Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After AllIt is the forerunner of Restoration stage comedy, of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century “comedy of manners,” and of what has come to be called “screwball comedy..." Beatrice and Benedick are perhaps a little older, and in any case more worldly—and more wordy—than the tongue-tied Hero and Claudio. Much Ado About Nothing is indeed in many ways Shakespeare's great play about gossip. ...in fact the three Shakespearean “jealousy” plays, Much Ado, Othello, and The Winter's Tale, are often, and fruitfully, compared. In this play, as we will see, the “Iago figure” is Don John, the malcontent bastard brother of Don Pedro, the Prince of Aragon. Here, as in the tragedy of Othello and the tragicomedy of The Winters Tale, a jealous man thinks he sees his beloved dallying with another man.” [...] “the most exquisite Claudio” is—again like Cassio—a Florentine, a resident of one of the most elegant and mannered cities in Italy. ...the skills that were so apropos in war will prove of limited value in peacetime ...conversion becomes one of the dominant themes of the play, underscored by the refrain of Balthasar's song “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more”: “Converting all your sounds of woe / Into hey nonny, nonny” (2.3.56ff.). Hero will be converted into “another Hero,” Margaret converted into Hero, Benedick and Beatrice into lovers, tragedy converted into romance and comedy. "Thus goes everyone to the world but I,” we can sense for a moment the limitations that she will confront if she does not marry and leave her uncle's house. This is a sentiment that is, again, worn lightly in the early part of the play. It will return, more vividly and painfully, after the humiliation of Hero, when Beatrice longs to revenge her cousin and must instead enlist Benedick's aid to fight with Claudio: “O God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place” (4.1.303–304). It is worth noting that in other Shakespearean comedies of this period the heroine does become a man, at least for a little while. Don John's silence is emblematic of his malign reserve—we may think ahead to Iago's “From this time forth I never will speak word” (Othello 5.2.310) ...without language to interpret and intercede, mistakes are made, misinterpretations and false “noting” take place, and tragedy looms behind the scenes. This is a frequent theme in Shakespeare—we can think most obviously about Cordelia's dangerous decision, in that other play about “nothing,” to “[l]ove and be silent” (Lear 1.1. 59–60). Benedick will admit: “I am so attired in wonder, / I know not what to say” (4.1.143-144). This is a major turning point for him, a moment when language—his usual language—will not serve him, or insulate him from painful events. As speech is his and Beatrice's natural condition, so speechlessness—whether from astonishment, horror, or love—is the condition to which they may be converted. Language can always, if temporarily, be stopped by a kiss. “Nothing” meant a thing or person not worth mentioning—as Don John will say, with hidden intent, that Hero's misdeeds are “[n]ot to be named, … not to be spoke of” (4.1.94), which is literally true, since in fact they don't exist. “Nothing” could mean someone of little worth, like the foolish Watch headed by Dogberry. “Nothing,” paradoxically, also could mean “everything” or “all,” since its sign was the full or empty circle, and in this play whose most characteristic mode of language is paradox, much ado is indeed made about everything. Perhaps most surprising to a modern audience—though not to an audience that knows its Hamlet and King Lear—is the fact that “nothing” was a slang term for the female sexual organs. “...nothing” in Shakespeare's time was pronounced, we think, the same as “noting.” “Much ado about noting” is certainly an apt description of the play's events, and nonevents. To “note” was to observe or mark carefully, to give heed or attention to (something just about everyone in this play signally fails to do), but also to set down as having a certain good or bad character, to point at or indicate by pointing, to mark or brand with some disgrace or defect, and to stigmatize. ...in the final scene...Hero becomes a literal emblem of “nothing,” a mysterious masked and unspeaking figure who could be anyone or no one. This potentially tragic scenario of noting and false noting, making something of “nothing,” has its counterpart in the comic gulling of those impervious sophisticates Beatrice and Benedick. We have seen that Beatrice and Benedick are in fact already in love with each other when their friends decide to provoke them into action by gossiping where they can be overheard. Are Hero and Claudio likewise already prone to the behavior that produces their near-tragedy? Is there anything other than a perfectly natural reticence in speech that renders Claudio and Hero vulnerable to the plot devised against them? Juliet, a virginal bride, is far more articulate in her longing than the young soldier Claudio, whose prince and captain voices the passion that he himself does not express, and may not fully acknowledge It is interesting to recall that at the masked ball the only men who do not wear visors are Don John and Borachio, the two figures who are already falsifying themselves, without benefit of costume. Much Ado About Nothing is one of several Shakespeare plays to juxtapose overtly the spoken and the written, and in this play the latter is often called upon to stabilize or interpret the former ...it is Beatrice and Benedick who unquestionably steal the show, and whose love represents an achieved maturity—shot through, it is fair to say, with genial folly— that differentiates them from all the others in the play. [...] They are adults, these two. They stand apart as whole people, timely and timeless, people we would probably like to know.
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