SETTING IN SHAKESPEAR’S “MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING”
Messina is a place where people find it hard to behave with appropriate seriousness and in William Shakespeare’s well known play “Much Ado About Nothing” the most important ‘character’ in the play is in fact, Messina itself, detailing as it does a Shakespearean comic world, by nature light hearted, witty, optimistic and destined for a ‘happy’ outcome for its trials. Yet Messina also deals with serious matters. Love, the impediments to love, and the pain that must be reconciled before love can be confessed, reciprocated, and fulfilled, are all a part of life in Messina.
All of Shakespeare’s great comedies explore in one way or another the problems of being serious in a society ruled by laws of comedy and it is this concept that we relate to in the world of “Much Ado About Nothing”. In this witty and light-hearted play there are verbal jokes, puns and forms of word play which the characters deliberately employ in their zest for life and there are practical jokes and tricks of varying levels of seriousness which the characters also play on one another. One of the most successful jokes is the parallel practical jokes played on Beatrice and Benedick in order to trick them into admitting their love for each other and as long as sensitive feelings and serious fates are not too much at stake, which they are not in this successful Beatrice and Benedick practical joke, these deceptions can be justified.
However the social hierarchy of Messina is a very class conscious one and although most of the inhabitants of Messina are witty as a full time occupation and most of this tragic-comedic life consists of various characters playing practical jokes and tricks on each other, underpinning life in Messina is a strict adherence to a code of social conduct. The world of “Much Ado About Nothing”, which is so energetically presented to us in the opening scenes, is in many ways attractive. It is busy, lively, witty, teasing, socially animated and entertaining. It almost seems like a perfect place to live, but in other ways this society is also brittle and fragile, exposed to treacherous misrepresentations and too much at the mercy of slander, malice and abuse. Vindictive lies and deceptions can ruin this perfect society in a second, because the majority of the characters lack both trust and faith in themselves and those around them. In order to sustain its collective social code, Messina must trust itself and have good cause to do so, but we are shown through the vagaries of life that it cannot afford to do this and the realities of love and jealousy plunge this society into the depths of seriousness that its gossipy social manners cannot cope with. If we look at the world of Messina in this way, we shall find the explanation for the dominant place of Beatrice and Benedick and understand the shallow relationship of Claudio and Hero and the reasons why this society could so easily accept the devastation that pulls it apart.
Messina is a deeply convention-bound society. For all its bantering and convivial surface and easy, informal exchange of dialogue between figures of differing social rank, the rigour of social and moral custom makes itself felt when serious matters are concerned. A clear sense of honour and prestige extends consistently throughout the play. The wooing of Hero by proxy is a Messinian game, but clearly it is also an advantage for Claudio to have his cause supported by a Prince. On the other hand, if this same Prince prefers his own claims, there is nothing that Claudio can do about it. Courtship and wedding are socially governed events, and honour depends on strict obedience to the rules. Above all else the bride must be a spotless virgin. Love is a matter of feelings, but these feelings are channelled through prescribed conventional speech. Messina’s free-and-easy ways are on the surface. Underpinning them is a strict role play of language, convention and ritual and driving this role play is eavesdropping, instant gossip and inaccuracy, exemplified in its citizens’ inordinate desire to eavesdrop on the conversations of others.
We witness the Prince and Claudio talking in private, and not a moment passes before Antonio’s man passes on this news, complete with his own spin on what he has just heard, which gives us instant gossip. Antonio’s man has not waited a moment in passing on the news, because it is only a minute or so of stage-time since we heard this conversation ourselves, and already it is at the third stage of transmission from ear to ear around Messina. Inaccuracy is the norm in Messina and Antonio’s ‘good sharp fellow’ gets it wrong, mistaking the Prince’s promise of proxy courtship for intentions of his own. Nothing comes of this particular incident, but it shows the shape of things to come. The minor error perpetrated by Antonio’s man is an early sign of a society which is deeply vulnerable to deception and misreporting.
However there is one thing in Leonato’s response which is not characteristic of Messina. His reluctance to give the story immediate and wholehearted belief, ‘Hath the fellow any wit that told you this?’ shows him here to be circumspect, which is unusual because Messina is not in general a place which bothers to think twice before believing things. Leonato’s reaction also reveals to us another curious feature of Messina’s social practices. Messina has a penchant for doing things by proxy and Leonato decides that his daughter should be warned, not by himself but by Antonio, which is characteristic of Messina’s social world, its gullibility, its impulsive credulity and its willingness to trust in surface appearances, whether visual or verbal. In Messina, characters find it easier to believe in words about people than in people themselves, so there is not much dependable continuity of feeling.
When this Sicilian society breaks down it is because all trust between its members has collapsed into a corroding suspicion. The Sicilian court is compromised by a lack of trust that has become endemic, breeding mutual suspicion and resulting in an exceptionally fragile set of alliances and misalliances. Leonato’s acceptance of Don John’s deception must rouse the audience to furious indignation because it is on this indignation that our trust in and affection for Beatrice is built. Beatrice becomes the spokesperson for our growing frustration and anger at this superficial society which conspires to ostracise and shame the innocent Hero. To an indignant audience Leonato’s response signals the nadir of Sicilian society, a society so compromised by distrust that even family loyalty is abrogated. A father upholds the values of a shame-culture that prefers for its women, death to dishonour. Leonato renounces his responsibility as a father in failing to protest at Claudio’s treatment of Hero.
Don John’s successful plotting reveals that courtly life in Messina is based upon appearances and representations. Appearance represents, or signifies, something else and only in jest one can show a casual cynicism which is quite at odds with one’s response to reality. When Leonato’s daughter’s virtue is impeached, he feels the shame almost inordinately, because this shame will condemn him to an isolation where there are no defined orders and no places, either ‘ordinate’ or ‘inordinate.’ He will be banished to a state of utter emptiness. Although Messina is, at the centre, light, witty, sophisticated and worldly, at its edges, it is panicky, insecure, and violent, suffering from a chronic breakdown in trust and suspicion, where the numerous dramatic images of eavesdropping are both pervasive and destructive. This is a surveillance society and to heal such a social lesion Shakespeare challenges us with its comic antidote blind trust.
The eavesdropping scenes between Beatrice and Benedick are so delightful not only because of the way Benedick is set up for eating his words, and the brilliant monologue in which he does so, ‘When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married,’ but also because they contrive a possibility for getting to know the truth about someone else’s feelings which is so rare in life. Once this ‘truth’ is known the breach between Beatrice and Benedick is quickly healed because they are at least partly cured of their linguistic disease, wit, which was preventing their true feelings from emerging. This release means they are now free to affect the repair in other elements of society and the means declared appropriate are those of blind trust, proving that distrust can only be healed by its comic antidote, blind trust.
The subjects that people make jokes about are often a reliable index of their underlying anxieties and in “Much Ado About Nothing” the bachelor soldiers spend their time joking about love, marriage and cuckoldry. There are few plays where the idea of a wife’s betrayal of her husband is so obsessively harped upon as in “Much Ado About Nothing”. In Messina there are, it appears, only two possible ways of thinking about love. One is the cynical view of love, marriage and cuckoldry which Benedick expresses and the other is the version of idealistic, courtly love, characterised by a romantic attraction at a distance, followed by a happy ever after marriage, at first exemplified by Claudio and Hero. The continual jokes about husbands and cuckolds are indications of the underlying tensions in a society which is obsessed with an anxiety about women’s sexual licence. Borachio succeeds in getting Claudio to exchange his romantic ideal of love for one of hatred and contempt once Hero appears no longer to be his chaste, idealised goddess and he immediately reverts to Benedick’s cynical view and concludes that she is a whore.
Strictness of conventional behaviour is the serious reality beneath Messina’s frivolous exterior. Love is a witty game, but convention prescribes the available roles in the game and the limitations of those roles. Characters’ impulsive beliefs and impulsive changes of mind and emotion entail an abrupt transition from one conventional role to another, from soldier to lover, from ardent lover to betrayed lover, from loving father to offended and disowning father. People tend to inhabit any one single and defining role at one time. Changes, which are frequently both sudden and violent, are marked by sharp alterations in speech and tone, extremely rapid reorganisations of oneself and one’s intentions, and are often accompanied by a formal self-dramatisation in some new and histrionic stance.
By far the worst capitulation is the maladjusted seriousness of Claudio’s voice in Act 3, Scene 2. All the crucial elements of behaviour and style are evident here. Although Claudio’s reaction is gullible and impulsive, it is also planned and considered. It is egocentric and self-dramatising, exploiting the sacred convention of marriage against itself. He shifts in a moment from love to vindictive loathing, from one romantic role to another. The language is short, condensed, and brutally practical, yet it also incorporates the conventional stylistic artifice of formal antithesis, tonight/tomorrow, wed/shame. The weaknesses and wrongs of Messina and its incapability for civilised seriousness, all cluster in this one obnoxious speech. However Beatrice and Benedick stand apart. Where Messina’s surface social practices are concerned, these two are just as susceptible to error as the rest of Messina and both are extremely fond of gossip and rumour. In the masked dance they play the role of slanderous gossip-bearers to each other and both are fond of eavesdropping and spying which lays them open to Don Pedro’s love-trick. However, Beatrice and Benedick are not as convention-bound and as role-bound as the others. They are not fixed in set roles by obedience to social stereotypes or artificial notions of pride and honour.
They reveal their own blend of wit, romance and appropriate seriousness, unique in the world of Messina, in the two remarkable scenes where mutual love is declared in the shadow of Hero’s disgrace. Here we have an exchanged avowal of surprising love, and Benedick’s initial shocked refusal of Beatrice’s command ‘Kill Claudio’, followed by acceptance of his role as Beatrice’s champion. It is a scene with its roots in ancient chivalry, and is serious and worthy as a part of that tradition. Emotions run deep. There is a place for profound affection and for volatile anger. Yet conversation is also urbane, sophisticated and witty. The movement to and fro between comedy and seriousness in these scenes is an engagement of civilised and tender beings in a play of mutual discovery, and we witness all their suppleness of mind and feeling employed in the human art of growing and maturing. In their minds and emotions both Beatrice and Benedick display a kind of agility which is a condition of true life, and compared with them most of the other characters appear wooden and immobile, too easily trapped in destructive roles. These two lovers are unusual and unconventional citizens of this play’s comic world, but are also its most natural and successful ones. Their play on words between ‘hand’ and ‘hands,’ deploys wit for a wholly serious purpose and is a mark of exactly that free play between comedy and seriousness which sets Beatrice and Benidick apart from the rest of Messina.
Claudio addresses Hero directly only three times in the play, each time briefly and each time in highly public circumstances of formal acceptance or rejection, whereas Beatrice and Benedick’s extensive, private interchanges could not be more emphatic, and it is Benedick who is able to drop his role of jester and by ceasing to joke break the fellowship in order to love. Beatrice and Benedick appear to us to be ‘realists’ because they are not idealists. Hero and to a slightly lesser extent Claudio are idealists. Beatrice and Benedick express Messina’s unruly margins and Claudio and Hero express its most serious aspirations. Claudio and Hero are idealists in the sense that they are fired by ideal visions of things, ‘ideal’ here meaning ‘the best imaginable’, the highest, the noblest, the purest. Idealism is the belief that what we really see around us is only the external appearance of something else, and that to get at it you must somehow have to get behind appearances. One of the play’s ironies is that it is the play’s ‘realists’ who will not take appearances at face value, but seek to get behind them. The jokes made by Beatrice and Benedick are sometimes blunt and crude, sometimes elaborate and self conscious. Puns, similes, metaphors, and paradoxes are all brought into play in their continual game of mutual insults and it is this aggressive verbal battle which pushes Beatrice and Benedick to the foreground of the play.
Beatrice stands out from the rest of the women in Messina because she is as good at this kind of verbal game as any of the men, for she has taken over an area of discourse which the bachelors of Messina, and Benedick in particular, usually treat as a male preserve, a witty and aggressive word play which is used to ward off the prospect of marriage. It is only Beatrice who will openly claim her fair share of lines in a conversation with a man, and it is only Beatrice who makes their kind of bantering language completely her own. Moreover, she can do this without seeming merely to be copying the men because Beatrice shares Benedick’s contempt for love and marriage. Beatrice equates a husband with ‘horns’, on the one hand a phallic symbol, but on the other the sign of a cuckold.
Beatrice’s social position gives her a freedom the other characters cannot enjoy. She is not Hero’s sister and she is certainly an orphan. She has no parents in the play, and Leonato is her guardian. He calls her ‘niece’ a term which was used more broadly than it is now. She is related to Leonato and treated affectionately by him, but there is no suggestion that a dowry is one of her attractions and a dowry matters in the world of “Much Ado About Nothing” where Claudio coolly establishes Hero’s inheritance before Leonato signifies his approval of their troth. Beatrice is just a step down the social ladder and there is no serious prospect of her becoming the Princess of Aragon. Unlike Claudio, who initiates what is negative for his own honour, Beatrice initiates what is positive to honour her friend.
If we are to save ourselves and the play from the emptiness of gossip, we need to grasp the conventions of the code of honour which govern the society of Messina. “Much Ado About Nothing” is best considered as a problem play, whose disturbing ending dramatises the inadequacy of the ideology by which its ruling classes rule. It is a comedy of social manners whose romance structure, with its improbable story, characters and denouement, makes deliberate play out of social tensions which in real life are not so readily resolved. It is an affectionate critique of upper-class manners, whose outwardness in matters of love and religion ran contrary to new expectations of the inner life that were becoming widely spread in Elizabethan England.
For Beatrice and Benedick, their jokes become a means for them to resist the kind of love-relationship exemplified by Hero and Claudio. In the end the ‘happy-ending’ which sees Hero married off to Claudio is one fraught with contradictions, for the conventional relationship founded on romantic love which they exemplify has been severely satirised by Shakespeare. Beatrice and Benedick are offered to us as an alternative to Hero and Claudio, because they have managed to deploy their jokes and their bantering not only as a defence against love, but also as a language of love in order to define their own relationship, which is a more equal one than either of them could have expected in Messina. If the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick is not presented as an ideal, it is nonetheless seen as preferable to the fragility of an idealised, romantic love such as Claudio’s with its potential to collapse into loathing and disgust. And for Beatrice and Benedick to have wrested the language to their own ends in this way is in itself a cause for celebration.
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