MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Much Ado About Nothing takes place not in a ‘world elsewhere’— Illyria or Arden-but in Messina, Sicily. From its very opening lines it insists that the audience recognise on the stage a simulacrum of the ‘real world’, with its townsfolk, householders and their families, servants and visitors-and its gossip. In this Much Ado is much more akin to Romeo and Juliet or Measure for Measure than it is to the other ‘romantic comedies’ with which it usually grouped. This is not a world in which a girl can disguise herself as a boy and not be recognised even by her lover; it is, rather, a society structured very like the Elizabethan one which first witnessed it, in which the niceties of interpersonal behaviour are directed by accepted rules. And although those standard tropes of farce, disguisings and tricks, soon enter the narrative, they are not its principal dramatic interest; they are merely there to help along the plot which has from the first held the audience’s chief attention-the courtship of Beatrice and Benedick. The bringing together of two prickly, unconventional adults in marriage-into conformity with the structures of society which they have hitherto managed to floutholds a gleeful fascination for the audience, as it does for the ‘audience’ on stage-all the other members of Leonato’s household. None can finally escape the powerful coercion of our social system: ‘The world must be peopled!’ (II.3). Despite Benedick’s apparent libertarian bravado here, what he means and what the play means is a world peopled via the ceremony of Christian marriage only. The play’s triumph is to make the audience assent to its vision of a community always to be revitalised from within, by the incorporation of rebellious energy, not its expulsion. It does this by presenting, in Beatrice and Benedick’s dialogues, such an ‘erotic friction’ (in Stephen Greenblatt’s term) that our profoundest desire is to see that friction come to its bodily

consummation. ‘Peace, I will stop your mouth’— the talking only ceases when the lovers’ bodies come together in a kiss. (In modern terms, we may read Benedick’s ‘domineering’ action here as a playful and selfconscious taking-on of his social role as ‘Benedick the married man’; but we might a l so remember that in II .1 Beatr ice quite unselfconsciously suggests that the roles can be reversed when she says to the newly engaged Hero, ‘Speak cousin. Or if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss, and let him not speak, neither’.)

The play achieves its conservative victory also by flattering the audience’s intelligence, encourag ing us to despise the callow foolishness of the conventional Claudio (and to a lesser extent, of Hero) and to identify with the witty, unconventional Benedick and Beatrice. Marriage, it argues, is not just for dull people-in fact, they are lucky to be allowed a second go at finding an appropriate mate. Shakespeare seems particularly interested in the workings of gender in society in Much Ado. Claudio’s immature behaviour is grounded in his dependence on the hierarchical brotherhood of the military and its ideology of male honour; Hero’s helplessness arises from her being the protected daughter of a still-living father, bound to consult and obey him in all matters. Beatrice, by contrast, is, like Rosalind, a ‘poor relation’, without living parents: one who survives on her wits, intelligence, and the affection and tolerance of her oddities freely given by Leonato’s family. The text also suggests that she and Benedick have had some sort of love-relationship in the past (‘Marry, once before he won it [her heart] of me, with false dice’ (II.1)); that is, that she is no stranger to the vagaries of sexual love and the ways of the social world. But ultimately, for a woman in a solidly-structured patriarchal society such as this one, there are no prospects other than marriage or a barely-tolerated maiden-aunt status. Beatrice’s fantasy of spending eternity ‘where the bachelors sit, and there live we, as merry as the day is long’ (II.1) is recognisably that-a fantasy-in the context of the clearly divided male and female spheres of the society which the play presents. By showing the gaps between ideal and reality in the Hero and Claudio story, Shakespeare deconstructed the gender-ideology of separate spheres; and offered in Beatrice and Benedick an image of the ‘merry war’ that may exist between two strong-willed characters resistant to the behavioural restrictions of conventional gender roles. However, once these two acknowledge their sexual attraction, they cannot avoid society’s discourse of romantic love and marriage; the best they can do is to meet it with wit, fully conscious of their own absurdity: ‘Thou and I are too wise

to woo peaceably’ (V.2). It is this shared consciousness of the delicious playfulness of language which can always circumvent the dead hand of convention that makes Beatrice and Benedick such an attractive pair: the audience’s fantasy of the intelligent, witty, and car ing heterosexual couple. The permutations of that image, and of the society which permits it (more or less) to flourish, are typically varied in performance.