SOURCE: Humphreys, A. R., ed. Introduction to The Arden Shakespeare: Much Ado about Nothing, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-84. London: Methuen, 1981.

[In the following excerpt, Humphreys surveys the principal literary sources for Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing.]

(I) CLAUDIO AND HERO

GENERAL SURVEY

Stories of the lover deceived by a rival or enemy into believing his beloved false are widespread and of great antiquity. An analogue of the Claudio-Hero plot has been traced back to a fifth-century Greek romance by Chariton, Chaereas and Kallirrhoe. Seventeen Renaissance versions, narrative or dramatic, are recorded before Shakespeare's, in Spanish, Italian, French, German, and English. They include the fifteenth-century Spanish Tirant lo Blanch (Tirant the White) by Juan Martorell, which probably lies behind Ariosto's version in the fifth canto of Orlando Furioso (1516).¹ Ariosto's lovers are named Ariodante and Genevra. His story, first translated into English and much elaborated in Peter Beverley's poem, The Historie of Ariodanto and Ieneura (c. 1566),² was further translated by Sir John Harington as Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591). From Ariosto, Spenser derived his own very different version, which ends in disaster instead of the lovers' reunion; it tells how Squire Phedon, deceived by his supposed friend Philemon into thinking his adored Claribell disloyal, falls into the intemperance of killing her (The Faerie Queene, 1590, II.4.xvi-xxxviii.)

Meanwhile Matteo Bandello, the Italian ecclesiastic, diplomat, and man of letters, treated the subject in his own way in the twenty-second story of La Prima Parte de le Novelle (1554), naming his lovers Sir Timbreo and Fenicia. A French translation, morally and rhetorically elaborated, appeared as the eighteenth tale of the third volume of François de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques (1569).

Versions in English other than those mentioned comprise, possibly, a ‘matter of Panecia’ (i.e. Fenicia?) play performed by the Earl of Leicester's Men at Court on New Year's Day 1575 but no longer extant,³ and, more evidently, an Ariodante and Genevra (also not extant), done likewise at Court, on 12 February 1583, by Merchant Taylors' schoolboys under their humanist headmaster Richard Mulcaster.⁴ Other analogues or sources comprise George Whetstone's story of Rinaldo and Giletta, incorporating elements of Ariosto and Bandello in The Rocke of Regard (1576: see Appendix I.ii), and two plays, one—Victoria—in Latin (c. 1580-3) by Abraham Fraunce, the other—Fedele and Fortunio, The Two Italian Gentlemen—in English (1585) by one M. A. (Anthony Munday?).⁵ Both are versions of a highly reputed comedy, Il Fedele, by Luigi Pasaquaglio (1579). In this, the would-be seducer Fedele, unable to win his desired Vittoria (who, though married, is enamoured of his rival, Fortunio), traduces her to her husband Cornelio and arranges that Cornelio shall see a servant (in love with her maid, like Borachio with Margaret in Much Ado) enter the house and court a supposed Vittoria. Cornelio, gulled, plans to poison his wife, but by a trick she mollifies Fedele and escapes her fate. With many variations as to its intrigues the story was widely popular, varying in tone from farce or Plautine comedy to tragedy.

ARIOSTO: ‘ORLANDO FURIOSO’, CANTO V (1516)

Ariosto, translated by Harington in 1591, tells how the brave Renaldo, ‘Of noble chivalrie the verie flowre’ (V. 82), arrives in Scotland and learns that the Scottish princess Genevra must die accused of unchastity unless a champion comes forward to defend her. Resolving to do so he makes for the court at St Andrews and on the way saves a woman from murderous assailants. She is Genevra's maid Dalinda and she tells him that the princess is innocent.

Dalinda has been in love with Polynesso, Duke of Albany, and he has often met her secretly in Genevra's room, ascending by a rope ladder; Polynesso, nevertheless, has aspired to marry Genevra herself. But she loved the noble Ariodante, and was equally loved. Polynesso's desire for Genevra turning to hatred, he plotted to destroy the lovers' hopes. Though posing as Ariodante's friend, he arranged that Dalinda (who had ‘no reason, nor no wit, / His shamefull drift (tho' open) to perceaue’; V. 26) should dress herself as her mistress and admit him by night; he then placed Ariodante and the latter's brother Lurcanio where they could see him enter Genevra's window. The deception succeeded. Horrified, Ariodante disappeared, intending to drown himself, though in fact (unknown to anyone) having jumped from a cliff he thought better of it, swam ashore, and remained incognito. Lurcanio accused Genevra of unchastity, and she has been doomed to death.

To remove the unwitting accomplice Dalinda, Polynesso then planned the murder from which Renaldo has saved her. The two travellers reach St Andrews and Renaldo prepares to fight for justice. He finds a strange knight already engaging the deluded but honourable accuser Lurcanio, and he declares that neither contender should lose his life, Genevra's unknown champion because he fights for the right, Lurcanio because he is the victim of deceit. The combat ceases. Renaldo then accuses Polynesso and in the ensuing fight he mortally wounds him. Polynesso dies confessing his guilt; the strange knight reveals himself as Ariodante and is joyfully reunited with Genevra (to protect whom, though still thinking her guilty, he has even opposed his brother); and Dalinda betakes herself to a nunnery.

The similarities to Shakespeare's plot (though they show considerable variation) amount to Polynesso's mortal jealousy (for reasons different from Don John's in the play); his love affair with the maid and the ladder ascent to the disguised girl impersonating her mistress (though the play transfers these operations to the subordinate Borachio); the maid's ignorance of her action's bearing; the court's belief (in the play only temporary) in the heroine's guilt; the defending champion's challenge to the accuser; and the happy outcome after peril.

The most obvious of the differences from Shakespeare's plot are Ariosto's courtly-romance level; his Scottish location and quite different personal names; his sense of tragic danger and murderous violence (far outgoing anything in the play); his villain's motives (foiled jealousy in love) and initiatives in the deception (instead of through an agent's instigation); his deceived lover's reported suicide and secret reappearance; his accusation urged not by the lover (as a kind of vengeance) but by the lover's brother (as an act of justice); his wholly different handling of Genevra's plight (as compared with Hero's) and of the circumstances of the challenge (in the poem the deluded compassionate Ariodante opposing his brother; in the play the deluded uncompassionate Claudio opposing the erstwhile friend Benedick) and the restoration of love; and the maid retiring to a nunnery (in the play, fully restored in social esteem). Shakespeare's particulars belong to a markedly different conception from Ariosto's.

BANDELLO: ‘LA PRIMA PARTE DE LE NOVELLE’, NOVELLA 22 (1554)

Bandello's version is much racier, and far nearer to Shakespeare's. It tells how the knightly Sir Timbreo di Cardona, one of King Piero of Aragon's courtiers, and a valiant soldier while the King is capturing Sicily, falls in love during the victory celebrations in Messina with Fenicia, daughter of Messer Lionato de' Lionati, ‘a poor gentleman and not his equal’.⁶ Fenicia behaves so modestly that Sir Timbreo concludes that he can win her only by marriage (not at all his original plan). Her birth, he reflects, is lower than his but she is of good lineage, and through a friendly nobleman he gains her father's consent. The lovers rejoice and all Messina likewise, Lionato being highly regarded.

A rival, however, Sir Girondo Olerio Valenziano, has also fallen in love with Fenicia. Though basically honourable, and a friend of Sir Timbreo's, he resolves to break the betrothal, and he employs an agent, ‘more pleased with evil than with good’ (II.115), to tell Sir Timbreo that if he will hide in the garden he shall see Fenicia that very night playing him false. Suffering ‘bitter (and as it seemed to him just) anger’ (II.115), and ‘blinded with the veil of jealousy’ (II.116), Sir Timbreo does so, unaccompanied. The bedroom, in a remote part of the house, is entered by Sir Girondo's servant dressed as a gentleman. Sir Timbreo's love turns to ‘cruel hate’ (II.117), but bound by a vow of silence he leaves the scene without intervening.

Through the nobleman who arranged the betrothal he informs Lionato that Fenicia's misconduct has ended the engagement. Her whole family is shocked; Lionato, attributing the charge to Sir Timbreo's scorn at their reduced circumstances, vows his belief in her innocence and his trust that God will vindicate her. Fenicia herself, swooning, then recovering for a while, delivers a long and touching defence and prays that God will enlighten Sir Timbreo. She then lies apparently dead, but while awaiting burial she revives and her family take this as a sign that truth shall prevail. She is secretly sent to the country house of Lionato's brother and renamed Lucilla. The whole city grieves, obsequies are performed, and a sonnet is carved on her ‘tomb’.

Sir Timbreo now begins to waver. He reflects that the bedroom in question is too remote to be hers, and that the intruder could hardly have been visiting her. More remarkably, Sir Girondo, struck with remorse at Fenicia's fate, offers Sir Timbreo his dagger before her tomb, confesses what his jealousy had driven him to, and begs for death.

Vengeance on him will not restore Fenicia, however, and Sir Timbreo nobly declines it. Valuing friendship before love he announces that had he known of Sir Girondo's passion he would have yielded Fenicia to him, or, he suggests, had they discussed the matter, Sir Girondo might have done likewise. They will, at any rate, publicly vindicate her, and this they do. Lionato exacts a promise that Sir Timbreo will take no other bride than one chosen for him.

Time passes. Fenicia completes her seventeenth year and blooms so beautifully as to be unrecognizable as her former self. She has, moreover, a younger sister Belfiore, almost as lovely. Lionato tells Sir Timbreo that he has a bride for him, and a gay company (including Sir Girondo) makes for the country house, attends Mass, and meets Fenicia-Lucilla and Belfiore. Though Sir Timbreo is reminded of Fenicia, in her enhanced beauty he does not recognize her. They are married, and at the wedding banquet he poignantly expresses his grief for the ‘dead’ bride, his joy in the living one, and his adoration of both; whereupon Lionato announces that the two are one. Joyful reunion ensues, Girondo begs for and receives forgiveness and the hand of Belfiore, and King Piero receives the party on its return to Messina with festivities, bestowing dowries on the brides and wealth and honour on Lionato.

This story is much nearer Shakespeare's than is Ariosto's. From it he derives the festive Messina setting, the names of Pedro and Leonato, Claudio's recent war service (different though the war's cause and course), the courtship conducted through a noble intermediary, the deceiver's disguised agent, the lover's seemingly justified public rejection of the supposedly false bride, the religious assurance buoying up the heroine's friends, her swoon, revival, self-defence, and presumed death, the obsequies and epitaph, Claudio's penitence and submission, Leonato's offering of the ‘substitute’ bride under his brother's auspices, the acceptance and marriage of the veiled and unknown lady, the revelation, and the concluding festivities under princely patronage.

The differences from Shakespeare's plot are, nevertheless, notable enough to testify to Shakespeare's selective and modifying intelligence. First, Bandello's King Piero has no part in the plot save as the victor during whose sojourn in Messina the wooing takes place, with no intervention from him, and as the patron of the eventual marriage. Shakespeare, instead, has Don Pedro presiding throughout and negotiating the betrothal. The story gains a more courtly air. Then, Bandello gives Fenicia a mother, whom Shakespeare discards, though including ‘Innogen’ as Leonato's wife in the entry directions for I.i and II.i. Since in Bandello the mother figures almost solely when the ‘dead’ girl is being prepared for burial, and Shakespeare makes no use of this scene, her part doubtless just naturally lapsed. Then again, Sir Timbreo is a sensual youth prepared to seduce Fenicia and turning to marriage only when seduction proves impossible: Claudio, quite on the contrary, rejects Leonato's surmise that he may have ‘made defeat of [Hero's] virginity’ and vows, convincingly, that he has shown nothing but ‘Bashful sincerity and comely love’ (IV.i.47, 54). Throughout he is a shy wooer, whose willingness to have Don Pedro negotiate for him seems due as much to social diffidence (so different from his military courage) as to the expected diplomacies of well-bred courtship.

Then again, jealous though Sir Timbreo is on thinking himself deceived, he shows no sign of the jumpiness that the callow Claudio evinces when Don John, almost as his first action, tricks him into thinking that Don Pedro has wooed for himself. True, Claudio is not too blameworthy in this, for Leonato's circle—Leonato, Antonio, even Beatrice and Benedick—all think the same; this Act II minor gulling portends the Act III major one, where Claudio's credulity is again endorsed by the similar error of the experienced Don Pedro. Wanting to give plausibility to the later crisis, Shakespeare differs from Bandello in making Claudio's temperamental instability a strand in the web of deceptions and misunderstandings integral to the play's fabric.

The motives for deception, next, are much changed from Bandello's. Rivalry over Hero, though credible were the events real, would in the world of the play be unfitting to so gentle and sheltered a heroine, so no element of rival love enters: Hero is to be virginal even to the extent of having no other wooer. From the rumbles of the concluded war Shakespeare picks up a different motive for Don John's envy—military jealousy and rancour—and saves Hero from any taint of competition; Don John's animus is against the ‘young start-up’ whose glory it is to have overthrown him (I.iii.62-3) and against the princely brother who has forgiven his rebellion.

The deceiver, moreover, is not Bandello's brave (though temporarily erring) knight who has loyally fought in King Piero's war but a rebel against his lord and brother; he has the wicked nature of Ariosto's Polynesso embodied in the saturnine, melancholic, minor Machiavel readily recognizable as the source of malice, and dramatically popular on the Elizabethan stage. He is, moreover, a bastard, in conventional corroboration of this evil humour, though on the stage the fact, set down in an entry direction (I.i.87), is not mentioned until Benedick reveals it after the church scandal (IV.i.188).⁷ For Bandello's ‘friend’, treacherous only through love rivalry, Shakespeare substitutes a melodramatic rebel/foxy schemer, polarizes the two sides, sharpens the dramatic effect, and avoids the love-versus-friendship situation which had worked so dubiously in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and which in Bandello produces a Sir Timbreo and Sir Girondo each ready to hand over Fenicia regardless of her choice. Shakespeare rejects also the unlikely situation in Bandello when Sir Girondo, penitent after his appalling conduct, is again received into Lionato's family and shares in the wedding celebrations.

Among other main differences from Bandello are the equalizing of rank between Claudio and Hero, whose father is Governor of Messina, gracious and generous host of Don Pedro, not merely the head of a reduced though ancient family. This results in social cordiality all round among friends and eliminates any intrusive considerations of status. Of more importance are the different ways in which the accusation and its sequel are managed. In Bandello, Sir Timbreo alone sees the ladder trick. He then engages a friend to break off the betrothal before ever the wedding ceremony is reached. He wholly fails to convince Fenicia's family that she is guilty, and soon he begins to suspect his own judgement. Claudio on the other hand has fellow witnesses, in one of whom he has every confidence, and what they think they see is corroborated by Borachio. Then, though earlier he has had Don Pedro woo for him, Claudio himself takes up in church the role of accuser and performs it with highly dramatic effect; the impact is much stronger than with Bandello's breach negotiated by proxy, effected in Leonato's own household. So clear does the evidence seem, and so authoritative are the witnesses, that Leonato is convinced, and even Benedick is ‘attir'd in wonder’ (IV.i.144) until Beatrice makes his mind up for him. And Claudio, far from coming to suspect his own judgement, has to behave with egregious tactlessness, to be challenged by Benedick (analogously to the situation in Ariosto, though this one is differently handled), and have his error dispelled by Dogberry.

Neither Bandello nor Shakespeare intends the tragic shock to be unbearable; both provide assurance of relief. But this happens in quite different ways. Bandello has Lionato's family confident that God will reveal the truth; Shakespeare has Dogberry's Watch discover it beforehand, and the Friar give spiritual comfort in church. The passions of Claudio and Leonato stretch the nerves in one direction: knowledge that enlightenment will soon dawn relieves them in the other (though Benedick's challenge to Claudio, instigated by the marvellously welcome indignation of Beatrice, maintains the potential of tension). Finally, Dogberry's bumblings produce an enormously enjoyable sense of relaxation.

As for Claudio's conduct, from accusation to clarification, it is far more disturbing than Sir Timbreo's. Whatever psychological reasons may be offered (callowness, shattered idealism, hyperemotional self-justification, the choking intemperateness to which adolescents are liable, and so on), it is difficult to forgive such behaviour. Yet, as The Merchant of Venice had recently shown, Shakespeare was fascinated even in comedy by dramatic intensification whenever tragic potential is present. This kind of comedy is a sunny day over the afternoon of which looms the blackness of storm, to yield to the glow of evening. (Not long before, the end of Love's Labour's Lost had shadowed the sunshine with death delaying the fulfilment of love.)

So—and here Shakespeare differs dramatically from Bandello—the church scene explodes with power. Making the bridegroom central in the denunciation of the bride, springing this theatrical coup amidst the happy expectancies and solemnities of the church scene, Shakespeare achieves a scene so startling that the inmost natures of the participants disclose themselves in a way alien to mere comedy.

As for the dénouement, in the sources either the maid, if there is one, or the repentant deceiver discloses the truth. In Shakespeare, things are quite different. Margaret (one feels if one finds time to reflect, but none is allowed) ought to do so but does not, and Don John certainly will not. So Dogberry steps in, an incomparable deus ex machina, and turns grief and anger into irresistible mirth.

THE INTERLINKING

The main ingredients Shakespeare finds in Ariosto, then, are the following: the intriguer of unredeemed wickedness; the lady's maid involved in an affair with the villain (or his agent), in the ladder trick, and in the impersonation of her mistress, while ignorant of the guile which prompts this; the joint witness, by the lover and his supporter, of the furtive entry; the shared belief in the heroine's guilt; the challenge by a defender; and the villain's punishment.

In Bandello he finds the setting in Messina and its elegant society; names for the visiting prince and his host; the young lover's prowess in his prince's war; the courtship conducted through a noble intermediary; stress on social honour blotted by supposed feminine frailty; the intriguer's scheming subordinate who effects the night entry; the heroine's swoon, revival, self-defence, apparent death, concealment, unrecognized reappearance, and finally revealed identity; the religious context promising the proper outcome; and the final festivities reestablishing the initial gaiety.

Interweaving Bandello's materials with Ariosto's, Shakespeare shows a mind ranging over elements loosely similar but so markedly variant in tone and incidents that only the shrewdest of judgements could co-ordinate them into a theme of such tragicomic force. Of course, his treatment shows one fundamental difference from both Ariosto's and Bandello's: those, though ending with love satisfied, are not comedies. In Much Ado, Beatrice, Benedick, and Dogberry affect the tenor of the serious plot throughout, enriching and brightening it in its happy phases, qualifying its severity in its grave ones, and doing this not merely by concurrent presence but by the most integral of plotrelationships. Much Ado is indeed superbly devised.

BELLEFOREST: ‘LE TROISIèME TOME DES HISTOIRES TRAGIQUES EXTRAITES DES OEUVRES ITALIENNES DE BANDEL’, HISTOIRE XVIII (1569)

Belleforest's narrative closely follows Bandello's, particularly in its later stages, from the crisis of the broken engagement to the end. The main difference lies in much sentimental and moralizing embellishment; Belleforest is about half as long again as Bandello, a difference for which the embellishment largely accounts. To relate his plot would be virtually to recite Bandello again.

On which version Shakespeare drew can hardly be determined with complete certainty, since the differences between them, in so far as they belong to the story and not to the sentimentalizings of Belleforest, are insignificant; none, anyway, has any bearing on Shakespeare's treatment. The likelihood, though, is in favour of Bandello. Momentarily, Belleforest's ‘le Roy Pierre d'Aragon’ may look closer than Bandello's ‘il re Piero di Ragona’, but this detail is too slight to support any deduction.

What seems more significant is that, while in neither version does King Piero/Pierre figure as more than detachedly present at start and finish (at the start as the victor whose entourage is enjoying life in Messina, at the finish as benefactor of Lionato's family), Belleforest's prince enters the story much less favourably than Bandello's, as ‘ce roy inhumain Pierre d'Aragon’. This is because Belleforest's French patriotism is outraged by the slaughter suffered by the French at the Sicilian vespers of 1283, which occasioned the King's arrival with his army to take the island over. If this had been how Pierre was brought to Shakespeare's attention, the transformation into the gaily participating, courteous, and kind Don Pedro of the play would be most unexpected. It is true that in Bandello also King Piero occupies Sicily (being induced to do so by the Pope), and then defeats an invasion by the King of Naples with great difficulty and much slaughter on both sides. But nothing is said to his disadvantage, and much is made of the joyful victory celebrations, so he forms a far likelier original for Shakespeare to transform into the noble friend who furthers the young hero's suit.

The odds, then, seem decidedly to favour Bandello as the actual source. For all practical purposes, in any case, he must be so considered, since Belleforest—if against likelihood his was the version Shakespeare had before him—merely transmits, as far as all material points go, what his precursor furnished him with.

(II) BEATRICE AND BENEDICK

Beatrice and Benedick themselves, though not referable to precise sources, owe much to two traditions. These are those of the scorner of love, rejecting suitors, and of the witty courtiers in many Renaissance stories exchanging debate or badinage.

THE SCORNER OF LOVE

This tradition is familiar in romance and popular narrative. The scorner, the love-heretic, often finds his or her hauteur a prelude to conversion and surrender. In Troilus and Criseyde, having derided Cupid as ‘lord of thise fooles alle’, Troilus is foreseeably subjected to the anguish and ardour of desire. Shakespeare's own Valentine opens The Two Gentlemen of Verona by teasing the amorous Proteus on being ‘yoked’ in a state ‘where scorn is bought with groans, / Coy looks with heart-sore sighs’ (I.i.29-30), only himself soon to be mocked by Speed as being ‘metamorphis'd with a mistress’, Silvia (II.i.16-28). The King and lords of Love's Labour's Lost suffer similarly for their hubris, and admit defeat. An instance very recent at the time when Shakespeare was working on Much Ado is that in Spenser's story of the haughty Mirabella, the widely adored but scornful beauty who vows that, born free, she will ever remain so.⁸ ‘With the onely twinckle of her eye’ (stanza 31) she torments her admirers until Cupid enquires why his servants suffer so, and then condemns her to wander the world until she has saved as many loves as she destroyed. Since in two years she manages to redeem two only as against the scores she has slain, the sentence looks interminable. Her steed is led by the tyrannous Disdain cruelly abusing her, and followed by Scorn with a whip (Beatrice, we may recall, is ‘Lady Disdain’, in whose eyes ‘Disdain and scorn ride sparkling’).

A nearer suggestion of Beatrice, however, occurs in Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (1528): Shakespeare may well have known it:

I have also seene a most fervent love spring in the heart of a woman, towarde one that seemed at the first not to beare him the least affection in the world [This appears to mean ‘towards one for whom she seemed not to bear the least affection’; Ed.], onely for that she heard say, that the opinion of many was, that they loved together.⁹

Nothing could better foreshadow Beatrice's self-discovery.

Shakespeare had himself treated the related though different figures of Katherina the beautiful termagant of The Taming of the Shrew, the witty ladies of Love's Labour's Lost routing the lords who think themselves superior to love, and Portia in The Merchant of Venice deriding her flock of suitors as gaily as Beatrice could do. Shortly, in As You Like It, Rosalind would mock affected lovers. All these in due course yield, like Beatrice herself, but before they do they all (save for Katherina) deploy the shrewd wisdom and witty malice which are their invincible weapons against male pretension.

PATTERNS OF COURTESY AND WIT

What was needed for wit comedy was a literary genre of intellectual equality between the sexes in a sophisticated spirit of challenge and debate; this is the basic theme of George Meredith's classic essay The Idea of Comedy.

The traditions of courtesy literature which came to provide this did not begin with the Italian Renaissance,¹⁰ but for the present purpose the seminal inspiration was that of Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, the outstanding example of Renaissance social doctrine.¹¹ Castiglione (1478-1529) entered the service of the Duke of Urbino in 1504 and proved accomplished in war and the humanities. He recorded the tone of his circle in a work which Dr Johnson was to recommend to Boswell on 2 October 1773, while they were in Skye, as ‘the best book that ever was written on good breeding’.¹² It celebrates the ducal circle in ‘the lytle Citye of Urbin’, a principal feature of which is the distinction of the women. Among them Lady Emilia Pia, ‘endowed with so lovely a wytt and judgment as you shall knowe, seemed the maistresse and ringe leader of all the companye’. The spirit of the place is one of intelligent happiness—‘pleasaunte communication and merye conceytes, and in every man's countenaunce … a lovynge jocoundness’.¹³ The men are brave, honourable, and athletic, the women charming, lively, and intelligent:

For right as it is seemlye for [the man] to showe a certain manlinesse full and steadye, so doeth it well in a woman to have a tendernesse, soft and milde, with a kinde of womanlie sweetnes in every gesture of herres.¹⁴

They dance, cultivate music, and enjoy ‘wytty sportes and pastimes’. Accomplishments are achieved ‘rather as nature and trueth leade them, then study and arte’.¹⁵ Their speech is cultured, neither archaic nor affected, their utterances well turned. Debating on love and kindred matters the women distinguish themselves as much as the men, for ‘who woteth not that without women no contentation or delite can be felt in all this lief of ourse?’¹⁶ In particular the sprightly contentions between Lady Emilia and Lord Gaspare Pallavicino reflect their ideal of mental and temperamental equality. The Tudor Translations edition admirably sums up what the book could offer to Elizabethan playwrights. First, in general terms:

In one notable regard The Courtyer may well have served as a model for the nascent Elizabethan drama. The dramatic form of colloquy in which the book was cast was the most popular of literary forms at the time of the Renaissance. … To escape from the appointed order, the categories, partitions, and theses of scholasticism into a freer air; to redeem the truths of morals and philosophy from their servitude to system, and to set them in motion as they are seen in the live world, … was in itself a kind of humanism, a reaching after the more perfect expressiveness of the drama.

Then, in more specific terms:

The civil retorts, delicate interruptions, and fencing matches of wit that are scattered throughout the book had an even higher value as models for English writing. Where could English courtly comedy learn the trick of its trade better than from this gallant realism? … The best models of courtly dialogue available for Lyly and Shakespeare were to be sought in Italy; not in the Italian drama, which was given over to the classic tradition, but in just such natural sparkling conversations as were reported in the dialogue form of Italian prose.¹⁷

The inspiration of The Courtyer was extended by other works. George Pettie translated Stefano Guazzo's La Civile Conversazione (1574) out of Italian as The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo (1581, Books 1 to 3; 1586, Book 4, translated by Bartholomew Young). This consists of discussions between Guazzo's brother and the brother's friend, discussions ‘rather familiar and pleasant, than affected and grave, … with carefull diligence and skilful art; mary yet so that … the whole seemeth to be done by chaunce’.¹⁸ Particularly notable in Guazzo's cultivation of social courtesies is the comment on the animating spirit of women in society:

If you marke the order of feastes, playes, and merie meetings of friends, you will saye, that all these assemblies are colde and nothing delightfull, if there bee no women at them. For … men in their presence plucke up their spirites, and indevour by woordes, jestures, and all other wayes to give them to understande howe desirous they are of their favour and good will. … To be shorte, women are they whiche keepe men waking and in continuall exercise. … [And] women do the verie same, who I warrant you woulde not be so fine, so trimmed and tricked up, so amiable every way, but of a desire to please men.¹⁹

No very original discovery, perhaps; yet to establish such a code was to set the tone for Shakespeare's world of courtly comedy.

LYLY

In comic drama the strongest influence on Shakespeare was that of John Lyly's euphuistic fiction and plays.²⁰ Their effects on Shakespeare's prose will be suggested [elsewhere]; here what is in question is the technique of comic management. Lyly's is a gay, trim world of (if one took them seriously) affected clevernesses, in an elegantly mannered society which would be speechless were epigrams disallowed. Each phrase must have its point, each utterance its poise and pattern like the figures in a dance; each speaker must, whatever his alleged emotion, be self-possessed.

Lyly's plays develop epigrams and antitheses as their specific mode. The brisk logic-chopping of his pert pages and banterers foreshadows that of Shakespeare's cheerful impertinents like Moth, Costard, Launce, Speed, and Launcelot. His suavely witty exchanges among young elegants are heard again in Shakespeare's courtly comedies. The aim is to achieve, as Silvia remarks in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ‘a fine volley of words, gentlemen, and quickly shot off’, except that the ladies are as adept as the gentlemen and often more so, and the volleys, with Shakespeare's development, consist not of words alone but of perceptive analyses and the sparkling rallies of active minds.²¹

SHAKESPEAREAN PRECEDENTS

Shakespeare had already brought to a high point of stage effectiveness the sexual rivalry for mastery in The Taming of the Shrew (for instance at II.i.179-270) and the wit contest over love and other matters among the lords and ladies of Love's Labour's Lost, Berowne and Rosaline in particular (as at II.i.113-27 and 179-92). In Berowne, moreover, he had already drawn a precursor of Benedick, rallying on all but equal terms with the wittiest of the women; ‘a merrier man / Within the limit of becoming mirth / I never spent an hour's talk withal,’ Rosaline testifies, one whose ‘eye begets occasion for his wit’ so that his tongue turns to jest whatever it touches. Shakespeare had also shown the self-confident Berowne, suddenly subject to love, breaking out into comically exasperated soliloquies in verse and prose which are hardly distinguishable from the idiom of Benedick:

And I, forsooth, in love; I, that have been love's whip;
A very beadle to a humorous sigh;
A critic, nay, a night-watch constable;
A domineering pedant o'er the boy,
Than whom no mortal so magnificent!
                                        … Go to; it is a plague
That Cupid will impose for my neglect
Of his almighty dreadful little might.(22)

The King he is hunting the deer: I am coursing myself. They have pitched a toil: I am toiling in a pitch—pitch that defiles. Defile! a foul word. … I will not love; if I do, hang me. I'faith, I will not. O, but her eye! By this light, but for her eye, I would not love her—yes, for her two eyes. Well, I do nothing in the world but lie, and lie in my throat. By heaven, I do love; and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be mallicholy; and here is part of my rhyme, and here my mallicholy. Well, she hath one o' my sonnets already; the clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady hath it: sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady!²³

Prefiguring Benedick, Berowne boasts himself superior to his fellows:

I am betray'd by keeping company
With men like you, men of inconstancy.
When shall you see me write a thing in rhyme?
Or groan for Joan? or spend a minute's time
In pruning me? When shall you hear that I
Will praise a hand, a foot, a face, an eye,
A gait, a state, a brow, a breast, a waist,
A leg, a limb?—(24)

this, of course, immediately before proving as vulnerable as they.

If Benedick has his forerunner in Berowne, Beatrice has hers among the witty ladies first of Lylyan and then of Shakespearean comedy. Of them all, only Katherina of The Taming of the Shrew compares with her in combativeness (and she is acrimoniously rather than attractively ‘witty’, greatly outdoing Beatrice in belligerence, though Beatrice shares the impulse to dominate which makes Katherina shrewish, as Beatrice, except in fun, is not): but others like Rosaline, Portia, and Rosalind delight in their intelligent high spirits. When they are satirical they are appreciatively so, enjoying the extravagances they mock but desiring no more in the way of reform than the prevalence of affectionate esteem and good humour. Each is, as Beatrice is for Don Pedro, ‘By my troth, a pleasant-spirited lady’, and each might say, as Beatrice does, ‘There was a star danced, and under that was I born’.

(III) DOGBERRY

John Aubrey (1626-97) collected materials for his Brief Lives from sources more or less connected with Shakespeare, and among them the report that

The Humour of … the Constable in a Midsomernight's Dreame, he happened to take at Grendon [i.e. Grendon Underwood] in Bucks … whiche is in the roade from London to Stratford, and there was living that Constable about 1642 when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that parish and knew him.²⁵

A Midsummer Night's Dream boasting no constable, this may be meant for Bottom the weaver, but since the Grendon notable is specifically constabulary Aubrey probably erred over the play's name rather than the character's function. One cherishes the thought of some actual Dogberry, in his own world anything but mute and inglorious. More ‘sources’ than this cannot be expected, save in the general sense that exuberant mismanagers of the English language, of the logic of evidence, and of the processes of discourse have always been found comic; Shakespeare had shown Dull, the constable of Love's Labour's Lost, ‘reprehending’ the Duke and wishing to ‘see his own person in flesh and blood’ (Dull's part is brief, however), Bottom lording it over his fellows, Launcelot Gobbo and his father bemusing Bassanio by interrupting each other,²⁶ and Mistress Quickly unleashing her dazingly voluble malapropisms.

John Payne Collier, who included a biography of Will Kemp, the original Dogberry, in his Memorials of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare (in the Shakespeare Society's publications for 1846), printed in that society's papers for 1844 a letter from Lord Burghley to Secretary Walsingham dated 10 August 1586, at a time when it was pressingly important to arrest conspirators in the Babington plot against the Queen. In his urgency Burghley marked his missive ‘hast hast hast hast Post’, and what he was so agitated about were ludicrous shortcomings he had discovered in the measures to (as Dogberry would have it) comprehend all aspicious persons. No actual connection is suggested between the Watch at Enfield (whence the complaint arose) and that at Messina, but real life may have furnished Shakespeare with inspirations over and above any he found at Grendon. The letter runs as follows:

Sir—As I cam from London homward, in my coche, I sawe at every townes end the number of x or xii, standyng, with long staves, and untill I cam to Enfeld I thought no other of them, but that they had stayd for avoyding of the rayne, or to drynk at some alehowse, for so they did stand under pentyces [i.e. penthouses—like Borachio!] at ale howses. But at Enfeld fyndyng a dosen in a plump, when ther was no rayne, I bethought my self that they war appointed as watchmen, for the apprehendyng of such as are missyng; and there uppon I called some of them to me apart, and asked them wherfor they stood there? and one of them answered, ‘To take 3 yong men.’ And demandyng how they should know the persons, one answered with these wordes: ‘Marry, my Lord, by intelligence of ther favor.’ ‘What meane you by that?’ quoth I. ‘Marry’, sayd they, ‘one of the partyes hath a hooked nose.’ ‘And have you,’ quoth I, ‘no other mark?’—‘No’, sayth they. And then I asked who apoynted them; and they answered one Bankes, a Head Constable, whom I willed to be sent to me. Surely, sir, who ever had the chardge from yow hath used the matter negligently for these watchmen stand so openly in plumps, as no suspected person will come neare them; and if they be no better instructed but to fynd 3 persons by one of them havyng a hooked nose, they may miss thereof. And thus I thought good to advertise yow, that the Iustyces that had the chardge, as I thynk, may use the matter more circumspectly.²⁷

The fact that in the play Borachio brings Conrade under the penthouse out of the rain is doubtless sheer coincidence. But one treasures the light thrown on constabulary practice by Bankes's men, to whom Dogberry's charge might well have been directed, who seem likelier than not to let ‘vagrom men’ steal out of their company, and who have merely a hooked nose on which to hang their case. Messina's Watch, conjuring up the mysterious Deformed, a vile thief this seven year, who wears a key in his ear and hath a lock hanging by it and borrows money in God's name without repaying it, could hardly surpass the earnest confusions of Enfield's.²⁸

Dogberry's ‘source’, if seminally in some worthy of Grendon, lies rather among these anticipations, combined with certain stage precedents,²⁹ together (it is a major consideration) with the cherished abilities of Will Kemp, the role's original performer. Kemp, leading comedian of the 1590s, figures in the anonymous Cambridge satire The Returne from Parnassus, Part 2 (c. 1601) as instructing a student, Philomusus, in stage delivery, and declaring that his face ‘would be good for a foolish Mayre or a foolish iustice of peace’;³⁰ he could presumably have trained him, too, for a foolish constable. Whatever Kemp's skills as a comic actor, Shakespeare would certainly envisage them in his conception of Dogberry.³¹

Notes

1. G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. II (1958), p. 62.

2. C. T. Prouty discusses and reprints this work, from the sole surviving copy in the Huntington Library, in The Sources of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (1950).

3. A. Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in Time of Queen Elizabeth, in Bang's Materialen, XXI.238. ‘Panecia’ may be an error for ‘Fenicia’, the guiltless heroine of Bandello's version.

4. Ibid., XXI.350.

5. Bullough, II.66, 68.

6. Bullough, II.118. Further references in this section are likewise to Bullough.

7. In King John, Philip Faulconbridge, bastard son of Richard Coeur de Lion, is a hero worthy of his father; bastardy, though conventionally thought synonymous with wickedness, was not necessarily so considered.

8. The Faerie Queene, VI.vii. The parallel was pointed out by A. F. Potts in ‘Spenserian “Courtesy” and “Temperance” in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing’, SAB XVII (1942), and developed by C. T. Prouty in The Sources of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, pp. 53-5.

9. Op. cit., ed. W. Raleigh (1900), Tudor Translations series, p. 279.

10. For medieval precedents see John Lawlor (ed.), Patterns of Love and Courtesy (1966).

11. See Mary Augusta Scott, ‘The Book of the Courtyer: a possible source of Benedick and Beatrice’, PMLA XVI (1901), p. 476. The article argues: (i) that Shakespeare could well have known the work, since it had had three editions by 1588; (ii) that prior to Much Ado he had done nothing in dialogue comparable to the freedom and ease of the conversazioni in Il Cortegiano (a dubious point); (iii) that, wishing to brighten the semi-tragedy of Claudio and Hero, he found in The Courtyer ‘a charming witty pair [Lord Gaspare Pallavicino and the Lady Emilia Pia] in a dramatic dialogue’; (iv) that though in their witty sparrings (like Much Ado's ‘merry war’), Lord Gaspare (like Benedick ‘a professed tyrant to their sex’) takes a lively anti-feminist stance and Lady Emilia counter-attacks, all this happens in a mutually appreciative spirit. ‘It is impossible to speak too highly of the artistic setting of the four evenings' conversation, sparkling with every variety of graceful interlude, from grave to gay; now a pleasing metaphor, now a jest, a drollery—a skirmish of wit, a dramatic episode’ (op. cit., p. 487). The resemblances noted are, however, merely general parallels, sometimes quite loose, and not specific enough to prove a direct debt owed by Shakespeare to Castiglione.

12. Its influence rapidly spread. In England Thomas Hoby translated it (1552-4) and published the result in 1561 as The Courtyer of Count Baldassar Castilio; further editions followed in 1577 and 1588, before the date of Much Ado. Roger Ascham, in The Scholemaster (1570), remarked that it should be more noted in the English court (he died in 1568, before it had had its full effect), since ‘advisedlie read and diligentlie folowed but one yeare at home in England [it] would do a yong jentleman more good then three yeares travell abrode spent in Italie’ (ed. J. E. B. Mayor, 1863, p. 61). John Florio's Second Frutes (1591: dedication) reports that the most commonly studied books for those learning Italian were this, together with Guazzo's dialogues (see below, p. 18). In John Marston's first Satire (ll. 27-50) the punctilious courtier is ‘the absolute Castilio,—/ He that can all the points of courtship show’. Everard Guilpin's Skialethia (1598) invites the reader to Court, where ‘Balthazer [i.e. Baldassare Castiglione] affords / Fountaines of holy and rose-water words’ (Sig. C4). Gabriel Harvey paid repeated Latin tributes (e.g. Rhetor, 1577, prefatory letter, and fol. I.ii; also Gratulatio Valdinensium, 1578, IV.3, 17, 18). Ben Jonson's Timber: or Discoveries (1641) recommends Castiglione's book, along with Cicero's De Oratore, as a model for the ‘Life, and Quicknesse, which is the strength and sinnewes of your penning, by pretty Sayings, Similitudes, and Conceits’ (ed. G. B. Harrison, 1923, pp. 86-7).

13. Op. cit., ed. W. Raleigh (1900), p. 32.

14. Ibid., p. 219.

15. Ibid., p. 59.

16. Ibid., p. 264.

17. Ibid., pp. lxxi-lxxii, lxxxiv.

18. Op. cit., ed. E. Sullivan (1925), Tudor Translations, 2nd series, I.24, 27.

19. Op. cit., I.235-6.

20. There is an excellent chapter, ‘Lyly and Shakespeare’, in G. K. Hunter's John Lyly: the Humanist as Courtier (1962).

21. Of Love's Labour's Lost G. K. Hunter remarks, ‘Shakespeare has written a courtly play, a play which exposes to our admiration the brilliant life of a highly civilised community bent on enjoying itself. … Shakespeare, like Lyly, centres his picture of Cortegiano-like brilliance on what is also known as courtship—the verbal technique of wooing’ (op. cit., p. 334).

22. LLL, III.i.164-8, 191-3.

23. Ibid., IV.iii.1-15.

24. Ibid., IV.iii.175-82.

25. Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (1949), p. 334.

26. Mer. V., II.ii; cf. Ado III.V. Muriel Bradbrook sees Dogberry and Verges as ‘clearly incarnations of Gobbo and his father’ (in Leonard F. Dean, ed., Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, 1957, p. 105), but the resemblance is limited to this particular scene. Gobbo and Old Gobbo, Bottom and Quince, Dogberry and Verges, are all comedy duos, the leading comic man and his ‘feed’.

27. Shakespeare Society Papers I (1844), pp. 3-4.

28. Babington and other conspirators were in fact arrested on the day Burghley wrote his letter, though in different circumstances, so some parts of England's law-and-order system worked quite as well as Messina's.

29. For a precedent in Lyly's Endimion see below, III.iii.i, n.

30. The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman (1949), pp. 341-2.

31. For Kemp's qualities see W. A. Armstrong, ‘Actors and theatres’, in Shakespeare in his Own Age, Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964), p. 195. This suggests that as Kemp was notorious for upstaging his fellow actors with extemporal witticisms Shakespeare provided him with a part devised to absorb such sallies: ‘As for Dogberry, … the bumbling discursiveness of the characterisation seems designed to accommodate … such digressions, by-play, and improvisations as Kempe may have brought to the role. That Shakespeare's clowns were shaped to fit the actors who played them seems beyond question.’