about Nothing is structured around “an interplay of formality and naturalism”.¹¹ Opposed though these structural elements may be, that conflict is ultimately resolved, and indeed dissolved, in the perception “that however individual we are we are ultimately bound by the rhythms of life, and we must follow the leaders”. Here textual difference and larger stylistic oppositions are neatly displaced by a meaning which is gently prized free from process to clear a path for the return of familiar essentialist distinctions: appearance/reality, formal/natural, individual/society. Yet in the final analysis these terms are seen as two sides of the same epistemological coin, so that the play can be made, as it were naturally, to yield up that truth artfully lodged at its centre: “the idea of human reality at the heart of social convention”.¹² This, it need hardly be said, is a bourgeois, liberal humanist “reality” whose intentions are naturally expressed through “social convention”, though somehow individuals submit to its demands voluntarily through the imposition upon process of a mystifying logic: “we are ultimately bound by the rhythms of life and we must follow the leaders”. So totalizing a rhetoric of social and political quiescence presupposes an always already constituted bourgeois “subject”, but also calls to mind Walter Benjamin's astringent observation that there is “no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.¹³

Leggatt's reading of the play, which conforms to the underlying theory of comedy proposed by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), implies that Utopia is the ultimate objective of the comic action, and is realized at the point of the resolution of the action when the “inner” (“the idea of human reality”) harmonizes with that which fully expresses it, the “outer” (“social convention”). If we theorize this critical stance, then it becomes clear that the moment of carnivalesque release which brings inner into conflict with outer, and which could be read in terms of a political rupture, is aesthetically necessary as the precondition for clarifying what is really a deep structural unity which exists between the two, and which the comic closure finally confirms. This moment of aesthetic closure, the culminating moment in the process of the production of harmony, marks the erasure of textual difference, and is, according to this problematic, the point at which the human essence achieves self-identity and restablishes its existence beyond discourse. What this theory suppresses are those irreducibly dialogic elements of discursive practice, whose challenge to official ideology is always recoverable from the text, and whose irrepressible presence signifies that meaning is always a site of ideological struggle. This is the carnivalesque discourse that resists domestication, directing us back to the place where meanings are produced. In the words of Valentin Volosinov: “there is nothing in the structure of signification that could be said to transcend the generative process, to be independent of the dialectical expansion of the social purview”.¹⁴

II

The reduction of the material contradictions which permeate the discourses of Much Ado about Nothing to an ordered hierarchy of fixed meaning is nowhere more evident than in the attempts to identify the meaning of the play's title. Since, apparently “nothing” and “noting” were homophones for the Elizabethans, it has been assumed that the play was about “noting” and “misnoting”,¹⁵ but more recent criticism has sought to explore the sexual connotations of “nothing” as a synonym for what E. A. M. Coleman, careful to avoid any suggestion of prurience, calls “the female pudend”.¹⁶ “Nothing”, we may recall, was what Hamlet thought was “a fair thought to lie between maids' legs” (Hamlet, III.ii.127), while in Antony and Cleopatra this metonym is made to stand for womankind generally, as Enobarbus, commenting upon Cleopatra's sexual prowess, is made to observe: “Under a compelling occasion let women die: it were pity to cast them away for nothing, though between them and a great cause, they should be esteemed nothing” (I.ii.134-7). The location of gender in an absence which is both physical and cerebral, augmented with a language of valuation, reinforces the concept of the gendered female subject not in terms of an object or an essence, but a relation. Moreover, this is also true of “nothing” as it appears in King Lear, where Lear's chilling “Nothing will come of nothing” (I.i.92) emphasizes a process of “subjection” which reaches inwards towards a domestic filial relation, and outwards to the promised land which doubles as a marriage dowry and as the material expression of political power. It is, in the circumstances, insufficient to invoke a simple linguistic plenitude, pace the New Arden editor of Much Ado about Nothing, and to assert vacuously that “The play's title is, in fact, teasingly full of meaning.”¹⁷

Clearly, there are considerable dangers in reducing Much Ado about Nothing to a unitary “meaning”, just as there are in reducing the conflicts in the play to a resolution between two terms for supremacy in which it can be assumed that ultimately the traces of that conflict will be erased. To the ever-growing list of binary oppositions to which the action of the play has been reduced, could be added “trust” and “transgression”, in so far as the preferred term in each equation is the index of a hypostasized meaning which is located beyond the essentially dialectical processes of signification altogether, establishing a permanent and unchanging “truth” about an equally hypostasized “human nature”. I propose to argue, drawing upon Saussure, that terms such as “trust” and “transgression” are, in fact, differentially derived, and thus must be “defined not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively, by contrast with other items in the same system. What characterizes each most exactly is being whatever the others are not.”¹⁸ Such terms—and they exist within the play—constitute the discourses through whose mechanisms reality is constructed, and it is important that an attentive criticism should do more than simply ventriloquize certain of the differentially constructed elements of these discourses as if they were objective truths. But, in addition to Saussure's radical perception, a distinction should be made between the notion of difference functioning within an abstract linguistic system and conservatively reinforcing the stability of the system itself (the project of the more domesticated forms of structuralism), and the manner of its operation dialectically within particular historically specific discursive practices at the place where ideology reduces the plurality of possible meanings to singular meaning. To speak of “trust” and “transgression” in this context is not to ventriloquize the text's “secret coherence”. Rather, it is to insist that terms are forced into an axiological relation with each other through difference, and that to explore their dialectical relation is to lay bare the text's own ideological processes.

In purely bibliographical terms Much Ado about Nothing is already a deeply fissured text. The quarto of 1600, thought to have been printed from Shakespeare's foul papers, retains inconsistent speech-headings and, for the romantic essentialist, at least two puzzling scene-headings. Dogberry is variously referred to in speech-headings as “Const.”, “Andrew”, and “Kemp”, interpellations which traverse social role, dramatic/comic role, and the name of the actor who is behind the illusion. Dogberry is self-evidently the site of a full play of intertextual relations involving history, literary tradition, and professional theatrical practice. Similarly, though not quite to the same extent, Verges is variously referred to as “Headborough” and “Couly”. More intriguing, the scene-headings for I.i. and II.i. contain references to the supposed wife of Leonato: “Innogen his wife” (I.i.) and “His wife” (II.i.). In Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book II, which contains a version of the plot of Much Ado about Nothing, the figure of “Inogene” appears as the wife of Brutus, “faire Inogene of Italy” (X.13) but it is generally thought that the references in Shakespeare's play are to an early draft, and since 1733 editors have systematically excised her from editions. Her name appears in Furness's variorum edition of the play,¹⁹ but for A. R. Humphreys she is a disturbingly Pirandellian figure, “an unrealized intention” and he goes on to assert with worrying certainty that “originally” Shakespeare “meant Hero to have a mother … but then found no use for her”.²⁰

In a play in which questions of identity and social role are consistently foregrounded, in which the paternalistic control and “silencing” of female characters is a norm,²¹ and in which the one exception to that rule can be metonymically reduced to the appelation “my Lady Tongue” (II.i.252), this reduction of the wifely role to silence—the position towards which Beatrice herself gravitates in the play—which diplomatically constituted texts have been prepared to excise, or banish to footnotes, represents in an unusually explicit form the place of the woman in the play's own network of significations. From the woman silence is expected, or achieved through genial coercion as she submits to the paternalistic power of her “governor”; at the moment of transformation from “shrew” to legitimate object of desire Beatrice internalizes this process: “And Benedick, love on, I will requite thee, / Taming my wildness to thy loving hand” (III.i.111-12). In such circumstances, the relegation of “Innogen” to the status of “an unrealized intention” conceals an essentially romantic theory of composition and is consistent with an empiricist theory of meaning. It rejects implicitly what Catherine Belsey has called the notion of meaning as “interindividual intelligibility”,²² abstracting meaning from the play's network of colliding discourses, and is thus caught in the act of processing “truth”.

But abstracting a transcendent “truth” from the discursive practices of Much Ado about Nothing is precarious, at best, since unlike most of Shakespeare's other comedies the play contains no identifiable centre in the form of a hero and/or heroine, and therefore contains no metonym for it. Pace Charles I, who designated the play “the comedie of Benedick and Betteris”, critics have been generally disposed to accord them this central position: “Beatrice and Benedick, resembling stars, but serving as planets, outshine those about whom they revolve.”²³ Conversely, much critical effort has been expended in asserting the essential weakness of Hero, and the objectionable character of Claudio.²⁴ What most critics have had some difficulty in coping with is the structural fact that the “plot” effectively deconstructs itself; the plan to bring Benedick and Beatrice together is undertaken using the same mechanism as that which Don John uses to drive Hero and Claudio apart. This difficulty has been negotiated either by extolling “right deception”²⁵ or, more usually, by insisting that Beatrice and Benedick (like Petruchio and Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew) are essentially in love with each other, and always have been.²⁶ One other feature of the play, which does not appear in any of the versions of the story which were current at the time of performance, is that the obstacle to the attainment of harmony is a villain of a special sort, not a harsh or impersonal social law dividing young and old. Don John's “malevolence and unsociability”, marked by “images of sickness, festering poison, and incompatibility (the canker-rose, the thief of love, the muzzled dog, the caged bird) and by themes of resentment and moroseness” are, according to A. R. Humphreys, defined by his being “a rebel and a bastard”.²⁷ In a play concerned with marriage and its impediments a reversal of Humphreys's formula would seem to be nearer the mark: Don John is a rebel because he is a bastard.

The question of Don John's bastardy is, in principle, similar to that involving the role of “Innogen” in that it is concerned with the whole issue of the construction of human subjectivity in the play. In general this issue involves what Althusser calls a “Law of Culture”, a collective term for those historically specific processes which are “the determinate ideological formations in which the persons inscribed in these structures live their functions”.²⁸ Don John's subjectivity cannot be reduced to a role in an Oedipal drama, nor is it sufficient merely to explain his function in post-structuralist terms as a supplement at the origin which constantly resists the closure of the logocentric oppositions of the text (although at a purely formal level this is precisely what Don John does). Rather, he is to be situated at the very point where “pleasure” and “power” intersect. Don John is not “pleasure” standing in opposition to “power”, since, as Michel Foucault has observed: “Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another.”²⁹ Structurally he represents the material consequence of pleasure undertaken in defiance of the constraints of power, and thus, translated into historically specific terms, he is the “other” against which the political economy of Messina defines itself differentially. Don John is controlled by being accorded a “christian” subjectivity (his name is the commonest of Christian names according to the OED), but he is, by virtue of his illegitimacy, without a “surname” and therefore without access to the socially accepted political channels of the power/pleasure economy. Paradoxically, the definition of Don John's “subjectivity” involves exclusion from the political mechanisms of the social formation within which that definition is inscribed. It is a contradiction which Shakespeare broaches in the later play King Lear, in the figure of Gloucester's bastard son, Edmund.

In a provocative, but finally idealistic account of the play, Marilyn French argues that Don John's position is, in structural and epistemological terms, that of the “outlaw feminine”, and that his rebellion is “terrifying because it comes out of a sense of powerlessness and seems to want nothing”.³⁰ This is to presuppose the existence of an essential “feminine principle” which will ultimately collapse sexuality into the gendered subject. The play itself inscribes femininity within a powerful masculine discourse, and it is in this context that Don John should be viewed as the product of the very type of violation of an institutionally derived femininity against which Messina's masculine “honour” code is differentially produced. Don John occupies, rather, the place of “transgression”, and as such in both historical and social terms he has neither legitimate political position nor self-identity; he is literally “nothing”, he does not and cannot signify in any actantial sense within a logocentric scheme of things. It is significant that though he supports Borachio's plot he is not the agent of its execution, and therefore to suggest that “he seems to want nothing” is to misread discursive practice as though it were simply an effect of essence. A better way of theorizing Don John's position is to suggest that he is “profanation”, in that he refuses to accept that the sacred has meaning, and this places him within Foucault's definition of “transgression” as “profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred”.³¹ But it is important to remember that Don John's transgression is emphatically not a liberation from ideology; on the contrary, his position in the play is conceptualized as part of an ethical universe—he is “evil”—and his radical freedom must be coerced. In general terms, therefore, we may say that Don John becomes the mechanism in Much Ado about Nothing whereby the plurality of possible meanings is ruthlessly reduced to a singular, authoritative meaning; this is performed by the forcible subjugation of the disruptive term “bastard”, which always returns and threatens to undo the social formation. It is no accident that the play begins with a military victory in which Don John was an adversary—if not the adversary—and it ends in a similar fashion.

In Much Ado about Nothing the management of sexual relations, and the construction of gendered subjects, is bound up with questions of power and hence of politics. Far from celebrating a “consonance” of “Head and heart, style and substance, convention and nature”³² in any naive or essentialist sense, the play's aesthetic presents through the symbolic language of festivity a victory by force over a particular threat to Messina's determinate social institutions from a villain who “transgresses” its “ideological formations”, profanes its sacred values, and exposes a series of contradictions lying at the heart of its discursive practices. But of course Don John has no existence independent from Messina's institutions; he is a “visitor” certainly, but he is also the brother of the legitimate Don Pedro, “Prince of Arragon”. Thus, he represents the point at which relations of power manifest themselves negatively as “refusal, limitation, obstruction, censorship”, and as such his challenge to the formally constituted relations in the play appears, to use Foucault's terms, “only as transgression”.³³

What Don John's activities in the play highlight is a contest for “history” itself, opposing an “illegitimate” history that is forced to make itself against a “legitimate” history whose status is both sovereign and privileged. The result, however, is not a radical questioning in any conscious sense of the privileged status of historical narrative as such (a radical scepticism which might be taken to form one strand of post-structuralism in its Nietzschean guise), but a struggle for domination at the level of domestic relations at a time when “legitimate” history is under internal pressure to revise its own practices. The problems arise at the very point where “history” enters “discourse”. It is important to realize that we are not here dealing with an object, but with what Fredric Jameson has called an “absent cause”, which is only accessible in textual form, and that as such “it passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization, in the political unconscious”.³⁴ The specific significance of this for a play such as Much Ado about Nothing is that its concern is never with an object, a transcendental signified, a “something” to which its discourses can ultimately be reduced, but with a series of overlapping class and gender relations which always already exist and which are inscribed within the political unconscious as “prior textualizations”. It is disturbance at the level of the play's symbolic language that gives us some purchase upon the text's unconscious processes, those areas of which it cannot expressly speak.

The term which occupies that point at which the full range of the play's interrelated discourses converge is “honour”, which can be separated out into its constituent elements; it is preeminently the term which mediates the play's masculine discourse, but it also inscribes within its historical narrativization of repressed social and political fears a feminine (or as Spenser's Faerie Queene would have it, a Foemen-ine) discourse of “chastity” or “virginitie”. It is in Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander, from which Shakespeare may have borrowed at least a name, that the relation between these terms is inadvertently demystified, to expose the whole gamut of masculine political relations as an “absent cause” (i.e. as a history) which can only be grasped in discourse. Leander, seeking to persuade Hero to submit, proffers the following argument:

This idoll which you terme Virginitie,
Is neither essence subject to the eye,
Nor to any one exteriour sence,
Nor hath it any place of residence,
Nor is it of earth or mold celestiall,
Or capable of any form at all.
Of that which hath no being do not boast
Things which are not at all are never lost.(35)

From the woman's perspective there is a dilemma here between freedom of personal action on the one hand, and on the other the paternalistic constraint of a socio-sexual order in which female “honour” is both determined by, as well as determining, masculine honour. Helena in All's Well that Ends Well faces part of this dilemma when she debates the issue of female chastity with the aptly named Parolles: “How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?” (I.i.165-6), and it resembles in its sentiments the position which Beatrice occupies initially in Much Ado about Nothing with her potentially subversive advice to Hero to defy her father if necessary and please herself in choosing a husband; “it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say, ‘Father, as it please you’: but yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say, ‘Father, as it please me’” (II.i.48-52). In Othello a segment of “textualized history” is transformed into a material object in an attempt to appropriate it for an alternative discourse; Desdemona's “virginitie” upon which Othello's masculine honour rests, becomes a handkerchief which he can, under guidance from Iago, then re-texualize: “Her honour is an essence that's not seen, / They have it very oft that have it not: / But for the handkerchief—” (IV.i.16-18).

Female “honour” is valued in a paternalistic society only in so far as it accepts inscription in the constellation of discursive practices designed to textualize masculine sexual and political impulses. Marlowe's Leander can introduce his textualization of “virginitie” with a statement about female “imperfection”: “Base boullion for the stampes sake we allow, / Euen so for mens impression do we you, / By which alone, our reuerend fathers say, / Wome receaue perfection euerie way” (lines 265-8). Within the Christian tradition these discourses converge in the heavily symbolic institution of marriage, within which the woman is simultaneously interpellated as the cause of man's fall and of his salvation; it is no accident that the etymology of Beatrice's name is “She who blesses”, while that of Benedick's is “He who is blessed”. In material terms marriage is also the institution through which possession and power are legitimized and consolidated, offering “subjectivity” in the form of a social identity, and a range of discursive practices for internalizing these objective social relations at a symbolic level of emotions and affections. But differentially these positivities are defined against a constellation of anarchic “others” which collectively threaten to undo this symbolic order: the female refusal of paternal control; shrewishness, or the refusal to accept “silence”; infidelity and cuckoldry (the sexual expressions of a political anarchy); whoredom; suspicion; and—the consequence (significantly) of female promiscuity in an age without effective contraception—bastardy, that term which in the play's discursive economies opposes “honour”.

III

It may be argued that this is too heavy a burden of seriousness for a play such as Much Ado about Nothing to bear. But far from dealing with human abstractions which can be conveniently transported from one epoch to another, it is concerned with a series of historically specific social issues which collectively resist any idealizing critical gestures, and which Elizabethan society coped with by a form of marginalization through laughter. It is worth pausing briefly to suggest some of the ways in which these contested issues enter Elizabethan discursivities as “prior textualizations”.

The Second Tome of Homilies (1595) makes it very clear that female sexuality was conceived as part of a totalizing biblical narrative, although recently attempts have been made to suggest that this narrative was in the process of undergoing revision in favour of women during this period.³⁶ Such revisionist claims, while not wholly inaccurate, present a polar alternative to the dominant ideology, and thus neglect to point out the contradictions which reside at the core of at least some of these revisionary texts. For the homilist in “A Homilie of the State of Matimonie”, authority in marriage rests firmly with the husband who “ought to be the leader and author of love, in cherishing and increasing concord, which then shall take place, if he will use measurablenes and not tyranny, and if he yeeld some thing to the woman”.³⁷ The woman still requires to be controlled, however, since she is regarded as man's inferior in every way:

For the woman is a weake creature, not indued with the like strength and constancy of minde, therefore they bee the sooner disquieted, and they be the more prone to all weake affections and dispositions of minde, more then men bee, and lighter they bee, and more vaine in their fantisies and opinions.³⁸

A little earlier, in 1592, the Puritan Henry Smith had shifted the emphasis slightly in favour of women in his sermon “A Preparative to Marriage”, in which he explained the divine origins of the institution in the following way: “In the contract Christ was conceived, and in the marriage Christ was borne, that he might honor both estates: virginitie with his conception, and marriage with his birth.”³⁹ But Smith then went on to point out that the bearing of children in marriage reflected “honour” on the woman, but, “for the children which are borne out of marriage, are the dishonor of women, and called by the shamefull name of Bastards”.⁴⁰ A little later he condemned adulterers whom he “likened to the divell, which sowed other mens ground”, inscribing the woman within a discourse of property, and he cited scripture to demonstrate that for bastards “no inheritance did belong to them in heaven, they had no inheritance in earth”.⁴¹

Some six years later in 1598, probably the year in which Much Ado about Nothing was first acted, another Puritan, Robert Cleaver, building on Smith, could take the definition of marriage a stage further, not only “spiritualizing the household”, to use Christopher Hill's phrase, but rendering its relations explicitly political. In his A Godly Form of Householde Government, he noted:

A householde is as it were a little commonwealth, by the good government whereof, God's glorie may bee aduanced, the commonwealth which standeth of seueral families benefited, and all that live in that familie may receiue much comfort and commoditie.⁴²

Both Smith and Cleaver are caught in contradiction as each makes a liberal gesture towards the woman's position, while preserving a vocabulary of social control which has its roots in a now seriously troubled biblical narrative. But it is on the question of sexuality that Puritan and homilist alike are at one. In the “Third Part of the Sermon Against Adultery” in the Second Tome of Homilies the pleasure/power axis is negotiated through the suggestion that sexual pleasure itself has its origins in Satan: “how filthy, beastly, & short that pleasure is, whereunto Satan continually stirreth us and moveth us”.⁴³ St Paul's wry concession that “It is better to marrie then to burne” is here seized upon by the homilist as a desperate spiritual justification for what he, and later Cleaver, expresses as, in essence, the political management of sexual activity internalized as a structure of religious feeling containing its own tension between the world of the flesh and that of the spirit.⁴⁴ These are, of course, strands in a much larger body of discursive practices which, at a purely secular level, amalgamates neo-platonic, courtly, and romantic/poetic discourses, all of which are found in contemporary Elizabethan fiction, epic poems such as The Faerie Queene, the sonnet tradition, and courtier manuals such as Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1588).

It is this whole precarious discursive edifice which produces Don John's subjectivity that is threatened in the play. That subjectivity is more than simply a marker of “plot”, however, in that Don John internalizes a range of related discursive positions which function from an ethical standpoint to contain his disruptive potential. In his essay “Of Friendship” Francis Bacon argued that “a natural and secret hatred and aversion towards society, in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast”,⁴⁵ and it is therefore not surprising to find Don John associated with images of bestiality; he is prepared to “claw no man in his humour”, and he asserts: “If I had my mouth I would bite, if I had my liberty I would do my liking:” (I.ii.17 and 32-4). Moreover, in the essay “Of Envy” Bacon observes that “Deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards, are envious”, and he concludes that this characteristic is “the proper attribute of the devil, who is called The envious man, that soweth tares among the wheat by night.”⁴⁶ Don John is also, as Hero informs us, “of a very melancholy disposition” (II.i.5), and therefore suffers from what, in the words of Timothy Bright's A Treatise of Melancholy (1586), is called “an unnaturall temper & bastard spirite”. Moreover, given the discursive practices within which “love” is textualized, Timothy Bright's designation of the related areas which are the grounds for Don John's challenge as “the primitive emotions”, is shown to be nothing more than an empirical reading of what we have seen is an objective social formation: in Bright's terms these are “love mixed with hope” which, we are told, “breedeth trust”, and “love mixed with fear”, which breeds “distrust”.⁴⁷ Behind Bright's curiously untheoretical practice lie the twin discourses of salvation and possession. Thus, to adapt Foucault's remarks in relation to “madness”, Don John may be said to represent “an area of unforeseeable freedom” where sexual impulse is in danger of becoming unchained from those discourses which would hold it in place, and like the madman's frenzy Don John's bastardy represents “the secret danger of an animality that lies in wait”, which “undoes reason in violence” and truth through its violation of social norms.⁴⁸

It is here, however, that we encounter historically a mixture of fact and illusion. Peter Laslett has suggested that during the decade 1590-1600, while the population of England was a little over 4 million, bastardy accounted for just over 3 per cent of all births.⁴⁹ But he also argues that while bastardy was an issue among the dominant elite, in actual fact “The engendering of children on a scale which might threaten the social structure, was never, or almost never, a present possibility.”⁵⁰ Lawrence Stone argues that there is tentative evidence to suggest that on a national scale the specific pressures applied in local communities within the sphere of sexual morality resulted in low illegitimacy ratios, and that when such community pressure failed, then “any constable was empowered to break into any house in which he suspected fornication or adultery to be in progress and, if his supicions were confirmed, to carry the offender to jail or before a Justice of the Peace”.⁵¹ The role which Dogberry and Verges play in Much Ado about Nothing serves, therefore, to combine political and moral surveillance.

The picture which we get from The Homilies is, however, very different in emphasis: a difference, perhaps, between the “imaginary” and the “real”, which has come to designate for us the terrain of ideology. It would not be surprising to find both the political and domestic values which constitute the lived relations within ideology inscribed in the letter of the Law itself, especially in relation to the question of bastardy. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England the eighteenth-century lawyer Blackstone outlined explicitly the legal rights attaching to the state of bastardy. For the bastard:

The rights are very few, being only such as he can acquire for he can inherit nothing, being looked upon as the son of nobody, and sometimes called filius nulius, sometimes filius populi. Yet he may gain a surname by reputation, though he has none by inheritance.⁵²

Excluded from all forms of inheritance, Don John is precluded from asking the question that Claudio asks Don Pedro concerning Leonato's possible “heirs”, since he has no name to promulgate. Legitimate marriage, Blackstone states, gives the husband access to all of the wife's property, though he does not suggest openly that the wife is property herself.⁵³ Thus, while marriage itself legitimizes the transfer of property (the currency of power), reinforces a social and political identity through the sustaining of a family “name”, and is, to use Foucault's terms, that “deployment of alliance”⁵⁴ whereby sexual activity enters into discourse, the bastard is without property, without identity, and stands as a defiant reminder of the underside of the pleasure/power axis as an anarchy consequent upon the transgression of its economies.⁵⁵ In the legal and juridical sense of the term, and in a manner directly pertinent to Shakespeare's play, the bastard is therefore nothing, nonidentity in a society caught in the contradictory process of “naming” as the step towards “self-identity” but forced to confront, time and time again, the differential mechanisms of its own signifying practices.

IV

Thus far I have been concerned, selectively, with areas of what might be called “the political unconscious” of Much Ado about Nothing, and I have tried to show briefly how historically specific discursive formations “mythologize” a concrete history. In specific terms, faced with either formulating a concept of female sexuality or obliterating it by hiding it, the discourse itself “transforms history into nature”, to use Roland Barthes's terminology, naturalizing it as part of a totalizing theological narrative. This is not, of course, to collapse sexuality into the irreducibly metaphysical concept of “power”, but rather to suggest that these related discourses ensure the placing of individual subjects in relation to a state apparatus, one which masks, but which would by no means exclude the issue of the exploitation of one class by another. Thus marriage, which in Much Ado about Nothing is formulated as a “natural” occurrence (“In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke” (I.i.241-2)), becomes the domestic bulwark in the fight against “evil” waged on the terrain of “Christian faith”. “Faith” and “Trust” are important elements in this discourse, as the homily “A Short Declaration of The True and Lively Christian Faith” indicates. Here “inward faith” is described as being: “not without hope and trust in God, nor without the love of God and of our neighbours, nor without the feare of God, nor without the desire to heare God's worde, and to follow the same in eschewing evill, and doing gladly all good workes.”⁵⁶ Those who perform “evill workes” and who “lead their life in disobedience and transgression or breaking of God's commandments without repentance” inherit, says the homilist, “not everlasting life but everlasting death, as Christ sayeth”.⁵⁷ By reading these discursive practices “against the grain”, so to speak, we can begin to see how, through “naturalization” of the contradictions of their material history, they conspire to reduce plurality of meaning to a single totalizing narrative which has as its desideratum political quiescence. Don John is a threat because he would return this discourse to the place where its writ of privilege does not run, but in the attempt to “recuperate” him (through physical coercion) the contradictions residing at the heart of the whole ideological apparatus of Messina are laid bare.

Everywhere in Much Ado about Nothing, from the Messenger's initial communication of Claudio's uncle's expression of joy, which “could not show itself without a badge of bitterness” (I.i.21-2) through to Benedick's final utterances in the play, the linguistic sign itself gapes to reveal the material process of its own production. Deception both does and undoes; it can destroy, but at the same time it can produce “honest slanders” which, as Hero ironically observes, “may empoison liking” (III.i.84-6). Moreover, by the time that Hero is in a position to generalize that “Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps” (III.i.106), she herself is caught proleptically in the articulation of her own “death”. But analeptically her comment recalls Benedick's earlier encoding of the figure of “blind Cupid” as the sign on “the door of a brothel-house” (I.i.234-5). For Benedick, liking is already “empoisoned” since the institution which Don Pedro assumes will transform the “savage bull” into a willing husband produces also an animal of a very different complexion: “pluck off the bull's horns and set them in my forehead … let them signify under my sign ‘Here you may see Benedick the married man’” (I.i.244-8).⁵⁸ After the failure of the first Don John plot it is Benedick's female counterpart in “apprehension” who can point to the canker of possessiveness, the “suspicion” or lack of “trust” enshrined at the heart of the notion of civility:

The count is neither sad, nor sick, merry, nor well; but civil Count, civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion.

(II.i.275-7)

Thus, at the heart of marriage in this play is a difference along whose axis of signification the gendered human subject is constructed; the woman is a “subject” and she “subjects herself” to the authority of father and husband, while her “virginitie”, textualized as “no thing” becomes, not a signifier of female essence, but rather of masculine honour. That woman in the play is positioned in masculine discourse is made clear in Borachio's chilling account of the purpose of the second Don John plot; the “poison” which the villain will temper will make it possible for him “to misuse the Prince, to vex Claudio, to undo Hero, and kill Leonato” (II.ii.28-9). Hero is here, literally, embedded in a masculine discourse, which will be undone when she is undone and which will be reinstated only when her “honour” is re-inscribed.

Against Hero's “subject” positions as daughter to Leonato, and as legitimate object of male affection, we must set Claudio's own constructed subjectivity. He has no independent autonomous “character” as many of his detractors mistakenly assume; rather, he moves through the play from one textual position to another. His military prowess, like that of Benedick, is already inscribed within the “prior textualization” of a masculine honour code, whose domestic inter-subjective manifestation is the discourse of formal courtship within whose boundaries Hero is herself inscribed. Don Pedro locates the smooth transition from soldier to lover: “Thou wilt be like a lover presently, / And tire the hearer with a book of words” (I.i.286-7). By contrast Benedick occupies a contradictory position, accepting the public militaristic discourse of masculine honour but rejecting its domestic inter-subjective analogue; faced with the prospect of encountering Beatrice, he expostulates to Don Pedro:

Will your Grace command me any service to the world's end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on; I will fetch you a toothpicker now from the furthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of Prester John's foot; fetch you the hair of the great Cham's beard; do you any embassage to the Pygmies, rather than hold three words' conference with this harpy. You have no employment for me?

(II.i.247-55)

This frivolous articulation of the discourse of courtly honour will be re-constituted in much heavier circumstances later in the play, when having been persuaded through a deception to negotiate the contradiction in his own position, Benedick's (I believe) now serious expostulations: “I will swear by it (my sword) that you love me, and I will make him eat it that says I love not you” (IV.i.275-6), and “Come bid me do anything for thee”, are both met with Beatrice's stony imperative: “Kill Claudio!” (IV.i.286-7). Benedick's reluctance to defend “female honour” to the death makes him less than a man, as the now fully “subjected” Beatrice comes to realize:

Princes and counties! Surely a princely testimony, a goodly count, Count Comfect, a sweet gallant, surely! O that I were a man for his sake, or that I had a friend that would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones too: he is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.

(IV.i.314-23)

The alleged loss of Hero's honour marks the point of Beatrice's entry into the very discursive formation that she had before resisted, while its re-constitution at the end marks the re-inscription at different levels of ideological practice of the masculine honour of both Claudio and Benedick. The latter's attempted resolution of the inconsistency of his position at the end: “for man's a giddy thing and this is my conclusion” (V.iv.106-7), effects the transformation from “history” into “nature” so characteristic of myth, but by this time the narrative has become a severely troubled one.

We need only to go back a little to find out precisely how troubled the narrative has become. From Claudio's articulation of “prior textualizations” of female beauty as: “a witch / Against whose charms faith melteth into blood” (II.i.169-70), through to Benedick's cynical jibes at cuckoldry, and his mischievous suggestion that Don Pedro may have stolen Claudio's “bird's nest”, it becomes clear that “virginitie” is really a reification of the discourse of an authoritative and paternalist honour. Don Pedro interprets the issue as being one of “trust”, and responds indignantly to Benedick's allegation of theft with: “Wilt thou make a trust a transgression? The transgression is in the stealer” (II.i.210-11). The violation of “trust”—the ideological catalyst which gaurantees political quiescence—through Don John's persistent questioning of Hero's chastity, raises the disturbing spectre of a plurality of meaning which threatens the whole social order, and which renders Hero a plural object: “Even she—Leonato's Hero, your Hero, every man's Hero” (III.ii.95-6). The drama is played out, literally, over the undone body of Hero, which becomes the plural text upon whose surface is inscribed a range of competing meanings that jostle for supremacy. During the relentless deconstruction of the marriage ceremony Hero becomes for Claudio “this rotten orange” who is “but the sign and semblance of her honour” (IV.i.31-2), whose “blush is guiltiness, not modesty” (IV.i.41), and who is translated from a human subject into one of “those pamper'd animals / That rage in savage sensuality” (IV.i.60-1). For Don Pedro the whole issue reflects upon his “honour”: “I stand dishonour'd that have gone about / To link my dear friend to a common stale” (IV.i.64-5), while instead of the legitimate re-naming of Hero as Claudio's possession, her female subjectivity is ruthlessly cancelled: “Hero itself can blot out Hero's virtue” (IV.i.82) leaving her the site of contradiction: “most foul most fair”, and “Thou pure impiety and impious purity!” (IV.i.103-4).

This is a narrativization to which Leonato himself subscribes, as he transforms Hero's body into a “writing”: “Could she here deny / The story that is printed in her blood?” (IV.i.121-2), lamenting her loss of value as a signifier in the masculine discourse of possession:

But mine, and mine, I lov'd, and mine I praised,
And mine that I was proud on—mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,
Valuing of her—why, she, O she is fall'n
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again,
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul-tainted flesh!

(IV.i.136-43)

Here, in Messina we are offered a glimpse of a society inscribing a body in discourse, constructing a sexuality in historically specific ethical terms. It is because of the inscription of Hero's body within the ethical axis of “good” and “evil” that it can be subjected to an alternative reading; her blushes can be interpreted as marks of “innocence” and “maiden truth”, whose full meaning depends upon another sort of “trust” which can recuperate her body for a theological discourse. Significantly, this reading rests with the Friar:

Trust not my reading nor my observations,
Which with experimental seal doth warrant
The tenor of my book; trust not my age,
My reverence, calling, nor divinity,
If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here
Under some biting error.

(IV.i.165-71)

It is this recuperative gesture which serves both to foreclose and provoke subversive questioning of the play's discursive structures, thus permitting a thoroughly “interrogative” reading of the conditions of their formation. As if aware of the Pandora's box of discursive possibilities which it has opened up, beyond the text's own powers of conceptualization, a truly dialogic voice is stifled in the play's retreat from those “real questions” of which Pierre Macherey speaks, which would seriously subvert its dominant ideology, proving the closure of the action “always adequate to itself as a reply”.⁵⁹

Heavily implicated in the whole textual process, while at the same time providing a class perspective on the action are Dogberry and the Watch. Dogberry and his colleagues are the instruments of government in Messina, but their collective inversion of sign and meaning represents an habituation of those self-cancelling devices which mark the discursive strategies of the “dishonour'd” Claudio. For Dogberry goodness and truth are punishable, with the victims having to “suffer salvation, body and soul” (III.iii.1-3), while allegiance and responsibility are the rewards of “desartlessness” (III.iii.9); also, the duty of the Watch is defined negatively: “We will rather sleep than talk; we know what belongs to a watch” (III.iii.37-8), while among the manifestations of Dogberry's “merciful” disposition is his willingness to let the “thief” banish himself: “The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is to let him show himself what he is, and steal out of your company” (III.iii.56-9). Inscribed in such apparently delightful ineptitude is the sense of an imperfectly learned system of values which are imposed from above. In this respect Dogberry and his colleagues are not unlike Beatrice and Benedick who later ape imperfectly the discourse of romantic love, succumbing as they do to its imperatives but failing to internalize slavishly its discursive practices:

Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried. I can find out no rhyme to “lady” but “baby”—an innocent rhyme; for “scorn”, “horn”—a hard rhyme; for “school”, “fool”—a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings! No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.

(V.ii.34-40)

In this respect, though on a smaller scale than that of Beatrice and Benedick, Dogberry and the Watch elicit both ridicule and sympathetic laughter: as representatives of the Law on the one hand, but also as repositories of a popular resistance to its demands on the other. The one is inscribed primarily in the discourse of sexuality, while the other is inscribed in the discourse of class. But they overlap in a surprising way with Dogberry's insistence that as Messina's “subjects” he and his colleagues must be “suspected”: “I am a wise fellow, and which is more, an officer, and which is more, a householder, and which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina …” (IV.ii.77-9). Here social position and gendered subject are glimpsed through a defensive gesture which asserts hierarchy at the same time as it undermines it. It is upon this precarious balance that the discursive formations of Messina rest. The “flesh”, a metonymy of Man's inheritance after Adam's “transgression” is textualized as a narrative which reproduces its own discursive practices, and it is no accident that the “prior textualizations” which drive Benedick and Beatrice together are, in the conflation of Dogberry's “tediousness” and Leonato's impatient paternalism, the efficient cause of Hero's undoing.

Structurally Dogberry and the Watch occupy a potentially subversive position in the play, seeming to invert the letter of the Law. But even so they, like Benedick and Beatrice, can hardly be said to represent the “other” of official ideology in any Bakhtinian sense. Indeed, they are shown here to be the repository of values which are ultimately re-affirmed in the court of Messina itself. Borachio makes the point bluntly to Claudio and Don Pedro: “I have deceived even your very eyes: what your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light …” (V.ii.226-9). The result is not a fragmenting, but a universalizing of Messina's ethical and discursive practices, while at the same time acknowledging local social antagonisms within this unified structure. Here, momentarily, the text gapes to reveal a glimpse of hegemony in the making.

V

It is this unity which Don John challenges, and into whose precariously balanced structures he must be coerced and held as the mark of “transgression”. But we should distinguish the manner of his marginalization from the recuperation, for the play's dominant discourses, of the seemingly independent figures of Benedick and Beatrice. Their admission coincides with the resurrection of Hero, her re-union with Claudio, and the capture of Don John; but even this process of re-inscription cannot be effected without recalling to mind the “other” of discourse itself irrepressibly lodged at the source of meaning as excess. To enter into discourse is to enter into a political semiosis, in which all communicative gestures are harnessed to the process of the production of meaning. In a potentially subversive gesture the merry-hearted Beatrice of Act II counsels Hero to “speak” to the silent (but, we recall, “civil”) Claudio, “or if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss, and let him not speak neither” (II.i.292-3).

But this proves no solution to the problem. Indeed, at the end of the play, and now constrained to accept herself the silence which is the modus operandi of the “wife” Innogen, the fully “subjected” Beatrice becomes the victim of her own strategy, as Benedick suppresses her former persona into “silence”: “Peace, I will stop your mouth” (V.iv.97). The gesture is, surely, intended to transcend the treachery of language itself, but Don John, the man who is himself “of few words” has got there before the lovers, drawing this gesture back into the material world of difference where meanings have to be contested. Benedick's gesture both unites and splits the lovers, as evidenced in Count Bembo's disquisition on kissing in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier:

For since a kisse is a knitting together both of bodie and soule, it is to be feared, lest the sensuall lover will be more enclined to the part of the bodie, than of the soul: but the reasonable lover wotteth well, that although the mouth be a parcell of the bodie, yet it is an issue of wordes, that be the interpreters of the soule, and for the inward breath which is also called the soule.⁶⁰

This gesture of uniting two “soules” in spiritual bliss is also, paradoxically, a reminder of Man's “transgression”. Thus, Benedick's words of advice to Don Pedro to “get thee a wife! There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn” (V.iv.121-2) both extols marriage and at the same time seeks to hold in place through laughter the “transgression” that threatens to deconstruct its “transcendental signified”. Thus, the platonic ideas of unity and harmony based upon a “trust” are defined only in terms of the proximity of their “other”, a “transgression” whose “author” is Don John, and whose image is variously the cuckold, the whore and, most politically subversive of all, the bastard.

At the end of the play it is the “whore”, that signifier of the defamatory “writing” on the body of Hero, who dies. Similarly, it is the bastard, Don John, who is rigorously coerced into the ritual affirmation of a collective solidarity which is aesthetic closure, by exclusion. Indeed, Don John's body will become the site of another “writing”, this time of a promissory and spectacular nature, connected with what Francis Barker has called “the … pageant of sacramental violence”.⁶¹ Benedick's final words incorporate this “pageant” into the festive context of the ending itself with his exhortation to: “Think not on him till tomorrow; I'll devise thee brave punishments for him. Strike up, pipers!” (V.iv.125-6). But that process does not clear the path for a progress “through release to clarification”; rather, it constitutes a driving back down into the “political unconscious” of a force that, dispossessed from power, silenced by coercion, and re-inscribed in the pageant of Elizabethan juridical practice, seeks its revenge through the temporary colonization of those discursive practices which struggle to suppress it. Thus, the ending of Much Ado about Nothing offers no momentary perception of Utopia through the mechanism of carnival release; rather, it offers us an insight into a politics of comedy in which those strands which constitute the complex economy of power and pleasure are exposed, only to be concealed again within the naturalizing process of “myth”. The need for such mythologizing would have been rendered still more necessary for an Elizabethan audience when it is remembered that on the throne of England was a monarch who was both the public epitome of virgin “honour” and who, in the view of religious subversives, was the bastard child of Henry VIII.⁶²

Notes

1. Terence Hawkes (ed.), Coleridge on Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 122.

2. A. D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the representation of reality (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 167.

3. Hawkes, Coleridge on Shakespeare, p. 115.

4. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 19.

5. See James Kavanagh, “Shakespeare in Ideology”, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 144-65.

6. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 226.

7. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 121.

8. Richard Henze, “Deception in Much Ado about Nothing”, Studies in English Literature, 11 (1971), 201.

9. See David Ormerod, “Faith and Fashion in Much Ado about Nothing”, Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1971), 104.

10. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 58.

11. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 152.

12. Ibid., p. 183.

13. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Collins/Fontana, 1973), p. 258.

14. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York and London: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 106.

15. Dorothy Hockey, “Notes, notes, forsooth …”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 8 (1957), 355.

16. E. A. M. Coleman, The Dramatic Use of Shakespeare's Bawdy (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 18.

17. A. R. Humphreys (ed.), Much Ado about Nothing (London: Methuen [Arden], 1981), p. 5.

18. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 115.

19. H. H. Furness (ed.), Much Ado about Nothing (London: Lippincott, 1899), p. 2 and p. 58.

20. Humphreys, Much Ado, p. 77. The figure of “Inogene” the wife of Brutus appears in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto X, the book in which a version of the story of Much Ado about Nothing appears. See Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), p. 261.

21. See The Faerie Queene, Book IV, Canto X:

    And next to her sate sober Modestie,
    Holding her hand vpon her gentle hart;
    And her against sate comely Curtesie,
    That vnto euery person knew her part;
    And her before was seated ouerthwart
    Soft Silence, and submisse Obedience,
    Both linckt together neuer to dispart,
    Both gifts of God not gotten but from thence,
    Both girlonds of his Saints against their foes offence.

    (Ibid. p. 505)

22. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen [“New Accents”], 1980), p. 42.

23. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 73.

24. See J. R. Mulryne, Much Ado about Nothing, Studies in English Literature 16 (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), pp. 38ff. See also, Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, pp. 155ff.

25. Henze, “Deception”, 201.

26. The evidence for this is located usually in Beatrice's reply to Don Pedro's allegation that she has “lost the heart of Signior Benedick”:

    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.260-4)

    (Cf. also Christopher Marlowe's poem, Hero and Lender, in The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker-Brooke (reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 500: “Heroes lookes yeelded, but her words made warre, / Women are woon when they begin to iarre” (lines 331-2).

27. Much Ado about Nothing, p. 52.

28. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 211.

29. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 49.

30. Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), p. 132.

31. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), p. 30.

32. Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare, (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 178.

33. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), pp. 139-40. Dramatically speaking, he occupies a place which is not unlike that which Jonathan Dollimore ascribes to Marlowe's figure of Faustus who is the stimulus for a subversive questioning which is both foreclosed and provoked, although, of course, unlike Faustus, he is never allowed to occupy the central position in the play. See Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: religion, ideology and power in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), p. 110.

34. Political Unconscious, p. 35.

35. The Works of Christopher Marlowe, p. 498.

36. See Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and The Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975). See also Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference”, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 168ff.

37. The Second Tome of Homilies (London, 1595), sig.Gg5r.

38. Ibid., sig. Gg5v.

39. Henry Smith, The Sermons of Master H. Smith (London, 1592), p. 2.

40. Ibid., p. 4.

41. Ibid., p. 12.

42. Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Householde Government (London, 1598), p. 9.

43. Homilies, sig. L5r.

44. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 186; see especially his account of the destruction of The Bower of Blisse in The Faerie Queene, Book II, pp. 183ff.

45. Francis Bacon, Essays (reprinted London: Dent [Everyman], 1962), p. 80.

46. Ibid., p. 25.

47. Timothy Bright, A Treatise on Melancholy (London, 1586), p. 81.

48. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the Age of Reason (third impression, London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 76-7.

49. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (reprinted London: Methuen, 1983), p. 59.

50. Ibid., p. 154.

51. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 106. See also pp. 276-7 on the question of infanticide, though Stone makes no mention of female infanticide.

52. William Blackstone, Commentaries on The Laws of England, 4 vols. (Dublin, 1769), vol. 1, p. 459.

53. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 433ff.

54. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 107.

55. See Louis Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 32, 1 (Spring, 1981), 28-54; see especially his comments on Shakespeare's exploration of the conditions “in a rigorously hierarchical and patriarchal society, a society in which full social identity tends to be limited to the propertied adult males who are the heads of households” (p. 35). My own conclusions depart radically from Montrose on the question of “subjectivity”, and I cannot accept his conclusions concerning Shakespeare's plays as “reflections” of conflict (p. 54).

56. Homilies, sig. C8r.

57. Ibid., sig. D3r.

58. Cf. Montrose, “The Place of a Brother”, p. 49 on the issue of “Charivari”: “traditionally the form of ridicule to which cuckolds and others who offended the community's moral standards were subjected”.

59. Macherey, Literary Production, p. 131.

60. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (London: Dent [Everyman], 1966), p. 315.

61. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: essays on subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 76.

62. G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558 (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 255.