Mistaking in Much Ado

Many readers of Much Ado About Nothing have remarked that its tragicomic pattern sets it apart from Shakespeare’s other romantic plays and links it with the so-called problem comedies. I want to turn finally to Much Ado because it brings us full circle to Measure for Measure. Unlike the threatened tragedy of Measure for Measure, however, the tragedy of Much Ado is apparent rather than real. Things appear to happen; all the characters at one moment or another are seduced into believing in appearances, and its two plots are linked by this common theme of credulity and self-deception. Readers of both plays have been troubled by the uneasy union of vehement and lifelike passions with the conventions of comedy, in Much Ado in IV, i, and in Measure for Measure in the shift from the first three acts to the last two. Of Much Ado, J. R. Mulryne complains that ‘the unlovable Claudio is too vividly and realistically portrayed (in the manner of a figure in tragedy)’. ¹ Tillyard argues of Measure for Measure that the change to the conventions of comedy from the ‘more lifelike passions is too violent’ and that the bed trick is not a ‘case of modern prudery unaware of Elizabethan preconceptions but of an artistic breach of harmony’. ² Shakespeare’s persistent use of substitution, disguise and the language of mistaken identity in both plays establishes from the outset comic expectations in the audience which are ultimately fulfilled, but as Jean Howard has recently argued of Measure for Measure, the play

strains and distorts a comic paradigm Shakespeare had used many times before, and in so doing calls attention to the way in which any set of conventions, generic or otherwise, can betray its basic function of mediating between audience and author to create lifelike illusions and becomes instead a sterile mechanism inadequate to its task. ³

She goes on to claim that Measure for Measure is an experiment in which Shakespeare attempts to escape from conventional comic formulas without losing his audience’s ‘power to comprehend’. Though I find this view persuasive, I would like to qualify it by suggesting that the ‘problem’ of Measure, and that of Much Ado as well, is not so much the inadequacies of art and its conventions ‘to create a satisfactory illusion of lifelike complexity’, but the uneasy union of the traditional comic plot designed to call attention to artifice, coincidence and wonder, with the conventions of realistic characterization, particularly the rhetoric of consciousness. In Much Ado, IV, i, and in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare uses such conventions so forcefully that our willingness to accept the artifice of their comic plots is undermined. Instead of extending the metaphorical power of mistaken identity by shifting its emphasis from plot to character, from external to psychological or internal mistaken identity, Shakespeare undermines our comic expectations by exaggerating the conventions of lifelike characterization in these plays. In Much Ado, Claudio is presented as a type common to Shakespeare’s comedy, the courtly lover, but in IV, i, Shakespeare endows him with an inner life which conflicts with the type. So also in Measure for Measure the conventions of realistic characterization Shakespeare uses in portraying Angelo and Isabella conflict with the Duke’s intrigue plot. The ‘problem’ of the two plays is not real passions versus comic conventions, as is so often claimed, but two kinds of opposing conventions, one which calls attention to itself and its artifice, the other which conceals itself by seeming ‘real’.