Immoderate Reactions

1. Fresh from a war where he has behaved conspicuously, our young gentleman becomes smitten by the governor of Messina’s daughter and pledges to marry her; this will be a society wedding, war-hero to demure upper-crust bride. But when all convene at the altar, brattishly our champion jilts his girl, “this rotten orange”, because report is abroad that she has lived unchastely. The girl herself, decent as we know her to be, is astonished at the charge, protests her innocence, then swoons from shock at this infamy levelled at her. Where on earth does it spring from? How, if he loves, can this well-recommended Florentine lack simple trust to see the aspersion trounced? Our gentleman and his party withdraw from the church, while daddy, standing over his inert and only child, fervently hopes her swoon betokens her death because, if not, he’ll kill the slut himself, guilty as she must be until proven innocent in a community where female shame may be relied on as a touchpaper to lurid imagining.

2. Here are immoderate reactions. And here is drama holding up for us its mirror to nature, which in this instance shows the nervy behaviour of men and women as they select their lifetime mates. Theirs is an era distinct from, yet informed with, the volatility of our own regarding such commitments, and their excesses are gathered under the pert title of Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy. A comedy, we expect, will fall within a convention where fortunes will turn out well in the end for these incautious blowhards, young and old, despite their murderous attitudes to each other.

3. And so fortunes will, for despite their vehement attitudes when roused, their society comprises mostly well-disposed folk. They include a visiting Prince of Aragon and Don John his bastard brother, Messina’s governor, his daughter and brother, and lords from Florence and Padua. Here are grandees at their leisure in a respite between wars. They are ripe for diversion and dalliance and for the decencies of hospitality and courtship that an interval of peace affords. Soon Don Pedro is devising an “entertainment” by which his lieutenants, Claudio and Benedick, might be transformed from bachelors to husbands, and to Hero he outlines his plan of directing the course of love away from blind nature to human stage management:

I will teach you how to humour your cousin, that she shall fall in love with Benedick … in despite of his queasy stomach he shall fall in love with Beatrice. If we can do this, Cupid is no longer an archer; his glory shall be ours, for we are the only love-gods.

4. Now here is a risky vaunt: the only love-gods? But Don Pedro is a benign CO and it is fair to suppose a little contrivance from him might help propel his coltish lieutenants into matrimony. So matchmaking will be the diversion of their furlough. But malice has arrived with this cohort of officers in the person of the man they have defeated. Outwardly and decently Don John has been “reconciled” with his victorious brother, but in reality he is giddy with rage:

I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace, and it better fits my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob love from any … let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me.
(I.iii.25ff)

Here is a bastard outcast, who, like King Lear’s Edmund, will wear his bastardy such that he knows himself to be real. And Don John’s recent defeat by his brother presents motive enough for mischief-making. How better directed than against the “most exquisite Claudio” whose celebrity “hath all the glory of my overthrow”. Yet charged as this resentment is, Don John’s presence in Messina is an oddly casual one. “I am not of many words,” he accounts for himself to his host. And we note how his ill-will can spoil but not undo love (as Iago’s can) and his eventual flight and capture serve as mere afterthought for the last four lines of the play. Moreover, his malice, insofar as it is depicted as native to Messina society, is entirely disarmed by the impressive sincerity of his henchman Borachio’s penitence at Hero’s “death”. How very much more credible this is than Claudio’s stilted epitaph to her monument (V.iii.3ff). Don John’s malice, I suggest, is not the real “ado” of the play.

5. And my point in suggesting the low profile of malice in this story is this. Subsumed by vicious thoughts as the characters, for a period, are in this comedy, Much Ado About Nothing does not study a society where viciousness is innate, as it is in Hamlet’s Elsinore, or even in the Vienna of Measure for Measure or the Venice of the merchants. Rather, here is decent company where intemperate attitudes flare despite prevailing good-will. Certainly Leonato diverts his homicidal impulse from his daughter to her accuser. Beatrice incites affable Benedick to fight-to-the-death Claudio, his bosom companion-at-arms. And this constitutes the main action and, ostensibly, Shakespeare’s “ado”. But is the fuss about nothing in the end? We know from the outset that Claudio’s charge against Hero is headstrong and manipulated by others. We also see how the overreach in his behaviour has cumulative consequence. Well-disposed at heart the company may be, but hasty or obdurate attitudes, formed in the conspicuous absence of evidence, can polarise well-disposed people and imperil lives. Only the friar keeps his head in the outbreak of accusations at the altar. Indeed attitude-adrift-from-evidence might express the central theme of the play.

6. But then the play is not quite what it seems. Quietly but deliberately, Much Ado About Nothing deflects our suspense from the ostensible main plot to the more intriguing suspense afforded by sub-plot. While the impetus of the play’s action focuses on whether Hero’s reputation will be properly restored and the society wedding brought off, the sharper psychological suspense gathers around whether Beatrice and Benedick, these two attendants on the central drama, will overcome their Drang regarding marital commitment, and join the society pair at the altar. Both are lesser in rank, but in the intelligent quick of their teasing, and the greater intimacy with which we are permitted to know them, they are very much warmer than Claudio and Hero in the personal interest they arouse in us.

7. The action has scarce begun and Benedick not yet arrived when Beatrice commences her provocations against him. Her needling of “Signior Mountanto” is witty and naughty, but we also note how she cannot help herself from this subject. Her actual question to the messenger is to ascertain whether this man, for whom she has an attraction she will not yet let herself recognise, is alive or dead from the wars. So the mockery that follows has this real anxiety as its prompt. From the tolerance of her listeners we learn how the mockery is a form of self-display with a vocabulary of tease evidently rehearsed for the purpose. The blurt may be “a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her”, as Leonato excuses it, but it also illumines how this particular attraction must masquerade itself as disdain: “I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? For indeed, I promised to eat all of his killing.”

8. Delicious in this raillery is the glimmer of Beatrice’s energised sexuality. Forestalling his advent in Messina, she mocks the soldier/lover in the same moment she declares herself ready to eat his “kill”. And from this we learn the calibre of her intelligence. It is quick, bold, knowing, savage, slippery, and behind it lies an insistence that her presence be engaged with. This insistence locates her pathos, and it is a high-tuning that is in marked contrast to how her conventional cousin emerges for us. Hero is a self-possessed, quiet girl for all the proper repugnance she shows when her honour is challenged. In II.i.50ff, we see how she withholds herself when her bumptious cousin must butt into conversation where flagrantly she is not the one addressed. Beatrice is described as “self-endeared” and in all her utterances we catch her “going on her nerve” when the other company is mindful of civility.

Although she relishes attention, we note how she does not quite trust her simple presence to draw attention as her cousin does, so must assert it. Here then is a depiction of one anxious that she will be taken as inconsiderable, caught in these opening lines asking if a soldier she knows has survived the wars, then promptly disguising her concern with a detraction of him which converts her wit to waspishness: “I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick; nobody marks you.”

9. This is people-watching of meticulous resolution and the nicety of it here places Beatrice as the play’s focal, if not central, character. For instance, we are shown into her dreaming mind when Leonato defends his niece’s spiritedness against the charge of morbidity:

There’s little of the melancholy element in her, my Lord. 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. (II.i.338ff)

We see, under her goading, the shrewd independence of her mind when, upon overhearing that Benedick might love her, she reveals how her own judgment has valued him “better than reportingly” (III.i.116). So I think the suspense aroused by Beatrice’s presence on stage resides in this: Can this young woman, who “mocks all her wooers out of suit”, so change in the course of the play as to trust herself to the attention of one beloved other? An identical suspense gathers about Benedick, who seals his bachelordom with this clincher: “Because I will not do them [women] the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the fine is … I will live a bachelor.”

In this way the couple draw focus, but remain off-centre, and one notes how often, in addition to their self-displaying, their company must resort to explaining or excusing them.

10. Let me return for a moment to the immoderate reactions. From Don Pedro, Claudio, Leonato, Beatrice and Benedick these flare and drive the main plot. But the scene that holds the veritable key to the psychological suspense in this play comes at IV.i.266ff. It is where Benedick and Beatrice, in the same church where Claudio defiled his bride with blame, declare their love for each other. The lifelong bachelor declares first, and must add to the admission that to do so is “strange”. Then, in her conflicted requital—adoring her boy but looking to recruit him for a vendetta—Beatrice uses that same word, strange, for the release of love in her own being. We witness the most watchful pair in the play make their identical observations of this palpable change as they succumb to the sensation of discovering what it is to value another. Two lovers, hitherto exuberant yet uneasy in their own sovereignty, in this scene now turn to watch each other with a vital, wary exhilaration in the same instant they inwardly watch, fascinated, their own converting selves. What a care for character’s dynamic process is here!

11. Whatever natural stirrings of love might have animated these lovers from their encounters in the foreplay, this, their church betrothal, owes its portion to Don Pedro’s stage-management. Benedick has been put in the way of hearing Beatrice loves him, and Beatrice has been apprised of Benedick’s love a scene later in an identical ploy. Here is ruse artificially prodding at love. Nonetheless, the ruse succeeds in altering the sense of self each cherishes in their respective singularities, as they discover they are valued by a singular other. It marks the point where defensive self-regard can begin to dissolve such that each will find paramount value in the other:

Benedick: I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?

Beatrice: As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing so well as you. But believe me not, and yet I lie not.

Here is the key to Shakespeare’s love vision. People fall in love naturally and this is strange, good, transforming, but the contriving (call it theatre) of the watching society is inalienable, indeed natural, to its processes. This bachelor and this spinster, we know, have been drawn to each other from the outset. But the accomplishment of their union requires the intervention of theatre to bring it off.

12. This transforming opportunity where character can show its pliancy is the “ado” I identify in this delightful comedy and is made conspicuous precisely by the nicety of the two portrayals. While Dogberry is a most vibrant cartoon, and Claudio’s callowness has some pathos, Benedick and Beatrice are particularised more roundly, finely, vibrantly than anyone else in the dramatis personae. So we note how suspense regarding what will happen to Claudio and Hero depends on outside dangers—the machinations of Don John, Borachio and Conrade, the peril to Benedick and Beatrice comes from within, from two spirits who we recognise to be both endeared with each other while they remain “self-endeared”. Shakespeare’s topic is the volatility of the lover’s situation, the degree to which lovers do not know themselves, but can come to do so, and show in this mirror to nature, how the human mind is not just attitudinal, but unfolding, dynamic.

13. The conclusion to Much Ado About Nothing is shrewd. It finds Benedick cock-a-hoop. The declarations between him and Beatrice in the church have been affirmed before the company that helped to contrive their union, but with a tempering of raillery between them that in no way diminishes attraction but affirms them in their wayward singularity. So the company witnesses how the two will complement each other without loss to their distinct vibrancies. Then, in an odd insistence, Benedick overrules Friar, governor and his C-in-C to insist on immediate dance:

… that we may lighten our own hearts and our wives’ heels.

Leonato: We’ll have dancing afterward.

Benedick: First, of my word; therefore play, music.

Accordingly music plays, dancing ensues, and the spirit of Benedick’s moment prevails over Leonato’s more proper agenda. The conflict of authority here is small, but telling from this playwright who, throughout his thirty-seven plays, is so attuned to how authority resides or migrates within character. Here Benedick, this lieutenant and mere visitor to Messina, this fiancé only just released from the casque of his bachelor vanity, in a spur-of-the-moment recognition of what his moment demands, overrules the governor of the city to take his spirited girl, and together, lead their company in the dance that renews the opportunities of life. And how proper it is that Benedick and Beatrice should take this lead ahead of the constituted authority. From the dramatis personae, these are the two in whom change unfolds and character shows its vital, intelligent responsiveness when love intrudes on complacent attitudes. Herein lies their eligibility to lead the dance, and so seal the “ado” for which Shakespeare, in my opinion, finessed these two parts in Much Ado About Nothing above other parts. For the “ado” will always find its best expression in the dance rather than the officiation. It is one thing to stand together at an altar, another to choose movement with a chosen other, in company, convergent and divergent, presences welcoming the surprise of each other in the rigmarole.