[In the following essay, Bate focuses on Hero's passivity and her provisional dispatch to death—the ultimate silencing. Noting how frequently other characters speak of her or allude to her—thus demonstrating her centrality in the play—he compares Hero to sacrificial women in classical literature who die in order that their husbands may be transformed.]

King Charles I knew what he liked in Shakespeare's comedies. He inscribed in his copy of the Second Folio alternative titles for some of the plays. Thus he called Twelfth Night ‘Malvolio’ and Much Ado about Nothing ‘Benedick and Beatrice’. There was a precedent for this: the Lord Treasurer's account for 1613 refers to a performance of ‘Benedicte and Betteris’. The sub-plot has taken precedence over the main plot. Berlioz's opera of 1862 completed this movement: Béatrice et Bénédict makes the squabbling witty lovers into the main plot and simply uses Claudio and Hero as instruments in bringing them together.

Why has Much Ado about Nothing endured in the repertory? For Beatrice and Benedick, for Dogberry. There is a wonderful accessibility about these two plot elements: the wits who get their comeuppance and the dullards who unwittingly assist in the plot. But to foreground Beatrice and Benedick and the Watch is to work against the play's own sense of itself. Both performance and criticism in the twentieth century have made a heroine of Beatrice but made very little of Hero. William Hazlitt thought differently of the matter, and he seems to me to be truer to the play. In his Characters of Shakespear's Plays, published in 1817, he noted that ‘Mr Garrick's Benedick was one of his most celebrated characters; and Mrs Jordan, we have understood, played Beatrice very delightfully.’ But having said this, he went on to assert that ‘The serious part is still the most prominent’, and that ‘Hero is the principal figure in the piece, and leaves an indelible impression on the mind by her beauty, her tenderness, and the hard trial of her love.’¹

Let us suppose that Hazlitt is right, that Hero is the ‘principal figure in the piece’, that—why not say it?—Hero is the hero of the play. We all know and love Beatrice and Dogberry very much indeed. I suspect, however, that for many viewers and readers Hero remains a passive and shadowy figure, more victim than hero. What happens, then, if we look at the play from her point of view? This is something that critics have tended not to do—Anna Jameson, the first person to write a full-length book about Shakespeare's female characters, has a chapter on Beatrice but barely mentions Hero; modern feminist criticism follows her in being able to do much more with the talkative than the silent woman.

In thinking one's way into the role of Hero, a good way to begin is to consider it from the point of view of the boy-actor who would originally have created it. As is well known, Elizabethan actors prepared their parts in isolation; there was only one copy of the complete text (the promptbook), so each actor would be given merely his own part plus the cue lines. What would Shakespeare's original boy Hero have been given to commit to memory?

In the first scene, hardly anything: the character is on stage for the first 150 lines but speaks one single line, which merely identifies another character: ‘My cousin means Signior Benedick of Padua’.² The boy would presumably simply have been told who his ‘father’ was (Leonato), and instructed to follow him on and follow him off. He is not on stage for the next two scenes. In II. i (the masked ball scene), he is on for the first 150 lines, off for 50 lines, and back on for the remaining 160. He speaks more than a one-liner for the first time; they are, however, lines that would not have taken too much learning: ‘He is of a very melancholy disposition’ (with regard to Don John); an exchange with the masked Don Pedro consisting of four lines of routine courtesy; and, after returning, just one speech in the remaining 160 lines, again, a piece of formal courtesy, and a line that refers to another rather than Hero herself (‘I will do any modest office, my lord, to help my cousin to a good husband’). He is not on stage for the next two scenes. III. i is the first scene in which Hero plays an active role; it is the character's major scene, with her two gentlewomen. Here she is the dominant figure and speaks about 75 out of 105 lines until she exits, leaving Beatrice to come forward from the bower where she has been hidden and speak a brief soliloquy. But the scene has been devoted to Hero talking about someone else: its entire purpose is the gulling of Beatrice into the belief that Benedick is in love with her. In a sense, Hero is still only functioning as a conduit, an object of exchange, a plot-device, not a realized character. The actor is not on stage for the next two scenes.

III. iv is another scene for Hero and her two gentlewomen, and, later, Beatrice. A certain amount is spoken—though it begins to become apparent that Hero only initiates conversations at all when she is among women and in private. The actor has twelve very brief speeches, almost exclusively on the subject of clothes (‘No pray thee good Meg, I'll wear this’; ‘Help me to dress, good coz, good Meg, good Ursula’). All the banter and vitality come from the other women. Hero, one begins to sense, is little more than an object to be addressed and dressed. (S)he is not on stage for the next scene. IV. i is the crucial church scene, in which Hero is on stage and at the centre of attention for the first 255 lines. But in the course of these lines she says nothing more than the following: ‘I do’; ‘None, my lord’ (the marriage vow and the statement of non-impediment—they are not her words but the publicly prescribed ones); ‘And seem'd I ever otherwise to you?’; ‘Is my lord well that he doth speak so wide?’; ‘“True”? O God!’; ‘O God defend me, how am I beset! / What kind of catechizing call you this?’; ‘Is it not Hero? Who can blot that name / With any just reproach?’; and ‘I talk'd with no man at that hour, my lord’ (six questions or exclamations in response to the accusation of her infidelity). Then at line 110 she sinks to the ground. About sixty lines later she revives and speaks her longest public speech of the play so far—it has all of eight lines. It is her weightiest, most moving speech, the first real opportunity for the actor to use his/her full emotive resources. The cue-line comes from the Friar, ‘Lady, what man is he you are accus'd of’:

They know that do accuse me; I know none.
If I know more of any man alive
Than that which maiden modesty doth warrant,
Let all my sins lack mercy! O my father,
Prove you that any man with me convers'd
At hours unmeet, or that I yesternight
Maintain'd the change of words with any creature,
Refuse me, hate me, torture me to death!

(IV. i. 177-84)

Hero is silent for another 60 lines or so, and then led off.

The actor is not required in IV. ii, V. i, V. ii, V. iii. Hero is a significant absence for four scenes, one of which is very substantial in length; indeed, the character is presumed dead, presumed not likely to reappear at all. The last of these scenes is actually set at her tomb. In V. iv, she is brought on for the first twelve lines but says nothing before being told to withdraw. She reappears masked soon after and has two short speeches when unmasked: ‘And when I liv'd, I was your other wife; / And when you lov'd, you were my other husband’; ‘Nothing certainer: / One Hero died defil'd, but I do live, / And surely as I live, I am a maid.’ Then there are three lines when she produces Beatrice's love-sonnet: ‘And here's another, / Writ in my cousin's hand, stol'n from her pocket, / Containing her affection unto Benedick.’ And that is all. It is unlikely to have taken a bright Elizabethan boy actor more than about an hour to learn this part. On first looking at it, the actor would, one imagines, have found it distinctly unrewarding. Compared with Portia or Rosalind, or even Hermia and Helena, it has little to offer. Traditionally the leading actress—Mrs Jordan, Ellen Terry, Peggy Ashcroft—has played Beatrice, and one suspects that the Chamberlain's Men's best boy may well have done so too.

Given this extraordinary silence and passivity, how could Hazlitt have found Hero ‘the principal figure in the piece’, who ‘leaves an indelible impression on the mind’? We will begin to gain an answer if we go through the play again, this time considering not what Hero says but what is said about Hero. For she is a character who is talked about far more than she talks. And when we begin to look at her in this light we begin to come to the centre of the play, for talking about people is one of the central activities in the play. Messina is full of hearsay: the play begins with a report in a letter; a short scene like I. ii is typical—an overhearing in a thick-pleached alley in the orchard. Key moments occur when people overhear conversations about themselves or others: Beatrice and Benedick's affair is precipitated by their hearing their friends talking about their opposite number's supposed love for them; the Don John plot is undone by the First and Second Watchman overhearing Conrade and Borachio talking about the wooing of Margaret in the name of Hero. As the First Watchman says, ‘we have here recovered the most dangerous piece of lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth’ (III. iii. 161-62): he means discovered the most dangerous piece of treachery, but like his master Dogberry he speaks truer than he knows, for this overheard discovery will eventually bring about the recovery of the play through the knowledge that Hero is not after all guilty of lechery. Indeed, the title of the play draws attention to the whole area of discovery and overhearing, for in Elizabethan pronunciation ‘nothing’ and ‘noting’ were homophones: one way of hearing the title is therefore Much Ado About Noting. There is sustained play on the homophone in the exchange immediately before Balthasar's song (‘There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting … Note notes, forsooth, and nothing!’—II. iii. 54-57).

Looking through the play from the point of view of Hero's speaking we might say that she is reduced to almost nothing. Looking through it from the point of speaking about her, we find that she is much noted. The play could almost have been called ‘The Noting of Hero’. It is the false notings of her that precipitate the play towards potential tragedy; it is the Friar's scrupulous true noting of her that redeems the action (‘For I have only been silent so long, / And given way unto this course of fortune, / By noting of the lady’—IV. i. 156ff, my emphasis). Her name is spoken 63 times in the course of the action. This means that in the printed play ‘Hero’ occurs as a name in the text more frequently than it does as a speech-prefix, for she only opens her mouth 44 times. She says far less than the other major characters, but we hear her name more often than that of any other character.

Consider the extraordinary frequency with which Hero is addressed as ‘she’: I. i. 95-105 is a conversation about her in which she is embarrassingly silent; I. i. 150ff is a long conversation about her between Claudio and Benedick after the others have left, ‘Didst thou note the daughter of Signior Leonato? / I noted her not, but I looked on her’—the exchange is an extremely detailed noting and enumeration of her beauty. Then Don Pedro comes back and the whole thing is played through again in a different key. It is like a set of musical variations on a theme: first the mocking interjections of Benedick (‘he is in love with Hero … Leonato's short daughter’), then, after Benedick has left, a shift into verse and the courtly lover's idiom (‘Come thronging soft and delicate desires, / All prompting me how fair young Hero is’), then the surrogate wooing picks up on the courtly idiom. The first scene ends and one sees that it has been almost entirely about the noting of Hero, with the return from war and the sparring between Beatrice and Benedick as supplementary matters. Given what is said, as opposed to what she says herself, one begins to understand Hazlitt's sense that ‘Hero is the principal figure in the piece, and leaves an indelible impression on the mind’—she has certainly left such an impression on the minds of the other characters.

Moving to scene two, Hero is centre-stage again, even though at two removes from the actual stage: Antonio tells Leonato that a servant has overheard Don Pedro telling Claudio that he, Don Pedro, loves Hero and will woo her at the coming dance. Two problems about this little scene have troubled editors and critics since the eighteenth century. One question is whether the servant has given Leonato a garbled account of the scene we have just witnessed. If he has heard I. i. 300-307, picking up the reference to the coming evening's dance and to ‘breaking with’ Hero's father, he should also have heard the intervening lines explaining that it will be a disguised surrogate wooing. Secondly, the long opening scene is in a public place, not what Antonio calls a thick-pleached alley in an orchard. The misunderstanding of the conversation between Don Pedro and Claudio is especially curious since Shakespeare makes a point of including an exchange attesting to the wit and sharpness of the servant in question. Unless we imagine another conversation between Don Pedro and Claudio concerning Hero, we presumably read this as an instance of mis-noting. But whether the reference is to the immediately foregoing scene or an imagined second dialogue in Antonio's orchard, it is clear that contained within I. ii are several encounters: the scene in which Don Pedro and Claudio are overheard, the scene in which the servant tells Antonio, and the scene we actually witness in which Antonio tells Leonato. Hero is central to all of these scenes but not on stage in any of them. Everyone is talking about Hero, but, as was seen from the analysis of the boy-actor's role, she is not a presence.

The next scene, I. iii, is yet another overhearing and conversation concerning Hero. Don John is introduced as a mischief-maker; Borachio comes on and provides an opportunity for mischief in the form of the news he has heard that the Prince is going to woo Hero on behalf of Claudio. Here the information is correct, but the location is again different: the Don Pedro/Claudio conversation is now said to have taken place in a musty room, with Borachio hidden behind an arras. Whether we have three putative conversations or three versions of one conversation, this provides further multiplication of the sense that everybody spends all their time in Messina talking about Hero. Every way we turn we are offered a brilliant little realization of a new location—the alley in the orchard with closely twined trees, the musty room being smoked clean—that heightens our sense of the reality of Messina as a place, and each time into the location walks … another conversation about wooing Hero.

There is yet more at the dance: Don John leads Claudio to believe that Don Pedro is wooing for himself; Claudio responds with a typical, veritably Othello-like, reaction in his ‘Farewell, therefore, Hero!’. This prepares us for the later rejection of Hero; in this scene, recovery soon takes place as Don Pedro gives Hero over to Claudio. The moment offers another extraordinary instance of Hero being at the centre of things but not actually saying anything:

LEON.
Count, take of me my daughter, and with her my fortunes; his Grace hath made the match, and all grace say Amen to it.
BEAT.
Speak, Count, 'tis your cue.
CLAUD.
Silence is the perfectest herald of joy; I were but little happy, if I could say how much. Lady, as you are mine, I am yours; I give away myself for you and dote upon the exchange.
BEAT.
Speak, cousin, or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss, and let not him speak neither.
D. Pedro
In faith, lady, you have a merry heart.

(II. i. 285-95)

At the crucial instant, there is no cue for Hero; from her point of view, the key line is ‘Silence is the perfectest herald of joy’. She is not absolutely silent, for immediately after the exchange quoted above she is noted whispering to Claudio (Beatrice remarks that ‘My cousin tells him in his ear that he is in her heart’—II. i. 296-97), but that it is a whisper rather than an utterance shared with the other characters and the audience is symptomatic of Hero's chronic embarrassment about speech, of the way that in public she is stifled.

II. ii sees another conversation about Hero set up, as Borachio tells Don John to tell Don Pedro and Claudio that Hero loves him, Borachio. When this conversation actually takes place in III. ii, Hero's name is dragged through the mud. The way that Don John harps on her name is suggestive—‘Leonato's Hero, your Hero, every man's Hero’, for it was a name that to Shakespeare's audience was synonymous with fidelity and loyalty. The name of this Hero's father half-echoes that of a more famous Hero's lover: the classical Hero, familiar from Marlowe's highly popular poem, was not every man's Hero but Leander's Hero and his alone (Leander's fame as an exemplary lover is later alluded to by Benedick—V. ii. 29). When her Leander drowned, Hero drowned herself: she would rather die than be another man's. It is with her classical forebear in mind that Shakespeare's Hero defends her name—both her own good name and the name ‘Hero’—in the broken wedding scene: ‘Who can blot that name / With any just reproach?’.

Hazlitt's admiration for Hero stemmed very much from this defence, from those simple questions she asks at this point. The essay in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays continues as follows:

The justification of Hero in the end, and her restoration to the confidence and arms of her lover, is brought about by one of those temporary consignments to the grave of which Shakespeare seems to have been fond. He has perhaps explained the theory of this predilection in the following lines:—

and here Hazlitt quotes the Friar's crucial speech:

She dying, as it must be so maintain'd,
Upon the instant that she was accus'd,
Shall be lamented, pitied, and excus'd
Of every hearer; for it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost,
Why then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours: so will it fare with Claudio.
When he shall hear she died upon his words,
Th'idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit,
More moving-delicate and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul
Than when she liv'd indeed.

(IV. i. 214-30)

This brings us to the very heart of the play. Silence is associated with death and Hero's name is also associated with death, for the classical Hero was an exemplary suicide victim in Ovid's Heroides. Death is the logic of the Hero-ine's exclusion from the first part of the play. What I have demonstrated in my rather laborious working through of scenes from the first half is that everybody talks about her—and in this sense she is the centre of interest in the play—but she is not there, she does not speak: in this respect she is almost like a dead person from the start. But the Friar's suggestion is a kind of appropriation of death: he recognizes that the kind of death into which Hero has been forced can become the basis for a new life. He recognizes that the moment people believe she really is dead, they will start to value her. His recognition of this is based on what Hazlitt calls the theory behind Shakespeare's predilection for temporary consignments to the grave, namely the intuition of the human tendency not to value someone or something fully until we have lost it:

                                                                                                    for it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost,
Why then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours.

The idea is very important to Shakespeare right through to the end of his career. Prospero only realizes how much he loves Ariel when he releases him—he spends most of the play ordering him around, telling him off and threatening him, and only in his very last speech before the epilogue is his love released: ‘My Ariel, chick, / That is thy charge. Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well.’

The point about the temporary consignment to the grave is that it gives a second chance. It allows one to experience the loss that makes one value what one has lost, and then it gives back the object lost. And this time, so the theory goes, one will really value it. ‘Come, lady, die to live’, says the Friar: it is only the apparent death, played out in elaborate fulness, that can provide a sufficiently firm basis for a subsequent fulness of life. When Hero is brought back to the stage, the language dwells sustainedly on this notion of dying to live—Hero dies while her slanders lived and lives once they die.³

All this takes us into areas of considerable profundity. Let us ponder one or two ramifications for a moment. First, a temporary consignment to the grave is powerful in a play because a play serves a similar function. Claudio will come to value his Hero through having lived through her death. We will come to value our Heros through living through the stage-deaths of others like them. Montaigne wrote an essay on the Ciceronian dictum ‘That to philosophize is to learn how to die’; Shakespeare would suggest that to playgo is to learn how to live by seeing others pretend to die. As defenders of the stage were quick to point out when the theatre was attacked by Puritans as immoral, the drama may serve an educative function for the audience. It may make us learn to value life through the surrogate experience of loss.

Secondly, comedy must always be close to tragedy; the apparent death is necessary for the achievement of a comic fulness of life. One way of putting it would be to say that The Winter's Tale, with its hinged tragicomic structure, is the logical conclusion of Shakespeare's work. That play is certainly the fully matured reworking of Much Ado. Thirdly, the temporary consignment to the grave is not only an analogue for the audience's experience in the theatre, and for the tragic element in comedy, it is also central to most myths and religions. Christ spends three days in the grave; Christianity is built on the idea of dying to self in order to achieve fuller life in Christ. Shakespeare made much of certain classical myths of temporary death and rebirth—the dying god, Adonis; Proserpina, goddess of spring, who dies to live and who is the archetype of Marina and Perdita; Orpheus bringing Eurydice back from the underworld.

The ultimate ‘source’ for the Hero plot of Much Ado is a Greek myth, that of Alcestis. Shakespeare could have known a Latin translation of Euripides' play on the subject; he certainly received the story at secondhand through the prose romances that were the direct sources of Much Ado about Nothing. The plot of Alcestis may be summarized briefly: Zeus has killed Asclepius the physician and son of Apollo; in revenge, Apollo has killed the Cyclops who forged Zeus' thunderbolt; in punishment, Apollo had to be a servant in the house of Admetus for a year; Admetus has treated him well; in gratitude, Apollo makes a deal with the Fates that Admetus should be allowed an extra length of life, provided that at the appointed hour of his death someone else can be persuaded to die for him; Admetus' father and mother refuse; Alcestis, his loyal wife, consents and accordingly dies; just after her death, Herakles happens to be passing, on his way to perform one of his labours; despite his wife's recent death, Admetus entertains Herakles in accordance with the laws of hospitality; the latter discovers what has happened and goes to Death, the messenger who is taking Alcestis to the underworld, wrestles her from him and restores her to her husband who by this time feels guilty and repentant that he has let her die in his place. The story is played out on the level of myth, not in a civic community like Shakespeare's Messina, but the idea of a second chance is the key shared motif.

The dignified deathbed words of Alcestis are reported by a maid, but then the quiet heroine is carried on to stage and has a long, moving speech of farewell. She is simple, self-possessed, concerned above all for her children. Admetus says that he will have a statue of her made and kept in the house in memory of her. He speaks of the image of her coming to him in his dreams; there is an interesting consonance here with that powerful passage in the Friar's key speech:

The idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit,
More moving-delicate and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul
Than when she liv'd indeed: then shall he mourn—

Shakespeare shares with Euripides the idea of transformation being wrought by an image of the dead wife working on the mind.

Alcestis expires on stage. Euripides gives a strong emphasis to her liminal position, both dead and not dead, no longer living yet not received into underworld. A gap is thus left open for recovery and return. When Herakles does return, it is with a veiled woman. Initially he says that it is a woman whom he has won; he asks Admetus to look after her while he goes off to perform his labour. Admetus says that he doesn't want a woman in the house, especially one whose form is so like that of Alcestis. Herakles talks of a potential re-marriage and the widower reacts angrily; there is a sense of him being tested and this time not failing. Eventually Admetus gives way to the strong will of Herakles and says he will take the woman into the house. The revelation and reunion then occur:

ADM.
Gods, what shall I think! Amazement beyond hope, as I look on this woman, this wife. Is she really mine, or some sweet mockery for God to stun me with?
HER.
Not so. This is your own wife you see. She is here.
ADM.
Be careful she is not some phantom from the depths.
HER.
The guest and friend you took was no necromancer.
ADM.
Do I see my wife, whom I was laying in the grave?
HER.
Surely. But I do not wonder at your unbelief.
ADM.
May I touch her, and speak to her, as my living wife?
HER.
Speak to her. All that you desired is yours.
ADM.
Oh, eyes and body of my dearest wife, I have you now beyond all hope. I never thought to see you again.(4)

Several details of this are close to The Winter's Tale, but one particular feature is especially striking: Alcestis does not speak. This motif is taken into the mythic structure when Herakles explains that she will not be allowed to speak for three days, by which time her obligations to the gods of the underworld will have been washed away. Alcestis functions as the archetypal silenced woman, and in this she is a precedent for the Hero who is allowed to say so little throughout the play and is given only two brief factual speeches on her unveiling at the climax. There are plenty of differences, not least in that there is no accusation of infidelity on Admetus' part. Alcestis is not a direct source for the Hero plot; rather, it is a powerful mythic prototype for the silencing of the woman and its extension, her temporary consignment to the grave. As in All's Well that Ends Well and The Winter's Tale, the actual death of the myth is replaced by a self-conscious stage trick. Theophanies like that of Apollo and super-human interventions like that of Herakles are replaced by domesticated divine agents: the Friar's scheme, Helena's self-contrived devices, Paulina' s priestess-like art. Silence is not given a mythico-religious cause but becomes a psychological and social reality. But the strong sense of a second chance, of dying to live, draws the texts together.

Alcestis bears one of its most powerful resemblances to The Winter's Tale in the motif of the man refusing the offer of another bride—there is a sharp contrast to the repentant Claudio's rather over-eager embracing of the offer of ‘Antonio's daughter’. But in the image of seeing the dead bride in the new woman, the correspondence between Euripides and Much Ado is striking. Here there is an interesting contrast with The Winter's Tale, where Leontes sees his dead bride in the face of a different character, his daughter. It is helpful to posit a set of parallels and variations between the plays: Alcestis-like, Hermione does not speak to Leontes on their reunion (she thanks the gods and addresses her daughter); Alcestis and The Winter's Tale work with variations on the statue motif, while in Much Ado there is not a statue but a tomb with an epitaph.

The latter is a motif from another prototypical mythic source, Ovid's Heroides. Hero's name suggests not only Hero, who figures in one of those epistolary tragic monologues, but also the whole sequence. This has not been perceived before by critics, I think, but it is noteworthy that the Heroides were very well known in the Elizabethan age, when they were much studied in schools. They were particularly in the public eye at precisely the time of Much Ado, for Michael Drayton's imitation of them, Englands Heroycall Epistles, was published to considerable popularity in 1597, then reprinted and augmented in 1598 and 1599, the years in which the play is usually dated. The Heroides were exemplary texts concerning female heroes who die as sacrificial victims to love; they are full of male infidelities and loyal females betrayed or deserted or left to die by the men they love. Yet these women remain unquestioningly devoted. Many refer to their own tombs, several inscribe their own epitaphs. The epitaph and tomb scene makes Hero recognizable as one of the Heroides. Her name makes this link: it sets up a prototype that can be recognized by the audience. This is something different from a direct source. Hero's swooning and supposed death, together with the obsequies and epitaph, derive more directly from the novella by Bandello that is almost certainly the play's primary source, but Shakespeare's effect turns on the change in name from the Fenicia of Bandello to the more symbolic and Ovidian Hero. Ruskin wrote in Munera Pulveris of the symbolic nature of names in Shakespeare—for instance, Desdemona, dusdaimonia, ‘miserable fortune’—and singled out Benedick and Beatrice as meaning ‘blessed’ and ‘blessing’ (there is a certain ironic wit on Shakespeare's part here in that they spend so much time cursing each other and love).⁵ I would suggest that the name Hero is even more tellingly symbolic than those mentioned by Ruskin.

The Hero and the other heroines of the Heroides are essentially tragic figures; in that Ovidian text there are no second chances. Much Ado is more in a romance mould, and this suggests a generic link with Euripides' Alcestis. The latter was a kind of transcended tragedy; it was performed in the position usually held by the comic satyr-play, as fourth in a group of dramas, following and in some senses defusing or providing relief from three tragedies. It is a potential tragedy but with last-minute relief. Life is heightened because of the process of going through death: the pattern is that of many works in the romance tradition and of several of Shakespeare's later comedies—Much Ado, All's Well that Ends Well, Pericles and The Winter's Tale.

Such an analysis raises a question about Claudio. If we read Hero as an analogue for the Heroides, he is like one of the men in those poems—thoroughly untrustworthy and self-interested. This would accord with the bad press he's always had: Charles Gildon at the beginning of the eighteenth century accused him of ‘barbarous’ conduct towards Hero, A. C. Swinburne at the end of the nineteenth century called him ‘a pitiful fellow’, and most theatregoers today have little sympathy for him. But if on the other hand Hero is an Alcestis, Claudio is an Admetus who repents of and learns from his earlier unfair conduct. I do think that in order to accept the play as romance we have to go with this reading. The Friar's plan has got to work: the mock-death must make Claudio see Hero's virtues, must make him into a nobler lover. We must therefore take seriously such lines in V. i as ‘I have drunk poison whiles he utter'd it’ and ‘Sweet Hero! Now thy image doth appear / In the rare semblance that I lov'd it first’; and we must take seriously his vow of an annual sack-cloth visit to her monument. We must accept the magic of the reunion and, as in The Winter's Tale, we must, in the Friar's words, ‘let wonder seem familiar’.

Did Shakespeare know the Alcestis story? There were sixteenth-century Latin translations of Euripides' play; there is a brief version of the story in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. But the story is also told in an Elizabethan collection of romances, George Pettie's A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure. One tale in there (Cephalus and Procris) is a likely secondary source for Othello, a play with a theme of wrongful accusation of a wife that is closely linked to both Much Ado and The Winter's Tale; Pettie's ‘Admetus and Alcest’ has an Admetus who first learns in his sleep that Alcestis will return from the dead, and when he learns this ‘he had much ado to keep his soul in his body from flying to meet her’. I do not attach great significance to the common phrase ‘much ado’ appearing here, but it would be intriguing if Shakespeare did know Pettie's version of the tale, for there a curious moral is drawn from it: ‘This seemeth straunge to you (Gentlewomen) that a woman should die and then live againe, but the meaninge of it is this, that you should die to yourselves and live to your husbandes.’⁶ It is a good old-fashioned plea for wifely submissiveness. But Shakespeare orders the matter differently: he retains the motif of the woman dying and then living again, but he does so in order that the husbands should die to themselves and live to their wives, for in Much Ado, as in The Winter's Tale, it is the husband who must be transformed by loss in order that he may become worthy of his wife. The play might be said to rephrase Pettie's moral thus: this seemeth strange to you, Gentlemen, that a woman should die and then live again, but the meaning of it is this, that you should die to yourselves and live to your wives.

Notes

1. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London, 1930-34), IV, 335.

2. I. i. 33. Subsequent line references given in text; all quotations are from the Arden edition of A. R. Humphreys (London, 1981).

3. See especially V. iv. 66, and note also the structuring of Claudio's epitaph in V. iii around the motif of living in death.

4. Euripides, Alcestis, lines 1123-34, trans. R. Lattimore (Chicago, 1955).

5. See Ruskin, Munera Pulveris: Six Essays on the Elements of Political Economy (London, 1872), chap. 5.

6. The tale is in A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, ed. I. Gollancz, 2 vols. (London, 1980), II, 61ff.