Much Ado About Nothing (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series)

by William Shakespeare

  The main interest of the play, then, starts in the world of common sense. Raillery and wit will protect light hearts. "There is measure in everything," (2.1.70) says Beatrice, and lest that remark on moderation sound immoderately serious, she makes it into a pun and dances out her conviction. The lovers are too clear-eyed not to be self-critical. When Beatrice overhears her disdain, scornful wit, and self-endearment exaggerated, she abandons them. "Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!" (3.1.109). And when Benedick also overhears a conversation on his character--that he will scorn Beatrice's love, since he "hath a contemptible spirit"--he decides to forsake "quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain" (2.3.236-37) because, he says, "I must not seem proud. Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending" (225-26). Part of this, of course, is not the result of the lovers' good resolutions, but of their instinctive attraction toward each other. "Good Lord, for alliance!" cries Beatrice, as she watches Claudio and Hero making love, and there is a touch of envy and self-pity in her jest: "Thus goes everyone to the world but I.... I may sit in a comer and cry 'Heigh-ho for a husband!' " (2.1.314-16).

  "Alliance," then, catches these two independent spirits, who have too much good sense to resist nature. Leonato in his passion of grief had asserted: I will be flesh and blood;

  For there was never yet philosopher

  That could endure the toothache patiently.

  (5.1.34-36)

  Now Benedick feels the pangs of love, and when his friends twit him on his sadness, he replies: "I have the toothache." (3.2.21) They ascribe it to love and suggest a remedy, but Benedick already knows well that "Yet is this no charm for the toothache." (66)

  To himself, he will not deny the effects and the power of love. Yet he will try to keep it in proportion through humor: Leander the good swimmer, Troilus the first employer of panders, and a whole book full of these quondam carpetmongers, whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse--why, they were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love.

  (5.2.30-36)

  He has too much respect for his genuine feelings to transform them into fashionable conventions; he "cannot woo in festival terms," and when he looks for rhymes for "lady," "scorn," and "school," he can only come out with "baby," "horn," and "fool." Sentiment--even when it is experienced directly--is to be kept in its place by antisentiment.

  His sincerity is best shown in that excellently conceived dramatic scene of his challenge to Claudio. Here we have dramatic reversal of moods, for the perpetual giber Benedick is now in deadly earnest--"You have among you killed a sweet and innocent lady" (5.1.189-90)--and his friends Pedro and Claudio are uneasily jesting against his estrangement and their own bad consciences. In critical moments Benedick controls both his emotion and his wit; their interaction protects him at once against the affectations of intellect and the extreme sallies of passion.

  The integrity and sincerity of his love, based so broadly, make him in the end impervious to mockery, and it is "Benedick, the married man" who, after kissing Beatrice heartily, replies in all surety: "I'll tell thee what, Prince: a college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humor," (5.2. 100-11) who demands music and dancing, and who advises Pedro: "Prince, thou art sad. Get thee a wife!" (123). In . the wedding of Benedick and Beatrice, humor has been married to love on both sides of the family. Since humor presupposes a greater consciousness of the world and of one's self, the wedding promises more stability and happiness than in any of Shakespeare's previous imaginings. "Man is a giddy thing," says Benedick, "and this is my conclusion" (107-8). Man is less giddy, surer in his moral sense, in direct proportion to his awareness of his own giddiness.

  W. H. AUDEN

  From The Dyer's Hand

  The called-for songs in Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night illustrate Shakespeare's skill in making what might have been beautiful irrelevancies contribute to the dramatic structure.

  Much Ado About Nothing

  Act 2. Scene 3.

  Song. Sigh no more, ladies.

  Audience. Don Pedro, Claudio, and Benedick (in hiding).

  In the two preceding scenes we have learned of two plots, Don Pedro's plot to make Benedick fall in love with Beatrice, and Don John's plot to make Claudio believe that Hero, his wife-to-be, is unchaste. Since this is a comedy, we, the audience, know that all will come right in the end, that Beatrice and Benedick, Claudio and Hero will get happily married.

  The two plots of which we have just learned, therefore, arouse two different kinds of suspense. If the plot against Benedick succeeds, we are one step nearer the goal; if the plot against Claudio succeeds, we are one step back.

  At this point, between their planning and their execution, action is suspended, and we and the characters are made to listen to a song.

  The scene opens with Benedick laughing at the thought of the lovesick Claudio and congratulating himself on being heart-whole, and he expresses their contrasted states in musical imagery.

  From The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays by W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, Inc., 1962: London: Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1963). (c) Copyright, 1957, by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

  I have known him when there was no music with him but the drum and the fife; and now had he rather hear the tabor and the pipe.... Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?--Well, a horn for my money, when all's done.

  We, of course, know that Benedick is not as heart-whole as he is trying to pretend. Beatrice and Benedick resist each other because, being both proud and intelligent, they do not wish to be the helpless slaves of emotion or, worse, to become what they have often observed in others, the victims of an imaginary passion. Yet whatever he may say against music, Benedick does not go away, but stays and listens.

  Claudio, for his part, wishes to hear music because he is in a dreamy, lovesick state, and one can guess that his petit roman as he listens will be of himself as the ever-faithful swain, so that he will not notice that the mood and words of the song are in complete contrast to his daydream. For the song is actually about the irresponsibility of men and the folly of women taking them seriously, and recommends as an antidote good humor and common sense. If one imagines these sentiments being the expression of a character, the only character they suit is Beatrice.

  Leonato... She is never sad but when she sleeps, and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say she hath often dreamt of unhappiness and waked herself with laughing.

  Don Pedro. She cannot endure to hear tell of a husband.

  Leonato. O, by no means! She mocks all her wooers out of suit.

  I do not think it too farfetched to imagine that the song arouses in Benedick's mind an image of Beatrice, the tenderness of which alarms him. The violence of his comment when the song is over is suspicious: I pray God, his bad voice bode no mischief! I had as lief have heard the night-raven, come what plague could have come after it.

  And, of course, there is mischief brewing. Almost immediately he overhears the planned conversation of Claudio and Don Pedro, and it has its intended effect. The song may not have compelled his capitulation, but it has certainly softened him up.

  More mischief comes to Claudio who, two scenes later, shows himself all too willing to believe Don John's slander before he has been shown even false evidence, and declares that, if it should prove true, he will shame Hero in public. Had his love for Hero been all he imagined it to be, he would have laughed in Don John's face and believed Hero's assertion of her innocence, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, as immediately as her cousin does. He falls into the trap set for him because as yet he is less a lover than a man in love with love. Hero is as yet more an image in his own mind than a real person, and such images are susceptible to every suggestion.

  For Claudio, the song marks the moment when his pleasant illusions about himself as a lover are at their highest. Before he can really listen to music he must be cu
red of imaginary listening, and the cure lies through the disharmo nious experiences of passion and guilt.

  CAROL THOMAS NEELY

  Broken Nuptials in Much Ado About Nothing

  Poised at the center of Shakespeare's thirteen comedies, Much Ado About Nothing uniquely blends elements from them all. It is linked with both the romantic comedies and problem comedies by virtue of the interactions of its two couples, its two plots. In the Claudio/Hero plot, the anxieties and risks underlying the conventions of romantic love are expressed and contained by the broken nuptials, Hero's vilification and mock death, and Claudio's penitence and acceptance of a substitute bride, motifs that are developed further in the problem comedies, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, and in the late romances. In the Beatrice/Benedick plot, the mutual mockery, double gulling, and Benedick's acceptance of Beatrice's command to "kill Claudio" function, as do the mockery, trickery, parody, and tamings of the festive comedies, to break down resistance and to release desire and affection. The Beatrice/Benedick plot protects the Hero/Claudio plot by ventilating and displacing it and by transforming its romance elements. In turn, the impasse of the Hero/Claudio plot generates movement in the Beatrice-Benedick plot and, by permitting the witty couple the expression of romantic affection, initiates the transformation of their "merry wars" into a witty truce.' Together the two plots maintain an equilibrium between male control and female initiative, between male reform and female submission, which is characteristic of the romantic comedies. In this play, wit clarifies the vulnerability of romantic idealization while romance alters the static, self-defensive gestures of wit.

  From Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 38-57, abridged by the author.

  The two plots are played out against a backdrop of patriarchal authority; this authority is protected by the extensive bawdy, especially the cuckoldry jokes. This bawdy expresses and mutes sexual anxieties; it turns them into a communal joke and provides comic release and relief in specific ways. It manifests sexuality as the central component of marriage and emphasizes male power and female weakness. The bawdy persistently views sex as a male assault on women. Men "board" women (2.1.142), "put in the pikes" (5.2.21 ), and women cheerfully resign themselves to being "made heavier ... by the weight of a man," and "stuffed" (3.4.26-27,62-63). The women counterattack by mocking the virility that threatens them: the "blunt foils" (5.2.13), "short horns" (2.1.23), and "fine little" wit (5.1.165) of the men. They do not, however, see their own sexuality as a weapon. They joke about female "lightness" (3.4.36,43,45) to warn each other against it, not to threaten men; even the term itself identifies women with weakness rather than strength.

  But women's proverbial "lightness' is also a source of male anxiety. Men, perceiving sexuality as power over women, fear its loss through female betrayal. They defend themselves against betrayal in three ways: They deny its possibility through idealization, anticipate it through misogyny, or transform it, through the motif of cuckoldry, into an emblem of male virility. As Coppelia Kahn shows, cuckoldry is associated with virility through the horn, which symbolizes both.2 The reiterated motif "In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke" (1.1.252) emphasizes the bull's potency as well as his submission to dull domestic life and inevitable cuckoldry. Similarly, to be "horn-mad" (260) is to be both furious with jealousy and sexually voracious; both halves of the pun imply aggressiveness. The defensive function of these jokes is especially apparent in the extended one that precedes the couples' pledge to marry. In Claudio's account, the scorn due the cuckold is ingeniously swallowed up in the acclaim awarded the cuckolder for his "noble feat" by which he attains power over both the woman and the husband: Tush, fear not, man! We'll tip thy horns with gold,

  And all Europa shall rejoice at thee,

  As once Europa did at lusty Jove

  When he would play the noble beast in love. (5.4.44-47)

  All rejoice with the woman. The cuckold is crowned, the cuckolder is noble, and even the illegitimate calf will be proud of, if intimidated by, his father's virility--and may even inherit it (48-51). Cuckoldry has thus been deftly dissociated from female power and infidelity and identified instead with masculinity, virility, and solidarity.

  In Much Ado, marriage and cuckoldry, both potentially threatening to male bonds and power, become assurances of them. But male authority in the play remains lame and diffused. Leonato is a weak father; Claudio, a passive protagonist; Don John, a conventional villain. Don Pedro is potentially the most powerful man in the play, but he phases himself out of the plots he initiates. Male power in the play is blunted by its ineffectuality and rendered comic by Dogberry's parody of it. In 4.2, Dogberry parodies the inept strategies and good fortune of the other men; his arraignment reenacts as farce Hero's trial in the preceding scene. The arraignment occurs before any examination of the evidence; "malefactors" and "benefactors" are indistinguishable, and judges as well as accused have charges brought against them. Dogberry's self-defense becomes a comic defense of his betters which articulates the men's testy response to insults real or imagined, their reliance on conventions to protect and confirm their self-importance, and the potential for asininity that goes along with their desires for swaggering and safety: I am a wise fellow; and which is more, an officer; and which is more, a householder; and which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to! And a rich fellow enough, go to! And a fellow that hath had losses; and one that hath two gowns and everything handsome about him.

  (79-85)

  Yet in spite of the men's rivalry, ineffectuality, and silliness, they control all of the play's plot-generating deceits and revelations. They fit women with husbands, and their authority and solidarity are confirmed in the play's conclusion.

  But first, conflicts disrupt both the male bonds and the two couples. The Claudio/Hero alliance is thinly sketched as a conventional one in which the functions of romantic idealization are made clear. Claudio protects himself from Hero's sexuality by viewing her as a remote, idealized love object who is not to be touched or even talked to: "she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on" (1.1.181-82).3 Patriarchal marriage customs conveniently coalesce with romantic rhetoric, enabling him to maintain Hero as an object of social exchange and possession: "Lady, as you are mine, I am yours," he cautiously vows (2.1.304-05). He lets Don Pedro do his wooing for him. He scarcely acknowledges Hero's sexual attractiveness, and his only reference to his own desires seems oddly passive and gynecocentric in a play crammed with aggressively phallic innuendo: "But now I am returned and that war-thoughts Have left their places vacant, in their rooms Came thronging soft and delicate desires, / All prompting me how fair young Hero is" (1.1.291-94). Claudio thus alleviates his anxieties about marriage by viewing it both as a romantic ideal and as a conventional social arrangement.

  Hero's willingness to be the passive object of her father's negotiations, Don Pedro's decorous wooing, and Claudio's low-keyed proposal provide her with a parallel defense against sexuality. She is as unforthcoming as Claudio at their first exchange, and perhaps she welcomes his silence, for she asks Don Pedro as he begins his wooing to "say nothing" (2.1.87-88). Her own uneasiness about sex is suggested in her unhappiness on her wedding day; the one bawdy innuendo that she contributes to the women's banter, "There, thou prick'st her with a thistle" (3.4.74) is as tentative as Claudio's allusion. Hero is the perfect object of his "delicate" desires: modest, chaste, virtuous, silent.

  The witty verbal skirmishes comprising Beatrice's and Benedick's "merry wars" explicitly express the anxieties about.loss of power through sexuality, love, and marriage that are suppressed by Claudio's and Hero's silent romanticism. Their verbal wars fill up the silence of the Hero/Claudio plot and reveal the fundamental asymmetry of the battle of the sexes. Benedick expressly equates loving with humiliation and loss of potency; he imagines it as a castrating torture: "Prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with
drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad marker's pen and hang me up at the door of a brothel house for the sign of blind Cupid" (1.1.241-45). He likewise fears being separated from his friends by marriage and loss of status with them if he must "sigh away Sundays" or, feminized, "turn spit" like Hercules (1.1.194; 2.1.251 ).

  He defends himself from fears of love, marriage, and female betrayal by distrust of women--"I will do myself the right to trust none" (1.1.235). Distrust, coupled with the claim that all women dote on him, allows him to profess virility without putting it to the proof. Mocking Claudio's romantic idealization, he is similarly protected by misogyny. The parallel function of the two poses is evident in Benedick's admission that if he could find an ideal woman, he would abandon the pose: "But till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come into my grace" (2.3.28-29). Benedick's misogyny puts him in a position of unchallengeable power; his wit is consistently belligerent, protective, and self-aggrandizing.

  Instead of defensively asserting power, Beatrice's sallies often reveal weakness and ambivalence; her wit, in contrast to Benedick's, is consistently self-deprecating. Her mockery of marriage and men poignantly reveals her desire for both. Her repartee expresses as much anxiety about being unmarried, as it does about being married: "So, by being too curst, God will send you no horns" (2.1.25-26). She does not mock Hero's marriage plans as Benedick does Claudio's but only urges her to marry a man who pleases her. Hero's engagement does not engender smug self-satisfaction in her but a sense of isolation: "Thus goes everyone to the world but I, and I am sunburnt. I may sit in a comer and cry 'Heigh-ho for a husband!' "(314-16). Even her allusion to "living as merry as the day is long" in heaven "where the bachelors sit" shows a desire to continue to share equally in easy male camaraderie rather than a desire to remain single (48-49).