ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the play's repudiation of Claudio's position through Beatrice's bond with her cousin, a bond that Cressida lacks but that the Merry Wives deploy to great advantage. It argues that Beatrice instigates a hermeneutic change in her play, interrupting the structural practice of the false narrative against Hero and the play's focus on male bonds and competition. While scholars have often read Beatrice both as promoting the masculinist ethos of the play in her desire for male violence and as silenced at the play's end, the chapter argues her power is both produced by and contingent on the masculinist systems she critiques, so that she functions, in the words of Alan Sinfield, through "arise out of the conflict and contradiction which the dominant, itself, produces". Beatrice's passionate critique of male honor offers the necessary counter-narrative to Claudio's violent shaming and abandonment of Hero.
