SOURCE: Taylor, Mark. “Presence and Absence in Much Ado about Nothing.” Centennial Review 33, no. 1 (winter 1989): 1-12.

[In the following essay, Taylor focuses on the inscrutability of characters' reports of events in Much Ado about Nothing that are not represented on stage. Emphasizing the subjectivity of these reports, he focuses on Don Pedro's offstage conversation with Hero in Act II, scene i and the chamber-window scene in which Margaret is mistaken for Hero.]

Who would not say, that glosses increase doubt and ignorance, since no booke is to be seene, whether divine or profane, commonly read of all men, whose interpretation dimmes or tarnisheth not the difficulty? The hundred commentary sends him to his succeeder, more thorny and more crabbed, than the first found him.

—Montaigne, “Of Experience” (trans. Florio)

It is difficult to read. The page is dark.
Yet he knows what it is that he expects.
The page is blank or a frame without a glass
Or a glass that is empty when he looks.

—Wallace Stevens, “Phosphor Reading by his own Light”

What happens in Much Ado about Nothing, on the stage, when Don Pedro presents Hero to Claudio, the man in whose name Pedro claims to have wooed and won her? Hero's father Leonato blesses the match, and then Claudio offers a few words on his lack of words, a deficiency, he explains, that demonstrates the authenticity of his feelings. “Silence is the perfectest herald of joy,” he says. “I were but little happy if I could say how much” (2.1.274-75).¹ Now it is Hero's turn, and Beatrice prompts her: “Speak, cousin; or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss and let him not speak neither” (278-79). I am interested in what follows Beatrice's first two words: “Speak, cousin.”² Pedro has performed successfully his role of agent in a wife-acquisition deal, Leonato, that of father of the bride, and Claudio, without doing much of anything, that of triumphant suitor. If Hero were content to play a role in the drama these men have created—and we might suppose that women were expected to accept such roles—she could say something: she could, for example, at least echo Claudio's words. But she says nothing (where Claudio only pretended to say nothing), and that nothing, or more properly the duration of that nothing, is part of the definition of Hero and thus of the meaning of the play. “Speak, cousin,” says Beatrice. How long does everyone wait until it becomes perfectly clear that Hero is not going to speak, a social awkwardness that Beatrice tries finally to gloss over by suggesting that, as alternative to speech, Hero might kiss her new fiancé? What gap, what implied ellipsis, exists between Beatrice's first two words and the rest of her speech, and correspondingly, what is the length of the moment that Hero stands there, probably between Leonato and Claudio, all eyes upon her, saying nothing?

There is no single answer to these questions; indeed, there can be as many answers as there are productions of the play that care to consider the questions at all. At one end of the spectrum Beatrice's pause after “Speak, cousin,” will be virtually imperceptible, thus suggesting the immediate second thought that a kiss is a far more significant seal of approval than a mere word.³ At the other end, she will give Hero perhaps as much as ten or fifteen seconds to do nothing, a hiatus that encourages the audience to reflect upon Hero's probable indifference to Claudio, a man to whom she has never spoken, and thus upon the extent of her victimization and of injustice in Messina.

In all events, the words Hero fails or refuses to speak at Beatrice's behest become as much a part of the play as anything explicitly and positively said or done upon the stage. This silence pushes the play's meaning, even its content, beyond its physical representation of word or deed into its gaps and interstices, its words unspoken and things undone, absences which are not at Much Ado's periphery but at its very center, amid all that can be heard and seen. I wish now to examine two much larger gaps in the play's surface than the ellipsis in Beatrice's speech and thereby propose how much the play incorporates of what it chooses not to represent.

I

The first of these is Don Pedro's actual wooing of Hero during the second-act revel at Leonato's house. Pedro asks Hero whether she will “walk about with your friend” (2.1.75), and after a few jests about his appearance, “They step aside,” in the modification of Hanmer's stage direction that most editors follow. They are apparently absent from the stage for the next hundred lines or so, and some eight lines after they re-enter, Pedro will tell Claudio and the others that “fair Hero is won.” What has been the method of Pedro's wooing and winning Hero during their presumable absence from the stage?

Don Pedro, like most of the other men in attendance, is masked during the revel. Although masks can succeed as disguises, as Hero's will do in 5.4, it seems to me that here Shakespeare is deliberately violating a convention allowed by his theatre. Right after Pedro and Hero “step aside,” Ursula tells the masked Antonio, Hero's uncle, “I know you well enough. You are Signior Antonio” (99-100), a remark whose whole point seems to be to show that masks do not always work. And right after this segment Beatrice defames Benedick to his very own masked face (“Why, he is the Prince's jester, a very dull fool” [122] and so forth). Although Beatrice may believe she is slandering Benedick before a third party, the scene, like Beatrice herself, becomes far wittier and subtler if one assumes that she is perfectly aware of Benedick's identity and is taking advantage of the defenselessness that his mask imposes—that is, of Benedick's continuing commitment to his disguise. And if Ursula and Beatrice can so easily penetrate the disguises of Antonio and Benedick, then it follows that Hero can do the same to Don Pedro.⁴ Consequently, though the actual wooing scene is denied to us as readers or spectators, we are rather openly invited to suppose that Don Pedro never fools Hero at all.

This supposition is strengthened by the reiterated belief of several of Much Ado's characters that Don Pedro is wooing for himself anyway. Antonio tells Leonato that his (Antonio's) servant overheard Pedro tell Claudio that he (Pedro) loves Hero himself and plans to tell her so “this night in a dance” (1.2.6-14). Leonato believes this report, for he will then encourage the possibility of a royal alliance for his daughter. “If the Prince do solicit you in that kind,” he tells Hero, meaning in the way of marriage, “you know your answer” (2.1.57-59). And Claudio also believes this account of Pedro's affections when it is related to him by Don John, who seems, or pretends, to be commenting upon what his brother is actually doing during the, to us, invisible wooing scene. “The Prince woos for himself,” Claudio concludes, and adds, sententiously, “Friendship is constant in all other things / Save in the office and affairs of love” (2.1.156-58). And Benedick sees the matter the same way: “The Prince hath got your Hero” (173), he tells Claudio.

Still another possibility, further complicating the whole matter, is raised by Borachio in 1.3.51-56, where he tells Don John, “Being entertained for a perfumer, as I was smoking a musty room, comes me the Prince and Claudio, hand in hand in sad conference. I whipt me behind the arras and there heard it agreed upon that the Prince should woo Hero for himself, and having obtained her, give her to Count Claudio.” This statement, although it anticipates the event, makes the scene in question recede still deeper into the inaccessible core of the play.

But unlike Borachio, who has no one to confirm his account, Antonio, Leonato, Claudio, and Benedick all agree that Pedro might be wooing for himself. And there is one sense in which their suspicions appear simply wrong. Before the revel Don Pedro had promised Claudio that “I will assume thy part in some disguise, / And tell fair Hero I am Claudio. … And the conclusion is she shall be thine” (1.2.289-90; 295); his later announcement, “Here, Claudio, I have wooed in thy name, and fair Hero is won” (2.1.267-68), is entirely consistent with this description of his design, and the play's plot goes forward from here with no further inquiry into the matter. A reader who possessed only these directives of Don Pedro's would regard the wooing scene merely as a necessary contrivance of the plot, as a way of securing Hero for the unromantic Claudio, the precise operation of which is no more to be questioned than, for example, that of the bed-trick in Measure for Measure. As it is, however, the parallel account of Pedro's personal interest in Hero, utterly at variance with what he himself says but given some support by the likelihood that male disguises are ineffective in this play, forces attention upon the absent wooing scene—in the same way that Beatrice's injunction to Hero to speak forces attention upon her silence. What we have, it seems to me, is not a mere description of an unrepresented event, which should be accepted at face value (as I believe we accept Hamlet's account to Horatio of his escape from the ship bearing him to England), but rather two—or three, if we add Borachio's—competing interpretations or readings of an event whose opacity makes our own corrective reading impossible. And since we cannot read the wooing scene, for all of our curiosity about it, since we can never know it, we can infer only that its exegetes are reading themselves rather than a separate text outside them: that Don Pedro's helpful and generous explanation of his behavior shows that he is a helpful and generous man, that Leonato's enthusiasm for a royal match for his daughter shows his desire for social advancement, that Claudio's cynical platitudinizing shows his profound cynicism. It is not that one man is right and the others wrong, but that the play focuses our attention upon a blank spot within itself as a way of showing how various characters perceive themselves in that blank spot.

II

The second, much larger gap in Much Ado is the chamber-window scene, as it is usually called, in which the gentlewoman Margaret and Don John's crony Borachio are noted, at night, at Hero's bedroom window by Don John, Don Pedro, and Claudio, the last two of whom mistake Margaret for Hero, whose unchastity thus becomes proven to them and a provocation to the denunciations of act 4. This scene occurs—perhaps one should say it fails to occur—at the very center of the play: it is framed by 3.2, in which Don John offers to show evidence of Hero's promiscuity to Don Pedro and Claudio, and 3.3, in which Dogberry's watchmen overhear Borachio tell Conrade of his successful practice. Moreover, unlike the wooing scene, which ends up having consequences only for Hero and Claudio, the chamber-window scene greatly affects all subsequent aspects of the play's action. In the serious plot, to borrow the New Arden editor's questionable yet helpful designations,⁵ it misuses the Prince, vexes Claudio, and undoes Hero, as Borachio said it would (2.2.28-29); it changes radically the direction of the comic plot once Beatrice extracts from Benedick a pledge to “Kill Claudio” (4.1.288) to avenge poor Hero; and it is the entire raison d'être of the auxiliary plot, for if Borachio's conversation were not overheard, there would be no need in the play for Dogberry and his assistants. The chamber-window scene is remarkable in its complexity and therefore still more remarkable in its absence.

There have been numerous justifications of the scene's absence, including explanations that it could not be convincing on the stage, but it seems to me that most commentators have proceeded on the mistaken premise that at the center of Much Ado something is missing rather than that nothing is present.⁶ The problem is not an absence (though one inevitably uses words like “absent” and “missing” for the chamber-window scene) or incompleteness, e.g., because of authorial oversight or inability, but rather a presence—but of nothing, a void. The play is neither making its point by representation nor failing to make it by non-representation, but is making it by non-representation. As I hope to show, it is only by transgressing the limits of word and action here that Much Ado can fully articulate its meaning. Surely there exists a valid distinction between an event not worth the playwright's time and trouble to dramatize (again, like Hamlet's boat ride), an unambiguous report which can be taken at face value, and an event whose non-representation is a precise corollary of its inscrutability. Such an event is the chamber-window scene, which simply refuses to answer any questions we ask of it. No report of this event can be verified because the event is a nothing; if one looks behind any given report, all one finds is another report.

There are two rather extended accounts of the chamber-window scene, Borachio's and Don Pedro's, which are worth comparing. In the first of them Borachio, overheard by the men of the watch, tells his friend Conrade what has recently transpired.

But know that I have to-night wooed Margaret, the Lady Hero's gentlewoman, by the name of Hero. She leans me out at her mistress' chamber window, bids me a thousand times good night—I tell this tale vilely; I should first tell thee how the Prince, Claudio, and my master, planted and placed and possessed by my master Don John, saw afar off in the orchard this amiable encounter.

(3.3.133-40)

Since it is Borachio's intention to give only the most bland and matter-of-fact account of the episode, with no embellishments—that Don John maneuvered the Prince and Claudio into their places as audience; that Borachio then addressed Margaret as Hero; and that during “this amiable encounter” Margaret bid him “a thousand times good night”—it is significant that he has so much trouble telling his tale, that he is aware of this trouble, and that he makes us aware of it. It may be, of course, that he is drunk, as his promise to Conrade that “I will, like a true drunkard utter all to thee” and his very name suggest,⁷ but if so, does he have trouble with the story because he is drunk, or is he drunk so that he will have trouble with the story? It seems to me that the main point of his drunkenness is to confound his account of his earlier practice, and the point of the confounding is to show that the practice will not admit of objective transcriptions but only of unreliable readings that are colored by the reader's condition. If the reader is confused by drink, then his interpretation will be similarly confused.

It is remarkable that the men of the watch can make as much sense as they do of Borachio's meanderings, and that they will decide to take him and Conrade into custody, but what they hear is not entirely what is said. Before he speaks of the chamber-window scene, Borachio converses with Conrade about fashion and asks rhetorically, “But seest thou not what a deformed thief this fashion is?” (115). Overhearing this remark, the men of the watch make the simple adjective “deformed” into a proper noun, the name of a thief, “I know that Deformed,” says the First Watch. “'A has been a vile thief this seven year” (116-17). What they do with the meaning of “deform,” actually, is deform it. And their doing so, before our very eyes and ears, with a word we, too, have just heard, is another demonstration either that interpretations create new meanings for texts rather than making manifest meanings that are latent within them; or that the impetus to these meanings, and thus their foundation, is outside and prior to the text, not text at all but pretext.

At the de facto trial of Hero in 4.1 Don Pedro offers his reading and therefore his deformation of the chamber-window scene. Don Pedro is, in most respects, a good man and a reasonable man, whose main impulses in the play are to help others; not only does he secure Hero for Claudio, he successfully “undertake[s] one of Hercules' labors, which is to bring Signior Benedick and the Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection th' one with th' other” (2.1.324-27). But his very involvement in the affairs of others gives him a degree of self-interest, a public image that he must preserve and defend. When called upon for his testimony at Hero's trial, he says, “I stand dishonored that have gone about / To link my dear friend to a common stale” (62-63). Perhaps one whose honor's at the stake is never the most reliable and objective witness; and earlier, in being forewarned by his brother that he was about to see a “disloyal” Hero, Don Pedro had his expectations of being personally dishonored shaped before, looking upon Margaret and Borachio, he saw whatever he saw. That is, he eavesdropped not as a disinterested reporter, but as a man whose reputation for making honorable matches for his friends had been implicitly questioned. His critical stance has been formulated and revealed before the text was read or even presented to him. So at that earlier moment, when he told Claudio, “And, as I wooed for thee to obtain her, I will join with thee to disgrace her” (3.2.111-12), if Hero proves false, Don Pedro showed already righteous indignation and some pleasant anticipation of the kill.

In 4.1, after Hero denies Claudio's accusation that “yesternight, / Out at your window betwixt twelve and one” she talked with a man (88-89), Don Pedro submits his full report:

                                                                                                              Upon mine honor
Myself, my brother, and this grievèd Count
Did see her, hear her, at that hour last night
Talk with a ruffian at her chamber-window,
Who hath indeed, most like a liberal villain,
Confessed the vile encounters they have had
A thousand times in secret.

(4.1.86-92)

That Don Pedro begins by again invoking his honor should alert us to the likelihood that his reading of events will be exactly that—his reading, neither necessarily false nor deliberately contrived, but as conditioned by his sense of self as Borachio's had been by drink.

At a couple of specific points Don Pedro's language interestingly echoes but qualifies Borachio's. Pedro speaks of the ruffian and Hero's “vile encounters” where Borachio spoke of his “amiable encounter” with the disguised Margaret; and Pedro claims to have overheard the lovers confess to having had their vile encounters “A thousand times in secret,” whereas Borachio said that Margaret “leans me out at her mistress' chamber window, bids me a thousand times good night.” Both men use the hyperbolic figure of “a thousand times,” and both refer to one or more “encounters,” though the encounters thus mentioned are far more sensationalized by Pedro's “vile” than by Borachio's mild and attractive “amiable.” Throughout 4.1, as a matter of fact, both Don Pedro and Claudio speak of Hero in terms that are positively venomous as well as sensational; no language elsewhere in the play is so extravagant as Claudio's words here about Hero, the “rotten orange” (30), who “knows the heat of a luxurious bed” (39) and who is “more intemperate in your blood / Than Venus, or those pamp'red animals / That rage in savage sensuality” (57-59). It is my thesis that these words, like Don Pedro's description of the previous night's activity, do not mirror, even in a distorted way, the chamber-window scene, because that which is nothing reflects no image. Or to return to my previous figure: we have no reason to accept Don Pedro and Claudio's reading of the chamber-window scene, and therefore we do so at our peril, because it is a commentary on a text that is a gap, a great void, at the center of Much Ado about Nothing. If we seek to verify this reading, all we find behind it is another reading, Borachio's, beside which Don Pedro and Claudio's is clearly revisionary. But what has been revised? The text that they so confidently pretend to read is indeed one nothing of the play's title, and their reading together with Borachio's reading, and all of the consequences of the chamber-window scene for Hero, Leonato, Beatrice, Benedick, and others, are components of the play's much ado.

A third reading, another anticipation of Borachio's, makes the scene yet more impenetrable. In 2.2.34-39 he tells Don John that Claudio and Don Pedro “will scarcely believe [the accusation against Hero] without trial. Offer them instances; which shall bear no less likelihood than to see me at her chamber window, hear me call Margaret Hero, hear Margaret term me Claudio; and bring them to see this the very night before the intended wedding …” (emphasis added). If the presumed Hero were to call Borachio “Claudio,” it would mean that she is herself deceived but not disloyal.

Since all these readings cannot be generated by the text, which is a void, they must be generated by the readers. In a recent article on gender difference in this play, Carol Cook categorizes Hero “as a kind of cipher or space, which other characters … fill with readings of their own.”⁸ I make the same claim for the chamber-window scene and add that it is themselves whom the readers—that is, Don Pedro and Claudio—see framed in the window. Thus Claudio, theretofore cautious, bloodless, phlegmatic, energized only by the possibility that he will find Hero disloyal and be able to “shame her” (3.2.116), posits all of the passion, sensuality, and abandon notably lacking in his own life. When he comments on the missing scene, he reveals areas of himself that are everywhere else concealed: his sexuality and probably his belief that sexuality is indecent and defiled. By contrast, when Borachio reads the missing scene to Conrade, he mentions no word that intrinsically must discredit or dishonor Margaret, his partner in this “amiable encounter.” If others take Margaret for Hero and assume the worst, that is their problem. This is the same Borachio who later will defend Margaret before the great men of Messina. Among these is Leonato, who has great trouble resisting the “facts” according to Don Pedro and Claudio, even after they have been disproven, and who shows thereby the dangers of a reliance upon secondary sources. At a late moment in the play Leonato suggests that Margaret was Don John's witting accomplice in the recent deception: “This naughty man,” he says of Borachio,

Shall face to face be brought to Margaret
Who I believe was packed in all this wrong,
Hired to it by your brother.

(5.1.284-87)⁹

Not at all eager to save his own skin whatever the price, the oddly noble Borachio insists,

                                                                                No, by my soul, she was not;
Nor knew not what she did when she spoke to me;
But always hath been just and virtuous
In anything that I do know by her.

(287-90)

Unlike Claudio, Borachio does not displace his own inadequacy (if inadequacy there be) upon a helpless woman.

The scene that causes Hero and then Margaret so much difficulty is itself silent and invisible, an airy nothing that men strive to give a local habitation and a name. It exists, or if you prefer it does not exist, at the heart of Much Ado, but somewhere beyond the limits of either page or performance. And there it mysteriously summons to life both page and performance.

Notes

1. Josephine Waters Bennett, ed., Much Ado about Nothing, by William Shakespeare, in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

2. The quarto (1600) and the folio (1623) versions of Much Ado represent Beatrice's speech the same way: “Speake cosin, or (if you cannot) stop his mouth with a kisse, and let not him speake neither.” Punctuation offers no infallible guide to pronunciation, however, since it is not necessarily Shakespeare's and since the duration of a pause signaled by a comma is uncertain.

3. This choice only defers a confrontation with the problem. A few lines later Beatrice says to Don Pedro, “My cousin tells him in his ear that he is in her heart” (282-83). What is Hero doing? This is an odd way to describe a kiss, and if Hero is whispering something to Claudio, what is she whispering? How should they appear to the audience at this moment?

4. Cf. Love's Labor's Lost, where merely by an exchange of favors the Princess and her ladies disguise their identities from the King of Navarre and the others, who are unable to fool the women with their Muscovite costumes.

5. A. R. Humphreys, ed., Much Ado about Nothing, by William Shakespeare, The New Arden Edition (London and New York: Methuen, 1981) 60. The terms are questionable because they too absolutely impose a separation between the play's “serious” and its “comic” matter; yet they are helpful because they make possible simple reference to different strands of the play's action.

6. Representative comments on the missing scene include the following. Geoffrey Bullough finds the omission “truly remarkable,” though he suspects that Shakespeare deliberately left it out “in order to draw attention to his major theme of hearsay and false report” (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 2 [New York: Columbia UP, 1958] 76). Joyce Sexton agrees and finds the absence of evidence from the play (though not from Claudio and Don Pedro's consciousness) telling: “The whole point about slander is that it works without evidence” (The Slandered Woman in Shakespeare [Victoria, B.C., Canada: U of Victoria P (ELS Monograph Series 12), 1978] 43). Other commentators appear to suspect insuperable obstacles to staging; Humphreys believes that it must be kept offstage to be “wholly convincing” (New Arden edition, 56). Josephine Waters Bennett believes that the scene must be left out because “it would either deceive and so confuse the audience, or it would fail to deceive the audience and so make the Prince and Claudio look too gullible” (The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, 275).

7. “Borachio” resembles the Spanish “borracho,” drunkard.

8. Carol Cook, “Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado about Nothing,” PMLA 101 (1986): 192.

9. Nor does Leonato's obsessive and perverse misreading end here. Three scenes later he will still maintain, “But Margaret was in some fault for this, / Although against her will, as it appears / In the true course of all the question” (5.4.4-6). The need for a woman to blame seems a distinct part of his pathology.