Much Ado About Nothing (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series)

by William Shakespeare

  Another aspect of the sustained, mimetic realism of Much Ado has to do with the kind of language that makes up the complex, closely interwoven dialogue of the play. The language used to carry the interchanges between Rosalind and Orlando, or between Viola and Duke Orsino, is romantically stylized and tempts us to immerse ourselves in some ideal, golden world of love. The language used for the interchanges between characters in Much Ado constantly reminds us of the flow of clever discourse in the best moments of the actual world we all inhabit. And the potency of this language of Much Ado is such that it seems capable of generating the natural, this-worldly atmosphere of the play just in itself. It is not the formalized repartee, the carefully contrived and balanced give and take of wit in Restoration comedy. Rather, its special quality is its air of the spontaneous. In Much Ado it is as if the characters themselves were inventing in front of us their quick ironic retorts and their exultant gaiety at the accomplishment.

  The characters in this play take their dramatic world to be so much alive that they are constantly remembering what they have said to each other earlier in the action. The most striking example of this sort of realism is the acid repetition to Benedick by Don Pedro and by Claudio (5.1 and 5.4) of Benedick's extravagant description (1.1) of what may be done to him if he ever falls in love. But Beatrice, who turns the word "stuffed" inside out in her ridicule of Benedick (1.1), later tempts Margaret to use it against her (3.4): "A maid, and stuffed!" Don Pedro, with Claudio by (5.1), catches his anger at Leonato's importunate language in the deftly sardonic phrase, "we will not wake your patience." Claudio, moments later in the same scene (after he learns that he has been grossly fooled), expresses his genuine contrition to Leonato by slightly varying the same phrase: "I know not how to pray your patience." Even the two members of the watch, who are worried about "one Deformed" in 3.4, find Dogberry carefully remembering in 5.1 to have Borachio examined "upon that point."

  The sustained, conversational quality of the dialogue of Much Ado, which accompanies and gives body to the nonchalant casualness of the character confrontations in the play, is perhaps the ultimate essence of the play's mimetic richness. The characters may individualize what they say, but they all speak essentially the same sophisticated-realistic language of their group. In its imagery it is much concerned with the act of sex and with the expected cuckoldry of their society ("he that is less than a man, I am not for him"; "Tush, fear not, man! We'll tip thy horns with gold"). It is also full of the kind of literary reference that would be known to a person of such a society. Hercules, Ate, Europa and Jove, Baucis and Philemon are tossed into the stream of discourse; Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and A Handful of Pleasant Delights are quoted; Beatrice makes use of current attitudes already exploited in Davies's poem Orchestra in her description of marriage as a dance. But beyond all this sort of identifying conversational style is an "aliveness" in what the characters say to one another. It is this extravagant "aliveness," in combination with the play's other dramatic devices, that gives to Much Ado its separate identity of discourse. In no other of Shakespeare's comedies could one of its characters call another, with such eloquent understatement, "my Lady Tongue."

  The substance of Much Ado is that of the romantic comedies, sex, love, and marriage. But this play's differentiated way of regarding this substance, its sophisticated realism, is certainly intentionally suggested by its title. Within the play itself there are two views of this substance. One view is that assumed by Claudio, Don Pedro, Leonato, and Hero. Claudio is the central, dominating voice of this group as he acts out its social assumptions. He is presented as a conventional young man, one who regards love and marriage as the making of a sensible match with a virtuous and attractive young girl who brings a good dowry and the approval of her father and of his friends. Although a young man today, a member of a similar social group, might put his feelings in somewhat more romantic terms, if he were of a "good" family in any city of the Western world, he might essentially agree with Claudio's view.

  Claudio is certainly no passionate Romeo, and there is no indication in the play that he has done more than regard Hero as an attractive member of the aristocratic society to which they both belong. He is (perhaps somewhat in the position of Paris, in Romeo and Juliet) a young man capable of an easy romanticizing of sexual attraction, as his comment on Hero to Don Pedro fully reveals: ... now I am returned and that war-thoughts

  Have left their places vacant, in their rooms

  Come thronging soft and delicate desires,

  All prompting me how fair young Hero is,

  Saying I liked her ere I went to wars. (1.1.291-95)

  Claudio, again like Paris, is the young man bent on doing "the right thing" in his society. He is attractive as a man, as his worst enemy, Don John, lets us know by his envy. But Claudio is also, as people aware only of the right thing to do tend to be, terrifyingly naive (and terrifyingly obtuse). As Benedick puts it, Claudio reacts like a hurt bird when he thinks Don Pedro has taken Hero from him ("Alas, poor hurt fowl! Now will he creep into sedges" 2.1.200-1). And Benedick places Claudio's romantic inclinations toward Hero at the level of the feelings of a small child by comparing Claudio to a "schoolboy who, being overjoyed with finding a bird's nest, shows it his companion, and he [Don Pedro] steals it" (220-22). Claudio's politeness, his sense of the socially appropriate, even leads him to suggest that he abandon his bride immediately after his marriage and accompany his sponsor, Don Pedro, from Messina to Aragon. Don Pedro again identifies for us the childlike quality of Claudio's feelings for Hero when he replies: "that would be as great a soil in the new gloss of your marriage as to show a child his new coat and forbid him to wear it" (3.2.5-7).

  In the church scene, Claudio's turning on Hero for her supposed assignation on the eve of her marriage is wholly in keeping with the nature of his feelings for her and with the codes of his group. He moves toward his denunciation in the sententiously arrogant, teasing manner of the overly conventional person who has been fooled about something rather important and who will now take great pleasure in a measured retaliation. Claudio, the exquisite, reacts appropriately like a child cheated over a toy promised to him. And the absolute "rightness" of his attitude in the play is made quite clear by the fact that Hero's father and Don Pedro instantly agree with it. Leonato, who was as concerned as Claudio, and Don Pedro with a "good" marriage, reacts, indeed, much as Capulet (also a socially conventional man) had reacted when Juliet had refused to marry Paris: Why had I one?

  Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?

  ... mine that I was proud on, mine so much

  That I myself was to myself not mine,

  Valuing of her--why she, O, she is fall'n

  Into a pit of ink. (4.1.128-39)

  Beatrice and Benedick, wholly unchildlike, present an- . other view of the essential stuff of this play, a view that cuts across the conventional one, and insinuates doubts lurking in sophisticated minds as to its necessary validity. They are everywhere presented as completely aware of the fact that they are playing roles with and for each other--Beatrice as shrew, Benedick as misogynist--and enjoying the playing. The subject matter of their game is a distaste for institutionalized romantic love leading to marriage, the precise kind of "love" that Claudio and Hero accept easily and without thought. The only obstacle to Claudio's pursuit would be the sort of thing he thinks had happened, a lack of sexual virtue on the part of the girl who has caught his fancy. The subtle obstacle to the union of Benedick and Beatrice is that neither is ever sure of what he or she would be like if they agreed to quit playing their respective roles. Indeed, part of the dramatic (and psychological) excitement at the play's end is that neither one of this pair is yet certain of what emotions really lie below the level of the role-playing.

  The love game of Beatrice and Benedick is an intricate one in Much Ado, because both of them are teasing something more complicated than just conventional romantic love. They are dramatized as testing the antiromantic roles they are actually play
ing against their sense of what it would be like to be a Hero or a Claudio, to fall into the words and phrases and stances of institutionalized romance. Moreover, in their dueling in the self-accepted roles of the man and the woman too knowing to wear the yoke of marriage and to "sigh away Sundays," it is always made dramatically obvious that both characters are aware that with any slipping either or both could easily become a Hero or a Claudio and turn husband and wife. Benedick's first direct comment on Beatrice, early in the play (1.1.184-86), is, it seems to me, self-evident acknowledgment of this fact: "and she were not possessed with a fury, [Beatrice] exceeds [Hero] as much in beauty as the first of May doth the last of December."

  It is this ambivalent element in their love game, I think, that made Beatrice and Benedick so fascinating to their own age, and now also to us. And the basis of the fascination is that in their own probing of their reactions to ritualized romantic love, they invite us to probe the usually inaccessible areas of our own knowing, our own awareness in such matters. More important, if we think, at the play's end, that Beatrice and Benedick merely exist for five acts to be tricked into admitting that they are fundamentally as conventionally involved in sex, love, and marriage as Hero and Claudio, we have missed the essential purport of the play.

  Beatrice is the more open of the two in her acknowledgment of the ambiguity of her role-playing. Her acid remarks in the first scene of Act 1 concerning Benedick's challenge to Cupid, and her uncle's fool's response (i.e., Beatrice herself ?), carry the suggestion, never made overt in the play, either that Beatrice had never been sure of her role as Lady Tongue or that she had once tried out a romantic role with Benedick himself. She is presented as openly uneasy (2.1) over the fact that Hero has got herself a husband ("I may sit in a comer and cry 'Heigh-ho for a husband!' "). And she once darkly hints an earlier involvement with Benedick when she tells Don Pedro that Benedick lent his heart to her for a while, "and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice" (275-78).

  The ambiguousness in Benedick's role as misogynic bachelor is perhaps best suggested by the extravagant language he always uses to defend his role: Prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad maker's pen and hang me up at the door of a brothel house for the sign of blind Cupid. (1.1.241-45)

  His taunt to Claudio concerning Hero ("Would you buy her, that you inquire after her?" 173-74), and his headlong flight from Beatrice (2.1) with the bitter comment that "while she is here" he could live as quietly in hell, are but further illustrations of this extravagance. Dramatically, to be sure, such soaring flights of words prepare us for the irony of his surrender to love of a sort. Psychologically, they tempt us to wonder that a man could hate so vehemently what he professes to have no interest in.

  The marriage of Hero and Claudio turns on the simple problem as to whether Hero is a virgin or not, i.e., as to whether she is socially and therefore personally acceptable to Claudio in his aristocratic world of arranged marriages. The marriage of Beatrice and Benedick turns on the ability of their peers to trick them out of their self-conscious role-playing. It is of interest to note that the latter pair's willingness to surrender to love and marriage takes place while Hero's virtue is still under a cloud as far as Claudio is concerned, and therefore at a moment when their previous bantering would be inappropriate. It is equally important to note that both Beatrice and Benedick, if somewhat subdued, actually bring alive again, at the play's end, something of the ambiguity toward love that they had had from the beginning of the play.

  Beatrice's final words are not those of a Rosalind or a Viola: I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption.

  (5.4.95-96)

  Benedick's penultimate comments are addressed not to Beatrice, but rather to Don Pedro. And Benedick insists upon being as ambiguous about his feelings, now that he had agreed to conform to marriage, as he had been earlier, when he could only exclaim against it. He insists to Don Pedro that "since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it" (104-6). He concludes that Don Pedro himself had better marry in order that he too may join the gay company of cuckolds-to-be: get thee a wife, get thee a wife! There is no staff more reverend than one tipped with hom. (122-24)

  In Romeo and Juliet, written about four years before Much Ado, Shakespeare had dramatized the lyric, fragile love of very young people not yet wise enough to yield to the social realities--and therefore broken by them. He had presented their love as a highly perishable commodity, one as subject to accident as to time. It is not only Romeo and Juliet, but we, as audience, who acquiesce in their deaths because we are fully aware that in "reality" there can only be either slow dilution or abrupt extinction of such flower-like love. In Twelfth Night, written probably a year or so later than Much Ado, we are kept within the elegant, golden confines of courtly, aristocratic romance--a place full of music and of bodily forms (to borrow from Yeats) "of hammered gold and gold enameling," set singing to keep some "drowsy Emperor awake."

  The kind of love encompassed by the dialogue of Much Ado, and by its two sets of lovers, is love in the social world. This comedy, indeed, is a highly novel one for Shakespeare to have written. The play ends with its characters and the audience accepting the two marriages that have been in the making from its beginning. But the power of the comedy lies not in our accepting the fragility of youthful passion or in our surrender to idyllic romance. Rather, Much Ado, by all its strategies of language and characterization, moves so close to reality that it cannot reach a denouement in which the simply understood mood or attitude of Romeo and Juliet or of Twelfth Night reaches final focus.

  The essential uniqueness of Much Ado as a comedy, and its fascination, lies in the fact that it invokes our awareness of the complicated relationship between the indeterminate nature of private feeling and the simplicities of the decorous behavior which is supposed to embody such feeling. That is to say, Much Ado dramatizes sex, love, and marriage in close imitation of their complexity in actuality. This play, of course, is far too stylized to be "real," and it keeps us comically insulated from too deep involvement with its characters and its substance. The play's final moment of balance, of standing still, then, is necessarily somewhat different from that of the Shakespearean romances where a long ritual of wooing comes to a ritualized conclusion. In Much Ado we are given, in its last scene, the dramatic illusion that the pair of marriages has been created by the volition of the characters themselves. They seem to be marrying out of their own desire to find, if only momentarily, a way of being at peace with themselves and with each other.

  --DAVID L. STEVENSON

  Hunter College

  Much adoe about Nothing.

  Enter Leonato governour of Meffina, Innogen bis wife, Here

  his daughter, and Beatrice bis neece, with a

  messenger.

  Leonato.

  I Learne in this letter, that don Peter of Arragon comes this night to Meffina.

  Mess. He is very neare by this,he was not three leagues off when I left him.

  Leona. How many gentlemen have you loft in this action?

  Mess. But few of any fort, and none of name.

  Leons. A victory is twice it felfe, when the atchiuer brings home ful numbers: I find here,that don Peter hath beftowed much honour on a yong Florentine called Claudio.

  Mess. Much deferu don his part, and equally remembred by don Pedro he hath borne himfelfe beyond the promife of his age, doing in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion he hath indeed better bettred expectation then you must expect of me to tell you how.

  Leo. He hath an vnckie here in Messina will be very much glad of it.

  Mess. I have already delivered him letters, and there ap peares much joy in him, even to much, that ioy could not fhew it felfe modeft enough, without a badge of bitternesse.

  Leo. Did he breake out i
nto teares?

  Mess. In great measure.

  A 2 Leo.

  First page of text from the Quarto of 1600. Notice that in the first stage direction, the Governor of Messina is said to be accompanied by "Innogen his wife." Apparently when Shakespeare began writing the scene, he thought he would include this character, but in fact she appears nowhere in the play.

  Much Ado About Nothing

  [Dramatis Personae

  Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon

  Don John, his bastard brother

  Claudio, a young lord of Florence

  Benedick, a young lord of Padua

  Leonato, Governor of Messina

  Antonio, an old man, his brother

  Balthasar, attendant on Don Pedro

  Friar Francis

  Dogberry, a constable

  Verges, a headborough

  A Sexton

  A Boy

  Hero, daughter to Leonato

  Beatrice, niece to Leonato

  Messengers, Watch, Attendants, &c.

  Scene: Messina]

  Much Ado About Nothing

  [ACT 1

  Scene I. Before Leonato's house.]

  Enter Leonato, Governor of Messina, Hero his

  daughter, and Beatrice his niece, with a Messenger.

  Leonato. I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.

  Messenger. He is very near by this. He was not three leagues off when I left him.

  Leonato. How many gentlemendeg2 have you lost in this action?