Much Ado About Nothing – an interpretation

Much Ado is one of Shakespeare’s lightest – though not “greenest” – comedies: it is less mechanical, and the love-theme is more emphatic in it than in The Comedy of Errors; it is more elaborated than The Two Gentlemen of Verona;, the battle of the sexes is less violent than in The Taming of the Shrew; it does not end on the note of death as Love’s Labour Lost does (though the Biron-Rosaline pair is very much a prefiguring of the Benedick-Beatrice couple). Much Ado does not exploit the twin-theme (as The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night do) but it is more carefree than Twelfth Night, yet it is less green or “bucolic” than either A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It: much of Midsummer takes place in the forest near Athens, and almost the entire As You Like It in the forest of Arden, and though the Prince’s garden (or orchard) plays an eminent role in Much Ado, most of the scenes are played indoors, in the “civilised world”, where the emphasis on polite conversation and social manners (in striking contrast with some spontaneous outbursts) point towards the wit-combats of the comedy of manners, so important at the end of the 17^th century. When the significance of mannered conversation grows, the theme of transformation – even through magic, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – becomes less important; although Benedick, Beatrice and Hero (and, to some extent, Claudio, too) go through a transformation¹⁵², it is less obvious and especially less visible than e.g. Bottom’s or Lysander’s or Demetrius’s in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Less is at stake, so the plot and even the creation of the central “problems”

(will Benedick and Beatrice fall in love? Is Hero chaste or not?) is more artificial: as far as these questions are concerned, “much ado” is really about “nothing”, since Beatrice and Benedick can be claimed to be in love form the start, just they do not want to acknowledge it, and their mutual recognition of a certain value (which they first identify as theirs but it is recognised in the other) comes, to a great extent, through conspiracy and social “pressure”.

And Hero’s chastity is so obvious that only Don Pedro and Claudio really believe the opposite.

Yet nothing has two other very important meanings here: in Shakespeare’s time nothing also meant the female genitals (often linked to the shape of zero), while the thing was the male genitals. Cf. Hamlet, for example:

Hamlet (to Ophelia): Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Ophelia: No, my lord.

Hamlet: I mean my head upon your lap?

Ophelia: Ay, my lord.

Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters? [Do you think I meant rustic doings; with a pun on cunt in country]

Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.

Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maid’s legs.

152 Cf. “Benedick: I will not be sworn but love may transform me to an oyster [shut me up like a clam], but I’ll take my oath on it, till he have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool” (II; 3; 22-24).

Ophelia: What is, my lord?

Hamlet: No thing (III; 2; 101-109).

Then – as the pun in Shakespeare’s time also goes – nothing is not nothing at all, and, paradoxically, it must still be, because the word itself says that no thing is involved; being (every human being) gets engendered in a kind of non-being (in the female “nothing”), thus being cannot be “nothing”, yet the moment one grants a kind of being to nothing or non-being, one denies non-being’s (nothing’s) very essence, i.e. its being. Thus, it might be said that “much ado” goes on about far more important things than simply nothing; it goes on about the thing and nothing. Even further, critics have also noted that nothing in Shakespeare’s time could also be pronounced as noting: “The o in nothing was long, and the th could be sounded as t (as still in some regional or plebeian speech)”¹⁵³. So when Balthazar apologises for his bad voice and says: “Note this before my notes; / There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting” and Don Pedro answers: “Why, these are the very crochets [‘musical quarter notes’] that he speaks! / Note notes, forsooth, and nothing!” (II; 3; 54-57), he might mean: ‘pay attention to the musical notes and nothing else is important’ or: ‘To pay attention to musical notes is to note nothing worth noting’¹⁵⁴ or: ‘you note the notes and then you go on noting them: this is all what singing is about’. Thus, then the title is telling ‘the truth’, since the play is about various forms of right or wrong noting, spying, eavesdropping and overhearing; it is noting that keeps the plot moving.

The play is not noted in Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia, which was entered in the Stationer’s Register on 7 September, 1598, while Meres lists for example Everard Guilpin’s Skialethia, which was registered 8 days after Meres’s own work, so he was pretty up-to-date.

Meres does not list The Taming of the Shrew, either, but he does mention a play (besides Love’s Labour Lost) called Love’s Labour Won, which was later on identified as an alternative title either for the Shrew or for Much Ado. Yet in 1603 a London bookseller, Christopher Hunt listed all his books and there he mentions “loves labor lost”, the “taming of a shrew” and

“loves labor won”, yet by then Much Ado had been published (in 1600) in a Quarto-form and the title-page has the accepted title and no other. So Love’s Labour Won must be a lost play, with a mysterious identity. Now from a speech-heading in the 1600 Quarto we also know that Dogberry’s role was played by the famous comic actor, Will Kemp(e), yet he left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in early 1599. Thus, the play must have been written in late 1598.

The theme of the falsely accused woman (in Shakespeare: Hero) is very widespread in Renaissance literature; it can be found in the 5^th Canto of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), where the lovers are called Ariodante and Genevra. In 1566 Peter Beverly wrote a poem on the basis of Ariosto’s 5^th canto called The Historie of Ariondo and Ieneura, and the whole of Orlando was translated by Sir John Harington in 1591. Yet the story is there in Matteo Bandello’s La Prima Parte de le Novelle (1554), where the lovers are Sir Timbreo and Fenicia. A French translation appeared in the 18^th tale of the 3^rd volume of Francois Belleforest’s Histories Tragiques (1569).

For the Beatrice-Benedick-story, the major source is more difficult to find. The love-heretic, who finally “gives in” is popular, however, from the story of Troilus and Cressida (to which there is even a reference in the play [by Benedick]: “Troilus the first employer of pandars”, V; 2, 30), to Spencer’s “haughty Mirabella” in The Faerie Queen (VI/VII). Yet the most important source of social doctrine and polite conversation was Baldassare Castiglione’s (1478-1529) highly popular Il Cortegiano (1528), translated under the title The Courtyer of

153 A. R. Humphreys (ed.): Much Ado About Nothing. The Arden Shakespeare, London and New York: Methuen, (1981), 1985, p. 135; cf. Stephen Greenblatt (et. al.) : The Norton Shakespeare. New York and London: W. W.

Norton and Company, 1997, p. 1383.

154 Cf. Greenblatt, op. cit., p. 1407, Humphreys, op. cit., p. 134.

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Count Baldassar Castilio in 1561 by Thomas Hoby, and there were further editions in 1577 and 1588; even Roger Ascham recommends this work in his The Schoolmaster in 1570. Yet the playwright who stared to write comedies about mannered society, working out the dramaturgy of such comedies of manners was one of the “university wits”, John Lily, also influencing the prose (of which there is unusually much in Much Ado) with his Euphues.¹⁵⁵

There are two main groups in the play: one is led by Leonato of Messina; he has a brother, Antonio (who plays a negligible part in the play), a daughter, Hero, and a niece, Beatrice (without parents), and Hero has two “gentlewomen attending her”, Ursula and Margaret. The other group has Don Pedro of Aragon as its central figure; he is coming to Leonato’s court form the wars, together with Claudio, a Florentine (to fall in love with Hero), and Benedick from Padua, who, as it seems, was once in love with Beatrice but then something unspecified happened and they broke off.¹⁵⁶ The third group is the group of intriguers (Don John, Borachio and Conrade), yet they are loosely connected to Don Pedro, since Don John is Don Pedro’s misanthropic bastard-brother. Borachio gets connected to the other group through Margaret, with whom (though, it seems, without her conspiratorial knowledge) he carries out the great deception-scene (which we only hear about but do not see). Lovers and intriguers with two well-meaning, quite good-humoured and basically encouraging senior members: this is a nice circle for a social comedy, yet one needs, besides the comic theme of love, wit, intrigue and misunderstanding, the level of boundless foolery, buffoonery and even farce as well, and this is provided by a lower level of society: Dogberry, the “master constable”, and the two watches. Dogberry is self-important, full of malapropisms, and he is really making much ado, yet he significantly contributes to the plot through the discovery of truth. Borachio will rightfully say at the end: “I have even deceived your [Don Pedro’s] very eyes: what your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light” (V; 224-229). Time and /or sight unfolding the truth is an important theme is comedy, and here this feat is given to real fools, who do it in their simple-mindedness and faithfulness to their duty. Folly (in the sense of Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly) triumphs, in a special but significant way, not only over evil scheming but sophisticated wit as well.

The Friar, a minor outsider, is a wise go-between here, who does not believe in Hero’s unfaithfulness and comes up, practically, with Friar Lawrence’s trick from Romeo and Juliet at the end of the play: Hero should be reported dead, so she “dies” for the slanders and is reborn for a better Claudio.

At the beginning of the play there is peace, since the war is over, so instead of swords, tongues and even “double tongues” may fight (cf. Don Pedro’s: “there’s a double tongue, there’s two tongues”, V, 1; 166-167). Yet tongues are acknowledged as dangerous weapons which can kill even within the play: it is precisely Hero who says, half-mockingly, in the deception scene she plays with Ursula that “one doth not know / How much an ill word may empoison liking” (III, 1; 85-86) and she, in a sense, dies and gets “resurrected” in the course of the play (like Hermione in The Winter’s Tale) but if there is no Friar trusting her innocence, if there is no Beatrice being convinced that this is just a misunderstanding, and if there is no Benedick ready to challenge Claudio into a duel (to prove his love and manliness to Beatrice as well), the epitaph Claudio reads out for Hero’s tomb would become permanent. Love moves in the dangerous presence of death all the time, as Leonato’s strange, almost Lear-like outburst (“Could she here deny / The story that is printed in her blood? / Do not live, Hero, do not ope thine eyes”, IV, 1; 121-123) also indicates. And there are plenty of cheerful, half-serious references to poison, hanging, plague, burning at stake, etc.

155 The data of the previous two paragraphs come form Humphreys, op. cit., pp. 2-33.

156 Cf. Beatrice: Indeed, my lord he [Benedick] lent it [his heart] me awhile, 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, therefore your Grace may well say I have lost it. Don Pedro: You have put him down, lady, you have put him down” (II; 1; 261-264).

Claudio falls in love with Hero at first sight and Don Pedro is ready to “assume”

Claudio’s part “in some disguise” and “to tell fair Hero I am [i.e. Don Pedro] Claudio”, to court her and then to speak with the father, Leonato and though for a while Claudio thinks Don Pedro did all this for himself, that misunderstanding is soon cleared away and by Act II Scene 1 everything is fine: they can go to church and get married. Their love is constructed almost totally by the others, and they conventionally fit into its frame very well, so if evil Don John did not plot against them, they could not even realise, as the Friar puts it that “what we have we prize not to the worth / Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost, Why then we rack the value, then we find / The virtue that possession would not show us / Whiles it was ours” (IV, 1; 218-222).

Don John is unhappy with the happiness of others: he has no other motivation to start the plot of intrigue than that he is a “plain-dealing villain”. He is a bastard, so he is an outsider for ever, yet Conrade relates that “You [Don John] have of late stood against your brother [Don Pedro] and he hath ta’en you newly into your grace”(I, 3; 19-21), yet his answer is: “I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace” (I, 3; 25-26) and he emphasises his independence and his inability to flatter. A typical “bad guy”, perhaps a Vice-figure, who is only there to mar the others’ joy. Borachio is ready with the plan: “offer them [Don Pedro and Claudio] 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 [sic!]; and bring them to see this the very night before the intended wedding – for in the meantime I will so fashion the matter that Hero shall be absent – and there shall appear such seeming truth of Hero’s disloyalty that jealousy shall be called assurance and all the preparation overthrown” (II, 2; 41-50). This is a rather precarious plan, especially because it is hard to see what Borachio means by “Hero shall be absent” and what “proof” there would be of her disloyalty if Claudio and Don Pedro hear Margaret-Hero call him “Claudio”. Perhaps he means that Hero should not discover him and Margaret in the garden, and maybe Margaret has to call him Claudio because then Claudio will think that the wooer enacted him, which might be even a graver sin. But it is obvious that it is the secret meeting in the night itself which is to mar Hero’s reputation and Claudio and Don Pedro are just as readily gullible as it is accidental that the two watches overhear Borachio boasting to Conrad how well his plan worked, and how much money (a thousand ducats) he has earned. It is also significant that Borachio uses the word fashion, which here means ‘shape’, yet the play, in its social manners and speech, is much dominated by fashion as ‘what is in vogue’.

The main plot – obviously – is the series of wit-combats between Beatrice and Benedick, with important turning points in Act II, Scene 3 and Act III, Scene 1. In II; 3, Don Pedro, Claudio and Leonato, very well knowing that Benedick is hiding “in the arbour”, tell how much Beatrice is in love with Benedick. The plan works; Benedick says “This can be no trick. The conference was sadly borne [seriously conducted]. They have the truth of this from Hero” (II; 3; 211-213), so here it is precisely Hero’s trustworthiness on which Claudio and Don Pedro built their plans. The next step is taken by Don Pedro again: “Let there be the same net spread for her [Betarice]” (II, 3; 205), but before that Benedick meets Betarice. Now Benedick already thinks that Beatrice is in love with him, and immediately starts to read a

“double meaning” into Beatrice’s sentences: “ ‘Against my will I am sent to bid you come to dinner’ – there’s a double meaning in that. ‘I took no more pains for those thanks than you took pains to thank me’ – that’s as much as to say, ‘Any pains that I take for you is as easy as thanks’” (II; 3, 248-252). Beatrice’s turn to be tricked into love comes in III, 1: Margaret is

“used” here by Hero and Ursula; Margaret calls Beatrice “into the arbour” to “overhear” their conversation, and, of course, the topic is how much Benedick is in love with her. Here gossip, and noting this gossip, produces what the love-juice does in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Beatrice concludes that she was too proud and adds: “For others say thou dost deserve, and I /

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Believe it better than reportingly [better than as mere rumour]”. There is plenty of the constructed, coming from the outside, from society, even in the love between Benedick and Beatrice; perhaps – and especially in contrast with Claudio and Hero – their example testifies to the happy fact that even in spite of social arrangement, recommendation and even conspiratorial fabrication, two people can still find real love.

So the whole comedy turns on the wheels of words and belief. At the beginning Beatrice charges Claudio with having “caught the Benedick” (I; 1, 81), as if her future bridegroom were a disease; now in the play belief is like a disease, and most of it is false.

Words are able to create a reality and then “real” reality catches up with it (as in the case of Beatrice and Benedick, in the sense that they eventually will admit they are in love), or created reality must finally be erased, as in the case of virtuous Hero. Two really theatrical and courtly factors play additional roles: disguise and dance. There is a dance at the beginning of the play (when Don Pedro proposes to hero in Claudio’s name and they all wear masks) and at the very end (before that, both Hero and Beatrice also come out in disguise). And there is the disguise of Margaret, giving rise to false accusations. Everybody unmasks in the end:

Hero takes off the mask of disgrace, Claudio the mask of disbelief, Beatrice that of scorn and pride, and Benedick gets rid of the bachelor’s mask, always worrying about horns. Hero and Claudio markedly do not woo each other and they are very reticent: they have to learn to speak. Beatrice and Benedick talk far too much and they constantly abuse each other: they have to be “silenced with a kiss”. Words are double-edged, as swords: they tell the truth and they create false reality. Do we ever get to know reality, then? Benedick says in Act II, Scene 1 (189-190), after the fist dance-and-mask-scene: “But that my Lady Beatrice should know me, and not know me!” And earlier he made reference to “an old tale” (a kind of Prince Blue-beard story) when mocking at Claudio’s love; the tale has a sort of “refrain” coming back again and again in the course of it: “It is not so, nor ‘twas not so: but indeed, God forbid it should be so”. The last phrase (“God forbid it should be so”) is a wish one might utter at the beginning of a tragedy, though there it turns out that God generally does not “forbid that it should be so”. But “It is not so, nor ‘twas [it was] not so” is strangely true of all stories of the imagination, and especially of comedy, (this is also the key in which metaphor works): a semblance is created that shows an aspect of reality (of the “real world”, as we know it), yet this aspect of reality is precisely of that kind in which this semblance is different from this reality, while the semblance is, in its being there, in its being constructed, still real in the sense that we are able to interpret it for our world (for the “real world”). And the double

Hero takes off the mask of disgrace, Claudio the mask of disbelief, Beatrice that of scorn and pride, and Benedick gets rid of the bachelor’s mask, always worrying about horns. Hero and Claudio markedly do not woo each other and they are very reticent: they have to learn to speak. Beatrice and Benedick talk far too much and they constantly abuse each other: they have to be “silenced with a kiss”. Words are double-edged, as swords: they tell the truth and they create false reality. Do we ever get to know reality, then? Benedick says in Act II, Scene 1 (189-190), after the fist dance-and-mask-scene: “But that my Lady Beatrice should know me, and not know me!” And earlier he made reference to “an old tale” (a kind of Prince Blue-beard story) when mocking at Claudio’s love; the tale has a sort of “refrain” coming back again and again in the course of it: “It is not so, nor ‘twas not so: but indeed, God forbid it should be so”. The last phrase (“God forbid it should be so”) is a wish one might utter at the beginning of a tragedy, though there it turns out that God generally does not “forbid that it should be so”. But “It is not so, nor ‘twas [it was] not so” is strangely true of all stories of the imagination, and especially of comedy, (this is also the key in which metaphor works): a semblance is created that shows an aspect of reality (of the “real world”, as we know it), yet this aspect of reality is precisely of that kind in which this semblance is different from this reality, while the semblance is, in its being there, in its being constructed, still real in the sense that we are able to interpret it for our world (for the “real world”). And the double