[In the following essay, Traci discusses the motif of meddling in the affairs of others in Much Ado about Nothing, particularly with respect to the romantic relationship between Beatrice and Benedick.]

However critics have viewed Much Ado About Nothing,¹ whether as happy comedy² or Shakespeare's most cynical study in the genre³, they have agreed that its title, despite its seeming throwaway quality, carries significance. Here, however, agreement ends. Dorothy Hockey sees a central pun in the Elizabethan pronunciation of “nothing” as “nothing”, which underscores, she points out, the noting and misnoting in the play.⁴ The pun is not without significance to such studies as those of Berry, Evans, and Lewalski, which focus in different ways on different levels of “knowing.”⁵ The differences among Claudio's eyes, even when they negotiate for themselves, the Friar's patient and compassionate observation, and Dogberry's Watch's foolish but saving discoveries are as obvious as significant.

The difference among the three are not only in the way in which they see and come to know, but also in the ways in which they react or let be. The title, I suggest, also implies that too much doing or meddling in the affairs of others—especially lovers—is less helpful to a healthy resolution than doing nothing more than allowing the natural course of events to take place.

Meddling is underscored in the text: While Claudio specifically asks Benedick if he has “noted” Hero, the Prince offers his assistance even before he is asked (I. i. 274-279). Before Don John asks Conrade and Borachio if they will assist him to cross his brother, the Prince (I. iii. 59-60), Conrade has asked him if he can make any use of his discontent (1. 34) and Borachio promptly provides him with the opportunity (11. 51ff.). Both the Friar and Dogberry and his men (whose values of course better reflect those of the play) bring positive results more through observation than meddlesome action. The Friar's long and highlighted speech (IV. i. 153-168) is in stark contrast to Leonato's hasty “Confirmed, confirmed!” (1. 148). He asks simply that he be heard a little (1. 153). Doesn't the line imply staging in which he passively, patiently watches all that has preceded? He has “only been silent so long” and only now “given way to this course of action” by “noting of the lady.” He offers as authority the fact that those gathered—loved ones of the bride and groom I should add—trust his reading, observation, experience, age, reverence, calling, and divinity (11. 163-166). That the Friar prefaces each of these appeals to authority with negatives (“trust not,” “nor,” etc.) underscores, I suggest, that he advocates pause, patience, and restraint, rather than action. The only advice he offers is to “pause awhile” (1. 198) to “let her awhile be secretly kept in, / And publish it that she is dead indeed” (11. 201-202). The Friar offers no specific course of action other than to let nature take its course so that Claudio's grief at Hero's “death” will naturally “restore” his love.

If the Friar's “counsel” lacks the tone of meddlesome ado, however, Shakespeare's addition to his source in the characters of Dogberry and his Watch underlines even more this course of benign neglect. The recent vogue for Keystone Kops with their attendant frenzy does not erase the passivity advocated in their lines. Dogberry, the chief, if shallow, fool who discovers what the wisdom of others could not, “charge[s]” (III. iii. 22) his Watch repeatedly to avoid rather than to confront a villain: “take no note of him, but let him go” (1. 26). If Dogberry's men are “to meddle,” it is with “none but the Prince's subjects” (11. 31-32). They are, moreover, to “make no noise in the streets.” His men can hardly be seen to espouse a code that advocates greater activity, for they would “rather sleep than talk.” They are, however, admonished against complete inactivity, for they are told to “have a care that your bills be not stolen” and to “bid those that are drunk get them to bed.”

Dogberry's charge continues to advocate non-intervention. While they may lay hands on a thief, for example, they must remember that “they that touch pitch will be defiled,” and even more significantly, with “such kind of men, the less you meddle with them, why, the more is for your honesty” (11. 48-50). “The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, he observes, “is to let him show himself what he is, and steal out of your company” (l. 53ff.). Surely the admirability of such conduct by these “shallow fools” is underscored when the “wise” old Leonato's impatience before the wedding will not allow him to pause to listen to the Watch that has already captured the villains. “I must leave you,” he says, since he is “in great haste.” His offering wine to the Watch as he exits is one of his most commendable, if perfunctory, gestures in the play.

After his charge about the thieves, Dogberry, who has “been always called a merciful man,” and “would not hang a man by [his] will, much more a man who hath any honest in him,” suggests even less ado than Verges' charge that “if you hear a child cry in the night, you must call to the nurse and bid her still it!” When asked, “If the nurse be asleep and will not hear us?”, he adds simply, “Why then, depart in peace and let the child wake her with crying: for the ewe that will not hear her lamb when it baes will never answer a calf when he bleats.” Leonato could well profit from such advice. And the advice, works, after all, for Conrade and Borachio are revealed more through their own confessions than through either arrest or examination.

While Shakespeare's other most notable additions to his source, Beatrice and Benedick, might seem to argue for the positive results of meddlesome matchmaking, the case, I suggest, is otherwise. Beatrice, after all, reminds us that Benedick “lent” his heart to her once before, when she gave him use of hers (II. i. 249-250). The cementing of their union by the characteristically meddlesome Prince, who has offered his services to Claudio and his hand to Beatrice with a superficiality outdone only by his despicable behavior in the church, would not be convincing. He decides to bring Beatrice and Benedick together only in order that “the time shall not go dully by us” “in the interim between Claudio's betrothal and his marriage” (11. 323-324). The tenuousness of the union of the warring lovers as joined by the jovial medlers is emphasized both when Beatrice tests Benedick's love by ordering him to “Kill Claudio” (high meddling indeed!) and at the play's conclusion.

Such a focus on non-interferring heightens the dramatic sympathy of Benedick. While Dogberry's instinct and the Friar's trust have received ample critical attention, Benedick's virtues have not. It may very well be overreading to see Benedick's non-meddling in his “five wits … halting off” (I. i. 57), in his talking but nobody marking him (11. 103-104), his always ending “with a jade's trick” (1. 129), and bearing the disguised Beatrice's disdain when even “an oak but with one green leaf on it would have answered her” (II. i. 216). But the evidence does accumulate. He responds to her verbal sallies not with retaliation but by begging the Prince to send him on some errand “to the world's end” (11. 236-237), and instinctively responds to Beatrice's “Kill Claudio” with “Not for the wide world!” When Beatrice complains, “You kill me to deny it,” Benedick's “Tarry, sweet Beatrice” mirrors the patience that provides comic resolutions. Surely killing Claudio could not do that. Even when Benedick does agree to be Beatrice and Hero's champion by challenging his friend Claudio, he merely “discontinues” the Prince's company, leaves Claudio to his gossip-like humor (he certainly isn't in mourning yet for his lost bride), and even wishes Claudio peace until they meet again (V. i. 179ff.). Coming so soon after Leonato's aggressive “challenge to the trail of a man” (1. 66), the contrast is revealing.

But then the whole Beatrice and Benedick matchmaking is framed from beginning to end with indications that the lovers must join themselves. Without too much ado, the play suggests, the natural course of things would have led to their eventual marriage. Hero knows the Signoir Mountanto (I. i. 27) that Beatrice asks after is Benedick since he's all her cousin ever thinks about. Even the meddlesome Prince and Claudio know of their love or they wouldn't have set about to bring them together. The audience realizes that the labor is not Herculean, but comically inevitable.

Even as the Prince, Claudio, and Leonato prepare their meddlesome plot to join the witty lovers (with Benedick already in the arbor), the men enter “with Music” (s.d. ff. II. iii. 133). The lyrics of their song are not without significance to my focus:

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

the song begins. The refrain of “Then sigh not so, / But let them go” that echoes through the song merely repeats the advice that we have noted throughout the play as a whole:

          Then sigh not so,
          But let them go,
          And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
          Into Hey nonny, nonny.
Sigh no more ditties, sing no moe,
          Of dumps so dull and heavy!
The fraud of men was ever so,
          Since summer first was leavy.
                    Then sigh not so, & c.

The strongest evidence, however, that the play points to the lovers themselves (or Providence) rather than the unsympathetic meddlers bringing about the union of Beatrice and Benedick is the ending. Even after Benedick has proven that he is willing to challenge Claudio to the death, Beatrice, who has up to now “against her will” been sent not only to urge him to dinner (II. iii. 226-227), but also to love him, once more challenges his love. And he, hers. Significantly, they have “own hands against [their] hearts” (V. iv. 91-92) to provide the “miracle” that joins them. To note the importance of this miracle at such a climactic point in the text (which could even now undo all that has been joined) is not, like Benedick, to see “a double meaning” where there is none (II. iii. 237), but rather to notice a motif the play emphasizes. That the miracle is here provided by the lovers themselves is as meaningful as “the miracle that Heaven provides” with Ragozine's death in Measure for Measure.

But if Benedick and Beatrice are, despite their surface contentiousness, willing to “follow the leaders” “in every good thing,” they (unlike Claudio, the Prince, Leonato, and Antonio) “leave them at the next turning,” “if they lead to any ill” (II. i. 135-138). Even Don John seems to follow in his meddling in the play. Don John merely mentions the marriage that will take place; Borachio offers the fact that he “can cross it” (II. ii. 3). While Don John asks how he can cross it, he must be prompted by Borachio that he “spare not to tell [his brother] that he hath wronged his honor in marrying the renowed Claudio (whose estimation do you mightily hold up) to a contaminated stale, such a one as Hero” (11. 19-22). Again Don John needs to be prompted. When he asks, “What proof shall I make of that?” Borachio replies, “Proof enough to misuse the Prince, to vex Claudio, to undo Hero, and kill Leonato” (11. 24-25). The order proves prophetic enough in the climactic order he reveals. It also makes clear the degree of wasteful suffering his meddling causes others in order to “misuse” the Prince.

Don John, though “a plain-dealing villain” (I. iii. 28), is thus rare among Shakespeare's villains in that another proposes his “miching mallecho” rather than his initiating it. He, like Antonio and Leonato, those “two old men without teeth” (V. i. 116), cannot “bite” (I. iii. 30-31). If Antonio's line that titles this paper is delivered to Leonato with comic impotence as he challenges Claudio and the Prince (“Come, 'tis no matter. / Do not meddle”), the line is not without significance to the play as a whole. So too is it important that Don John does not initiate the villainy. He is a villain appropriate for a comedy; dangerous enough to devise “brave punishments” for and yet not so powerful that he can defeat the festive and amorous victories at the play's end. As the pipers strike up and the dance begins, we realize that it is appropriate that Benedick, rather than the Prince or Leonato or Claudio, advise us that we “think not on him till to-morrow.” Without much more ado, the dance begins.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, edited Josephine Waters Bennett (1958, rpt. Baltimore, Maryland: Penquin Books, Inc., 1962), V. i. 100-101. All subsequent quotations from Much Ado in this paper are from this edition and are included in the body of the text.

2. John Dover Wilson, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (London: Faber and Faber, 1962) is, of course, but one of those who have traditionally dubbed Much Ado one of the happy or “joyous” comedies.

3. M. M. Mahood in her introduction to volume 32, “The Middle Comedies,” of Shakespeare Survey, 1979, admirably surveys “a generation of criticism,” as she entitles her work. For those who see the harsher view of Much Ado, she points to A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns, and those who focus on the frailties of Claudio, pp. 1-13.

4. Shakespeare Quarterly, 8 (1957), 353-358.

5. Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972); Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies, 1960, rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); B. K. Lewalski, “Love, Appearance, and Reality: Much Ado About Something,” Studies in English Literature (1968), 235-251.