Beatrice's ambivalence about marriage is rooted in her fear of the social and sexual power it grants to men. Her bawdy jests manifest both her desire for Benedick and her fear of the potential control over her which her desire gives him. In the first scene she refers to Benedick as "Signior Mountanto," suggestively initiates dialogue by asking, "Is it possible Disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?" (1.1.29,116-17), and from behind the safety of her mask admits to Benedick (of him)--"I would he had boarded me" (2.1.142). But her jesting about the unsuitability of husbands with beards and those without them mocks Benedick's beard and reveals her ambivalent attitude toward virility: "He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me; and he that is less than a man, I am not for him" (36-39). Because she is apprehensive about the social and sexual submission demanded of women in marriage and wary of men's volatile mixture of earthly frailty with arrogant authority, Beatrice does not want a husband: Not till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none. Adam's sons are my brethren, and truly I hold it a sin to match in my kindred. (59-64)
Given the play's dominant metaphor of sex as a male assault, the subordination demanded of Renaissance women in marriage, and the valiant cloddishness of many of the men in the comedies, Beatrice's fear of being "overmastered" seems judicious. But her anxieties, like Benedick's, grow out of pride and fear of risk as well as out of justified wariness.
Beatrice and Benedick, both proud mockers of love, cannot dispel these anxieties or admit to love without intervention. The asymmetrical gullings perpetrated by their friends displace Hero's and Claudio's silent engagement and act out contrasted male and female anxieties there left unspoken. The men gently mock Benedick's witty misogyny while nurturing his ego. Their gentle ribbing of Benedick's "contemptible spirit" is tempered with much praise of his virtues; he is proper, wise, witty, and valiant "As Hector" (2.3.181-88). They alleviate his fears about Beatrice's aggressiveness by a lengthy, exaggerated tale of her desperate passion for him: "then down upon her knees she falls, weeps, sobs, beats her heart, tears her hair, prays, curses--'O sweet Benedick! God give me patience!' "(149-51). The story dovetails perfectly with his fantasy that all women dote on him (and presumably it gratifies the other men to picture the disdainful Beatrice in this helpless state). The men also reassure Benedick that Beatrice is sweet and "out of all suspicion, she is virtuous" (161-62). The gulling permits Benedick to love with his friends' approval while remaining complacently self-satisfied. Even these protective assurances of his power win from him only a grudgingly impersonal acknowledgment of his feelings: "Love me? Why, it must be requited" (220-21).
The women's gulling of Beatrice is utterly different in strategy and effect. They make only one unembroidered mention of Benedick's love for her, and even that is interrogative--"But are you sure That Benedick loves Beatrice so entirely?" (3.1.36-37). They praise his virtues, not Beatrice's. Throughout most of the staged scene, they attack at length and with gusto Beatrice's proud wit, deflating rather than bolstering her self-esteem. The men emphasize Beatrice's love whereas the women emphasize her inability to love as a means of exorcising it: "She cannot love, Nor take no shape nor project of affection, She is so self-endeared" (54-56). Beatrice, accepting unabashedly the accuracy of these charges--"Contempt, farewell! And maiden pride, adieu!" (109)--is released into an undefen sive and personal declaration of love and of passionate submission to Benedick: "Benedick, love on; I will requite thee, Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand. If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee To bind our loves up in a holy band" (111-14). She views marriage not as a social inevitability but as a ritual expressing affectionate commitment. Benedick's "love" will be requited with "kindness," not merely with the production of "kind."
The men's anxieties about sexuality and submission then erupt violently in Don John's slander. It is ironically appropriate that, though Hero has never talked to Claudio at all and he had "never tempted her with word too large" (4.1.51 ), he should immediately accept Don John's report that she "talk[ed] with a man out at a window" (307) as proof of her infidelity. Though he does not "see her chamber window ent'red" (3.2.109), his suppositions about the act transform defensive idealization to vicious degradation, as will occur later with Angelo, Troilus, Hamlet, Othello, Posthumus, and Leontes. Once his suspicions are aroused, Claudio's silent worship explodes into extravagantly lascivious denunciation: Out on thee, seeming! I will write against it,
You seem to me as Dian in her orb,
As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown;
But you are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus, or those pamp'red animals
That rage in savage sensuality. (4.1.55-60)
He perverts the ceremony that had seemed to protect him and now seeks his friends' confirmation of Hero's corruption.
When unanchored idealization turns to degradation here, nuptials are shattered more violently and irretrievably than in the other comedies. The possibility of future reconciliation is kept alive, however, by the friar's scheme for Hero's mock death, by Dogberry and his crew's knowledge of the truth about Don John's deceit, and by Beatrice's command to Benedick. The slander of Hero tempers Beatrice's commitment to love. But Claudio's failure of romantic faith in Hero parallels and helps to rectify Benedick's lack of romantic commitment to Beatrice. Both men, along with Hero, must risk a comic death and effect a comic transformation to affirm their love. Although only Dogberry's revelation influences the plot, the three "deaths" function together to engender the play's comic reconciliations and festive release.
Hero's mock death, transforming the strategies of self-concealment through masking, disguise, or withdrawal practiced by women in romantic comedies, anticipates the development of the motif in later plays. The mock death, designed by the woman and her confidante to mend nuptials shattered by men, is both an involuntary, passive escape from degradation and a voluntary constructive means to alter it. Friar Francis, who engineers the death with Leonato's approval, outlines its constructive purpose and potential effects. The death--real or imagined--of the slandered woman satisfies the lover's desire for revenge while alleviating his fear of infidelity: "Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men" (Othello, 5.2.6). Then relief and guilt working together will change "slander to remorse" (4.1.210). Freed from the pain of desiring her and the fear of losing her, the lover can re-idealize the woman, a process that is described in detail by the friar, walked through in this play, and dramatized more completely in All's Well That Ends Well, Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale.
For it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it; but being lacked 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 appareled in more precious habit,
More moving, delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul
Than when she lived indeed. (216-29)
Through the death--pretended or actual--of the corrupted beloved, the lover can repossess her, purified.
But for women the strategy is bold, painful, and risky. Whereas, in earlier comedies, female disguise, control, and wit brought men to their senses, in later ones, more dis turbingly, female submission generates male affection. Hero must put herself in the hands of the friar, practice patience, and accept, if the trick fails, chaste seclusion in a religious r
etreat. Women pretend to die of unrequited love as Beatrice is said to be doing; they "die" sexually, validating male virility as Helen (All's Well) and Mariana (Measure for Measure) do in bed tricks whose deceit makes them a form of mock death; and they die, or pretend to, as retribution for their imagined betrayals. Juliet undergoes the death-like swoon induced by the friar's potion and her interment with dead bodies in the Capulet monument, while Hermione must remain in seclusion sixteen years. In the tragedies, Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cleopatra actually die.
The woman's pretended death, even when combined with a vigorous defense of her virtues by her friends,4 does not by itself ensure penitence. Claudio seems utterly unaffected by the death until Borachio testifies to Hero's innocence; then re-idealization is instantaneous: "Sweet Hero, now thy image doth appear / In the rare semblance that I loved it first" (5.1.252-53). Although the motif appears in all genres, playing dead can perhaps be seen as a female version of the tragic heroes' literal and symbolic journeys.5 Its effect is not to transform the woman as the tragic hero is transformed, but to achieve the transformation of her image in the eyes of the hero and to alter and complicate the audience's view of her. The motif satisfies the male characters' fantasies of control and the audience's need to sympathize with the slandered women.
But in Much Ado the festive conclusion is not only made possible by Hero's mock death, Claudio's enforced penance, and Dogberry's apprehension of the "benefactors" who expose the deceit. Equally important is Benedick's willingness to comply with Beatrice's command to "Kill Claudio" (4.1.287). Extravagant and coercive as her demand may be, Benedick's willingness to comply is a necessary antidote to the play's pervasive misogyny and a necessary rehabilitation of romance from Claudio's corruption of it. Benedick's challenge to Claudio, by affirming his faith in both Hero's and Beatrice's fidelity, repudiates his former mistrust of women and breaks his bonds with the male friends who shared this attitude. Romantic vows have proved empty and-must now be validated through deeds. Male aggression is to be used not in war but for love, not against women but on their behalf. Beatrice calls on Benedick to become a hero of romance in order to qualify his wit and verify his commitment to her. Although the duel does not take place, Benedick's acquiescence and delivery of the challenge to Claudio signals his transformation and reconciles him with Beatrice. The dynamics of the Beatrice/Benedick plot invert and counteract the dynamics of the Claudio/Hero plot. Whereas Hero must "die" in response to Claudio's misogynistic fantasies of her corruption, Benedick must agree to kill Claudio in compliance with Beatrice's demand in order to replace witty misogyny with romantic commitment.
At the conclusion, Claudio's and Hero's pat reaffirmation of their wedding vows ignores rather than transforms the conflicts which erupted through the broken nuptials. First Claudio performs a ritualistic but impersonal penance. Then he asserts his faith in women by agreeing to accept a substitute bride. But his willingness to "seize upon" any bride suggests that the possessiveness and conventionality which fuel romance are not exorcised. When she unmasks, Claudio declares, "Another Hero," but there is no sense of rebirth. However, Beatrice and Benedick, displacing the Claudio/Hero plot one final time, create the festive conclusion. Disruptive elements continue to be expressed and exorcised in their bantering movement into marriage. Their refusal to love "more than reason" or other than "for pity" or "in friendly recompense" (5.4.74, 93, 83) acknowledges wittily the fear each still has of submission and the desire each has to subordinate the other. The discovery of their "halting" sonnets signals their mutual release into the extravagance of romance and is followed by a kiss which, manifesting their mutual desire, serves as a truce in their merry wars. This kiss "stop[s]" Beatrice's mouth; affirming mutuality in one way, it ends it in another, for it silences Beatrice for the rest of the play as other strong, articulate women are subdued at the ends of their comedies--Julia, Kate, Titania, Rosalind, Viola.6 This inequality is confirmed as Benedick presides over the play's conclusion, using his wit to affirm the compatibility of manhood, friendship, and marriage. Beatrice's and Benedick's sparring is transformed by the broken nuptials into romantic attachment, and Hero's mock death and the revelation of her innocence transform Claudio's degradation of her into a ritualistic penance. Throughout the comedies broken nuptials, even when initiated by men, give women the power to resist, control, or alter the movement of courtship. But with the celebration of completed nuptials at the conclusion, male control is reestablished, and the women take their subordinate places in the dance. While rejoicing in the festive conclusion of Much Ado we should perhaps remember Beatrice's acute satire on wooing and wedding--and their aftermath: wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinquepace. The first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig (and full as fantastical); the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes Repentance and with his bad legs falls into the cinquepace faster and faster till he sink into his grave. (2.1.72-79)
Beatrice's description, which sees marriage as a precarious beginning, not as a happy ending, is anticipated in the irregular nuptials of the earlier comedies and is enacted in the troubling unresolved endings of the problem comedies and the "repenting" which follows in the tragedies. And in Much Ado About Nothing there is one final nuptial irregularity: The dancing begins even before the weddings are celebrated.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
1. See A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1974), pp. 72-74; Barbara Everett, "Much Ado About Nothing, " The Critical Quarterly 3 (1961): 32; and John Traugott, "Creating a Rational Rinaldo: A Study in the Mixture of the Genres of Comedy and Romance in Much Ado About Nothing," in The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), pp. 157-81 for valuable discussions of the relationships between the two plots.
2. Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 122.
3. Janice Hays, "Those 'soft and delicate desires': Much Ado and the Distrust of Women," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 79-99, discusses in detail Claudio's defenses against sexuality.
4. For example, Beatrice, the Countess in All's Well, Paulina in Winter's Tale. Marilyn Williamson, "Doubling, Women's Anger, and Genre," Women's Studies 9 no. 2 (1982): 107-19, discusses the function of the anger of the slandered women's defenders in Much Ado, Othello, and Winter's Tale.
5. Maynard Mack, "The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies," in the Signet Classic edition of Othello and in Alvin B. Kernan, Modern Shakespearean Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), pp. 344-45, discusses the symbolic functions of the tragic heroes' journeys, and Kirby Farrell, Shakespeare's Creation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975), Chapter 6, discusses the symbolic functions of heroines' mock deaths.
6. Clara Claiborne Park, "As We Like It: How a Girl Can be Smart and Still Popular," in The Woman's Part, ed. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, pp. 100-116, analyzes how the as sertiveness of the comic heroines is curtailed.
ROBERT SMALLWOOD
Three Ways to Begin Much Ado About Nothing
Folio (and Quarto) opening stage directions nearly always begin with the instruction "Enter" followed by a list of characters usually in some discernibly hierarchical order. Strict adherence to what is printed would presumably mean a reasonably brisk parade onto the stage, or perhaps simultaneous manifestation through several doors, followed immediately by the first line of dialogue.... Modem directors have found much to exploit in the alluringly vague area between the house lights going down and the first word of dialogue. Three versions of Much Ado About Nothing will provide examples. "Enter Leonato, Governor of Messina, Innogen his wife, Hero his daughter and Beatrice, his niece, with a messenger" say
s the Folio (and Quarto) direction. All three productions left out Innogen (a "ghost" character who never speaks) and all three created a space between the appearance of the family and the arrival of the messenger, half a minute or so in which interpretative intentions were made clear and the production's manifesto declared.
On the Stratford main stage in 1988, in a modern-dress production by Di Trevis, the stage lights came up on Leonato's family lounging in the sunshine on the terrace of what was clearly their very expensive villa. They looked languid and listless, each isolated from the other, clearly rather irritable; and into this scene of bored wealth came the messenger in battle-dress. The image of a society that was From Robert Smallwood, "Director's Shakespeare," in Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History, ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 192-93. Used by permission of Oxford University Press.
rich, decadent, and selfish had been economically created with not a word spoken and was to color our response to the rest of the play. In the preceding year Judi Dench's production for the Renaissance Theatre Company, set in the nineteenth century, had also presented Leonato's family sitting on a sunny terrace, but the relationships we saw were of cooperation and mutuality--Beatrice helping Leonato with a jigsaw puzzle, Margaret and Hero winding wool together--a community at peace with itself, in contented interdependence. One director wished the disintegrating events of the play to be unsurprising, almost what such a society deserved; the other made them seem a shocking intrusion into harmony, eliciting from us a response of pain and pity. In Bill Alexander's production, at Stratford in 1990, in splendid Renaissance costumes, the performance began with the somewhat incongruous spectacle of Beatrice and Leonato enjoying a little bout of rapier-fencing together, with Beatrice, in spite of the encumbrance of long, flowing skirts, winning rather easily. And then the messenger arrived and "the play" began--except that it had really begun for the audience with this image of a woman defeating a man at what, in the period presented, was a man's game. "O God, that I were a man!," Beatrice will say later, and here in this little directorial pre-play we were invited to think about the restrictions and frustrations imposed upon an intelligent woman in the play's patriarchal society. Here were three productions of Much Ado About Nothing, then, each postponing the entry of the messenger for a few seconds to create directorial space that would present a strong interpretative angle on the play.
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